The problems with adapting to a changing market place is not just a journalism problem.

Clear parallels can be drawn between the problems that the journalism industry is facing and the problems that other big media industries are facing as well. One only has to look at television industry, and how big networks are still trying to find ways to force us to view content the way they want us to view it. Less people are viewing TV, which has led to an onslaught of cheap-to-produce reality series, and younger people increasingly want to view TV on their iPods or computers.

People want choice and they want distribution methods that fit their lives. These are some of the same criticisms of the newspaper industry. Newspaper execs failed to embrace the Web, because they wanted people to view content in a method, the newspaper, that worked the best for them — and not the consumer.

Back in 2002, while I was a freshmen in college, Family Guy was starting to become a popular show, despite being canceled. There was no place to get the shows at that point. FOX didn’t sell DVDs of the show yet, it wasn’t in syndication and there weren’t new episodes on the horizon.

But my friends and I wanted to view the show (along with millions of other people). So, we did. We downloaded every episode for free through file sharing programs.

It’s not that we didn’t want to pay for the show. It’s that we couldn’t.

Family Guy was eventually brought back because of extremely strong DVD sales. But FOX still lost a lot of revenue when it wasn’t selling Family Guy on DVD or allowing other networks to syndicate the show. Plus, a lot of college students didn’t have cable, but they all had broadband connections.

An Internet distribution model would have brought in a lot of revenue. FOX should have anticipated that ground swell of change and gotten ahead of the curve, instead of languishing behind it. Instead of suing YouTube for “violations,” networks should have beaten YouTube to the punch.

The reason there is a YouTube or a Craig’s List is because big media companies failed to move quickly and capture a market that should have been theirs. Newspapers complain bitterly about Craig’s List, but it filled a niche that newspapers were unwillingly to. YouTube is largely comprised of original, non-copy righted material, despite what big media companies would want you or courts to believe, but big media properties also are popular on the site.

Clips of shows like The Daily Show and The Colbert Report started showing up on You Tube because fans of those shows wanted to be able to re-watch their favorite clips and Comedy Central (owned by huge media company Viacom) failed to provide an avenue for viewers to be able to watch their favorite clips. In short, they didn’t meet their own customers demand, and they thought they didn’t have to.

Without disruptive influences like YouTube, Comedy Central and other companies wouldn’t offer free clips on their Web sites. Although a free, non-profit site is still delivering what consumers want a lot more than Comedy Central is — Colbert on Demand. It’s a YouTube-like site for Colbert Report clips. Comedy Central should buy that site, sell some ad space and watch as the money rolls in.

Not only will they make money off of people watching clips that were already created for TV, but they’ll also encourage more people to watch the show itself. Site like Colbert on Demand are also great ways for a show to become popular. The Web is an incredible marketing tool when used properly.

Getting back to my original story; years ago it was possible to view the TV shows you wanted to when you wanted to on your computer or portable device. It was exactly what users wanted, and it had no restrictions on what computer or portable player you could play it on. Of course the big media companies weren’t making money off of this, because these were rogue solutions by fans for fans.

NBC is finally launching a service to let people watch TV on their computers, which is what we did years ago in college — but on our own terms. Unfortunately, it only works on Windows computers for now, which is silly because they are eliminating millions of potential customers (Mac customers on average are wealthier and better educated than Windows customers. Linux customers are very into computers and the Web. Never turn down a potential customer).

The service will allow customers to download shows to their PCs (but not portable players) for seven days after the show originally airs (because people are only interested in shows the first week they are available). It is supported by ads and it is free. The service should be in beta form later this year, and hopefully launched by the end of this year or early next. It might be a great way to get more viewers, but unfortunately a big media company can’t do the Web right.

It’s just not possible as long as they think they know best and not the consumer.

Why eliminate the ability to play it on portable devices? Why limit people to a seven-day window after the shows original launch date? Why force people to download special software to play these shows just so you can spy on consumers?

And why, oh why, must people reauthorize the shows if they haven’t viewed them within 48 hours?

Because big media companies want to control how you view their content, despite the fact that the Web is all about how we choose to view content we like. What makes this decision even more backwards, is that it is NBC’s attempt to get away from iTunes. But Apple understands two things very well: computers and the Web.

NBC doesn’t understand either one. NBC wants to control the distribution channels once again, something that iTunes store didn’t allow NBC to do. Yet, it was the iTunes store that made their comedy darling, The Office popular.

Back in early 2006, Greg Daniels the show’s co-creator had this to say:

“It was just unbelievable,” said Daniels of the show’s success on iTunes. “If you’re trying to talk to someone about this show you saw, and you actually have the ability to whip something out of your pocket and show them a scene, it helps word of mouth spread… That helped ['The Office'] get a full-season order.”

