The question is no longer just a hypothetical one. With increasing convergence between social media and traditional content, what is known as a traditional news website might not exist in the coming years.

Perhaps a revealing example is the creation of Facebook applications by a Seattle-based aggregator, NewsCloud, which received a grant from the Knight Foundation to study how young people receive their news through social networks.

With developer Jeff Reifman leading the way, NewsCloud has developed three applications (Hot Dish, Minnesota Daily and Seattle In:Site) that engage users in news content through linking to stories by providing a headline, photo and blurb. The applications also allow them to blog, post links themselves and much more – all while getting points for completing “challenges” that can be redeemed for prizes, which works as an incentive to stay engaged. Prizes include everything from t-shirts to tickets to a baseball game to a MacBook. Some of these challenges are online ones (sharing a story, commenting on content, blogging, etc.) and others are offline challenges (attend a marketing event, write a letter to the editor).

HotDish

Hot Dish was the first application that NewsCloud worked to create with Grist.org, a website that provides environmental news, commentary and advice. The stories posted are centered around climate change.

Minnesota Daily is an application that was created to feature news surrounding the University of Minnesota community, featuring news from the college newspaper’s website (MnDaily.com). (Disclosure: I worked as the editor in chief of the paper when the application was launched.) The interesting thing about this application is that not only does it look and feel like the newspaper’s actual site, it pulls several features directly from it, such as a feed of university-related Tweets and even some banner ads. The application is mostly used to connect students to MnDaily.com stories, but has the potential for much more.

Seattle In:Site functions for a similar purpose, but the content produced is by journalism students at University of Washington and the application features certain multimedia that can directly be watched on the Facebook app.

Replacing news sites?

It might not be these Facebook applications that replace news websites, but perhaps something similar. The point is: it’s all meshing together in one pot of media and it might not be far off before social media sites like Facebook become the primary publishing platform. Of course, this may take some time and some needed additions in content management for these platforms to be viable, but let’s use these Facebook applications as a starting point. The checklist:

• Content: We need original content, not just aggregation. Well, these Facebook applications already include ability for users to blog (again, with some needs for improvement, like offering rich text).
• Multimedia: Users can watch videos directly on the Seattle In:Site application. The Daily application features a Twitter feed, and the possibilities for more are endless.
• Subscription: Users can sign up for the application and follow it on their Facebook profile pages. It also includes the ability to ad the application as one of your tabs on the profile page. And of course there are always twitter feeds.
• Advertising: The site currently pulls ads from the other websites, but could also include original ads. Why not make some of the challenges sponsored? For example, a business would pay for you to post a challenge that involves going to their business (prizes could be sponsored too).
• Virality: Things spread like fire through social networking sites. You don’t have to worry about users coming to you. With the way Facebook is structured, things spread quite quickly through sharing. For example, if I am signed up for the application and do sort of interaction with it, it will show up on my profile page for my friends to see. They will see if I posted something, etc. The applications also allow the administrator to send notifications to its visitors and users. Also, users have the option to place an application badge onto their profile page for their friends to see. When I was editor at the Minnesota Daily, we received 15,000 visits from Facebook out of 257,000 in one month. That is a good start. And I can image many more people didn’t click through but only read the content actually provided on the application.

What’s next?

NewsCloud application source code is now open to college media that is interested in using the application and customizing it themselves, or media organizations can hire NewsCloud to manage the application for them.

The applications were used to gather data on how users were interacting with the content. Jeff Reifman said preliminary data is now available and the research being done by Christine Greenhow from the University of Minnesota will mostly be complete by the end of August. It will be interesting to see what the findings are. Using the information, the applications can be retooled to better attract users and learn how they interact with news most.

The following is the last part of a series of responses to the government inquiry into the future of local and regional media. We will be submitting the whole – along with blog comments – to the Culture, Media and Sport Committee. This post, by Alex Lockwood, looks at:

“How to fund quality local journalism”

The bottom has fallen out of the traditional publishing business model–and with it goes the hefty dividends expected by shareholders (e.g. £48.4m in 2008 for the Trinity Mirror Group). The future of local quality journalism can only remain with the current crop of regional newspaper publishers if they radically change their expectations, and innovate.

