May was the best month yet for The Journalism Iconoclast.

Overall my site (my blog and personal site are tracked together) received 8,668 page views and 6,264 visitors. Twitter is now the No. 3 traffic source to my blog with 15.1% of my visitors coming from there. California was again the top state coming to my blog.

Interestingly, Nevada — specifically Las Vegas — turned in a very strong, unexpected month of traffic with some abnormal time spent on my blog and a high amount of page views per visit. Yes, I do realize the month isn’t over yet, and that the numbers will be higher tomorrow after I check Google Analytics, but it’s already been a record as of a day or two ago.

Now it’s time for the fun stuff.

The most popular posts of the last month are as follows:

1) Hyperlocal will make money: This post from July 2007 proves the power of SEO, deep linking and social networking. For whatever reason there has been a big uptake in interest in the subject of hyperlocal journalism in 2008. Whatever the cause, it has brought my blog a lot of traffic.

2) Web natives need to lead Web operations:

I mean honestly would you stick a bunch of Web people with little print experience in charge of a print publication? I guess if you wanted to fail you might consider that a viable option.

Let’s be real here: Web operations can only thrive when they are staffed by people who get the Web and enjoy using the Web. These are people who categorically prefer the Web over print publications. If this doesn’t describe your journalism organization, then you are doing something wrong.

3) News organizations need to rethink staff resources in order to promote innovation:

It’s a simple question: What should news organizations stop doing, today, immediately, to make more time for innovation?

And it’s a simple answer: News organizations should stop pretending like it’s the pre-Internet days. Most news organizations are still legacy-first. Newspapers still care more about the print edition than the Web edition. Beats are still centered around making content for print edition.

4) Can newspapers keep their smart young people?

I’ve said before that many of the top journalism students never go into journalism. Instead, they choose more lucrative fields that have more stable futures. I can’t blame them — that’s probably the smart decision.

Still, many very smart people go into journalism. Are newspapers capable of keeping them, especially the talented Web people? I’m not so sure.

5) Journalism is killing itself with shallow coverage:

The average daily newspaper, however, could have a monopoly on great local coverage. Local coverage has become so bad lately that we have had to come up with a new term to describe actually covering local events: hyperlocal journalism.

Hyperlocal journalism is real local journalism. The fact that we had to come up with a new term shows how far many journalists and journalism companies have strayed from the beaten path. People care about local journalism, which is why national outlets like ESPN are getting into high school sports.

I hope you enjoyed the month as much as I did. I plan on starting off June with a big post that details why journalists should blog (maybe not what you think, however). I don’t think June will top May, because of some new projects that hopefully will be fleshed out soon. I can’t say much, but the JI might take a back seat for a month or so.

That will be the perfect time, however, for me to plot the launch of the next generation of this blog. This blog was thrown together in a night. It’s about time I bought a real blog up in its place. Please leave any suggestions you have for making this site better.

Thank you for your continued support.

~Pat

Rob Curley said at the E&P Interactive Media Conference that he tries to only work on projects that “move the needle.”

If you’re not moving forward, you’re moving backwards, because your competitors are always trying to outdo you. With the Web, everyone is a competitor.

Pushing the needle forward means not asking “what have we done in the past,” but instead asking, “what can we do in the future?” How can we innovate?

How can we make something better? Pushing the needle forward means realizing that your last project will never be your best project, because you’ll always be trying to make things better.

That’s why I think everyone should constantly be working to improve themselves (it’s individuals who allow companies to rest on their laurels). With that in mind, I’ve been using Lynda.com for the past month, and I have to say it’s been a complete pleasure.

I’m using the premium version, which is $375 a year (non-premium versions cost less but don’t come with exercise files). That may seem like a lot in the abstract, but it’s actually quite a bargain if you use it every week. One class at a community college could easily be that much.

So far I’ve been watching the PHP/MySQL videos (and doing the exercises along with them) and watching videos on SEO. Both have been great resources so far. The SEO videos are particularly great because I can just veg out and watch a few when I get home from work.

Unlike the PHP/MySQL videos, they don’t really require a lot of work while watching the videos. I occasionally make tweaks to my personal site and write down notes while I watch the videos. I have already seen some real SEO gains from the tips I have learned. I now am the No. 1 result for both Pat Thornton and Patrick Thornton under Google.

