Bas Timmers on the problems with updating on the web.

Imagine this: you read an exclusive breaking news article on a website that says Gordon Brown is about to resign voluntarily. An hour later you come back to that same site, same article, but it now tells you David Miliband is about to step down after an argument with Brown. What to believe now?

This is an example of how much news has changed since the dawn of internet. If this imaginary scoop of Brown stepping down was printed on old-fashioned newspaper, it would have led to a rectification the day after. Together with the story of Miliband stepping down.

Online it doesn’t work like that. A story never stops. You publish it, and then subsequently change it if necessary, when new facts emerge, new sources arise and/or commenters give you new insights to the situation. That’s the developing story, changing (in theory) forever.

But as the imaginary example above shows us, it can lead to some strange situations. A visitor to the site has to trust the news. But what to believe if that news changes? What is accurate? The latest version, the reporter replies.

But it can’t be so simple that you just overwrite the earlier version and pretend that it wasn’t ever there? That is utterly confusing for visitors that read the previous versions. And it would make it all too simple for journalists to hide their previous mistakes.

Don’t get me wrong, it is a huge advantage that you can nowadays through the internet make your stories more accurate along the way. But it should also be compulsory to make earlier versions of the story accessible to the public. Take this example of Dutch open news site EN.nl, which does exactly that (example).

There is one more reason for this procedure: legal implications. It would be all too simple to pretend to have a scoop, and then just correct it (or erase the entire article, as sometimes happens) and pretend there never was an earlier story.

Imagine being Gordon Brown, the victim of the scoop in the example. His reputation is damaged because of a slanderous article on a newssite. One has to stand for what one writes. So be open about it. And show me what you did with your story.

Bas Timmers is newsroom editor at Volkskrant newspaper in the Netherlands.

Guest Blogger Bas Timmers is Newsroom Editor at Dutch broadsheet de Volkskrant.

‘A newspaper is like an oil tanker,’ editors in chief call out in despair again and again. Changing the direction is often slow and difficult. But that of course just depends on whether you have the right rudder or not. Because the captain is still steering the ship. Yes, journalists can be quite nasty and stubborn, but mutiny is still a step too far for most of them.

Jeff Jarvis also used a metaphor from the shipping industry recently: “When you’re redesigning newsrooms, you need to redesign habits and brains and job descriptions and skills while moving the furniture — or else you’ll be moving the furniture on the Titanic.”

He touches a very sensitive spot with that. Of course it’s important and groundbreaking if you design a hypermodern newsroom. One that is physically in the heart of the newspaper, surrounded by the sports, economy, politics and other desks and completed by some nice videowalls. Like the Telegraph in London did, for instance. And much better by the way than the ‘zoo newsroom’ in the new office of the New York Times, which looks like a major step back in time. Transparency looks different, that’s for sure.

Multimedia

But ultimately of course it’s not about where the desks are. You have to change the work- and thinking-patterns of the editorial staff, and that’s much harder than moving furniture.

The entire concept behind an integrated newsroom is to start working as a multimedia company, to let the differences between print and online dissolve: convergence, as everyone now seems to call it. Which is quite necessary, because every editor in chief will see that the entire news process is still focused at the paper product. Editors write their article at the end of the day, hand it in to the subs and go home happily.
An integrated newsroom can’t change that all at once. Yes, very slowly there are editors emerging who are willing to produce several pieces for the web DURING the day. But the developments in the online news world are going so rapidly that publishers run the risk of changing too slow.

Alternatives

There are just too many things happening at the same time. A comparison between paper and online news content teaches us that the customer has so much choice nowadays that he really is the king of his own world. Because he has alternatives for every product he uses. The newspaper only has a dominant share in media consumption during the morning hours. Later this consumption shifts to internet, cell phones, television and radio. During that process, the customer makes personalised choices all of the time: through rss feeds, or by visiting sites that cover a certain field of interest. A page about cinema reviews for instance.

