Something happened early this year in the media blogging world. We suddenly stopped talking about what we should be doing and started talking about what we are doing. We started talking about being the change we wish to see. It was at the same time a jarring change in tone and an exhilarating one.

Now is the time to be that catalyst for change in your news organization. No more talking about it. We’re doing it. And we want you to do it too.

I’m excited to announce, with Ryan Sholin, Howard Owens, and many, many others, the official launch of WiredJournalists.com, a social network for journalists geared towards training and exchanging ideas.

We have gathered some of the most talented, standout and promising people in this business. We’re here to help you, at any level of your organization, create change in your newsrooms. This isn’t a time for talking any more. The economics of our situation changed long ago. We need to catch up.

Change, that nebulous buzzword we hear far too often lately, must take place at every level of organization.  But change can only happen through action. The Wired Journalists network will show you methods of action. No prerequisites required. We will help you through every action. And we hope to all learn from each other. That’s the power of networking.

Our mission statement:

Our goal is to help journalists who have few resources on hand other than their own desire to make a difference and help journalism grow into its new 21st Century role.

You don’t need the best equipment, the biggest budget or even management support to accomplish worthy goals. The only requirement is a willingness to learn and a mind open to new ways of thinking about journalism.

We are here to help each other learn basic skills and learn how new technology and new societal expectations for media are changing journalism.

At WiredJournalists.com we are all teachers and we are all students. We help each other and learn together. Those who know more should help those who know less. Those with questions should never be afraid to ask them.

We’re done talking doom and gloom. We’re done making lists of what we should do to better serve our audiences. We’re going to start checking off items. We will better serve our audiences.
We want you to join us.

We want people who know a lot help those that know little.

We want those who know little to know a lot.

Please send the Wired Journalists link to everyone in your newsroom. Everyone.

Now we act.

[This post serves a couple of purposes. First it's part of a training side project some of us media bloggers have been working on (More on this soon). Second, I thought it would make for a good Carnival of Journalism post this January. Thanks to Adrian Monck for hosting it this time.]

Blogs in a nutshell:

For the uninitiated, a blog is, in a nutshell, nothing more than a publishing platform. Think of it like a series of Word documents that you can put up on the Web instead of putting them in a folder on your hard drive. They may have as little or as much organization as you’d like, but usually the most recent post ends up leading your page.

Blogs, however, are incredibly handy for journalistic purposes. Once we set them up–a relatively painless affair, you’ll soon see–we can work on producing content without putting much or any thought into the programming that creates a Web site.

Write about anything. We can have an editor look over our work or not. We can write about news, or comment on the issues of the day or just tell people what we ate for lunch. If freedom of the press only applies to those that own the press, here, my friends, is your press.

Because blogs are nothing more than simple publishing platforms, and they
lower the bar for anyone to publish, they essentially hand a printing
press or broadcasting license to anyone with the time to speak his or
her mind with text, pictures, audio and video; People express an amazing volume of ideas on the Web. Some of it
good, a lot of it not so good. It all comes down to personal taste.

While a blog can scale to mass media heights, it also remains intimate with readers through commenting systems. You can have a conversation with your readers on your page. These conversations help us all learn.

Choosing a platform:

There are dozens, if not hundreds of blogging tools out there. I’m only going to cover three free blogging platforms in this tutorial.

They are:

• Wordpress
• Blogger
• Tumblr

Between Blogger (owned by Google) and Wordpress (An open source project), Blogger is the easiest to set up and it integrates very nicely with other Google products.

Tumblr, is my favorite blogging platform because of its simplicity. It takes no more than 10 seconds to sign up, allows for different types of posts (audio, video, picture, text, chat, etc.). It allows you to import your YouTube videos, flickr photos, del.icio.us bookmarks, twitter updates and so much more automatically. Most tumblelogs are microblogs, meaning they aren’t meant for long bits of text. If you’re a photographer, this is exactly what you want in a blogging platform.

Use Wordpress if you really want to know blogging inside and
out. The Wordpress platform will give you reporting tools that will
show you who has visited what on your site and gives you a ton more
options. It also requires a wee bit more knowledge.

Blogger:

If you already have a Google account, for watching YouTube videos, checking your Gmail or reading other blogs with Google Reader, you’re nearly already signed up. Just log in using the Email and Password fields at the top of the page.

If you don’t have a Google account click “Create you blog now” and follow the directions to set up a Google account.

Once you get that set up and you log in, you’ll be presented with a dashboard. The the main management area, you’ll have two links to click:

Click Create a Blog. Obviously. Fill out the forms. The address you choose may be taken so check its availability. You blog will appear at http://thenameyouchose.blogspot.com. Notice it’s at blogspot.com and not at blogger.com, where you go to administer your page.

Next, select a template that you like. This is what your blog design will be (and it’s ok, you can change your mind later).

Once your blog has been created, you can start posting immediately. You’ll see a little editor with buttons similar to a desktop text editor like Word.

When you’ve finished writing, click the publish button, if you’d like to stop writing for now and save a draft, click the save draft button. Simple.

To view your published posts and your drafts, click the Edit Posts tab where you’ll see something similar to this:

Click the view blog link at the top at any time to see what your blog looks like to others.

The next time you log into Blogger.com, your dashboard will look like this:

Once you’ve set up your blog, poke around to see what other features it has. At no point should you be afraid to push any buttons. Go ahead and mash away! You’re probably not going to break anything, and if you’re about to, Google will warn you. Plus, we’re here to help you out, too.

Tumblr:

Head over to Tumblr to set up this account. Click the big sign up button in the middle of the page. Fill out these three forms:

Done! You’re now ready to start posting different kinds of posts:

Under the Account tab at the top, you can select Theme, and select from a few templates to change the look of your blog. You can also select Feeds to start importing your content from other Web services you’ll use in the challenge:

Wordpress:

Wordpress is a little more complex, but you can begin heading over to wordpress.com/signup to set up your account.

Once logged in, click My Dashboard in the top navigation bar. Here’s where things get a bit hairy.

You’ll first notice a lot of menus and a lot of submenus (Dashboard, Write, Manage, Comments, Blogroll, Presentation, Users, Options, Upgrades, etc.). Don’t panic, this is why Wordpress is so powerful!

If you really wanted to, you could start posting immediately be clicking On the Write tab; There you’ll find a text editor similar to the others:

You can manage your posts under the Manage tab.

You can select different templates under the Presentation tab. There’s a lot to choose from. Try not to feel overwhelmed. This is good. Some themes let you import your most recent delicious bookmarks or twitter posts, to a sidebar (instead of your main post area), but we’ll touch on all the goodies in other tutorials (stay tuned).

That’s it!

For now, you’re ready to start writing. Don’t be afraid to click around. Don’t be afraid to ask us questions here. We’re glad to help.

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.