Posts about newspapers

A right step

April 14, 2006 by Jeff Jarvis
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Miami Herald editor Tom Fiedler sings the right tune [via Onsquared]:

We are beyond being satisfied with incremental change and giving polite head nods toward other media platforms. We are going to execute fundamental restructuring to support that pledge. Every job in the newsroom — EVERY JOB — is going to be redefined to include a web responsibility and, if appropriate, radio. For news gatherers, this means posting everything we can as soon as we can. It means using the web site to its fullest potential for text, audio and video. We’ll come to appreciate that MiamiHerald.com is not an appendage of the newsroom; it’s a fundamental product of the newsroom.

No more will some people be strictly newspaper staff and others will be strictly on-line or multi-media staff. If you produce news, you’ll be expected to produce it as effectively for the electronic reader or listener as you would for the newspaper reader. If you edit or design for the newspaper, you’ll learn to edit and design for the web site.

Here was my prescription.

Keller interacts

April 10, 2006 by Jeff Jarvis
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A subtle box in The Times announced this morning that Executive Editor Bill Keller will go online and “answer questions in this space about the newspaper and the news.” I might have found a different phrasing: Let’s not presume that he has the answers or that the readers want to ask them. I’d prefer “discuss” or “converse” and leave open the option that he and his editors would ask the public questions to answer. But I quibble.

I will not be surprised when some of the submissions to this new feature are rather harsh and when Timesmen complain about that. The implication will be, “see what happens when the masses mass?” But remember that these people feel as if they have been shouting to a brick wall for years. Let the steam rise first and get into a conversation — as Washington Post people have been doing successfully for sometime in their regular chats — and I will bet that you’ll end up with good discussions that are quotable and even newsworthy.

Maybe you’ll enjoy interacting so much, you won’t just do it with filtered email. Maybe you’ll even blog.

SEO as the new newsstand

April 10, 2006 by Jeff Jarvis
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The Times discovered the value and necessity of search-engine optimization (SEO) for news and media yesterday. (I found it surprising that they gave scant credit to About.com, the Times company where — full disclosure — I consult, for About is the first media company built to embrace search as its front door. But that’s always the case with intramural stories; editors resist acknowledging their smart cousins.)

I wrote a Guardian column about the need for media outlets to understand that search, aggregation, and links are their new means of distribution; smart companies will embrace this, while dinosaurs will go hide.

The fear about SEO is that it dumbs-down or blunts-up the presentation of content so a search engine can understand what a story is about and lead readers interested in that topic to it. But I’m not so sure that simplicity, directness, and bluntness are so bad. How often have you read headlines and the first halves of overwritten newspaper and magazine stories wondering what the hell they are about? A simple summary of a story with clear labeling of its topics is good for humans, too. I’d love it if every story — online and in print — quickly told me what it is about so I can decide whether I want to spend my time reading it. After all, that used to be the real value of headlines before they became another stage for showing off. Says The Times:

Journalists, they say, would be wise to do a little keyword research to determine the two or three most-searched words that relate to their subject — and then include them in the first few sentences. “That’s not something they teach in journalism schools,” said Danny Sullivan, editor of SearchEngineWatch, an online newsletter. “But in the future, they should.”

Such suggestions stir mixed sentiments. “My first thought is that reporters and editors have a job to do and they shouldn’t worry about what Google’s or Yahoo’s software thinks of their work,” said Michael Schudson, a professor at the University of California, San Diego, who is a visiting faculty member at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.

“But my second thought is that newspaper headlines and the presentation of stories in print are in a sense marketing devices to bring readers to your story,” Mr. Schudson added. “Why not use a new marketing device appropriate to the age of the Internet and the search engine?”

Right. When, at People magazine, I started grading TV shows in my reviews — a conceit I carried over to Entertainment Weekly — some of my fellow critics chided me, saying, “Well, but then people won’t read all your reviews.” I responded that they shouldn’t have to. This isn’t about giving me attention; I’m not a cat. This is about serving the public and if they don’t want to bother reading about a C-level show (or enjoy reading a review with an F), that’s up to them. Our public is busy. We should be saving, not demanding, their time.

Let’s also not forget that SEO is not just about the presentation on a page but also about keeping content visible online with permanent links. If you hide your content behind pay walls and in archives, you will lose Google juice that others will gain. Indeed, I will be teaching that at CUNY. When I instructed my fellow faculty at the Graduate School of Journalism in citizens’ media, the first thing I taught was the value of the permalink.

