What's old is new again: a Facebook 'newspaper'

World events stored in my basement.
(photo by me)

I'm more of an ink-on-dead-trees reader than a digital one: I like the feel and smell of newspapers; to study the typography and photos and story placement; to peruse the display ads as well as the bylines. I'll read the New York Times or Washington Post online, but I'm happier feasting on their printed editions.

Newspapers were with me growing up, and they still inhabit my house: yellowed pages in boxes in the basement shouting out horrific events; random titles in a bedroom closet acquired at airport newsstands; special sections filed away for -- well, I don't remember exactly what, but there they sit in a filing cabinet drawer.

But neither nature nor nurture seemed capable of passing along a love of newspapers to my children. Not even guilt worked: "If you don't read the paper, I could lose my job," I used to say. (It was offered in jest at the time, but turned out to be prophetic.)

So allow me a self-satisfied chuckle at PostPost, the "personal, real-time Facebook newspaper" (emphasis added).



Don't get me wrong: It's a cool idea and one of several services for use alone or on Facebook to organize news feeds coming to you via social media. (For example, I get a paper.li "newspaper" daily in my inbox with tweets shared on the topic of "journalism.")

Mashable, which offers a technical analysis of PostPost (isn't that nameplate reminiscent of the New York Post's?), sees it as a next step in sharing: "As more of us use social networks like Facebook and Twitter to find and share news, the traditional RSS reader is slowly getting replaced with these types of solutions."

Come Christmas break, I'll have to see whether either of my Facebook-focused Gen Y kids now "reads" a "newspaper."

Ready! Set! Read!

(via Flickr: jj_pappas423)

For your rest-of-the-weekend reading pleasure:

"The Newsonomics of Journalist Headcounts" (Nieman Journalism Lab): Ken Doctor supplies an exhaustive rundown of journalism jobs lost in the last decade and those being created today. Bottom line: We've lost more than we've gained, even as "technologies and growing audiences have built out a huge capacity for news."

"When Campaigns Manipulate Social Media" (The Atlantic): Here's some food for thought post-midterm election: 140-character attack campaigns may be more worrisome in the future than deep-pocketed interest groups.

Creative video interlude: "A Life on Facebook."

"Rusbridger: Openness, Collaboration Key to New Information Ecosystem" (Poynter Online): Alan Rusbridger, editor in chief of The Guardian newspaper in London, writes about the "mutualisation" it employs that embraces Web attributes of openness (linking) and collaboration (working with readers and others). Be sure to follow the link to one example he gives, "Comment is Free," a cool comment website.

"U.S. Mobile Data Traffic to Top 1 Exabyte" (GigaOM): An exabyte, you'll learn here, is "a unit of information equal to 1000 petabytes or a billion gigabytes" -- which I still can't fathom, but the short of it is that our appetite for access to data whenever and wherever we want it is growing rapidly. Hello smartphones.

An appropriate music video interlude.

"I Am a Blogger No Longer" (The Atlantic): Marc Ambinder bids adieu to his gig as blogger for The Atlantic, saying he missed the rigor of print and found the 24/7 nature of online exhausting. "What I hope I will find refreshing about the change of formats is that I will no longer be compelled to turn every piece of prose into a personal, conclusive argument, to try and fit it into a coherent framework that belongs to a web-based personality called 'Marc Ambinder' that people read because it's 'Marc Ambinder,' rather than because it's good or interesting."

The post got folks talking on Twitter, and also spawned this: "Escape from Thunderdome" (Snarkmarket), a three-fer that dissects Ambinder. One interesting comment to the dissection, though, raises this point: maybe Ambinder got tired of being a brand, a supposed goal of all journalists going forward. Sacrilege!

Hilarious video interlude: The Washington Post generates a lot of chatter for a video -- featuring a befuddled Bob Woodward -- that introduces its new iPad app. (It even earns a jab from Washington City Paper.) But I want to know about the hole in the sole of Ben Bradlee's shoe -- real or a prop?

In multimedia, 'journalist' still important

I was viewing a "career chat" on the Poynter Institute website the other day when a sense of déjà vu came over me.

I was back at my first daily newspaper learning to operate a then-state-of-the-art camera to take pictures to go with my stories.

The paper was small and family-owned; it may have been between photographers. (We had only one and he died of a heart attack on assignment.) But word went out that we city desk reporters would learn to take pictures and would be assigned cameras for stories.

I suppose at that point I became the equivalent of today's multimedia journalist, although at the time it seemed more like I was being asked to do my job and another's. (But I did get a "money shot" one election night as I covered Democratic headquarters and caught the dejected incumbent being consoled by a supporter.)

These days, there's more to being multimedia (video, audio, Flash, Twitter, Facebook, blog, etc.), but it still feels like a big pile-on. And where do you begin to choose what to learn and how much of an expert to become?

That's not sacrilege from a digital dinosaur; the Poynter chat brought it home:

Question: "How do young journalists know what skills we should learn and from where should we learn them? I don't think we're afraid of learning new things. It's more of a matter of: where do we go from here? How do we stay competitive so we can be one of the few who get future j jobs?"