Now, season four of The Office is not on iTunes because NBC wanted more control and Apple was unwilling to acquiesce to their demands of wanting to charge upwards of $4.99 a show versus the current $1.99. NBC is pulling out of the very venue that helped make their shows popular, and the only venue that can put their shows into the hands of millions of people who own an iPod or iPhone.

NBC can’t even embrace a disruptive distribution channel like iTunes that made some of their most popular shows popular. It’s cutting off your nose to spite your face, and it just lost lots of customers like me who aren’t home when The Office normally runs and want to view the show.

My main computer is Mac, and I have an iPod. NBC direct is clearly not for me.

I’ll still catch every episode of The Office this year. There is no doubt about that, but I probably won’t be catching them in the way NBC would want me to or in ways that will make NBC money. Now, whose fault is that?

CNET’s Buzz Out Load Podcast recently said NBC was “shooting themselves in the foot right outside the gate” with their upcoming service because of all the hoops that they are making people jump through.

But why can content purchased from iTunes be played only on an iPod or iPhone and not a Creative Zen, for instance? Don’t blame Apple. Shows purchased from Amazon.com’s Unbox play on several video MP3 players, but not the iPod (or Macs or Linux). Don’t blame Amazon.com.

The culprit again is the big media companies. They insist on Digital Rights Management (DRM) for music, TV shows, movies, etc, which limits your ability to use content you purchase in the ways you want to use it. Apple, consumer watch dog groups and other companies have openly called for an end to DRM, but big media companies like NBC want to keep DRM because it controls how you view content — it controls you.

Amazon’s Unbox has a particularly troubling DRM scheme. To purchase content from Amazon.com you have to download the Unbox software so it can phone home and keep track of what you are and are not doing with videos you purchase from Amazon.com. This, of course, takes up computer resources because it is constantly running, and it also causes serious privacy concerns.

Apple created their DRM, FairPlay to appease big media companies. Many have wondered why Apple doesn’t license FairPlay, allowing users to play content protected by FairPlay from the iTunes Store on a myriad of FairPlay-approved devices? Apple asserts that they are liable if someone cracks FairPlay and the big media companies could hold Apple monetary responsible. If they license it, it will become considerably easier to crack.

Apple contends the simplest way to allow content purchase from iTunes, Unbox, etc to work on a myriad of platforms is to do away with DRM. MP3s, AACs, MPGs, etc are all standard file types that play on a myriad of computers and portable devices. Even Microsoft’s Windows Media format and Apple’s QuickTime format can play on just about anything.

Some big media companies, however, are experimenting with the idea of getting rid of DRM.

EMI was the first big media company to start selling DRM-free music on the iTunes store. Of course, you have to pay extra for the pleasure of using DRM-free content. Instead of$0.99 a song, you can pay a cool $1.29 a song to be DRM free. To be fair the songs are encoded in a bit rate twice as high as the DRM version, but it’s still essentially asking customers to pay and extra $0.30 to be able to do what they want with their own content.

We may see other media companies go DRM free for music, but it seems very unlikely for movies or television shows. Why would a company want to make it difficult for you to enjoy content that you like on different platforms? Simple — to protect legacy forms of revenue.

It’s no secret that network television is based off of TV advertising — kind of like how newspapers are based off of print advertising. Allowing people to view content in other forms — whether it be a newspaper on the Web or a show on an iPod — cuts into those legacy forms of revenue, which those industries are completely reliant on. Big media companies haven’t found a coherent way to make money off of the Web, which is why they try to limit it.

But you can’t limit what the people want. It was the people who made The Office into such a widely successful show. And it was those very same people downloading shows to their computers, exchanging clips on the Web and spreading the word about the show on message boards, blogs and other Web sites that made that show popular.

Big media companies, whether they distribute television shows or news, will have to adjust, and they will have to find ways to make money off of more than just legacy forms of revenue. The people have already adjusted — it’s time for big media companies to stop trying to tell people what to do and to start giving the people what they want.

The more you look around, the more you realize it is not journalists or journalism that is resistant to change. It’s something that afflicts a lot of people and lot of industries. At the end of the day, however, change will occur.

And it’s always much better to embrace change than fight it in the end.

In the rush to seem with it or hip, journalism companies have been adding blogs by the bucket full.

Often editors go around asking who wants a blog, and will accept just about any idea for a blog from a staff member. Maybe they’ll even allow them to have a blog with no real theme or vision. They’ll allow those staffers to post about whatever.

That’s what we call lack of a concrete strategy. People don’t like blogs because they are blogs. People like blogs because of the content and the two-way communication.

People like bloggers who connect with them. People like blogs with a specific purpose that fills a niche. In short: people don’t like random blogs.

Any newspaper or journalism company should only be adding blogs that fit a journalistic mission — their specific journalistic mission. Journalism is what we do. Writing about whatever isn’t journalism — it’s a journal.

