New journalism is old again; plus, what CQ means

Everybody's fed to the teeth with this discussion of "Is the Internet killing journalism (or has it been slowly dying since the '20s)?!?" and "How will social media/the iPad/global warming save journalism?!?"

So here's two different thoughts. First: The Internet is BECOMING journalism -- a thesis clearly laid out by no less an authority than Gawker, which explains that in the age of people trading links on Facebook and Twitter, your items have to have speed, brevity, clarity and accuracy, or you're going to get your pants beaten off. Oh, and good headlines, too.

This is shockingly similar to the conditions that produced Journalism 1.0. (Read here about how inverted pyramid style came about upon the death of Abraham Lincoln and avoiding bias came from the telegraph and the Civil War.)

Second: Somebody finally found out what CQ stands for. No lie. Read all about it!

Thanks to @scottmladd, whose tweet about the first item led me to the second.

Ordinary people creating less Web content these days

One of my coworkers shared this interesting chart on how "social engagement is changing."

My translation: People used to blog about their cats and their belly buttons, but now they pass around links to news stories and other stuff.

Why? My theory:

Because creating good content is FREAKING HARD. Much easier to pass around the good stuff than to sit down and generate it! Social media (Facebook, Twitter) make it really easy to share links.

Said coworker (Rob Quigley, my Beatles trivia partner, Statesman social media editor and writer for Old Media New Tricks) says he believes this is good news for newspapers. I optimistically agree!

The iPad, the user and the design in between them

OK, one more post about iPads/tablets/e-readers and user interfaces, and then I will get back to actual Aggie-related journalism news, of which I have quite the backlog.

First, Adobe and Wired have rolled out a digital magazine prototype that works across multiple platforms, which is what I was hoping for in my last post. Here's a video:



And the need for an intuitive interface is underlined by a fairly unbelievable occurrence in the past few days. Friday, a blog called ReadWriteWeb posted an entry about logging into Facebook that wound up, for some period of time, being one of the top five search results if you Googled "facebook login." Literally hundreds of people went to this blog post instead of to Facebook.com, tried to log in to Facebook and then posted angry comments on the blog saying they didn't like the way Facebook had been redesigned because it was too hard to log in.

I went to that blog and read over the comments and am satisfied it's not a joke. Some several hundred people literally thought it was Facebook despite it not being called Facebook and not being at Facebook.com, and were unable to log in but perfectly able to leave angry comments saying how stupid Facebook was.

Lots of folks have had great fun mocking this, of course; others are simply worried about the future of humanity. However, a really thoughtful, elegant mea culpa comes from a designer/developer named Ed Finkler at Funkatron.com, who begins also by talking about the iPad user interface. Here's an excerpt of my favorite parts:

• How is it the fault of the users when we present them with multiple, barely-differentiated text fields within the same window. Is it really surprising that they don’t understand the differences between each? And is it surprising that they choose to use the one which works with more natural language, rather than entering syntactically-unnatural domain names?

• There is LOADS of anecdotal evidence that most users simply use search engines as a sort of natural language CLI. Shouldn’t we be designing interfaces that work in the way most natural for the majority of users?

These people have better things to do with their days than tweaking out the spacing in their browser toolbars. A computer for them is a utility. One that is increasingly complex, and one that is used because it’s the only option for accomplishing certain things – not because it’s a good option.

It’s kind of like the Photoshop Problem: when people want to crop a picture, we give them Photoshop. Photoshop is a behemoth application with nearly every image editing and touchup function imaginable, and it is terribly complex.

...

When folks need an elevator, we should give them an elevator, not an airplane. We’ve been giving them airplanes for 30 years, and then laughing at them for being too stupid to fly them right.

...

I certainly don’t think that the computer can become (anytime soon) a magic box that determines our whims, nor do I think that people shouldn’t have to learn some things.

What I do think is that the current interface modern OSes on computers provide is simply overwhelming for most users, to the point that it’s very challenging to learn how to accomplish tasks without a very significant investment of time. Driving would be a good example of a task that does require investment of time, but is not so overwhelming that the vast majority of people fundamentally get it wrong: you don’t see people steering with their feet, or accelerating and braking with the radio. I’d argue that modern computer interfaces, in a rush to offer flexibility and capability, make it possible to steer with your hands, feet, teeth, and knees — and don’t make it particularly clear which one is best.

Hearst's e-reader: the Skiff

Click here for photo and description of the e-reader designed by Hearst -- still black-and-white for now, but color is rumored, and it apparently builds in advertising features.

As a consumer, I have to say I'd buy the product that's in color and DOESN'T have advertising features... as a journalist I'd say we're better off designing our product to be viewed on many platforms. Am I wrong or is it strange for us to start making the TVs when what we're good at is making the TV shows? That said, I hate to be negative when what we need is new ideas and execution, which is clearly what Hearst is doing here.

