Chip Oglesby

Advice to newspapers: Just link it!

// June 16th, 2010 // 1 Comment » // Journalism, The Future

I’ve seen enough articles about Nick Carr’s and Clay Shirky’s back and forth rhetoric over the internet making you dumber and smarter. Surprise, surprise, they’re both publishing books very soon (disclaimer: I plan on buying both because I like their work).

I think a lot of newspapers are missing the point of what these articles are saying. Instead of bickering back and forth about using readability or actually using links in articles, what I would like to see is more people encouraging newspapers to actually use links!

I’ve visited quite a few South Carolina based media companies this week, searching for their RSS feeds for my new job and their sites have a long way to go. Some papers like The New York Times do decent jobs at creating topic pages, which I’m a fan of, but there are very few outgoing links to other, competing websites.

When would this be helpful?

For beginners, linking out to other sites helps define you as an authority on news. It’s showing your readers that “hey we don’t know everything, but we’ll show you who does, and we’ll show you where you can find it.” Be a link authority in your community and at your paper.

How can we get started?

If you’re a reporter, you should have a delicious account. Delicious is a free online bookmarking service that allows you to store links online and tag this with specific keywords. You could do this with every story that you write, with items that you’re following or as your own personal clipping service. Here’s my delicious account.

Another option is to use Publish2. I used publish2 while at The State when the Boeing news story broke to aggregate stories from around the U.S. on Boeing’s big news in S.C. It received a lot of high praise for including supporting stories.

What should we do next?

Your next step is to talk to someone in your online department. More than likely, they’ll be willing to add the links as assets to your story (hopefully). If you have a system like CCI or some other offline system, it might add them for you automatically. You should also requests for your online CMS to your website and ask your Online Editor to let you go in and manually add the links yourself, you may get shot down, but you won’t know unless you try.

In conclusion:

Stop talking about how the internet is making us uber ADD and just look at it for what it is: a way to make the world more connected through a simple use of an HTML link.

Your news site is not a portal

// May 11th, 2010 // No Comments » // Journalism

Repeat after me “My newspaper site serves no purpose as a portal site.”

There, doesn’t that feel better? When newspaper CEO’s look to cut costs, they look at the bottom of the employee food chain to cut expenses, instead of cutting frivolous expenses like Associated Press feeds.

When your news site publishes AP feeds for example, you’re not only wasting money, you’re also helping to fragment the web.

Take for example the recent Associated Press headline “Some oil spill events from Tuesday, May 11, 2010.” This query in Google returns over 3,000 versions of the same story. Do we really need that many copies of one single story floating around the internet?

Jeff Jarvis has a great idea known as the link economy. His basic thesis: Do what you do best, link to the rest.

Links are the currency of the new media economy. We bloggers think we’re doing AP and papers a favour when we link to their articles. I teach my journalism students that their headlines and intros are more important than ever because these are the advertisements that will draw people to click links and read more.

The problem for AP and other syndicates is that they are trapped in an old-media economy, selling their content to publications to support their work. In print, we needed countless copies of an article. But now, online, we need only one copy with countless links to it.

If it’s better to link to a story, why run AP feeds at all? Most of the time, AP feeds are bundled with a print subscription service, therefore forcing sites to use both. In the case of chain newspapers, they don’t have a choice about running the feeds it’s a part of their contract. There have been a few cases of papers dropping AP feeds, but not as many as you would expect.

What can newspapers do instead?

Newspapers have always bundled news into their products. It’s a low cost, low value alternative to actually producing original news. Prior to the internet, Editors have made a living deciding what news is most relevant to readers. Most ed’s considered their “news judgment” superior to readers judgment.

Step one: Educate readers on how to consume news electronically. Show them how to use and subscribe to your RSS feeds. Show them how to collect different RSS feeds from around the internet. Show them free tools like Google Reader.

Step two: Create an OPML file of RSS feeds for them to get started with. Include feeds from the New York Times, Washington Post and other large daily newspapers from around the U.S. Include various types of feeds like news, business and sports.

Step three: Use the free service Publish2 to curate links from around the web. More than likely, your editors are spending a portion of their day hunting for the best links around the web and looking for the most interesting stories to publish in tomorrow’s paper. Why not give them the one click ability to share their favorite/most important stories with your audience. Publish2 also allows users to create a collaborative newswire so that everyone in your sports department can include their links into any given section.

Conclusion: Your site doesn’t have to spend thousands of dollars to keep your readers informed about current situations when services like Google’s living stories (which is open-source, available for anyone to use) can do it cheaper and more efficiently. Instead of focusing on waste and fluff, give your readers meaningful content and show them that you can be an authority on news by collecting and sharing the best of the best.

UPCOMING POST IDEA: Do you think the Associated Press and newspapers are fragmenting the internet by publishing multiple copies of the same story? What happens to the structure when there is more than one URL for the same story?

One small step for man

// October 20th, 2009 // 3 Comments » // Journalism

This may seem trivial for most, but I have lamented the use of generic uses of refers to our website before..