And if people want to read random online journals they can easily go to MySpace or Live Journal. Blogs can be very powerful and popular at traditional media outlets, but they have to be handled with grace.

You need to have a vision and plan to really make blogging work, and just adding blogs for the sake of having blogs does not impress anyone. Blogs are everywhere. Little kids to grand parents have blogs.

You need to offer a blog that others can’t offer. You need to harness your niche, which should be owning the stories and news in your coverage area. If you’re a local newspaper, don’t write about national issues that don’t directly affect your readers.

 Here are a few blogs that I have found that I like and dislike.

The good:

Stars and Stripes Pacific Sports Blog
This is a blog at my paper run by our Pacific sports beat writer, Dave Ornauer. Basically, he uses the blog to augment his coverage and seek reader feedback.

For instance, there was a recent controversy where the Department of Defense in Europe instituted a policy where coaches could not report to the media a high school football score that had a scoring differential of more than 39 points.

If a team won a game 50-0, it had to be reported to us 39-0. We refused to run those scores unless we could independently verify them. Obviously, this was a good blog topic for us to tackle, because it was an unpopular decision with fans — both the the 39 point rule and our decision to cease running scores.

We had gotten a lot of letters about this, but a blog provides a much stronger back-and-forth between readers and between readers and writers. Without a blog (our Ombudsmen also tackled this issue in his blog), our readers wouldn’t have had the same sounding board.

Dave has used his blog several times to ask readers how they felt about controversies. The best blogs look to readers to lead the way.

 The bad:

The Reading Eagle
It’s hard to pick just one blog over at the Reading Eagle to single out as being poor. Here is a paper with a sub-50,000 circulation that has more than 40 blogs. Any stupid idea that a staff every had was apparently accepted.

What makes it even worse is that on the top of their blog index they are asking for more bloggers. They need less bloggers and better bloggers.

Here is the description of one of their blogs:

Al Walentis, multimedia projects coordinator for the Reading Eagle, leads a lively and irreverent conversation on world and local events, stuff going on around this site, online trends and the occasional rant.

Basically, he writes about a bunch of stuff that he has no authority on. I’d much rather read about world events from Thomas Friedman and local events from a prominent community member or beat reporter. And why is this guy an expert on online trends?

And spare us your rants. This is a professional newspaper! What makes the majority of the frivolous, MySpace-esque blogs more egregious is that the Reading Eagleactually has some good blogs from knowledgeable people.

Holly Herman, a 15-year veteran reporter covering state and federal courts, will be there to share with you the legal wrangling, the human side of the men and women in robes, and the tragedies victims endure as they wait for justice.

Legal matters are often hard for citizens to fully understand. Having a blog by someone who understand the local legal landscape is a great idea. Why can’t the rest of the blogs be like this?

Those other blogs dilute the power of the good blogs and frankly hurt the Reading Eagle as a whole.

Conclusion:

You shouldn’t go around asking everyone and anyone if they want a blog. Blogs aren’t candy. They’re a tool.

A tool if used properly that can really augment your newspaper’s coverage. A tool if used poorly can dilute your brand and hurt your standing with readers.

Each journalism outlet should have a clear vision of what it wants to accomplish with its bloggers. Don’t over load on too many staff bloggers. Often the best bloggers come from outside, especially those that are experts in certain areas.

I once saw a blog by a local “pet lover,” giving out advice to readers. A blog from a local veterinarian would be infinitely better.

Don’t add features like blogs, pod casts, talk back, etc just because you heard other places were using them. Add them because it makes your coverage better in a meaningful way.

Everything you do on your Web site should be to further your journalistic mission and to better connect with your readers.

They are countless places to go for random blogs, but there are very few places to go to get insightful blogs about local issues.

The Stars and Stripes has a few openings on our Web staff for Web Content Editors.

Do you want to become an online journalist or are you an online journalist looking for a challenge? Join me on the Web team. Here is the official opening at journalism jobs.

You’ll be a journalist or understand journalism and appreciate it. You’ll know (X)HTML well and have an understanding of CSS. Some of the skills you’ll have might include: writing. copying editing, photo journalism and photo editing, audio/video production, Flash, graphic design, PHP, MySQL, Python, Ruby, Django, Ruby on Rails and any other relevant online journalism skills.

Maybe you have several of those skills.

You’ll work with me on improving features like Heroes and making new ones. You’ll be responsible for posting content to stripes.com and deciding which stories deserve the biggest play. And you’ll help us determine what features to add to our new site launching next year.

Point of Contact: Sharnise Frazier, NAF Human Resources Office, 202-782-5028, WRAMCNAFVAB@AMEDD.ARMY.MIL. Put Announcement No.: NCNAFAN070991 in the tagline of your e-mail.

