Rabu, 08 Februari 2012

Nieman Journalism Lab

Nieman Journalism Lab

What Charlie Sheen taught Salon about being original

Posted: 07 Feb 2012 06:30 PM PST

There’s a reason why The Onion’s recent HuffPo-tweaking satire — ‘Huffington Post’ Employee Sucked Into Aggregation Turbine / Horrified Workers Watch As Colleague Torn Apart By Powerful Content-Gathering Engine — resonated with so many reporters. “It’s because nobody wants to feel like a cog,” Salon editor-in-chief Kerry Lauerman told me. “I think it’s our fear as journalists that we’re turning into cogs of a machine.”

Lauerman referenced that Onion piece in a Tuesday blog post that outlined a simple yet fundamental shift in Salon’s approach: publish less, and focus instead on producing original, high-impact journalism.

The value of original reporting might be obvious, but Lauerman says he was shocked was how dramatically this new strategy appears to have increased Salon’s traffic in December and January. In an industry that has at times begrudgingly hailed aggregation as essential (even central) to attracting the eyeballs and SEO necessary for journalistic survival, Lauerman found the opposite could also be true.

“It’s kind of the worst of both worlds. You’re spending a lot of time on someone else’s work. You’re more motivated when you’re pursuing your own work.”

In December and January, Salon published 33 percent fewer posts than it had in those same months the previous years — but it saw 40 percent greater traffic. Slashing the amount of content it published by a third, the site still logged record-high unique visitor numbers — 7.23 million at the end of January — and without any “big viral hits” that would have skewed the numbers, Lauerman said.

This isn’t just heartening from a business perspective, it reaffirms a principle that many journalists still hold dear. “Most people in our industry are dying to hear good news, particularly the kind that emphasizes our instincts,” Lauerman said. “Good work matters, and can be rewarded.”

Getting to this point has been “so organic” that Lauerman says he can’t say exactly where or how it began. He does remember the low-point that preceded Salon’s shift, and it involved — perhaps appropriately — Charlie Sheen and his very public meltdown last winter.

“I remember we had aggregated a Charlie Sheen story, and I saw it tweeted a lot,” Lauerman said. “It wasn’t a really interesting essay, just the latest news breaking. I saw TweetDeck, and I was watching all of our peers — either before or after us — tweet the exact same story. I thought, ‘This is how it ends. This is grim. We’re all just sort of regurgitating the same thing over and over again.”

Soon thereafter, Salon welcomed back founder David Talbot, who again became the site’s CEO last July. Talbot’s return marked another step away from aggregation. “It seemed totally logical to him, and he really wanted us to be ambitious and aggressive and break stories that really matter to our readers,” Lauerman said. “Focus less on doing pieces that could be found anywhere else.”

In other words, instead of racing to catch up on the same stories as everyone else, why not produce the stories that the aggregators will scramble to reproduce? Of course, not all aggregation is recreated equally. Value added from one news organization can advance a story in a critical way, as well as answer or raise important questions. Looking at the lifespan of a story (or a news organization), aggregation can also be an entry point — one that then naturally leads to original reporting.

“I thought, ‘This is how it ends. This is grim. We’re all just sort of regurgitating the same thing over and over again.”

But ultimately, Lauerman said, the time it takes to aggregate really well is still time away from original reporting. “It’s kind of the worst of both worlds,” Lauerman said. “You’re spending a lot of time on someone else’s work. You’re more motivated when you’re pursuing your own work.”

Salon isn’t abandoning aggregation entirely, but Lauerman can point to instances where he is proud of the decision to pursue boots-on-the-ground reporting instead. He sent reporter Irin Carmon to Mississippi to cover the personhood movement, which argues for a legal definition of life that beginning at conception.

“A year or two ago we would have said, ‘Let’s stay on that and blog it, cover it form afar,’ and you could have done a fine job with that,” Lauerman said. Instead, Carmon returned to New York with “a totally original piece of reporting, and a great piece of journalism.”

“For an online site, it’s much easier to just blog at a distance,” Lauerman said. “Easier and safer. But I don’t think there’s any substitute for doing that kind of shoe-leather reporting.”

