An open letter to college journalists

Dear college journalists,

Please innovate. Be the risk takers, the innovators, the iconoclasts that this industry so desperately needs. Journalism organizations are dying from an acute case of bad management and a lack of fresh ideas.

Our j-schools are spitting out people who celebrate the status quo. I’m here to tell you that if you try to emulate a dying industry, you will find yourself without an industry. We need you, all of you and your wildest ideas.

Journalism is largely an industry paralyzed by the past. Many of its leaders are the same people that drove our industry over the cliff. They cannot save journalism.

Much of the journalism industry is afflicted by a belief that what ails us and the industry is largely externalized, that’s it not something that we control. That it happened to us. That’s not true.

What ails us is us.

You have a much better chance of saving and transforming journalism than any of those executives that you look up to do. But you must not look outward for help. Forget what we’re doing.

We’re tied to the past. We can’t figure out how to make money online to support journalism. We can’t figure out how to make truly exceptional interactive products. We can’t figure out that people don’t want tablet apps that pretend they are newsprint.

We can’t get out of our own ways. And we can’t forget the past.

Ignore us. We don’t exist. Create the news organization that your campus users would want. Create a news organization that doesn’t acknowledge that print, radio or TV exist. Rethink everything.

While we have to keep our legacy products because many of our users want them and those products still produce the majority of our revenue, you don’t need to be tied to such thinking. The majority of your users aren’t reading print newspapers. And if they are, your website sucks more than you think.

We need you to be incubators for the future. We need you to make products that appeal to your generation, a generation that grew up with computers. Look to your classmates and understand what they want in a news organization.

You’ll learn a lot more about the future of journalism by observing and talking to your classmates about how they consume and want to consume journalism than by studying legacy media organizations. They are your users, not yourselves and especially not the ideas and users of the past.

You are not studying journalism and working for your college newspaper so that you can get a job at a dying institution. No, you are doing so so that you can help rescue this industry from mismanagement, poor ideas, a lack of risk taking. Maybe you can’t turn around a sinking ship, but you can come by with a life boat and rescue the survivors and help us regroup.

I believe in you where many other professional journalist do not, because I have lost faith in many established journalism organizations to turn it around. I’m watching a bunch of slow-motion publisher-assisted suicides. I believe in you because you have yet to be tainted by tradition, by what was, by a veneration for what no longer is. I believe in you because if you looked inside of yourselves and unleashed your wildest ideas, you could help us turn it around.

I’m also writing you this because of my own regrets. While I’ve never been one to color inside the lines or to pay my dues or to venerate the past over the future, I have largely failed. I was not aggressive enough as the editor in chief of my college newspaper, despite having more Web experience than journalism experience. I could not lead my student newspaper to the future, nor could I show a path forward.

We did new things online at the time that few had done, but we were not the true iconoclasts that professional news organizations could look to for innovation and new ideas. And since I’ve entered the work force, I hardly think I have changed much in the journalism status quo.

Once you enter legacy journalism, no one will really listen to your new ideas for years. Your more likely to assimilate than to change a news organization.

That’s why it is vital to take risks while you are a student journalist. When someone tells you that that no one has done that before or that won’t be successful, you can point to what you did in college at your news organization and show how it was successful. Look to your college media experience as an opportunity to build case studies for your professional career.

College media needs to be the linchpin of innovation, risk taking and sometimes all-out gambling in journalism. And I don’t mean little or petty risks. This isn’t about sensationalism or being edgy; it’s about finding new ways to present content, new ways to make money for journalism and even radically rethinking what your college news organization is.

If you think the inertia of changing a college publication is hard, wait until you get into the professional world. Wait until you have a paycheck and a career on the line. Or the careers of other people on the line.

Wait until you have a higher up editor shoot down your plan. Wait until you run into the way things have always been done. Wait until you run into your own professional self doubt as you try to lead people with much more experience than you forward.

You need evidence. You need proof. You need to create great, modern news organizations in college and bring those lessons to bear for news organizations. Gone are the days when college media was a training ground for future professional journalists. College media is now a training ground for professional journalism organizations.

In fairness to my peers and my colleagues, radical change is hard, no matter how necessary. It’s hard to institute radical change without proof that it could work. And where should that proof logically come from? It should come from college media, institutions that can afford to take risks and afford to make mistakes.

In other parts of academia, research and labs are used to test out ideas that industries aren’t ready to implement or don’t have the money to investigate themselves. Imagine the medical and healthcare industries without all the scientific researchers at universities. That’s the model that journalism departments and college media needs.

Forget the model of journalism departments and college media being a minor league for professional news organizations. You need to be our R&D departments.