If you have any questions about the positions e-mail me at pat [at] patthorntonfiles [dot] com. If you do apply for the job, let me know.

If you haven’t checked out The New York Times’ “Assessing the ‘Surge: A Survey of Baghdad Neighborhoods,’” you should do so right away.

It is a prime example of how some stories are just better told online than in print — much better. Assessing the “Surge” is a difficult task, and this feature helps people understand how the “Surge” is working and where it is or isn’t working.

This feature specifically looks at Baghdad and breaks down the city into neighborhoods. It also allows you to see if a neighborhood is mostly Sunni, Shia’ or mixed. The “Surge” itself is a complicated military strategy, and it has differing effects on not only the country as a whole but on different areas of a city or location.

Go to the site and select a neighborhood. Dora is an excellent example of how well this project works. First, you can read a summary of the area.

Here is part of it:

A Sunni majority district south of the Tigris, flanked by lush farmland and a huge power station. With Saydia and other neighborhoods, Dora is part of East and West Rasheed district, an area the size of San Francisco with a population of 800,000 people.

Living in the southernmost section of Baghdad, residents have been uncomfortably aware for decades that it was Baghdad’s buffer zone, with the huge Shiite heartlands which began just south. It rapidly became a notorious killing zone for Sunni extremists who drove out Christians and Shiites, killed barbers and anyone not conforming to their Islamist edicts.

Then you can watch a video where an Iraqi woman explains how nothing has changed and how the area is very dangerous. There are also several photos of American soldiers trying to keep the peace. One of the most informative areas is the bottom of the page where there is a break down of progress before and after the “Surge” into quantifiable areas: Electricity, Garbage, Displacement, Freedoms and Outlook.

I really like how this project, unlike many other newspaper projects, is based in HTML and CSS and not in Flash. The project uses Flash to display the map of the area, video and photos, but uses HTML and CSS to build the framework of the section and display the text.

Flash is a bit of a resource hog, and it is often more time consuming to update in the future. By building this with a HTML backbone, the feature is a much faster and enjoyable experience. I also really like how it is its own feature, yet it is still part of www.nytimes.com.

By not taking users away from the site, it makes the experience more seamless and organic. Plus, it will encourage users to go back to www.nytimes.com for more content. Every newspaper should allow for features and multimedia stories to be displayed like this, while also understanding that some really big features may deserve their own, unique site.

If you ever thought that “new media journalism” was a fad or “not really journalism,” check out this feature. Read the information, watch the videos, see the photos and play with the graphic. Then try to tell me with a straight face that this is not journalism.

It’s one of the strongest pieces of journalism I have seen from one of the best journalism sources in a long time. That’s the power of the Web. That’s the future of journalism.

The New York Times has decided to do away with its subscription Times Select feature, freeing its popular columnists and editorials upon the world.

It’s a win-win. The Times will reach a new and expanded audience, which will generate a lot of ad revenue. Millions of people will now be able to read their award winning columnists for free. What’s not to like?

Sure, the Times will lose out on its subscription fees –$7.95 a month or $49.95 for a year, but it will gain a lot more in ad revenue. The Times made about $10 million in revenue from Times Select last year. That’s hardly anything to sneeze at, but it’s certainly not enough to warrant limiting the freedom of your content.

First, a newspapers primary goal is to inform readers, not to make money. So, when the Times put its very talented and persuasive columnists behind its wall, it limited their ability to have an impact on the world. It was a great way of rendering those columnists, with their considerable knowledge and experience, moot.

Second, the Times Select wall was a short-term strateg, and it simply had no long-term sustainability. Sure, there were a lot of people willing to try Times Select for the chance to read nationally and internationally renowed columnists like Thomas Friedman and Maureen Dowd among others, but those columnists won’t be around forever.

The Times had spent years building up its op-ed page into one of the finest and best known in the world. It had a commodity that people were willing to pay for. But one day their current columnists will retire or move on. Then a new bunch will take over.

With a Times Select wall, they wouldn’t be able to become as well known or respected as current columnists at the Times. If only a limited audience can read their materials, then it limits their ability to become popular. If they aren’t popular then people aren’t willing to pay for them.

Times Select was destined to fail on that end.

But it also didn’t make sense on a third end. Times Select generated about $10 million in revenue from last year. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out that the Times wasn’t getting that much traffic to its op-ed pages behind its wall.

According to the Reuters article:

TimesSelect had about 227,000 paying subscribers as of August. People who receive the paper at home get access to it for free, as do students. In total, about 787,400 people have access to TimesSelect now, the company said.

That’s not exactly a wide reach, and it shows little growth from when the service was launched a few years ago. I personally am a fan of Friedman’s, but haven’t read one of his columns in years because of the wall. Now, I will read his and other Times’ columnists again.

