One of my favorite journalism blogs is Journerdism, and it just got better with a new redesign.

The new look is certainly sharper, but what I really like is how Will Sullivan is positioning his content differently. Instead of doing big updates with multiple small stories, he is posting each item as its own update. In many ways it just makes more sense.

Reading through 10 tidbits and links in one post can be daunting, but reading a few separate posts a day is much easier to digest. It’s also more in tune with new media. A continuous news cycle is where all newspapers should be headed and blogs too.

We still see many sites (mine included from time to time) that pile on a lot of content at one time and then go dormant.

Sullivan brought a continuous news cycle to his blo, and I think makes for a much more enjoyable experience. For other bloggers out there who do big updates with a lot of links, I’d consider a format similar to Journerdism.

The site is still very much new, however, and it does have a few bugs and inconsistencies that I’m sure Sullivan is ironing out. Regardless, it should be one of first new media journalism sites you read each day.

I’m going to experiment with updating my blog in a similar fashion. My blog posts are traditionally broken up into two different classes: my longer-more indepth writings and my “today’s thoughts” posts that often have multiple shorter tidbits of information. The latter also tends to be more link driven, while the former is more original content.

I’m going to do away with the today’s thoughts concept for a few weeks and see how it goes. Let me know your thoughts too.

I was on vacation up until yesterday, which is why the updates have been slow on this blog. A lot of good content is coming soon.

Many of you are freelance writers, photographers, designers, etc. Is there a better way to possibly display your work than through a Web site that anyone in the world can see?

No.

A well designed, easy-to-navigate site is a great place to display works, especially for journalists. I tell my writer friends all the time to build a Web site for their clips. Instead of photocopying clips and snail mailing them away, you can have a digital portfolio that is accessible by anyone.

Sean Blanda has an interesting post about the subject. Every freelancer, journalist, etc should have a personal Web site (it’s a good way to get more work). More importantly, however, it should be a good Web site. Don’t waste your time making a Web site that embarrasses you and detracts from you work.

Blanda’s post was inspired by his own desires to make a new site, but when he looked around for inspiration from fellow freelancer writers, he realized their sites weren’t very good.

His recommendations are:

1. Make the writer easy to contact
2. Present themselves as a business, not an individual with a Blogger account
3. Have a home page that does not try to list all of your articles
4. Let the user decide if they want more details on you or your work
5. Support transparency and answer questions people have about your article/book/etc.
6. Stand out without compromising usability

His site, however, is an example of what not to do. It’s buggy, a lot of pages don’t have content and there are several glitches. I don’t know if he is working on the site right now, but don’t use his site as an example.

But his advice is very sound, which is probably why he realizes he needs to make a new site. Don’t have pages without content on them and make sure features work on all pages. And you must test your Web site across Internet Explorer 6 and 7, FireFox 1 and 2 and Safari at the minimum.

If you follow those recommendations, you’ll be well on your way to having a quality Web site to display your work. A good Web site will help any journalist professionally. No one ever looks down on you for having a strong Web presence.

When I designed The Pat Thornton Files a few a year ago, my goal was to build something that was clean, elegant and easy to use. It was important for me to display some of my varying works between writing, Web design, graphic design and photography. I also needed a site that would allow people to easily contact me and view my résumé.

Since, I built the original site, I have been adding additional graphical flourishes, like CSS and Ajax effects. I added these later because they weren’t crucial — my work was the main attraction. The additional effects, however, fit in perfectly with my design because I kept the design simple and flexible (ala Apple.com).

If you’re not a graphic designer, don’t try to be one. That’s the No. 1 mistake people make when designing sites. I have years of experience with photoshop and design, but I wouldn’t consider myself a graphic designer.

My advice is to be elegant, keep your site clean, display your best work (not all of it), make it easy for people to find out about you and be easy to contact. Every Web site should have a contact form. Just listing an e-mail address is unprofessional and may lead to you getting spammed out of your mind..

The Web is your friend journalists.

