Well sort of.

One of the features many people may have noticed with the relaunch of CNN.com earlier this year is that CNN offers succinct bullet points above articles about the key points of the story. Most people skim stories anyway, so why not give them the ultimate way to skim an article? Maybe they will read the whole thing, but use the bullet points to help them remember key points.

 The current top story at CNN.com is ”FBI: Bomb threats force stores to wire money.” Next to the headline on the story page you’ll find:

Story Highlights

• NEW: Law enforcement source: At least $13,000 has been extorted
• FBI suspects extortion scam is based overseas; calls traced outside U.S.
• Stores, banks in 12 states have received bomb threat calls demanding money
• Caller says money must be electronically transferred or bomb will go off

There is also an in-depth story, map of where the bomb threats were made and related links. All good stuff for sure, but the idea of putting bullet points with a story is so simple, yet so ingenious.

It’s something that any publication can do right now with minimal effort. Just ask your writers or editors to come up with a few key bullet points for the Web to go with each story, especially for longer, more complicated stories. In many ways it is Web centric, and it’s much easier to do than adding video, blogs, talk back and other sexier features.

Craig Stoltz said it well:

I’d say it’s ironic that a broadcast Web site understands how to present news to an electronic user better than newspaper publishers that pay for serious reporting and news analysis. 

But it’s not.

If newspapers took a cue from CNN’s packaging, and topped their full reports with easily skimmable summaries, they’d have the best of both worlds: Important, original news that carries out the vital functions of the Fourth Estate–and reaches the maximum audience. 

Newspapers know that people skim stories, so I am not sure why others haven’t adopted this approach. Perhaps there would be too much blow-back from a paper like The New York Times. Writers might feel it cheapens their writing.

But in the end, it’s the user that matters most. I think giving people key take home points above every story (unless it’s a really short brief) is just plain common sense. And it’s the kind of easy to add feature that users will love.

Isn’t that  a win-win?

One of the biggest problems facing newspaper Web sites is the inability to keep readers on their site for more than a story or two.

It’s simply a matter of Web design, and most sites are very poorly put together and print focused. Most papers give you a story with maybe a photo or two and occasionally a link to a related item. If your goal is to get people to read more stories, you need a way for them to stumble upon them.

This is how the print product has always worked. A person reads a story and then thumbs through until he or she finds something else that is interesting. This concept hasn’t been duplicated well on the Web, but it’s especially vital in the world of page views and time spent on a site.

Mark Potts has an excellent post about the subject:

The problem: Most news sites are a collection of vertical cul de sacs. You click on a headline, read the story…and you’re left with virtually nowhere to go when you’re done reading. At that point, you’ve got to hit the Back button and return to the home page or section page or whatever to choose something else to read. More likely, you’re just going to leave for another site. You’re not given a lot of choice to stay.

I have argued for years that Web sites need to at least track and display the most popular stories on Web sites by view, rating and most e-mailed (same with photos, videos, etc). This is an easy way to give people recommendations, and a great way to get people to view additional content.

I often view stories at cnn.com based on what is recommended to me either by CNN or fellow viewers. I also really like the Drudge Report because it’s the ultimate in stumbling upon content, but we can go far beyond that. Potts points out that The Washington Post recently added a box at the bottom of every story that contains a list of stories that is populated by stories that “People who read this also read…”

It’s very amazon.com like and it’s a proactive way to get people to consume more of your content. A lot of traffic to news Web sites comes from search engines, blogs, links from friends, e-mails, etc. If people are coming in for one story, then they need to be presented with a reason to stay. Without relevant ways to keep people interested, they’ll simply leave, and your site will be deprived of valuable ad revenue.

Every site should include with every story a most popular section (by views, rating and e-mailed), plus something like the Post does. Beyond that, your site should link to related content. Now, there are two ways of doing this.

You can either have producers or editors manually link to stories, which works if the stories are meant to be packaged together or if the story is a follow-up (ESPN has done an excellent job with this with their Michael Vick coverage) but that doesn’t really work for most stories. Instead, sites should tag their content, so that if I am reading a story about the the al-Maliki government and its troubles, I’ll be shown a list of other stories that were tagged with “al-Mailiki,” “Iraq” and “troubles.”

