Why Schultz is Wrong About Anonymous Comments

Anonymous comments are dangerous, Connie Schultz wrote yesterday on Cleveland.com. They lead to poison and vitriol.

Plus, she said: "Anonymity on the Web offends most journalists I know, and not just because their own names go on everything they write. It breaks every rule newspapers have enforced for decades in letters to the editor, which require not only a name and a city of residence, but contact information to confirm authorship."

Schultz's preferred prescription: Get rid of anonymity and require commenters to identify themselves.

But she's wrong. This is just another example of the kind of faulty thinking that gets in the way of newspapers' ability to move successfully into the new digital era. Two reasons:

• It fails to recognize that the online world is a world of its own--one that is much bigger than just news organizations. News organizations that try to force that wider online world to behave according to its preferred standards are going to fail. Successful organizations are the ones that try to learn the local ways and adapt themselves accordingly.

• Those who take the time to do this--to understand the local ways--quickly realize that it's not anonymity that leads to uncivil discourse in forums. It's poor moderation. The way you encourage civil behavior in online communities is to have clear rules of the road and then to enforce them. Online community experts have known this for well over a decade.

So today's takeaway: The key to helping news organizations survive and thrive in the digital world is not to try to make that world conform to newspapers' ways of doing things. Instead, the key is to understand the digital world and its ways of doing things--and then to use those insights to help you accomplish your goals.

Photo courtesy of: gregmote. Creative Commons License

Of Course No One Was Suprised That A TV Story Was Shot with an IPhone

At the end of June, a producer for a Miami TV station shot an entire story with the new iPhone... and the journalism world went crazy. The TV station wrote a story about it. Tweeters tweeted. And Poynter interviewed the producer in question.

Most telling in the coverage, however, was one assertion, in the TV stations' story about the story. The story itself was about the launch of the new iPhone, and the iPhone-shot story happened by accident. The producer had lined up in the wee hours with hundreds of other Apple fans to get the new phone. A good reporter, it occured to him there was a story there, so he started taking still pics while in line and then started shooting interviews once he got his phone. One thing led to another, and the station said why don't you just do a whole story for us with iPhone footage?

So here's where the telling part comes in. The TV station's story about the story includes the following line: "Oddly enough, not one of these Apple fans found it strange that a television station was shooting video with an iPhone!"

Let's ponder this for a moment. The news world is all abuzz, but the folks on the street think this is perfectly normal. Moreover, the TV station thinks it's odd that the folks on the street don't think it's strange.

You can only draw one conclusion from all this, and it's an important one of the news business: The news industry is behind its audience. And, in being so, most likely holding itself back from finding its way forward.

The reason you don't see more TV news stations shooting with iPhones comes down to quality. A traditional camera obviously delivers much better quality than video-enabled smartphones. But maybe news organizations should ask themselves whether that really matters. Maybe the smartphone video is good enough.

Not that anyone is suggesting TV stations jettision all their professional-grade cameras in all circumstances. Rather, it might be useful if they were to regularly consider for what types of stories and events it might be just fine to use a smartphone or a Flip. And to regularly experiment with how far they can push the boundaries on this question.

What's the point, you might ask. Why bother trying to see how much coverage you can get away with with a smartphone when you have perfectly good professional-grade cameras on hand?

There are a couple reasons:

• Video-enabled phones are obviously more mobile--and take less expertise to use--than professional cameras. TV stations might discover a range of situations they can access that the couldn't access before, and they might discover they're able to do stories they never could do before. Or simply that they might be able to do more coverage than they were able to do before. In other words, they might discover that, although they sacrifice some degree of quality, they gain more in content. And if viewers don't care about the lower quality or, alternatively, are psyched about the new coverage, that creates growth oppotunities for TV news.
  


• Budget. Smartphones are obviously a lot less expensive than professional cameras. Again, no one is suggesting that TV stations completely ditch their professional cameras (and professional shooters), but it might be possible to substituted smartphones for the big equipment in some situations, thereby saving money for cash-strapped news operations or, alternatively, freeing up budget for use elsewhere.