There are so many other subjects I plan on exploring in the next year with Lynda.com. If I’m not learning something new, or honing an existing skill, I’m moving backwards.

Journalism needs people who are constantly pushing the needle forward. I’m convinced that The Washington Post will suffer much more from Curley leaving for the Las Vegas Sun than vice versa. He is the kind of person who is always looking to push the needle forward and keep innovating.

And every employee was dedicated to pushing the needle forward, we wouldn’t have to worry about disruptive technologies and new competitors. We would be one step ahead already.

Journalism needs people who are never satisfied. The kinds of people who never, ever say, “but that’s how we’ve always done things.”

It doesn’t matter how you used to do something. It matters how you’re going to do something.

P.S. The JI set a new record in May for traffic. It’ll be a letdown if June isn’t a new record as well.

Does this imply that most reporters are not assisted by computers in their reporting?

That might explain why some reporters are kicking and screaming to stay in the 20th century. Maybe we need a better term for journalists who analyze and use data to report and help others report.

Just a thought

Innovation in College Media has an interview with me up right now if you want to find out more about what and how I think.

I will leave you with a small preview of the interview. This sums up what I think well:

And if you want to make journalism better — truly foment change — you have to believe there is no idea too crazy to succeed. Journalism needs dreamers. Journalism needs entrepreneurs. Journalism needs people willing to take big risks. The status quo will result in all of us losing our jobs.

And here is a little Q&A preview:

ICM: You mention that journalists need to “get and understand the Web.” Could you flesh that out a little more. Lots of students, for instance, know facebook, youtube, and the like. Is there something more to understanding “the Web”?
Thornton: It’s one of those things that if you need someone to show you how to do something or if you need to read a manual for something like YouTube or Blogger.com, you don’t really get the Web.
Anyone can use Facebook. We need people who have that entrepreneurial spirit — the people starting their own blogs, creating their own personal sites, etc. Making a MySpace page is nothing. Do you know some HTML and CSS? Can you FTP files to your site? That’s understanding the Web. And getting the Web means that you understand that the Web is an interconnected Web of people, cultures and civilizations.

Just because you can shoot video or make an audio slideshow, doesn’t mean you get that concept. Journalism needs people who understand that the Web is a community. That’s how we break out of this one-way communication paralysis in journalism. The Web allows everyone to have a voice, and many journalists — and journalism students — still don’t get that.

Last June I made one of my most popular posts ever (and one of my first): my Summer reading list.

Basically, the idea was to compile a list of things to read and do to help journalists and journalism students become better prepared for new media journalism. I support the “peace-out method” of suggesting that people have a myriad of skills (or knowledge of several subjects), but that people show know two skills really well to take over a project.

Last year’s summer reading list encouraged journalists and students to learn:

• HTML
• CSS
• How to blog
• Audio/Video
• Flash

The idea is that it’s good to be exposed to a variety of skills. Then journalists should hone on on a few skills to really excel in (and this will vary from person to person based on what people are comfortable and enjoy). All these new media skills, of course, should be combined with strong reporting skills and solid news judgment.

Now I need you to help me make this list better and up-to-date. What would you change? Which resources would you guide people to?

I think some experience with databases and spreadsheets would be a good recommendation. But which resources do you recommend for going about those projects? Social media skills might make sense to, but how does one go about learning social media skills?

Any help would be great. A journalist should never stop learning.

Will Sullivan, myself and others have argued that newsrooms should consider switching to GMAIL because of its interface, search capabilities, advanced filtering and tagging and other features.

Honestly, I am much more productive with my GMAIL and Google Apps e-mail (used with @patthorntonfiles.com addresses) than I am with my work e-mail at Stripes that runs off an Exchange server. And if I was forming a start-up, it would be a no-brainer to go with the cheaper, more Web-friendly e-mail client.

GMAIL just works better. But there are reasons why Outlook/Exchange are so popular in corporate environments.

I’m going to write some posts weighing the pros and cons of a newsroom making a switch from Outlook to GMAIL, but before I do, I wanted to harness the wisdom of my blog readers. What are the advantages of Outlook over GMAIL, especially in a professional environment?

