And any other newsroom that feels it necessary to build their business on the desires of the rubbernecks

I’m disappointed to see the Herald ran a fatal accident story, complete with photograph on Sunday’s front page.

While I concede that deaths in public are a matter of public record, I cannot see the public value of giving these types of stories undue weight on the front page.

What news value do such stories have? Who do they impact beyond the people directly involved? At what magnitude does a rather unimpressive accident become so important that it be splashed across the front page? How can you consider something so routine unusual enough to disrupt the balance of fair coverage? One would expect that a Pulitzer-winning paper would have a firm grasp of such things, but maybe all the decent people at the Herald left for greener pastures.

Was it because a moped was involved? If that’s the case, by putting the story on the front page are you implying that mopeds and scooters are intrinsically dangerous? Why don’t you grow some stones and report on the safety of these vehicles instead of using someone’s death for your own purposes?

You have set a terrible precedent. Will you always put these accidents on the front page? I hope you’re not stupid enough to let that happen.

And the photo. Did you stop to consider the harm running a photo of the vehicle could cause? By not releasing the name of the victim, you understood that the family likely had not been notified. And yet you gave enough information (location, age, vehicle) to identify the victim without actually naming him. Did you even ask if the family had been notified? I doubt it. I know that the much of the victim’s family, including one of his daughters, had not been informed by the time you published.

Maybe I’m misguided. Maybe thousands of 63-year-old men ride their white mopeds up and down that residential street every day. Or maybe your laziness and disregard for decades of journalism’s ethical standards is the real issue here.

“People read it.” That is your only excuse. You know it and I know it.

I have never understood media’s desire to pander to rubbernecks and gawkers. It is one thing to set aside your emotions to report a story, another to set aside your humanity to sell litter lining. To call you vultures would be incredibly unfair to vultures.

No wonder this business is failing. You’ve lost touch with the people in your communities that give a damn. You’ve traded them in for suckers and rubes. And you know what they say about birds of a feather…

I’m mostly ranting here, so I apologize if it comes off a bit scatterbrained.

I want to believe that Howard Owens is right, that the Philly memo means they’ll break the trend and differentiate their products in a meaningful way. It’s a provocative argument. But I don’t believe that’s what’s actually going on at the Inquirer. At least not from what I read in the memo:

“We won’t post those stories online until they’re in print.”

“We’ll make the decision to press the button on the online packages only when readers are able to pick up The Inquirer on their doorstep.”

“For our bloggers, especially, this may require a bit of an adjustment. Some of you like to try out ideas that end up as subjects of stories or columns in print first.”

In regards to breaking news: “I want to re-emphasize that being first with the news is all-important.”

That, to me, is saying that your Web site is little more than radio news, with a few news “packages” you can send off for antediluvian awards and pats-on-the-back. You will only focus on the breaking coverage, and then you’ll shovel the paper online at a later time. Oh! And if you use your blog to collaborate and tweak your print stories, maybe you won’t get to do that any more.

When I think of “Web-first” I don’t think of running a nearly-finished, print-ready story, like so many supposedly Web-first shops operate. I think of a series of quick updates, watching a story build, collaborating with other reporters from multiple angles and engaging the public for their opinion and their expertise. That’s how I envision it.

But basically saying you’re not willing to let the network be the network, that you might not be willing to build the majority of your content from the ground up in front of people? That frightens me. What makes you any different than radio or TV, if this is your grand plan for the Web?

To me, this smells not like differentiating a product. It smells a lot like reallocating scant resources to the print product so they can use the Web mostly as a place to shovel their content. And shovel it later than they were shoveling their content previously.

Lastly, this isn’t a business model. It’s a defensive move to try to protect the print product while sticking their tongue out at their online readership.

Jarvis, an open Clinton supporter has this to say about political bias:

Media have an Obama problem they’re going to have to grapple with now or after the election: They love him. They hate Hillary. And the gap between the two is clearly seen in coverage, which surely is having an impact on the election.