Answer (from a Poynter faculty member): "In addition to the standard skill set (writing, reporting, story-telling), I'd advise journalists to develop programming skills as well as video and audio gathering and editing. If I were an editor, I wouldn't hire someone who couldn't do one or the other, in addition to solid reporting."

Then later, other participants pitch in:

• "I would also take a MySQL, php and/or programming classes at your local community college."
• "Any programming language you can get up to speed on will be useful, and it's a lot easier to learn your second language than your first. If you've got design skills, then I'd recommend action script for Flash. Otherwise, plenty of online newsrooms are using Ruby on Rails or Django, and it's mostly personal preference."
• "I'd also recommend, if you haven't already, sitting down and doing some video editing. You don't have to know Final Cut Pro; use iMovie. Just have the experience and the willingness to try."

It's enough to make your head spin.

College programs, too, seem to be trying to figure out how to allocate resources for the new media landscape, judging from the comments to this blog, which put online course descriptions through Wordle to create "word clouds" -- a visual depiction of the most frequently appearing phrases -- to show what the journalism schools were emphasizing.

A saving grace of the Poynter chat -- as well as the word clouds -- is this: an emphasis remains on basic writing and reporting skills. After all, the new job description is multimedia journalist.

What price better-paid journalists?

Leonard Witt, founder and executive director of the Center for Sustainable Journalism at Kennesaw State University in Georgia, has posted a video interview on YouTube in which Lisa George, an assistant professor and empirical economist at Hunter College in New York City, talks about her belief that there will be fewer but better paid journalists in the future.



Did you catch her point about "superstar" journalists? That "some of the best reporters, and the most insightful commentary, will come from fewer and fewer sources. But," she says, "these reporters will have national reputations, and those reputations will be well-financed, both from media itself and also from books and speaking engagements."

A shiver just ran down my spine.

George spoke about the same thing last month in a workshop held in Washington, D.C., by the Federal Trade Commission on the future of journalism in the Internet age. (You can see a webcast of her presentation here, at about 1:12:43 into the afternoon session on the second day of the program. Read the pdf transcript here.)

Her argument is that technology has given newspaper readers many more choices than they had with traditional ink on paper, and that will push journeyman scribes out of the marketplace as papers disappear. But it will elevate to superstar status those with expertise offering analysis and commentary.

At the FTC workshop, George seemed to suggest there will be no market in the future for local news -- "hyperlocal" coverage (news at the neighborhood level) most recently was the lifeline at which many ad-revenue-starved newspapers grasped -- so the reporters who become expert at big-picture national and international issues will see their stock (and paychecks) rise.

(The lesser reporters, I guess, will make their living in the future earning micropayments as freelancers. George told the FTC she was "a big proponent of micropayments -- penny per click," which is one business model now being tried by an ever-growing number of online-only media companies that use free-lanced copy to fill their sites.)

Witt, George's YouTube interviewer, also is chief blogger at PJNet.org, site of the Public Journalism Network, which is described as "a virtual global network of journalists, educators and lay people interested in exploring and strengthening the relationship between journalism and democracy."

You'll note Witt's interjection asking George whether the creation of superstars is "a good thing or a bad thing for the public square?" -- with "public square" generally meaning the place in a democracy where the exchange of ideas occurs. (Some say that role is shifting to blogs and the Internet.)

"It’s generally a very good thing because people can read more and better stuff," responds George.

The "more" I can understand, but I still need convincing about the "better."

But you've got to eat your spinach, too

As AOL launches as a stand-alone company (disentangled from its ill-regarded merger with Time Warner), attention will focus once again on whether "content mills" are the model for journalism in the future.

Newspapers for years have been bad chefs in planning their daily spreads, trying to balance how much spinach vs. cotton candy to serve up to readers -- in other words, what an informed citizenry ought to know as opposed what it (secretly or otherwise) wants to know. Derivatives or Britney? Public option or Tiger?

In some ways, the Web has made the menu-planning harder, since it can easily measure the "traffic" a story generates. A horrific ax murder in an affluent neighborhood? Not only will the news bulletin on a newspaper's website produce a lot of clicks from local readers but it also will bring hundreds of thousands more through a national aggregator.

So a package of stories on the ax murder is developed for the next day's newspaper, perhaps to the detriment of stories on shrinking ice sheets, famine and war, nuclear politics or other thumbsucking esoterica.

The more the murder resonates with readers, the more stories are produced around it. And the more eyeballs those stories draw in print or online, the more happy are advertisers who happen to be on display nearby.

But companies like Demand Media, Examiner.com, Suite 101 and Associated Content have upended that model: They watch online searches for keywords on what interests readers, sell that audience to advertisers, and then produce the content to keep readers coming back. They pay freelance writers pennies per word -- $10, $15, $20 a story, vs. the historical $200 and up -- but promise to share future revenue as the stories or adjacent ads are clicked.

(The model, by the way, irritates professional freelancers, judging by this call to arms by one Seattle writer to petition "sweatshop-content users and content-mill owners to pay writers fairly," as she described it on LinkedIn.)

Now enter the 800-pound gorilla, AOL.