A few that I can think of are:

• Push e-mail - Exchange has it and it works well. Is there a way to rig this up for GMAIL?
• I can’t imagine it being easy to transfer years worth of Exchange e-mail to GMAIL. A lot of newsrooms want through headaches when they went from Lotus Notes to Exchange.
• LDAP support. GMAIL has a really cool contact manager that remembers everyone you have ever contacted, but I’m not sure it supports a company wide contact list. I know GMAIL does support CSV files, and each employee could manually upload a CSV file of contacts, but this seems less elegant than using LDAP.

Please leave information, suggestions and comments in the comments section of this post. Your help would be greatly appreciated.

It’s an important, tough-to-answer question.

I’ve said before that many of the top journalism students never go into journalism. Instead, they choose more lucrative fields that have more stable futures. I can’t blame them — that’s probably the smart decision.

Still, many very smart people go into journalism. Are newspapers capable of keeping them, especially the talented Web people? I’m not so sure.

I already know several talented young journalists who have left the field. I think the fundamental issue (besides the horrible pay, hours and uncertain future) is that newspapers traditionally have been very rigid organizations.

Producing the “daily miracle” required a great day of institutional control. It required many layers of management and a rigid structure to ensure a daily product was produced on a medium — print — that is not a good daily medium.

The Web is the opposite. It’s instantaneous. It’s open.

The Web is immediate. Change can happen in the blink of an eye. The Web is an incredible platform for innovation.

Therein lies the problem. Will talented, young technologists really want to stick around institutions that are often risk-averse and slow to adopt new technology? Those people could find a lot more freedom to build cool and useful stuff in other fields.

William M. Hartnett thinks that newspapers have too many managers and too rigid of a management structure to keep around a lot of talented, entrepreneurial young people:

I, for one, am not terribly patient about the changes that we all know need to happen. I’m guessing quite a few people much smarter than me are even less patient and, dare I say it, far more entrepreneurial. Do we seriously expect talented, impatient, entrepreneurial young people to put up with our strictly hierarchical newsrooms?

“Great idea, whiz kid. A really killer app. Now just take it to your boss. Then up one level of management. Then another. And another. Just a couple more levels to go now. Whoops, looks like you’re not even being invited to the meetings anymore.”

Right. That just screams innovation.

For me, I think I love journalism too much to seriously consider another field at this point in my life. But that doesn’t go for every journalist. For many, journalism is just another job.

And if working for a newspaper is just another job, a person won’t hesitate to take another one in another field if its a better situation. That’s a major issue for the future of newspapers and journalism.

Marc Matteo proposed the radical idea on a comment earlier today:

In the same vein that there are requirements w/in newsrooms to subscribe to the paper, I’d like to see the “online desk” staffers barred from taking the print edition.

Why? Because it clouds online news judgement. When online staffers are still happily existing in a 24-hour news cycle of monologue presentation, they fail a lot of times to expand their thinking to a web-based, constant news stream, dialog model that will, it seems pretty clear to me, define the future of news online.

In short, they become liabilities.

I recognize the value both financially and functionally of a print product, I truly do. I don’t think such a restriction should be permanent by any means. It’s just that since many newspapers are not hiring “web natives” for their web positions — and therefor crippling themselves — a “print ban” on online staffers seems like a good way to whiplash them into starting to think like web natives.

Sort of a “total immersion” type of approach.

It’s a crazy idea. So crazy, it might just make a lot of sense. The idea, as I see it, is simple: Web employees will think about how to present and produce content differently if they live in a Web-vacuum.

Their only way to disseminate content will be the Web. It will also force employees to forget about print models of distribution, which are entirely one-way.

The Web is two-way, and maybe the only way for newspaper employees to fully grasp that concept is to force themselves to be apart of that two-way conversation without a one-way conversation to fall back on.

Can a “total Web immersion” strategy work?

What do you think? Agree? Disagree?

It’s a simple question: What should news organizations stop doing, today, immediately, to make more time for innovation?

And it’s a simple answer: News organizations should stop pretending like it’s the pre-Internet days. Most news organizations are still legacy-first. Newspapers still care more about the print edition than the Web edition. Beats are still centered around making content for print edition.