Today we moved one small step towards where we need to be by using a bit.ly link in the paper. The link was to an op-ed piece in the Times and Democrat in Orangeburg.

The whole discussion that evening was based around the argument of “We need to drive traffic to our website, so we’re going to say ‘For this link, visit thestate.com.’”

To begin with, I can’t say how wrong this thinking is. Let’s make it as easy as possible for readers to find supporting info. To support my argument, I used another link that was used on B1 to an external link as well.

I can understand how this might happen in print, but this would never happen online. Would anyone say ‘to see these documents, go find this story on latimes.com?’ NO! They wouldn’t they would link directly to the documents themselves.

If you think about it, this is a great example of control and education. On the one hand we have someone who wants to do things the way they’ve always been done. On the other hand we need to educate them that their are better ways of doing things. I know this is a long and complicated process, but we’ve got to start somewhere.

Two issues facing newspapers

// September 26th, 2009 // No Comments » // Journalism

There are a lot of issues that plague newspapers. Aggregation, fair use, copyright infringement are just a few, but when you really hone in on the problem it may surprise you.

The two main issues keeping newspapers from moving forward are control and education.

Why control?

The Washington Post’s new social media policy is a great example of what I consider ‘control.’ Before the immense rise of social media fueled by recently by twitter, it was easier for a journalist to hide their opinions. Services like twitter keep their thoughts and opinions archived and always on the record. There are plenty of conversations going on about transparency and objectivity in journalism, but why is the Washington Post so concerned about controlling the message of their journalist?

The one-way street that newspapers had are quickly coming to an end. Newspapers need to prepare and educate their staff on how to properly handle these situations. Just because journalists need to remain objective doesn’t mean they can’t engage with readers and sources.

Let’s take a look at the Ombudsman’s blog on the Post’s situation:

In today’s hyper-sensitive political environment, Narisetti’s tweets could be seen as one of The Post’s top editors taking sides on the question of whether a health-care reform plan must be budget neutral. On Byrd, his comments could be construed as favoring term limits or mandatory retirement for aging lawmakers. Many readers already view The Post with suspicion and believe that the personal views of its reporters and editors influence the coverage. The tweets could provide ammunition.

A lot of this can be avoided if newspapers would adapt the idea of transparency in the newsroom as Dan Gillmor and numerous others have suggested. Journalist, like everyone else are people and they have opinions and bias. They may as well be as open as possible about it from the beginning. Some will think that this could lead to “Fox news style journalism” but there’s a difference between being transparent and injecting your opinion into every story.

One of the things we’ll be talking about at Social Media Club in October is how journalist can use services like twitter to engage with readers and help build a stronger audience through transparency and engagement. Newspapers also need to have active social media users in their company draft guidelines instead of relying on senior management or editors with little to no experience with these tools.

The second example of control is the continuation of the general interest product. I’ve borrowed this quote before and paraphrased it but it really applies to newspapers as well: “If publishers would focus on how people read and not how they publish, they would be a lot better off.”

The actual quote comes from Clive Thompson:

To which I reply: Sure they can. But only if publishers adopt Wark’s perspective and provide new ways for people to encounter the written word. We need to stop thinking about the future of publishing and think instead about the future of reading.

The Internet has completely unbundled the newspaper and allows news to come to the reader instead of the reader going to the news. Although newspapers continue to see a decline in print readership and an increase in online readership, papers still operate in an old school model where stories are routinely held until midnight deadlines. It’s understandable that the paper is still the golden egg of newspapers, but failure to embrace the wants and needs of your readers will result in the end of your business, plain and simple.

Why education?

What’s wrong with your company when 100% of your employees know what a furlough is but less than 75% can actually write a full hyperlink? If your employees can’t finish this “a href” you’ve got some serious problems. Some of the main divisions in the newsroom come from the simple fact that employees aren’t being properly educated. I’m not just talking about continuing education through school, I’m also talking about educating them about their future of their jobs and their trade in a real world environment.

If you ask a typical employee why newspapers are doing so poorly, you’ll likely get an answer like ‘I blame the Internet’ or ‘it’s all Craigslist’s fault’ when in actuality, it goes much deeper than that.

Education also includes teaching coworkers things like although the AP is useful for print, it’s unnecessary for the web when you combine tools like Publish2 with ideas like the link economy. So wire editors now become curators of news instead of copy editors.

Education also extends past institutional knowledge and also includes having an open conversation with coworkers. Before you groan about having another meeting or another brown-bag lunch, consider the fact that these conversations will be one of the most important things you’ll ever talk about at your paper. Leaving coworkers in the dark about what’s going on is just another form of control and shows a lack of education.

Where do we go from here?

All of this starts with a conversation. It could be in small groups or it could be through email, but it must happen. Newspapers cannot afford to operate in the business as usual mentality. Don’t wait for higher-ups to start this conversation, take it to your coworkers and start it yourselves.

Take the time to see how your paper uses ‘control’ and question if it’s really necessary. Ask questions about everything and don’t be afraid to raise the question of education, the only thing worse than an uneducated audience is an uneducated newsroom.