Online Journalism Blog » series

Model for the 21st century newsroom pt.6: new journalists for new information flows

Paul Bradshaw — Thu, 04 Dec 2008 08:33:00 +0000

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?

BASIC Principles of Online Journalism: C is for Community & Conversation (pt2: Conversation)

Paul Bradshaw — Thu, 18 Sep 2008 08:00:22 +0000

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:

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

Your work will be informed by user contributions, and better for it
You'll be more likely to be 'there' when a story breaks - and to understand the context
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.
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:

BASIC principles of online journalism: A is for Adaptability

Paul Bradshaw — Wed, 20 Feb 2008 13:01:12 +0000

In the second part of this five-part series, I explore how adaptability has not only become a key quality for the journalist – but for the information they deal with on a daily basis too. This will form part of a forthcoming book on online journalism – comments very much invited.

The adaptable journalist

A key skill for any journalist in the new media age, whatever medium they’re working in, is adaptability. The age of the journalist who only writes text, or who only records video, or audio, is passing. Today, the newspaper and magazine, the television and the radio programme all have an accompanying website. And that website is, increasingly, filled with a whole range of media, which could include any of the following:

(Hyper)Text
Audio
Video
Still images
Audio slideshows
Animation
Flash interactivity
Database-driven elements
Blogs
Microblogging/Text/email alerts (Twitter)
Community elements – forums, wikis, social networking, polls, surveys
Live chats
Mapping
Mashups

This does not mean that the online journalist has to be an expert in all of these fields, but they should have media literacy in as many of these fields as possible: in other words, a good online journalist should be able to see a story and think:

‘That story would have real impact on video’;
or: ‘A Flash interactive could explain this better than anything else’;
or ‘This story would benefit from me linking to the original reports and some blog commentary’;
or ‘Involving the community in this story would really engage, and hopefully bring out some great leads’.

The person who eventually films the video, or creates the Flash element, may be someone else, particularly as news organisations begin to understand that no single journalist can do all these things, or identify individuals and teams who produce the podcast, the video packages, or the Flash interactives, or who manage the community elements. But the ideas should come from every member connected with the online newsroom. And ideas always come first.

Skills come after, but the online journalist should have laid some foundations in a range of areas.

They should be able to write well, succinctly, and quickly – for more than one medium, if possible.
They should be able to find accurate information and reliable sources online and offline, quickly, and they should have a collection of RSS feeds keeping them in touch with their area.
They should understand some basic principles of video, audio and still images.
They should have played with editing software.
They should have played around with examples of journalistic interactivity and web-based databases.
They should understand online communities like Facebook, Flickr, YouTube or their own sector of the blogosphere – if possible, they should already be a productive member of one.

Some of these foundations only require some very light background reading, some just involve exploring good examples of online journalism, or tinkering on free software. The one area that does need time, attention and practice, are the core skills of newsgathering and news production.

The adaptable content

It is not only the journalist who benefits from being adaptable. In the new media age, information needs to be adaptable as well.

Adrian Holovaty, in his article ‘A fundamental way newspaper sites need to change‘, points out that much of what journalists gather is structured information that has the potential to be repurposed by either the reader or another journalist – his examples include:

“An obituary is about a person, involves dates and funeral homes.
“A wedding announcement is about a couple, with a wedding date, engagement date, bride hometown, groom hometown and various other happy, flowery pieces of information.
“A birth has parents, a child (or children) and a date.
“A college graduate has a home state, a home town, a degree, a major and graduation year.
“Every Senate, House and Governor race in the U.S. has location, analysis, demographic information, previous election results, campaign-finance information and more.
“Every known detainee at Guantanamo Bay has an approximate age, birthplace, formal charges and more.”

Once this information is made adaptable – for example, by inclusion in a database – it can be presented in a range of ways. A level results can be plotted on a map, for instance; sports stats can be displayed graphically; news can be displayed specific to the reader’s own location; or journalists can check to see how many crimes have occurred around a certain location.

The first way an online journalist should be making information adaptable is to tag it. For newsgathering, a social bookmarking site like del.icio.us is essential. These allow you to ‘bookmark’ any online source with a series of tags, enabling them to be quickly found when required (and that’s not touching on the ‘social’ element, which allows you to see who else has bookmarked the same page, and what else they are bookmarking, which can lead to some useful leads).

For news publishing, blogging services like WordPress and Blogger have a tagging (or ‘keywords’) facility built in; so do photo-sharing site Flickr and video-sharing site YouTube. And newspapers like the Liverpool Daily Post and Echo are starting to incorporate tagging in all stories.

You might also be working with a content management system that allows metatagging or mapping. These amount to the same thing: information about the story.

Beyond tagging there are a number of other ways to make information adaptable. Databases and spreadsheets are obvious ways. Managing the information on a big story using a spreadsheet can prove useful if you need to make that information public at some point, or need to hand it over to someone else who can work magic with it. In general, it’s just good practice that makes your life easier.

RSS is another way to make information adaptable. If your stories, a subject section or a search is available as a feed others can more easily combine it with other tools (e.g. mapping), aggregate it, filter it and do other things with it.

And of course the simple act of making your content downloadable or embeddable makes it more adaptable. The choice to stream video, for example, prevents users from doing potentially interesting things with it. Allowing a full download – even in different formats – opens up potential for all sorts of creativity from users and other journalists. All of which, ultimately, should drive more people back to your site and your stories.

Part three: S is for Scannability can be found here.