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.

I have quite a few opinions about this Kurtz piece. If you haven’t already, you should read it before moving on with my disjointed rant below.

Regarding the Web stuff at the bottom of this article: I think fear of what others in the community have to say is not an excuse to try to quiet their voice.

By simply turning off a blog on your site, you don’t do much. There is absolutely zero cost involved for a blogger to a new site. They can set one up for free. Then they’re competing for the same attention every site, newspaper or otherwise, is vying for. To me, embracing blogs is more important than trying to compete with them in the long run.

Because some projects fail (by what measure?), does that mean newspapers shouldn’t try new things? No. Dozens of television programs get canceled every year because they don’t meet audience expectations. But that doesn’t mean TV programmers necessarily fall back on producing the same types of content over and over. Each new program tries to serve a specific segment of the overall market. You have winners and losers and hope that the balance keeps you in the black.

First: Be the best source to the most valuable markets, then branch out

Sometimes I feel like the newspaper industry tries too hard to be all things to all people, but ‘all people’ really turns out to be current, vocal subscribers.

There’s too much talk of ‘The Readers’ when we really mean ‘Some Readers.’

I’m tired of the vague subtext from editors that readers read the entire paper. I have never seen evidence to back this up. In fact, it’s quite the contrary on the Web.

People have habits, cater to them

Each section, each piece of content (articles, comics, games and even advertising) is serving only a segment of the entire readership. Most people don’t say ‘I want to be informed of the world around me.’ They say ‘what happened in last nights Twins game?’ ‘What stupid joke does Mallard Fillmore have today?’ ‘Why did Playmakers change it’s name?’ ‘Why were the police on my block yesterday?’ Readers want to know about content that is relevant to them in some way (individual interests, subjects, proximity all play a role).

I think the serendipitous nature of learning something new about the world from a paper or a Web site is secondary to the reason people actually pick up the news. It comes after they’ve done the crossword, checked the box scores, cut coupons, read the obits or scanned the front page.

The real ’silent majority’ don’t read your product (yet)

The man who talks about the ‘silent majority’ of subscribers is probably right. But, personally, I don’t think that group of people should be the largest slice of readers. Think of it like a pie chart. This man represents only a slice. The business objective is to grow the overall diameter of the pie, regardless of why people read the paper or go to a Web site. The way to do that isn’t to just listen to your readers. Listen to the people that aren’t reading, too. The San Jose Mercury News is on the right track.

None of this changes the fundamental role of the newspaper. We are still providing information to people who need it. We have to ask what information people want and package it in a way that serves a segment of the community.

Somewhere along the line, this industry forgot to ask that on a daily, monthly and quarterly basis.

The Associated Press: AP Urges News Industry to Embrace Online

I’ve put a lot of thought into this in my young journalism career.

The methods of gathering news hardly change. Only the delivery mechanisms. We still go out and engage the community, ask questions. But we now have amazing opportunity to really listen to our audience. That’s the “institutional arrogance” that Curley is talking about. I’m saying this at my own risk: This entire industry may not really be listening while we communicate.

As aggregators and producers of information (news or otherwise), we can only benefit by being closer to our communities, online or off. The Web is most valuable when it provides a gathering point for discussion. That discussion can be about products (Amazon and eBay), humorous news (Fark.com) or video (YouTube, Vimeo, and a million other sites). The Web is just another bar, another softball field, another book club.

The beauty of the Web, in my eyes, is that it lowers the bar for anyone to produce media, to share their thoughts and expertise on any topic with anyone who happens across their site. That isn’t competition, that’s opportunity to listen to and engage our audience, on a one-to-one level and on a global scale at the same time.

The best we can do is facilitate and become a part of the discussions going on in our communities.

Same as always.

Part one of this series can be found here. Part two, here.

Anecdotal evidence

A few of my colleagues in the journalism business refer to their jobs as “the paragraph factory.” These people are all under 30. Notice how, even though they’re gainfully employed by a newspaper, they don’t make reference to the printed product, rather their output.

