Archive for the ‘Online Journalism’ Category

  • 31 Mar

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    Using Data Mining to Dig up Dirt

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    I’m in a few classes this semester for which I read several academic articles each week from fields ranging from behavioral economics to anthropology. More often than not, I’m frustrated by their lack of practicality and ability to be applied for the real world*. The silver lining to my blood pressure-raising annoyance, though, is that I now appreciate the fact that journalism works with real people on concrete issues astronomically more than I did previously. And technology is helping us do this job more effectively every day.

    One great example that I recently came across is this pothole mapping tool/smart phone application from the Des Moines Register. Think about it: how frustrating is it to ram your car into a crater-sized pothole that you didn’t see until it was too late? The smart phone app allows Iowans to turn their frustration into collective knowledge instantly.

    Potholes are color coded according to their severity, and recently filled holes are marked as well.

    More than just providing practical information, the Des Moines potholes map keeps the local government accountable. It also gives credit when credit is due—potholes filled within the past week show up in gray on the map.

    Newspapers need to find ways to become indispensable to their target audience. Providing practical information that you can act upon is a great first step.

    *For example, this sentence is from Paulo Freire’s book Pedagogy of the Oppressed on problem posing education, his solution for how to educate the lower classes: “It epitomizes the special characteristic of consciousness: being conscious of, not only as intent on objects but as turned in upon itself in a Jasperian ‘split’—consciouness as consciousness of consciousness” (79). Yes, I stopped reading halfway through, too.

  • 26 Sep

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    The Story Behind the Story: Duke vs. Alabama

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    Now that the dust has officially settled on the Duke vs. Alabama football matchup of more than one week ago (this past weekend Alabama continued to exert its dominance over the rest of the college football world while Duke dropped its third straight game), I wanted to look back over my work leading up to and immediately following the most hyped game in Duke’s recent football history.

    I had eagerly been awaiting my opportunity to cover the defending national champions and scheduled a sit down interview with Blue Devils head coach David Cutcliffe the week before the the Crimson Tide rolled into town in order to write a feature detailing his Alabama football days under legendary head coach Paul “Bear” Bryant. After the interview, I had enough material to turn my feature idea into a miniseries previewing the matchup, and spoke with Mal Moore,  Alabama’s director of athletics, for the second part to add a more balanced perspective. Here’s the tangible results of my reporting:

    Overkill for a game that was essentially over within the first 10 minutes of the opening quarter? Perhaps some would argue that. An example of the beat reporter I hope to be after graduation? Most definitely.  Dutifully completing my senior at Duke and being a professional-level beat reporter for the paper has been a balancing act—feel free to watch as I can keep juggling both gigs.

  • 05 Sep

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    The State of the News Media 2010

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    For the past seven years, the Pew Research Center‘s Project for Excellence in Journalism has put out an annual report on the state of American Journalism.

    And every year, the picture gets bleaker.

    I read through the overview for my Policy Journalism and Media class. Here are some notable points (the word “highlights” doesn’t feel right):

    • Newspapers, including online, saw ad revenues fall 26 percent during 2009, which brings the total loss over the previous three years to 43 percent. Total U.S. ad spending suffered its sharpest drop since the Great Depression.  Of all online news consumers, 79 percent say they rarely if ever have clicked on an online ad.
    • Of those online ads, display ads fuel revenue for news sites. Of that revenue, aggregators and Internet service providers take in 28 percent.  Television websites, which include both news and entertainment material, get six percent. Newspaper websites get 5 percent and current-event sites less than 3 percent.
    • Only cable news among the commercial news sectors did not suffer declining revenue last year.
    • Print revenue still provides 90 percent of the revenue for the industry.
    • Roughly $141 million of nonprofit money has flowed into new media efforts over the last four years (not including public broadcasting). That is less than one-tenth of the losses in newspaper resources alone.
    • After analyzing a million blogs and social media sites, the report found that 80 percent of the links are to U.S. legacy media.
    • The most often linked-to news stories among bloggers matched the top story in the mainstream press just 13 out of 47 weeks studied. On Twitter, the top story was the same just four of the 27 weeks studied.
    • A handful of sites collect most of the eyeballs, with 80 percent of the traffic to news and information sites concentrated at the top 7 percent of sites. Two-thirds of the top news sites (67 percent) are still tied to legacy media financed largely by their shrinking end of the business.
    • Moreover, of the news sites with a half million visitors a month (the top 199 news sites), 67 percent of from legacy media and 48 percent of them newspapers.
    • As media organizations get more niche, audiences aren’t splintering their attention further and further—while only one-third of online news consumers say they have a favorite news website, most people (57 percent) use between two and five websites, and only 12 percent use more than six.
    • People spend about half as much time per month on niche news sites as they do no those focused on general interest news.

    And finally….

    • While the notion that newspapers in large numbers were going out of business was not true (just a half dozen went out of business last year, most the few remaining second papers in their markets), roughly a third of the newsroom jobs in American newspapers in 2001 are now gone.

    That’s all.

