I hate to sit here constantly defending Howard Owens but here we are again. Howard recently posted a great little MBO plan to turn Luddite reporters into web savvy journalists. The plan includes super easy things anyone can do in about two weeks if they tried. But I guess the plan was too straight forward, as the comments attracted quite a few nasty trolls (with no sense of irony, either, since they’re reading and participating in blogs).

Anyway. My two cents.

What many of the complainers and trolls there forget (or maybe haven’t taken the time to know): Having a good web site begets a good paper. Publish to the database. From there you can cull the best content for print editions, mobile versions and even broadcast packages. And those are just the obvious ways to reuse your online product. You have real, quantifiable metrics with which to base editorial decisions. You have opportunities to provide breadth of coverage as well as target content to maintain and gain readership. You can optimize your content for your readers. You have opportunities to diversify content. You have opportunity to interact with the public directly (through comments, blogs, twitter, etc.) and indirectly (through site metrics).

Doing nothing different (and that includes reporters, editors, publishers–any level of news management) at a struggling news organization will only lead to the loss of your job and eventually, your paper.

And you know what? I’m sure that your former readers won’t mourn your loss because plenty other sources out there currently take the necessary steps to move in the same direction the readers and advertisers wish to move. Your information is your brand. If your audience doesn’t want the information you’re giving them, then they don’t want your brand.

NONE OF THE THINGS ON HOWARD’S LIST ARE EVEN HARD TO DO. The objectives require hardly any skill beyond tenacity. Your readers are going online and so should you. If you don’t understand what makes the Web different from print, god help you and the audience you’re trying to serve when you think of the Web as simply digital print.

I mean…really? You can’t take the time to learn how to push a single button on a point and shoot camera? You can’t spend the whopping 10 seconds to sign up for twitter and facebook to see what they’re about? You can’t start a free blog (which has no production schedule)? You can’t ask someone how to drag and drop some video clips around on a time line? That’s lazy. Journalism never had room for that kind of laziness or lack of curiosity to begin with and don’t pretend otherwise.

I’m willing to bet that I can think of a use for every single one of the items Howard lists for any beat. Any beat! Here’s your chance. I’ll do the real hard work–thinking–for you. Just tell me what you’re working on either by emailing me with the form on my homepage or in the comments below. Seriously.

If you hope to beef up your Web staff this year and have big plans to build sweet, dynamic, ongoing projects, I have some helpful hints for your newspaper’s Human Resources departments:

What to Expect When You’re Expecting

Creating Web sites isn’t like journalism. You can’t have a curious mind, an ability to write well and expect to learn the Internet in two weeks. Look outside the journalism field. Seriously. Don’t send out an email to your staff asking if anybody wants to be the Web reporter/editor/producer/guy/girl with the full intention of hiring the person most interested. If you end up hiring someone who doesn’t know HTTP from FTP, you’re off to a bad start. If you want to do that, teach your staff how to use the Internet, not how to build it.

Don’t expect to find an Adrian Holovaty. People who know journalism and also know programming don’t exist in large numbers. And they’re expensive people anyway. Find someone who knows the Internet and teach them journalism.

Beware Online Journalism programs and Graphic Communication programs. In my experience, both of these fields of study rely too heavily on Flash, site design and video. You don’t necessarily want a page designer, a Flash expert or a videographer. You want someone who can do write in some or all of the following (and someone who knows many more acronyms than this short list): PHP, Javascript, mySQL, Python, XHTML, and CSS. You don’t just want someone who just knows HTTP and FTP, you want someone who knows how to write a Cron script or someone who can tap into an API. You want someone to solve problems. You want a developer.

That said, don’t hire the biggest nerd you can find. Someone with a basic grasp on design theory will go a lot further than someone who only lives and breathes code. Hiring a lopsided developer can lead to overly complex interfaces. Balance is key.

Look for a developer with the mind of a journalist. Developers are usually curious people anyway, but you want someone with a broad range of knowledge, too. Someone who can just as easily work with your crime reporter as he or she can work with your features or business editors.