That’s a lot of page views for the Times, and it may inspire me to stay on the site longer and read other content as well. That’s a lot of potential ad dollars for the Times. I predict traffic to www.nytimes.com will show a noticable spike after the wall is taken down.

Getting people to your site is half the battle — never discourage people from coming to your site. These columns will now be widely linked to in blogs, and there will be an organic upswing in popularity of the columnists and the Times op-ed page.

These are some of the best opinion writers in the world. The blogverse will love them. But bloggers don’t link to sites that people have to pay for.

It simply makes sense to try to make as much content free as possible. It will give you a wider audience reach. If more people come to your site, they may stumble upon other stories.

Who knows how many millions of stories readers could have read if they stayed on www.nytimes.com after they read a column or op-ed piece.

The Web is a different beast than print. Never, ever turn down potential customers.

Getting a WordPress blog is a great way to add new media skills and to experiment with Web development.

I suggested yesterday that j-school students and journalists who want to learn how to use a content management system sign up for a free blog at WordPress.com, but there is a better solution for people who really want to learn as much as possible.

The only way to be able to fully customize a WordPress blog and be able to experiment to the max is by having your own blog on your own server. The blog is still free, but the server space is not. Many of you either don’t have a lot of money or don’t really want to spend it on a server.

For $5 a month you can run several Web sites off a Web server at A Small Orange. I use A Small Orange for my hosting, and it has been reliable and easy to use. You can install a WordPress blog in minutes.

The plan I recommend for those who want to experiment is $5 a month, but if you need more space or bandwidth, you can always upgrade to a bigger plan with a few clicks. With your own server, you can run your own domains, with your own e-mail, with blogs and databases. You can also experiment with coding by hand once you learn (X)HTML and CSS.

You can experiment and learn in ways that having a free blog hosted at a place like WordPress.org would never allow you to. If you make the plunge and get a server, here are a few places I recommend for would-be WordPressers:

Here is a great resource center to start with.

Choose from a thousands of themes to make your blog unique.

Add additional plugins to extend your blog. You can get plugins to run polls on your site and others to track stats, for instance. There are thousands of plugins to choose from, and maybe one day you can write your own.

If you want to really customize your blog, consider creating your own design.

The process of setting up a blog, installing plugins and messing around with the CSS of your blog will be an incredible learning experience. The best way to learn is just by doing, and WordPress.org has lots of docs and people who can help you experiment and learn.

Then you can use your blog to post written content, photos, videos, etc. Your blog can be a platform to show off your other journalism skills, be a digital resume and a place to connect with people. No matter what you make your blog into, it will be an incredible learning experience.

It’s clear that in this day and age journalism students and journalists need to know more than just words.

But what exactly do they need to know? Mindy McAdams has an excellent blog post about the skills that journalism students should have.

As much as I harp on the need to have a varied skill set, hearing it from her is much more powerful. She both has good professional experience and she is also one of the top academics in online journalism.

Every journalism student and journalist should know how to write, edit and check for AP style. Journalists should also have a firm grasp of ethics and law pretaining to journalism. Those are givens.

But journalists need more than that. So, what exactly do they need to know?

1. (X)HTML
Every j-school student should know what (X)HTML is, be able to read and write it and understand what it can and cannot do.

(X)HTML is not used that much anymore to actually layout Web sites. CSS is used for that. (X)HTML, however, is still the foundation that Web sites are built on. It provides the guidance for where a paragraph starts and ends using the <p></p> tags, for instance.

But most (X)HTML documents today are very light on actual (X)HTML and very heavy on CSS hooks. CSS provides the ability to style a whole site via a few universal hooks on any number of pages. That’s what makes it so powerful.

Students should know and understand (X)HTML, and frankly it can be learned in a few days at most. Just head over to the W3C school and read their tutorial.

Many journalists will need to occasionally deploy html tags like <strong></strong> (to bold words, for instance) to lightly style documents.

2. Learn a CMS
McAdams rightly points out that most sites are controlled by a content management sytem. Many papers won’t even allow you to go outside of the CMS to create content (although my paper does and I frequently go outside of the CMS).

But you cannot walk into a journalism job these days and not know how to use a CMS. Every journalist should understand what a CMS is and how to use one. As more and more staffs converge, it will be more important than ever for every journalist to understand content management systems.

Many of your school’s Web sites will be controlled by a CMS. It would be wise to join your student newspaper and try to learn and use the CMS as much as possible. If you’re a professional journalist and you don’t use your paper’s CMS, try asking someone who does to show you around it.

Try out all of the different posting options and see what it can and cannot due. That’s a good start, but getting a blog from WordPress.org is an even better idea. They provide free hosting, and you can set up a blog in minutes.

