Rabu, 06 November 2013

Nieman Journalism Lab

Nieman Journalism Lab

Jay Rosen, the view from nowhere, and “arrogance born of monopoly”

Posted: 05 Nov 2013 11:29 AM PST

When talking about objectivity in the age of digital journalism, Jay Rosen’s view from nowhere theory is one of the most frequently cited perspectives on the topic.

Yesterday, in a blog post that used the Old and New Testaments as a framework for discussing the age of mass media and the age that preceded it, Rosen argued that objectivity conservatives might be coming around to the age of the blogger.

A kind of new testament fundamentalism common in journalism from the 1970s to the 1990s held form through the early years of blogging in this century. It felt scorn for the more opinionated style and ridiculed its followers as "echo chambers." It defined itself as "the traditional" and dismissed everyone else as marginal. This was arrogance born of monopoly.

But then new testament journalists started blogging themselves and more recently they have taken to social media with genuine enthusiasm. Today they are not as confident that they have all the answers. They know that their business model is broken. They can see the advantages in personal voice and persuasive power that accrues to the Glenn Greenwalds and other practitioners of the personal franchise model in news. They understand that the people formerly known as the audience want to participate more in the news and that the insiders are less trusted than ever.

The next step, Rosen says, is building news organizations that make an attempt to combine both types of journalism.

Six lessons The Wall Street Journal learned from its experiment in reality TV

Posted: 05 Nov 2013 10:25 AM PST

Donald Trump may be a Wall Street Journal reader, but the Journal is not a brand that immediately evokes the style of Trump’s long-running reality show The Apprentice. And yet the Journal is experimenting with its own interpretation of the genre, having just completed a 20-week first-season run of its Startup of the Year online show — a contest that the Journal calls an “interactive crash-course in entrepreneurship.”

Actually, Startup of the Year is more Shark Tank than The Apprentice, says Andy Regal, executive producer of WSJ Video. Regal says he and his colleagues used reality show elements “in the broadest of terms” to fill what they see as a vacuum in coverage of innovation and entrepreneurship.

The series entailed 338 videos, each between about two minutes and seven minutes long, as the Journal tracked 24 new businesses vying for the Startup of the Year title. Last night, it announced the winner is Rebellion Photonics, a Texas-based company that builds chemical imaging cameras that can spot explosive gas leaks on oil rigs.

Over the course of 20 weeks, a group of Wall Street Journal editors winnowed down the list of competitors as they completed various tasks and activities — debates, elevator pitches, shooting clay pigeons that represent business frustrations, etc. Contestants were invited to participate in mentoring sessions with billionaire entrepreneurs like designer Tory Burch and Virgin Group founder Richard Branson. Here are some highlights:

The project was a way for the Journal to continue experimenting with video at a time when there’s huge demand for it. (Last year, then-Digital Network managing editor Raju Narisetti told me that "from a business point of view, we cannot generate enough video streams.”)

But Startup of the Year is also a way for the paper to go after an untapped audience of young entrepreneurs and business students. The Wall Street Journal believes it can convert this demographic into a new generation of Journal readers by showcasing a “dramatic slice” of their own world, Regal said.

The Journal’s definition of “dramatic” means exploring the travails of launching a business without the traditional reality-television format of “taking entrepreneurs to bars and showing them in bikinis,” Regal says. So it’s not surprising that much of Startup of the Year feels a bit closer to C-SPAN than E! on the reality TV spectrum. Still, the Journal learned that this kind of storytelling benefits from a lighter approach — combining a “documentary feel with more drama and suspense.”

And although the show traced the path of 24 companies through elimination rounds to a single winner, video producers at the newspaper insist the storytelling approach was meant to be nonlinear.

That’s why, for example, the show’s landing page isn’t organized in a way that lends itself to binge-watching the season in full. Instead, the idea is to encourage viewers to dip in and out of the storyline at any point.

The Journal was reluctant to share specific metrics about Startup of the Year viewership — other than to say content from the series was streamed 1.3 million times — though they’ve already decided to have a second season.