Again. You don’t want a webmaster. You want a developer. Period. Make it a point to grab the best talent from your local tech schools.

What to do when he/she has arrived

You don’t want a knowledge hoarder. Make sure this person doesn’t become a gatekeeper. Someone else should have a grasp on the developer’s work. You don’t need to know computer languages to know how a Web site works and how to fix minor problems. Pair the developer up with someone like a producer, a videographer and/or a database reporter.

Give them projects that last. Don’t think in terms of a short series of articles. Think in terms of ongoing value. Give the developer some small problem to chew on and then build on it from there. Where do ongoing sources of data come from in your community?

Give the developer access to the police blotter. Have them output the list on the Web. Then have them map that data in useful ways. Then have them attach articles to certain pieces. Then photos. Then think of tools you can build on top of that platform. Next thing you know, you’ll have chicagocrime.org.

A developer is not a producer or a videographer, per se. Let them work on the bigger projects (solving problems like how to get video on the site efficiently and quickly). Teach your reporters and producers and editors how to do those other things. A developer should build the tools that your editorial staff uses on an ongoing basis.

Don’t talk in terms of design right off the bat. What the public sees is only the tip of the iceberg. There’s a lot more going on under the hood. Design talk should happen near the end of a project.

Lastly, give them every opportunity to tell you your idea sucks. They are the experts on the Web. Tell them the problem you want solved, not how to solve it. Let them question you. You may find you’ve been asking the wrong question, or that the problem you want solved is part of a bigger question.

Fargo Star is back! from Zac Echola on Vimeo.

This is a little project we started last year at The Forum of Fargo Moorhead, one of my employer’s (Forum Communications) flagship papers. Without getting into too many details because of my blogging agreement with my employer, it was successful at bringing younger people to The Forum’s brand. More so, I’d say, than those stupid “For Teens” pages that were all the rage in the 90s. Seriously. When I was a teenager in the 90s, they made me feel like jumping off a cliff.

Anyway, I hate to pimp out my work, but it’s a pretty cool little idea. Basically. (I’m really not the target demo for this sort of thing. I am way too snarky).

Users create tapes of themselves singing a capella, upload them to a site like youtube or vimeo or whatever and then send us the link.

On in-forum.com, people can go online and vote for their favorite singers. The top 10 move on to a live concert a couple months later at a popular night club in town. The winner gets a few pretty sweet prizes. Last year we had about 1,500 people at the venue (with zero out of house ads, mind you) and we didn’t even think about how to monetize that.

This year, we’re planning to take things out beyond just our sites and papers. And this is really why I’m blogging about this.

First, we’re not just promoting on our sites. While we love that our current readers see the contest and follow it (really, we love you for reading!), the object is to also show outside readers that newspapers aren’t necessarily boring. We’ve set up a Facebook page for Fargo Star that will be monitored by real humans. Our YouTube channel will also be watched by real people. We don’t want these to fall stagnant, to become brochures. The idea is to get out there and do something instead of talking about it. The key word here, obviously, is real.

Also, I’ve kicked around the idea of helping users along with posting video to their myspace profiles and personal Web sites. We already have the embed code from youtube that we’re using to display the video, so why not point that back at the public? Give them a snippet of code of the video and a permalink back to the Fargo Star page (which is in the early stages of production, I’ll post a link when we launch).

Lastly, merchandising. Last year, the staff at the live event all wore these hideous pink shirts with the Fargo Star logo on it. They were horrible. I had at least 6 people from the public ask me where they could buy one. And I was behind the scenes in a video control room most of the night worrying about a live web cast!

The single most important part about this whole project, though, is getting Web, editorial and advertising staffs in the same room and keeping everybody focused on a singular goal: Promote The Brand To A Tough Demographic In A Way That Doesn’t Suck. Turn our readers (old and new) into cheerleaders for our products. Because these products aren’t just ours, and we’re starting to understand this. This is their videos, their votes and their comments. We’re just providing some tools and some prizes. Community.

