At first glance, Sky’s decision that its journalists should not retweet information that has “not been through the Sky News editorial process” and the BBC’s policy to prioritise filing “written copy into our newsroom as quickly as possible” seem logical.

For Sky it is about maintaining editorial control over all content produced by its staff. For the BBC, it seems to be about making sure that the newsroom, and by extension the wider organisation, takes priority over the individual.

But there are also blind spots in these strategies that they may come to regret.

Our content?

The Sky policy articulates an assumption about ‘content’ that’s worth picking apart.

We accept as journalists that what we produce is our responsibility. When it comes to retweeting, however, it’s not entirely clear what we are doing. Is that news production, in the same way that quoting a source is? Is it newsgathering, in the same way that you might repeat a lead to someone to find out their reaction? Or is it merely distribution?

The answer, as I’ve written before, is that retweeting can be, and often is, all three.

Writing about a similar policy at the Oregonian late last year, Steve Buttry made the point that retweets are not endorsements. Jeff Jarvis argued that they were “quotes”.

I don’t think it’s as simple as that (as I explain below), but I do think it’s illustrative: if Sky News were to prevent journalists from using any quote on air or online where they could not verify its factual basis, then nothing would get broadcast. Live interviews would be impossible.

The Sky policy, then, seems to treat retweets as pure distribution, and – crucially – to treat the tweet in isolation. Not as a quote, but as a story, consisting entirely of someone else’s content, which has not been through Sky editorial processes but which is branded or endorsed as Sky journalism.

Curation vs creation

There’s a second issue here which is more about hard commercial success. Research suggests that successful users of Twitter tend to combine curation with creation. Preventing journalists from retweeting  leaves them – and their employers – without a vital tool in their storytelling and distribution.

The tension surrounding retweeting can be illustrated in the difference between two broadcast journalists who use Twitter particularly effectively: Sky’s own Neal Mann, and NPR’s Andy Carvin. Andy retweets habitually as a way of seeking further information. Neal, as he explained in this Q&A with one of my classes, feels that he has a responsibility not to retweet information he cannot verify (from 2 mins in).

Both approaches have their advantages and disadvantages. But both combine curation with creation.

Network effects

A third issue that strikes me is how these policies fit uncomfortably alongside the networked ways that news is experienced now.

The BBC policy, for example, appears at first glance to prevent journalists from diving right into the story as it develops online. Social media editor Chris Hamilton does note, importantly, that they have “a technology that allows our journalists to transmit text simultaneously to our newsroom systems and to their own Twitter accounts”. However, this is coupled with the position that:

“Our first priority remains ensuring that important information reaches BBC colleagues, and thus all our audiences, as quickly as possible – and certainly not after it reaches Twitter.”

This is an interesting line of argument, and there are a number of competing priorities underlying it that I want to understand more clearly.

Firstly, it implies a separation of newsroom systems and Twitter. If newsroom staff are not following their own journalists on Twitter as part of their systems, why not? Sky pioneered the use of Twitter as an internal newswire, and the man responsible, Julian March, is now doing something similar at ITV. The connection between internal systems and Twitter is notable.

Then there’s that focus on “all our audiences” in opposition to those early adopter Twitter types. If news is “breaking news, an exclusive or any kind of urgent update”, being first on Twitter can give you strategic advantages that waiting for the six o’clock – or even typing a report that’s over 140 characters – won’t. For example:

• Building a buzz (driving people to watch, listen to or search for the fuller story)
• Establishing authority on Google (which ranks first reports over later ones)
• Establishing the traditional authority in being known as the first to break the story
• Making it easier for people on the scene to get in touch (if someone’s just experienced a newsworthy event or heard about it from someone who was, how likely is it that they search Twitter to see who else was there? You want to be the journalist they find and contact)

Everything at the same time

There’s another side to this, which is evidence of news organisations taking a strategic decision that, in a world of information overload, they should stop trying to be the first (an increasingly hard task), and instead seek to be more authoritative. To be able to say, confidently, “Every atom we distribute is confirmed”, or “We held back to do this spectacularly as a team”.

There’s value in that, and a lot to be admired. I’m not saying that these policies are inherently wrong. I don’t know the full thinking that went into them, or the subtleties of their implementation (as Rory Cellan-Jones illustrates in his example, which contrasts with what can actually happen). I don’t think there is a right and a wrong way to ‘do Twitter’. Every decision is a trade off, because so many factors are in play. I just wanted to explore some of those factors here.