Don't Bother with the Investigative Journalism "Strike Force" Idea

Reports say that the summit of nonprofit news organizations that met at the Rockefeller estate at the beginning of July discussed the idea of setting up an investigative journalism "mobile strike force" that could be deployed anywhere in the country, to pick up the slack on investigative reporting that, by all accounts, is falling by the wayside in these tight-budget days.

It's a lovely idea. But news organizations will actually get a lot farther a lot faster if they invest their energy and ingenuity elsewhere.

It's clear why the idea is compelling: In these days when newspapers are cutting back, when local journalism is suffering, when the scaling back on reporting is "putting democracy in jeopardy," wouldn't it be lovely to have an expert strike team to be able to swoop in and rescue the locals? Yes, it would. But it's neither practical nor, actually, is it ideal.

• First, ask yourself: Who's going to fund this?
  
  OK, you might get the Knight Foundation or some other organization to pony up the funds for a novel idea like this for a year or two. But after that? You need a sustainable business model, and right now, I don't see one. Unless you get a coalition of newspapers to fund it. But I imagine that after they did an ROI analysis of the returns they get out of supporting a strike force that, most of the time, will not be doing any journalism in their neck of the woods, those newspapers will decide their money could be better spent elsewhere.
  
  
• Next: ask yourself: Is a group of outsiders really the best team to look into local issues?
  
  Or, turn this around, ask yourself: How much further ahead could you get if, instead of bringing in outsiders, you figured out how to leverage insiders? Think of the pro-am approach Amanda Michel is spearheading at ProPublica and that Robert Rosenthal has talked about doing on the Center for Investigative Reporting's California project. Instead of looking back to the old days, when communities relied on hotshot investigative reporters to break open corruption and wrongdoing, news organizations should be looking to the more recent model of crowdsourced reporting--of the kind Talking Points Memo did in uncovering the U.S. Attorneys scandal--and figure out how to leverage the informed and motivated people within their own communities to bring issues to light that need to be brought to light.

The value that experienced investigative reporters bring is their understanding of how to do investigative reporting. But most of the hour-by-hour work they--placing requests for documents and sifting through them--is work any reasonably intelligent person could do. So, just as accountants can now outsource low level accounting tasks to India so that U.S. accountants can focus on higher-level tasks, we don't need investigative reporters to do the whole soup-to-nuts part of investigations anymore. Yes, we need their expertise in the form of guidance or mentoring. But much of the work can be done by motivated readers.

Instead of spending a lot of time dreaming about some fantasy team of super-reporters to rescue them, news organizations should start rescusing themselves: By investing in developing pro-am methods of gathering and interpreting the news.

What journalism can learn from KodakGallery.com

The big topic in journalism circles today is how to get readers to pay for content online when they're used to getting it for free. For an answer, it might be worth looking at Kodak Gallery.

I've used Kodak Gallery forever. Back since when they were still Ofoto. I love them--for no other reason than it's a really easy way to share photos with friends and family, and a really easy way to store and organize pix. Take pix at the family Easter party? Upload and share. Take pix at Dad's birthday? Upload and share. Take pix at Burning Man? Upload and share. And the same happens when someone else takes pix. I now have easy access to other people's Burning Man pictures. My nieces' ski trips. A company party.

I've done this forever. For free. Never bought a thing. Not a single hardcopy photograph. And KodakGallery has let me get away with it. Until now.

The good folks at KG have recently sent me a notice. Two actually. Letting me know that, regrettably, they can no longer completely support my mooching. They will happily continue to store my photos online. But I, they say, must do something for them: For the amount of storage I'm using (less than 2 GB), I must make at least $4.99 in purchases every 12 months. Otherwise, bye bye pix.

Now here's the thing. I don't want $5 worth of hardcopy pictures. I have no use for them. I've gone completely digital. But you know what? I'll do it. I'll go ahead and buy $5 worth of pix I don't want.

Why? Because I find their service incredibly valuable.

Sure, I could download all those albums. But that would take forever. And it would take them away from my family and friends, who also still have access to them on Kodak Gallery. All in all, it's easier for me to just pay them the money and keep my pix there.

So what's the takeaway for journalism? If you create something your users really value, they'll pay for it.