This, to me, only gives more weight to the argument that journalists should be disclosing their allegiances and votes. Reporters are not just covering the story. This year, they are part of the story. The ethic of transparency that I have learned online and that journalists apply to everyone they cover should also apply to them. I say that journalists have a responsibility to reveal their own views and votes — even as they endeavor to report apart from them with fairness, completeness, accuracy, and intellectual honesty — and we have a right to judge their success or failure accordingly as we also have a right to judge their roles in the stories they are covering.

I’ve been getting increasingly pissed off at the discussion about whether or not journalists should be allowed to participate in the democratic process.

The argument that critics may use available information about how reporters or editors vote doesn’t stand logically. When someone would use this data to criticize the media as having bias it is a psychogenetic fallacy at best, meaning to assume that because a psychological motive can be inferred (I mainly vote Democratic or Republican), that another argument is invalid (I can report on Republicans or Democrats fairly).

The arguments given lead to absurd conclusions: Would you not allow reporters/editors of a certain faith (or lack thereof) to cover other churches? If your reporters/editors shop at Wal-Mart, should they be barred from covering stories about Target? I would argue that this information about journalists is easily gathered, too, yet there are no policies that trounce on these particular employee rights.

Why should we cater to lunatic or vague perceptions of what the media is or should be? We, presumably, as journalists are in the truth trade. We should not be perception peddlers. Isn’t that the whole point of the Fourth Estate? Our goal is to uncover the truth, so why do we hide from it? Ad hominem attacks against our reporters and editors shouldn’t affect our ability to work as journalists, or our ability to act as individual citizens. How can logically weak or completely invalid arguments harm our credibility as journalists?

Nobody seems to be discussing the credibility of journalism. We’re talking about the perception of credibility of journalism, which is an important distinction. Perception is not always reality, and we shouldn’t forget that. Ultimately your arguments come down to unnecessarily restricting newsroom employees’ personal freedoms to defend against possible (read: not imminent nor real) false arguments.

The fact of the matter is that we all carry bias. To fool our readers into thinking we don’t have bias by simply not participating makes little sense to me. Not allowing your staffs to participate distorts reality. This is a thin veil at best and actually harms our credibility as fair journalists at worst. We’re giving invalid arguments false validity when we play make believe with our leanings.

The better solution would be openness and transparency about our biases because we must be able to recognize them to overcome them in our coverage. Acknowledgment of bias is the first step to truly avoid conflicts of interest.

Don’t fear engaging your critics. Take them to task for their stupid beliefs. With logic and reason, not by hiding behind the curtain.

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.

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.

Reflections of a Newsosaur: Flat-footed in Omaha

It’s simply unacceptable. The site still takes upwards of 2 minutes to load today. It looks like the site’s been hit by digg.com or slashdot, but I don’t believe that traffic would sustain like that for this long when nothing is loading. There is probably some other mess going on behind the scenes.

TV stations in omaha had live video online all day there and was on top of both stories, so I don’t buy the argument that there wasn’t enough staff to cover the shooting. That they couldn’t shift from Bush coverage tells me something is wrong with their entire process. KETV (which isn’t even the market leader) nailed the shooting coverage and I can guarantee you they didn’t need 20 people on either story. I’m betting it’s because they’re simply more equipped to handle breaking news environment.

The blog they’re talking about was a free blogger.com blog that had a handful of nothing on it. One post, a few comments. Nothing… Makes me think they had no blogging strategy to begin with. http://omahaworld-herald.blogspot.com/

There are two shining examples of recent that I can think of on how to cover a huge local story on the Web: The Strib had a several stories, a video, graphics and maps all up within 2 hours of the bridge collapse and the Virginia Tech shooting coverage with its twitter.com-like fast updates on the Roanoke homepage.

What we call the news, a new original animation from Jib Jab takes a shot at what television news has become in the ever-present chase for ratings.

Project for Excellence in Journalism recent released analysis of cable TV networks, showing negative audience growth for CNN, FOX News Channel and MSNBC last year.

Andrew Tyndall attributes the decline to lack of compelling crises coverage last year, compared to previous years. And to be honest with you, I think crises coverage is where 24 hour TV news shines.