The fact that readers appear to agree with him is what’s shaping Salon’s identity going forward. In coming months, you can expect to see more resources devoted to Salon’s campaign coverage, new bylines from freelancers who can devote time to in-depth reporting projects, and a site redesign. Internally, the most immediate change — the one already underway — may be a sense of liberation. Lauerman calls the shift “piecemeal” and says it will be largely up to staffers to figure out how they can best contribute to the site’s evolving overarching mission.

“Steve Kornacki, for example, I can see the back of his head from where I’m sitting right now,” Lauerman said. “He’s a machine. He writes four or five times a day and they’re all thoughtful pieces. I don’t really want him to slow down unless he has a piece that he really wants to spend time developing. Then we’d have that conversation right away. Even a year ago, I think it would be hard for people to get the break they needed to write…For pieces that really take time, you’ve got to clear the decks, spend time working phones and log off for a little while.”

Salon may be bucking the aggregation trend, but it’s not alone. To take one high-profile example, the viral aggregator Buzzfeed had taken big steps toward producing exclusive content.

“People are coming to the same conclusions, and they’re the oldest conclusions in our business,” Lauerman said. “You’ve got to be original to really thrive. It’s the most honest metric of all.”

Charlie Sheen photo by Angela George used under a Creative Commons license.

OpenNews aims to satiate demand for news-savvy coders… or is it code-savvy journalists?

Posted: 07 Feb 2012 10:00 AM PST

OpenNews logo

One hundred Internet years ago, in 2010, Dan Sinker got together with Mozilla and the Knight Foundation to push more news organizations to embrace the open web. Five technologists were selected as News Technology fellows, charged with bringing the “show your work” ethos to traditional newsrooms across the country.

The fellowships are just getting underway, but now Sinker wants to solve a new problem: Suddenly news organizations are hiring coders, data visualizers, and product managers like crazy — The Washington Post alone has 17 openings in IT and engineering! — but there aren’t enough people to fill the jobs.

Today Knight and Mozilla announced a new name and expanded scope for the News Technology Partnership, reborn as OpenNews. The project will turn its focus more toward getting developers excited about newsrooms, not the other way around. There are plans for more hack days, a new website to share code and lessons learned, and new educational materials for the code-curious. The core function of the project, the fellowship program, will stick around, but Sinker said they are tinkering with the particulars of future fellowships.

“The big problem right now is, Where are the developers?”

“If you talk to some of the newsrooms that are ahead of the curve…the big problem right now for them is, Where are the developers?” Sinker told me. It’s barely a year-and-a-half-old phenomenon. “That is not a problem that is unique to news. It’s a problem that is unique to every single person that is trying to hire developers in 2012, including startups.”

Yeah, I said, but startups have the advantage. More money and sex appeal than newspapers.

“That’s probably a cop-out of an argument. I think if you look at some of the unbelievable talent that exists in news right now — people like Brian Boyer or all the people at The New York Times, you’ve got people who could be doing work and did do work in well-paying jobs at startups or in financial services or things like that,” he said.

“The argument for better-paying jobs is like, well, why does anyone become a journalist? Why don’t they all go into PR? They’re good at writing. They’re good at telling people things about things. Well, they do it because they want to do good. They do it because they want to change the world, and not just sell something.”

Sinker said he is borrowing from the success of the open-government movement. A lot more news developers today come from hack days than j-school, he said. Knight and Mozilla did host hack days last year, but those were more like meetups and brainstorms, Sinker said. What Sinker has in mind are heads-down coding marathons. He said OpenNews wants to sponsor more self-hosted hack days, as well.

The OpenNews team is also developing a new website, Source, to help support the news developer community as it grows bigger. Think Stack Overflow + GitHub for journalists. (Sinker DM’d me after this piece went up: “I’d say Source is less Stack Overflow + Github, and more Nieman Lab + A List Apart.”)

“You’ve got a ton of teams that are documenting their work. You’ve got a bunch of GitHub repos, you’ve got all kinds of action happening around it, but there’s no real center point,” he explained. “That was kind of the seed of Source, was, Man it would be handy if there’s a place you could go and just find out what’s going on in all of these teams.”