Without knowing it, they’re starting to see the separation of content and form. Their job is to write words, they don’t really care about where those words are going to end up. So long as they get paid.

* * * I often spend lunch at a small Chicago-style deli about a block and a half from my office. There, I grab the local alt-weekly paper if I haven’t yet read it and sit down in front of the big screen TV that always has CNN on, unless there’s an afternoon Twins game. As I wait for my greasy, delicious food, I page through the paper, looking for something that interests me. I’ll listen to the TV, in hopes that some news comes up that I didn’t catch scanning the wires earlier that morning.

I imagine a lot of people in this field spend their lunches like this.

But there’s something new. I have a MotoQ. And I have a data plan through Sprint. And Google Reader has a mobile version.

When the alt-weekly, or CNN, or fails to provide anything to relevant to me, I turn to my phone and fire up my feed reader.

* * * As a freshman in J-school, I remember my Intro to Mass Communications professor talking about mobility.

You can’t easily carry a TV with you, he told us. Laptops are nice, but finding a Web connection is difficult. A newspaper is inherently the most mobile form of news media because you can fold it up, stick it under your arm and read it on the bus to work. You can read it at the table during breakfast, on in the afternoon on the crapper.

He might have been right then, but he’s not anymore.

* * * In the first part of this series, I talked about the synergy of the Web. Data and content are separate from form. Information on a newspaper page is stuck on a newspaper page. Information in a database can be output to a paper, to a Web site and to a mobile device.

When my journalist friends write news down, it ends up in a repository that gets put onto the Web, and into a paper. It is syndicated to readers via RSS and possibly picked up by other papers in our company.

When I’m at lunch, I can pull down any news I’m subscribed to via RSS. On a mobile device. Text, pictures and video come together on my phone. I can do the same on the bus…or on the crapper. And I’m engaging with the news. I’m sharing it like this.

As the technology gets better, so will my bathroom reading experience.

So it goes.

Howard Owens says something mobile could be the newspaper killer. I think mobile technologies in general are the newspaper killers. It is just a matter of time for smart phones with cheaper data plans and RSS and WiMax and whatever happens after the FCC’s 700 MHz auction to spread beyond the techy, business, and uber-user worlds into the hands of general consumers.

So it goes.

The game is changing…fast

This is bad news for news media, right? Wrong. It’s all opportunity to make money. It’s an expansion of reach. It’s the possibility of a wider aggregate audience.

This is a time of abundance of information. And want of information. Lots of want.

The news business has two purposes: 1) To provide information for its community. 2) To sell ads around that information.

Anybody who thinks this industry is more than that is greatly overreaching. Anybody who thinks this industry is less is vastly underestimating the business.

Many of the complaints I hear and read about money moving from newspaper and television advertising to the Web is that the dollar amount for a Web advertisement is substantially smaller than the dollar amount for a newspaper or TV spot.

I think the problem arises because newspaper types are still hung up on treating the Web as a digital copy of the paper; It is treated as another place for yesterdays news or an up-sell for print advertisers.

The Web is a wholly new product. Therefore it is a wholly new way to generate revenue.

The paragraphs and photos (and in the case of TV, the video) are the same in both products, yes. But the Web offers more opportunity than that.

“But there’s 80 billion things on there,” Larry King said of the Internet. That’s exactly why advertising is cheaper on the Web than in print. Resources aren’t scarce. Space is a commodity. Web ad inventory is determined by the size of your audience, not space or time.

Another point: because “there’s 80 billion things on there,” one Web site doesn’t cut it in the overall picture of the Web. Think about your local news providers. In your geographical region, there’s only a few sources for media. Scarcity necessitates top-down control of information.

But on the Web, we, meaning your former newspaper community, can fragment into communities bound by interest, not necessarily by location.

Hyperlocal news is an attempt rebuild communities, but don’t get hung up on the word local. It has little to do with physical location, and everything to do with relevance of a subject to a potential reader.

You’re no longer a part of your community

The news business has two purposes: 1) To provide information for its community. 2) To sell ads around that information.