You need to train us.

Paying for great writing in the Internet age

Rather than continuing to vent my rage over The Atlantic trying to pay a writer with publicity, I want to talk about how we can save great writing.

Great writing is probably never going to generate the most pageviews, and an ad model focused on pageviews, and not quality or demographics or time spent actually reading a piece, is not going to support great writing.

The Web has brought lots of new forms of journalism, and is allowing us to tell stories in completely new ways that are often better than we ever had before. Blogging has taken beat reporting to a new level. The Web, however, has not been a friend to great writing.

Needless slideshows of written text, link-bait headlines, contrarian arguments rooted in nothingness, top 10 lists and gifs will generate pageviews. None of those are remotely great writing.

In print, there never was spammy SEO or link bait. A well researched and written piece would find an audience. A great piece could carry an entire $4.99 magazine.

I have been skeptical in the past about paywalls and pay meters. But that skepticism is largely rooted in the fact that most news organizations and blogs — even traditional outlets — have embraced pageview gaming, suspect SEO practices and link baiting. That content is not worth paying for, and if advertisers want to pay by the pageview for that, so be it. It’s a match made in Internet Hell.

It may be time for those of us who love great writing and reporting to say enough is enough. Gone are the days when advertisers would pay a premium to be placed next to a premium product.

Great writing will never be supported by publicity. Or a token $100. Great writing takes time, research, retrospection and craftsmanship.

So, how do we support great writing?

We can sign up for paid accounts with news orgs that have them, but this would require those news orgs to produce great content. The New York Times, unlike most of its contemporaries, didn’t dismantle its ability to write good stories and do good reporting. While I disagree with the amount they charge for a digital subscription, and think a lower amount would ultimately bring them more revenue, I’m still a paying subscriber.

I remain unconvinced that most large dailies have enough left to warrant paying for. Great journalism takes time, knowledge and research, and Web ad models have struggled to support this. I’m not willing to pay for a piece based on anecdata or a story largely lifted from a press release or a no-research opinion piece.

For news organizations that used to produce great writing and would like to do so moving forward, perhaps they need a paywall around just that great writing and let advertising be the way to pay for the quick hitters, beatblogging and daily updates. The kind of content that The New Yorker, Harper’s Magazine, The Atlantic and newspapers’ magazines produce (or used to in some cases) was always expensive and often didn’t make much money. Those pieces were never the most popular, and with a business model centered around popularity, we need another way to pay for it.

We have a choice: Either we break out great writing and find a specific business model for it, or we risk losing it.

For individual writers looking to fund their writing, I highly recommend crowdfunding sites such as Kickstarter. We recently got funded a $15,000 reporting package on Antarctica. People are willing to fund journalism, and are perhaps even more willing to fund reporting through Kickstarter than sign up for paywall access.

When you pitch a stories or a series on Kickstarter, people know what they are getting and know that a lot of time and effort will go into it. When you sign up for generic paywall access, you’re also paying for the poorly reported stories that rely on anecdata and for the opinion pieces with no research and for link bait stories that are more infuriating than informative. A lot of people don’t want to pay for that.

Journalists can also sell Kindle Singles, short ebooks that can house long-form journalism. Instead of trying to get a piece into an existing publication and attempt to get just compensation for it (usually north of free), sell it directly to consumers for $0.99 or $1.99 or something reasonable.

This idea can be combined with the Kickstarter. Your Kickstarter backers can fund the research, reporting and writing of a piece or series, and have first crack at your finished work, but then you can sell that work on the Kindle, iBooks, Nook and other e-reader stores.

Think of Kickstarter as an advance that pays for your time and Kindle Singles as a way to generate some additional income. To get your name out there and to connect with readers and fans, you’ll need a personal site with a blog. You want to keep people updated on your work and make it easy for them to find what you have done and how they can get a hold of it.

In between long-form pieces, you can do short written pieces for free on your own blog. If you’re going to blog for free or for insulting sums of money, why not do it for yourself, keep your dignity and generate publicity for yourself? Eventually, your blog may become popular enough that you can justify selling ads yourself like several Web writers do.

News orgs can do the same thing, although I think they should adjust the strategy. Kindle Singles and similar ebook platforms are something very much worth exploring for them. But I would go beyond that.

The Magazine is a new iPad-only publication that focuses on medium-length writing. It comes out twice a month and each issue usually has 4–6 stories in it. While I think the writing has been uneven thus far, and I’d like to see a lot more research and reporting go into most stories, especially the personal essays, which would be a lot better if they took the Harper’s approach to essay writing, consumers have embraced the publication. It is off to a pretty good start, and it’s showing a sustainable way to create a new news publication focused on writing that isn’t reliant on ads, click bait, spammy SEO headlines, slideshows, top 10 lists or other gimmicks.