    All that depressing news is enough to make one yearn for the simpler pleasures in life—like fishing off the coast of Lisbon, Portugal, with an October sunset in the background.

  • 30 Aug

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    First Day of School

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    My summer will officially end at 2:50 p.m. when I go to my first class of my last year in college. With the start of a new year comes a plethora of opportunities—you can anyone you want to be (why yes, I will take that flier to try out for your a cappella group and Bhangra dance troupe!). Fortunately, though, I know I want to be a journalist, and I have spent the past three summers working to ease the transition from student-journalist to professional, paid, real-person, real-job journalist (by the way, my resume and clips pages are all up to date with this summer’s activities).

    While they don’t get paid and normally don’t get published by traditional media outlets during the year, student-journalists are still journalists. As Robert Niles of the Knight Digital Media Center points out in his advise for journalism students blog post, the career of a student-journalist has already begun.

    His other advice includes:

    • Everyone who posts online has the potential to be a journalist. Immediate access to a global publishing medium allows any source to become a breaking news reporter, even if it is only for a fleeting moment.
    • Your career is only as strong as your network. Networking has taken a digital turn thanks to the rise of social media. Now, you no longer have to have met someone in the flesh to make a professional connection.
    • Get passionate about a field and start to master it. Niles recommends turning it into a second major. My second major, for the record, is Spanish—I consider it a tool to hopefully allow me to reach more people and travel across the globe.
    • Conduct yourself as a journalist, at all times, and never stop reporting. This goes back to bullet point number one: anything posted online has to potential to be newsworthy to someone else. Journalists by definition are unbiased and open-minded—any hint of bias could come back to become your own personal Kate Moss cocaine scandal.

    » Read the rest of the entry..

  • 25 Aug

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    Facebook and Media Partnership

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    I’ve previously blogged about Facebook’s potential to help journalists and small websites like mine. Last month, Justin Osofsky, Facebook’s head of media partnerships, detailed more of Facebook’s power to help the media.

    In a post titled, Working with Media Organizations to Build Social News, Osofsky unveils information on driving traffic, increasing engagement and an analytics system that website managers can use to track the number of times their posts get liked or shared—and by whom.

    » Read the rest of the entry..

  • 31 Jul

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    The Future of News

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    The sooner we accept this as a relic of the past, the better. Image from State Library of Queensland's Flickr page.

    …is not just full of  doom and gloom.

    Michele McLellan, a longtime editor at The Oregonian, posted a summary of her recently-competed study of just over 100 promising journalism web start-ups on The Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard’s website. I would encourage anybody interested to read the full Nieman post (it starts out with an extended tree vs. sprouts metaphor, a tried-and-true indicator of good writing).

    McLellan and her research partner, Adam Maksl, established a criteria for admission onto the list (the production of original news in ways that attempt to be fair and transparent with demonstrated effort in finding a sustainable revenue model) and divided their findings into four categories:

    • New traditional -  sites dominated by original content produced by professional journalists. The newsroom staff may be smaller than in a traditional newspaper newsroom, but tends to have more journalists than two of the other categories, community and micro local.  Many are embracing digital connectivity with their users while keeping traditional journalism as their bread and butter.

    my selected highlight: The Texas Tribune. A self-described non-profit, nonpartisan public media organization. Its mission is to “cover every line in the state budget” and to promote civic engagement and discourse on matters of statewide concern through original reporting and on-the-record, open-to-the-public conversations with elected officials and other newsmakers.  With a staff of 27, the site advocates reading this as a supplement to your local newspaper, since it has probably cut back on political reporting. Funding comes strictly from donations, no advertising. The site itself is beautiful.

    » Read the rest of the entry..

  • 19 Jul

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    What Google Really Thinks About Newspapers

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    Don't be evil.

    In case you did not see this when it was still “news” (as opposed to two-and-a-half-week-old food for thought), Google Chief Executive Officer Eric Schmidt offered his thoughts on how newspapers need to change and what they will look like in the future while at the Guardian’s Activate 2010 Summit:

    “they’re replacing analogue dollars with digital cents, and a lot of people are losing their jobs as a result. It’s much less bad here in Britain, perhaps because of the history of newspapers here, but in the US there are unhappy people who are losing audience at a faster and faster rate.”

    I’m somewhat embarrassed to admit I had never really considered the differences between newspaper cultures in the two bastions of the English language, but apparently others have. Ah, but maybe this is just an American newspaperman pining for the good ol’ days—a June 17 report from the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development presented by paidcontent.org shows that UK newspapers have suffered the most dramatic circulation declines of any country outside the United States since 2007. In fact, UK circulation has fallen by 25 percent between 2007-09, second only to the US, where the decline was 30 percent. Greece (20 percent), Italy (18 percent) and Canada (17 percent) have also seen noted dropoffs.

    Less bad? Sure. “Much less bad” as Schmidt claims? The data say not so much.