Nowadays the customer also wants to have his say about those movies himself, because the critics’ truth doesn’t necessarily have to be his truth. So he reacts to reviews through comments, or through his own weblog. The consumer becomes a producer and vice versa. And we’re not talking merely about the so-called early adopters, the relatively small group of geeks that just LOVES to use new technique. No, everyone born after 1985 is part of a new generation for which internet has always been there. Those consumers want to:

• get news for free, 24/7
• discuss and participate. Interactivity
• consume the news in many different ways: paper, pc, laptop, cell phone, iPod, tv, etc.
• be served tailor-made. Many many niche markets will be created
• be surprised. Read or watch something that is hard to get somewhere else

Third stream

Such a concept is not tenable in the current time-frame with the current, very generic newspaper product. When news has to become more interactive, personal and 24/7, the focus should therefore be on online production. The newsPAPER is the logical continuation of that, a snapshot at 7AM of the best stories and photos of the preceding 24 hours, complemented with (background) material that has been produced specifically for paper.

Creating for online and paper means making videos, pictures, graphics and fully integrated in this process. But the biggest difference is that editors will start to produce much more and per field of interest, inspired by the blogosphere and readers. That will become the third source of inspiration, after the feeds by news agencies and ideas/research of the staff itself. Welcome to third stream country.



What this means in everyday practice

So blogs have to be taken seriously, finally. Until now they were often perceived as uninteresting, badly-written personal diaries that we don’t need. That was the general opinion, not least among journalists. And for 95 percent of blogs this assumption is true. But those last five percent still represent a massive amount of blogs, a massive amount of knowledge and a massive amount of power. Bloggers just use a different approach, a different stage and a different definition of news than journalists.

One of the differences is that they also write about less important news, that wouldn’t make it into the paper. Which is no problem, because a paper is a generic product, whereas a blog has a specific subject in which readers are interested above average. But the more important difference here of course is that bloggers open up to their audience. This can lead to a lot of cursing back-and-forth, yes, but also to great tips to explore a subject.

In the American election race for instance the blogosphere will have a major influence because of the authority of some commentators and because of the salient facts that will be discovered about candidates.
That’s why journalists should take blogs serious. They are important competitors, that threaten to undermine the role of newspapers as news- and opinion makers.

The news last week that Google is opening the attack on Facebook already leaked through to the blogosphere months before and was first officially confirmed by TechCrunch. That’s why reporters should find the bits, pieces and big chunks of news on the web and then publish them in a way that is attractive to the modern consumer of news: through blogs, indeed. That is the essence of the ‘three streams model’, where internet becomes the third source for stories (together with own research and the personal contacts of a reporter). But what does this model look like in the everyday newsroom?

Start early

Well, the days that the editorial floor fills up at around 10AM are over. The web staff starts at 7.00 sharp to put the most important news from the past night and the current paper online. The rest of the office will be organised in small clusters of, let’s say, five people that focus on subjects such as education, environmental issues, showbiz, movies, European Union, domestic news, football, internet, America, etc etc. Every cluster has at least one editor present at 7.45 to scan the latest news on their respective fields. Fifteen minutes later the online morning meeting starts. On which subjects do we focus? What are video and graphics going to do?

The coordinators of the clusters then start to produce items throughout the day, based on the news wires, blogs and their own research. Subjects that need more time and attention should be done by colleagues. They are also responsible for writing columns, editorial opinions, and so forth.

In the meantime the coordinator has a look at the feedback from readers and deals with it. When there is important news, he signals the head of the internet desk, who is functioning as a gatekeeper to the frontpage of the site. This gatekeeper is also responsible for determining whether breaking news should be published immediate through sms, e-mails and mobile platforms. Exactly as it was described by Paul Bradshaw in his Diamond Model Theory, which is really good for breaking news.

