A few of my favorite things

Today I’m talking about two of my favorite things – building digital communities and citizen journalism!! Actually, I like how Jeff Jarvis calls it “networked journalism” because that’s a more accurate term, especially in this day and age.

Right now, we’re in the relaunch phase of a product whose mission is now defined as “fabric of community life.” I like to think of it as hitting that strata of information that falls directly under what traditional journalism has the time or resources to cover.  It’s what you share with friends at the neighborhood party. Think “little j, big C”.

There are a lot of people trying to do this kind of project, and I think the jury is still out on whether a niche site can prosper formed around a geographical area.  The plusses, as I see them, may also be the minuses: People are creating, reporting, their own news more than ever, because many platforms now exist on which to do that.  All we have to do now is ditch the “build it and they will come” mentality and replace it with a “become part of the hyperlocal news ecosystem” mentality.

I think there are alot of good things coming for csfreshink.com. More on this soon.

Still alive

My New Year’s resolution (or at least one of them) is to blog more often. So here I am starting early with a catch-up blog, since I have a new job now and lots of exciting things to talk about.

My new job is at the same company, and its not so new since I got it in June. It’s quite a mouthful: Director of Interactive Content and Audience Development. But boiled down to one word – FUN. I feel so fortunate to have an excellent boss who recognized the company’s need for this role and my ability to fill it.  Here’s the nut graf of my job description:

This position provides leadership and strategic direction for the Interactive division with regard to content and product development, site development and management, market positioning and overall traffic page growth for all Gazette.com and affiliated websites. This position is responsible for the governance of all Interactive content activities within Gazette.com, Coloradosprings.com and all related web sites with an unwavering focus on audience engagement, user experience and page view growth and attracting new revenue opportunities.

Its fun to be on the growing side of the news business, and my job is to drive audience engagement and eyeballs on our sites as our business model shifts from being print-dependent.  And not just print-dependent, but dependent on one core product, The Gazette. I don’t hate print, I even love it, but it has to be just part of our growing portfolio, and we have to be willing to build other products that better meet the needs of content readers and advertising clients alike.

That’s just the tip of the iceberg. More to come.

What are you going to do about it?

This is such an amazing time to be a journalist.

No, I haven’t been drinking. It’s just that newspapers have been sticking their collective head in the sand for the last 10 years. Even today, newsrooms are launching projects, pages and programs that aren’t being monetized. In this environment, it’s hard to sit by and watch. And an increasing number of people, even many outside the journalism world, are looking at newspapers and saying “What are you doing to do about it?”

So now, the rubber is most definitely hitting the road. And that’s an exciting place to be.

The Rocky Mountain News shut down on Friday, and there was a touching video on their site that day. But as I watched the B-roll of the hustle and bustle inside the newsroom, I couldn’t help but think that they never stopped making yo-yos the same old way.

And with the San Francisco Chronicle, the Philadelphia Inquirer, and countless other newspapers on a death watch, its been interesting to see the so-called battle plans emerge from the supposed media elite.

Newsday and the Hearst Corp. are adopting the one I like to call the “panic plan.” That’s the “oh shit, we’re losing our shirts, let’s start charging for information” approach. These people like to salve their anxious souls by likening city council stories to Britney Spears songs and saying to each other “See? It worked for iTunes.”

I find this idea extremely impractical. It takes one mommy blogger at a city council meeting to blow your nickel-a-story idea out of the water. And as far as charging for Big-J journalism only, I think most newspapers are going to find out just how much that’s worth to the web crowd: Peanuts.

I’m not saying its not important. I’m just saying that journalists have been giving people vegetables with their meat for a long time, and now you’re asking them to PAY for the vegetables?

There’s also the newspaper-as-nonprofit idea, and the newspaper-as-aggregator idea. This last one is one I am somewhat partial to. Drudge and Huffington Post have raised this to an art form.

But the one I’ve really got my eye on is the new hyperlocal venture being launched by The New York Times. I love this idea of newspaper-as-community-dinner-table, and I think that is part of what social media offers on a bigger scale.

It’s not fun to read about all the newspaper companies declaring bankruptcy. But lately ideas have finally begun emerging that make me think the industry has moved past the “Why don’t you love print anymore?” phase. And that’s a good thing.

So it will be exciting to watch these efforts evolve and see what comes of them. The world will be watching.

The yo-yo analogy

This blog post is dedicated to @virtualbrian, with whom a conversation about newspapers spawned my yo-yo analogy. It’s how I explain to non-newsies about what I think of the industry’s downward spiral.

Let’s just say you have a yo-yo factory. And it takes you 15 people to make yo-yos. Your yo-yos are pretty nice and people are generally happy with them. Life is good, and you’re pretty freakin’ happy with yourself.

Then, while you were busy thinking about how great you were, other people started making yo-yos. Just on the fringes, but they didn’t need factories to do it. Fewer people were buying your yo-yos because they could buy them other places for less, and they discovered they didn’t really NEED yo-yos to have fun. All of the sudden, things weren’t looking quite as rosy for you. So you cut a few people – but you aren’t really all that worried. Now it takes you 12 people to make your yo-yos.