Let it make you a better journalist.

I’ll admit, I was suspect of the concept of the CNN / YouTube debates.

I mean, really, does it matter how the questions are asked? Candidates just give canned answers anyway. That’s still true, but the YouTube debate of the democratic primary ended up going off pretty well.

Unlike other sites, I am not going to try to rate the candidates’ performances (despite my political science degree). Rather, I am going to talk about the more technical aspects of the format and the inclusion of YouTube.

Good:
The No. 1 positive of the debates was an increased sense of humanity from the questioners. Most town hall-style debates don’t have questioners who are nearly as impassioned. It’s largely the format.

First, a lot of people are camera shy and don’t like getting up in front of millions of people. Second, only certain people have access to those debates. The debate has to be in your area, it has to fit your schedule (Americans are busy people) and you have to be able to get tickets.

YouTube changes all of that. Anyone, anywhere can send in a question. They don’t have to worry about the camera, because they can rehearse their question over and over again until they feel comfortable. The YouTube format also encourages users to ask the tough questions.

The debate featured some of the best questions I have seen in a long time and often some very good answers.

Also, the debate was watchable online. That’s a must. Not everyone has CNN where they are (an intern friend of mine was only able to catch the debate because it was live on the Web), and not everyone wants to watch it on TV. Even better, it was easy to find the debate online to watch after the fact.

That’s what the main stream media needs to do more of. A lot of media companies have great content but they are unwilling to expand their delivery options. It’s very important to allow people to consume content how they want to when they want to.

That’s one major triumph of these debates. Everyone can still check out the individual debate questions (if you want to pick and choose which ones you want to watch) for months after this debate. It will be a great tool allowing people to compare debate performances over the coming months.

Bad:
The No. 1 problem of this debate was the amount of candidates debating. Eight candidates is a minimum three too many. I know that it is extremely early in the race and no one should be written off, but the debate got boring when some of the better candidates had to wait 20-30 minutes in between talking.

This debate format led itself well to some quality questions. Quality questions need quality answers. Does everyone really believe there are eight worthy democratic candidates? Of course not.

Somewhere between three to five candidates would be the sweet spot. It would allow for more responses for each candidates and a lot more time for rebuttals. It would be a real debate.

I give CNN some props for partnering with YouTube. That took some guts, but it was a better debate format than normal. I would be shocked if they didn’t pull in a lot of extra younger viewers this time.

A few years ago I rarely watched CNN and never went to cnn.com, because it was a stodgy company that looked dated compared to its competitors. Now, it’s a trail blazer and it’s producing some of the most compelling content out there.

All in all, I think the debate was successful. The format could use some tweaking and certainly less candidates, but the questions were real and that’s what this nation needs. And it’s great to be able to consume the debate in the format that works best for you.

Reporting is important and it always will be
No matter how much I stress the importance that journalists need to learn Web and new media skills, there is one thing I will always mention: reporting skills are a must. The world will always need people who can work leads and cultivate sources. That’s a given.

And no amount of video editing or programming skills will ever make you a journalist. You have to be a journalist and a reporter first.

It’s important for journalists and j-school students to realize that the ability to be a reporter is timeless. It’s the method of your reporting that isn’t.

Just as television deeply impacted radio news, the Web will deeply impact print journalism. But all of it is still journalism and all those formats need reporters.

The key to succeeding in the 21st century will be combining solid reporting skills with being media and platform agnostic.

After all if you can be a newspaper reporter, why can’t you be a Web reporter? It’s simple, you can.

Goodbye to Newspapers?
Are newspapers on their way out and have all forms of journalism lost their way?

Russell Baker’s New York Times review of “When the Press Fails: Political Power and the New Media from Iraq to Katrina” by W. Lance Bennett, Regina G. Lawrence, and Steven Livingston, highlights some of the best points of the book. It’s a good read for people trying to understand the downfall of newspapers.