Developing automated ways to display related content is much more logical. Every story has related stories, but print people don’t think of related stories like that.

They think in “packages.” They link stories together that run as part of a print package, or were about the same exact event or person. Related stories, however, are often much less concrete than that.

If a homicide happens in D.C., there may not be a directly “related” crime, but other stories about homicides, violence and the overall safety of the city are related. Your site should be intelligent enough to give me several other stories, videos, features, etc that are relevant to that homicide story.

My recommendations are the least that every newspaper should be doing. And that’s in 2007. You need to be building features for the future too.

Potts nails it on the head:

If you want to keep readers around, you’ve got to give them multiple reasons to stay — not lead them into a frustrating dead end.

If they leave, they may never come back. Don’t give them a reason to leave.

Some of you have noticed that there are now del.icio.us links at the top of the right column of this blog.

This links will be of interesting and current topics in online journalism and/or Web development. They will be updated continuously as the day goes along. Many of the topics won’t be discussed in depth on this blog, while others will be.

I realize they’re not that prominent, but they also don’t really need to be. The other option would be to have a once daily posting in the main column with links. The big negative of this is that you’ll only get new content once a day, whereas the current method allows for continuous updates.

Let me know what you think and what you would prefer. I’m always looking for ways to make the experience better for users on this blog.

The St. Petersberg Times and Congressional Quarterly just launched PolitiFact, and it covers politics in a way that no other format can.

It’s really a good example of online journalism because it does something that you can’t do well in other formats. Merely taking concepts you have learned from print or broadcast journalism and sticking them on the Web is hardly “new media.” It’s just repurposing content.

But PolitiFact isn’t that. It’s a database-driven site, built from the ground up, to cover politics in a new way. Instead of the pundits and talking heads, who clearly root for their home teams, this site attempts to cover politics objectively.

How is that possible? Its goal is to ascertain the truthfulness of claims made by presidential hopefuls. We are bombarded with countless ads, e-mails and people telling us what a politician has or hasn’t done. Often they are factually incorrect.

With PolitiFact you can go figure out how honest politicians or claims about them are.

This is from the about section of the site:

In the months ahead, the news staffs of both organizations will examine major claims by presidential candidates and rule on their veracity. Our Truth-O-Meter will help voters sort fact from fiction in the campaign. This is a working database and over time it will grow more valuable.

Because the site is database-driven, it is really easy to find information. If you only care about attacks on Hillary Clinton you can go to her page and see what people have said about her. Conversely, if you only care about the attacks she makes, you can find that information too.

The site has just launched, so it’s hard to say how good it will become. The concept is great and the execution has been good too. The site could use more content, but that should come in time (you can view all the content on the site in 15-30 mins).

Politifact should serve as notice to newspapers that they need to figure out better ways to cover stories. Just writing stories about the truthfulness or lack thereof of politicians isn’t good enough. We all know newspapers only cover some of those stories, and they are never grouped together.

Without grouping stories together, it’s hard to put them into context. That’s the ultimate power of this site, because it allows you to view claims about all the presidential politicians at once. Also, while most of the content is written, Politifact hasn’t taken to writing long-winded stories about everything. It has short, concise written pieces that have summaries at the top.

Summaries and not flowery ledes? How dare they! Those written sections are combined with graphical elements to display its content.

It just works. Hopefully, other newspapers are taking notice.

I was just visiting Cleveland.com to check out some information about the Browns, and my blood pressure has just risen.

The site, as always, asked for my information — location, age and sex. I’ve typed it in countless times over the past 10 years or whatever. Every time I login on a new computer or empty my cache and cookies on my current one, I have to type it in again.

This has been going on for years. Clearly, their data is skewed heavily by the fact that people like me enter the same exact data. That’s not exactly a great way to gather information.

It’s one thing to ask people to do this once when they sign up for an account, but it’s another thing to tie it into a cookie. So, as you can guess, I’ve been placing fake information in for the past year or two because I am so fed up with it. It really aggravates me.