We aren’t worrying so much if the people who watch Fargo Star videos also read city hall stories in the paper. We hope they do, but we understand that people want what they want. The technical and philosophical lessons we learn from this project vastly outweigh any other reason for doing it.

One day it’s sharing videos for a contest, the next it’s sharing news videos. One day it’s participating in the Fargo Star chats, the next day it’s posting a restaurant review with a rating and some photos. Same philosophy. Same technology.

Howard Owens has been arguing with what seems to be the entire videography field over this for too long.

Having worked in the TV news business and in newspaper Web sites, I can say without a doubt that 1 hour production time is well within reason for most videos. If a TV photographer can’t work under that kind of pressure, they’re in the wrong business. I’ve seen photogs edit great VO-SOTs (Voice Over to Sound On Tape, usually a talking head, for the uninitiated)–with linear bays, no less!–in under 10 minutes.

Multitasking skills, solid understanding of shooting basics and good division of labor (where possible) are key to kicking out quality vids fast. Newspapers just aren’t prepared for this quite yet. Thankfully, we’re starting to get there.

It all comes down to the economics of the medium.

Documentary film is meant for larger scale audiences. With TV, everybody watching is going to see that long, well-produced packaged. On the Web, not everybody hitting the homepage cares about that well-crafted 2:30 package on whatever. They just won’t click on it. Because they don’t care or something else on the site interests them more and their time is limited.

You might get a few hundred views from interested people in a day and then that video falls into oblivion. News has a pretty short shelf life.

Why spend 5 hours on one video, when you can spend 5 hours on 5 videos to get a thousand or more page views (a few hundred times 5+) and possibly increase time on site (assuming some users might watch more than just one video)? Put more “crap” on the Web.

This nonsense about the “craft” is infuriating. We’re not in a storytelling business (if we were our stories wouldn’t be so overwhelmingly boring; Very few newspapers write terribly compelling long form pieces with any regularity. And yes I know that statement will piss people off–deal with it. I consistently read better articles in my wife’s copy of Glamour than most of the stuff the newspapers I read put out every year). We’re here to disseminate information to an audience. Who. What. Where. When. Why.

Which suggests we should strive to better understand our audience.

We in the news business get so hung up with ourselves we usually forget about what our audience actually wants. We need to stop being so high and mighty.

In live TV, I’d go home pissed about a horrible show. Everything went wrong in production. Supers were mixed up, cues were late or missed, the guy on the audio board was asleep at the wheel and the studio camera crew couldn’t properly frame up shots. And I’d get home, fuming. I’d start to rant to my wife or my in-laws or my friends about everything and rarely, very rarely did they ever notice these details that I thought ruined everything. They were still able to parse the info they needed. They didn’t have the same notions about my product as I did.

And this is our problem. A good story might come up and we won’t cover it because we’ve covered a similar story earlier, assuming everybody else in the world already knows about it. Christ. What is wrong with that? Anyone who has ever looked at Web traffic data can tell you, rolling their eyes no less, that it’s simply not true. Nobody, except for a few people at the paper reads every story. Nobody!

Getting back to Web video. This doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t strive to do great videos. We certainly shouldn’t do video for the sake of doing video.

But, we should stop worrying about the little details. Who cares if the edit isn’t quite tight enough or the audio is a bit too hot? We do. But we care too much! Just ask yourself if the video and any accompanying package gives the audience what they need. Then move on to the next story.

There’s this weird tradition in news media that if we don’t produce the best possible craft we can, we’ll lose our readers. Look at it like this: First, we’re already losing readers. Second, there are people in your audience that care about higher quality and people that don’t.

First, target the group that will make you more money, then, when you’ve nailed that model down, go after the other group. Look for tangible results. Because honestly, that’s what your advertisers are looking for.

While intangibles like “reputation” and “preferred source” and “best” are nice for marketing yourself to clients or possible new readers, they’re not as valuable in the long tail market.

People want what they want. Brand hardly matters. Or rather, information is brand.

A while back I wrote a post containing talking points for building better Web sites with little or no programming.

Well, Christmas comes early because I’m going to show you how to make a simple interface that will automatically update your site with new weather alerts. We’re going to use free data sources, free Web tools and use very, very little HTML and CSS.