The same goes for broadcast. Even the best news organizations often have separate Web staffs that produce editorial content for the Web product. But that makes no sense.

Why have two staffs to produce editorial content, when most employees could be creating content that works on multiple platforms? That’s what I mean by rethinking staff resources.

It’s simply a matter of making employees and content work for us. Duplication of work is a great way to stifle innovation, because most news organizations are under a tremendous budget crunch and can’t afford to waste resources like that.

It’s easier to go from Web-first to print than the other way around. Why? Because the Web is incredibly flexible.

It can do all sorts of content incredibly well. Print, for instance, can only do writing, and photos to an extent, well. And print even has major limitations on written content that the Web doesn’t have (arbitrary story lengths, anyone?).

Let’s take the example of a beat reporter. Some beat reporters have begun blogging, but their blogs are often treated as one more thing to do. That’s hardly a way to promote innovative content. In fact, one-more-thing syndrome is a good way to promote staff burnout.

Rather, a blog should be the heart of a beat reporters arsenal — not the 15-inch story. Any time a nugget of information comes in, a beat reporter should blog about it (or post to Twitter or both). As news comes in a blogger can either add to his original post or make a new post.

Twitter updates take seconds to write, but make fantastic notes for longer written pieces later on. This keeps readers updated and interested.

At the end of the day, when the dust has settled, it will be a lot easier to put together a 15-inch story. A beat reporter will already have notes (Twitter is great for this) and several post of content to work with.

But imagine the reverse scenario. A beat reporter concentrates on producing copy for the print edition first. This means no meaningful content will be posted until a story is completed for the print edition (or stories). This also means the story may be an aribitrary length to fit print needs — not the story’s needs. Many beat reporters who operate like this will occasionally dump smaller news items into their blogs.

When people ask “how can we make more time for innovation,” it’s really more about using time more wisely than about making more time. Think about it. Blogging and Twitter are naturally mobile friendly, which saves us even more time while reaching an even broader audience.

That’s another bird killed with the same stone. Any good blog has at least one RSS feed (if not multiple ones for comments and sometimes categories). Google Reader is a fantastic (and free) mobile RSS reader. Without doing any extra work your content is already mobile friendly.

And I don’t have to explain how ridiculously mobile friendly Twitter is. So, now a beat reporter isn’t actually doing any extra work, but he is hitting the Web and mobile with full force. And because of the way blogging and Twitter work, it’s extremely easy to make a print story from all writing that has already been done.

We need to make our content work for us. This means making our content smarter and rethinking how we us staff resources in news organizations.

This is my May post for the Carnival of Journalism. It is currently hosted by Ryan Sholin over at Invisible Inkling.

As Facebook has evolved from a college-only network into a broader social network, so have my uses for it and my views on it.

Traditionally, I used Facebook to connect with some of my closest college and high school friends. We’d exchange inappropriate wall posts, send news over direct messages, post photos of each other and in general just have a good time staying connected, even though we have dispersed around the world.

Everything changed after Facebook opened up to everyone. Now potential employers were lurking on Facebook, scrutinizing every wall post, photo and friend connection. Now I’m getting friend requests from people I have never met.

It’s a whole different social network. As Facebook has gotten larger and tapped into a bigger social community, is has actually become less social between individual members. I now have more friends, but I less to share with each friend.

I have to be guarded. It’s no longer just my close friends viewing my profile. They get my inside jokes, our drunken photos from parties and they know when I’m serious or not.

Because of this, many of my friends have stopped using Facebook as much. Once you graduate, you have to think of your career, and the last thing you would want to happen is have a social network derail your career.

So, my profile is a lot tamer. I even use Facebook for business and journalism purposes now. This is why I finally put a link to my Facebook page on my connect page. I never publicized my Facebook usage before, because I tried to keep my friends list to people I know.

But times have changed. That’s why if you want to connect on with me on Facebook, you can. I have just a few requests of you if you choose to friend me on Facebook:

• If you want to be my friend, act like it. This means saying hello, sending me IMs and messages, debating issues and in general being social. Facebook is not LinkedIn. If you just want to have me as business connection use that service instead.
• I’m still going to be me. I can only make my profile so tame. I’m going to have fun on Facebook, and you should too. Again, if you want to see an extremely business side of me, there are other social networks for that.