Much of the problems with newspapers go far beyond editorial issues and a lack of new media savvy. Most of those issues can be attributed to the business end and its narrow-minded pursuit of profits above all. Journalism wasn’t founded around making money.

Journalism was, and should be, about informing the public and keeping government and businesses honest. Obviously, journalism needs to make some money, but it’s only goal was never supposed to be just profits. John S. Carroll, former editor of the Los Angeles Times said it well a few years ago:

We have seen a narrowing of the purpose of the newspaper in the eyes of its owner. Under the old local owners, a newspaper’s capacity for making money was only part of its value. Today, it is everything. Gone is the notion that a newspaper should lead, that it has an obligation to its community, that it is beholden to the public….

Someday, I suspect, when we look back on these forty years, we will wonder how we allowed the public good to be so deeply subordinated to private gain….

What do the current owners want from their newspapers?— the answer could not be simpler: Money. That’s it.

Can journalism be saved from the ravages of Wall Street? I don’t know. It may need to crash and burn and then rise from the ashes to become what it was supposed to be — what it needs to be.

Rob Curley of the Washington Post has said there are only five publishers in the U.S. he would work for. Five! The rest don’t get new media or don’t care about journalism or are falling apart.

The Web is an amazing format for journalism. It allows for continuous coverage, interaction and new ways of telling stories. The companies that aren’t beholden to quarterly profits will be the ones that make the biggest waves in the coming years.

My brother, who works for Tribune Co., once told me that shareholders expect the high profit margin that its holding typically got, which is why Tribune kept cutting costs and staff. They had to maintain that fat profit margin.

That was their obligation and it shows within many of Tribune’s holdings. Carroll left the Times because he refused to cut anymore staff.

Newspapers do need to embrace new media and deliver the content that people want. But the publishers, owners of papers, corporate boards, etc need to allow editors and journalists to be able to create that content.

If they don’t, everyone loses.

People love photos.

No, they really, really love photos.

Don’t believe me? Check out flickr, webshots or even facebook. The digital revolution has allowed everyone to cheaply take and share photos. People absolutely love photos.

68% Respondents to a survey I commissioned for my 2006 award-winning honors thesis on the impact of the Web on newspaper said they found photo galleries appealing or very appealing. Video, often thought of as the new media wunderkind, was found to be appealing or very appealing by 51% of respondents.

It should be noted my survey was of college students only. So, any suggestion that video will become more popular as younger audiences age is probably false. Video is important moving forward, but not before papers utilize photos like they should be.

Photos continued to get ignored, while everyone is pushing video. Newspapers already take some of the best photos anywhere, now they just need to harness them. If you take dozens of photos (or hundreds of thousands) with every story, why do you usually only put one photo online with each story?

Put as many good and relevant photos as you have online. In fact, I often see less photos online. This doesn’t mean you have to be creating photo galleries left and right, but it does mean more photos should be attached to stories.

This is how I would harness photos better.

1. Attach more photos to stories

If I have five good shots from an event, I’ll use them all. There is no need for me to just stick one shot per story.

2. Develop a system that allows for easy creation of non-Flash photo galleries

Every time you have more than a few photos doesn’t mean you need to bust out Flash. It makes sense to have your Web site automatically create a photo gallery once you upload more than a certain number of photos. A simple Ajax gallery would work well and would allow for an easy way to create smaller photo galleries.

This system should require no technical work by those uploading the photos.

3. More photo essays with Flash (or Ajax)

This is for the bigger galleries, when you have a lot of really good photos. It is probably more along the lines of a photo essay. These are the kinds of galleries that stand on their own, where the previous ones go with a story. Most newspapers need to do more of these.

Maybe it means doing a photo essay a day, or doing one whenever you have a big story. Maybe it means doing a gallery for the best photos of the week. Think outside the box and do something exciting.

4. Tag photos.

I don’t care about your legacy systems or how everything is built around your print operations. Those are excuses.

What I do care about is delivering content and technology that users want. Because ultimately it is the users that matter. They want a better way to consume and find photos.