That might not happen. If it doesn’t, they will die off, and the future of quality local journalism will take a huge – but not definitive – blow. Then the future lies with new initiatives and the local communities themselves – passionate and entrepreneurial people, only some of whom will be journalists. What about local council initiatives to publish newspapers and local information? That’s not the way to go – covered in Part 3.

But how to fund it? Here are eight suggestions for the future of local journalism funding:

1. Save the big regional publishers through a public subsidy? The culture secretary, Andy Burnham, has already ruled that out: no state subsidies for beleaguered local newspapers. In some ways, that is good. Let’s not shore up businesses that have met requirements of shareholders over those of the local community, and which have – with a few notable exceptions – failed to innovate.

2. But… as Andy Price argued on this blog yesterday, “The regional press is the only institution with enough professional journalists to really cover civic Britain successfully.” So where public money is available, e.g. through the Digital Britain programme, efficiencies in government funding are necessary. As the authors of After the Crunch, published last week, write, “The DCMS, BERR, DCSF, Treasury, DIUS between them, spend a lot of money in the name of ‘creativity’ and ‘innovation’, but much of their effort is frustrated by the lack of a coherent approach.” If quality local journalism is a public service, then what portion of the public service budget could go to newspapers? And only on the basis that they reform their structures (as suggested by @Geoffrey Gevalt).

3. That could be knitted together with a second point made in After the Crunch: that “the small-scale nature of creative industry enterprises connects more easily, and more productively with smaller-scale government.” The government could streamline legislation and funding frameworks for supporting media organisations at local levels without the baggage of outdated business models. They can work with Business Link and entrepreneurship schemes to offer many more bursaries and small business grants to new ventures that establish in their business plans a commitment to produce quality local journalism covering local democracy issues. These will most probably be started by two groups of people: those local journalists who have been made redundant, and who are deeply passionate about local democracy and community; and new entrepreneurs who can see the potential in investing in a portfolio of local media products using new, free technologies and mash ups.

4. Where regional publishers can prove they are adapting to the new media environment, individual papers or sub-regional groups (similar to what Peter Preston called for in the Observer last Sunday) could be cut out of the dying corpse of their parent company, and given subsidies to see them through the migration to a new business model.

5. Reduce costs through ditching daily print routines. Newspapers become professional news magazines published once a week but constantly updated online by continuing to grow community engagement and news as a conversation, and by investing in non-traditional ways to access information, e.g. these maps empowering social change (h/t @JoshHalliday).

6. Media organisations, both new and traditional, turn to community-owned, community-sourced local journalism.  Two-hundred years ago it was pampheteering. In 1932, it was nine interested individuals fed up with newspaper oligarchs who raised £40,000 and set up their own local paper, the Bristol Evening Post. Crowd-sourcing and crowd-funding have always been a part of the future of media. As argued for by former Northern Echo editor Peter Sands this morning on the Radio 4 Today programme.

7. Take a leaf out of new magazine membership models, as developed by numerous brands but articulated here via Alyce Alston: sell bundles of information.

8. Fund training programmes for current (recently redundant?) journalists in new technologies and entrepreneurship. This gives the next generation of media entrepreneurs preparedness for the need to adapt to rapid media change – and that means more money into projects such as Infuze at the University of Central Lancashire (h/t Laura Oliver)

What the typical local media organisation might look like?
So how about this? The future of quality local journalism is published immediately online and weekly in print, probably in magazine format.

• A small group of editors, journalists and community managers work with a network of contributors to develop feeds in a number of formats, e.g. news stories linked to local maps, for geographical and issue-based hyper-localities: all of this online, using APIs to mash together maps, local government records, planning information etc.
• A printed version provides a format for the weekend read and brings in advertising—similar to the ways the best Teesside hyper-local content gets published in weekly papers.
• The media organisation supports investigative reporting through entertainment, sport and feature copy that attracts advertising and sponsorship.
• The magazine is distributed freely around the local region.
• This local brand was set up with a government grant, including ongoing training in technology and entrepreneurship.
• The magazine is owned by the community through a crowd-funded structure (ten thousand people each pay £20 as a yearly debenture – not a subscription) and that community then have a vote on the governance and issues covered by the magazine… Want journalists to prioritise investigations into local planning decisions? Then pay for it.

Think of it as a combination of The Age of Stupid meets Spot.Us.