You can either select an area to post about like I do, or just randomly post, but what you post isn’t that important. What you are using this blog for is to learn how to use a CMS inside and out. WordPress is esentially a free and fairly powerful and flexible CMS.

WordPress can grow with you. You can add new features to your blog or completely change the design, which will be fun to do if you know CSS. It’s also a great showcase for potential employers, and you might grow a strong following with your blog.

3. Know audio and video
Whether or not you plan on doing a lot of audio or video work isn’t the key. You’ll probably be asked to do some of it in the future. What you want to learn are the basics: how to capture good audio or video (the conditions make a big difference), what is and isn’t professional quality gear, how do you use the gear and how to make good journalism with audio and video.

The most important thing for a j-school student is to have a strong appreciation of online journalism and new media. Whether or not you are ever a coder or videographer is not the point.

Understanding varying technologies is the key to colloraboration. One day you might be a product leader or editor, and you’ll be much better at your job if you know what can and cannot be done, even if you can’t do it yourself.

4. Consider some coding for more in-depth projects
This recommendation is a little more tricky. It depends on what kind of journalism you ultimately want to do. If you want to go beyond just using a CMS, than you need to know CSS. It’s not that hard to learn, and an excellent book by Eric Meyer provides a fun and easy way to learn CSS.

With CSS you can create custom sites or highly-stylized sections within your CMS. But CSS is just a mark-up language for design. If you want to go deeper, you’ll need to consider PHP, MySQL, Javascript/Ajax and possibly other languages and platforms.

If you want to create a database-driven project like ChicagoCrime.org, you’ll need to know how to code (it is made with the Web framework Django which uses the programming language Python). Database journalism is on the rise, and it can really be a powerful tool. It’s not for everyone though.

If you want to concentrate on creating content, I’d worry more about my previous three recommendations than this one. But at least try to understand what is and what isn’t possible using programming. A site like PoltiFact is made possible because it is driven by a database.

It was created with Django, by the way.

Conclusion:
A journalists needs more in his or her toolbox today than ever before. I wouldn’t try to be an expert at all new media skills. It’s more important to have an appreciation and understanding of the concepts I have mentioned above.

Maybe you’ll never learn video, but if you don’t really understand it or how it can be done well, how will you ever collaborate well on a project that brings together several different kinds of journalism? What if your video person doesn’t understand databases? Well, you’ll probably have a project that just doesn’t work well with the pieces you try to cobble together.

If you are already out of j-school, McAdams has some advice for you:

There’s a heck of a lot more to being an online journalist than HTML. I’d venture a guess that many online journalists today don’t even know HTML. Designing the page layout or the package is the job of a designer, not the reporter. But using a CMS? Writing a good headline on your blog post? Writing good link text and choosing appropriate material to link to? That’s what online journalists are doing — as well as uploading photos and audio files, creating spreadsheets, and making mashups.

If you know how to use a CMS, you can make your stories shine. You can link to relevant content and really give stories and features depth. That’s one of the most powerful aspects of the Web, because it allows journalists to put stories in context.

Journalism is changing. Your skills will need to as well.

Additional reading: My summer reading list will provide you with the roadmap to become a new media journalist.

Many of us have been arguing for years that adding additional Associated Press content to a newspaper will only hasten its decline.

The reasoning is that AP content is typically added to save money, but it’s commoditized content. People can find the same content in another publication. So, why would they read yours to get it?

Most likely they won’t. So, by trying to save money, a paper will most likely lose more money because it has made its content less appealing. This can partially explain losses in newspaper circulation.

Do people really read their local hometown paper for wire copy? Of course not.

AP content makes even less sense on the Web. Steve Yelvington says to stick a fork in AP because it is done. What real purpose does highly commoditized content serve on the Web?

Very little. The trend has been towards more local content and social networks for users. Users are joining social networking sites because it allows them to connect with people that share similar experiences of beliefs. They are looking for unique experiences.

Local and hyperlocal content are unique to specific publications. It’s the kind of content that is guaranteed to draw unique eyeballs. And it’s the kind of content that newspapers should be striving to produce.

I often flip open the page of large metro newspapers (I’m looking at you Plain Dealer) and find tons of wire copy. Well, I also read The New York Times and other publications. If The Plain Dealer wants to fill their paper with day-old stories that first appear in the Times or the AP, I’ll probably pass.

I simply don’t read a newspaper about Cleveland to get news that can be read anywhere.

Yelvington explains: 

Local news websites are under tremendous pressure to build audience. Having generic AP content isn’t an effective way to do that, so they’re turning to blogging, photo galleries, social networking tools and databases of local information.

At some point, wire copy is not merely of low value, it’s of negative value. Local sites are drowning their users with too much stuff, too many links. As Jakob Nielsen has said, every added link subtracts from the prominence of every other link. A cleanup is in order.