The Magazine is, in my opinion, the best journalism app for the iPad when it comes to content presentation and readability (trust me, readers appreciate readability). It’s all about the writing, and it feels like a truly native iPad experience rather than an app trying to mimic print on a glass screen.

News orgs could create a monthly tablet publication similar to The Magazine that puts together their best long-form writing each month. The Magazine has eschewed complicated print-style pagination and layouts for something simpler, cleaner and less time intensive to put together.

Traditional news orgs really need to look at more innovative ways to showcase their best written content: Kindle Singles, tablet apps similar to The Magazine, strong Web layouts, etc. Do it all, and try to make money each step of the way. Fight, scratch and claw your way to making money off of good content.

Pricing also helps The Magazine. News orgs like to give people huge discounts on subscription over single issues when they sign up for a year, but that’s a print anachronism. What we have found is that people are more willing to sign up for a shorter duration and just have it auto renew for them. A lot of people will balk at committing even $24.99 a year, but $1.99 a month? Why not?

With the iTunes Store and other platforms, most of those subscriptions will auto renew month after month after month, essentially giving you yearly subscribers without the high initial cost that causes most people to balk.

For great bloggers that work a beat and like to write long-form pieces from time to time, of which I am very found of, they also may need to find ways to package their best long-form content and make additional money off of it. The core writers at The Atlantic all have beatblogs, but they also produce long-form written pieces for the print edition. The print edition can support those pieces, but for bloggers at news orgs without access to a vehicle to subsidize that great writing or for independent bloggers, looking to Kindle Singles, Kickstarter and other means of bringing in money may make a lot of sense.

These are just a few of my ideas, but rather than stew about how news orgs aren’t paying for great writing anymore, let’s try to find solutions. We need to get creative, and luckily for us, there are a lot of creative solutions to be had. And we no longer need traditional gatekeepers to produce great writing and reporting.

“There’s no hard-and-fast data that quantifies… but we know”

This pernicious phrase reared its ugly head in a CNET piece about Facebook and teens:

There’s no hard-and-fast data that quantifies Facebook’s teen problem. But we know — from observing teens, talking to parents and analysts, and from a few company statements — that age doesn’t become Facebook with this group.

There is a reason we do research, surveys and studies. Because we don’t know and cannot make definitive statements without hard data and evidence. Saying that there isn’t hard data but we know anyway is a trope used by journalists trying to justify writing about something that they feel is true, even though they have no data to support it. Or as a way to justify writing some provocative that will get attention, even though the evidence is not there.

The core issue is the “but we know.” There is nothing in this CNET piece that suggests they know anything. There are beliefs supported by circumstantial evidence, some of it mildly compelling, some of it not.

I have no issue with writing an opinion piece that is based on anecdotes and circumstantial evidence to ask a question, to begin to posit that studies and date are needed. But this piece doesn’t ask a question. It states opinion as fact, as dangerous of a journalistic sin one can commit.

Talking to some teens or some of your friends’ children doesn’t count as research. You don’t know if they are representative of the larger population, thus you can’t generalize this information to the population at large. Maybe it is true that in San Diego, where the author Jennifer Van Grove is based, teens are leaving Facebook for other social networks, but what does that tell us about rural Kansas or Cleveland or Washington, DC? Or even neighboring school districts from the one she lives in?

We are also given no indication of how many teens she observed, how she observed them, who she talked to, how many people she talked to, where those people live, how she got ahold of these people to talk, etc. In short, she provides no evidence that she collected her data in any sort of scientifically relevant manner

But it gets worse.

The core thesis to this poorly researched piece is that there isn’t hard data, but that through anecdotes and conversations with unrepresentative samples, we know the truth. But there is some data to compare this thesis to.

Garry Tan of Y Combinator surveyed 1,038 people about their social networking usage, broken down between 538 responses from users aged 13-18 and 492 responses from users 19-25. I haven’t seen the methodology of this survey, so I can’t speak to its scientific veracity and its almost certainly not of the caliber that I could use in my research, but it is still better than a reporter — who is not a trained ethnographer — observing some teens and talking with some parents and reading tea leaves.

Tan’s data shows that 55 percent of 13-18 year-olds surveyed use Facebook. That is surpassed by Tumblr, which has 61 percent penetration. Instagram, the social network that Grove said was stealing Facebook’s thunder, is used by 21 percent of users surveyed (and it just passed 100 million users, less than a tenth of Facebook’s, meaning that it would need to be wildly overrepresented amongst teens to be more popular with teens than Facebook).

