A great read over at the OJR on how newspapers have been stiffling innovation by worrying too much and innovating too little.

It sounds about right. If you’re in a dying industry (or in a massive upheaval), it’s probably because a lot of people at the top are too conservative. Let your reporters and editors blog, take on outside projects and innovate. If they turn out to be really good, try to bring them in house and offer them some sort of advertising sharing arrangement.

That’s exactly what Forbes is doing with the massively popular Fake Steve Jobs. This industry needs innovation. Let your staff soar free.

Most publications, however, have taken the approach to putting restrictions on what their employees can do outside of work, instead of letting them learn new media and innovate.

I’ve lived in three states in 2007.

Clearly, I don’t have a subscription to a newspaper (unless you count The Economist as a newspaper and not a magazine), and I know most of my peers don’t either. Us not-too-far-out-of-college people are not settled yet, and it’s hard to justify subscribing to something or caring about something if you don’t think you’ll be in that area long.

This is why newspapers have to realize lightening fast that the Web is the only way to attract a certain segment of the population. Just because I’m not settled, doesn’t mean I don’t want to be informed, but it does mean I can’t form an attachment to one area or paper.

I read washingtonpost.com frequently (I’ve spent almost all of 2007 in the D.C. metro area). I’m not about, however, to subscribe to that publication or any other newspaper.

Will I still be in Alexandria, Va. a year from now? I’m not sure, but I’m fairly confident I’ll be in the D.C. area for awhile to come. This is why I’ll continue to read washingtonpost.com, politico.com and other Web sites in the area.

I’ll be honest, I’d love to see a loudounextra.com site for my county too. I’d go there frequently, especially since I don’t know the area well. What better way to start a connection with a community than through a site that will connect me with all the things I want to know.

I don’t know the good restaurants (or any really), where churches are, what there is to do around here or even what’s going on in the area. If I moved to another area in D.C. next year or 2009, I’d love a site like loudounextra.com for that area too.

You have to build products that make sense for your users. Newspapers increasingly make less sense as people switch jobs, careers and areas more often in a lifetime. They especially make little sense for segments of the population that haven’t settled.

I’m confident that a certain segment of the population will always enjoy a written product. It makes sense for people who are settled and have a strong connection to a community. If they are retired, and have more time to dedicate to reading through a product, they will have an even stronger connection.

But for most people, the Web will make the most sense. Trust me, it’s not that young people don’t want to be informed and part of a community. We just want to be informed in our own terms (pick and choose content) and part of the communities that make the most sense for us (social networks).

I’m not sure where this idea started, but when a lot of newspaper journalists talk about new media, they focus on video.

Last time I checked there is local news, network news, cable news and the long shadows of legends like Cronkite and Murrow. Reporting the news with video isn’t exactly new. So, why would throwing some random video on your Web site all the sudden make you new media?

It wouldn’t.

Video and written stories are certainly part of new media. New media will find new ways to disseminate this traditional content and unique ways to package it. But neither one will ever be the backbone of what new media is.

New media is currently focused around the Web, which means any new media endeavor needs a killer Web site. A Web site that looks good, is easy to navigate, has a powerful search engine, has a clean design and is filled with lots of unique content. The kind of Web site most newspapers don’t have.

The backbone of new media journalism is deep database content, two-way communication (talk back features, blogs, chats, etc), a continuous news cycle, hyper searchable content, database journalism, Flash story telling and infographics, unique packages with audio, video and other journalism and of course finally utilizing photos properly (tag them and make your whole database of photos searchable).

New media journalism companies understand one fundamental truth: you cover a story in the format that best fits the story. It might be a combination of written text, a talk back feature/blog, a photo essay and video. It always varies from story to story, based on the needs of the story.

Sometimes it might just be written text (in fact a lot of times it will be, but it often shouldn’t be in the traditional journalism narrative form). It also might just by a little text with a database allowing people to see how many crimes happened in their city the past year, where they happened, who committed them and what kinds of crime they were. Maybe it’s a Flash infographic explaining how a bridge collapsed in a major U.S. city.

Maybe it is a documentary-style video feature on the lives of post Katrina citizens that gets combined with a blog allowing citizens to sound off. But new media isn’t and never will be just shoveling old media content onto a Web site. This means video too. You can’t just take a traditional written piece and add a little bit of video and expect it to be new media.