I’m sure The Plain Dealer and Cleveland.com really enjoy all the erroneous information they are giving advertisers. Here is a simple solution: get rid of that stupid information request!

It’s so annoying that I often click out of the site before viewing a story. I’m not alone either. And other sites need to stop making people register so they can  view basic content like stories.

Are you really gaining valuable information from these processes? Of course not. Plenty of people type in erroneous information and it sends others away because it is an unnecessary step.

If you want accurate information find a more scientifically proven method to gather data for advertisers. But don’t annoy your users just so they can view your content. Plenty of sites do not do this, and users are more than willing to go to their sites to view content instead.

Are you listening New York Times? CNN doesn’t make me register, which is probably why I go to their site more often. It’s just more user friendly.

We just want to view the content. Nothing more.

If I register for a site, it better be for a good reason. If sites have social networking or customization features, it makes sense to offer registration? But requiring registration to read a story?

Get real.

Journalism is an incredibly competitive market place, and you need to do all you can to stand out.

The standard résumé is not the best way for a young journalist to stand out. The New York Times just published an article about how low grades in college can hurt a person’s job search. If all you do is show someone a piece of white paper, listing what you have done, your grades will count for a lot.

That’s why you need a digital résumé. It’s so far beyond the boring and basic résumé that most people have. It’s a way to showcase your skills to anyone in the world and better illustrate those skills.

With a digital résumé, people won’t notice something like a low GPA as much because they’ll be immersed in your talents. How much can you really gleam from a piece of paper?

Not much.

And I understand that a lot of us have writing clips, but not all journalists are writers and a lot of newspapers are looking for people with varied skill sets. With a Web site you can show off a wide array of skills. Don’t tell people your skills, show them — that’s what us journalists do.

My digital résumé can be found at www.patthorntonfiles.com, and it has served me well. It’s much easier and impressive to send people there than to just hand them some boring piece of paper.

My paper résumé looks a lot like your résumé. I can’t really stand out with it, but my Web site is unique.

It has my own design with my own creations on it. It’s me in a nutshell. That’s why you should create one, and it’s not as hard as you think either.

Here are a few good examples of digital résumés:

• Mindy McAdams
• Ryan Sholin
• Adrian Holovaty
• Rob Curley

Those are a few of the many good examples out there using varying degrees of difficulty. Some use a lot of off-the-self parts, while others a very custom, but they all work.

1. Gather all your content
Figure out what you want to showcase. Are you a writer? Grab your best clips and make sure they are ready for the world to see.

Maybe you also take photos. You should find your best photos and divide them into relevant categories. If you do Flash, video or audio it would be wise to put those files on the site too.

And of course link to any projects you have done that you are proud of. Yes, this site will still have the standard résumé features like your past employment, your skills, where you went to school, G.P.A. (if warranted) and so forth, but it will also show people what you can do.

Remember, this site is for your best works. Don’t go putting tons and tons of your work on there unless you think it is all worth viewing. Potential employers may randomly pick a story, and it may not be as strong as some of your other writing, for instance.

2. Conceptualize and design
Now you need to start brainstorming what features your site will have and where they will go. I’d start with a pen and paper and start sketching up. I’d also do a site map to figure out where the content should go. I recommend that your site has at least an about page, HTML version of your résumé, contact page and at least one page with your work on it.

You may want to go beyond that, but that’s a good starter site. If you don’t have a lot of design experience you can go one of a few ways.

You could look at sites on the Web and see what you like and try to emulate them. You could build your site with something like WordPress and use a theme created by someone else (many are quite beautiful). Or you could try to sketch up a completely original design.

You may want to make a rough mock up with pen and paper of your design and then start making a serious one with Photoshop. My only starting point for The Journalism Iconoclast was that I wanted it to be green and fresh looking.

3. Start building
You can approach this from several angles with varying degrees of difficultly. The method you choose should largely depend on how much Web skills you want to learn along the way, or how much you already know. I have a lot of friends who do Web work, but don’t have a personal site. Don’t be like that.

