If you haven’t been following the Carnival of Journalism, what have you been doing these past few days?

Nothing of importance I’m sure. I’m going to be commenting on all of the carnival posts in due time, but there is one that editors, managers and publishers should read over at Journerdism ASAP.

Will Sullivan blogged about how high tech freelancers are helping to fill gaps in new media teams at newspapers. Maybe, it’s just a sign of the times or a cold, hard reality, but most newspapers don’t have nearly enough technical talent. That’s not good news.

But many realize that they don’t have the budget or the mindset to hire the right people. So, instead of trying to find their own programmers or Flash developers or whatever, they outsource. It’s a good idea for many companies for a few simple reasons:

1. All newspapers need to be making compelling digital content right now. If you don’t have the staff to do so right now, find someone who does. You can’t wait around to make compelling features until you have all the personal in place, which may never happen anyway.
2. Some of the best talent is just too expensive. Newspapers do not pay well. That’s a fact of life. If you are really good with programming or Flash or another skill, you could get paid a lot more working for another company. Plus, many programmers and developers find working for newspapers to be very restricting, especially since their bosses are often extremely glib about technology and online journalism. Newspapers can’t compete with the money or freedom that technical people can enjoy elsewhere, but they can hire very talented people and companies on a per project basis.

If your company doesn’t have the talent or the knowledge to deploy that talent, top editors should strongly consider outsourcing to high tech companies that get the Web. Will sums it up well:

I think this can be a symbiotic relationship for both parties – papers and freelancers/agencies. The freelancer/agencies get more work, more freedom, don’t have to work in the traditional newsroom and get to avoid the cubicle “Office Space” life. Newspapers can combat their brain drain, get to do cool projects quickly and perhaps get some fresh, non-traditional ideas about information and storytelling in their newsrooms.

Carnival of Journalism - This was my first post for the blog carnival dedicated to journalism, founded by some of the leading voices in online journalism.

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Don’t let the graybeards and naysayers sway you, the Web is the greatest thing to ever happen to journalism.

This is the turning of the tide. It’s when journalism begins meaning so much more in people’s lives. It finally gives people a voice.

It’s 24/7 news that you want. It’s deeper background. It’s more interactivity.

It’s a conversation. It’s what the news always should have been.

The newspaper never has, never could and never will hold a candle to the power and depth of online journalism. It’s the past, and this is the future:

1. News that you want, when you want — on any subject.
2. News in the formats that you want that best tell each individual story.
3. News that you can get from anywhere in the world on a myriad of devices.
4. News with deeper background and content.

The Web is not killing journalism. Journalism is more alive than ever, but the Web will kill many journalists and journalism organizations unwilling to change, unwilling to deliver news that matters to people and unwilling to deliver news to people in the formats that matter to them.

The Web has no room on its vast bandwagon for out-of-touch journalists or companies who fear change. Journalism has always been about change — it has liberated societies, it has brought down corrupt politicians and it has spurred movements.

Innovation is the path to salvation.

Take a look at the some of the most innovative projects and voices in journalism:

Congress Votes Database - Built by data-as-journalism evangelist Adrian Holovaty during his days at the Washington Post, this database gives users the kind of information that print or TV news never could. It gives users access to information about the political process in an easy-to-use format.

It tells people the kind of data that helps make informed citizens. Want to know how often your senators miss votes? Now you can. Want to know how often your senators vote with their party? You can.

Want to know how your senator voted on the latest legislation? You can. Want to know how that stacks up against his or her party colleagues? You can.

This is news that people can use. It goes so far beyond what traditional journalism ever could. It’s the fourth estate in its finest hour, and it will help keep people far better informed about what their national politicians are or are not up to.

Exonerated, Freed, and What Happened Then - This excellent multimedia package by The New York Times tells the stories of wrongly convicted prisoners after they were exonerated by DNA evidence. It uses audio clips from the wrongly convicted to help tell their stories and is packaged nicely with Flash.

Beyond just the audio, a written component gives you background on each former prisoner and what has happened since he or she was freed. The package also tells you how long each prisoner was in prison, how much their compensation was for being wrongly convicted and other information. I can’t imagine a better way to tell the stories of people wrongly convicted of heinous crimes.

The Lawrence Journal World - This newspaper and its parent company Journal World are pioneers in making journalism matter in the digital age. They started being hyperlocal years before there was a name for it. They allow their site to be a conversation and make use of deep database content.

Look at this story on the recent ice storms rocking the Midwest. There is a written component, photo gallery, two videos, links to related stories and additional information about the storms. This innovative paper has decided to cover news from every angle to give its readers the full story.

