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The emerging news and information eco-system - Journalism That Matters
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Too Many Local Journalists Are Missing The Big Story: Revenue | Street Fight
Getting passionate about revenue is the message to journalists from this post. Not in a 'WHERE is the money?' hand-wringing sort of way, but in a community-linked approach. I think maybe there's a bit of a leap in this post - a hyperlocal startup approach to commerce isn't the same as the big regional media company strategies, but certainly some interesting thoughts raised by successful entrepreneurs who have cut it in the space... "There are so many new, often interlocking components of business thinking that have to be integrated into digital journalism: big data, social media, third-party ad exchanges, geo-location of the user and, increasingly, the user’s behavior right wherever she is at the moment."
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Hideous and hilarious all wrapped up... “I put out a tweet about it and then when I got in the queue, and a member of staff approached me and asked if she could have a quick word," Leiser explained. "She said she understood I’d said something on social media about easyJet and then told me they were not allowing me to board the flight."
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What are the digital priorities for local and regional newspapers?
12 regional and local editors talking about their own digital consumption, and what form the shift is taking in their newsrooms and strategies. Really interesting read.
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While I'm sure a lot of useful, relevant information and idea-sharing went on at #SMWLDN, I prefer to catch up via the snarky Tumblr. Joy.
Sunday, 29 September 2013
My 'interesting reads' roundup (weekly)
Saturday, 28 September 2013
Definitely NOT another 'How Journalists Should Use Pinterest' post.
However, any social media wrangler in a newsroom knows a site has to be proven earn its keep before more than tentative attention is invested. And how do you even start to overcome this chicken/egg scenario? It's a Google+ sized problem for most of us.
Articles will now have more information - including the headline, author, story description and link - right on the pin. So when you find articles about things you're passionate about... they're easier to save and organise.
7. Category boards search is your friend. If the audience isn’t using search, they go straight to the categories list.
Monday, 23 September 2013
Sometimes you don't realise how fundamental a change has been
Today, I reflected on just how much, and how quickly, in the general scheme of things. The Daily Post notched up its 50,000th edition today, and we made quite a big deal of the fact.
There was a front and back wrap, comprising a montage of historic front pages, and an 8-page pullout of which my favourite contribution was by Head of Production, Neil Avery, charting a day in the life of the Post.
I like it because it sets out in increments of time just how the daily life of our newsroom has changed, in a fairly short time; the Post has shifted from a print identity with a companion website to a multi-platform publication which operates in real time as much as possible.
Ignoring the computers and production systems for a moment, if an early 20th Century Daily Post editor had access to a time machine, and zapped himself forward to today he would still recognise he was in a newsroom.
And he would still recognise the general set up and operation of part of that newsroom - discussions around story angles, photos, and headlines pretty much follow the same patterns, after all.
But how much else would be alien? Pages being whizzed remotely to a printing press, the night editor's final task of his shift - exporting of xml to create the tablet app, live tweeting, live blog interviews, photos being pinged to the head of images via Dropbox from reporters' phones... these are just a tiny fraction of the changes you see in our newsroom today. But the Post is just my example, because I work here and see it - it's not unique. Such changes are happening everywhere in local newsrooms, and I'd imagine the timespan and accelerated shift is similar.
And yet, if you consider the lifespan of the average UK regional daily newspaper as a clock, these are changes that have happened in just a few minutes. For years there was the status quo for titles and their staff and now, suddenly, there has been this snap and a new phase begins. One in which audience is far more at the heart of what we do, I'd suggest.
Anyway, of all the lovely tweets we received today (and I've storified many of them because they show how important local journalism is to many people) this one made me particularly happy:
Happy 50,000 edition @dailypostwales, thanks to the app, I don't miss an issue even when in Gran Canaria on holiday.
— Eric Wyn Roberts (@JoPeli) September 23, 2013
Happy birthday, Daily Post. I am so proud to be a tiny piece of your history.
Sunday, 22 September 2013
Women in journalism and management - some thoughts
- Who was your mentor?
- Did you seek unofficial mentors if you weren't allocated one?
- Does your company have a mentor programme?
- Are you a mentor?
- If so, how does your role work?
I had one email off him and then he left the business. End of story.
So much for my official mentor experience. I've always sought out my own role models anyway, and there have been plenty of editors and deputies who have helped me (or hauled me) up the slippery rungs of management.
However, there have been times in my career path when I really would have appreciated a female executive - role model, mentor, whatever - to discuss things with, and you know what? There wasn't one.
I don't mean there wasn't one I could talk to, I mean there was no one in a senior management role who could help a young female journo new to management with some friendly encouragement.
I finally worked with my first female assistant editor when I joined the South Wales Argus, and met the first female newspaper editor of my career when I joined the Liverpool Echo, where we shared an office with the Liverpool Daily Post, then edited by Jane Wolstenholme (now a successful author).