As soon as you digitise information you remove the physical limitations that necessitated the traditional distinctions between the editorial processes of newsgathering, production, editing and distribution.

A single tweet can be doing all at the same time. Social media policies need to recognise this, and journalists need to be trained to understand the subtleties too.

I spent today at the hyperlocal C&binet event, organised by Creative Industries MP Sion Simon at the Department for Culture, Media & Sport. I’ve already blogged my thoughts leading up to event but thought I would add some more links and context.

For me, it is significant that this happened at all. Normally these sorts of events are dominated by large publishers with lobbying muscle. Yet here we had a group combining hyperlocal bloggers, successful startups like Facebook, Ground Report, Global Voices and the Huffington Post, social media figures like Nick Booth and Jon Bounds, and traditional organisations like The Guardian, BBC, RSA and Ofcom. Jeff Jarvis pitched into the mix via Skype.

As for the event itself, it began the previous afternoon with a presentation from Enders Analysis, embedded below:

The following morning saw more experiences thrown into the pot – Jeff’s CUNY business models for hyperlocal; Rachel Sterne’s experiences at Ground Report, embedded below:

US Hyperlocal News Market –

Nick Booth’s experience from Podnosh followed, then my own contribution, and The Guardian, Huffington Post, and Northcliffe all took centre stage at various points too.

Following that exchange of perspectives attendees put together 2 lists: what they thought government should or could do, and what they thought government should not do. These are listed on co-chair Will Perrin’s blog and some reproduced in their glorious fluorescence below:

You can read more about the day on that Will Perrin blog post and Hannah Waldram’s post for Podnosh.

So, students at CUNY have delivered their much-awaited New Business Models for journalism - four in total, that aim to answer “What happens to journalism in a top-25 metro market if a newspaper fades away. Can journalism be sustained? And how?”

The post introducing the models is surprisingly succinct: the real work has gone into 3 spreadsheets which are linked to under each heading (there are only 3 as 2 of the business models have been presented together).

Each model has a separate post which is equally succinct, but invite comments. They are:

• Hyperlocals and the Framework
• New News Organization
• Not-for-Profit News Organization

Much credit goes to CUNY. Although this has the luxury of being funded by the Knight and McCormick Foundations, it is always going to attract much criticism. And I’m not going to shy from being critical: I’m disappointed.

Why? Well, the first 2 (combined) models are pretty old-school, being solely based on advertising. The innovation, it seems, comes from a networked approach to selling that and in production – but I can’t help feeling it overlooks one of the core problems presented by the web: reduced advertising spend over a much larger number of sites where audiences are valued more cheaply. (Note: Matthew Sollars responded: “We’re assuming conservative advertising revenue (and other rev streams). Online only pub with occasional print eds.”)

New News Organisation

Moving onto the New News Organisation, this is more promising. Advertising features largely again, but now there are business-to-consumer and business-to-business services. These include text alerts, events and conferences, themed issues, coupons, iPhone apps and a donation service for watchdog journalism.

What I can’t find is the logic behind these figures – now that would be really interesting. (UPDATE: It seems I’m not the only one; TechCrunch report on the livestream from Jeff Jarvis after the figures were published: “Everyone from Esther Dyson to Michael Kinsley and Marissa Mayer pointed out at the forum, the numbers don’t look very realistic.”)

The other issue, which I wouldn’t have expected CUNY to address, is that their idea of a metro market for this new news organisation is an adult population of 5million. That’s the equivalent of London, so by that reasoning the Evening Standard (which only recently decided to stop claiming to be a national newspaper) is the only newspaper in the UK with an equivalent ‘local’ market. So it’s hard to see how these figures might work in the UK.

Also, I’m somewhat baffled by the projected margins of 29% by year 3 – those are the sorts of margins news organisations enjoyed during the ‘print bubble’© and led to the sort of debts and shareholders that have been just as problematic as advertisers. I’m not sure that those are sustainable and would suggest allocating some of that money into investments that prepare for the next big disruption. (Note: Matthew Sollars responded: “We weren’t aiming at 29% margins, that’s what we believe the market will bear for lean, online news orgs”)

Not-for-profit

Finally, the not-for-profit, based on a combination of foundation support, advertising and corporate support, fundraising and membership, and e-commerce. One thing that stands out for me is that website development costs are static at $150,000 every year – experience suggests this should be heavily increased in the first year, but that’s a small point. 

