Tag Archives: journalism

An open letter to college journalists

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Dear college journalists,

Please innovate. Be the risk takers, the innovators, the iconoclasts that this industry so desperately needs. Journalism organizations are dying from an acute case of bad management and a lack of fresh ideas.

Our j-schools are spitting out people who celebrate the status quo. I’m here to tell you that if you try to emulate a dying industry, you will find yourself without an industry. We need you, all of you and your wildest ideas.

Journalism is largely an industry paralyzed by the past. Many of its leaders are the same people that drove our industry over the cliff. They cannot save journalism.

Much of the journalism industry is afflicted by a belief that what ails us and the industry is largely externalized, that’s it not something that we control. That it happened to us. That’s not true.

What ails us is us.

You have a much better chance of saving and transforming journalism than any of those executives that you look up to do. But you must not look outward for help. Forget what we’re doing.

We’re tied to the past. We can’t figure out how to make money online to support journalism. We can’t figure out how to make truly exceptional interactive products. We can’t figure out that people don’t want tablet apps that pretend they are newsprint.

We can’t get out of our own ways. And we can’t forget the past.

Ignore us. We don’t exist. Create the news organization that your campus users would want. Create a news organization that doesn’t acknowledge that print, radio or TV exist. Rethink everything.

While we have to keep our legacy products because many of our users want them and those products still produce the majority of our revenue, you don’t need to be tied to such thinking. The majority of your users aren’t reading print newspapers. And if they are, your website sucks more than you think.

We need you to be incubators for the future. We need you to make products that appeal to your generation, a generation that grew up with computers. Look to your classmates and understand what they want in a news organization.

You’ll learn a lot more about the future of journalism by observing and talking to your classmates about how they consume and want to consume journalism than by studying legacy media organizations. They are your users, not yourselves and especially not the ideas and users of the past.

You are not studying journalism and working for your college newspaper so that you can get a job at a dying institution. No, you are doing so so that you can help rescue this industry from mismanagement, poor ideas, a lack of risk taking. Maybe you can’t turn around a sinking ship, but you can come by with a life boat and rescue the survivors and help us regroup.

I believe in you where many other professional journalist do not, because I have lost faith in many established journalism organizations to turn it around. I’m watching a bunch of slow-motion publisher-assisted suicides. I believe in you because you have yet to be tainted by tradition, by what was, by a veneration for what no longer is. I believe in you because if you looked inside of yourselves and unleashed your wildest ideas, you could help us turn it around.

I’m also writing you this because of my own regrets. While I’ve never been one to color inside the lines or to pay my dues or to venerate the past over the future, I have largely failed. I was not aggressive enough as the editor in chief of my college newspaper, despite having more Web experience than journalism experience. I could not lead my student newspaper to the future, nor could I show a path forward.

We did new things online at the time that few had done, but we were not the true iconoclasts that professional news organizations could look to for innovation and new ideas. And since I’ve entered the work force, I hardly think I have changed much in the journalism status quo.

Once you enter legacy journalism, no one will really listen to your new ideas for years. Your more likely to assimilate than to change a news organization.

That’s why it is vital to take risks while you are a student journalist. When someone tells you that that no one has done that before or that won’t be successful, you can point to what you did in college at your news organization and show how it was successful. Look to your college media experience as an opportunity to build case studies for your professional career.

College media needs to be the linchpin of innovation, risk taking and sometimes all-out gambling in journalism. And I don’t mean little or petty risks. This isn’t about sensationalism or being edgy; it’s about finding new ways to present content, new ways to make money for journalism and even radically rethinking what your college news organization is.

If you think the inertia of changing a college publication is hard, wait until you get into the professional world. Wait until you have a paycheck and a career on the line. Or the careers of other people on the line.

Wait until you have a higher up editor shoot down your plan. Wait until you run into the way things have always been done. Wait until you run into your own professional self doubt as you try to lead people with much more experience than you forward.

You need evidence. You need proof. You need to create great, modern news organizations in college and bring those lessons to bear for news organizations. Gone are the days when college media was a training ground for future professional journalists. College media is now a training ground for professional journalism organizations.