Snapchat, another social network that as cited by Grove as being an issue for Facebook was even less used at 13 percent (and may have under 5 million monthly users). When I first read the title of Grove’s piece, I assumed she was talking about Tumblr because it is one of the 10 most popular sites in the U.S., and half of its user base under 25. But no, Tumblr a site that by many measures is doing quite well with younger audiences, was mentioned once in Grove’s piece.

This is why anecdata, which Grove and many journalists fall prey to, is useless. I have no doubt that within certain pockets of users, Instagram and Snapchat are huge and that Facebook is passé. But when we talk about trends, we need good data that is generalizable across a population.

If you were to go to a high school, you would find different things popular within certain cliques of students. What makes Groves’s analysis so specious, is that if she observed a certain clique of students, it is possible that Instagram was all the rage among their friends, but not even generalizable across that one school.

I don’t doubt that Facebook is no longer the cool social network. It is used by more than one billion people every month, has amazing market penetration and is popular with all age groups. It’s not hot, new or cutting edge.

But Facebook is the standard bearer. It has proven itself over nine years of use, a long time in the land of social networking. It may never again be the hot, young social network. Just as The Rolling Stone or U2 may never again be the hot, young rock band. But Facebook may prove to be something much bigger — enduring.

Beyond this, none of this data or anecdata shows that teens won’t become Facebook users as they age. Facebook was always a social network for an older audiences than middle and high school students (it was originally college only). The real question will be whether or not people don’t age into Facebook, and we are a few years away from knowing that.

I don’t disagree that Tumblr, Instagram, Snapchat and other newer networks are better at anonymity than Facebook, which is something that appeals to teens. Grove argues that lack of anonymity and the presence of parents and grandparents causes Facebook to not be cool with teens. But anonymity is also something that causes weak ties.

What makes Facebook enduring, and what makes it something that has appealed to older users, is that Facebook users tend to have their strong ties on the network — family and close friends. The presence of strong ties is the impetus for many people to join Facebook in the first place.

I’ll delve deeper into the difference between strong and weak ties in the future, but it is an important concept to understand when it comes to analyzing social networks. The average person has at most 10 strong connections in their life, and these are connections that often last a lifetime.

13-18 year-olds are just beginning to forge strong ties and are often antagonistic to future strong ties (family). So, I would be careful when comparing social networks that appeal to weak ties to those that appeal to strong ties.

2013 New Years resolutions pt. 1: Sound body

It’s time for New Year’s resolutions. No I don’t plan on clogging up your gym for a month or two before I give up on my hopeless New Year’s resolutions in a fit of self loathing where I consume three pints of Ben & Jerry’s ice cream in one sitting and cry myself to sleep.

But I do like to try to better myself each and every year. I don’t believe in standing still. And I do believe that New Year’s resolutions should be well thought out, doable and be something that will make you stronger for the future.

For me, I believe in both a sound body and mind. My resolutions will encompass the usual trying to be healthier, but, I believe more importantly, trying to improve myself as a person and expanding my mind. This is part 1 of my resolutions, focusing on the body. And luckily, I own weights and have a gym in my building and believe in exercise that doesn’t involve a gym, so your gym space is safe.

Vanity is not the driving force with me. I’ve come to grips with the fact that I am no longer a college student. As I get older, however, health is something that concerns me more and more. Living longer, healthier and happier is something that I want to work on.

Walking may be the healthiest activity a human can do. It helps stave off cognitive decline, helps build and maintain muscles (particularly in the legs and hips, important for avoiding dreaded lower-body fractures as we age), gets blood moving and doesn’t put stress and wear and tear on joints like running and some other activities. And walking is something that be done every day for miles, without needing to take days off. Walking is something that can be incorporated thoroughly in human life.

Human beings shouldn’t need gyms to be active. The healthiest places on Earth, as measured by longevity, don’t have a culture of gyms. The very idea that you’d need to go somewhere to get exercise would blow their minds.

Exercise, moving — living — is something that must be done daily. Going to the gym three days a week and running five miles while being sedentary the rest of the walk and driving everywhere is not healthy. It’s better than nothing, but not by that much.

I do get plenty of movement by walking places, using public transportation, owning a German Shepherd/lab mix in an apartment who needs lots of walks and not using a car. But if you really want to push yourself you need data. You need to pick up a Fitbit or something similar that will tell you how much you are moving and set goals.