Market fragmentation means that your former readers are looking more and more to other sources for information, because you do not provide the information they want or because you are no longer a member of their community.

These two issues are related. First, not providing information that people want makes you irrelevant to their community. Second, if you are providing information that is relevant to their community you are not where they are on the Web.

One Web site doesn’t cut it in the overall picture of the Web. You need to get out there and actively engage with your communities:

That means full text RSS feeds, active Facebook profiles maintained by real live staffers who drive discussions and answer questions, full-fledged mobile versions of newspaper.coms, Flickr accounts, YouTube channels, podcasts and videoblogs formatted for iTunes, and paying close attention to whatever’s next. (Ryan Sholin)

Bringing it all together

The paragraph factory mentality serves to coldly separate content from form. This is a good way to move forward by technically providing content across multiple platforms. But it feels top-down, megaphone, WE ARE MEDIA AND YOU ARE AUDIENCE. We need to move beyond this.

As reporters, producers, editors and publishers, we need to actively engage with our communities–our readership–on as much of a personal level as we can.

We, as news consumers, are also reporters, producers, editors and publishers. Give us a platform to share our content and information with you, as well as tools to share your content with others in our communities. We know our communities interests better than you do, so let us share easily. Let us be your megaphone.

This is how you grow an audience. And yes, it will be hard to meet our second purpose (to sell ads) on some platforms (like youtube or facebook) because we do not own those sites. But we’ll be engaging our communities, building relationships, and giving people opportunity to discover our products that pay our bills.

In that same Intro to Mass Comm class, my professor spent a large chunk of time one day talking about the letters to the editor section of the newspaper. It serves as a community bulletin board, he said.

Now, I think, all our content is a conversation.

You can find the first part of this series here. In it, we looked at what convergence really is. It is a synergy of previous media. It is how we interact with the web, either overtly through IM, email, polls, and blog comments, or implied through our usage of the Web’s technologies.

We can use the Web how we see fit. This is the key difference between the traditional (old) media and online (new) media. The technologies that combine to create the Web give the end-user as much control over the Web’s outcome as the original creator of a Web page.

Wait, what?

Think about it. New media bloggers, like those at Media 2.0 workgroup and Cluetrain fanatics, like to talk about the Web as a conversation. The Web ebbs and flows in reaction to itself. Since the we are the Web (loosely speaking the Web is a network of people as much as a network of computers), we create and build the Web every day, through our personal blogs, our Amazon wish lists, our craigslist listings and our email forwards.

The Web is full of conversations. Conversations from corporations to clients, from retailers to customers, friends to friends, bloggers to like-minded readers and insane people to anyone who will listen.

I remember watching Larry King a while back. He was talking to Rosanne Barr about the Internet. It was painful to watch. King said he wouldn’t like it, there’s “80 billion things on there.” And surprisingly, Barr hit the nail on the head. You can watch the video here.

She doesn’t know she’s talking about filters, per se, but she’s describing the single most important idea on the Web. The internet is noise. Constant noise. The ebb and flow of the Web means that it is constantly changing. And growing. If any single person tried to keep up with everything on the Web, they’d explode. Thank god smart people built robots to crawl the web, to give us the ability to search for whatever we wish. Thanks Google.

“But there’s 80 billion things on there.” King is right. But there’s also lots on books in a library. That’s why libraries are organized so that one person can dig out information relevant to their search.

The problem with libraries, though, is that we can’t easily add meta-data to the books we find in a library. All the information in a card catalog is meticulously entered by a librarian, god bless ‘em. However, that information is not extensible. We cannot add to the catalog.

Scarcity necessitates top-down control

Let’s step back and think about how we interact with “old” media.

Television, as I stated before, is locked into time. So is radio. There are only 24 hours in a day so a select few people decide what goes on air, much like librarians decide how to create filters for library catalogs. A librarian is a curator of filters, and an editor is a curator of content. But in doing their jobs, they both act as filters, leaving the the final users of the products out of the process.