Big waves

Only by starting at this early hour can the editorial room produce sufficient materials before 9.00 AM. At that time, the first big wave of visitors hits the sites to keep on rolling until 11PM. So the journalists keep on rolling until that time as well, in two shifts. During the day the reporters shift their focus from news to opinion, background and video: these need more time to produce. Besides, visitors have more time for this kind of material in the evening.

The rest of the cluster can start at the normal time. The paper product will be discussed briefly and by only a small group of people in the morning (to evaluate and to generate new ideas). Editors will blog about this meeting, just as The Guardian does, so readers know why the paper made some choices and to show the internal debate.

In the early evening there is another meeting where the outline of next day’s paper will be determined AND the online products of the current day are being evaluated. Indeed, another reason for a blog post.

And yes, editors will have to work much harder, sometimes well into the evening. But the work also becomes faster, more challenging and personal. Those who don’t fancy this development have no future any more in journalism.

Bas Timmers is Newsroom Editor at Dutch broadsheet de Volkskrant. This post is also available at http://www.bastimmers.nl/diginewsuk.php

“In the virtual world a year only lasts three months,” a manager once sighed. The innovations keep on coming very quickly indeed on the web, and a success story can turn into a tale of shattered dreams within months. Kazaa and ICQ were once extremely popular, for instance, but are now only marginal players on the web.

This high speed of innovation doesn’t mean that you cannot draw any lessons from the past. For example, Pablo J. Boczkowski was examining three online projects at American newspapers already in 1999 and 2000, but the conlusions he drew are still applicable.

At the New York Times he was studying the technology section; with the Houston Chronicle he was on board at the Virtual Voyager project; and with New Jersey Online he was examining a web tool for communities.

Boczkowski (by now a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology) wrote about his findings in the book Digitizing the News. Everyone reading this sometimes rather academic work will sometimes have to suppress a smile of nostalgia when looking at the screenshots. But the conclusions are still very much 2007.

He observed that newspaper publishers had already been experimenting with digital techniques (Videotext for instance) for thirty years. Not for the sake of innovation, but to protect their advertising market. Defensive, not offensive.

This explains why on the internet other players (Google News for instance) are much more succesful. These companies don’t think with paper products in the back of their minds. They don’t have to save scoops for tomorrow’s paper thingy. They are more flexible, more creative.

As far as I am concerned, you can add one more important reason for these differences in success. Newspapers online have to carry the DISadvantage of their paper image. In the world of dailies lives the widespread misconception that the name of the newspaper is such a strong brand, that it serves as a traffic magnet online as well. But it only gives them a headstart, and even then only in certain segments of the market.

Yes, faithful readers of dailies will also know how to find ‘their’ newspaper on the web: they associate it with quality and reliability. But there are also other, bigger groups in society (and it’s not only youngsters) that associate the product with the terms old-fashioned, biased and occasionally ‘something for the high-society’. In that case the title of the newspaper becomes a burden instead of a blessing.

This is indeed only about marketing and not about content. Traditional journalists will be horrified and blame the younger generation. Yeah, right. The generation that was said to not be reading papers anymore, but nonetheless embraced free dailies in a spectacular way in the past five years…

Instead of blaming others, newspaper publishers ought to be developing new, strong online brands alongside their dailies. No more volkskrant.nl, sueddeutsche.de or scotsman.com for example, but vk.nl, sz.de and… sm.com? Or did anybody already claim that last one?
Note: In an experiment with monetisation, Digitizing the News and other online journalism books can now be ordered through the Online Journalism Blog shop.

Bas Timmers is Newsroom Editor at Dutch broadsheet de Volkskrant

It´s 2015. Newspapers don´t exist anymore. At least, not as a mass medium. Because everyone is living in his own cocoon, his own little world, assembled to his own preferences. Customizable, as the phenomenon is generally called. A television(or a computer screen or electronic paper?) displays documentaries and YouTube-like videos from internet users with the same preferences and the same lifestyle. The mp3-player pounds out songs automaticallty that fit the mood of its user, because the bloody thing can sense the mental state of of its boss. And in the meantime it also suggests some new songs that might match his preference.

