Things that Make You Laugh about Newspapers

On the way to work, I'm listening to an NPR story about CNN taking the mojo-approach to journalism. If you don't know, that's the one-man band, mo(bile) jo(urnalist) who does everything from video to reporting. It's a concept introduced to the media by the newspaper industry, which has been fighting cutbacks and is looking for ways to compete with the immediacy of Internet news. (Here's a note or confession, depending on your perspective: In the interest of full disclosure, I worked for the Gannett editor who created the concept.)

Anyway, a few hours later, I get an e-mail link to a story on wired.com about the same topic. After I read it, I couldn't help but laugh.

The funny of the day: The writer who wrote the story apparently didn't know that Fort Myers, Fla., the home of the original mojo, has only one "e." (IE: Myers, not Meyers.) My e-mail tip of the day for wired? A mojo still needs a good editor.

Functionality, Not Form, in Newspaper Content

Leon Levitt, vice president of digital media for Cox Newspapers Inc, was quoted in editorsweblog.org as saying newspapers can boost online advertising revenue by "slicing and dicing" content to suit reader needs.

I couldn't agree more.

Since I jumped off the newspaper bandwagon and into a job as editor of an Internet startup site, it's become clearer to me that what newspapers aren't doing is making their content functional beyond the stories they produce.

I've had several conversations about this with newspaper editors in the last few months, including one this weekend with a friend who was visiting from Ohio. One of the keys to the puzzle of finding ways to make money off traditional newspaper content, I explained to her, was finding a way to improve the long-term functionality of the news that's produced daily.

What do I mean?

About two months ago, I began to re-examine the content on my site, not just for quantity but also for utility. While we've done a solid job of news-related content, the functionality of the site from an encyclopedic standpoint needed some improvement. After a discussion with our CEO, Cotter Cunningham, formerly of bankrate.com, it occurred to me that the encyclopedic information is in the news content -- just not organized in a way that makes it easy for users to find it again once the news content was archived.

Obviously, my news background was affecting how I focused the web site -- not a bad thing. But I what about users coming to the site for a specific topic on a day when it wasn't a top story? Yes, we have archives, but is that really enough?

When I examined our bounce rate (the rate that's given to site after users come to the site searching for a topic and leave without finding it), I discovered it's better than the average web site. But I realized it was still an area that needed more attention from me. So I began working on a project that will improve the long-term functionality of site's content.

Since I'm still a news junkie, it occurred to me during my daily reading of blogs, topic content feeds and stories, that this was also missing in most traditional newspaper operations. While some companies are working on these efforts, no one seems to be doing it very well. Imagine what they could do with all the content they have if, after publishing the traditional newspaper story form, editors considered the encyclopedic functionality of their content.

Thomson, a former newspaper company that sold many of its properties to Gannett some years ago, appears to be building a business model of this type. In its recent $16.6 million merger with Reuters, company officials told The New York Times that it plans to refocus Reuters on business news -- using that content to build a database of targeted content for users who need specific financial content and all its related information.

For traditional newspaper companies to build something similar, however, would require them to stop cutting back on the content-gathering efforts of their news operations and focus, instead, on investing -- in the reimagining of function over form.

Perhaps then we could stop talking about the death of the newspaper industry -- and start focusing on its rebirth.

Can Web Sites Be Sued for User Comment?

Recently, I read an interesting story, "Roomates.com can be sued for violating fair housing laws." The story reported that a federal appellate court ruled that the housing site, roommates.com, could "be sued for helping to match roomates based on race, sexual orientation," etc.

Interesting enough, to be sure. But the case has far-ranging potential, according to another article about the issue in mediapost.com. Why? According to the article, "Some digital rights advocates view the Roommates.com case as a significant loss, because it appears to open the door to lawsuits against a variety of Web publishers for reasons that go far beyond discrimination in housing." One of those being the ability "to sue for defamatory comments" from users.

What does all of this mean for newspapers? There's the question. Many users of the Web consider the Internet a free-wheeling, free-for-all of commentary protected by The First Amendment.

But in an article by Robert Niles, "It's time for the newspaper industry to die," the author asks whether there isn't a responsbility attached to print stories posted online. In his article, he questions the user-generated commentary attached to a feature story. That commentary offered misinformation to anyone reading, and Niles suggested a reporter should have corrected the misinformation by responding to it -- a no-no in many traditional print newsrooms around the country.

Given what I know about the heated debate on the issue in several newspaper newsrooms I've worked in over the years, I must admit I have wondered long before reading his article whether he wasn't right. I must now admit I have a particular emotional stake in this debate, given that my mother left her own country to live in a country where you can say anything without fear of retribution. Plus, I'm a journalist, so I come with an additional bias -- I consider defending The First Amendment "God's work" as my old boss used to say.

But because of my background in community newspapers, I've also struggled with where to draw the line between the right to say what you want and understanding the damage it can do to people like my mother, who has been told a number of times over the years to "Go back to where you came from," because someone didn't think she spoke English very well. I suppose that makes me a little more receptive to the idea that The First Amendment comes with a responsibility -- to spark debate, to engage in discussion for certain -- but also to be respectful to others at the same time.

It will be interesting to see how the decision about roommates.com plays out. Whatever the effect it has on the discussion over the long haul, I hope that it offers something all of us can learn to live with -- a little less crudeness and a little more civility.

