Online Journalism Blog

A model for the 21st century newsroom: pt1 - the news diamond

A month ago, I used the Online Journalism Facebook Group to ask readers to suggest what areas they wanted covering, in an experiment with bottom-up editing (the forum for suggestions is still open by the way). Megan T suggested “Rethinking the production of newspapers”.

After researching, conceptualising and scribbling, I’ve come up with a number of models around the news process, newsgathering, interactivity and business models.

The following, then, is the first in a series of proposals for a ‘model for the 21st century newsroom’ (part two is now here). This is a converged newsroom which may produce material for print or broadcast or both, but definitely includes an online element. Here’s the diagram. The model is explained further below it

Building on the strengths of the medium

The strengths of the online medium are essentially twofold, and contradictory: speed, and depth.

New media technologies are able to publish news faster than the previous kings of speed: TV and radio. Think mobile and email updates. Think moblogs. Think Twitter.

At the same time, the unlimited space and time of the web, and its hypertextual and ‘pull’ properties, make it potentially deeper and broader than the previous kings of context and analysis: newspapers and magazines. Think Wikipedia’s coverage of Hurricane Katrina. Think the Daily Kos. Think hyperlocal websites. Think Chicagocrime.org.

The process model above proposes how a large news story might pass through a converged newsroom, from speed to depth, in the following steps:

1. Alert: as soon as the journalist or editor is aware that a story is breaking, an alert is sent out. This might be from their mobile phone, Blackberry, or wifi laptop. Subscribers to text or email updates, a Twitter or Facebook feed, would be notified instantly. This shows you ‘own’ the story; it reinforces your reputation for being first with the big stories; and for the smaller stories, it can provide an opportunity to add personality to your coverage (the ‘what I’m doing now’ approach of Twitter). And it drives readers to your website, newspaper or broadcast.
2. Draft: too rough for print or broadcast, but perfect for blogs. Backing up the alert, the draft report - like a wire report - gives initial names, places and details - and sources. It is updated as fresh details come in. The draft performs the important role of keeping the ‘Alert’ readers on your site, but it also serves to spread word through the blogosphere, bringing in more readers and helping your search engine ranking. Ideally it will also attract commenters and pingbacks which can add or correct details, or even provide new leads. Frequent updates - for instance linking to other coverage - help to prevent it getting knocked off the top of Google News (which looks for the most recently updated, not the first posted).
3. Article/Package: in between the two extremes of speed and depth where online excels, traditional print and broadcast media have these strengths: their documentary nature, and the very limitations of their time and space. Their ability to document a ’snapshot’ - an interim definitive account: the 300-word article or 3-minute package - is key to traditional news media’s appeal. The editorial decision that this story was worth a spot is important when compared to the internet’s infinity. At this stage, the draft turns into a package with higher production values, and which could be online, in print, broadcast, or all of those. The timing may be dictated by print or broadcast processes.
4. Context: back online, that infinite space has an important role to play in providing instant and extensive context: how many times has this happened? Where can I access previous reports? What does that concept mean? How does this scientific principle work? Where can I find more information about this person or organisation? Where can I go to for support or help? Hypertext is central here - the ability to link to a range of documents, organisations, and explanations - both from your own archive and from external providers - in a portal that provides an essential resource. The print or broadcast report may also draw on some of this context, but it should refer to the online resource for more.
5. Analysis/Reflection: after the report, comes the analysis. For online this may mean gathering the almost instant reaction taking place in the blogosphere in general, on your own blogs and forums, and proactively from the informed and the affected. The person covering the story may reflect on the whole experience on their blog, while podcasts are great for staging discussion and debate. At some point print and broadcast will take one or more snapshots for their production cycles.
6. Interactivity: interactivity requires investment and preparation, but can engage and inform the user in a way other media cannot, as well as providing a ‘long tail’ resource that generates repeat visits over a long timescale: a Flash interactive may take days to produce but can provide a compelling combination of hypertext, video, audio, animation and databases (they can also be dynamically updated); a forum can provide a place for people to gather and post experiences and information; a wiki can do the same but more effectively. Live chats can allow users direct access to newsmakers, journalists and experts.
7. Customisation: the final stage should be automatic: the ability for users to customise information to their own needs. At its most basic this might be to subscribe to email, text or RSS updates of that particular story. More advanced services might include social recommendation (’Other people who read this story also read…‘) or database-driven journalism that allows users to drill down into the information: ‘What happened to that street?’; ‘How many cases were there in my postcode?’; ‘What does this tax mean for someone on my wage?’. This means production processes that integrate things like metatagging, and interfaces that can run off a database, and last but not least, a culture that thinks in terms of these possibilities.