Hitting and exceeding your goals will cause you to set bigger goals and beat those as well. Some days you’ll check your Fitbit and realize that you’re about 2,000 steps short of your goal. Having this data will help you realize that you need to get more activity in. These little reminders really add up over the course of a year.

My daily goal for my Fitbit is 13,000 steps (6-6.5 miles), but some days I get more and some less; the real key is to try to average 13,000 steps a day over a seven-day period. I’d like to make sure that I get 10,000 steps a day no matter what and have more 15,000 and 20,000 step days (and I’d like to get that 25,000 step badge this year). I need to make sure that I commit myself to being active, even when I’m at conferences or visiting relatives in walking-unfriendly places.

Traveling to places with little walking infrastructure is the first thing that torpedoes a walking goal. Want to be active in a place like that? Off to the gym for you. You’d be surprised at how much of America is incredibly unfriendly to walking, running and biking, but these are just just challenges that will eventually morph into excuses, and I’m committing to more movement in my daily life.

I walked 2,138 miles with my Fitbit last year (some days I didn’t have a Fitbit after my original broke, but I’m back at it with my Fitbit One). I’d like to best that amount, and 2,250 miles in a year seems like a reasonable goal. 2,500? That will take a commitment to more hiking and running, in addition to walking. It’s at least a stretch goal to keep in mind.

While I was physically active in 2012, my strength training fell off the map once I started graduate school. Working full time and taking multiple classes doesn’t leave a lot of time for the gym. I also have a wife, a condo to keep up, a dog, two cats and a fish. But excuses are excuses, and there is no excuse for doing zero strength training in several months.

That time away from strength training will eventually become several years, and I’ll be curved over with a weak hunched back. And my shoulders will hurt from being on the computer too much. And I won’t be able to lift heavy things over my head anymore. I’d like to avoid this future.

Strength training serves several key purposes. Once we hit our 40s (perhaps as early as late 20s), we begin losing muscle mass every year. Strength training can reverse and help prevent this decline. Strength training not also builds strong muscles, but it also strengthens bones, making fractures less likely, particularly as we age.

For a desk jockey like myself who does a lot of writing both words and code, strength training is also what prevents me from having RSI and shoulder problems. It also prevents people from having a hunched back. I make it a point of emphasis to do a lot of back and shoulder exercises, and to make sure that my ability to do a row (a back exercise) is similar to my ability to bench press.

If you have a physical job where you are lifting and moving things, strength training really isn’t that important. You’re naturally building and maintaing muscle. But for those of us whose jobs consist of punching keys and clicking buttons, we don’t have that luxury. I have to lift weights, or I am setting myself for a frail old age. Heck, maybe even a frail middle age.

I’m taking two more classes this semester and plan on this work load until I complete my degree. I’ll be fitting in my full-time job in there too. It’s unrealistic to think that I’ll be able to go the gym frequently with this kind of work load, but I do have weekends and nights without class.

I want to commit to do some kind of strength training at least twice a week, whether it be a big dumbbell and barbell workout or a quick kettlebell workout. You can do a pretty great kettlebell workout in about 10 minutes, because with kettlebells you spend most of your workout moving weights, unlike other weights where you spend most of your time resting in-between sets.

There is one negative of strength training: flexibility. Lifting weights can often make muscles tight. Strength training has left me with tight hips that bother me from time to time. Stretching and yoga help alleviate these issues.

If I’m going to make a renewed commitment to lifting some kind of weights at least twice a week, I need to make a commitment to stretching and yoga. Stretching on a daily basis only takes a few minutes and it can be done before bed, on break at work, in the elevator and all kinds of places.

Yoga requires a bit more work and time. Committing to doing yoga for at least 30 minutes once a week will help keep me flexible. Yoga is also good for balance, and it will make my balance better, which isn’t a concern now, but will be as I get older.

Trying to commit to going to the gym on a daily basis is a recipe for burnout. Unless you love the gym, I don’t recommend it. This is why I have a Fitbit and all this lovely data about my activity, and why I try to incorporate walking into my daily activities. I walk to get groceries, to restaurants, to bars, to the library, to shopping stores, on my breaks from work to see Washington, D.C., etc. If you can get in physical activity while doing everyday tasks, you’re way ahead of where most Americans are.

Even make a commitment to get up once an hour and walk around the office. Get some water, go the bathroom, see some friends. Just get up and move.

Once you can get in a lot of movement without ever going to a gym, it makes it much easier to do formal exercise. If you only get around to it once a week, don’t sweat, you’ve already been active for the entire week. Kettlebells in particular are a great way to get some strength training in. They don’t take up a lot of space, can be hidden away and the workouts don’t take a lot of time for measurable results.