Again, the really interesting thing is missing: how did they arrive at these figures? (Note the spreadsheets have a number of sheets that drill down into detail – it’s worth spending some time exploring that.)

So, lots of numbers, lots of questions, lots of missing back-story, but in the end this is far more developed than anything I’ve seen in this area. Journalists hate spreadsheets – so here’s a great place to start getting used to them. And let me know what you find.

While talking to an editor at a newspaper that had made a splash with a crowdsourced investigative story a couple years ago, I remember the subject of payment coming up, to which she made an interesting point. The citizens who contribute their time and effort have a personal interest in the story and do it because they want to help the paper – this is a citizenry interacting with its hometown newspaper for the betterment of the community and for the good of democracy. It was a valid point. After all, if they paid their citizens, they wouldn’t just be citizens anymore, they’d be employees.

News organizations have long been excused from digital sharecropping, a label that has been attached to crowdsourced businesses that exploit free labor from the public without offering compensation. Perhaps, media entities benefit from the altruistic and democratic nature of information sharing. The millions of Internet users that voluntarily put content out for free are more than a testament to that.

But where should the line be drawn? When should news organizations and media conglomerates begin to have to start paying for utilizing the time and resources of their volunteer contributors while holding complete ownership of the product – or at the very least, making revenue off of an individual’s product?

When Lindsey Hoshaw, a California journalist keen to investigate the “great garbage patch,” a huge mass of plastic  flotsam circulating in the Pacific Ocean, pitched the idea to the New York Times, the paper’s Web site expressed interest in the story and agreed to potentially pay her $700 for pictures. The trip alone would cost Hoshaw 10,000$, however. So she approached the crowdfunding Web site Spot.Us (where readers pledge donations to fund stories of interest to them) in order to raise money to cover travel expenses. The organization is hoping to garner 60 percent of the entire amount, and Hoshaw plans to take out a loan for the remainder.

The paper – and Hoshaw herself – justify the partnership because it is “a story she has long dreamed of, and [it’s] a chance for a byline in The Times,” one that allowed her to use the stalwart organization’s name to raise funds. The Times is not doing anything different in this case than it would do in the case of any farfetched freelance pitch – outlining how much it would pay her for the story and leaving it up to her to figure out how to obtain the remainder of the funds.

Jeff Jarvis calls this a necessary  “collaboration” in the new media ecosystem. His argument is that this is not very different from the Times site picking up a story that someone may have posted on a blog, for instance. Legally speaking, it’s more than fair. The paper’s Web site doesn’t own the story unless it funds fifty percent or more of it.

As per Spot.Us’s terms, unless a news organization decides to contribute one hundred percent of the funding, it doesn’t get exclusive rights, and if that were to happen, donors get reimbursed.

In an age where newspapers are struggling to raise revenue, all options are on the table. “Whatever you call it, what’s happening spotlights an important step in how we’ll pay for the news: finding some workable alternatives to news organizations shelling out big bucks required to cover important news in far-away places,” writes Bill Mitchell in Poynter this week.

This is not the first time The Times has partnered with a nonprofit site. It also has an ongoing collaboration with the publicly funded investigative reporting site ProPublica, which routinely offers its stories to America’s most influential newspaper for greater impact.

While this “journalist as entrepreneur” model is fueling important stories that might not otherwise get covered, it is also dangerously shifting the costs of reporting on to the shoulders of young, enthusiastic reporters.

Over the past couple of years, American journalist Jason Motlagh has reported on everything from the Maoist rebels in India to civilian casualties in Afghanistan, but doesn’t get much more than a travel stipend for his stories.

Motlagh is part of the Pulitzer Center for Crisis reporting, which I wrote about in a previous post; the nonprofit is covering stories that traditional American media are not covering for want of international bureaus that were shut down during the start of the industry’s crisis over two years ago.

The Center helps its reporters market their stories to other news organizations to “maximize impact.” In partnership with the organization, Motlagh’s work has appeared in the public broadcasting show, Foreign Exchange, the Frontline’s iWitness webcam program, and the Virginia Quarterly. But it is unlikely that this concept of “reporting first, money maybe later” will continue to allow journalists to make a career out of reporting.