And Sinker is working with the Mozilla Learning Team to figure out how to inculcate new journo-hackers. “I think you see it a lot at a Hacks/Hackers meetup,” he said, “journalists who really don’t have a lot of web skills at all but they really want to learn it.” He is developing an online curriculum that would ease newbies into HTML, CSS, and data visualization.

Full disclosure: The Knight Foundation is a financial supporter of the Nieman Journalism Lab.

Anticipation and expectation: Did Esquire’s story trailer work?

Posted: 07 Feb 2012 06:30 AM PST

The Internet may have disrupted traditional journalism schedules — no need to wait for the 6 p.m. news or the next morning’s paper — but that doesn’t mean timing doesn’t still matter. How many minutes pass before a reporter gets on the scene of breaking news. How much daylight is left between writing and an impending deadline. And maybe most importantly, when it’s time to publish. Timing can affect how broadly a piece is read, whether it leads coverage in other outlets, and whether it spurs investigation and legislation. The trick of timing is maybe even more crucial in the world of monthly magazines, where the time necessary to produce a story can be out of sync with both the regular news cycle and the day paper hits newsstands.

Yesterday GQ and Esquire published dueling stories online on Terry Thompson and his zoo in Zanesville, Ohio, the one that grabbed the world’s attention last October when the animals were set loose. I’d encourage you to read (or at least Instapaper) them both: Here’s Chris Jones’s “Animals” in Esquire, and Chris Heath’s “The Insane True Story of the Zanesville Zoo Escape” in GQ. These are the stories magazines are made for, probing and colorful, with a subject just familiar — and bizarre — enough that readers don’t have to spend much time recalling the basic facts. Both stories don’t officially hit newsstands until next week. But what makes this case interesting is that Esquire, in trying to get a jump on marketing the piece and put a little multimedia muscle behind it, may have tipped its hand a little early.

Sunday night, Esquire released a short trailer for Jones’ piece on Esquire.com. Less than a minute in length, the trailer combines audio from interviews and 911 calls with images from Thompson’s compound. It was a novel new approach to getting readers attention to a magazine story; it also didn’t hurt that the trailer was the perfect bite size portion for flittering around Twitter, Facebook and Tumblr. Speaking to Brian Stelter, deputy editor Peter Griffin said when editor-in-chief David Granger “remarked that the article ‘read like a movie,’ I said we should promote it like the action movie of the winter, so let’s do a trailer.”

A smart, fun, idea, but one that perhaps ended up costing Esquire a hint of exclusivity as Heath’s GQ’s story saw the light of day a few hours later. In response, Esquire posted its piece online, a decision that did not escape Jones’ notice:

Jones also tweeted that he and Heath stayed in the same hotel in Zanesville while covering the story, which means both had an idea the other was on the trail, but may have been uncertain when their stories would come out of the oven ready for readers.

Condé Nast spokesperson Corey Wilson told me over email GQ doesn’t typically publish stories ahead of the magazine online unless there are special circumstances. (Like, say, an interview with Katherine McPhee posted ahead of her show “Smash” debuting on NBC.)

The Internet, and by extension social media, have done a lot for making news organizations more transparent — sometimes willingly, sometimes not — about how they produce their journalism. But at a certain level, magazines are still behind a veil. Maybe it’s the culture that surrounds the world of magazines, or perhaps that, aside from the newsweeklies, many magazines rely on a mix of news and features each issue that isn’t easy to predict.

But like everyone else in the journalism world magazines have also been dragged into the new realities of online media, where websites need elements of timeliness, relevance, and stickiness, to be successful. Even as magazines face declines in print circulation and challenges for visibility online, it’s never been easier to promote their work and try to build anticipation around stories. Of course, readers today sometimes have little tolerance for anticipation, as we saw last year when Rolling Stone tried to tease its profile of Stanley McChrystal. The Internet wasn’t having it, and in the time it took for the piece to get on RollingStone.com, the magazine paid a price.

(For what it’s worth, as of this morning, Esquire’s winning the Facebook battle — 420 “likes” for its story vs. 296 for GQ’s — but GQ’s winning the Twitter battle 161-89.)
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