What other ideas are there?

The government has launched a new inquiry into the future of local and regional media – and there’s just six weeks to have your say on the subject.

None of us (yet) have the answers to the question of new journalism business models, and the local and regional press is suffering some of the hardest hits.  But ideas and initiatives are presenting themselves everyday. And now the Culture, Media and Sport Committee is looking for views on a range of tough issues, including:

• The impact of newspaper closures on independent local journalism and access to local information;
• How to fund quality local journalism;
• The appropriateness and effectiveness of print and electronic publishing initiatives undertaken directly by public sector bodies at the local level;
• The opportunities and implications of BBC partnerships with local media;
• Incentives for investment in local content;
• Opportunities for “ultra-local” media services.

We’re thinking about a collective response from journalism educators and OJB readers to the key questions, coordinated from here. So to begin with, what are your ideas, links to the best think pieces you’ve read or examples you’ve seen? Do you agree with the call to relax competition laws to allow local newspaper publishers to merge? Or what about Andy Burnham’s statement that there will be no bailout for local papers.

Let’s use this as a starting point to develop a collective, crowdsourced response to the inquiry.

From September I will be running an MA in Online Journalism at Birmingham City University. I hope it’s going to be different from any other journalism MA.

That’s because in putting it together I’ve had the luxury of a largely blank canvas, which means I’ve not had to work within the strictures and structures of linear production based courses.

The first words I put down on that blank piece of paper were: Enterprise; experimentation; community; creativity.

And then I fleshed it out:

In the Online Journalism MA’s first stage (Certificate) students will study Journalism Enterprise. This will look at business models for online journalism, from freemium to mobile, public funding to ad networks, alongside legal and ethical considerations. I’m thinking at the moment that each student will have to research a different area and present a business case for a startup.

They will also study Newsgathering, Production and Distribution. I’m not teaching them separately because, online, they are often one and the same thing. And as students should already have basic skills in these areas, I will be focusing on building and reinventing those as they run a live news website (I’ll also be involved in an MA in Social Media, so there should be some interesting overlap).

This is an explicit space for students to try new things, fail well, and learn what works. They will do this in partnership with a news organisation based on a problem they both identify (e.g. not making enough revenue; poor community; etc.) – I’ve already lined up partnerships with national and regional newspapers, broadcasters and startups in the UK and internationally: effectively the student acts as a consultant, with the class as a whole sharing knowledge and experience.

Alongside that they will continue to explore more newsgathering, production and distribution, exploring areas such as computer assisted reporting, user generated content, multimedia and interactivity. They may, for example, conduct an investigation that produces particularly deep, engaging and distributed content and conversation.

The final stage is MA by Project – either individually or as a group, students make a business case for a startup or offshoot, research it, build it, run it and bid for funding.

By the time they leave the course, graduates should not be going into the industry at entry level (after all, who is recruiting these days?), but at a more senior, strategic level – or, equally likely, to establish startups themselves. I’m hoping these are the people who are going to save journalism.

At the moment all these plans are in draft form. I am hoping this will be a course without walls, responding to ideas from industry and evolving as a result. Which is why I’m asking for your input now: what would you like to see included in an MA Online Journalism? The BJTC’s Steve Harris has mentioned voice training, media law and ethics. The BBC’s Peter Horrocks has suggested programming and design skills. You may agree or disagree.

Let’s get a conversation going.

Financial crisis, digital revolution, crumbling media companies – these are shaky days for media and everyone involved in the field. How can journalism students make sense of it all?

I asked several of the speakers and participants at the Digital News Affairs conference in Brussels one question: What is the best piece of advice you will give to journalism students in the middle of this upheaval? Here is what they want you to focus on:

Ben Hammersley, editor, Wired Magazine: Everything comes down to being able to write well. Before you write well, forget Facebook, Twitter, etc. And you learn to write well by reading lots of good stuff and write a lot yourself. And find a good editor!

Alexandros Koronakis, editor of New Europe: After listening to this conference, I would suggest you change your major, start studying something else than journalism! The journalist profession will be overrun by semiprofessionals and amateurs. There will be a lot of quantity, not necessarily so much quality. I’m very pessimistic from what I’ve heard. As a journalist, you have to be able to adapt to what is going on. And the journalism studies also have to adopt, but obviously, that will take some time.