The company has been gearing up to create deep content around highly sought-after topics, like Demand and its brethren do. It even has created a mechanism, called Seed, to automate the process of conceiving of and assigning stories to writers.

It's a tough model to accept for those of us who formerly earned our living via legacy media. Fifteen bucks per story and pennies per click? The other day, one wag did the math and came up with a staggering volume of page views that a reporter would need to earn a modest $40,000 annual salary.

And what of the spinach, the stories that help shape an informed citizenry?

Consider this offered by Lauren Rich Fine, a former Merrill Lynch analyst who now is associated with Kent State University’s School of Journalism & Mass Communication. She participated in a panel discussion on new business models in news at last week's workshop on the future of journalism in the Internet age, held by the Federal Trade Commission:

"The idea of matching advertisers with content like Demand Media and AOL I think it is actually very smart. ... I think the flaw in the model is, what this whole workshop is getting at, is if you're trying to preserve democracy, giving people what they want probably won't end up with the kind of coverage that most of you in this room really want to provide, and therein lies the real challenge."

Fighting for journalism's future

File this under best-laid plans.

The idea originally was to travel post-Thanksgiving to Washington, D.C., to help auto-less daughter get ready for an overseas assignment. (You can't buy everything you need at the CVS Pharmacy located atop the nearest Metro subway stop. Eventually, you have to travel to Target in the 'burbs.)

Then, once she was in-flight, I could use her apartment as a base of operation for exploring job options in D.C. And, given the timing of the trip, I could also indulge a bit of wonkiness: taking in the Federal Trade Commission workshop on the future of journalism in the Internet age.

Ah, if only...

A Monday morning networking breakfast at the National Press Club was interrupted by a fire alarm and a cellphone call. The former was only a drill, but we nevertheless had to descend the stairs from the 13th-floor premises, cutting short the slim hour allocated for networking. The latter canceled a planned networking lunch that day, and took several e-mail exchanges to reschedule.

Then another e-mail moved a nice-to-finally-meet-you meeting with a prospective employer up a day, to Tuesday. The networking lunch formerly scheduled on Monday became a late-Wednesday coffee date instead. Both changes blew my plans to attend the FTC workshop in person, as those of us who pre-registered were told the early bird would get the seat and the rest would watch via videoconference in a hall a few blocks away.

So I cut my losses and saved the Metro fare by logging on to the webcast when I could. The morning session of the first day is here (bear with the intro video); you can get access to the other sessions here. (One downside to the webcast was its nearly stationary camera, meaning none of the speakers' data slides was shown as they talked.)

Big on the first day were appearances by News Corp.'s Rupert Murdoch and Huffington Post's Arianna Huffington. Their presentations were critiqued by New Haven Independent Editor Paul Bass, who himself was a panelist on the second day of the workshop. Or you can listen for yourself on the FTC webcast: Murdoch is introduced at about 57 minutes; Huffington at about 2 hours, 45 minutes.

The workshop ran for two days, from about 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. each day. Officials said it will be followed in the spring by more workshops focused on some of the policy issues related to journalism today: changes to copyright law or cross-ownership restrictions, for instance.

Should we really schedule another meeting?

I wish I had been the first to connect the dots, but I wasn't. So I'll just pass along this observation: that journalism's deep thinkers seem to be spending a lot of time in meetings these days, just as the mainstream media do.

Meetings are as much a part of life at a metro daily newspaper as breathing. What with the morning planning meeting, afternoon planning meeting, Sunday planning meeting, special-section planning meeting, etc., etc., etc., it's a wonder the managers responsible for making sure the paper is published get it out every 24 hours.

(As an aside: Early in my time at a metro, I'd have nightmares about missing these many meetings. So I used to devise elaborate Post-It Note and Microsoft Outlook reminders -- which occasionally flummoxed people trying to use the latter to set up a meeting with me. Oops!)

Is it any wonder, then, with so many meetings, that getting an idea from conception to execution at a legacy paper is more like a marathon than a sprint? Or that the mainstream media seem more like slow, plodding elephants than online's nimble, speedy gazelles?

Surely there's a lesson here as the future of journalism is debated.

Yesterday, the topic at a one-day conference hosted by Minnesota Public Radio was "The Future of News: Creating a New Model for Regional Journalism in America"; last weekend saw a two-day conference at Yale University on "Journalism & the New Media Ecology: Who Will Pay the Messengers?" On the West Coast, there was an overlap with Gonzo Camp, which billed itself as a different kind of conference where "ideas get done." And that followed by a day or so the "hypercamp" sponsored by the folks at the School of Journalism at the City University of New York who are involved in the New Business Models for News Project.

And let's not forget two other conferences this month: at Harvard on "The Future of News" and in Australia, hosted by Media140, "a newly formed global collaboration of journalists, academics and social media practitioners" that says it's staging conferences around the world on the future of journalism.

Whew!

While we learned as children that sharing is good, we know as adults that talk is cheap. (And as journalists, we know that a heavy schedule of meetings can be paralyzing.)

Let's be sure these discussions, near and dear to many of us affected by the implosion at newspapers, lead to someplace other than the next conference.