First, most newspapers do video very poorly. They operate under the modus operandi of “good enough.” Every journalism outlet has a threshold of good enough. It varies widely based on the company.

The problem is that a newspaper will have a much higher standard for written articles and photos than they will for audio or video content. Because they’re “just print journalists” trying to do new media. Can they really be expected to make compelling video content?

Yes, and they will be by consumers. They expect synergy between different story telling methods on your Web site.

Doing video for new media, means taking the same standards you had for print and applying it to video. The video should look good, be edited well and be compelling. It should do something that a print story couldn’t.

That’s the problem. Most newspapers video does something a written piece could do, and often their writers can do a better job. Which exactly why video does not equal new media for most newspapers.

Keep in mind that consumers aren’t clamoring for video either. In my survey I conducted in 2006,  less than half of my respondent were looking for newspapers to add it to their Web sites.

Which means you have to add content that appeals to all those other people (the only way to succeed in new media is with a breadth of content). The No. 1 place people read newspapers online is at work, and work is not the best place to be watching videos.

But the real question is, where did this focus come from?

I’m not sure, but every time I mention new media, old-school journalists start going off about video and how they aren’t trained or about how they think the quality of journalism at their company will suffer. Let’s get this out of everyone’s heads once and for all: video does not equal new media.

It is one component of it, but that’s all it is. That’s all it ever will be. If you really want to do new media, first get a good Web site and then realize that new media journalism is far beyond video.

It’s all those things I mentioned above. And when you do video (because it does have a place in new media), do it well. Make it real journalism and make it compelling.

The following are true stories that I have either witnessed or have been relayed to me by fellow journalists:

“Google will one day charge per click.” - a newspaper editor on how he believes Google will one day charge people for each search, leading him to believe journalism will come full circle when people revolt and start reading newspapers once again. Needless to say he’ll be jobless in a few years.

“I don’t have broadband Internet, but it’s a good thing. It keeps me from spending too much time on the Web.” - a Web editor on why having dial-up Internet is a good thing for him. I bet that is one high-tech Web operation at his paper.

“I don’t want new media training and if I was on a new media training course i would resent it.” - a journalist who bristled at my question about whether or not newspapers should provide new media training. He’ll probably also resent in 10 years being laid off. It’s about the people, not about journalists. Give them the news they want in the formats they want. It is what it is.

“Personally, however, I’m all for the old school. I love, love, the item that is the newspaper. Let the photographers take the pictures, let the videographers make the slideshows. I’m a reporter. I write stories.” - a reporter on how he’ll always be a newspaper man. I have nothing witty to say about that. I’m just in shock.

” A few years ago the people in advertising said that some businesses don’t want their information put online.” - a mistaken journalist on why he doesn’t look online for places he needs to find or call. Every reputable business wants to be listed online. They need to be found to do business.

This is the same journalist who buys the newspaper just to get movie listings (one of many like this), despite the fact that they are free on sites likes movies.com. And he admitted that the newspaper listings are often inaccurate. You could use technology to do something cheaper, faster and better for you, or you could stick to old ways that often don’t work. I’m sure a forward thinking person like that has some great ideas for the future of journalism.

Is it any wonder that newspapers are struggling so much? The No. 1 thing holding back journalism is journalists. Many aren’t particularly good with technology, don’t have a wide skill set and, worst of all, are unwilling to learn new techniques.

I want my newspapers staffed by hungry journalists willing to do what it takes to tell each story in the best way possible. I want journalists willing to report the news in the formats that consumers want. I want journalists willing to learn new techniques as the years go on.

We can all agree that more journalists need new media training.

What hasn’t been in agreement is whose responsibility it is to do that training. Should newspapers train people or should they expect journalists to have all the skills they need? To me, the answer is simple: newspapers need to provide the training because ultimately they are the ones that will benefit the most from it.

A lot of bloggers and journalists have noted that newspapers do not provide training. Training budgets have all been cut with the increasingly bleak fortunes for newspapers. And the suggestion has been made that if a journalist wants to learn new media, he will have to do it in his own time, with his own money.

I agree that’s the reality we have been presented with. Newspapers are in a downward spiral, and if you want to learn something new, you’ll have to do it yourself. But that’s not how things should be.