So, tag your photos! Every photo doesn’t need a caption, especially if you post a gallery with 100 shots from a local football game (Users will eat this up. Trust me, your print instincts are wrong on this). I’m not going to read 100 captions, but every photo should be tagged. Every player in the shot tagged, all the teams, the event, etc.

If the photo gallery between West High and East High is tagged with both schools’ names, the date they played and who is in all the photos, that’s all I really need to know. There will be a full-fledged story with the game anyway. I don’t need a novel with each photo.

Tagging makes a lot more sense than just relying on captions. When I look at photos on facebook, most don’t have captions, but they are tagged. I know the event, I know the people in them and I usually know when it happens. That’s all I usually need to know.

Remember photo galleries and photo essays aren’t the same thing.

But tagging is so much more than that. If something is tagged, it is incredibly searchable. The searchability of photos on most Web sites is alarmingly bad.

People would get fired if stories were that unsearchable. Tag your photos, now.

5. User photos.

User-generated content is here to stay, but it needs to be utilized correctly. The easiest and best way to harness it is through photos. Maybe you didn’t get shots of that local carnival but your readers did. Soliciting their photos will get them both involved and get you content. What more could you ask for?

Relevant photo galleries from users are also popular. In my honors thesis, I noted The Morning Call had photo galleries from users that were 66% as popular as staff galleries. That’s really good when you consider the content is free.

Newspapers take great photos. They need to start utilizing them and technology better. Don’t talk to me about video unless you have already hit a home run with your photos.

Let’s start showing photos the love they deserve.

Just how will hyperlocal make money and have good content at the same time?

Backfence tried to make money without rich, compelling content. The key is giving users quality content, which costs money to produce. You spend money to make money.

Can we honestly expect a journalism site to succeed long term without quality journalism? Sites like facebook thrive off of user-generated content because the technology is cutting edge, and it is focused around a niche.

Facebook started as an online version of the “facebooks” that freshmen students got when they matriculated each fall. The idea was to not only allow students to find out about each other, but to also allow them to connect with one another. It made the whole process of making friends and starting school easier.

It was a far better product than the print versions, and it rendered them instantly obsolete. Most hyperlocal sites pale in comparison to newspapers in terms of content and reasons to use them. That’s why companies can’t look at facebook and think that if they build a site with community-publishing tools, users will come.

You need more than just tools and technology.

Tom Grubisich over at The Online Journalism Review explains how he would have staffed Backfence with an estimated $1.6 million dollar budget from ad sales. The crux of his argument is that a hyperlocal site needs to pay people to make content. The idea that users will create content and dictate its direction is probably misguided at best.

Citizens are apart of the conversation now, but that doesn’t mean they are the conversation. They have full-time jobs, families and other engagements. Hyperlocal can’t expect them to carry the load.

The Backfence strategy – expecting its communities to deliver compelling content without any inspiration, mentoring or compensation – was doomed to fail. The result was stories and commentaries that rarely made anyone sit up and take notice. When Backfence announced its impending demise on its homepages on June 29, users, the few there were, paid almost no notice. Boring content meant weak traffic, and the most aggressive “feet-meet-the-street” ad staff can’t sell that.

Rather, we should expect citizens to augment the load and help expand our coverage and generate a meaningful conversation. This means having full-time staff to help produce and cultivate content.

Backfence expected its contributors to work for nothing. Its founders piously maintained that financial compensation was the last thing contributors wanted or expected. Many people donate their time to their church or congregation, neighborhood school or library and charitable organizations. But why should they work free so a for-profit company can justify its business model and rake in more money?

I propose that regular citizen contributors – working, say, 40 or 50 hours a month – be paid a $1,000 monthly stipend. That comes to $20 to $25 an hour – not a lot, but not an insulting amount, either. If you’re a retiree, a stay-at-home mom (or dad) or somebody looking to close a household budget gap, $1,000 a month for a few hours here, a few hours there, may seem like a pretty good deal.