    “What does the newsreading experience look like many years from now? I think it’s delivered to a digital device, which has text, obviously, but also colour, and video, and the ability to dig very deeply into what you are supplied with. At the moment we have readers, but it’s not intelligent enough; newspapers often tell me what I already know. We’ll have advertising products that are much more media-centric. The most important thing is that it will be more personalised.”

    » Read the rest of the entry..

  • 12 Jul

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    How to Save Journalism

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    Times Square sold its soul to advertisers long ago. Would the media be doing the same thing if it put ads in emails sent by reporters?

    Last week, Andy Boyle, a journalist who is a friend of mine, put out a tweet that caught my attention:

    An e-mail from a guy at a newspaper just contained an advertisement at the bottom. So. Can e-mail ads save journalism?

    The Pew Research Center estimated back in September 2009 that about 58 percent of all American adults send or read an email on an average day.  This compares with just 17 percent of people who say a print national newspaper is part of their daily news diet (slide 16).  But we already knew print is dying, right?

    [side note - it would be inaccurate of me not to report that the same Pew survey says that 50 percent of people view a local print paper on a typical day. That makes me wonder what all exactly qualifies as a local print paper.]

    So, there is no question that placing advertisements in a journalist’s email would help advertisers reach a wider audience than if they advertised in a printed paper. If a reporter is not out in the field, than he or she is likely sending out emails to sources and subjects. On top of that, it would be fairly easy to identify the demographics of certain audiences—for example, a sports reporter will probably be emailing men in the coveted 18-49 age group. A local advertiser could team with the local beat reporter, and so on.

    We already know the technology is available—see the ads at the top of your Gmail messages based on the content of your emails as exhibit A. Journalism, though, has a much stricter set of ethical guidelines than most professions.

    So, would selling ad space in reporters’ emails be ethical?

    I can’t pretend to know. Ethical issues are rarely black and white, and history is rife with examples of how media outlets use advertisements in ways that violate unspoken (and sometimes spoken) ethical rules. Obviously, the reporter and editors should play no role in the arranging and selection of these ads—let the business people take care of that. Local TV news has been using product placement since at least 2008 during its broadcasts—is that really different from letting ads run at the bottom of emails containing a non-endorsement disclaimer?

    Out of this ethical debate, there is one certainty—print outlets need to find a new advertising model, and they needed to find it yesterday. It’s through outside-the-box ideas such as this that will give birth to the new business model.

  • 29 Jun

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    Sports Journalism, Twitter and the World Cup

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    As someone who has spent a fair amount of time in sports journalism, I am used to the realization that, for most newspapers, the

    sports section is the most popular with readers. Sports stories drive the most hits, engage people that are only casually interested in “news,” and lend themselves well to creating promotional items that can generate extra revenue for their perspective papers.

    Europe loves its soccer (as evidenced by my picture from Real Madrid vs. Xerez in Estadio Santiago Bernabeau, September 20, 2009).

    And now I have another piece of evidence to bolster my claims—Twitter announced over the weekend that the Japan vs. Demark soccer game set a new record for Tweets per second (TPS). When the referee blew the final whistle, the Twitter crew counted 3,283 TPS (They also note that the Netherlands vs. Cameroon game ended six minutes earlier). The old record? Another sporting event, of course—3,085 TPS at the end of the Los Angeles Lakers victory over the Boston Celtics in game 7 of the NBA finals. The Twitter blog also said that, “The second week of the World Cup continued to see consistent spikes in TPS after goals that are remarkable increases over our average of 750 TPS.”

    Techcrunch.com goes into more detail:

    Last week the all time highs were in terms of Tweets-per-second took place after goals were scored in the following games: Japan scores against Cameroon on June 14 in their 1-0 victory (2,940 TPS), Brazil scores their first goal against North Korea in their 2-1 June 14 victory (2,928 TPS) and Mexico ties South Africa in their June 11 game (2,704 TPS).

    One of the most remarkable observations from this data is that none of these games involve the United States. As stateside journalists, it is easy to get caught up in our United States (note—not American) bubble. The audience for news, though, is worldwide.

    So, why is this helpful for Journalists?

    » Read the rest of the entry..

  • 23 Jun

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    Rolling Stone’s breaking news fail

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    Photo taken from El_Enigma's photostream on Flicker.

    Rolling Stone acted more like a 1960s rock band today than a magazine operating in the 21st century. It had a story that was bound to spark national debate—General Stanley A. McChrystal, the top U.S. military official in Afghanistan who commands the 130,000 soldiers in the NATO coalition, is not too fond of his civilian counterparts. In the profile piece, aptly titled, “The Runaway General,”  McChrystal and his aids take shots at Karl W. Eikenberry, the U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan (who, by nature of his position, is the top U.S. civilian in that country) and Vice President Joe Biden, who is no. 2 in command back on U.S. soil. Can you say public relations disaster for the U.S. Goverment?

    As expected, the fallout was severe—every major news organization picked the story up, Obama ordered McChrystal back home and may fire him…and Rolling Stone did not even bother putting the story on its website until 11:00 a.m.

    What?

    » Read the rest of the entry..