Newspapers are largely in a downward spiral because they don’t offer a product that enough people want. It’s a matter of relevancy. If they are to become relevant again, and offer news in formats that work for consumers, they’ll need journalists who can produce content that consumers want.

Which means they’ll need to provide training. Most j-schools aren’t spitting out talented new media journalists. In fact, most j-schools are badly ill-equipping journalists for the future.

So, we can’t rely on them. And even if j-schools were making great new media journalists, who is going to give all those veteran reporters new skills? Clearly, newspapers need to provide training, and it doesn’t have to be that expensive or difficult.

1. Newspapers need to be lead by people who get new media
Countless newspapers have top editors and section editors who are borderline computer illiterate. They believe in urban legends about the Web (expect a post about this soon) and frankly don’t have a clue what is or what isn’t possible. If you have someone who doesn’t know what is possible or how best to do something, he will clearly lead you astray. Or simply just not lead.

2. Newspapers need to show everyone what is possible
The first thing any newspaper needs to do is have a big staff meeting where someone (either inside or outside) comes in and shows everyone what is possible with new media journalism. You can’t just buy equipment and expect people to turn out quality journalism. You have to show them the best of what it out there. Once they see it, they’ll realize that new media journalism is real journalism, and it can tell stories in ways never thought possible.

3. Start training
The easiest thing to do is to have your best new media journalists provide hands on training for interested staff members (don’t try to force new media training on veteran reporters at first). If you don’t have quality new media journalists, you can hire outside ones to come in and provide training.

4. Have readily available training tools
Every newspaper should have training books on Web design, video and audio editing, Flash, etc. Journalists should be encouraged to pick them up and learn something new. They should also be given time to learn. A great tool is Lynda.com. It provides interactive tutorials on a myriad of programs and technologies that will help your newsroom.

5. Offer to send your best journalists to classes
In-house training and Lynda.com are great resources, but you probably will have to send your best journalists outside occasionally to get them some much needed skills. Maybe you have a Web designer that you want to learn a new programming language, and you really can’t provide quality in-house training. Well sign him up for a class.

Or maybe you want one of your video journalists to take her work to the next level. Outside training may be the answer.

6. It’s an investment in a paper’s future
Training journalists is an investment that every newspaper needs to take seriously. Instead, most newspapers and journalists sit around and whine about how the Web is killing newspapers. Well, your newspaper could become bigger and more relevant with a quality Web product. You have journalists who know how to report. Now give them the skills necessary to report in the 21st century.

7. What you can do on your own
Sense this is not going to happen, here is what you can do to learn new media. First, check out my previous blog post about learning new media. If you complete that program, you’ll have more new media skills than most journalists.

Second, consider buying some additional books to read or signing up for a class or two. Pick an area that you want to specialize in and go for it. It’s good to have a myriad of skills, but it’s also good to have a specialty.

Once you learn new skills keep practicing them. It’s the only way to get better. It’s just a shame that your employer probably won’t pay to get you trained on something that would greatly benefit them.

Want to know the easiest way to learn a lot of new media?

Get a Mac. It’s that simple. All Macs come with iLife built in, which gives you movie editing, photo cataloging and editing, audio and podcast production, Web design and DVD production.

Think of it as MS Office for your digital life. You can create a myriad of multimedia content with it, fun and easily. And it’s all free.

The best part, however, is how good it is. I got a new Macbook a few months ago, and I love iLife (and I have the old version. Your version will be even better). I use iPhoto all the time to manage my photos. When you have thousands upon thousands of digital photos, you need an easy way to edit and group them.

iLife is also incredibly easy to use, which is what makes it such a great learning tool. A lot of what you can create with iLife is professional quality, and yet it is so intuitive to use. My first experience with video editing was with iMovie several years ago. The concepts and confidence I got from that carried over to the work I do today in Final Cut Pro or Adobe Premiere.

Apple also has great integration between their products. For instance, you can drag and drop photos you have in iPhoto or audio files from Garageband into iMovie.

Apple just released iLife ‘08, which promises to be even better than ‘06. I have ‘06 and there is nothing like it on PCs, especially when you factor in the price.

Let’s face it, newspapers aren’t in the business of training people anymore. So, if you want to learn something new (something that might keep you in journalism for years to come), you probably have to do it yourself. iLife is a great way to get your feet wet and show how fun and easy new media can be.