The core difference between kettlebells and other strength training regimes is that you combine anerobic exercise with aerobic exercise. Kettlebell workouts are not only measured in how much weight you lift, but rather in how long you do a lift for. I do each exercise for at least one minute straight without stopping.

I don’t count reps. I just keep doing until the timer tells me to stop. Take a 30 second break and start up the next exercise. You primarily progress not be adding more weight but by adding more time. You start with doing a clean and jerk for one minute straight up to doing it for three minutes straight or more. These exercises both build cardiovascular endurance while also adding muscle.

I have two different kettlebells: a 20-pound one that can be used every day for aerobic activities and a 45-pound one more geared for building strength that I need a day off in-between using it to rest my msucles. Yes, I can lift more weight with my adjustable dumbbells that go up to 90-pounds, but a dumbbell workout is a serious commitment to time, and doesn’t give you the same aerobic advantages. I have also found kettlebells being easier on the shoulders, and even helping to alleviate shoulder pain.

When I do lift dumbbells I am concerned about how much weight I’m lifting, and I am trying to get stronger. I believe the two work well together, and can be a good way to build muscle. Kettlebells can be done every day if you want, and because of how fast-paced the workouts are, don’t require a huge time commitment. When I have the time, however, I can spend an hour or more lifting lots of weight.

As office workers, desk jockeys, thinkers, troublemakers we don’t get in great exercise in our daily lives. We have to commit to getting movement in every day.

In a few days, I’ll be back with my part two, where I focus on how I want to better my mind and my skills in 2013.

Combining a journalism degree with a disparate degree, instead of pursuing multiple journalism degrees

A lot of people are considering getting a master’s degree in journalism, and I think that’s a fine choice if you have an undergraduate degree in something else and are looking to get into journalism or learn more about journalism, but if you have an undergraduate journalism degree, you would be doing a disservice to yourself and journalism by double-downing on journalism and not expanding our academic horizons.

Journalism needs practitioners with varied skill sets, and while there are programs that have different concentrations — digital media, magazine journalism, photojournalism, data journalism, etc. — that’s not quite the same as combining a journalism degree with a computer science degree or a design degree or a political science degree (imagine if more of our political journalists had taken constitutional law classes). I view journalism as a great way to apply what you’ve learned in a subject, and unless you want to be a journalism scholar or researcher, I’m not sure the wisdom of only studying journalism. Journalism is inherently an interdisciplinary field, and it would benefit from a greater breadth of academic and knowledge areas from its practitioners.

If you’re an undergraduate student considering a master’s in journalism, you’d be better off not majoring in journalism as an undergrad. Use that time to play the academic field. Learn about economics, statistics, political theory, computer science, design, sociology and more. Major in something that will compliment your future master’s journalism work.

Journalism school teaches you the ethics of journalism, how to interview and do research, writing, editing, first amendment law and other core journalism skills. These are important skills and topics to know. Taking this knowledge and marrying it with skills and knowledge from another field will only help make you a better journalist.

I’m getting a master’s degree in human-computer interaction, an interdisciplinary field of computer science, information studies, psychology, design and other fields. I’ve long been interested in computers, Web programming and other technical areas. I’m looking to add more to these skills and more rigor to my design and user interface work, and while I could have gotten a master’s degree in digital journalism or something similar, I believe there is a lot of value with studying outside of journalism with non-journalists.

I’m studying and working with people who don’t just want to become great technologists and user experience experts for journalists, but rather people who want to become great technologists and user experience experts. My fellow students have worked at user experience design shops, tech consultancies, academia, Web development shops and more.

When we work together on projects, we bring a vast array of experiences and skills together. I worked with two classmates on a project; one works in consulting and another had worked in Web design and is now looking to work in academia. When we were coming up with ideas for our final project (we had to make a prototype to present to the school to solve a problem) we had different experiences and ideas to lean on, and the ideas we came up with were broader and more innovative because of these differing backgrounds.

Imagine if instead my group was three people whose experience consisted of j school and working for newspapers. We may have come up with something awesome, but I fear we may have also suffered from group think and lack of aggressiveness and imagination. We all would have similar training and backgrounds.

I also fear this is part of what is affecting innovation at news organizations. Diversity in all facets can help lead to change and innovation.

Get a writer, a computer scientist and a designer together in a room and watch the sparks fly. Each one of those people will bring something unique to the table, and have people of different backgrounds working together to solve problems will lead to more solutions.

I’m a supporter of journalism degrees. I think it’s a fantastic undergraduate degree that will serve you in many fields, and a master’s degree in journalism is a good way to get into journalism or to get some more formal journalism training and rigor if you don’t have it. But if you have an undergraduate degree in journalism, is a master’s degree in digital journalism the best way to expand your skill set? Probably not.