Wikipedia, Collective Knowledge and Newspapers

A few years ago, I sat in a meeting with an editor and argued that we should start a local version of Wikipedia. The idea was simple. We could remain the historical knowledge of the community by using our Web site to help us.

Given that we were focusing on how to improve our online content, this new element, I thought, would offer something that people would come back to over and over again. (As an example, just consider Joe Biden’s folks trying to rewrite his political history with plagiarism.)

I figured it would be a cross between the newspaper archive and refrigerator journalism. Unless you’re from a particular region, state or community, you’re probably not going to go searching for this kind of stuff. However, school kids, locals and folks who need term paper topics for college might find it handy. It was, I believed, another way to chronicle the area’s history. And a new way to look at our jobs as journalists.

The idea was shot down for a number of reasons, including: The newsroom didn’t have the staff to maintain it; There was an unwillingness to open up the project to the community; There seemed no way to connect it to our online efforts; and most importantly, at a time when newspapers were struggling financially, it would compete with the idea that people would pay for old newspaper stories in the newsroom's archives.

Back then newspaper companies around the United States were struggling to keep readers from dropping their print subscriptions. They’re still struggling now, even though they've all changed their focus to online.

I must be honest. I’m part of the problem. I used to read a print newspaper every day. Several of them. I used to collect them on vacations so I could see what my colleagues were all doing and how well they were doing it. I used to think I’d never do anything but work for one. But today, I have a job at an Internet startup company, and if it weren’t for my parents, (and my boss who still gets the NY Times daily for work) I would rarely read a printed newspaper.

My parents are not the norm. They don’t own a computer or know how to use one. In fact, they weren’t sure what I did when I worked for one. And now that I work for a Web site, I might as well be working on another planet.

I, on the other hand, have a laptop at home connected to the laptop at work. I have a laptop at work connected to RSS feeds from around the world. I read more news online than I ever did when I collected newspapers to read. And my Blackberry connects me to everything, all the time, even in traffic. Not a day goes by in which I don’t know what’s happening, when it’s happening, updated by news alerts. So by the time the newspaper arrives at my doorstep every morning, I’ve heard it all several times over.

The only time I check the news is when it’s breaking. For example, when the recent shooting at a Wendy’s restaurant occurred down the street from where I live, I went to my local newspaper’s Web site to check out the coverage. I was able to share the name of a person in the restaurant at the time with an editor in another part of the state where that person was from – helping an editor in a newsroom I used to work in get a local angle to a story that got national attention.

I have, unfortunately, become the reader I wanted so badly to attract when I was working in newspapers, which circuitously gets me back to my point.

If we want to attract readers to newspaper Web sites, we have to be more than we have become. And one of the things I think we lost along the way was our commitment to being the historical memory of our communities. Between the buyouts and the layoffs, employees with years of experience in their communities no longer work at a place where they can share their knowledge with readers.

So here’s a suggestion. Give up your paid archives. If you were making the kind of money from them you needed, you wouldn't be laying off folks in the newsroom. And because I'm the kind of news person who hates telling you what to do without offering to make it better, here's an idea to consider.

Set up a Wikipedia for your community with topics based on the beats that are important to your readers. Use the collective knowledge of your readers to build that historical knowledge for your news Web site. Then assign upkeep of the facts of those entries to reporters in your newsroom – or if you’re a larger newsroom and still have a librarian or two, they can help as well. Older reporters who might be annoyed by the new work could be swayed by its ability to become a community resource. And reporters new to a particular beat might actually learn something about their community before they go out to cover it.

Then, if you consider my previous blog on links, you'd be able to use it to give readers a deeper online content experience. Every time a name pops up in a story or a well-known court case is mentioned, you can use your community's Wikipedia. And if you're like the editors I have spoken with who have concerns about the resource's accuracy, you will know that your version has been fact-checked by your staff as part of your new media efforts.

In the end, you become more useful to your readers. And who knows? You might attract an advertiser or two along the way.

Getting Journalistic "Street Cred" Online

A few months ago, before our first web site was launched, my boss asked me what our journalistic standards would be. I didn't really know how to answer, to be honest. I figured online news was like print. Were the standards really so different?

Ok, I'm a little naïve - and a bit of a traditionalist to be sure. But after wandering the Internet for a few days afterward, I realized he was right to ask. Between bloggers, social networkers-turned-experts and folks who have become media darlings through their own business savvy, it does make you worry about journalistic standards.

Thank goodness for Linkedin, which has become my online Roladex of some of the best journalists I know in an industry that's struggling so badly that even top editors are worried. ("It's like kicking a dead horse," said one editor, whose name I won't use to protect her from her own company, where she fears losing her position.) During my conversations with colleagues, some even asked what it has been like for me to jump off the traditional print bandwagon and onto a web-only publication. They were curious, just in case they ever had to do the same.

Listening to them gave me the idea for some shameless arm-twisting, I must admit. If I wanted journalistic "street cred" if you will, who better to go to than the folks I know? And so, with many thanks to my former employer for teaching an editor how to "sell", I pounced on their interest. "Hey, wanna try it?" I asked.

And since the site's launch, the question of journalistic standards isn't a question any more. No matter where I've worked, I've always believed, those standards begin with the quality of the people who do the work. In the last few months, I've had the pleasure of working with extraordinary journalists who have a wide range of experiences. They include: a projects editor, a number of reporters-turned-authors and a former-investigative-reporter-now-media-law-expert.

And the list goes on and on.

I figure with that kind of experience behind us, we've got our the journalistic "street cred" covered.