October 2007 news about media

After two decades of cutbacks in international bureaus, ABC News is bucking the trend by creating one-person operations that will dramatically boost its coverage in Africa, India and elsewhere. The small offices, staffed by a reporter-producer with the latest in hand-held digital technology, cost a fraction of what it takes to run a full-time bureau. But the work they file will be featured not only on ABCNews.com and ABC News Now but also occasionally on such ABC shows as "World News Tonight" and "Good Morning America."

The mini-bureaus are being opened in Seoul; Rio de Janeiro; Dubai; New Delhi and Mumbai, India; Jakarta, Indonesia; and Nairobi, Kenya. "Technology now makes it possible for us to have bureaus without a receptionist, three edit suites and studio cameras and so on," ABC News president David Westin told The Hollywood Reporter. "The essence of what we do is reporting, it's not production. Production is the way you get it on the air and to people, but reporting is the essence."

Each of the seven reporters will work from home and travel around their region carrying a small DV camera and editing-enabled laptop. They'll report, write, shoot and edit their pieces, though they also will have support from others at ABC News. Most of the work will be uploaded via broadband to New York, though they will carry a portable satellite dish for the field where broadband isn't available.

The new rules of the game are:

• The user is in control. They decided what, when, why, where and how to consume media.
• Users aren’t interested in our deadlines and desire to make sure we have the full story before publishing what we know. They want to know what we know when we know it. They want their news now.
• People want to participate. They want to talk back. They want to add to our stories, correct us and just spout off as need be with their own opinions.

Here are twelve things journalist can do to help us recreate journalism for the 21st Century.

• Become a blogger. By this, I don’t necessarily mean “start a blog,” but that is never a bad idea. More importantly, become an avid blog reader. Blogs should be a daily routine for every dedicated journalist. They should read every blog related to their beats. They should read blogs about their own interests and hobbies. They should read blogs about their profession. To get blogging is to get how things have changed.
• Become a producer. Pick up a digital recorder, a point-and-shoot camera or a video camera and start producing content beyond text. Do this as part of your job, fine, or do it on your personal time. The goal is to understand DIY. Post stuff on YouTube, Flickr or any number of other UGC sites.
• Participate. As you read blogs, leave comments. If your newspaper.com has comments on stories, read the comments and add your own. Become known as somebody who converses on the Internet.
• Build a web site. It will greatly expand your mind about how the web works if you go a bit beyond just setting up an account on Blogger or WordPress. Learn a little HTML. Better yet, learn some PHP, Cold Fusion, JavaScript or other web development language. You should own your own domain, anyway.
• Become web literate. You should know what Flash is, and how it differs from AJAX. You should know the meaning of things like HTML, RSS, XML, IP, HTTP and FTP. You should understand at least how people use applications and tools to build web sites. You should know the potential and the limitations of each.
• Use RSS. You need an RSS reader and lots of RSS feeds to consume. This will help you better grok distributed media.
• Shop online. Part of your goal is to become immersed in the digital lifestyle. You will learn stuff about the digital life if you shop on Amazon, Ebay and other ecommerce sites. As you do, think about how these sites work and why they’re set up as they are.
• Buy mobile devices. Get a video iPod. Get a smart phone (an iPhone, Treo, Helio Ocean or Nokia N-series are all good places to start). Learn about distributed, take-it with-you-anywhere content. Buy a laptop and tap into some free wi-fi while you’re out and about. Learn what digital life is like when you’re not shackled to a desktop machine.
• Become an avid consumer of digital content. Watch videos on YouTube. Download video and audio podcasts (take them with you on your iPod). Visit the best newspaper sites in the world and watch what they’re doing. Turn on your TV less and your computer more.
• Be a learner. Technology and culture is changing fast. You can’t keep up unless you’re dedicated to learning. I love this quote from Eric Hoffer because it is so appropriate to what our industry is going through now: “In a time of drastic change it is the learners who inherit the future. The learned usually find themselves beautifully equipped to live in a world that no longer exists.”
• Talk about what you’re learning with your co-workers. Be a change agent. Get other journalists excited about the new digital communication/media tools.
• Finally, read Journalism 2.0 ( PDF ) by Mark Briggs. You’ll learn about the stuff covered above and how it is changing modern journalism. Brigg’s book is the best primer on the topic you will find.