This has, perhaps, been the plight of freelancers for decades, but what is scary is that veteran newsmen and stalwart news organizations are hailing these projects as exemplars of the new journalism model. Motlagh “is the prototype for the journalist of the future: a free-lancing, multimedia correspondent who knows how to market his work and live on a tight budget,” writes David Westphal in the Online Journalism Review.

If the news industry plans to rely on young, ambitious journalists eager enough to make a career so as to pay for their own breakthrough stories, where will subsequent stories come from? While journalists like Motlagh and Hoshaw should rightly be lauded for their determination and passion, this is simply not a sustainable model. Media scholars should be talking about workable ways to fund these projects and urging mainstream news organizations to get behind them, instead of making the case that this is the future of journalism.

This afternoon I will once again be working with a group of editors as we look at business models for online news. To their credit, the micropayments/paywall issue rarely comes up – and then only as a ‘devil’s advocate’ question. But it seems others have been asleep for the past 10 years. To those and the unfortunate souls having to field these questions, I offer you the following primer culled from recent coverage of this pointless debate:

Recovering Journalist:

“Let’s look at the numbers, and I’ll keep this very simple: Imagine that a good-sized metro daily can charge $20 a year for access to its Web site, and that it attracts 500,000 people to pay that much to read whatever the paper puts online (and this assumes that the content is so unique that those readers won’t decide to take their business elsewhere when confronted with a pay wall). How much revenue is that? It’s $10 million a year.”

From If they won’t pay for Facebook, they won’t pay for your city hall reporter:

“these kids have complete faith in the availability of a substitute good — that is, something else that would come along, serve as a decent Facebook surrogate, and be free.

“So, I ask you: If these kids aren’t willing to pay for Facebook — something they engage with every single day, something they love, something they have already invested countless hours into to build up a network of friends and apps and what have you — what’s the chance they’re ever going to pay half a penny to read a news story?”

From Jeff Jarvis:

“Micropayments have never been shown to work except when distribution is tightly controlled (see: mobile phones and iTunes). Subscriptions have been abandoned by The New York Times and others because the costs, enumerated above, are too high. A newspaper cartel is an oxymoron, as publishers have never shown the ability to self-organize (the last attempt in the U.S., the New Century Network, was a flaming disaster). Charities are lovely, but even the Scott Trust that generously supports this newspaper rose not out of pure altruism but out of a need to avoid inheritance taxes that would have forced a sale. Government support has been discussed in these pages but I, for one, am fearful of the notion of the prey feeding the watchdogs. The Kindle is cool but has a tiny audience.”

From Paid Content Strategies for News Websites (PDF), an academic study:

“Interviewee responses [executives at national newspapers] indicated a widespread consensus that it is impossible to charge for general news content, because it is freely available in a similar form elsewhere on the internet.”

From Printed Matters:

“Anyone in the content business knows that their product is not newspapers, or broadcasts, or magazines, or even news, or even content, or even information. No! It is readership. Your product is readership, which you sell to advertisers. More readers = more ads = more money. In the bad old print days, newspapers had to charge subscription fees to offset the costs of delivery. Hey, no more cost of delivery! Why charge subscription fees and limit your readership, then?

“Paywalls don’t work: we don’t have to argue from principles. We can just gather empirical evidence.

Finally, from Brand Republic:

UPDATE: From the comments: similar lists now available for Norway and Sweden.

I will soon begin teaching my annual module in Online Journalism and one of the first things I get the students to do is set up a Twitter account. It’s often a struggle to demonstrate the usefulness of Twitter, so this time around, in addition to following each other, I’m going to give them 10 people to start following from the off. This is the list I’ve come up with – would welcome your suggestions for others:

1. @davelee - former journalism student and excellent blogger who landed a plum job at the BBC after graduating. Get the point?
2. @channel4news - example of how a news organisation can use Twitter in a personal, conversational way, rather than simply republishing its RSS feed (see also: @r4news, @mashable)
3. @jemimakiss – likewise, example of a journalist using Twitter to involve readers in production, as well as just be a ‘real person’ (alternative: Mike Butcher).
4. @jayrosen_nyu – journalism professor at New York University with excellent links and analysis on the news industry and online journalism (see also: @jeffjarvis)
5. @digidickinson – Andy Dickinson, UK journalism lecturer and online video specialist. Ditto above. (alternative: @egrommet)
6. @bhampostjoanna – Jo Geary of the Birmingham Post & Mail, uses Twitter brilliantly, and is so switched on there’s a power surge every time she wakes up. (alternatives: Sarah Hartley and Alison Gow)
7. @shanerichmond – Communities Editor at The Telegraph, knows his onions. (alternative: Martin Stabe)
8. @documentally - vlogger, moblogger, social media man, has worked with Reuters and others
9. This is a local choice so you would probably have a local equivalent, but @peteashton founded local arts blog Created In Birmingham, which recently won Best UK Blog. Every journalism student should be following – and talking with – people like this in their area. One good place to find out is by searching twitter.grader.com for your area
10. Likewise, @tom_watson is a local MP, but is closely involved in campaigning for the release of government data to the public, and in the government’s digital communications generally. You may have a local or national equivalent.

Needless to say I’ll be suggesting they use services like Twellow, Twitterlocal and Twits Like Me to find other users in their ‘beat’, but I think it helps get someone into a conversation quicker if they can see what other people are talking about – and how.

Over to you – who would you recommend…?

Continuing the final part of this series (part 1: Community is here) I look at conversation. I look at why conversation is becoming a form of publishing itself, why journalists need to be a part of that conversation, and a range of ways they can join in.

Conversation is publishing

In the first dotcom boom it used to be said that ‘Content is King‘. It’s not. As Cory Doctorow points out:

“If I sent you to a desert island and gave you the choice of taking your friends or your movies, you’d choose your friends — if you chose the movies, we’d call you a sociopath. Conversation is king. Content is just something to talk about.”

Jay Rosen, talking about journalism in 2004, noted that it was moving ‘from a lecture to a conversation‘.

And a year later Jeff Jarvis argued “Conversation is the kingdom“:

“In this new age, you don’t want to own the content or the pipe that delivers it. You want to participate in what people want to do on their own. You don’t want to extract value. You want to add value. You don’t want to build walls or fences or gardens to keep people from doing what they want to do without you. You want to enable them to do it. You want to join in.”

Look closer, and you could argue that the distinctions between conversation and publishing in an online medium are being eroded. Everything that we say is recorded, linkable, distributable.

Conversation is publishing.

The one-to-many relationships built by print and broadcast media have been disrupted by the arrival of the internet. By mixing these with the one-to-one cultures of telephony it has created a new, emerging, culture of many-to-many relationships.

For a long time the most popular use of the internet has been email. For the net generation, that is being replaced by social networking and instant messaging. All demonstrate that people don’t want to passively consume content online – they want to use it, produce it, and exchange it.

When the Chinese earthquake (among others) happened, it was reported on social networking sites before news websites. The information moved very quickly from people talking about what was happening to them; to people talking about what was happening to their friends; to people talking about what was happening to their friends’ friends: conversation.

Meanwhile, communities formed to pass on and clarify information more efficiently than the news organisations (for example, translating accounts, mapping, and mashing up). An online journalist who ignores this is ignoring a fundamental element of their job.

Conversation and community are closely linked: any editorial plan involving one is flawed without consideration of the other. Conversation leads to community, but it’s difficult to have a conversation without a community to begin with. It’s a chicken and egg situation.

Blogs are a classic example of generating a community from a conversation. Individual posts can gather global traffic if they touch a nerve, as conversations spread well beyond their points of origin – and back again. But how do you maintain that community when the conversation ends? (Should you even try?)

Building a conversation out of a community is perhaps harder, and why news websites have not always been successful in their attempts to do so. It is like having a room full of people with shared interests but who are too shy to talk.

You need an ice breaker.

The Professional Conversationalist

An online journalist should be a mix of the ideal party guest and the ideal party host, taking part in – and stimulating – conversations in a number of ways:

• Be involved in your communities, online and offline. Comment on blogs, post on forums, correct and update wikis, converse on Twitter, join and contribute to social network groups.
• Open up your own work for others to contribute editorially: include an email address; allow comments. In particular, don’t structure your work as a dead end: present it as work in progress; ask questions and leave them unanswered; acknowledge gaps in your knowledge; invite contributions there and elsewhere.
• Open your work up technically too if possible: make your content portable by providing an RSS feed; widgets users can place on their webpages; wikis for them to edit; or even raw data for mashups.
• Not only that, but you must respond to those contributions: That means reading comments on your own work and responding to them, in the comments as well as in the occasional follow-up post. That means looking at who’s linking to your work and posting comments there, or linking to them in your own work with an acknowledgement.
• You must show explicitly that you are part of the conversation, by linking to sources (who will in turn know that they are being quoted either through pingback or traffic)
• And finally, most importantly: you must listen. That means reading blogs, forums and other media in their sector, and then starting from the beginning again: comment, respond, link, open up.