The cheapest and potentially easiest method is WordPress. You can sign up for a free account and go with the standard template or download and install (which is quite easy) one of many free designs. WordPress does give you a lot of power and flexibility. You can customize your design and really use WordPress as a content management system.

With WordPress you obviously will have a blog, which you can use in a myriad of ways. Maybe you don’t want a blog, however, and you still want an easy way to create an original site. I would strongly look into getting a What You See Is What You Get editor (WYSIWYG).

Dreamweaver is the best known of the bunch. It’s an Adobe product, so it plays well with Photoshop, Flash and others. But it’s expensive. If you have the money, or can build a site during the 30 day trial period (completely doable), then I would seriously consider Dreamweaver.

It’ll both allow you to easily make a site, but it will also allow you do powerful things on your site. Plus, a lot of employers like potential employees to know how to use Dreamweaver. A free alternative is Mozilla’s Seamonkey suite. It should give beginners similar results. 

A program like iWeb, while not as powerful as some other WYSIWYG editors, is probably the easiest way to make a great looking Web site. It comes loaded with a bunch of easily editable templates. Because these templates are very professional looking out of the box, you can focus on putting your content up.

The last option is for those who really want to add serious Web skills to their portfolio. Learn (X)HTML, CSS and anything else you need and open your favorite text editor and start coding. My summer reading list is a great place to start if you want to learn some basic Web skills.

It links to the sites and books you’ll need to get up and running. My favorite text editor (it does a heck of a lot more than just code) is Coda. This way not only will you display your other works, but you will clearly demonstrate that you understand the Web and how to build a site. You can also build a site to look exactly how you want it to.

4. Server space
You’ll need a Web server to run your Web site with. WordPress.org runs blogs/sites for free. That’s always a good option.

.Mac is an easy way to link up with iWeb and get your site up and running in minutes. A Small Orange and other companies like them provide quality hosting for as little as $5 a month. It all comes down to how comfortable you are with FTP programs or how much you want to spend.

Conclusion:
There is an option for everyone. Each option will depend on how comfortable you are with the Web and (X)HTML, your budget and what your goals are.

Having a digital résumé will allow you to stand out in ways that other candidates can’t. If you have design clips, photos, videos, Web projects, etc, you really need a Web site. Even if you just have written clips, it’s a better way to demonstrate your potential.

If you have any more specific questions feel free to contact me, and I can give you personalized advice. Good luck. 

Some of you may have noticed yesterday that The Journalism Iconoclast looked different — a lot different — for a little while.

I upgraded to 2.2.2, and it broke the JI theme. Instead, users were greeted with the default WordPress theme, which can be kind of jarring if you aren’t expecting it. I did not back up my blog before I installed the update — big mistake.

Always back up first. Luckily, my server had a back up of the blog, and I was able to grab that and replace the busted WordPress install.

At most jobs your data is backed up, but you have to actively back up your personal data. My desktop is backed up daily, but I need to remember to regularly create back ups of my Web site.

It’s important to always back up your work. Take it from me.

Let’s put to rest this whole journalists are liberal thing.

Just read this article about Medill’s new dean and you’ll understand. The students at Northwestern are in an upheaval because their new dean John Lavine is changing the curriculum to meet the changing demands of journalism. I mean he even is bringing in fancy stuff like online journalism.

Kids these days hate the Web. What is Lavine thinking?!?

I mean how dare he! He is attempting to give them the skills that employers want and students will need in the future. Yet, most j-school students have an incredible resistance to change.

Hence, they are clearly conservative. Take this anecdote from the article:

It was a bare-knuckled accusation that seemed suited more for a blue-collar saloon in the bungalow belt than the ivied Evanston campus of Northwestern University. “You lied to me!” the graduate student angrily told John Lavine, the dean of the Medill School of Journalism. “I came here to learn to be a writer,” the student said, explaining that he had chosen Northwestern—and forked over more than $40,000 in annual tuition—because he wanted to hone a flair for writing that would land him at a publication like The New York Times. “But you’re having us do all this video stuff. I didn’t come here for that.”