Jodi Williams, part of Barack Obama’s press team, now at Premier Digital Services: Journalists have to remain flexible and be open for new opportunities and creative ways to work. The opportunities might not be what they appear to be. Media will change so much in the near future.

Matt Cowan, technology reporter, Reuters: Learn the different facets of the job. The more you can do, the easier it will be to find a job. If you learn to perfection one world, for example broadcasting, that will limit your possibilities. Even if you want to create documentaries, don’t shy away from news. One more thing: Look for mentors and listen to them!

Dardis McNamee, editor in Chief, the Vienna Review: You need to learn how the world works, study political economy or science, as well as the tools of journalism. A skill that never goes out of style is to learn how to think or how to learn. Learn how to organize your ideas and communicate them. Be brave!

Richard Gizbert, presenter, Al Jazeera: Specializing was the thing when I entered broadcasting thirty years ago. Today, spezializing is the wrong way. Be as versatile and useful as you can. There is all this talk of “death of the industry”, but as a journalist, you have to believe in what you are doing. The field is as big as you are good. In television, there will always be a market for cool images and good writing. Don’t let the doomsayers get you.

Guido Baumauer, director of strategy, marketing and distribution, Deutsche Welle: Flexibility. Being a journalist is shifting to make conversations happening. You want to engage people, not only send outmessage. You cannot become either a radio journalist or a tv journalist, you have to do both and you need an integrated approach.

Wilfried Rütten, director, European Journalism Centre: Don’t give up! Be curious, learn as much as you can. Reading helps. Expect that you will spend more money than you earn. But don’t focus so much on the money, journalism will give you a decent income. Leave your immediate surroundings, don’t just stay in Sheffield, travel as much as you can, talk to as many as you can.

What is your best advice for journalism students in these crazy times?

While everybody in journalism is wondering how the future of media looks like, entrepreneurs try to shape it. They develop new products and services that maybe could be the next big thing in journalism. OJB asks those entrepreneurs three simple questions in a series of interviews. First up: Shafqat Islam from NewsCred.

For everyone who has never heard of NewsCred: it’s an online platform that aggregates articles from lots of media – newspapers, magazines, blogs. NewsCred users can build a personalised online newspaper by selecting media and topics they want to read from and about.

The platform says it collects “all the world’s credible news, in one place”. It’s up to users to decide which news is credible and which isn’t. They can vote those articles down if they think it contains false facts or bias. A negative vote on a article doesn’t only influence the article but also the reporter that wrote it and the medium that published it. Based on the all the votes for a certain medium or journalist NewsCred ranks the credibility of media and journalists. And of course that ranking influences how prominent news is brought in the personalised newspapers.

How did you came up with the idea for your startup?

“Before we had any idea Iraj Islam and I always talked about the press. We were discussing biased articles that came across or false facts in the media. Soon we realised all our friends had lots of issues with the media transparency just like we had. We wondered if there was something like a online track record about media and journalists. A platform that would give insights into biased stories and false facts published by media and journalists. We found out that such a platform didn’t exist yet. So we decided to build NewsCred to introduce that level of accountability.”

“Initially we wanted to build a platform that collects data about those biased story and false facts and we would then analyse this data. The platform would present the user all kinds of graph and charts so they could see which source is credible and which isn’t. But soon we found out that it’s very hard to judge which source is credible and which not – just based on numbers. Even if you have all kinds of data. That is when NewsCred morphed into the what it is nowadays: a platform where readers can voice their opinion and join in discussions about the credibility of news media.

What did you learn news startups and about media?

“That it’s very hard to scale a business. Just doing a consumer website isn’t enough to monetize NewsCred. We ask ourselves the same question as newspapers and news websites do: how do I make money out of this consumer website? Advertisements just aren’t enough.”

“We think we’ve found a way to monetize NewsCred. I can’t say much about it yet, but it comes down to using our underlying technology to help other web publishers improve their websites, acquire new users and increase their user engagement.”

“I’ve also found out that nobody has the answers to the defining questions about the state and future of the media. To find those answers we all have to work together. Startups, evangelists, pioneers, critics, news corporations – they all have to work together.”

What is the future of journalism?

