If you’re a fan of The State’sAdam Beam, you may have noticed something different in yesterday’s paper.
Instead of Adam’s traditional footer with his work phone number, he’s now using a Google Voice Number exclusively. This allows Adam to use one number that will ring two different numbers incase he isn’t by his office phone at the time.
There are numerous features that make GV a valuable tool for journalists. Most notable is the embeddable “Call me” button. Anyone who is running their own blog can use this to let readers call and give them tips about breaking news as it happens. This would give people the ability to give eye witness accounts on a digital tip line, or express their outrage over an editorial in the paper. The voice-mails in GV are also embeddable which is also helpful, but could be a security risks depending on the sensitivity of the message. To use the call widget below you have to enter your correct telephone number which Google will call and connect you with the Google Voice number you have dialed.
There’s also a transcription service. Google will transcribe your emails and email them to you along with a link to an mp3 of the voice-mail. The transcription service is a hit or miss, and gets a 6 out of 10 on the usefulness scale.
You can make and recieve calls within Google Voice or on your phone. I was lucky enough to snag a copy of GV mobile while it was still in the iTunes app store. If you contacts have telephone numbers in Gmail, you can call them and also send them text messages. You also have the ability to record your telephone calls in GV as well.
You can also set up the service to only ring certain phones at select times. For example, you can set your cell phone up to ring only between 7 a.m and 8 p.m. or have it only ring your work number during that time.
Some of our guest have already taken the time to respond to our questions. Dan Conover and Doug Fisher have addressed all of their questions on their own blogs. I also plan on answering as many questions on the site since I was the one who came up with them.
I wanted to take the time to highlight two great points from Dan and Doug. First is an idea from Conover
There are plenty of people who can walk into your newsroom and set up the workflows and training sessions that can make a web-first system work (like, say, me for instance). But unless your top management is accountable for its success, and by that I mean that their salaries and bonuses are tied to it, it’s not going to change. This is a cultural challenge masquerading as a technical problem.
Dan has really hit on something here. How many publishers salaries are tied into how well their website do? Right now, I would guess that the majority of their concern is with the print product, but it is going to take a complete change in mentality before everyone is ready to accept the web first model of news. I would like to see a newsroom system set up that rewards everyone for being web first.
Everyone wants to talk about micropayments from customers, but let’s flip the idea and consider micropayments for reporters, editors and photographers who move stories, photos and video faster, engage their audience and get more pageviews. Those employees would receive a monthly bonus based on how well they did online.
Once we put the incentive on being web first, I think we’ll see more of the pieces of this puzzle fall into place.
The second point, raised by Doug about institutional knowledge verses reader knowledge:
Well, let’s start with these two assertions: at least half of your audience knows more about a story than you do, but two-thirds of them really have no clue about much outside their own little world. In other words, the collective and institutional knowledge are complementary. If you don’t acknowledge a lot of people know more than you do, all sorts of bad things result. You tend to write down to your readers. You tend to ignore nuances and oversimplify. You might miss valuable information.
As we all know, journalism can no longer be a one-way street of information, it has to flow both ways. Part of the problem journalist have with community journalism is knowing that we can trust what they say and write. When you approach journalism from a wiki style model where a static story becomes a living story, you’ll learn that sometimes you’re readers know much more about a subject than you do. Figuring out how to collect and curate this content is one thing we hope to discuss.
There are two ways to approach this idea so just hear me out.
People on one side of the argument will tell you that “it’s unnecessary to curate content for people because they can do it themselves. There are tools for doing that.” That’s true, with twitter, google reader and the New York Times custom RSS feed, who needs journalists?
There’s the other side of this argument. “People need us because they are lazy and don’t have the knowledge to do it themselves.” That may be a blunt statement, but part of it is true. How many people do you know that actually change their own oil? How many people can repair their own P.C.? I know plenty of people who can do both, but I know that their are more people who are willing to pay someone to do it for them, because they don’t know how, or they would rather not waste their time trying to figure out something they only need to do once or twice. Once we can figure out a sustainable way of curating content for readers, we’ll move forward in this discussion.
This could solve two problems. One, How do we get people to pay for content? Two, how do we get our content on the web without putting it behind a paywall?
Your content would still reside on the web, it would be indexed by Google and could be linked to by legacy bloggers who are still blogging the same way in 10 years, but no one says how it should look. The link itself could be a simple text file with nothing more than a bunch of meta tags.
Here’s a video that Charles Ellison and I recorded for our SMC meeting, I think it’s about as painfully awkward as you can get and I freaking love it!
When was the last time you noticed a dateline in the newspaper? Do your readers even know the purpose of a dateline?
In the 1800 and 1900′s before the internet, mobile computing and GPS, using a dateline was fine, the relationship to the location was understood and in present day it still is, but in the age of the links, having a standard dateline doesn’t work. If the Internet is built on semantic information, why not relate the physical location in a digital environment?
There’s a lot of talk about the future of hyperlocal journalism, but have you noticed how the same old standards for datelines still apply to the online world?
Understand this, it just doesn’t work the same way!
Location based services and stories with specific geolocations will be vital to the next newsroom.
There are numerous applications that use location based services. Brightkite and AroundMe are two examples for the iPhone. As smart-phones gain popularity among users, we will see a dramatic shift in the way people send and receive information. That opens the doors for great opportunities in hyperlocal journalism and advertising.
Who could benefit from this?
Weekly and small dailies who produce a lot of community journalism are most likely to succeed with an idea like this. Their focus is more on covering their community, so they are more likely to have a larger set of data to work with.
What are some examples?
Example 1: Take this story written in the Fort Mill Times, a McClatchy newspaper. Fire destroys Indian Land house under construction The reporter Jenny Overman does a great job of telling us what happened at the scene, but there is no mention of the exact location of the house.
I’m sure that residents in that area saw the smoke and were very curious about what was going on. By using the geolocation of the phone and home, readers would be able to get updates about the story based on their physical location.
Example 2: Let’s say that you’ve decided that you want to go play golf in Hilton Head Island at Harbour Town Golf Links, which has been the past host of the Verizon Heritage Tournament. You’re standing around waiting to tee off, so you open your phone which determines your location and shows you ever article, photo and video about the hole your stand at.
Haven’t I heard this before?
Yes you have! outside.in and Everyblock are very similar, but newspapers haven’t taken the time to get rid of the industry old byline and update it with new methods using longitude, latitude.
Outside.in does a decent job of showing some local news from the Columbia area, but it depends on crowdsourcing to give a link a location or place. This could be circumvented by having a reporter and photographer use a GPS device.
News companies need to invest in technology that will harness this power if they hope to be a competitor in the online market. It’s only a matter of time before someone comes along and does it bigger and better than we could and we’ll be left shaking our heads asking “Why didn’t newspapers think of this?”
Where do we go from here?
Every story that’s written in a newspaper that references a real world location should have a gelocation tag associated with it.
Reporters and photographers should use a Spot Me GPS, iPhone or equivalent device.
If there’s a way to archive and update old stories to include location, it should be done.
All future information will have to be catalogued for future reference.
There’s more research that could be done on this and I would love to your thoughts and opinions about it.
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