I've worked with plenty of female newsdesk peers who I could throw ideas around with, but senior editorial management was a female desert for a sizable chunk of my career.
I was reminded of this when someone included my @-name in a tweet to the Reuters 'Women and Journalism study' as a female editor, although actually, this study is about the national newspapers.
Anyway, reading a summary of the study I see the question is raised about the high numbers of aspiring female journalists: "There are all these women coming in - but where do they go?”
Press Gazette notes:
Franks found that where women have built successful careers in journalism, it tends to be in the lifestyle areas. Meanwhile, politics, news, comment and opinion remain largely the preserve of men.
“I was surprised by the segregation by genre and subject matter,” Franks said. “All the old stereotypes hold on just as much as they ever did. You think these things are breaking down but this is not the case. It is altogether pretty shocking.”
Women are, however, relatively more prominent in business and finance reporting. Another area where female journalists have found a voice is in war and conflict reporting.
So, obviously, women in journalism is a subject that is relevant to mah interests, as they say, and so I went back to my Diigo bookmarks to see what else I'd squirrelled away.,
There's this, on the number of women newsroom leaders in college publications, and this, from the American Journalism Review, entitled Do Women Lead Differently? which is a response (about a response) to an interview with NYT executive editor Jill Abramson, who said gender had nothing to do with how a paper was edited.
Among her points were:
"The idea that women journalists bring a different taste in stories or sensibility isn’t true. I think everybody here recognizes and loves a good story."
"I think it's true we're all identical in loving a good story, but not all editors will define a good story identically... Do I think gender plays a role in that case? I suspect at times it does. Being a woman gives you access to some experiences in life that men don't have, just as the reverse is true."
FWIW I'm in the Abramson camp: People edit differently; you're influenced by life experiences. Also, I'm definitely NOT the sort of editor who hugs, as cited in AJR. I would be greatly discombobulated to see an editor hug a journo, unless it was at a pub, at said journo's leaving bash, and alcohol was heavily involved.
Up to, say, department head level, there are many women managers. But it does thin out as you get past that layer of strata, and it's not a simple case of subscribing it to their leaving for family reasons, as HBR's Sarah Green writes in her article on the subject:
...it's not exactly that there's a glass ceiling (or a glass cliff, or a maternal wall): the days of blatant discrimination are (mostly) behind us. Today, it's more like a glass obstacle course of a hundred hard-to-see hurdles.On the subject of HBR, I'd also recommend the linkfest of research that is Tell Me Something I Don't Know About Women in the Workplace.
I hadn't thought of the obstacle course comparison before and from a 'women as editors' point of view, I would have said the regionals doing much better than the nationals until recently. From announcements on industry websites, it does seem as though a number of women who edited dailies titles have moved on to other things.
I know several female executive or deputy editors and news editors, and a few editors of websites or weekly newspapers.
I believe the rapid growth of digital in our newsrooms has enabled many women journalists - I'd put myself among them - to advance their careers in directions that simply didn't exist seven years ago.
But I also know that the only Society of Editors conference I ever attended (2010) was particularly memorable - from my point of view, at least - because out of of all the editors and senior editorial types (by which I mean actually producing publications) put up to speak or participate in panel debates, only one was a woman, and she subsequently left the industry. So is this an issue or am I over-thinking it? Are women really not making it to the tops of the mainstream press tree in the numbers they should be? This post has some of my thoughts on the matter - I'd love to hear yours.
Related articles
- Jill Abramson, New York Times' First Woman Executive Editor : The New Yorker (policyabcs.wordpress.com)
- Guardian study finds just 22.6% of journalists are female (blogs.journalism.co.uk)
- 10 worst stereotypes about powerful women (msnbc.msn.com)
- Anonymous personal recollections of sexism in the media (thefword.org.uk)
Sunday, 15 September 2013
My 'interesting reads' roundup (weekly)
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Skills every aspiring journalist should learn | IJNet
This would be my list too: "Employers and recent graduates are telling me that the current job market demands that job applicants know: Multimedia storytelling skills. Producing slideshows with sound, shooting and editing video and photos, writing for the web. Data and statistical skills for storytelling. Collecting, editing, analyzing and interpreting data to produce compelling interactive maps and graphics. Audience development skills (formerly known as marketing and circulation) such as managing online communities, interpreting data on audience behavior, crowdsourcing for information, interacting with the audience. Basics of programming. How to create compelling pages that attract web audiences. The business of media. Journalists can help a news organization generate revenues without compromising their ethics, and today that skill is more important than ever."
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Stop feeding dead content to phantom news consumers
"During the last decades, the digital evolution has opened the possibilities of sending personalised content to many receivers. A combined user data unit/developer team/newsroom could create, if not individualised news feeds, then at least more personalised selections, serving relevant content and services at the right time. You’d be doing that, if you had one of those newsrooms. But most of you don’t."