Thank you to @givingcity for tweeting this link! Here's some of what's coming up soon on this blog: a chance to help record the history of journalism at A&M; great pics and a video from two fellow Aggie journalists; and a nice feature from the Battalion.

Happy Valentine's Day y'all!

A video from the future: News reading on a tablet

The future could be gorgeous. Until I saw this, I didn't have a clear vision of what "repackaging news for digital readers" might look like, other than, well, a Web page.

Now I do.

Mag+ from Bonnier on Vimeo.

This is just one possible concept, of course, but it's nicely thought out and beautifully presented. Many thanks to @StKonrath for tweeting this.

Crystal ball time: Good story on journalism's future

Nice analysis of the past and future of the journalism biz in the San Diego Union-Tribune a little while back. Here's the top:

By Thomas Kupper
UNION-TRIBUNE STAFF WRITER
There was a time when newspapers were a monopoly business, when people had no good way to get information other than to subscribe, and when businesses that wanted to promote their products had little choice but to buy newspaper ads.
Philip Meyer says that period is gone forever, and he knows when it ended: 1923.

It's a good read, talking with experts about

• 85 years of moving away from mass media to niche media;
• the "decoupling of news and advertising";
• why half of our newspapers will go under in the next decade;
• local and national papers' potential for increased audience;
• and how the journalism biz as a whole may survive but not be nearly as fat:

“It will be a good business compared to the average business,” (UNC professor) Meyer said. “But it will be a poor business compared to the easy money that newspapers used to make. It will be good enough that someone will want to do it.”

Newspapers can't make money online? Not so!

Your moment of sunshine for the day: Geneva Overholser, writing for the Online Journalism Review about planning a career in journalism, says:

...the economic models just aren't working for newspapers online, lamented one student attending USC Annenberg School of Journalism Director's Forum.

Not true, said Osder, fresh off consulting work with Tina Brown's just-launched "The Daily Beast." Plenty of people are making plenty of money online. (As if in confirmation, David Westphal, Annenberg's executive in residence, noted that McClatchy right now makes more money online than it costs to pay all the editors and publishers in the company.)

A forecast of how collapse may reinvent journalism

Via Common Sense Journalism: This 2006 piece from the proprietor of newspaperdeathwatch.com is still well worth reading for several reasons, including its positive spirit despite the gloomy-sounding verbiage, but also its comparison of newspaper economics and successful Web ventures; its breakdown of how the medium has shaped the writing:

Once a story was in print, it was permanent. This necessitated an almost obsessive attention to detail and fact-checking. All facts had to be assembled before the story was written. ... Structure was critical. Because stories were cut from the bottom, newspapers invented the “inverted pyramid” style of writing, in which more important information was placed higher in the story. Good information was omitted because there wasn’t enough space.
... Of course, all that is irrelevant online, and the new journalism will be based on an entirely different set of assumptions. Any report may be quickly and easily updated and corrected. Search engine results and referral links are the principal drivers of readership. Layout is almost irrelevant to a Web site.

... and its description of exactly what our business might look like AFTER it turns upside-down:

This will be nothing less than a complete rebirth of journalism around the concept that information is plentiful and cheap. Instead of 1,500 print newspapers, there will be perhaps five to 10 national “super-papers” and many thousands of regional and special interest community news sites.

'Wire' writer says journalists missed the big story

The ex-journalist writer of HBO's "The Wire" points out with quite a bit of glee (warning: strong language) that nearly all the journalists who were critiquing whether the show's final season accurately depicted a newsroom completely missed the larger, meta-criticism: Its fictional Baltimore newspaper missed every single major story in its city throughout the season. Corrupt mayor/police department. Schools teaching the actual test questions. Politics hampering prosecutions. Drug wars and killings. All of it, he says, goes largely unreported in the fictional paper while the journalists there busy themselves with other matters. And all of it "pretty much happened" in the real Baltimore and didn't much appear in news coverage, he alleges.

He decries the slide into " 'impact' journalism, special projects and Pulitzer sniffing," saying that even before the pressures of the Internet, the paper was losing relevance because of these trends.

And he talks about how difficult, time-consuming and expensive "good, probing journalism" is -- developing sources, pawing through records.

But absent that kind of reporting, we will all soon enough live in cities and towns where politicians and bureaucrats gambol freely without worry.

'Brand' yourself to survive in online journalism

Don't quit your j-job just yet. Via Romenesko: Online Journalism Review editor Robert Niles writes about how to "ensure that you will be one who survives this competition" -- that is, the renewed competition brought about by the Web.