Then, we’re going to use Twitter to automatically send out weather alerts to our readers.

Gathering the data and prep work

• For this project, we need data.
• We’ll need a basic understanding of what XML feed is and how we can leverage it. You can learn about it on your own. Just think of it like an email newsletter without the email.
• We’ll also need permission to syndicate the feed on our site and on Twitter. Don’t forget to ask, most people who create the feeds do it knowing it will be used in ways like this.

We’ll also need accounts set up at the following free services:

• Google Reader
• Twitter
• Twitterfeed (and you’ll also need an OpenID account if you don’t have one. I use claimID)
• Feedburner

The goal of this project is to pull in data (news releases, advisories, etc.) from government sources.

For this example, I’m going to use the National Weather Service but, you can use any government feed you find, really. Check to see if your city or county has feeds for anything on their sites. Do some digging. Ask around. Do what journalists do.

In the interest of being hyperlocal, I want to pull in all new results from my county in North Dakota. Thankfully, NWS has feeds for just that:

http://www.weather.gov/alerts/wwarssget.php?zone=NDZ039

Unfortunately, that feed does not validate, which means we have to figure out how to validate it. We could ask them to make a better feed, but chances are that will take time and they may never do it. We’re on a ridiculous deadline here!

Lucky for us, Google has already figured out how to deal with invalid feeds and they also have tools to share items in your reader. With our shiny new Google Reader account, we can add the subscription and stick it into a folder.

Click add subscription, paste the URL to the feed. Once the contents of the feed show up, we can add it to a folder called “weather.”

We need to get the contents of that weather folder out of our reader and into the public arena. To do this, click Settings > Tags. There you’ll see the weather folder. Next to it, there’s the RSS symbol with the word “private.” Click it to make it public.

Google does a few things with it, but all we really care about is the public page:

http://www.google.com/reader/shared/user/11212282270208586940/label/weather

This page has a feed of its own here:

http://www.google.com/reader/public/atom/user/11212282270208586940/label/weather

All that fun, invalid data is now fun valid ATOM data. Not quite squeaky clean, but it works.

By the way, ATOM is just another XML feed specification like RSS. Nothing important to the project. I just like typing ATOM in all caps.

Anyway, now we can move on to the fun stuff.

The fun stuff

Log into Feedburner. We need to burn the new Google Reader feed. While Feedburner has all sorts of fancy tracking and other tools, we only need one: Buzzboost.

Burn the feed. Give it a title and some name. It doesn’t matter. Skip to feed management. In the feed management dashboard, click “publicize” and then “Buzzboost.”

You’ll get a nice little tool to set things how you want. As this is for weather alerts, I really only care about the one most recent post by the weather service and the date. I uncheck all of the boxes except for date and set to display 1 item. Activate!

The next page will give you a little snippet of code like this:


<script src=”http://feeds.feedburner.com/cassweather?format=sigpro” type=”text/javascript” ></script><noscript><p>Subscribe to RSS headline updates from: <a href=”http://feeds.feedburner.com/cassweather”></a><br />Powered by FeedBurner</p>


Paste the script into the page on your site, where you’d like it to appear. You can adjust the look of it with CSS:

Every time the weather service updates their alerts, this script outputs the new changes, too.

You can do this with any valid feeds. My audio, suggested reading and del.icio.us pages on this blog are all fed this way.

I’ve also done quick projects for my job, if you want to see it in a more newsy context. Product Recalls is just one example.

On to twitter.

Log into twitterfeed.com. Set up a new twitter feed by entering your twitter username and password. Use the same Google feed we used earlier. Plop in the settings you’d like and have twitterfeed update every 30 minutes and pop! You’re done.

Like every project built on the cheap there are downsides to using twitterfeed and twitter, especially for this project. 1) Users need to have a twitter account to sign up for the weather alerts. Registration is always a hurdle. 2) twitterfeed will only check for updates every 30 minutes which isn’t very helpful when there’s a tornado already on your street.