The journal, on paper or on a foldable piece of ultra-thin e-paper, is tailor-made: a bit of politics, a snack of showbiz news, some sports and a lot of news about gadgets. Information that, by the way, is still supplied by the good old-fashioned newspaper company, that doesn’t make newspapers any more but rather focuses on delivering written content accompanied by videos and hyperlinks. And ads that match the profile of the user of course, but only if he wants that to happen.

The consumer keeps track of the latest news in his own world of expertise through rss feeds or something similar. And with a mini-broadcasting device (a sniffer) he scans his immediate environment to see whether there are friends and/or interesting people in the pub, cinema or shopping mall where he is. So he doesn’t need to ask his friend where they are, or lose time with chit-chatting with some rather boring people.

This consumer only buys in virtual stores. He gets advice from the iLama, the internet version of the Dalai Lama. On the basis of advice from other consumers and his buying behavior this iLama decides what devices to buy and not to buy. The real social network is only formed by physical friends: the rest happens through virtual online networks. Those friends do get an unlimited view in his life, though: where he is, what he does, when, what his calendar looks like, which movies he watches, what music he listens to, etc. Because he is king of his own world…

Science fiction? You bet. But the workshop I AM 2015 was all about dreaming up scenarios for the future.

Teachers, filmmakers, internet editors (like me), interface designers and other folks created the iLama. It may sound unlikely, but in his introduction consultant Krijn Schuurman pointed out what has happened in the past ten years: email, the growth of online shops, downloading movies, cell phone payments, a second-hand market online, voice recognition, MySpace, YouTube, Google. An impressive list that only few would have dared to dream up in 1997. With that in mind the iLama doesn’t seem so unlikely.

(Although the idea for special glasses that make boring people invisible on the street was very, uh, futuristic.)

Inspiring it was indeed, as was the entire Picnic ’07 event. The multimedia conference in Amsterdam was a mix of keynote speeches, workshops, network events and drinking a beer. Ideal for people who are orienting themselves to the future of online news. That is what this weekly column will be all about. Now just hope that I’ve got enough inspiration to produce something every week until 2015…

Bas Timmers
Newsroom editor at the Dutch daily quality newspaper de Volkskrant

TMZ and the New York Times are the latest news organisations to dip a toe in the world of multimedia commenting.

The NYT recently posted a video ‘letter to the editor’, while the TMZ.com blog is letting readers post audio comments, with video comments in the pipeline. They join the San Francisco Chronicle, who earlier in the year started podcasting voice messages from readers.

Meanwhile, This Is Me Reporting.com, launched this month, takes it a stage further – a whole site dedicated to reader comment and communication.

Examples include a man suggesting someone investigate the legal implications of eBay having access to PayPal’s customer data; a reader on the Madeleine McCann story; amateur footage of the aftermath of a plane crash; and Tim Berners-Lee explaining the importance of net neutrality.

Leanne McMahon from the site told me the people involved so far have either jumped ship from YouTube or are running videos on both: “We have a wide range of members at the moment from ‘Tom’ who is a psychologist to ‘TomLarkin’ who is a US marine.”

The site was set up to try to combat a perceived one-sidedness in professional journalism.

“We only get to see what the people who run these stations want us to see. You never hear the real story from real people, you never hear about anything good, you never see reports about ordinary people and their day to day lives. I hope this site will make this kind of news accessible.”

Key to the site is a personal relationship with site members: “We communicate frequently,” says Leanne, “and this brings a personal touch to the site.”

At the moment most content is in the channels for local, national and international news and opinion, while those for film, book and theatre reviews have no videos. There are also plans for a documentary photograph section.

UPDATE (Oct 18 2007): Take a look at Whistlebox for a tool for multimedia feedback (thanks to Bas Timmers)