No, iLife is not without flaws. It’s a consumer level product, and it lacks a lot of the power that people will need for professional uses. But it is a great way to learn the basics and see that video, audio or photo editing isn’t that hard. iWeb also allows people to easily make attractive Web sites.

If you don’t know new media, you have no excuse for not at least trying. So, do yourself a favor: get a Mac and play around with iLife ‘08. The best option for most people would be the iMac.

It’s powerful, has a big screen, is lightweight with a small footprint and looks great. And it comes with iLife ‘08.

There is no better way to learn than by doing, and I know many of you are very bright and motivated. Get to it.

Updates will be slow this week because I am in the process of moving from Rockville, Maryland to Alexandria, Virginia.

More quality JI content will be here later this week. This would be the perfect time to post or e-mail in any comments, suggestions or questions.

Thanks.

The problem with most journalism Web sites is that they were built for a print-first world.

Online was, and is at most publications, an afterthought. Thus, Web sites rarely harness content properly. There is a lot of content in papers that makes a lot of sense online, but only when utilized properly.

Adrian Holovaty had a good post last year about the fundamental way newspaper sites need to change, and I couldn’t agree more. He and others built a world class content management system in Ellington that fueled several award-winning sites like LJWorld.com. The Washington Post recently purchased it for LoudounExtra.com and other hyperlocal sites.

The crux of the issue is quite simple: most newspaper Web sites are built around stories, because newspapers primarily produce stories as their method of journalism. But the thing is a lot of content doesn’t make sense being thrown into a story template. Only stories should go on story pages.

Other content should have a unique way to be displayed. At my paper we run into this all the time. Why?

Because our CMS is limited, and it was built with a print-first focus. Yes, our Web site and almost all of yours were built to serve print needs first, Web needs second. That’s one of the major problems with newspaper Web sites and why they are having issues generating revenue.

How much money do you honestly think you can make forcing a product into the wrong format? It’s the old square peg, round hole. For instance, if I want to list events coming up for a festival, I have to put them into a story page on our site.

But each event at festival doesn’t belong on a story page. Each event is a unique event with a unique time, unique location and other factors. Instead of putting them on a hard-to-read and barely-searchable story page, each thing should be entered into a database. Perhaps your paper runs a weekly listing of the things going on in town that week.

That works for print, but those should each be unique database items that will be displayed on the homepage on the date they happen. Database items are immensely searchable, and making your site more searchable will make it a lot more useful.

One Web faux pa that makes me cringe the most is box scores for sporting events. In the paper they usually consume a few pages, while being scrunched together in small type. Everything is hard to read and find, but it’s the best print can do.

It’s the worst online can do. Yet, guess what most newspapers do? They’ll stick box scores, schedules, etc in the same format that the print edition had, online.

Instead, each box score and schedule item should be a unique database item. If I want to know who won a high school football game last night, I should be able to search a database of scores for the school I want. Better yet, each school should have its own page, populated by different database items.

If all the sporting events (recaps, box scores, schedules, photos), school events, news, etc about a given school are database items, they can easily be dynamically placed onto a page for a given school. Why should I have to hunt through countless information about schools I don’t know anything about?

I often am unable to find box scores I know exist on a newspapers Web site because they cannot be searched properly. I’ll do a search for school X, but box scores don’t show up under the search, because the technology of the site won’t allow it. Something that should take five seconds to find, can often take many minutes, and sometimes can’t be found.

Frankly, I have better things to do with my time than deal with your Web site that is built for a print world.

How do you fix this issue? Easy. Use a CMS that allows content to be placed into the system and displayed properly.

1. Not everything is a story.
Each type of content should be placed into a unique part of your Web site. Stories are different from photos, which are different from event guides, which are different from videos, which are different from box scores, which are different from blogs, which are different from…

2. Make it searchable
If everything on your site is a database item, it’s incredibly easy for users to find what they want. Maybe they heard about a really cool video on your Web site. They go to search and bam, there it is. Maybe they want to search your photo archive so they can find photos about certain subjects or events that interest them. By switching to a Web-first focus, searchability is a piece of cake.

3. You shouldn’t have to tailor your content around your Web site
Your Web site is a blank canvas to display whatever content you desire in whatever format. Your Web site should not dictate what you are able to do or not do. If your CMS is not flexible and you don’t have people who can develop new features, your paper isn’t going anywhere online anytime soon.