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Data scraping tool for non-coding journalists launches | Journalism.co.uk
"Import.io lets you extract data from any website into a spreadsheet simply by mousing over a few rows of information."
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How to Use Google Trends for SEO
Including some essential advice for those about to Newsjack... Choose a trending topic. Blog about it. Tweet it (using the established hashtag). Don't be a moron (e.g., don't try to capitalize on tragedy)."
Sunday, 8 September 2013
My 'interesting reads' roundup (weekly)
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Spike the gloom – journalism has a bright future
Agreed. "First, it’s not a given that today’s big journalism “brands” will go under: they face a horribly difficult task of adapting to radically changed circumstances but institutions will not fall. That’s what happens in deep disruption: some organisations adapt and survive, some don’t. Second, the insurgents of news publishing fully intend to become the giants of the future. A few will, most won’t. In America, where newspaper income fell faster than in Europe (largely because profitability rested more heavily on small ads), there is now a solid if small group of online news businesses which cannot yet match the giants of print but have a viable business – and have done so for several years. The poster girl for this group is the Huffington Post, but there are a cluster of other sites which have been in existence for a decade or more, don’t depend on grants or philanthropy and have a base of income and users solidly built."
- Journalists tend to confuse journalism with major daily papers. The “golden age” of newspaper journalism in the second half of the 20th century was, in reality, a long commercial decline. British national papers reached their peak total circulation in the early 1950s; the Daily Mirror’s highest sale ever was in 1966.
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On the death of journalism - and my Indy career | Christina Patterson
Heartfelt piece on what it's like to lose the job you love. But I don't believe in the death of journalism; I do believe journalism will change but that doesn't mean it disappears. Nevertheless, a good read. "We all know that the clock is ticking. Even Rupert Murdoch knows that the clock is ticking. During the Leveson report, he gave newspapers five to ten years. When I was asked, last autumn, to speak about Leveson at the Battle of Ideas, I tried to think about what newspapers should and shouldn’t do, and what readers should and shouldn’t want, but actually all I could think was this: we are fiddling while Rome burns."
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Social media disaster: What I learned when EVERYTHING went wrong
Honest and darkly funny account of what happens when the wheels fall off. IT really does not come out of this well. "I created something based on what I read on the web, not based in reality. I ticked off the list with things other people told me I would need. I did not take the company culture into account. I did not secure executive sponsorship. I did not look at realistic, measurable goals based on the capabilities of the company. I did not create a compelling story for what I was trying to accomplish and I did not use the company business plan as a guide."
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Wristband Turns Your Heartbeat Into A Unique Password, Unlocks Multiple Devices
On the one hand I think it's amazingly cool, on the other I'm pretty sure that within 24 months it will be considered old tech. The pace at which developments happen still amazes and delights me. "Developed by biometric technology company Bionym Inc., the Nymi wristband identifies its wearer by their heartbeat and uses it as a password for multiple devices, from a computer to a car. The Nymi technology is based on the fact that “like a fingerprint, your heartbeat is unique”—after putting on the Nymi wristband and activating it, you stay authenticated with your devices until you take it off. "
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Pocket : Choose Your Journalists Wisely…
Interesting read on the perceived differences between foreign correspondents, and journalists parachuted in by newsdesks to cover conflict. “Here in the journalists hostel there are lots of jackets hanging on the ends of beds with too many pockets and zips. One Japanese guy has a metal helmet with ‘PRESS’ written in large letters across the front in white Typewriter correction fluid. Some of them laugh during the night in their sleep. Is there something funny going on here, in Jerusalem, during this second Intifada? Maybe it’s just an escape. Maybe not though, perhaps they’re just insane. War clearly sucks but the core of western journalists who report on it seem to consist mainly of people who have no concept of the seriousness of the situation they’re involved in."
Sunday, 1 September 2013
My 'interesting reads' roundup (weekly)
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When Twitter Goes Horribly Wrong
A lovely read from The Awl, with some great, good-humoured responses from those early adopters who found their Twitter handle backfired on them a little. "Jeb Boniakowski is one of the lucky few people who possess a short, apposite Twitter handle directly related to his name: he's just @jeb. He’s also one of the unlucky people who happens to share his Twitter name with someone or something else that people tend to tweet at on accident."
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A definite Interesting Read on analytics, why they rock... and why they aren't always your friend. "There’s nothing like a dashboard full of data and graphs and trend lines to make us feel like grown ups. Like people who know what they’re doing. So even though we’re not getting any real use out of it, it’s addictive and we can’t stop doing it. But after a while you just don’t get quite the same high from your dashboards that you used to. You’ve habituated. We still look at Google Analytics, but at this point metrics like “unique monthly visitors” bore us. They were always useless, but now they’ve stopped being fun, too."