And then step back even further to the technology that makes TV work. Previously, there were only a few stations over the air. Those stations are still the only few that exist on the air waves. Spectrum is a form of space, so the government had to allocate that spectrum to certain groups.

The same goes for newspapers and magazines and books, which cannot feasibly produce 80 billion page volumes every day. Economics and usefulness outweigh the value of near infinite texts. Scarcity necessitates top-down control. Someone has to make a decision as to what stays and what goes. Someone must curate.

But the Web is so insanely different it doesn’t need top-down control. The reason it doesn’t need editors or librarians is, surprisingly, because there is so much stuff. We curate our own corner of the world and we tailor it to our sensibilities.

The cost of creating a Web page is fast approaching zero. Unlike paper, it isn’t trapped in spatial dimensions. You can have one giant page full of content or a billion pages with sparse content, it doesn’t matter. The device you use to access the internet doesn’t have to also grow in size because the amount of content is growing.

Content is separate from form.

What a concept.

Infinite content

I’m reminded of a Saturday Night Live skit. Watch it here. It’s fake commercial for a bank that bought the last Web domain available: clownpenis.fart.

It’s funny because people, when using the Web, don’t seem to give a shit what the name of a site is. They’re looking for content. They’re looking for usefulness. Brand isn’t a name anymore. Brand is interface. Flickr is a dumb name. So is Twitter. So is Google. But we’re not looking for a name. We’re looking for usefulness. We’re looking for content. We’re looking for what we want.

When we search, or click on a tag link, or drill down into a site, we’re looking for something that we want, that may be something general or something specific, but we want content and we want it now. We don’t want a name. If we don’t find something closely resembling what we’re looking for, we leave the page and try somewhere else.

The key for newspaper sites is simple. Make it easy for people to scan your pages. Make it easy to search for content. Don’t tell them what to look for. Help them find whatever it is they want.

If you don’t have it, or you make it hard to find, they will leave. We will leave. We’re not loyal customers anymore. Too bad, so sad. Deal with it. This is the main foundation for my argument for putting more “crap” on the Web.

Content everywhere

The Web is tearing down some ideals that existed in the past regarding ownership. The Web is a connection between people. A youtube video can appear somewhere other than youtube, which changes the videos context. RSS makes it hard to control where your content ends up. Hell, it could end up here. Or it could end up in my gmail account, my facebook profile and elsewhere as I’ve described here. Because we’re all curating our own corners of the Web, we’re getting flack from groups like RIAA, MPAA and overzealous editors who don’t see the value of their newspaper content anywhere else on the Web but their own Web sites.

Because content is separate from form, we can distribute it everywhere. I believe wholeheartedly, that distribution extends reach and increases content longevity.

Recently in our newsroom, we received an email from a professional photographer from the Twin Cities. He had taken a whole bunch of photos in a small town that was devastated by a massive tornado. They were great photos. Amazing photos. And he was giving them to us. All he wanted was credit and a link to his Flickr page.

This caused a stir that I hadn’t dealt with before. Why would this guy give away his great photos, members of the newsroom asked. Why wouldn’t he? It’s the Web. The guy makes his living from taking pictures (of weddings and such), not reselling his photos that were licensed under Creative Commons. The photographer wanted to use our site(s) to extend his reach. To get his name out there as a photographer. The photos are secondary to his ability to take them well.

And that’s exactly what newspapers need to do. Get your content in places where people will discover it. Think beyond your Web sites. You can’t expect thousands of people to just happen across clownpenis.fart on their own. You have to put yourself out there. Let your users stick your content in every nook and cranny on the Web. And then, once you’ve increased your market share, figure out how to profit off it. But we’ll talk more about distribution later.

What to make of this

The key points to take home here:

• Users want what they want, not necessarily what you have
• If what users want is not easily discoverable, they will get discover it somewhere else
• Many users want to do as they wish with your site, forcing them do anything else will only turn them away
• One way to achieve discoverablity is through distribution

Search is so important for newspaper sites. A newspaper.com is loaded with content, content that goes back years, if not decades. Hiding that from your users does nothing to help you. Give your users familiar tools to discover new content, and related content. You also can’t lay it all out there and expect them to know where it is.