: LATER: Simon Waldman of Guardian Unlimited says:

I compare it to supermarkets and apples. If you make apples and want them to be sold in the supermarket – they’ve got to a be a certain shape and size and shinyness, otherwise the supermarket won’t have them. There are those who say it’s great that apples these days are all uniform and shiny; others who say our produce has mutated into something bland. As a producer – it’s just the deal you have to do if you want distribution.

He frets that this will lead to homogenous news, all the same. Indeed, I fretted sometime ago that Google commodifies everything.

But Google and GoogleNews operate differently. Google operates by SEO; GoogleNews operates by a more closed and far more secret algorithm. The challenge is for producers of dynamic content — aka news — to be found in search itself. For in true SEO, the things the people click on and link to should rise and if that’s the case — if the people can edit — then I still have high hope that quality will out. (More on this from me at a later date….)

News by any other name

April 9, 2006 by Jeff Jarvis
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Times Public Editor Byron Calame can make anything dull… including blogs. He sniffs around the edges of the Times blogs today like a mangy dog unsure whether even he should eat that smelly lump of something on the grass. He finally decides that he likes Dealbook — and even wants similar blogs on health care and science (with no explanation why they are so bloggable). But then he turns around and sniffs that it’s really not up to his standards.

Despite the service that DealBook can provide to Times readers, it’s important to remember that a couple of journalistic standards are being bypassed. And I think because of this, readers should use the new blog with care.

He makes a blog sound like a piece of heavy machinery you shouldn’t be operating when on allergy medication.

While the banner of The New York Times flies at the top of each page of DealBook, much of the information there hasn’t been verified or confirmed by the staff. In my mind, this is a fundamental departure from the way the rest of the paper’s content — except for wire service stories — is authenticated before it is published.

Whoa, public man. What I’d like to see you outline now is exactly how The Times verifies and confirms everything it prints. I’m sure many of us can point to many things that could have used a little more verifying and confirming. That’s the case for any newspaper. But Calame still believes in the shining newspaper on the hill that gets the facts, ma’am.

One serious concern I have is the tendency of The Times to give DealBook the aura of news. A link on the DealBook site describes it as “a new online financial news report on nytimes.com featuring up-to-the-minute news and exclusives about Wall Street and corporate America.” And the home page links to this question-and-answer segment: “Is DealBook a blog? Not in the traditional sense. It is less opinion and more news and analysis.” Come on, it’s a blog.

What, so that means if it’s a blog it cannot be news? Oh, gag me with a stick of hot type.

Fred and Barney meet

April 7, 2006 by Jeff Jarvis
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Two groups of media’s moneymen held their confabs this week and they each spent some time self-flaggellating, as well they should.

The Times reports from the American Association of Advertising Agencies:

“I think our industry would be better if agencies were as comfortable with change as we like to tell clients they should be,” said Ron Berger, chief executive and chief creative officer for the New York and San Francisco offices of Euro RSCG Worldwide, part of Havas.

“I think our industry would be better if all of the people who speak at industry functions and say ‘It’s all about big ideas’ actually had a few” …

And Jon Fine reports in Business Week on the meeting of the Newspaper Association of America:

This year’s opening event was at the magnificent Field Museum, on a large open floor bookended by two massive dinosaur skeletons. Many attendees joked about this. To the executive to whom I said such an obvious metaphor would never, ever, appear in this column: I lied….

At the podium, Jay R. Smith, Cox Newspapers’ president and outgoing NAA chairman, gives a valedictory with the broad theme of “stop whining.” It begins with and repeatedly uses the phrase, “It wasn’t supposed to turn out like this.” He also says: “The world changed a lot. Newspapers changed a little.” …

And Washington Post Publisher Donald Graham tells the group when discussing newspaper strategy that “the only honest answer is we don’t know how our future will work out.”

OK, let the flaggellating end. Let the overdue strategizing finally begin. The time for mourning the past is long over. The time for shrugging at the future is over, too. You no longer get points for admitting that you’re in a mess. You only get points for taking brave action to get out of it.