I could teach an entire course on preparing yourself to compete in online media (and I do work this topic into every course I do teach here at USC Annenberg). But for those of you staring at imminent layoffs and buyouts, here's the quick guide to what smart journalists need to do to survive, and do great work, in the Internet era.

The short version: Create content readers value, pitch it to the right readers and "make yourself the brand." But he puts it a lot more constructively -- and specifically. For example, on making yourself the brand:

You want to ensure that the value you've created with your content and your promotion of it is associated with you. Yeah, it is selfish, but you're trying to save a job here. Blogging gives you a stronger brand on a website than tiny bylines do. (A blog gives you your own URL, much larger font-size byline and usually a head shot.) A strong Facebook or MySpace following amplifies your brand. Sending personal e-mail alerts to fans sustains your relationship with them. In-bound links to your name (or, if you are a solo publisher, your site's name), creates enduring value by boosting your brand's search engine value.
And when your name is more valuable, that makes you more valuable to employers, investors and advertisers.

Kindle 451: Reading NYT on device isn't bad

Via Romenesko: Peter Osnos of the Century Foundation recently wrote about his experience buying a copy of the NYT and reading it on his Amazon digital reading device, the Kindle.

He describes how you download it, what you see, how much it costs and so on. Generally, he says, the experience was "an acceptable substitute" for a real paper.

He also notes that newspapers are selling well via Kindle:

I purchased the Kindle when it was released last fall and have now read David Halberstam’s The Coldest Winter, mainly during a round trip flight to China, and found that experience satisfying and convenient. Checking the Kindle bestsellers from time to time, I noticed that many of the country’s leading newspapers dominate the list. The New York Times has been #1 and the Wall Street Journal #2, except for last week, when a new Oprah book selection blew them both away. The Washington Post and the San Francisco Chronicle are steady sellers also.

What's your OQ?

Recently, Poynter's E-Media Tidbits column highlighted a do-it-yourself plan of action from Howard Owens designed to get "non-wired" journalists Web-savvy. It's a cool plan, and going by the comments on his page at least one newsroom has already implemented it.

What levels have you already reached on the plan? Grossly oversimplified, Owens' steps could be stated as:

Level 1: I blog
Level 2: I post stills on an online photo sharing site like Flickr
Level 3: I've made at least 3 videos and posted them to YouTube and another video sharing site
Level 4: I have spent at least two hours per week surfing YouTube, observing trends and favorites, for six weeks or longer
Level 5: I belong to LinkedIn and either Facebook or MySpace
Level 6: I use social bookmarking such as del.icio.us, Digg, Mixx or Publish2
Level 7: I use RSS to keep up with news and blogs
Level 8: I text-message
Level 9: I Twitter
Level 10: I've done all these things plus made a Google map mashup.

I'm a level 5 so far. Then again, perhaps due to ignorance or my own antiquation (I'm 35), I can't imagine wanting to text-message. (Also, I do not play no rock and roll.) But I suppose it's likely that I will wish I knew how to text at some point in my job. That's what the plan's about, to me: giving yourself a reason to learn these things just for the sake of broadening your horizons. (Incidentally, if you're not even at level 1 yet, there could be $100 in it for you.)

What's your online quotient? Post a comment here and let us know. (With your class year! I could do a snazzy chart with the results.)

Bragg '80: What's killing newspapers? Newspapers

Roy Bragg '80 wrote this week about the future and the recent past of newspapers on his MySA blog. Under fire: Lazy, self-indulgent journalism and pointless "repackaging," when we should have long since been expending our energy using the Web to break news. Sing it!

Paperless news in a narrow-interest market

The folks at Corante's Rebuilding Media group blog write about a number of interesting concepts:

• Audience fragmentation is a myth
• Newspapers may outsource their printing before they go paperless. And, they were dying long before the Internet, so ... why?
  
• Why we can't just shovel the same news package online and charge for it
• And stop calling ourselves "newspapers."

Also, they reiterate the "Newspapers will go to e-paper" idea referred to below (and many other places, no doubt.)

In the year 2017 ...

Marshall Loeb of MarketWatch writes that within a few years:

• We'll all carry paper-thin 8.5x11 computer screens that work like an iPhone.
• A major newspaper will shut its print operation, going Web-only, and the others will fall like dominoes.
• Journalists' jobs will change permanently and become richer.
• Consumers will glory in so much free content at their fingertips.

Is the part in the middle where most of us get fired? However, I do really like this part:

These heady prospects may well be the main reason that so many journalism professors say that more and more of the brightest and best students are applying for journalism school now.

And heck yes, I want my shiny Jetsons tablet. I can absolutely see myself carrying an electronic piece of paper around instead of my beat-up calendar.

Your thoughts on 2017?