Newspaper editors are worried about how to grab readers. And a Cleveland Plain Dealer internal memo from last week urges reporters to keep things simple. Plain English and short, uncomplicated sentences are best. It notes that Sen. Sherrod Brown's spouse, columnist Connie Schultz, has written at a level appropriate for fifth graders. Meanwhile, Washington bureau reporter Sabrina Eaton seems to be rebuked. The memo says she wrote about Dennis Kucinich at a level appropriate for high school seniors, or subscribers to The New York Times. Her "reading ease" score was low.

The Writer's Group has been discussing Jack Hart's book, A Writer's Coach. This week we talked about the chapter on clarity. Hart points out that we can test the readability of our stories with the Flesch-Kincaid test, which is available in all Word programs. To get the Flesch-Kincaid test, click on tools, then spelling and grammar, then click on options and check "show readability scores". The Flesch-Kincaid test expresses scores in grade levels, based on sentence lengths, word lengths and active voice.

"Most writers with Flesch-Kincaid scores of 10 or less can engage a large, diverse audience," Hart writes. He says Pulitzer Prize winner Tom Hallman usually averages about grade 7. "Clear direct writing produces the lowest scorers," Hart writes.

Connie Schultz's Pulitzer finalist, Burden of Innocence, scored at the FIFTH-grade level. Burden had 4 percent passive sentences, 11.8 wps, 4.2 cpw and a reading ease score of 78, the highest of any I tested. Andy's Last Secret, a national award winner from Joanna Connors, also scored at the 6th-grade level with only 1 percent passive sentences.

Putting the entire paper online every day (most papers do a daily dump between midnight and 5 a.m.), causes several problems for the average newspaper company:

1. It retards organizational growth. Journalists simply must learn to take the web more seriously, and the daily dump is a crutch that makes it easier for newsroom personnel to ignore the web.
2. It gets in the way of building a truly robust web site. That “we’re a newspaper” feel is never shaken from the site structure and it makes it harder to draw attention to the real web features of your site.
3. It entrenches core readers into the notion of “I’m reading my newspaper online” instead of getting them to see your site as something different and maybe better than what you do in print.
4. It encourages too many people to think, “why should I pay for this when I can get it for free online.”
5. We’re in a tough situation with circulation anyway, and encouraging people to switch only hastens the migration away from print. It may be inevitable, but our web sites aren’t ready yet to shoulder the load.

What would a community news site look like that doesn’t overly rely on the entire paper online every day?

It would include:

• A continuous flow of news. Reporters would be active in web-first publishing, publishing what we know when we know it, and letting the community know what is going on now.
• There would be lots of opportunities for user participation and contribution — everything from comments on stories to UGC video and blogs.
• The mindset would be, we’re part of the flow of the conversation, not the whole conversation, and there would be lots of links out to related community content.
• Video (and other multimedia, but primarily video), and lots of it. The primary strategies would be a point-and-shoot video camera in the hands of every reporter, some better cameras for staff with the appropriate time and training, and some well-honed webcasts.
• Lots of utility pieces, such as calendars, movie listings, and strong advertising tie-ins for classifieds and internet yellow pages.
• Strong search. Almost no newspaper.com right now has really good search. We need good search. And it’s not about providing search for just our own web site, but serving the whole community.
• Blogs. This is part of being about conversation (see above), but it’s also about creating original web content, more web content and developing staff literacy about online culture. Of course, not all site-affiliated blogs should be staff-written blogs. Many should be from community members.
• Databases. Lots and lots of databases. If it’s data, and it’s relevant to our community and we can make it searchable and/or sortable, we should have it on our web sites.
• We should also make sure our articles, our videos, our databases — pretty much everything on our web sites — is easy to share. We create individually-addressable links for discreet pieces of content, we use embed tags, we certainly have RSS feeds and e-mail links, and we also create widgets where it makes sense.
• We have user profiles/social networking and the ability for users to customize their local online experience, including saving favorite stories, creating custom SMS and e-mail alerts.

If we can do all those things we will certainly have a community site that stands apart from the print-package newspaper. It compliments it rather than competes against it. It helps us serve our journalistic obligations better on so many levels.

Our web sites should be web sites, not newspaper sites. The daily dump doesn’t help us either in print or online and probably hurts us a lot more than we realize.