Whether or not you want to go to the Grubisich’s model and pay a lot of citizen contributors or not, is one thing, but I believe paid contributors are a must. The Washington Post has a staff of writers producing daily content for LoudounExtra.com. I think that quality journalism is one reason that site has a good chance of succeeding.

The idea of paying a bunch of people $1,000 stipends to produce content every month is pretty solid idea. I might go a more traditional route and have a team of stringers. I also think any hyperlocal project needs at least a few full-time people to produce daily content.

What is clear, however, is that we can’t just produce a Web site with tools and expect random people to create meaningful journalism that is important to people’s lives.

LoudounExtra.com has become hyperlocal journalism’s new hope.

The dazzling new site by The Washington Post is loaded with stuff to read and discover. It might be the site that finally puts the journalism in hyperlocal journalism.

But will LoudounExtra.com succeed where others have failed?

Only time will tell. Let’s take a loot at the good and bad of this exciting new venture.

The good:

You can clearly tell this site is made by the Post. It’s a looker. It’s very sleek and shares a lot of DNA with www.washingtonpost.com. The site manages to get a lot information on its homepage without feeling overdone. Many journalism sites suffer from “the wall,” as I like to call it. Those sites are just obtrusive walls of information that turn viewers away.

LoudounExtra is not that site. It doesn’t have an unnecessary side navigation bar with lots of useless links (I’m looking at you NY Times).

Most sites, www.washingtonpost.com included, use tiny photos and don’t play up their big stories, which I hate. Not this site. This site manages to use big photos to display major stories, but also find a way to display more than one using an innovative Flash interface.

But looks don’t make a hyperlocal site. This site has content and lotst of it. It’s not some pretend site that relies on citizen journalism to provide content. No, the staff spent months getting tons of quality information, and it is regularly updated with more journalism.

It has a guide with every restaurant in the county, complete with user reviews. It also has a database of all the places of worship in the, broken down by denomination, and a guide to schools in the county, broken down by type (high school, middle school, private, boarding, etc).

The best database is one dedicated to all the events happening in the county. It is, of course, searchable. Lots of newspaper put “events” online, but they usually do so in huge, hard-to-read, barely-searchable HTML files.

That’s so 1995. This site treats each event as a separate database file, making them easily searchable and displayable.

What are so special about these databases? Because they provide the kind of information that will make this site the center of people’s lives in Loudoun County. That’s what was missing with sites like Backfence.

Users of Backfence didn’t go to Backfence first if they needed to find something. They went trolling around Web 1.0 sites they found through Google, because Backfence wasn’t a portal to their lives. It relied heavily on the nebulous concept of citizen journalism, and not enough on real journalism or the kind of quality database content that people need in their lives.

Perhaps, the biggest good thing about the site is the staff of dedicated journalists producing real, quality journalism. Combining that kind of journalism with great database content is a winning combination.

There is a lot more I like, but I’ll keep this post relatively short.

LoudounExtra, however, missing one big component.

The bad:

The most immediate and startling omission is the lack of social networking. Vice President of Product Development Rob Curley promises big things in the months to come, but without robust social networking, I can’t see this site ever reaching its potential.

And it might fail because of the lack of it. Social networking is a very key component of hyperlocal. What makes local journalism local is the connection it makes. Social networking is the king of making connections.

Perhaps, one of those big features Curely is promising is social networking. He does promise an innovative way of doing citizen content. Will it just be a new way of doing community publishing or will it actually add something to the conversation? And will this community publishing truly harness social networking?

That’s the big question, because I personally would not make a hyperlocal journalism site without hyper-good social networking. LoudounExtra appears devoid of social networking.

For a 1.0 release, LoudounExtra is one heck of a good site. Curley promises much more to come in the months ahead. I can’t wait to see what they have in store, and then eventually I’d like to see the metrics on it.

If the Post team can add social networking and do community publishing in a meaningful way, I’m betting this site will succeed.

It already has quality content and real journalism. If I were a Loudoun resident, I’d come to this site firs to find out what was going on. But will the site add that hyperlocal touch?