Oh, and its circulation is about 20,000.

LoudonExtra.com - The Washington Post’s hyperlocal site all about Loudon County delivers in ways that traditional small-town media never could. It has breaking news, it has deep database content, it has in-depth coverage of prep sports, it has multimedia, it’s a conversation and so much more.

And it’s just for one county.

Want to know which places offer Sushi at midnight on Thursday night? LoudonExtra can help you. Want to know information on every school in the county? LoudonExtra can help you. Want to hear podcasts of sermons from local churches? LoudonExtra can help you.

It’s the site that every local newspaper should build. It’s the first place people look in Loudon for news and information. Every news organization should strive to be the portal of its users’ lives.

The time for action is now. Users don’t want what we have been giving them. They want so much more.

1. A conversation - Let your users comment on every story, photo, video, feature and item on your site. If you have blogs, make sure they foster a conversation. Blogs are not online columns.
2. Deep database content - Don’t just stick everything on a story page. Most content should be a database item, because databases are incredibly searchable and usable. And many stories can be told using data instead of just written text. Look at how many major metro papers get killed by NFL.com and ESPN.com when it comes to covering their own hometown teams. Why is this? Because both the NFL and ESPN realize that database content is very important to sports fans. You can get an incredible amount of statistical information at those two sites that virtually no major newspaper has. But here is the problem: major metro papers should own those stories. The Cleveland Plain Dealer should be THE source for Browns coverage. It’s not. Make it happen.
3. Multimedia - The Web is an incredibly immersive format. It does photos much better than print and can do videos in much more innovative ways than TV. Audio can add a lot to most stories. This doesn’t mean every story needs audio, video or photos, but it does mean that our sites need more of all of them. Users wants huge photo galleries of local sports and events, audio slideshows of compelling stories, videos that matter and audio that helps tell a story.
4. Go local - Many papers are adding more and more wire content. That’s not why people read local newspapers. They come for local stories. If you don’t deliver what people want, why would they come to your site? Don’t try to out-CNN CNN, because you won’t. Own your local stories, and people will come. You can only own the stories within your own sphere of influence. But you should rock those stories to the core.
5. Breaking news - This should be obvious by now, but I still hear some old-timers talking about “scooping ourselves,” when they post breaking news to their Web site a day before the print edition gets it. Listen, that’s nonsense. The whole point of breaking news is that it is breaking. If your site posts a story before your competition even knows about the story, you’ll have a huge lead time over them. You’ll own the story. Don’t worry about a competitor having the story for tomorrow’s print edition, because by then it’s not breaking news, and you should have a second-day analysis story by then anyway. Everyone will have heard about it from your paper in the first place. People want continuously updated news coverage, and the Web does it the best.

Embrace your readers, embrace innovation and embrace the Web. It’s going to be a special time for journalism.

It is journalists and quality journalism that will save newspapers — not some mythical device or some new technology in the future.
That’s the reality on the ground. Howard Owens has an excellent post about how there is no magic technology that will save newspapers, and he is right.

Owens first starts by dispelling two myths:

• First, we don’t need technology to save us. There’s no reason we can’t succeed on the web; in fact, we’re doing far better on the Web than many “the sky is falling” types in newsrooms give us credit for.
• Second, technology won’t save us. If we can’t succeed on the Web, we certainly won’t be able to succeed with the Kindle or e-ink, because each of those new technologies will bring their own challenges to the traditional way of doing things. Consumers will decide how to best use these devices, not publishers, or they won’t use them. That’s the rock-hard truth of digital technology — users are in charge, not publishers.

He argues that no magic iPod or Kindle-like device is going to save journalism, and he is right. It’s not the delivery method or the medium. It’s us. It’s our colleagues.

It’s our inability to give consumers what they want.

We’re not creating compelling enough content. Most of our operations are still print first, Web second. Most of our employees still think online journalism isn’t real journalism.

How is technology going to solve those issues? It’s not. But we can save newspapers by doing one thing and doing one thing really well: telling great stories.

Chicagocrime.org tells the story of Chicago crime and how it affects people on a personal level better than any newspaper article ever could. It’s a piece of journalism that touches every person in Chicago. It doesn’t rely on sensationalism or scare tactics, just cold hard facts.

MediaStorm tells incredible stories using multimedia packages. This story about the “Marlboro Man,” a famous/infamous Iraq War veteran, uses powerful audio and images to tell a story that a newspaper never could. It uses his own voice and words to tell you how his life has drastically changed since his last tour of duty.