In fairness to my peers and my colleagues, radical change is hard, no matter how necessary. It’s hard to institute radical change without proof that it could work. And where should that proof logically come from? It should come from college media, institutions that can afford to take risks and afford to make mistakes.

In other parts of academia, research and labs are used to test out ideas that industries aren’t ready to implement or don’t have the money to investigate themselves. Imagine the medical and healthcare industries without all the scientific researchers at universities. That’s the model that journalism departments and college media needs.

Forget the model of journalism departments and college media being a minor league for professional news organizations. You need to be our R&D departments.

You need to train us.

Paying for great writing in the Internet age

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Rather than continuing to vent my rage over The Atlantic trying to pay a writer with publicity, I want to talk about how we can save great writing.

Great writing is probably never going to generate the most pageviews, and an ad model focused on pageviews, and not quality or demographics or time spent actually reading a piece, is not going to support great writing.

The Web has brought lots of new forms of journalism, and is allowing us to tell stories in completely new ways that are often better than we ever had before. Blogging has taken beat reporting to a new level. The Web, however, has not been a friend to great writing.

Needless slideshows of written text, link-bait headlines, contrarian arguments rooted in nothingness, top 10 lists and gifs will generate pageviews. None of those are remotely great writing.

In print, there never was spammy SEO or link bait. A well researched and written piece would find an audience. A great piece could carry an entire $4.99 magazine.

I have been skeptical in the past about paywalls and pay meters. But that skepticism is largely rooted in the fact that most news organizations and blogs — even traditional outlets — have embraced pageview gaming, suspect SEO practices and link baiting. That content is not worth paying for, and if advertisers want to pay by the pageview for that, so be it. It’s a match made in Internet Hell.

It may be time for those of us who love great writing and reporting to say enough is enough. Gone are the days when advertisers would pay a premium to be placed next to a premium product.

Great writing will never be supported by publicity. Or a token $100. Great writing takes time, research, retrospection and craftsmanship.

So, how do we support great writing?

We can sign up for paid accounts with news orgs that have them, but this would require those news orgs to produce great content. The New York Times, unlike most of its contemporaries, didn’t dismantle its ability to write good stories and do good reporting. While I disagree with the amount they charge for a digital subscription, and think a lower amount would ultimately bring them more revenue, I’m still a paying subscriber.

I remain unconvinced that most large dailies have enough left to warrant paying for. Great journalism takes time, knowledge and research, and Web ad models have struggled to support this. I’m not willing to pay for a piece based on anecdata or a story largely lifted from a press release or a no-research opinion piece.

For news organizations that used to produce great writing and would like to do so moving forward, perhaps they need a paywall around just that great writing and let advertising be the way to pay for the quick hitters, beatblogging and daily updates. The kind of content that The New Yorker, Harper’s Magazine, The Atlantic and newspapers’ magazines produce (or used to in some cases) was always expensive and often didn’t make much money. Those pieces were never the most popular, and with a business model centered around popularity, we need another way to pay for it.

We have a choice: Either we break out great writing and find a specific business model for it, or we risk losing it.

For individual writers looking to fund their writing, I highly recommend crowdfunding sites such as Kickstarter. We recently got funded a $15,000 reporting package on Antarctica. People are willing to fund journalism, and are perhaps even more willing to fund reporting through Kickstarter than sign up for paywall access.

When you pitch a stories or a series on Kickstarter, people know what they are getting and know that a lot of time and effort will go into it. When you sign up for generic paywall access, you’re also paying for the poorly reported stories that rely on anecdata and for the opinion pieces with no research and for link bait stories that are more infuriating than informative. A lot of people don’t want to pay for that.

Journalists can also sell Kindle Singles, short ebooks that can house long-form journalism. Instead of trying to get a piece into an existing publication and attempt to get just compensation for it (usually north of free), sell it directly to consumers for $0.99 or $1.99 or something reasonable.

This idea can be combined with the Kickstarter. Your Kickstarter backers can fund the research, reporting and writing of a piece or series, and have first crack at your finished work, but then you can sell that work on the Kindle, iBooks, Nook and other e-reader stores.

Think of Kickstarter as an advance that pays for your time and Kindle Singles as a way to generate some additional income. To get your name out there and to connect with readers and fans, you’ll need a personal site with a blog. You want to keep people updated on your work and make it easy for them to find what you have done and how they can get a hold of it.