To understand some of the biggest surprises and lessons from season one, I caught up with Regal, deputy managing editor for WSJ Digital Gabriella Stern, and small business news editor Vanessa O’Connell. Here’s what they learned:

1. New kinds of storytelling can mean new kinds of audiences

Regal: Fully more than 50 percent of people clicking on videos we produce aren’t consuming them through the homepage. We thought this was a great opportunity to broaden the Journal audience to younger MBA students or entrepreneurs. I was an entrepreneur for many years before I came to the Journal and I wish I had seen this.
Stern: We want to own [this area of coverage]. We want to be the one-stop shop for people who care about entrepreneurship. Between The Accelerators blog, WSJ Startup of the Year, the stories the startup team produces, our tech coverage — plus we have something called Venture Wire about the financing of startups — we think the Journal has a real opportunity to be the essential place.

2. All great storytelling requires great characters

Stern: We wanted to make sure we had some startups in the mix that were sort of socially beneficial, we wanted them to have social utility…We were very careful to cast a wide net. We really made an effort to get a broad range of applicants. So we not only had tons of women in the initial 24, but of the three finalists, two of them have women CEOs. We’re really happy about that. Certainly gender was not a criteria, but what it shows you is if you make an effort to cast a wide net, you’re going to have diversity.

3. Journalists influence the outcome of a story, and sometimes that’s okay

Regal: We were able to get global thought leaders, some of the best minds in the world…We have so much anecdotal evidence that [participation in Startup of the Year] turned into investments from VCs or contacts they never could have gotten themselves because people saw the product in The Wall Street Journal.
Stern: I’m pretty old school. I’m 53. I’ve been doing journalism for a long time. There have always been stories that had an impact on the subject of the stories. It’s not unusual for great stories to help subjects of stories. In this case, because we were a startup and this was season one, we had no idea what would happen. We were confident that we would produce content about how to build a business that would be interesting, educational. We didn’t not know what the impact would be on the startups. We had no idea.

4. “Interactive” is not a one-size-fits-all designation

Stern: We didn’t want it to be just words on a page, we didn’t want it to be video you watch just passively. We wanted it to be video, words, and interactivity, so you had this sort of multi-dimensional documentary.

We had a voting game where audiences could cast a vote, but people could cast a vote multiple times, so we called it a game. We didn’t take those votes into consideration. We had a couple cafes, some hangouts — we had some in New York, one in San Francisco — where we actually brought together startups, mentors, and members of the broader community to interact. One time we had will.i.am do a surprise mentorship.

5. Always look for ways to complement other areas of the newsroom

O’Connell: This has helped tremendously in our sourcing. Looking to identify people who are gurus, people who are able to articulate big things, share knowledge around big themes. So this fits really well with our newsroom coverage. It helps us spread out our knowledge base a lot, even if we don’t use the same format.
Stern: The business editor Dennis Berman, who is very interested in entrepreneurship coverage, did something interesting. The last five weeks, we’ve profiled the five finalists. It was really a nice thing and we didn’t start out with that in mind. We’re so digitally minded that we just didn’t think in terms of what we call print adjacency, but it just seemed to be a natural evolution. I think in season two, we will probably formalize the print component.

6. Don’t be afraid to loosen up, even if you’re The Wall Street Journal

Regal: To be frank, because this was a little bit different and evolutionary for us, I was concerned about going too far and doing too much of the kinds of things that bring consumers in. I thought at great length about the fact that this had to have the WSJ brand in front of it. We weren’t going to do anything to compromise the brand and what the brand means for journalism. In season two, I hope we would get even closer to what it really is like — and I think we did this in spurts — to what it really is like to start a business.

We got a little piece of tape [of one of the contestants] sitting on the ground, looking dejected and demoralized next to the wheel of his car and there’s a boot on it. And we got a tape of him saying, “This is really what entrepreneurship is about. Yes, we park illegally. No, we don’t pay the tickets on time. This is what it really takes.” I hope we get a little closer more often to the struggles and the achievements of entrepreneurship.

Stern: I think what we mean by staying true to the Journal brand is not being, you know, hugely sober and business-y all the time. It’s about quality, it’s about fairness, it’s about accuracy, completeness, and thoroughness. But the Journal is a broader news organization certainly than it was five or 10 years ago.

When newsrooms move newsrooms, is it about decline or about digital?