Twitter works better for breaking news, I think, or for infrequent updates. The New York Times has a twitter strategy for all of it’s sections if you need an example.

Even if you don’t have these accounts set up, this project takes almost no time or skill. Yet, it’s useful and once it’s done, it’s done forever. There’s no follow up management involved at all.

You can have this done in under an hour. Easy. Just start hunting for feeds. Get creative and let me know how you’re using this stuff.

Zac Echola talks #2 - Mobloging?

This just may be the future of breaking news.

Here’s a great thing about this whole Web 2.0 thing. You hardly have to program.I’m serious. This podcast used absolutely no programming, just free Web services. It’s unbundled media, too–meaning you can find the content where I want you to find the content (or where you want to find the content): On my site, in a widget, at twitter, iTunes, Facebook, wherever. It’s fed to all those places via RSS, and hell, you can sign up for that too if you’d like.I’m using a service called Gabcast, but there a bunch of other similar products out there. All you need is a phone. Magic makes the rest happen.

Stuff like this adds a whole ‘nother element to mobile journalism.

This is news as fast as you can say it. This is audio from an entire press conference or the sounds of a crowd at a rally. Sure the quality kinda sucks, but I guarantee you there isn’t a professional news organization within 400 miles of me that’s doing something like this.

And I’m just me. Just think about what kinds of awesome things an entire news organization could do with something like this.

Where’s the revenue come from? Who knows? Who cares. It didn’t cost me a dime. Try it out.

40 Downloadable Open Source Social Software Applications by Max Kiesler:

While large scale social sites like Flickr, Digg, Youtube and Myspace have predominated the web-o-sphere over the past few years there still is a need for narrow content verticals in this arena. This list will give you links to 40 open source resources to get you started building your own social bookmarking, networking, filesharing or search application. The following is a list of what I consider the be the best open source social software that Ive found over the past year.

Newspapers.com, you have no excuse.

The following books are all great reads, and the ideas within can be applied to new concepts of journalism and media business.

Note: This isn’t advertising. There isn’t advertising on my sites. I’m not even going to link to any particular booksellers here. You can find them on your own.

The Long Tail by Chris Anderson

Anderson does a good job explaining a rather simple concept, but one that has far reaching implications for the news business. His discussion of filters and searching should humble a few holier-than-thou editors.

The Black Swan by Nassim Taleb

See also: Fooled By Randomness.

Taleb takes a couple of swipes at journalism. The sections where he picks apart narrative theory are brilliant.

Everything is Miscellaneous by David Weinberger

See also: Small Pieces Loosely Joined.

If there ever was a book that would make old-guard section editors cower in fear, this is it. No longer are the newsroom discussions of what section a story belongs completely valid. Put it in both places. Or more terrifying, let your readers decide where the news belongs.

I just went on a long rail in the comments over at multimediashooter.com. I think I just woke up too early this morning and I might be a little crabby, but I’m sick of seeing this line of thinking come from my (rather pretentious) colleagues in the Web news business:

Please tell me why these have seen the light of day? No dis-respect to photographers Chris and Jason, I know this is coming from above you, at least I hope, but WTF. Most of us in the industry are fighting not to do ‘video just because we can’ and you guys are doing this! Really, what is the point? I just have to know. Have they given the photo staff video quotas?
I am going to use these as examples of the wrong way to approach newspaper video.

And these from the comments:

I agree, what the heck were they thinking? This is the problem I think many people are facing, management that didn’t understand photojournalism before video, and really doesn’t understand the what multimedia storytelling can really do. This is the video equivalent of someone yelling out to go get a weather picture. Hopefully these two argued their case beforehand.

My guess is that these videos were tagged to a reporter’s online story. Just one more thing that the photo departments will have to deal with until reporters are trained to shoot these video tags themselves. These videos on there own don’t have much to say, but placed in the context of a written story they might give the viewer some added value. Is it what I want to shoot? Hell no.