Now things start to get a little hairy. For the young people, yo-yos are SO uncool. And fewer old people are attached to your yo-yos than ever before. To make matters worse, you’ve had to scale down the quality of your yo-yos to cut costs, and people are grumbling that they just aren’t as good as they were before. The more you have to cut costs, the crappier of a yo-yo you put out.

At what point, dear reader, do you stop making crappy yo-yos the SAME OLD way and figure out how to make a better yo-yo – something people really want and need – with less than 12 people?

The obvious point being: Newspapers just keep turning out less and less of the same product the way they’ve always produced it. They don’t want to change the business model. What other kind of company would survive by doing that?

If you paid FedEx to get a package somewhere in 2 days, and it took them 4, and then they said to you “Well, you know, we’re having trouble paying the bills because less and less people are using us,” would you consider that a valid excuse? More importantly, would you ever use them again?

Newspapers need to learn to listen, and give people the product (read: information) that they really want. Then they need to learn that they’re a business, and figure out how to produce a must-have product with lower internal costs.

Bring on the chicken dinners

Our new publisher, Steve Pope, came for an introduction last week and talked alot about content. I liked that, and I liked what he had to say – that newspapers (and journalists) have forgotten that they need to listen.

Because in these days when people get their news from Twitter, YouTube, Facebook, Digg and any number of other sites, that community connection is more vital than ever. The definition of “news” itself has changed and more people are now getting their news from the Internet than newspapers.

Pope talked about getting back to “chicken dinner” news while still delivering quality journalism, and it will be interesting to see how he and the editor plan to do that with existing resources. Sometimes it seems like we’re so busy putting out the print product that there’s no time for online already.

To really resonate with readers, the online site has to be a place where readers can connect with their community, where their voices can be heard (and not just when we ask) and that reflects the community in which we live. I’ve been looking at ocregister.com almosy daily lately to get ideas and learn. It seems like they embrace what the community wants, rather than dictating what the community gets.

To that end, I read a really interesting post today about how online newspapers can become the community hub, and there are lots of great suggestions. Some we’re doing, and some would take a seismic shift to accomplish.

What a year!

I’m putting together a contest that invites readers to vote for the biggest story of the year out of a preordained Top 12. Between putting together the story collections out of the archives, getting the art and wrestling with this contest platform that I have never used before, it is kicking my ass.

But besides that, I’ve put together a list of the Top Viewed stories as determined by our site analytics. Its an interesting batch, despite a fellow editor’s retort “Oh, aren’t those all just silly stories?” when I announced my plan. In fact, there is some crossover with what Big-J journalists might put on their lists, as well as some of the offbeat stuff. And while they won’t be on this particular list, Opinion and user-generated content also peppers the most-viewed bunch.

The contest goes live Friday. In the meantime, here’s a really interesting take on the 20 key web events of 2008. I concur with so many of these, but my favorites are Rick Rolling, of course!,  iPhone App store, the Facebook redesign, streaming television shows, and of course Twitter.

Culture club

I’ve been thinking and talking alot about how important changing the newsroom culture is.

Today someone tweeted a video that I thought summed things up really well on this topic. Michael Skoler talks about how its not as easy as technology or changing the business model - its about the mindset. It lasts 12 minutes, but I think it’s worth hanging on to the end.

Facebook, anyone?

I was reading a blog post on Wired Journalists, which I don’t read as often as I should, when I stumbled upon a post on Paul Balcerak’s blog in which he mentioned that his newspaper had recently launched their Facebook page. Now, I’ve of course thought we should have a Facebook page, and in fact I even set one up awhile back, but its always been one more thing that I just knew i didn’t have time to tend. And it can’t be some automatic thing – it has to have a human touch. But now I think I know the perfect person to do it. Or people. Because now that I’m actually more active on Facebook, it turns out that quite a few reporters are on there. Hmmm, something to think about.

Learning to listen

It’s obscenely early, but my husband just left the house to fly out to NYC and I can’t sleep when he’s gone.

I just sent out a tweet from The Gazette’s Twitter account, asking our followers for their ideas about a year-end package I have to put together for online-only. Sure, I’ll be checking out the Most Commented and Most Viewed stories from the Web site, but I wanted to get other thoughts as well.

It made me think about other times I’ve solicited reader input via gazette.com and the need to incorporate more user-generated content into our mainstream product.

Rupert Murdoch spoke last weekend about the hole the media has dug for ourselves: “A recent American study reported that many editors and reporters simply do not trust their readers to make good decisions. Let’s be clear about what this means. This is a polite way of saying that these editors and reporters think their readers are too stupid to think for themselves.”

PS, I came across an interesting Twitter post that argues for news organizations to turn off their Twitterfeed. I totally get the spirit of the post, but in practicality I’m not sure I’m on board. Maybe somewhere in the middle is just right.

Welcome to my world

Part of my job as online news editor at The Gazette is to hold training sessions with the newsroom.

Today I had a pretty good one on social media and how it is influencing traditional media. I think sometimes they get tired of hearing me talk about my love of Twitter, but I wanted to tell them about the recent Motrin controversy, and actually a few have signed up for their own accounts after the meeting.

I’ll have to share more community tips next time and get into interesting discussions like this one about how newspapers are using Twitter (RSS dump) versus what they should be doing (starting conversations).

But next week I’ll go with something they can wrap their hands around: Flip video cameras.