Are institutional memory and inertia killing the newspaper industry?

After reading the comments on a myriad of posts from journalists stuck in the past, I can’t help but think that there is no future for newspapers as long as the majority of their staffs (editorial and business) — and their collective institutional memories — are still around. Every change that is proposed, every new idea that is thought of, every staff cut that is made, is always compared to the old way of doing things.

The problem is that the old way of doing things for newspapers shares nothing in common with what 21st-century journalism is shaping up to be. What we are seeing is not a major change for the newspaper industry. It is a monumental rethinking of everything that newspapers have ever done.

This isn’t going from gas-powered cars to fuel cells. This is more akin to colonizing space.

And if you’re not prepared to colonize space, get the hell out of the way.

Can you imagine tailoring your reporting to fit a space dictated by a medium and not by the actual story?

Unreal. Imagine a world in which you write as much or as little as needed. Have one photo to go with a story? Have 500? Want to link to other sites, documents, databases and content?

That’s the power of the Web. That’s the power of blogging your beat.

The beat blog killed the news hole.

But I’m saving more links to my delicious feed in the right column, and I’m conversing more than ever on Twitter.

And, of course, I’m blogging at BeatBlogging.Org. If you’re looking for beat reporters pushing the practice using online tools and social networking, that’s the place to be. Want to modernize your beat reporting? Go to BeatBlogging.Org immediately.

I encourage you to check out my delicious links. They are almost entirely journalism focused (often online journalism related), and I always save a blurb (either a quote or my thoughts) about each link. They are updating constantly throughout the day, and now that I looking into the journalism industry as my full-time job, I have a lot more links to share.

If there is sufficient demand, I would consider doing a daily link post like many blogs do. I put the the delicious feed in the right column so that you could get new links all day long, instead of once a day.

Time to go write a real post.

A lot of journalists got into this business because they like to tell stories.

I think that’s one fundamental reason why so many journalists have a hard time adapting to the changing news landscape. For me, it was never about the story — it was always about the information and news.

So, if the format changes, it doesn’t really bother me. I’m not married to the format or the medium. I’m not here to weave intricate narratives and tell stories.

In fact, I’m not very good at telling oral stories. But I can tell you a lot of facts, figures and information.

This post was brought on by two things. First, the other night I was getting some drinks with some journalists and one said, “I’m not a journalist. I’m a storyteller.” He talked about how he had trouble keeping his stories short and didn’t like taking out quotes and information for brevity.

Obviously, his work was more for himself than for his readers. That’s does not serve our readers well, and it certainly doesn’t help journalism.

The second part of this post was inspired by a post by Howard Owens, “Not all information needs to be crafted into a story:”

Storytelling, whether written or visual, then becomes something that is more about serving your own ego than serving your readers.

So check your ego, whether writing or shooting, and give people useful or entertaining information in an accessible package.  Save the storytelling for when you really have a story to tell.

A lot of journalism seems to be ego driven. Some journalists report on what they want to cover, in the mediums they want to report in. It has very little to do with what people actually want.

But we’re in a business. We have to produce a product that people want. And most people just don’t read the whole story (thanks to Owens for the link):

But here’s the thing: journalists have always been far more entranced by ‘the story’ than audiences. Less than a quarter of newspaper readers claim to read to the end of a story, even one they’re interested in … and of those, over two thirds don’t read every word.

Yes, sometimes journalism is storytelling, but as Owens notes, we should save the storytelling for when we have really good stories to tell. I see so many feature, anecdotal and other non-news ledes on stories that are really just news stories.

Let me tell you something: I have stopped reading a lot of news stories because I didn’t want to put up with another boring feature lede on a news story. I wanted the news, and I wasn’t willing to wait for some journalist’s ego to go by. And I’ve read some great non-news ledes and they were usually on great feature stories.

If you’re a storyteller, it’s no fun to have to truncate your stories. Is it really a good story then? Is blogging a good storytelling medium? Probably not.

But if you’re in the business of providing facts, figures, information — news — you’ll find blogging and Web journalism to be amazing. The Web (and its mobile cousin) provide a great deal of immediacy and depth that print never could. The Internet is an awesome vehicle for information.

Too many journalists think of themselves as storytellers and not as journalists. People ultimately want journalism so they can be informed. I think if we concentrate on making journalism that people want, we’ll find ourselves and our industry in much better shape.

And sometimes people want great stories, but let’s not force every news item into the storytelling format.

It was another crushing week of buyouts and layoffs at daily newspapers all over the country.

The Palm Beach Post will be seeing almost half of its editorial positions slashed by the end of summer. The San Jose Mercury News will be down to 155 editorial employees by the end of the week from a high of around 420. The Merc will have lost about 63% of its editorial staff.

Metro newspapers don’t really excel at anything, and in the era of niche publications, does that model still make sense? The Star-Ledger has found success with a niche publication, Pharmalot. Is that the model for metros to move forward?

John Hassell, the online editor at The Star-Ledger, said that he can envision a future where newspapers are a network of niche blogs like Pharmalot. That future makes more sense to me than the current metro newspaper model.

This all brings us to Today’s Thought: Are the days of the metro newspaper officially numbered?