“I believe that openness will be very important for the future of journalism. News corporations should start to experiment with sharing their data, building platforms and API’s. Google showed us that  you can be open and still build a profitable company.”

“I’m very optimistic. I don’t think newspaper organisations will go away. Sure, newspapers will disappear – within 2, 3 or maybe 5 years newspapers are really gone. But the core competence of newspaper organisations isn’t the newspaper itself. It’s the typical kind of journalism they produce. And there are tremendous opportunities for them online to present the same kind of journalism but then via a different medium.”

Want to be the next news startup featured in this series? Send an e-mail to paul [AT] paulvereijken [.] nl.

Try new stuff! If it doesn’t work, just stop doing it. Then move on and try something else.

That’s what Mackenzie Warren, director of content at Gannett Digital (that’s the digital division of what’s currently the USA’s largest media company), advised a group of Norwegian media executives at the Norwegian Institute of Journalism this week.

Now, let me first point out that Mackenzie Warren has been a journalist since the age of 14. He’s been a photographer, reporter, online editor, managing editor… just about anything you can be in a newsroom. Except that at Gannett, and at Fort Myers News-Press, where he worked before heading up the digital content section at Gannett, they no longer call it a newsroom.

“We’ve done away with the word “newsroom”. There’s no news in a newsroom (desk reporters are often the last to hear of a story). Plus, it’s not news we do – it’s aquiring, processing and distributing information”, he said.

Now, the Gannett publications have more of a control centre where section editors (sports, news etc., not print, online or TV) monitor the competition and also what the readers and viewers are responding to at any time.

“We monitor what people actually read or use – which isn’t always what journalists consider the most newsworthy story. Being a journalist is about collecting information and connecting, packaging and distributing it,” Warren said.

Mackenzie Warren is known to some as “Mr MoJo”. At the News-Press, they have equipped their reporters with cameras (both for stills and video), laptops and mobile phones, and expect them to spend most of their time in the field. They write, shoot, and publish from anywhere, anytime.

“At first, there was a lot of reluctance toward learning new technical equipment. But, once given the proper training, they find being a MoJo both fun and rewarding. It’s the beeing a journalist part that’s difficult, the technical stuff is easy. I’d rather reeducate trained journalists than trying to teach a techie to report,” said Warren.

This MoJo – mobile journalist – is now in work throughout Gannett’s publications. This is Mackenzie Warren’s approach to development: Try it, refine it, then spread it to other’s. Then move on and develop something new. And if it doesn’t work, just stop doing it.

“We keep trying and improving and developing all the time. We don’t have to be perfect, we just need to start somewhere and get better from there.”

Warren thinks the curator-journalist is someone we’ll meet more often in the year to come.

“Everybody’s a publisher and participant now. The journalist may not have to be the storyteller, but the story manager. We need to create the space where people feel secure about coming to tell their part of stories – curating the audience. The curator-journalist may use language like “we” and “I” and “us”, language you wouldn’t normally do in traditional journalism. But he or she manages a community and relates to the members of that communities as a person.”

One example is The Journal News in the Lower Hudson Valley, New York. Their attention to fans of the New York Yankees baseball team includes live web-tv sessions with the specialist reporter, discussions via CoverItLive and more. Another example, perhaps the most exciting one right now, is the USA Today Cruise Log. The cruise log has seen a traffic increase of 1,000 percent in the past year, it’s immensely popular.

Gannett is also looking to find new business models. They create micro-site to target very specific audiences which are popular with advertisers. In the upcoming year, they believe their knowledge of their audience (age, gender, interests, how they behave online and which pages or sites they see) will be incredibly attractive to advertisers.

They don’t know yet if this will be a success. But Warren’s final piece of advice? TRY STUFF.

Three rules for experimentation:
1. You have to give it a try
2. Failure is a part of success
3. You cant really break anything

For a full transcript of Mackenzie Warren’s speech, see the CoverItLive version. The transcript is in English, but there are some tweets in Norwegian there as well.

Norwegian MoJo Frank Barth-Nilsen has written a blog post on Warren’s speech as well.