It’s a conversation loop:

[UPDATE: A similar cycle was identified by Jason mKey in 2011)

As a journalist, doing all of these things has 4 significant advantages:

1. Your work will be informed by user contributions, and better for it
2. You'll be more likely to be 'there' when a story breaks - and to understand the context
3. As you talk about your work, and involve users in it, you will be distributing it as well. If your motivation is commercial, replace 'conversation' with 'distribution'. Nothing works better online.
4. Nobody likes a tourist. You'll be building the trust and social capital needed for other users to give you the information that you need - or to help you find it.

Without the help of your community, without an effort to engage in conversation, your work will be one-dimensional, as flat as the paper it used to be printed on. And the journalist who doesn't contribute to their communities and its conversations will look increasingly like Doctorow's sociopath. Not the kind of person people will want to talk to, or read.

--

Read the full BASIC Principles of Online Journalism series:

• B is for Brevity
• A is for Accessibility
• S is for Scannability
• I is for Interactivity
• C is for Community and Conversation
  

]]> http://onlinejournalismblog.com/2008/09/18/basic-principles-of-online-journalism-c-is-for-community-conversation-pt2-conversation/feed/ 22 http://onlinejournalismblog.com/2008/08/22/the-teachers-are-online-interview-with-edward-griffith-of-tesconnect/ http://onlinejournalismblog.com/2008/08/22/the-teachers-are-online-interview-with-edward-griffith-of-tesconnect/#comments Fri, 22 Aug 2008 09:57:41 +0000 Paul Bradshaw http://onlinejournalismblog.com/?p=1349 Read more...]]>

This week the Times Educational Supplement relaunched its website TESconnect.co.uk as part-social network for half a million users to share and rate teaching materials . Alex Lockwood spoke to Head of Internet Edward Griffith:

“When we launch, we’ll have the largest single professional network online in the UK. The community lends itself to a social media network.”

What was behind TES’s move into social media?

In terms of content, the old site was really the packaged-up paper. It got some traffic, particularly in the forums, which  had strong growth from about 2003/4. The conversations are what you’d expect: some tightly controlled, and some rants. They’re not actively moderated, but we do police them, post-moderated, there’s always someone on hand for that.

Then the business was bought from Murdoch and there were some new eyes on the project. Someone noticed in the forums there were two big conversations going on. People were seeking support and ideas from each other. Second was sharing teaching tools and resources. So we thought, hang on, there are over half-a-million teachers, and there aren’t that many classes, so we thought: what can we do?

We had a resources section, but it was a bit of a dog. So we developed a prototype resources sharing tool, and it went through the roof.  It’s grown 200% y-o-y ever since.

The really weird thing was that, in some focus groups we ran, teachers were telling us how isolated they were. They were spending a huge amount of time planning their lessons in the evenings and at weekends, and doing it all alone.

Link that with what the teachers are looking for in the forums, and we’ve got the premise for biggest single professional social network in the  UK.

What’s the thing to watch here?

A way to share material, and a UGC platform. To me they’re the same thing. As a photographer that uses Flickr, you see how tightly community is woven into the content. On TES.co.uk, when the user has found a great piece of content, they click through to see the rest of the content from that user, friend them, and subscribe to their friend feed.

That’s the million dollar moment for me, when the users add each other to their networks. And then they can rate the content. We wanted to get the right rating system in place, so it’s not just about most downloads or average rating, but is a useful indicator of real quality, so we’ve worked hard on the algorhythm.

How will you grow the proposition?

The sharing and UGC all works around the resources. There’s a taxonomy, and then users can tag the content. The taxonomy will suggest a more formal classification, such as Physics at a particular Level, and then the user can make it more specific, such as say wave oscillation.

The other tool we’re using really shows the evolution of technology. We’re using Autonomy, which a few years ago was costing half a million, but which now costs a lot less. It’s very powerful.

One of the technical people here wanted to interrogate its ability so did a search on Ted Bundy, and the system reads into documents, and it found Ted Bundy on page seven of a literature PowerPoint on Frankenstein and the making of monsters. That’s just so powerful as a tool for sharing UGC.