4. Web first
If you want to make money online and attract a lot of eye balls, you need to think Web first. Let’s be real here for a second. Newspapers aren’t becoming more popular anytime soon. Circulation is rapidly dropping, while printing and delivery costs are rising.

Not a good combo. Printed journalism will exist for a long time to come, but its era of dominance is quickly fading. No matter if your company is print or broadcast focused, it should begin to realize that the Web will be the primary vehicle for journalism going forward. Newspapers should eventually be a place to put in-depth analysis and feature pieces.

It should be home to the kind of journalism it does best. Let the Web handle what it does best.

The stories we assign, how we cover them and what we deliver to users will be changing. We can’t take content that worked really well for one medium and expect it to work as well for another.

The other problem is that almost no one will listen to this advice.

Marc Gunther has a good article over at Fortune. The question is quite simple: will the Washington Post survive the turmoil ahead for media companies?

Why is the Post so important? Many people consider it to be the best traditional media company at navigating online, but even they are having revenue issues. Print revenue is falling faster than online is gaining.

What lies ahead for the Post seems to be a long and painful transition from print - so important to local advertisers that the newspaper could raise prices almost at will - to the Internet, where competition for readers and advertisers is brutal. The best evidence of the difference is the fact that advertisers paid about $573 million last year to reach readers of the company’s newspapers, predominantly the 673,900 daily and 937,700 Sunday subscribers to the Post. Advertisers paid only about $103 million to reach the eight million unique visitors to the Post’s Web sites each month.

One of the most watched stories from the Post in 2007 and 2008 will be the success, or lack thereof, of sites like LoudounExtra.com, the first of several hyperlocal sites launched by the company. All I can say is that if the Post is unsure of the future, I can only imagine what most papers’ top editors and publishers are thinking about the future.

The Post has one thing going for it: the right attitude. Unlike most journalism companies, they realized a long time ago that the Web was the future. Many journalists and companies are praying that the Web is just a fad. Those journalists and companies won’t be here in 10 years.

I’m starting a new feature at The Journalism Iconoclast on sites I like and why I like them. It will run semi regularly. I’d also like your feedback on which sites you like and why.

CNN.com is one of my most viewed sites, and in the end it’s the sites that I visit the most that are the most important to me. CNN.com combines a clean layout, quality journalism and unique content.

A lot of sites report national news, but CNN is the best at reporting news with video. That’s their niche. That’s what CNN does best, and their new Web site really showcases that.

There are countless searchable clips on all sorts of subjects from hard news stories to health stores to more feature-style stories. Before CNN relaunched their site a few months ago, cnn.com was not one of my favorite destinations. The video was small and buggy. I had trouble viewing a lot of clips I wanted to view.

I often left the site dissatisfied and stopped going for awhile. I was a subscriber to CNN’s Pipeline service and when it worked, I really enjoyed it. But it often didn’t work.

I was going to cancel it before CNN canceled the whole thing altogether.  It was the right decision from CNN to cancel it because they are utilizing video much better now.

Now the video is big and bold. The site really emphasis what CNN does best — video. I never have problems with the new site, and I enjoy the content better. It can’t stress how important it is to allow people to easily view your content.

The content is the same, but the delivery is just so much better. Video that goes with written stories are presented on the same page. You can get a written story, video and photos all on the same story on the same page.

It’s a great format. Better yet, it’s all free. CNN used to charge for Pipeline and a lot of the video associated with it.

People expect quality products on the Web to be free. Users can and will accept advertisements. I’d much rather view a few ads so I can enjoy CNN content for free than have to pay for commercial free video.

After all, CNN isn’t commercial free. Ad supported models can work and they are much easier to work when you can incorporate video ads.

I also really like the technology built into cnn.com — the use of Ajax for instance. The ability to transverse a lot of pages without having to reload content is great. It makes the site a lot more interactive and easy to use.

I also dig the minimalist design. It allows the content to shine. Journalism is about the content, and often Web site designs that try to do too much, end of doing too little.

I do wish CNN had some more original Web content and allowed for some more interactivity, but they have found a way to take quality content and display it in a new medium.

Overall, CNN.com is one of the best journalism redesigns in years.