There's a lot of talk about business models these days. But I don't see an equally focused and concerted exploration about what readers actually value--not just what kind of news they want to receive, but the forms in which they want to receive it, and the devices on which they want to receive it. Yes, there are a slew of projects working on various aspects of this question. But the dominant drumbeat you hear coming out of the news world these days is: How can we get people to pay? Not: How can we create something so great, people will happily pay?

Without that second discussion, however, there's little point in the first. If we do have that second discussion, however, if we do find forms of journalism that people truly value, I assure you, readers will pay. Happily.

What INDenverTimes did wrong

Back in March, following the demise of the Rocky Mountain News, three Colorado businessmen announced they were teaming up with former RMN journos to launch a new venture INDenver Times, a new online news site covering the local community. The launch date was set for April 23--assuming, they said, that 50,000 readers had subscribed by then. They needed the $3 million that would come from the $60 per annum subscriptions to fund the business.

Last week, the Denver Post reported that the three businessmen were abandoning the project. Among the disappointments: Only 3,000 people had signed up so far.

Perhaps this was a surprise to the INDenver Times team. But it wouldn't have surprised anyone in Silicon Valley. You see, the group's business plan violated one of the fundamental tenets of online innovation: You don't charge people first, and then deliver the product. Just the opposite: As anyone who's watched the evolution of Facebook, Twitter, and innumberable software products (online and desktop) knows: You give the goods away first. Then you charge.

The reason is twofold:

-- By putting your product out there for free, you get people to use it. And it's in watching real people use it that you learn what works and what doesn't. You then use this information to refine the product and ultimately produce something really excellent that you never could have figured out had you done all your development behind closed doors.

-- In the course of doing this, your users develop an attachment to your product, one they eventually are willing to pay for.

Together, this approach allows you develop two things you need in order to charge: A really excellent product and consumer demand for it.

The lesson is instructive for anyone considering a journalism experiment: You're going to have to find a subscription-less way to fund the project, at least for the first few years.

Photo courtesy of laszlo-photo. Creative Commons license.

Pulitzers measure nothing about a newspaper's viability

An investor at last week's New York Times annual meeting complained that the Times seemed to have plenty of money to send reporters all over the world but couldn't manage adequate coverage of the city's five boroughs. "Send these people to Brooklyn! Send these people to the Bronx!” he reportedly said. “You will increase circulation."

Times Co. chairman Arthur Sulzberger Jr. response? That the Times had just won a Pulitzer for local reporting. Yes, well, here's the problem: Pulitzers are handed out by other journalists, based on how much those other journalists like specific stories. They have nothing to do with whether a newspaper is delivering a product that is valued by its customers.

This is important to remember. As news organizations look forward, they need to forget about using prizes as a metric of their future viability. The only metrics that matter are circulation--and whether those numbers are going up or down.

Photo courtesy of terren in Virginia. Creative Commons license.

Why are these editors so downright giddy?

There was something interesting about the editors giving advice to Michelle Nicolosi, the new editor of the Seattle Post Intelligencer's online-only edition in CJR's recent piece "To the P-I, on Its First Day."

Talk to any journalist today, and you get a lot of gloom and doom. A lot of talk about how the demise of newspapers is catastrophic for democracy. About how online news sources can't possibly deliver the quality we saw in print. About much will be lost when newspapers are gone.

But not these editors. Oddly, these folks speaking directly to the editor of the first online-only city daily in the country, the editor starting out with a measely staff of 20, yes that's right, 20! These editors were anything but doom and gloom. In fact, they seemed down right giddy.

Their insights were peppered with words like "liberating" and "exciting". They talked about the excitement of being able to experiment and try new things--and discover cool stuff when their experiments worked out. They talked about being freed from the tyranny of having to cover everything, from the canon that said you had to "run after every ambulance, or chase after every press conference.” They talked about how having "everyone do everything" was actually great.

So who were these iconoclasts speaking so far from the conventional wisdom within journalism circles? They were the editors of several of the online-only newspapers that have emerged in the last couple of years: the Chi-Town Daily News, Voice of San Diego, and MinnPost.

This is good news for journalism. These are the people who've already been to the future. And they're telling us: It really isn't all that bad. In fact, it's quite liberating. And exciting.

Photo courtesy of localsurfer. Creative Commons license.