Over at BeatBlogging.org, I have a post about how “Beat Blogging allows reporters to concentrate on core reporting”:

When writing for the print edition, reporters often have to spend large amounts of time getting “man on the street” quotes from random people to flush out stories.

Not with blogging. That’s what the comment section of each blog post is for. That frees up a reporter to focus on his or her core job — reporting.

Example: Let’s say I’m an education reporter and the latest budget for a school district I am covering is announced. The story would detail the new budget with regards to the previous one, any cuts or additions, what the super superintendent thinks, perhaps a school board contact and maybe a few comments from teachers. It all really depends on how much the budget has changed.

But most editors would say that’s not the full story. They would want to know what “real people” think about the new budget. An editor would tell that reporter to call up random parents, until he or she has some quality quotes. The problem is those comments often take a long time to obtain:

Kent Fischer of the Dallas Morning News estimates that he used to spend upwards of 80% of his time getting those quotes to appease his editors for the print edition. His blog and beat are on the Dallas Independent School District, and his editors always wanted a parent’s voice or some other readers thoughts in his stories.

Fischer called that kind of reporting “contrived.” He had to fish around for quotes from random people, which would often eat up precious hours of his day that he could have used to report on more topics.

Often times those comments really are contrived. I know it, you know it — heck any reporter knows it. How many of those parents that would be contacted would have really looked over the full budget or had time to digest what had just been announced? Not many.

But that’s the beauty of using a blog to beat report. Anyone can leave a comment on a blog voicing his or her concerns or approval of the latest budget. This means a lot more than the few parents normally quoted in a print story can have a voice. Anyone can have a voice now — parents, students, teachers, etc.

It gets better. People can respond to each other, have a dialogue and form a community in the comment section of a blog. Often a story can come alive in the comments section where people begin to really digest and discuss what has happened.

And blogging also allows reporters to link to relevant content — like say the budget and other documents about school spending. Print could never do that.

Beat Blogging is about making reporting better and more modern. And wouldn’t being able to spend more time reporting and less time trolling for random comments make your reporting better?

You can read my full post on this subject here.

I’ve spent the last two years producing journalism in a myriad of formats and the last year arguing for ways to modernize and make relevant journalism in the 21st century.

I’ve argued for reinventing journalism. I’ve argued for journalists to let go of everything they’ve ever known.

Ultimately, informing people is my passion. I care deeply about journalism. I hope that’s what you’ve taken home from my blog over the past year.

I don’t care so much what medium or what form it takes. I just care about giving people information. I just want to make journalism better than it is.

I’ve been presented with a great opportunity to do just that, which is why I’m joining the Beat Blogging project with NYU’s PressThinker, Jay Rosen. Together we’re trying to discover how beat reporters are pushing the practice of journalism using Web tools like blogging and social networking.

Jay is one of those professors who gets it. He understands that journalism needs to change, and he has actively been pursuing ways to modernize journalism with projects like NewAssignment.Net, AssignmentZero.com, OffTheBus.Net and, of course, BeatBlogging.Org. It’s an honor to get to work with someone who has dedicated his career to improving journalism.

This project gives me the opportunity to do just that: improve the practice by adapting it better to the Web. It’s something I really believe in. And when I believe in something, I give it my all.

David Cohn did a fantastic job of getting this project rolling. But now it’s his time to push the practice of journalism further with his start-up Spot.Us. David is the kind of person journalism needs more of — smart, dedicated, innovative and, most of all, entrepreneurial. He got the Knight Foundation to give him $340,000 for his innovative idea.

David knows the future of journalism will look nothing like the past. He is actively working to make journalism better. We all need to be.

I’ve been out of college for two years, working to produce content that people care about. But now I can finally say my career has begun, because I’ll get to spend everyday working on the next phase of journalism, adapting the core practice of journalism — reporting — to the web.

That’s what Beat Blogging is all about.  Right now, there are beat reporters rethinking what it means to be a journalist. They are using new tools to do their jobs quicker and more effectively, while also engaging their communities better. Those are the journalists we want to highlight.

Join me as I scour the World Wide Web for the people who are pushing the practice of beat reporting. It promises to be an informational and wild ride.

P.S. Check out Jay’s post about Beat Blogging, where he looks back at the project six months in. Jay lays out how the project has gone and what the future will hold.

After cooling down and thinking about the situation more, I’ve got some new thoughts.

The Associated Press is in bind, with very few good options. AP makes money off of selling their content for someone else to publish, which is quite different than a media organization like The New York Times. The Times makes the vast majority of its money off of advertising.

The Times doesn’t have to charge for content and, in fact, doesn’t online. Having blogs like The Drudge Retort (the dumbest and most unoriginal blog concept ever, by the way) link to Times’ content, directly contributes to the Times’ bottom line. The powers that be at the Times probably don’t mind people taking short excerpts of their content in exchange for links.

But linking doesn’t directly contribute to the bottom line for the AP. The AP only makes money when they sell their content for someone else to repurpose. Perhaps bloggers will need to treat wire service content different than other content.