I hope so.

How exactly are we supposed to accurately measure the popularity of Web sites?

Is it through unique visitors, page views, time spent on a site? Most likely, it will be all three of those metrics. It’s extremely important to figure out a cogent way of measuring a Web site’s popularity, especially for newspapers and other media organizations.

Understanding a Web site’s metrics is the best way to be able to convince advertisers of the worthiness of a product. You look at how many more people typically view a newspaper’s Web site every month over who actually read the print edition and its puzzling because the print edition makes so much more on ads.

A better understanding and utilization of Web metrics could help to greatly bridge that gap. It’s important for all organizations to have a strong grasp of Web metrics, make them readily available and utilizing the best metrics for their individual site.

Never ask about hits. They never were and never will be relevant. Page views might be going the way of the hit, but the debate is still up in the air. The relevance of each metric varies greatly on the architecture of a Web site. Ajax, Flash and other dynamic technologies are changing how we have to think about Web traffic.

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If you want a journalism job you better have the journalism skills that employers wants.

That users want.

That means more than writing and reporting, because there are a lot of veteran journalists with those skills and many of them are looking for work. Those journalists also have better clips than you and a lot more experience. And frankly journalism is going to need less writers moving forward, not more.

So, if you want a job you better have the skills that people actually want.

Here are two thoughts from professionals over at Innovation in College Media:

Paul Connelly isn’t looking for people who only know how to write. He gets plenty of applications from people who know how to write and have experience.

The other thing I find really disappointing is the resume, the skill set. It’s not where I want it to be … They don’t have the skills that I want to see young people have because the older people I work with don’t have them.

Does it really make sense for j-school students to try to compete with veterans in an ever-shrinking market place? Of course not. There will always be a need for dedicated writers, but those will be the best writers — the ones with experience, established contacts and a unique flare for writing.

Most j-school students will never be that good at writing, but they know how to be reporters. All it takes is a willingness to adapt those reporting skills to new platforms and media types.

Andrew DeVigal wants you to embrace multimedia story telling.

For students who are reluctant to embrace multimedia, it sounds horrible to say, but there are going to be a lot of other students who are - who are going to be smart in the storytelling, who are comfortable with the technology.

He correctly points out that journalists need to figure out the best way to tell each story, which means being media and platform agnostic. Media companies aren’t looking for people who can only tell a story one way, regardless if that way makes sense. They need people with a diverse skill set.

Journalists can’t keep forcing people to consume content they way they want to give it to them. They need to give people the content they desire in the format they desire. We became journalists to serve the public, not to serve ourselves.

All j-school students need to know something beyond reporting. Maybe its video, maybe its Web design, maybe its Flash, but it better be something.

If you haven’t done it yet, I recommend you check out My summer reading list for j-school students and any journalist who wants to add new media skills.

You’re smart, you know how to research, find leads and work sources. You know how to be a reporter.

Now it’s time for you to learn how to be a reporter in a myriad of different formats that users want.

I have heard and seen so many stupid ideas with the Web that I realized that one thing most newspapers and editors lack is common sense.

That’s why every newspaper needs to go out right now and hire a Vice President of Common Sense (thanks Bill Simmons). The premise is simple: every time an editor, marketing director, publisher or whoever had a “great” idea for the Web, he or she would have to run it by the VP of Common Sense.

And usually that idea would be rejected within seconds.

Here are three ideas that have either been tried at my paper or suggested that defy common sense:

1. Let’s add a stock ticker and quotes to our site

What a great idea. Every reader of my 100,000 circulation paper has been thinking the coverage over at CBS Marketwatch, Motley Fool, Yahoo Finance!, Wall Street Journal, etc was sorely lacking. What better way to connect with readers than by offering an extremely limited financial tool on our site.

The best part is that it would cost a lot of money each money. Are you kidding? I have a free widget on my computer that is updated every few minutes with stock prices and keeps an eye on several indexes.

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