PolitiFact takes the basic political story about the truthfulness of a candidate’s claim or a group’s claim about a candidate and completely reinvents that journalism concept. It’s a database driven site where you can track individual candidates, political parties and issues. It presents everything in a lightning-fast graphical style that is infinitely easier to digest than the standard inverted pyramid story. Plus, it’s much easier and faster to update, because the writers and editors for the site don’t have to have enough content for a full-fledged story to update the site — just enough to analyze another claim.

The New York Times tells the tragic story of a man wrongly convicted of rape and murder. He was exonerated by DNA evidence, but only after spending 16 years in prison. The Times uses a multimedia package to tell the story of a lost man that was forsaken by our judicial system. Could the written word touch the power of this feature? Not in a million years.

It’s not the technology that these people are using that is so incredible, but rather it’s how journalists are thinking beyond the printed page. They are using existing technology to tell stories in new ways, instead of waiting for something mythical to come along and save them. They are being proactive and embracing Web 2.0, not fearing it.

Trying is half the battle.

So, when someone tells you that the Web is killing newspapers or that we need an iPod to save the industry, tell them this: The Web is the greatest thing that ever happened to journalism, and we don’t need some mythical device to save newspapers — just ourselves.

We have talked about what skills, knowledge and experience you would want in a new hire, but what skills does your organization (or your colleagues’ organizations or your clients) actually look for and accept?

Some of you have suggested that you would not hire a Web person who doesn’t have his or her own Web site. Others said they want Web people who use, understand and enjoy Web technologies and sites. They want people who use sites like del.icio.us, facebook, Twitter, etc.

They want people who have used a CMS or blog before and know how they work and an applicant with a blog is always a plus. (X)HTML, CSS and Photoshop? Well, duh.

But I know from talking to several people in the industry that is not the case. The people often in charge of hiring don’t know what to look for, or they often don’t put a large enough importance on people who genuinely love the Web and enjoy using cool Web technologies. Many job openings I see don’t even require Web applicants to know (X)HTML and CSS really well or have a strong familiarity with Photoshop.

Heck, how many of your Web applicants know the difference between (X)HTML and HTML (or the people doing the hiring)? Let’s clarify, I am not talking about applicants that are technical people with no journalism background (the best news organizations have many of these too). I mean journalists working on the Web.

The second part of the question is: what skills does your organization (or your colleagues’ organizations or your clients) look for in new reporters in general? Does your organization even care if your reporters have any Web skills?

Last question: are your companies (or your colleagues’ organizations or your clients) hiring practices helping or hurting your organization for the future?

The New York Times Fiona Spruill says that all journalists expecting a career on the Web desk should have:

• A proficiency in Photoshop, HTML and blogging software.
• An understanding of Web publishing systems (content management systems).
• Experience in the production of multimedia — including the use of audio and video editing tools.

Mindy McAdams says that journalists who can flourish online and in print can do at least these skills:

• Can package the news online.
• Can create original multimedia.
• Have solid journalism credentials.
• Have strong technical skills.

I can tell Mindy that many organizations don’t even require their Web staff to have those skills, let alone journalists in general. Most news organizations still look for print or Web people and not of the Web/print people that Mindy would like to see. Frankly, those are the kind of people news organizations need more of.

That’s just the reality on the ground. So, what are you seeing in the journalism world?

Next week kicks off the Carnival of Journalism with several of the better-known journalism bloggers from around the world (and me), and I encourage you all to follow along and participate.

The Carnival of Journalism is a blog carnival:

A blog carnival is a type of blog event. It is similar to a magazine, in that it is dedicated to a particular topic, and is published on a regular schedule, often weekly or monthly. Each edition of a blog carnival is in the form of a blog article that contains permalinks links to other blog articles on the particular topic. — from Wikipedia.

I encourage you to read the rest of what Wikipedia has to say about blog carnivals. My blog post will be dropping on the 13th, and it deals directly with the state of journalism as it is related to the Web.

On the work front, I am working on a new special feature that will make Army-Navy look tiny. But that won’t be hitting until 2008. Hint: it’ll be my first database-driven project for Stripes.

Happy Holidays!

Army-Navy 2007 has passed, and I’m going to share with you a few lessons learned from covering the big game.

Before reading this post, it’s probably a good idea to check out our Army-Navy coverage, if you haven’t already. I’ll start off with discussing what Stripes did in years past.

Usually, Stripes would send a photographer to the game and grab some photos and make a photo gallery. Stripes does not have any domestic sports writers, so my paper usually did not cover the game from a written standpoint. FYI, Stripes is only published overseas for U.S. troops and DOD members.