There’s a great article over at Miller-McCune on investigative journalism and what you might variously call computer assisted reporting and database journalism. Worth reading in full, the really interesting stuff comes further in, which I’ve quoted below in full:

“Bill Allison, a senior fellow at the Sunlight Foundation and a veteran investigative reporter and editor, summarizes the nonprofit’s aim as “one-click” government transparency, to be achieved by funding online technology that does some of what investigative reporters always have done: gather records and cross-check them against one another, in hopes of finding signs or patterns of problems

“… Before he came to the Sunlight Foundation, Allison says, the notion that computer algorithms could do a significant part of what investigative reporters have always done seemed “far-fetched.” But there’s nothing far-fetched about the use of data-mining techniques in the pursuit of patterns. Law firms already use data “chewers” to parse the thousands of pages of information they get in the discovery phase of legal actions, Allison notes, looking for key phrases and terms and sorting the probative wheat from the chaff and, in the process, “learning” to be smarter in their further searches.

“Now, in the post-Google Age, Allison sees the possibility that computer algorithms can sort through the huge amounts of databased information available on the Internet, providing public interest reporters with sets of potential story leads they otherwise might never have found. The programs could only enhance, not replace, the reporter, who would still have to cultivate the human sources and provide the context and verification needed for quality journalism. But the data-mining programs could make the reporters more efficient — and, perhaps, a less appealing target for media company bean counters looking for someone to lay off. “I think that this is much more a tool to inform reporters,” Allison says, “so they can do their jobs better.”

“… After he fills the endowed chair for the Knight Professor of the Practice of Journalism and Public Policy Studies, [James] Hamilton hopes the new professor can help him grow an academic field that provides generations of new tools for the investigative journalist and public interest-minded citizen. The investigative algorithms could be based in part on a sort of reverse engineering, taking advantage of experience with previous investigative stories and corruption cases and looking for combinations of data that have, in the past, been connected to politicians or institutions that were incompetent or venal. “The whole idea is that we would be doing research and development in a scalable, open-source way,” he says. “We would try to promote tools that journalists and others could use.”

Hat tip to Nick Booth 

new journalists for new information

Information is changing. The news industry was born in a time of information scarcity – and any understanding of the laws of supply and demand will tell you that that made information valuable.

But the past 30 years have seen that the erosion of that scarcity. Not only have the barriers to publishing,  broadcast and distribution been lowered by desktop publishing, satellite and digital technologies, and the web – but a booming PR industry has grown up to provide these news organisations with ‘cheap’ news.

Information is changing. Increasingly, we are not seeking information out – instead, it finds us. The scarcity is not in information, but in our time to wade through it, make meaning of it, and act on it.

Information is changing, and so journalists must too. In the previous parts of this series I’ve looked at how the news process could change in a multiplatform environment; how to involve the former audience; what can now happen after a story is published; journalists and readers as distributors; and new media business models. In this part I want to look at personnel – and how we might move from a generic, hierarchy of ‘reporters’, ‘subs’ and ‘editors’ to a more horizontal structure of roles based on information types.

Quality versus quantity

The strategy of many news organisations so far has been to simply require existing journalists and editors to do more – to make videos and podcasts, take photos and write blogs; to scour social networks and forums and video sites; to encourage user generated content and audience participation. Some have created new positions for community editors, Flash developers and even ‘Data Delivery Editors‘, but those positions are still relatively rare – and the skillsets to do those jobs, even rarer.

I’ve identified 6 journalist roles based on 3 core types of information that I see journalists dealing with in a networked environment. Perhaps you can suggest other roles – or other types of information: This is by no means a complete list.

The 3 types of information:

• Feeds (RSS) – not just from news sites and blogs, but anywhere. This post on Passive Aggressive Newsgathering has more.
• Social networks – online and offline. You might have called them ‘contacts’ before, but the online element puts things on a different scale and footing. And here’s why: contacts should now be as likely to seek you out, as vice versa.
• Databases - publicly available, accessed through processes such as Freedom of Information requests, and built in-house.

The 6 new journalist roles:

The Aggregator-Sub

In the traditional newsroom, the sub sat between the journalist’s content and the reader. In the 21st century newsroom, this is inverted. In a world of information overload, those subbing skills take on a new role to collect feeds together (aggregating), identify the useful and relevant stuff (filtering), publish it (bookmark-blogging), identify legal issues and verify where necessary.