If this is the future of journalism, we better start praying. I’ll say it one more time.

Journalism isn’t about you delivering what you deem to be news in the formats you deem to be worthy. It’s about delivering the news that matters to people in the formats that best suit each story and that users want most.

It’s about the people. It was never about us.

I became a journalist to inform people the best I could. Call me old fashioned.

To be the best, you have to want to be the best.

A site that has always typified that swagger is my high school’s Web site. It has the audacity to want to be the best in the world, and it has succeeded for years. When I was a junior in high school, it was named the best k-12 education site by Cisco and Education World.

The very next year, while I was co-student Web master, we set out to redo the Web site. That’s the thing about wanting to be the best — you have to believe that nothing is good enough. So, we redid, and it completely and utterly blew our award-winning site out of the water.

That designed stayed for six years, and is probably still the best k-12 site anywhere, but today my high school launched a new version. It’s bigger, it handles content better and it certainly is more audacious.

Why did they redesign a Web site that gets 30,000-40,000 visitors a day? Because they could.

Why do people climb Mount Everest? Because they can.

Kenston has between 1,000-1,200 students, and yet manages to attract more eyeballs than most daily newspapers’ sites. How is that possible? Simple.

About 15,000 people or so live in the school district, and all of them know about the Web site and many check it religiously. Alumni like myself check the Web site at least several times a week, and relatives all over the country can see what their family members are doing.

Plus, high school’s all over the country come to the site for inspiration. Want to know how to build a great Web site? Just go the Kenston site and you’ll know all you need to know.

So, what are the keys to success?

1. Content
The site is filled with content. It does a much better job of covering sports teams than local papers do. Want to see several hundred photos after every football game a few hours after the game is over? You can. If your son got on the field, even just for just a play, he will almost certainly be on the site.

Why pay for prom pictures, when your son or daughter will be on the Web site the next day?

Every class, club and team is covered on the Web site in varying degrees. The site is loaded with content. Some of it is certainly much better than other content, but they are at least trying to cover as much as possible.

2. It’s the place to go for info
With great content comes great information. Want to know the football team’s schedule or stats? Go to the Kenston Web site. Want to know if a softball game is canceled due to rain? Go to the Web site. Want to know when the next PTA meeting is? Well, you get the idea.

3. People have to believe
Cleveland, Ohio is not a technology hub. It’s an aging rust belt city. The only way to get a Web site like this going is to transform a community.

The site started with just a faculty adviser, Ronnie Continenza and a few dedicated students. It then grew to incorporate a Web design class. Now, Kenston has hired a second Web design instructor to teach advanced courses because the demand is great.

Imagine having a class that everyone wants to be in. The site regularly has about 100 kids working on it every day. Why?

Because it’s what all the cool kids are doing.

The site itself has no direct budget. Most of the money comes from people in the community who enjoy the content so much that they donate money. The site also has a few sponsors, but it general it is what it is because people believe in it. People believe in the product.

4. You need an impresario
Apple has Steve Jobs. He is the heart and soul of the company. Works hard to make products and to sell his vision.

Kenston has Continenza. He is a tireless worker. He puts in the usual work day as a teacher, but than covers games at night for the Web site, taking at least tens of thousands of photos each school year. He is the glue that holds together the Web site.

In many ways, he is the Rob Curley of Kenston. He may not have the technical prowess that Curley has, but he has at least as much heart, if not more. After Curley left Naples Daily News, the site quickly began to go downhill.

Your site, paper, etc needs an impresario. You need someone so dedicated, so good that everyone around him believes in the site and its future. That’s the biggest problem facing most newspapers today.

There simply isn’t that one person who wills your operation to victory. That one person who can change the mind of the publisher and make top editors believe. The thing is your staff might have one, but bureaucracy and seniority are holding him or her back.

Honestly, how many of your Web sites are run by someone with little new media skills or experience and were long-time print journalists? You need someone beyond just a person who volunteered to take over the Web site because he or she thought it would be a good career move.

You need someone who eats, drinks and sleeps the Web. Continenza is not some Web or computer genius. He’s best skill is photography, which he is quite good at.