That news process in action

Let’s take a typical mid-range news story: ‘public figure makes controversial statement’ to illustrate the process specifically:

1. Alert: ‘Lord Smith: “stop ‘Mickey Mouse’ degrees”‘ - link to…
2. Draft: gives more detail, and is open to comments and discussion, linking to other blogs. One commenter points out that Lord Smith studied English Literature. Journalist seeks ‘official’ comment to put in the…
3. Article: two blog post comments incorporated into a version that goes in the printed newspaper.
4. Context: best links taken from blog post comments, as well as full transcript of speech, audio and some mobile phone video taken by one attendee. Tags (’LordSmith’) used to link to ongoing coverage and provide an instant ‘portal’.
5. Analysis: one particularly well informed blogger who linked to the Draft post is paid to write a longer piece for the paper. A commenter - an academic - is invited to a podcast discussion with Lord Smith.
6. Interactivity: website visitors are invited to ‘attempt an essay question’ from a ‘Mickey Mouse’ degree, giving a real first-hand understanding of what is involved in the subject.
7. Customisation: an RSS feed or email alert is available for any stories tagged ‘LordSmith’

The news diamond

This model can also be represented as an alternative to the inverted pyramid: a ‘news diamond’, if you like.

Just as the inverted pyramid was partly a result of the increasing role of the telegraph in the news industry, and dominant cultural ideas of empiricism and science, this news diamond attempts to illustrate the change from a 19th century product (the article) to a 21st century process: the iterative journalism of new media; the story that is forever ‘unfinished’. More than anything, it’s designed to challenge the dominance of the inverted pyramid, to illustrate its origins in the industrial era, and its shortcomings. And in the spirit of the ‘unfinished’, none of these models are final: please post a comment with your own contributions.

UPDATE: Part two of the model for the 21st century newsroom is now live.

71 comments September 17th, 2007

Who’s reading how much, where

Here’s a cute little collection of charts: the Net Usage Index for News shows how many news webpages are being viewed around the world, and compares these with key news events. You can view by region, too.

Add comment September 3rd, 2007

Telegraph innovates again: A level results GoogleMaps mashup

After so long watching The Guardian take all the plaudits, The Telegraph website is starting to show some real innovation of its own. Following

last week’s football Flash stat attack, Marcus Warren posts about their mashup/database-driven A level coverage including a league table of schools’ performance updated in real time “(almost)”. And a map of schools who have sent in results “with links back to their position in our list.” (shown above)

3 comments August 23rd, 2007

Telegraph football website innovates with video and Flash

The Telegraph is showing some impressive innovation over at its football pages - video highlights of the weekend’s matches is one thing, but more impressive for me is the Flash application that allows you to look at match stats you wouldn’t even get on Sky: preferred passes, ‘density’, orientation (percentage in attack or defence), balls played, possession winning, and even personal statistics for each player. It’s like having your own ProZone.

What the Telegraph clearly understand is just how sad and anal us football fans are. Now I can see that new Bolton signing Jlloyd Samuel made 21 good passes out of 34, whereas the much-maligned Nicky Hunt made 30 from 38. (Next time you meet me, make a mental note not to mention the football.) The Guardian looks very, very flat indeed by comparison.

2 comments August 15th, 2007

A journalist’s guide to crowdsourcing

There’s a great journalist’s guide to crowdsourcing over at the OJR, which is close to being added to my must-read online journalism blog posts due to this quote: “Ultimately, journalism is social science, and journalists who want to make best use of crowdsourcing need to get familiar with the mathematics of social science.” Here’s some more:

“if you want to attempt a true crowdsourcing project, someone in your newsroom will [need programming skills]. Free online survey tools and mapping websites can help you collect and publish great reader-contributed data. But if you want custom information to move from survey form to published report in real time, you can’t do that yet without a programmer on your team.

“… The interviewing and document searches of 20th-century investigative reporting will look incomplete as savvy journalists and newsrooms learn to harness the Internet’s wide reach and interactivity to gather massive databases that only formal social science techniques can effectively manage and analyze.”