Nielsen is absolutely right. Many Web sites are hindered by the wall of information. The wall of information occurs when a homepage has too much information and too many links. It overwhelms readers.

Rather than stick around and try to make sense of all the noise, readers leave. This is why a site like the Drudge Report is so popular. It’s very easy to find what you are looking for.

Beyond a content and commodization standpoint, AP just doesn’t bring in the money. At my paper, we just don’t get the page views on AP content, which is why we use less of it on our Web site than our print edition does. Other papers notice the same lack of internet in AP content on their Web sites.

The smart thing to do would be to jettison AP content from most newspapers and Web sites. It isn’t good business practice, especially if you are a local newspaper.

There is a place for AP content, but it has to be displayed properly. My paper only runs AP content related to the military or Pentagon. We at least filter the stream of content for readers.

The future of journalism, especially on the great equalizer known as the Web, is more local and niche content. Users can get content about national and international stories from a myriad of sources. The only way to get more eyeballs to your site, and to build a more loyal user base, is to offer your users unique content.

And good content. 

Despite the push from many journalism companies into video, it’s not a format for all stories.

And those who think video will be the savior of journalism are dead wrong. Video has its place for sure, but don’t put too much stock into any one technology. That’s the ultimate lesson of the Web — to succeed you need a multi-prong strategy.

A lot of people have been making a hard push for video, believing that it can save a lot of newspapers and attract a lot of younger viewers. I’m 23, and I am here to tell you that myself and most of my friends just aren’t that interested in video.

It’s the least of newspapers’ concerns right now. There is a lack of relevant content that appeals to younger users as I noted last week.

Mike Cassidy asserts at his blog:

Online video is the first step toward achieving this goal, and is the driving factor in how these storied companies will once again reclaim some of their allure.

He is dead wrong. The first step — the step that virtually no paper has taken — is to create a beautiful and powerful Web site that is easy to navigate and enjoy. There are very few journalism sites that get it.

It doesn’t matter how good your content is, if you can’t display it properly. Worse, most newspaper sites are very hard to search (try searching for video, audio, Flash or photos). Most newspaper sites are closer to embarrassing then enlightening. Make a good platform to display your content, and then get back to me.

But even if you have a good Web site, should you focus on video? Video can cost a lot money to produce and shoot, so it makes sense to venture into the video waters carefully. Does every story require video? Of course not.

Just as every story doesn’t require text.

Here are a few examples of stories that just don’t make sense in video:

ESPN’s coverage of upcoming football games
ESPN does a myriad of stories and features for each game. A lot of it is centered around scouting. Yes, you could provide video previews of each game, and that would work well for fans of individual teams

But it falls apart when someone wants to be able to learn about a lot of upcoming games (like say fantasy football fans, people who take part in office pools and more dedicated fans). Video is time consuming. Text is skimmable, and video never will be. ESPN does an excellent job of breaking down a lot of its written content with lists and bullet points.

It’s written content that is meant to be examined quickly. Even better, is the database driven content that shows what happened the last 10 times two teams met, what star players did last time against their upcoming opponent, etc. The best way to look at and examine statistics is with written text, charts, graphs and visual simulations — just like ESPN.com does.

This particular page would never work well with video. Just browse around the NFL section of ESPN.com and the myriad of content the site has. It has video and audio content, but it also has content that clearly works better in other formats.

PolitiFact is another great example of where video just wouldn’t work. Video takes time to load and watch, and it usually has video ads. If PolitiFact had to rely on video to make its site work, it would be a very slow, boring and tedious site to use.

Not a lot of people would use it.

Instead it uses a highly searchable, database driven site. It displays content with pictures, graphics and text. It does have some video, and it’s usually very appropriate video for background purposes — like a campaign video that the site is analyzing for accuracy.

This isn’t to say that video doesn’t have a place. I watch a lot of video at CNN.com, for instance. It looks good, it’s easy to search (most sites have terrible search features for video), and it’s relevant. But if you think some poorly shot video that is barely edited about some newsless story is going to attract viewers, think again.

People like Cassidy claim to know what younger people want, but how many times do we have to hear what an older person thinks what younger people want before we realize that you can’t really understand something that you aren’t.

A 22-year-old reader of The Journalism Iconoclast isn’t thrilled about newspaper video:

To click on it, I’d have to think it would have something the text wouldn’t. I would have to want to see people speaking in a fuller context than quotes show, because video kind of requires more patience than text. You can’t really skip around or scan video.

Cassidy, us young people are impatient, and most Web video makes us really impatient. The worst is when someone tries to shove a 30-60 minute news program in its entirety on the Web. Talk about not using the Web properly.

To try to tell too many stories with video (some suggests that every story needs video) is a great way to turn off younger readers. We want speed and accessibility.