There are people who would benefit from multiple journalism degrees. If you want to teach, multiple journalism degrees would be a benefit. If you want to be a scholar of journalism, doing research into journalism while pursuing a graduate degree in journalism makes sense. There are also a few tech-heavy programs that might be a good choice for someone looking to transition to that side of the field.

But I do think there is a lot of value in studying another field with non-journalists. When you’re an undergrad, it can be difficult to plan out your future, and so maybe this is conversation that j school faculty need to be having more amongst themselves and students. Part of it is bringing in professors with more diverse backgrounds to j schools, and part of it is encouraging future journalists to look beyond j school.

Getting a non-journalism degree while working in journalism is one of the best decisions I’ve ever made. It is arming me with skills and experience that are unique for my organization and helping me work with others at my organization to build new products that will serve our users well in the future. And I’m here to tell you Mr. and Mrs. Journalist that you can be successful in other programs.

What do you think, and what would you recommend to students?

On paywalls and journalism as a public service

When Superstorm Sandy began ravaging New Jersey and New York, The New York Times and other publications took their paywalls down.

The information was considered too vital to withhold. Would you really tell someone experiencing the worst natural disaster of his lifetime that you won’t tell him important information about what is going on or about recovery efforts unless he gives you a credit card number? These newspapers with paywalls/pay meters couldn’t bring themselves to withhold information important to safety and even general knowledge about such an event.

And this got me thinking about the NYT’s role the rest of the year (and other news organizations contemplating paywalls/pay meters). Is not the information they publish of public importance? Is it not information that they would want as many people as possible to read and be educated about? Surely The New York Times has information too valuable to a functioning democracy and civil society other times of the year.

The merits of paywalls and pay meters as ways to financially support journalism is another topic altogether, and in general I like the NYT’s porous pay meter structure. What concerns me, however, is the impact that these restrictions on news will have on the public, public opinion, public knowledge and ultimately journalism as a public service.

Superstorm Sandy poised an immediate physical threat to many readers of the NYT. The financial collapse is more ethereal albeit it may have affected many NYT readers much more deeply than Sandy and may have effects on our democracy for generations to come. Fiscal cliff negotiations were also not considered vital enough to lift the NYT pay meter for, despite most Americans being generally ignorant about what was going on. And the latest updates from our foreign wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, which may cost American taxpayers $4 billion dollars in direct costs and future liabilities and have already taken more than 5,000 lives of U.S. soldiers, are not considered important enough to go sans-pay meter.

How do we draw the line as to what information is so important to a functioning democracy and society that we don’t put it behind paywalls and pay meters? Is it only if civilian safety is at immediate risk? Or is it when editors themselves directly feel the effects of a story?

Looking around nytimes.com, one can find plenty of articles and features that aren’t public service. Certainly what happens in the Style section doesn’t need to be seen, no matter how interesting it is to many of us. Nor is what happens in the sports and tech sections and many other areas of the site.

Major newspapers have always been a mix of general interest content and public interest journalism. I propose that news outlets should consider making public interest journalism more freely available, and that a paywall/pay meter should be able to be more porous for public interest journalism.

I would even be willing to pay money to the NYT for war coverage and other public interest journalism, but I would want it to be open for everyone. I already do this with Wikipedia. I donate $100 a year to the site to help keep it free and ad-free, and I’m much more likely to continue that yearly donation if Wikipedia keeps its pages open to everyone throughout the world for free.

The NYT could keep their paywall for access to general interest, opinion and multimedia parts of the site, while keeping public interest journalism open to everyone. People like myself could donate money to the NYT to keep these sections and beats open to the public. Perhaps we could even donate to individual beats and sections.

As a non-New Yorker, I don’t care that much about the education beat, but many in New York City care very much about that. People in the New York area would largely be the supporters of that beat, while foreign war reporting would be something that people all over the world are interested in helping to support.

I donate to Wikipedia because I use the site frequently and believe that my nearly-day use should be supported by money. I also donate to Wikipedia because I know many people, children and students wouldn’t be able to afford Wikipedia if it required a monthly or yearly subscription to access its information. The information contained within many of Wikipedia’s pages is too important and educational to be hidden away for only some to read.

The same is true of many news organizations. Yes, much of journalism isn’t public service and opinion pieces and thought pieces don’t need to be free. I’m not arguing against asking people to pay for content and journalism, but I am arguing that some journalism is too important to restrict to only those with means.

Getting the band back together

The Journalism Iconoclast is back.