2 comments August 2nd, 2007

Online journalism’s must-read blog posts

Shane Richmond is asking for contributions to a list of classic blog posts on online journalism. For some reason my comments don’t seem to have gone through, so here’s my list of the essential reads for online journalists:

1. For an overview of the forms and possibilities of online journalism: Jonathon Dube’s Online Storytelling Forms
2. For a mind-blowing insight into the journalistic potential of computer technology: Adrian Holovaty: A fundamental way newspaper sites need to change
3. For reflection on how the online news environment changes the nature of journalism: Dan Gillmor’s The End of Objectivity (Version 0.91)
4. For reflection on journalism ethics in the MySpace/Facebook/UGC/digital doorstepping era: Robin Hamman’s posts virginia tech bloggers: approach and confirm or link and disclaim? and his coverage of a debate on virginia tech coverage
5. For a sliding scale of ideas on how to involve the audience: Steve Outing’s The 11 Layers of Citizen Journalism
6. For a succinct and clear explanation of moving from the TV mindset to an understanding of online video: Andy Dickinson: Moving from TV to Online
7. For a quick list of tips when moving into video: Newslab’s Tips for Photographers
8. For an outline of the possibilities of Flash for interactive storytelling, and experiences of its use: Mindy McAdams’ Flash journalism: Professional practice today 
9. For a step-by-step overview of how to treat a story in a multimedia way: Mindy McAdams’ Journalism stories: A multimedia approach Parts 1, 2 and 3.
10. For a conceptual exploration of interactive storytelling: The Elements of Digital Storytelling
11. I’ll agree with Richmond’s inclusion of Ross Mayfield’s post on his own blog: What makes wikis work
12. And it pre-dates blogs, but answers very effectively that recurring question of “Is blogging/wikis/databases/broccoli etc. etc. journalism?”: G. Stuart Adam’s Notes Towards a Definition of Journalism

17 comments July 25th, 2007

Speech to Trinity Mirror Midlands

I’ve been at it again. Last night I presented a speech to editors and ad directors at Trinity Mirror Midlands (Birmingham Mail and Post, Coventry Telegraph, Sunday Mercury and various weeklies throughout the region). Given that they’d been exploring digital ideas all day I tried to keep it light to begin with - so the linked Powerpoint below begins with a mock awards, with the more hard hitting stuff coming after.

The hard-hitting stuff consists of lots of pithy phrases - the headlines were:

• It’s no longer about content, it’s about services
• It’s no longer about publishing, it’s about communication

I talked about how the news industry is having to shift from a 19th century production-based system to a 21st century service-based industry, and how online advertising alone is not going to plug the gap left by dropping print revenues (a number of new business models are covered that may provide other sources of revenue).

And I tackled this common phrase that the newspaper is now ‘one of many channels’. I think that’s still a ‘broadcaster’ mindset, and that instead we should think of print as ‘one way of helping people communicate’.

And I revisited some of the elements from my Vienna speech about the strengths that journalism needs to play to: investigative journalism, database-driven journalism, interactive journalism, and multimedia journalism; and reader-driven forms such as wikis and crowdsourcing.

Here’s the PowerPoint. Comments welcome.

Speech to Trinity Mirror Midlands

Add comment June 6th, 2007

Tutorials for online journalism goodness

Mindy McAdams links to Journalistopia’s impressive online journalism tutorials category, including:

“One I had completely missed: Quick HTML bar graphs with Excel, Table Tango demonstrates a very simple way to get a nice graph online fast.”Other tutorials he has featured teach us how to create nifty maps, use CSS better, and make Photoshop do lots of useful stuff apart from the usual dodge and burn.”

Add comment April 26th, 2007

Another great interactive graphic

Thanks to Innovations in Newspapers and Infographics News for pointing out Is It Better to Buy or Rent? from the New York Times. Marvel as you input house prices and work out whether it’s better to rent or buy. Database-driven journalism at its best.

Add comment April 16th, 2007

Slate taps into database power for election prediction

Slate is tapping into three “political prediction markets” to put together a ‘wisdom of crowds’ prediction for the 2008 election:

“If a single prediction market is wiser than the pundits and the polls, imagine how wise all the prediction markets are together. That’s the idea behind Slate’s “Political Futures,” which offers a comprehensive guide to all the big political prediction markets. From now until Election Day 2008, we’ll publish regular updates of the key data from Iowa Electronic Markets, Intrade.com, and Casualobserver.net.”

Add comment March 21st, 2007