The one-sided conversation

April 4, 2006 by Jeff Jarvis
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No single group sends me more email marked “not for blogging” than reporters and editors at The New York Times. I don’t mean email that comes in the course of my consulting for other parts of the company or from people I know there. It’s always in email that comes in response to my blog and things I say about Times’ reporting. I respect their wishes and sometimes end up having coffee with them to discuss what they want to discuss. They’re smart and caring people and I enjoy talking with them. But I always end up lecturing them about why we should have these conversations in public, how those will be better conversations for it, and why others should hear what they have to say. A one-way conversation is no conversation at all. But it always ends the same way: with reporters, of all people, wanting to stay off the record. I really don’t know what the root cause of this institutional false modesty and faux shyness is. I don’t think it’s as simple a diagnosis as fear. It’s something more complex and cultural than that.

Jay Rosen takes on that culture, from the top, at Comment is Free. He strings together quotes from Times Executive Editor Bill Keller about how he doesn’t want the paper to be self-absorbed. In his latest pronouncement, Keller said he said had stopped reading Romenesko, the American media Bible/blog (for which I took him to task here). Jay writes:

What Keller means by self-absorption is related to another idea: that it is futile to respond to most of the criticism that gets flung at the press, and specifically at the Times…. Keller did say that criticism helps keep the Times honest. But saying “we get it from everywhere” is not an attempt to understand what you are getting. Nor does self-examination have to end in self-absorption…. but what you may not realise is that by committing yourself to the dialogue you rapidly lose control of your time, as each answer brings six new charges and four new questions, plus three new misunderstandings it would be proper to correct. It’s endless.

That’s part of what it’s about: control. Joining the conversation means losing control. Publishing is having the last word. And Jay says that Timesmen — not by any means alone among journalists — think there can be a last word and that they can have it. Jay then responds to what Keller told me in a lengthy blog/email exchange we had last year:

“There seems to be no end to any argument in your world” [as Keller said] is quite a complaint for a newspaper editor to make. Do arguments on the opinion pages normally “end”? How about arguments about higher taxes, racism, war or globalisation as found in the Times news columns? Do they end?

Right, they don’t end. They mustn’t end. The endless back-and-forth of conversation is not merely an interactive nicety — patting the heads of us darling readers out here, if you even deign to do that. The conversation is a necessity to get to the truth and set the agenda and inform the democracy. The conversation is the journalism, damnit.

So Jay pushes The Times to follow the examples of The Guardian‘s editor’s blog and CBS News‘ transparency blog — not to mention humble, local newspaper editors’ blogs in Greensboroand Tacoma — and start a blog himself.

Then he could return to the public conversation about journalism, in which the editor of the Times has a rightful and important place.

This has been suggested before, inside The Times itself, when the newspaper’s post-Jayson-Blair-scandal Siegal Commission recommended:

The Web should also explore the possibility of creating a Times blog that promotes a give-and-take with readers while satisfying the standards of our journalism.

So let’s get blogging, guys.

As is my obnoxious habit, I’ll take it farther — and farther than most in my shoes would — and suggest that news organizations should be encouraging strongly — one step short of requiring — journalists, including editors, to blog. Here is The Times’ blog policy (search for “blog” in the long document). As is the unfortunate habit of newsroom policy statements, it talks about what blogging journalists should not do: On personal sites, they should “avoid topics they cover professionally” (which seems absurd — don’t you want the music critic blogging about music?); they should not be intemperate or shrill or humiliating or intolerant or take stands on divisive issues or link to bad stuff.

Note that the blogging policy does not say what they should do when blogging. Nor does it say they should blog.

I just spoke with a German reporter writing a piece about big-media blogs. He wisely separated out legitimate news uses of the blogging tool to, for example, publish news updates or to publish journals from the field. That is using the blogging tool as content-management tool rather than blogging-as-blogging. Then he challenged me to sum up why reporters should blog. I said it is to bring back the humanity of journalism; to restore the credibility we thought we protected but in fact lost when we insisted that we could and should be objective; to break down the wall we built separating ourselves as journalists from the members of the public we serve; and to join the conversation that is happening without us.

But even if they don’t blog, they shouldn’t be afraid to get into conversations with bloggers, aka readers. In fact, they should be encouraged to do just that.

As opposed to a pastist

March 30, 2006 by Jeff Jarvis
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The New York Times new lab is hiring a futurist. Laugh if you will. But when you think about it, maybe newspapers should have hired futurists, oh, 10 or two years ago. [See my disclosures]

Bad news

March 30, 2006 by Jeff Jarvis

A sobering view of Tribune Company’s pickle.