And again from Richard:

it should read editors defend yourself. I’ve been In the business long enough to know this is beyond photogs. But when you work at a place that uses these pieces as examples of why we ahould be producing five staff videos a day, i feel the need to speak out and say no. This is not the kind of video journalism we should settle for. All eyes are on us as an industry and we have a responsibility to speak up. We should be fighting and talking about this kind of thing to death. I know i didnt become a photojournalist to be told to go shoot video of grass growing. Maybe its time for me to get out of newspapers. And, as for me splashing this out there….well dont forget any jerk with a blog can say what they want.
i think the time to always be nice is over. Its time for some tough love. Dont get too worked up about the spreading of negativity there is always a bad apple in the bunch, but because it looks so ugly and moldy and smells bad it makes the rest of the apples look good.

This was my long winded response:

As a Web producer for mid-sized group of papers, I’m all for tiered video on the Web. By this I mean having a mix of well produced video packages that can stand alone from a written story and short clips packaged with text, graphics and photos that certainly can’t stand alone very well.

Granted, those short clips should somehow enhance the story. And a reporter could just as easily shoot it as a photog.

But, the fact of the matter is that sending photographers out on extended video assignments doesn’t make much sense on deadline either. A photo is arguably easier to produce and it can be used in multiple media (the paper, the Web, cell phones, etc.), whereas video takes generally more time to create and can really only exist on the Web right now; Unless you have some kind of deal with a TV station, that video has a smaller audience than a series of photos. So it makes sense to spend more time on photos than video, thus producing more short clips and saving produced video packages for weekend centerpiece stories.

My argument extends further to text and photos. Why not put the “crap” on the Web, too? Storage and distribution costs may as well be zero and everything on the Web finds an audience regardless of how you perceive the quality. Write briefs about the little league game that will never make the paper, add those photos you don’t have space for in the paper, or that you think are unworthy of print. SOMEONE wants to see it.

This is the beauty of the Web, the crap and the masterpieces are the same value when it comes to serving up advertisements; two eyeballs equals on ad, regardless of what those eye are seeing. There isn’t the problem of limited space and time, like we have with newspapers and TV respectively.

The “archaic” line of thinking is that you only distribute what you think is the best content. You don’t speak for everybody in your audience.

I think it’s time for newspaper and TV people (I’ve worked in both areas) to start understanding the Long Tail of the Web. Google it.

That is all.

And now for another long rail:

To elaborate a little bit further via analogy: YouTube wouldn’t work if you cut off just the best videos on the site. First, deciding the “best” is such a subjective game. Second, cutting off all those videos with, say, fewer than a 1,000 views over the past month would artificially cut off thousands upon thousands of people who want to see these so-called “crap” videos.

YouTube would simply not grow. It would die because some competition would come along and aggregate all the content better.

The problem with we media types is we have a tendency to think we know what our audience wants and needs. Our view of quality is disproportionately higher than our audiences view of quality. We spend all day looking at media of all kinds, and then we either directly or indirectly (it doesn’t matter which) assume that our audience thinks like we do.

This is a confirmation bias and it is wrong! DO NOT purport to know who your audience is, because you are at the fringe of the audience yourself. You cannot see the forest for the trees.

For the most part they (our audiences) do not watch you and watch your competition! They do not necessarily read your newspaper and your Web site. They do not care about us!

They care about a variety of information. You may have a thousand readers who want to know about a city council meeting and one reader who wants to know what the fishing is like at some lake. It’s easy to give them all what they want because space is unlimited and the cost of producing the fishing information is probably much less than the cost of producing the city council information. Since ad space on a page is limited, you’ll get a higher return on eyeballs looking at the fishing information than the council information.

The point is people come to us in hopes that we have what they’re looking for. If they can’t find it, they look somewhere else.

This idea of “general” is dying off. It died in the magazine industry, and the content is flourishing because of it. It’s dying in television and the content is flourishing because of it.

We need to think about our audiences (yes plural). We need to think about niche content. We need to think like spaghetti sauce companies.

Keith Jenkins, Picture Editor at The Washington Post shows off some of the best audio slide shows in journalism.

But he fails to mention the single greatest use of audio on the Internet for a journalistic purpose:

Sounds of SimMan.