Don’t get me wrong, video is cool. It has a place, and it can tell some stories with incredible power. But written text, photos, infographics, Flash projects, database content, etc all have a place too.

It’s mastering how to put these different pieces together that is the real challenge. A lot of stories should be told by multiple formats, while some are really only able to be told in one format. Any paper that wants to succeed would be wise to understand and utilize a myriad of ways to tell stories to inform readers.

Just don’t over rely on video. It’s not a magic bullet.

We just launched our latest little mini special feature on the Landstuhl Regional Medical Center, and it has some important lessons in how to and how not to collaborate with print and Web editors on a project.

The idea for the project came from writer Steve Mraz and photographer Ben Bloker out of our bureau in Germany. Before troops in the Middle East ever make it to Walter Reed or Bethesda, they go to Landstuhl. Mraz and Bloker went around for a day interviewing four different people at Landstuhl from the four different branches of the armed forces.

Mraz wrote four different stories about the people he met, but he wanted to take his audio clips and use them on the Web. Ben took a lot of good photos, and the two of them thought it might make a good audio slide show project.

The idea was relayed to the Web staff at our main office in Washington. After going through the photos and audio, Melanie Bender and I decided the project was doable. We also decided to make it into a special site, with a unique design, instead of just dumping the content on our normal site.

Why? Mostly because we could, and it was fun. But also because the site we developed help convey the power of the photos and audio better than our own site ever could. It was also a nice way to tie all the content together.

Plus, it had been awhile since we got to do something really cool on the site.

What went well:
Unlike a lot of special features, series, etc that run in the print edition, we were notified weeks before this was scheduled to run, and we had gotten ahold of all the content in advance. We have had several occasions where we found out that a series was running in the paper the day it was being laid out in the print edition. Needless to say we didn’t do anything special on the Web.

But this project was the opposite. From the start, Mraz and Bloker wanted this to be a Web-centric project. Yes, it has a written component, but they wanted to be able to utilize the Web from the start. Whenever you have writers and photographers who think like that, it makes a project go a lot smoother.

Most of the time Web is an afterthought. This time they had a clear vision of what they wanted. We combined their vision with our vision, and it turned out that everyone was really happy.

Usually, something gets lost in the translation when we try to work on projects with our overseas bureaus, but that didn’t happen this time.

I really like the package that Bender and I put together. For the slideshows, she handled the photos, while I edited the audio. She put them together in a nice package in Flash.

We came up with a design we liked, and I used CSS and AJAX to make it as smooth as possible. We wanted a site that would look nice and be elegant without over powering the content. Ultimately, content is the most important thing on any news Web site.

What went poorly:
With every project, there are always a few things that could be improved. While we had good collarboration with the the staff in Germany, there was poor communication with the print staff in D.C.

The Web staff was under the impression that the stories were fully copy edited when we were given copies of them. This was not the case. Apparently, the print staff in D.C., which does the final edits on stories, did not know we were running the full project ahead of the print edition.

So, as good as the communication was with Mraz and Bloker, the communication was very poor with our own copy editing staff. That’s something that will need to be addressed. It’s a unique challenge for Stripes, because we have so many writers and editors overseas.

The audio is not very high quality. It’s below the standards that I would accept out of myself or anyone else on the Web staff in D.C. The reason is quite simple for the less-than-stellar audio quality: poor equipment and little training.

You can hear the difference in equipment between what my staff has and what the other staffs have. Stripes needs to do a better job of getting quality equipment out to reporters in the various theaters we cover.

Beyond just equipment, it’s a training issue. Once we get the other bureaus up to speed on the equipment that we use, we need to properly train them. Capturing audio isn’t easy to do well, especially in a challenging environment like a busy, war-time hospital.

You need to know how to use the equipment the best you can, the proper settings and which equipment to use when. I did clean up the audio once I received it, but there is only so much you can do.

Conclusion:
This might have been our smoothest special feature yet. On the Web end, we were able to put it together in about two days (and it would have gone smoother if we weren’t getting in new computers this week). It was also very helpful to have print staff people be so willing to make this work on the Web.

There is no substitute for enthusiasm. When you have print people who want to do cool stuff on the Web, you’ll probably end up doing really cool stuff. That’s what I love.

The audio certainly could have been higher quality. We are hoping to get our overseas bureaus the same equipment we have this year, and also get them training. We certainly could have Webified this more and made it a much bigger feature.

Ultimately, however, not everything needs to be a big package. We can easily do a feature of this size weekly, while also working on bigger, more long-term projects. And that’s with two people working on these projects.

Imagine what a much bigger staff could do.

With the ever-changing staffs in newsrooms today, collaboration and communication are key to produce quality Web products. Once you start showing people what is possible, more and more people in your newsroom will start to believe.