How are you making money from online?

There’s a strong separation between the two businesses, but we do have a joint pot of money, so we don’t have to cover all online costs.

We get most of our money through jobs ads. TES has always been the leader for the education jobs market, and it was a wise decision in the 1990s to migrate that online. In April [when most September jobs are advertised] the paper is a brick; online it’s the same, and advertisers can buy online prominence. We have some display ads, but it’s meaningless in the grand scheme.

Does the move to social media mean the print publication is in decline?

Not at all. The print edition is not disappearing any time soon. For business media and publications that can ride on greater trends that the demand for news print, such as the Economist (we share an office with them), then the future of print and online is very strong.

Digital media  consumption is driving working-week habits, and then weekends are still old media, weekly media, such as news magazines and the weekend papers. I get all my media during the week online, I don’t touch newsprint. Web can satisfy that desire.

And old print news, particularly those that relied on classified advertising, well that’s all over now, sorry boys, there’s better ways to do it. And those old media that rely on jobs advertising, specialist jobs boards are closing those old media down, too.

Is there any tension between TES and TESconnect.com as ad revenue moves online?

There’s no real tension around the commercial. There’s more tension around the share of editorial voice. The TES always been the professional newspaper for the education community. There is the old world media organisation upstairs, and a lot of the content will go more rapidly online, but it’s going to be less important as the years go.

The user stuff is going to be more important. What’s key for me is harnessing the creativity of half-a-million professionals who week-in, week-out are preparing and testing the resources in the classroom: that’s the really valuable content for our users.

So print editors feel threatened? As Jeff Jarvis said in the Guardian Monday, who needs editors?

I’m a believer in the role of the editor. The editorial voice still has, perhaps has an even more important role, in the world of mass collaboration. It’s about point of view, but it’s also about promoting what’s out there. Even in today’s world, an editor’s view holds real credibility. If there’s a few thousand people voting on a theme, it’s the editor’s power to take notice of it, organise it and promote that content.

There’s definitely a role for editorial, it’s just finding that role to play.

What are you overheads? Do you have a big staff?

We’ve got 30 staff, and only six for content. Compare that with about fifty editorial on the paper.

What Web1.0 features didn’t work for you?

We’re not closing them down, but we are pressing pause on specialist blogs; it was really an old media form online, commissioning copy, and it didn’t seem a good use of time when you think about the effort going into each individual piece and the audience share it might get.

It seems a much better use of our time to build a framework for half-a-million people to provide content.

Who did you learn from to put together your social media tools?

Lots of media organisations have related well to their audiences, but it can be a leap of faith to give the audience its own voice. The Guardian and NYT have done that, but there are very few good UGC propositions coming out of traditional media companies. So we looked at all the good UGC sites, and we took them apart, really did, to find out what made them work.

And it wasn’t old media habits. In many ways what we’re not doing as well online is the old media bits, you know, publishing articles, and we can do a lot better on that. But I think we’re doing it the right way round. Get the social media right first, and then the publishing.

And what’s going to make you succeed?

The essence of success here is that teachers need information; they’re information intensive workers, and there’s a huge value in bringing that information together so it can be shared. Our strap, and this is a shift from the brand of the print TES, is: ‘for teachers, by teachers.’

The New York Times and LinkedIn have entered into a partnership that will see LinkedIn users “shown personalized news targeting their industry verticals … and will then be prompted to share those stories will professional associates.” Meanwhile, NYT readers will see a widget directing them to LinkedIn (see image below).

This is an excellent move – I’ve written often and at length about the need for news organisations to get a handle on online distribution. The significance of the NYT’s move is that it recognises that the walls need to come down, that your content needs to be where the reader is, and not the other way around.

After all, you don’t distribute newspapers in libraries alone, do you?

In another example of this issue, Jeff Jarvis wrote about Ed Roussel’s musings on the possibility of newspapers handing over distribution and advertising to Google. Frankly, that would be suicidal. Deals with the likes of LinkedIn offer a much more promising and healthier future for news. It also offers another indication of the direction news continues to head in: personalised information through social networks.

The fact that Google’s social network has not been hugely successful (nor has its partnership with MySpace) may turn out to be a vulnerability and better for the news distribution marketplace on the whole.

Until, of course, they buy LinkedIn.

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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.