But his biggest asset is the ability is to listen and take advice from people who know the Web. He listens to talented students and alumni, which is how the Web site has gotten so good. You can have someone head up your Web operation if they aren’t a Web God, but they have to be willing to listen to others who are more knowledgeable.

When you combine his hard work with his ability to listen to others, it’s easy to see how someone who took over the fledgling Kenston Web site in 1998 almost on a whim was able to make it the best in the country.

Conclusion:
If you want to be better, you have to actually believe that you can be better. You should always strive to be the best. My high school didn’t have to redesign its site and add more technical tricks to it, but it did.

It’s not about blogs, video or x, y, z. It’s about hard work, dedication and doing something not because you have to but because you want to. It’s about believing in the product.

Continual R&D is extremely important to the long-term success of any Web site. Sure, there are some things I think my high school could have done better (utilizing more databases and video for instance), but in general I like the idea that they are willing to reinvent the wheel.

Why?

Because they can.

If you ever wondered why the LA Times is having so much trouble online or why its product is fading so quickly, look no further than the editorial board.

In a shocking editorial the Times wrote, “many publishers consider the Internet, and Google in particular, a greater threat to their livelihoods than Osama bin Laden.”

Read that again.

No good publisher honestly believes that. No sane person honestly believes that. I’m confident, however that the people at Tribune Co. and the Times honestly believe that.

Which is, of course, why a company with two of the best newspapers in the country has managed to marginalize two once great publications, while providing an embarrassing Web product. Newspapers have been declining for decades, and the Internet is probably the one thing that can save newspapers.

Newspapers are hampered by several fundamental flaws. The whole newspaper model doesn’t fit a lot of people’s lives anymore as I wrote about yesterday. That doesn’t mean news or information doesn’t fit their lives, but the fundamental product that is a newspaper no longer works for millions of Americans.

The delivery and printing costs are the biggest single cost a newspaper incurs. With populations further dispersing from city centers, the costs only rise. Quickly rising gas prices don’t help either.

None of those concerns apply to the Web. The Web can delivery content far cheaper to an audience anywhere in the world. It can also deliver content in the ways that people actually want to consume it.

I still read the papers I grew up reading on the Web. Without www.cleveland.com, I wouldn’t be able to get The Plain Dealer. That’s ad dollars they would never be able to get otherwise from someone living in Virginia.

Back on topic:

But Google now is doing yet another thing that’s bound to get under journalists’ skin. This month, it announced plans to let people and organizations comment on the stories written about them. For example, if The Times ran another exposé on conflicts of interest within the Food and Drug Administration’s drug-approval process, Google News would provide a forum for the FDA and any researchers or drug manufacturers implicated in the story to respond, unedited.

Imagine how terrible a world it would be to live in where people got to respond to newspaper stories. Imagine a world where people could rebut what people write about them, try to correct their errors or explain why they did what. Imagine, if you can, a world where everyday readers can comment on stories.

No no no! That is too frightening a world for anyone to imagine. The Times could easily trump Google by allowing people to comment on their stories at www.latimes.com, like The Washington Post does. They have chosen not to do that.

They can further respond back to any response from the FDA or whomever else if they deem the comment to have been factually incorrect. It’s two-way communication. I hope Google allows for papers and commenters to have a back and forth discussion, because readers would really benefit.

But all of this fear could have been avoided years ago if the Times embraced two-way communication like a lot of newspapers. If you’re going to allow readers to comment on your stories, you should be willing to comment back to them. That’s what two-way communication is all about. Now, if Google doesn’t allow for a paper like the Times to respond to a FDA response to the original article, Google will clearly be doing everyone a disservice.

But in the end, sunlight is the best disinfectant. Newspapers make a lot of mistakes, largely due to shrinking staffs and increased output expectations. Comments on stories are a great way to get the truth out and alert editors that mistakes have been made.

Let it all shine through. What I sense from the Times, however, is that they don’t want people commenting or questioning their stories.

It’s crazy to think that the Times once competed against The New York Times and The Washington Post. My, those days have sure passed us by.