In the end, I think the AP should have left well enough alone. The Drudge Retort is not worth their time, and that blog doesn’t need AP content to survive or thrive. If I was going to risk a public relations nightmare (and that’s what this whole situation ultimately has been), I would have gone after a bigger, more insidious target.

Nobody can deny that lifting entire works, or large parts of a work, without compensation is wrong. But to challenge the Fair Use Doctrine over excerpts is a very poor position to be in for a company that needs freedom of speech to survive. Someone will have to decide what is Fair Use and what is copyright infringement. That someone should ultimately be legislators or judges — not journalism organizations.

If I were the AP, I would have handled this behind closed doors, without “heavy-handed” takedown notices (the AP’s words, not mine). I would have said, “look, our content is different than other media content on the Web; we need to talk about what is and what isn’t appropriate when it comes to our content.” I would have approached it as a conversation, instead of attacking bloggers for “breaking the law” (the Fair Use Doctrine is very murky, by the way).

The AP’s original actions were overly reactionary, kind of like my original post on this subject. That’s why I’m here looking at this issue from the other side. I understand AP’s dilemma, but I think they found the worst possible way to approach this issue.

Although, judging by how much of the journalism and blogging communities are reacting, maybe my original post was too kind. It’s a shame that the AP has not shown any real Web-savvyness and, honestly, might be threatening its own future. This isn’t the first time, either.

You have to pick your battles, and this was a poor battle to pick.

If you haven’t downloaded Firefox 3 (on all your computers), you should do so immediately.

It rocks. It’s faster, more secure and has better features. Plus, it has a new UI that looks better, and matches each OS it is running under.

Firefox 3 is a testament to how powerful open source software can be. It’s substantially better than Internet Explorer 7. Heck, Firefox 2 was substantially better too.

It’s amazing/embarrassing for the human race that people still use Internet Explorer. It’s like admitting you’re a failure. Not only is Firefox a better browser than Internet Explorer, but so are Safari, Opera, etc, etc.

Mozilla and Firefox liberated us from the tyranny of Microsoft. Many forget that Internet Explorer once had market penetration in excess of 90%. Why is that a problem? Internet Explorer used to have poor Web standards support (it still lags behind all other major browsers), and Microsoft saw little need to build a better Web browser than Internet Explorer 6 because little money is made off of Web browsers.

Simply put, IE threatened the evolution of the Web. Firefox ultimately forced Microsoft’s hand into developing a better Web browser. IE 7 is substantially better than IE 6, and IE 8 finally promises to have good Web standards support. But, IE still lags behind Firefox for speed, features and security.

I guarantee you’ll love Firefox 3. What’s the best new feature in Firefox 3? Hands down, the awesome bar, which takes the location bar (where you type URLs in) to a whole new level.

There is no excuse not to upgrade to Firefox 3 today. It is the world’s best browser (Safari 3 on OS X 10.5 is a beast too).

I’m officially boycotting the Associated Press.

Today. Tomorrow. Forever.

Please do not forward me links to AP stories. There are plenty of other news outlets that cover the same exact stories from the same exact angles. But most of those news outlets aren’t bat shit stupid about the 21st century.

Why am I so angry? The AP just said fuck you to Fair Use. They just said fuck you to America. They just said fuck you to each and every one of us.

AP wants to charge people for taking excerpts as small as 5 words from its stories. 5 words?!?! I can understand asking for compensation if people lifted large passages of your work or the work in its entirety but for 5 words?

This is such an incredibly 20th century policy. People linking to AP stories is good for the AP. It sends traffic to their content.

The symbiosis that bloggers and media outlets have enjoyed over the past 10 years has been beneficial to all. In exchange for taking excerpts of content (which is permissible under Fair Use), bloggers link back to the original source. That way if people are interested in the topic, they can read more about it, which makes money for the original media outlet.

Patrick Nielsen’s analysis is spot on:

The New York Times, an AP member organization, refers to this as an “attempt to define clear standards as to how much of its articles and broadcasts bloggers and Web sites can excerpt.” I suggest it’s better described as yet another attempt by a big media company to replace the established legal and social order with with a system of private law (the very definition of the word “privilege”) in which a few private organizations get to dictate to the rest of society what the rules will be.

You see what I did there? I took an excerpt of his post, and, in exchange, I linked to the original post (which you should all check out). I’m going to send his post a lot of traffic, which will make him and Making Light more money.

Heck, that’s why it is called the World Wide WEB. It’s a WEB of interconnected information. Can you imagine a world in which merely excerpting small amounts of information will result in you owing at least $12.50? Or $100?

This whole episode also has massive ramifications for free speech as Cory Doctorow points out (which the AP claims to like):

Welcome to a world in which you won’t be able to effectively criticize the press, because you’ll be required to pay to quote as few as five words from what they publish.

The people pushing for this stuff are not well-meaning, and they are not interested in making life better for artists, writers, or any other kind of individual creators. They are would-be aristocrats who fully intend to return us to a society of orders and classes, and they’re using so-called “intellectual property” law as a tool with which to do it.

Bloggers, citizens and people who believe in the rule of law should band together and pledge to boycott the AP, unless they drop this ridiculous policy.