In 2009, after several years of daily blogging and success, I changed the concept of this blog and the name. And I changed it again and again. Nothing took. My heart was never in it, and this blog has largely died over the last three years.

2009 was a dark year for me. BeatBlogging.org came to an end, and I couldn’t find a new job in journalism. It was a dark time for much of journalism, and jobs were being slashed left and right. I just didn’t have the same fire to blog anymore. I think I lost a lot of fire that year.

But it’s a new year and a new me. My new year’s resolution is to embrace who I am, and to get back to something that I love very much.

Now that I’m again focused on the future of journalism and pushing journalism forward, it’s time for me to come home. The Journalism Iconoclast is back. It’s who I am.

I should have never run from it.

I’m older, wiser, kinder and gentler than many of you may have remembered me and this blog. But I still care deeply about journalism and making journalism successful for generations to come. And I’ll never apologize for that.

My initial exodus from full-time journalism work took me to the non-profit world and to focusing on technology full time — a common retirement ground for ex-journalists. But then a funny thing happened.

My next non-profit job happened to be at a non-profit that has several publications. And the fire was reborn.

In the past few years, I’ve started The Interchange Project — a blog and podcast about the intersection of technology and the liberal arts. You’ll find my technology thoughts there, and even many of my journalism technology thoughts.

I’m also more focused on technology than ever. I’m getting a master’s degree in human-computer interaction. I believe the future of journalism needs people who study outside of journalism to bring in fresh new ideas.

I don’t know what the future of this blog holds, but I hope you’ll join me.

I’ve never been afraid to challenge practices, people, companies or ideas. I hope you’ll never be afraid to challenge me or my ideas. This blog was always supposed to be a conversation. I hope we can push that conversation forward.

Cheers,
Pat

My iPad setup

ХудожникOver at the Interchange Project I detail — and I mean detail –my iPad setup, which is a key part of my writing workflow:

A big part of what I do is write and take notes, and that part of my workflow will be the main focus of this post. I use several programs for this purpose: Omnioutliner, Byword and Simplenote (note: Simplenote is both an app and a Web service). They each serve a purpose, and I do not like programs like Word that try to be all things to all people.

Take a look at Word sometime and ask yourself is that a writing environment that inspires creativity? It looks like something designed for making corporate memos. Byword’s beauty and simplicity focuses on your words only, letting you create your own palette with your words.

If you’re a journalist, writer or someone just looking to use your iPad more for work, this is the post for you.

On writing

This was originally posted over at the Interchange Project.

This is my second day using the Das Keyboard full time. I can’t tell if this is on account of me being just a massive tech nerd or if it really is about the keyboard itself, but I couldn’t wait to wake up this morning and start typing on this keyboard. It was like Christmas for a writer.

Wanting to write — anything at all — is every writer’s dream. We don’t dread verbal diarrhea. There is no such thing as too many words. Those can be edited away.

We dread those lonely, days, weeks, months and even years when we feel like we have nothing to write, nothing to say. I suppose how much the physical act of writing is enjoyable plays into that equation as well. I don’t enjoy writing with pens and pencils for anything beyond short note taking and brainstorm.

I’d never be a writer if I had to write everything by hand. My hand writing is atrocious. I don’t write particularly fast, and I find that when I truly get on a writing tear — and all writers know what a writing tear feels like emotionally — my hand begins to give out long before my mind and muse do.

I suppose that if I lived in a different time with different societal norms, someone would have really impressed into me the importance of good hand writing, and I would have had to work at it relentlessly or I wouldn’t have been able to get an education. As it is, I had to take extra hand writing lessons as a kid growing up. Perhaps, this is why I’m such a good typist and why I love keyboards and computers.

With pen and paper, I’m behind the curve as a writer. I’m someone whose teachers deemed his hand writing unworthy, and by extension, given the times, his very writing unworthy. To live in a world where hand writing matters is to live in a world where hand writing is the core of writing, and the ideas and the words themselves fade into the background.

As I methodically strike these keys, and as they click and clack back at me, my words are appearing for anyone to clearly read, to judge on their very merits as words and ideas. And my words can be shared with anyone all over the world — hardly something that I could have dreamed of when sitting in extra sessions during lunch in grade school to learn how to make my writing easier to read.

The only thing holding back my writing now is my mind. I can be as wild and free as I want to be, and I can share my thoughts with anyone that wants to read them.

It’s hard to say why I couldn’t wait to wake up this mourning and start writing, but I do know this: Without a good keyboard, I wouldn’t be sharing these thoughts with you. For me, a keyboard and computer are much more than tools; they’re my voice to the world.