Otherwise, expect them to leave as they (and the rest of the Web) get more sophisticated.

MinnPost.com (not to be confused with parked site mnpost.com or news aggregate site minnesotapost.com), a Web only, not-for-profit news organization run by a bunch of laid-off or otherwise out-of-work Minnesota reporters has launched (sort of):

“MinnPost.com is for Minnesotans who are intensely interested in the world around them and want more insight and analysis than they’re getting from their media choices today,” said Joel Kramer, editor and CEO of the new not-for-profit enterprise, who served as editor of the Star Tribune in the 1980s and as publisher and president in the 1990s. “It will combine the best of traditional journalism with new forms of newsgathering and story-telling made possible by the Internet.”

But will it work?

My first impression of the site is this: Where’s the news? It seems like a horrible idea to pretty much launch a site–a news site–and the only news is a list of reporters and a news release declaring the upcoming launch of the site.

My second impression with the site is this: It looks like a blog, but it is not a blog as we know them today. The design flat out sucks. It might not be fair to say that, considering the lack of stuff to fill the page.

My third impression: What is the Web strategy? It is to be an online news source, after all. There’s no RSS, there’s no images (yet), there’s no video, there’s nothing but text and a few links. And they expect to compete with the Strib or the Pioneer Press? This whole site feels old. It’s certainly no Politico or Voice of San Diego right now.

My understanding is that they’re trying to tap into the news junkie market, to MPR listeners and to readers with a political slant, but I don’t know if launching a bare bones site with no features– a site geared towards news junkies–was the way to do it. At best this looks like a soft launch site with the marketing of a hard launch. Not good.

However, looking at the list of reporters, it should be interesting to see what they do. And to see if they can keep afloat as a non-profit, which has been a big talking point this year for many media bloggers. But right now: Yuck.

Here’s a few suggestions:

• Open yourself up to suggestions about your launch, build a community around your product. Start a blog (a real blog). Let people know what’s going on behind the scenes and let people have input.
• Seriously consider re-branding, too. The URL is confusing as it stands and it’s in a cluttered field of similarly named sites.
• Build a community! If this is just another top down news organization, what’s the point? What differentiates you from Pioneer Press, the Star Tribune and, heck, even Minnesota Daily? I want to see a site where I can be as close to the news process as paid reporters and editors. I want to see a site where Little League baseball matters and is reported . Think about Wikis, think about tiered news gathering.
• Read this
• And then read this

Update More on MinnPost.com:

Editor & Publisher
New York Times
Minnesota Public Radio
The Rake
Minnesota Monitor
Bob Stepno
Eyeteeth interview with Joel Kramer
The Deets

This post contains no spoilers

The new Harry Potter book, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows has been leaked four days before its release.

The copy of the book is just photos of each page, but there it is for everyone to download.

Scholastic purportedly spent $20 million to keep leaks under wraps, but all it took was one untrustworthy person with a digital camera and lots of time to spare.

One wonders if it was worth the money at all. As Schneier says in the link below, people are probably going to still buy the book.

[link]

Update: The publisher has not yet confirmed, nor have they denied this is the true version. A few weeks ago there was a fake leak that caused a bit of an uproar.

The LA Times has more:

“There are multiple versions of what appear to be official copies of the book on the Internet, and they all look very convincing, but they are conflicting,” said Lisa Holton, president of trade publishing and book fairs at Scholastic. “Our goal is to take down all this different material, and by taking it down we’ll never know whether any of it was real until you read it yourself on Saturday morning.”

Salon has more:

How did “Potter” get out? I have no idea. One account fingers a Canadian fellow named Byron Ng who says he stumbled upon the cache after some intrepid Web searching. But it’s a complete mystery who posted the pictures. The person’s fingers can be seen in some of the shots, and there’s an occasional glimpse of a brown shoe. All you can tell is that the person is white and has a taste for drab carpeting — not to mention extremely good connections.