Posted: 05 Nov 2013 07:00 AM PST

Newspapers quite literally used to create cities and their surrounding environment. For generations, most American downtowns featured an imposing edifice that housed the local daily — its newsroom and often its printing plant.

But with the decline of newspaper fortunes, newspapers are increasingly moving from their old homes — out of spaces organized for physical, industrial labor, and into smaller spaces designed specifically to create a digital-first workflow.

As part of my fellowship at the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, I’ve been tracking these newsrooms moving newsrooms and the connection between physical space and digital space. And these newsroom moves actually tells us quite a bit about both the economic state of newspapers and their digital strategies.

In some cases, these newsrooms are still in the heart of their cities but occupy a smaller footprint than before. In other cases, journalists have left the downtown proximity to courts, cops, and city government in favor of the surrounding suburbs. The trend is growing across the industry, including at papers owned by chains like McClatchy, Cox, MediaNews, Gannett, Advance, A.H. Belo, and GateHouse, and at newsrooms big and small.

The olden days

Back in the day of the publisher’s paper, newspapers could build cities. Frank B. Shutts and financier Henry Flager quite literally shaped the city of Miami in the 1920s and 1930s through boosterism in The Miami Herald. From encouraging cheap housing and even speculation, to covering up hurricanes, to creating energy around tourism (even building up the horse-racing industry), to pushing for rail lines and eventually Everglades National Park, the Herald helped build the city’s population and industry. Its prominent presence on the waterfront matched its importance and power.

Newsday’s Alicia Patterson (daughter of newspaper baron Joseph Medill Patterson) helped spur the creation of Levittown to bring a post-war population of GIs to Long Island and build her subscriber base. The Chandler family turned the Valley from orange groves and farms into cheap housing, encouraged the aerospace industry to move to Los Angeles as well as helping to spur developments of ports, promoted the freeway system the city still has, and in turn, helped create the modern city. Aurora Wallace, a professor at NYU, chronicles these stories and more in her book on newspapers and the built environment.

The economic impetus

Why move newsrooms now? After shedding people, the single most valuable asset many of these newspaper retain is their physical plant. Many of these newsrooms are in the heart of downtowns undergoing revivals or are in valuable commercial space.

And, for many, their space is just simply too big and too inefficient to actually keep at the size they are now. Newsrooms like The Miami Herald were built during the booms of the 1960s. (John S. Knight anticipated an eventual circulation of 1 million; today, the figure stands in the low 200,000s.) Other newsrooms in older spaces no longer need the large spaces to run presses that have since been shipped off to the suburbs (closer to highway access) or composing rooms.

Gannett hasn’t put a figure on the money it is stands to earn, but Bloomberg reporter Nadja Brant found that the company will have had more than 2 million square feet of property divestitures since 2005. The piece also reports that A.H. Belo’s non-core properties account for “$72.5 million — almost two-thirds of its stock-market value of $113 million.” Some argue that the most valuable part of John Henry’s purchase of The Boston Globe was not the newspaper but the real estate.

What now?

Today, The Miami Herald has moved out of its bayfront building downtown — a building seen smack in the center of the city with the address 1 Herald Plaza, with such incredible views that John S. Knight considered having a lunch room on the roof. The Herald now sits in a building closer to the airport, away from public transport, and quite literally across from a cow pasture.

But moving wasn’t just a matter of finances. The newspaper has had a chance to literally rebuild its very architecture and physical space to facilitate up-to-the-minute breaking news creation. Arguably, place matters less when a newsroom’s primary output is digital. That’s at least, what managers said to me — but journalists connected to downtown institutions were duly worried about new physical barriers (like traffic) that could prevent them from coming back to file and to be edited in this new newsroom. Even in a digital world, where journalists can file and work anywhere, being surrounded by a busy newsroom is one of the best parts of being a journalist. I’ll go back to Miami in a few weeks to see the effects of these changes in this newsroom.

Other metropolitan newsrooms have moved (or are moving) and have sold (or are selling) their buildings in exchange for new space — I’ve got a list of 29 so far (please send tips!) — including some illustrious names: The Atlanta Journal Constitution, The Seattle Times, the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, The Des Moines Register (which moved from its 13-story 1918 home), The Philadelphia Inquirer, and the Boston Herald.