In other words, what many bloggers have been doing for years in providing a ‘pre-filtered web’ by highlighting the good stuff in their RSS feeds – and for this reason, the Aggregator-Sub may be an existing blogger employed part time or paid a syndication fee (presumably with some training in areas of concern such as law and house style).

The Aggregator-Sub could also perform an important role in the newsroom, highlighting useful leads for other journalists to pursue, or building widgets that present selected aggregations of feeds. A good example is Jemima Kiss’s Newsbucket.

The Mobile Journalist (MoJo)

As news organisations cut the budgets and focused on efficiencies, reporters found it harder and harder to justify time outside the office, becoming increasingly reliant on public relations and official sources in their pursuit of regular, reliable copy.

Ironically, one of the most positive developments of networked technologies is to enable journalists to leave the office while still being connected via mobile phone and 3G/wifi-enabled laptop.

The MoJo, then, is permanently ‘on the road’, Twittering as they go, streaming live video from their phone and posting raw audio from the field. They have a brief to dig out the people and stories that are offline – and give them an online presence. Reuters have experimented with this, as have Gannett, and Trinity Mirror are investing in N96s and wifi laptops for their Midlands reporters. As Chuck Myron says:

“It’s a smarter way of doing business. I’m in the field where stories are happening instead of sitting at my desk, waiting for a phone to ring. I don’t miss important calls, either, since I’ve got a cell phone that’s always in my pocket and not ringing away at my desk while I’m out of earshot at the copier. Technology has made people more mobile, and journalism has to react.”

The Data Miner

The investigative journalist of the 21st century is someone who can work with databases and spreadsheets, picking out interesting patterns, pushing the powerful for data, and having an understanding of the vagaries of statistics. Adrian Holovaty’s ChicagoCrime.org is the godfather of the form, while the New York Times recently launched its own Visualisation Lab. More recent examples include Stephen Grey, Heather Brooke, Louise Acford, and Dominic Casciani.

For an idea of the job spec, here is what the Chicago Tribune was asking of applicants, and here is what the Roanoke Times expected the person to do. For examples of database journalism in action, see my Delicious bookmarks on the topic.

The Multimedia Producer

For all the quality versus quantity arguments, there is nothing inherently wrong with some journalists becoming jacks of all trades (after all, that’s what they have had to be editorially). An understanding of how a story or issue can be explored on a range of media makes a significant difference in how you come up with story ideas and gather information.

The Multimedia Producer has this understanding, and most likely technical skills across audio, video and image production, blogging, using databases, mapping and mashups. They may not do all the work themselves – for example, working with Flash developers on database-driven interactives, or asking a MoJo to get a particular piece of video – but they can see the possibilities.

Here’s a job description from the Roanoke Times (again); another at The Day; and here’s an interview with Regina McCombs of the Star Tribune about her Multimedia Producer role.

The Networked Specialist

This is the specialist reporter for the 21st century: now it’s not just about knowing their subject area, and the big names, but also being visibly networked in that environment, blogging, vlogging, bookmarking and commenting across their specialist parts of the blogosphere.

The successful blogs – Mashable, TechCrunch, Daily Kos, Boing Boing, TPM – are past masters at this: not just reporting on what’s happening, but engaging, passing on, and acting as a crossroads of traffic.

Community Editor

I said earlier that the online element puts community contacts on a different scale and footing. Sources become collaborators, co-writers and distributors, and the Community Editor’s role is to manage that, building communities, helping start or fuel conversations, preventing them turning nasty, supporting users, inviting guidance and help, and assisting them in certain projects.

There are plenty of journalists performing a community editor role, including Shane Richmond at the Telegraph, Joanna Geary at the Birmingham Post and Mail and Andrew Rogers, head of UGC at Reed Business Information. I’ve been conducting a series of interviews asking community editors for their top three lessons.

The obligatory conceptual diagram

As you can see, the different roles relate to expertise in different types of information. Databases are used particularly by the Data Miner and the Multimedia Producer; feeds by all except the Data Miner (it’s not essential to what they do but could be fed into it, for example a Google Spreadsheet has an RSS feed); and social networks are important in the work of the Community Editor, Networked Specialist and MoJo.

But as always, this is a work in progress. What unusual jobs have you come across as news orgs move to new media? How is information changing, and how does that affect journalists’ roles?