Stripes.com, however, gets about 2/3rds of its readers from the U.S. Thus, we have a different audience to cater to, and we should begin covering stories that matter to people stateside. A few months ago I brought up the idea of Stripes doing a special feature for the Army-Navy Game because it would be a great way to expand our audience, especially stateside.

Plus, Army-Navy is the kind of event Stripes should be covering in depth in the first place. I then began making a list of stories and angles I wanted to cover the game and events surrounding it from. This was my first year at Stripes, which is why I didn’t cover the game last year.

Goals:
To cover Army-Navy and everything surrounding it from a myriad of angles in several different formats. I wanted to tell the story of what this game meant to people, and how it is different than other college football games.

This was not going to just be a feature that could have been done in print. In fact, it was a Web-first feature, where content was taken from the feature and put into print later on.

Some things were left on the cutting room floor:
We didn’t do video (our cameras will not arrive until January or so), we didn’t make it out to West Point or Annapolis to interview students before the game and we didn’t have a commenting feature on the site (although we accepted e-mail comments that we put up if they were good).

Here is what made it:
We had seven written pieces (leading up to the game, on game day and day after stories), two audio slideshows, a big photo gallery with about 100 photos from the day, numerous other photos (from last years game, this years game and the press conference before it), comments from fans and others and additional audio. All of this was packaged together in a stand-alone site made with (X)HTML, CSS and Ajax.

How did it go?
For the most part, it went pretty well. It was more time consuming than normal because our Web staff was under staffed, and we were training two new people a few days before the game. I was the only one the editorial staff had at the time to code the feature and to do the audio editing, which meant for some really long hours. Plus, I was the lead writer for the feature because our Washington Bureau does not have a sports writer.

But the feature came off smoothly because I reused a lot of the code from a previous special feature I did. It gave me the basis for the page, while I had to change the look of it. I did have to write a bunch of new IDs and classes because this feature was much bigger and incorporated a lot more content.

The feature accomplished what I hoped it would — it covered the game and the pageantry from a variety of angles. Army-Navy is a lot more than just a football game. In fact, that is only part of it.

The audio slideshows were the perfect way to convey what the pep rallies were like at the Pentagon. No written text could do them justice. You just have to hear and see it, and the pep rallies are probably too fast to capture well with a video camera (there is a bit of running needed to keep up with those young academy members as they go through the halls of the Pentagon).

Why the Web?
This is the kind of story that isn’t possible to tell properly in print. I Twittered live from the game with my thoughts and observations on how the game was going. We put up updates as the game went along and had photos from the game on our special feature during the game.

We had a story about the pre-game festivities up at half time, and our recap was up shortly after the game. Later that night I added audio clips and photos to our story about the pre-game festivities.

Honestly, printing a recap a day after a football game happens is so 1980s. People want it immediately and they want lots and lots of photos. And much, much more.

You can’t cover an event like Army-Navy with just text and photos like a newspaper does. You need the multimedia content. And the ability to put more than 100 photos up about one event is something that the print will never be able to do.

What to differently?
This feature created a lot of buy in from the print staff. It was the first feature that I have led at Stripes (from not just an online perspective, but from a story and content one as well). A lot of print staffers are finally seeing what is possible online, and how we can do features on our Web site that really extend our brand and serve our readers better.

Plus, what’s good for Stripes.com is good for the print edition too.

We’ll be doing video next year and hopefully making trips out to both campuses a week or two before the game to get some more color from the students. It would also be nice to attend the pep rallies at both schools.

Allowing people to comment on stories, and a better way for people to send us comments, photos or other content would also make this feature better. It could use some more interactivity.

But in the end, the purpose of this feature was to tell the story of Army-Navy as best we could, while informing people as deeply and quickly as possible.

This feature was for the fans.

P.S. Special thanks to the whole Stripes Washington Bureau for helping out the Web staff. You guys are incredibly busy covering the Pentagon and Capital Hill, but you still managed to get us photos of the pep rallies (Lisa Burgess and Jeff Schogol) and help give us great color coverage on game day (Leo Shane III). Bureau Chief Pat Dickson and his whole staff have been big supporters of the Web staff and stripes.com. You can’t create cool features without buy-in from print staffers.

I’ll be Twittering the Army-Navy game.

You can follow me at: http://twitter.com/jiconoclast

I’ll be posting updates about the game, about our coverage, what it’s like to attend America’s Game and the experience in the M&T press box.

Follow along.