Not so much for nostalgia

While it was hard to watch the 13-story Des Moines Register building have nearly a century of history taken apart for its move — with a lot of it being packed away for storage or distribution to local universities and historic societies — journalists have quickly moved on. I romanced for a bit at a giant and mysterious shredder left in the now-empty printing-press space inside the Register, but I found that at most of the newspapers I visited, it was time to move on.

I’ve spoken with a lot of journalists affected by these moves, and the response has been generally positive. Since April, I’ve visited The Miami Herald (a week before its move), The Des Moines Register (days before the move), the Star-Telegram (settled into its new space), and The Seattle Times (on one floor in a building adjacent to its old home, shared with the headquarters of a wine company). In some cases, those reactions are based on the realities of a shrinking workforce inside a space designed for more people. As one Miami Herald journalist told me about the old space: “It’s demoralizing to be here. You look across the cubes and it’s just rows and rows of empty desks. No one’s here any more.”

In other cases, such as in Seattle, the newspaper building wasn’t in great shape. As The Seattle Times’ Suki Dardarian, former managing editor and now director of audience development and innovation, put it: “We had to stop a lot of maintenance about 10 to 14 years ago and it was gross,” replete with ancient coffee stains and cockroaches. “We were too small for the space…I was in Business and it was depressing. It was like we were living in another country with the space.”

Starting over

When these newsrooms move to a new building, it’s a chance to rethink how to work in a way more conducive to a digital-first workflow — and for most of the newsrooms I visited, this means an emphasis on breaking news. Many of these newsrooms have restructured their physical environment into something like a hub, with seats radiating out like orbs in order to facilitate physical communication between editors and reporters best poised to contribute to breaking news. (See here for the Star-Telegram’s “Starship Enterprise”, a raised platform in the middle of the newsroom.)

As Jim Witt, senior vice president and executive editor of the Star-Telegram explained to me in an email:

We wanted to find a way to emphasize digital and make it the “center” of the newsroom, and after looking at all the columns that we couldn’t move it actually gave us the opportunity to create a sort of bullring that could be elevated and have lighting to make it seem a little more special.

We knew we wanted everyone involved with breaking news to be together, so that’s how we grouped everyone — breaking news and cop reporters, the photo desk, and all our digital and assigning editors.  The goal was to make it noisy and create energy and be the center of attention.

We knew we wanted everyone to be able to work with two screens so they could constantly monitor social media and other websites while they worked, and to have plenty of TV monitors to give it that “news is breaking all the time” feel.

Seattle’s newsroom had also been physically assembled into this hub-with-orbs sort of thing (different from The Telegraph and the BBC’s hub-and-spoke model; see here and here). It looks a bit more like the Star-Telegram, with a central hub with a less severe spoke-ing — and much more spread-out — but it was nonetheless built to facilitate physical communication between online production, breaking news, and social media teams. Des Moines and Miami were still in the process of being moved into when I was doing my research; I’ll go back again.

An upcoming white paper I’m writing for Tow will look further into how these space changes facilitate breaking news, but for now, suffice it to say that this kind of organization creates a centralized production and distribution platform for newsrooms hungry to stay on top of the latest.

Other newsrooms are taking the opportunity to brand moves as organizational change as well, looking beyond nostalgia. In an article announcing its move, the Syracuse Post-Standard’s headline read “Syracuse Media Group’s move signals shift to digital-first focus for news and ads.” As the lede put it: “Goodbye, cubicles and copy editors. Hello, collaborative work space and curators.”

Goodbye it is to old spaces and old places — created for a time when newsrooms had the ambitions and the profits to justify homes far larger than they are today. We’ve watched change from the inside; now we can see change on the outside too, whether those old homes were built a century ago or in the boom days of the 1960s and 1970s. Stay tuned for more on this trend and for more of my research on the topic. And please let me know of more newspapers you see moving buildings or putting their buildings up for sale.

Nikki Usher is an assistant professor at George Washington University’s School of Media and Public Affairs and a fellow at the the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.

Photo of a diagram of the new Star-Telegram continuous news desk by Nikki Usher.
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