In between long-form pieces, you can do short written pieces for free on your own blog. If you’re going to blog for free or for insulting sums of money, why not do it for yourself, keep your dignity and generate publicity for yourself? Eventually, your blog may become popular enough that you can justify selling ads yourself like several Web writers do.

News orgs can do the same thing, although I think they should adjust the strategy. Kindle Singles and similar ebook platforms are something very much worth exploring for them. But I would go beyond that.

The Magazine is a new iPad-only publication that focuses on medium-length writing. It comes out twice a month and each issue usually has 4–6 stories in it. While I think the writing has been uneven thus far, and I’d like to see a lot more research and reporting go into most stories, especially the personal essays, which would be a lot better if they took the Harper’s approach to essay writing, consumers have embraced the publication. It is off to a pretty good start, and it’s showing a sustainable way to create a new news publication focused on writing that isn’t reliant on ads, click bait, spammy SEO headlines, slideshows, top 10 lists or other gimmicks.

The Magazine is, in my opinion, the best journalism app for the iPad when it comes to content presentation and readability (trust me, readers appreciate readability). It’s all about the writing, and it feels like a truly native iPad experience rather than an app trying to mimic print on a glass screen.

News orgs could create a monthly tablet publication similar to The Magazine that puts together their best long-form writing each month. The Magazine has eschewed complicated print-style pagination and layouts for something simpler, cleaner and less time intensive to put together.

Traditional news orgs really need to look at more innovative ways to showcase their best written content: Kindle Singles, tablet apps similar to The Magazine, strong Web layouts, etc. Do it all, and try to make money each step of the way. Fight, scratch and claw your way to making money off of good content.

Pricing also helps The Magazine. News orgs like to give people huge discounts on subscription over single issues when they sign up for a year, but that’s a print anachronism. What we have found is that people are more willing to sign up for a shorter duration and just have it auto renew for them. A lot of people will balk at committing even $24.99 a year, but $1.99 a month? Why not?

With the iTunes Store and other platforms, most of those subscriptions will auto renew month after month after month, essentially giving you yearly subscribers without the high initial cost that causes most people to balk.

For great bloggers that work a beat and like to write long-form pieces from time to time, of which I am very found of, they also may need to find ways to package their best long-form content and make additional money off of it. The core writers at The Atlantic all have beatblogs, but they also produce long-form written pieces for the print edition. The print edition can support those pieces, but for bloggers at news orgs without access to a vehicle to subsidize that great writing or for independent bloggers, looking to Kindle Singles, Kickstarter and other means of bringing in money may make a lot of sense.

These are just a few of my ideas, but rather than stew about how news orgs aren’t paying for great writing anymore, let’s try to find solutions. We need to get creative, and luckily for us, there are a lot of creative solutions to be had. And we no longer need traditional gatekeepers to produce great writing and reporting.

My iPad setup

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ХудожникOver at the Interchange Project I detail — and I mean detail –my iPad setup, which is a key part of my writing workflow:

A big part of what I do is write and take notes, and that part of my workflow will be the main focus of this post. I use several programs for this purpose: Omnioutliner, Byword and Simplenote (note: Simplenote is both an app and a Web service). They each serve a purpose, and I do not like programs like Word that try to be all things to all people.

Take a look at Word sometime and ask yourself is that a writing environment that inspires creativity? It looks like something designed for making corporate memos. Byword’s beauty and simplicity focuses on your words only, letting you create your own palette with your words.

If you’re a journalist, writer or someone just looking to use your iPad more for work, this is the post for you.

On journalism

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You know that day that you never thought would come?

Well it came. And I’m no longer a full-time journalist.

There are a lot of reasons that I’m no longer a full-time journalist. The main reason is that I don’t want to be. These are incredibly difficult times in journalism, and it was sapping my energy away.

I had increasingly become a bitter, angry person. Angry at the established media outlets who were pissing it all away. Angry at all the editors and publishers who couldn’t see that big, radical change was necessary.

I started as a professional journalist in 2006. I’ve never known prosperity in journalism. I’ve known layoffs, furloughs, paper closures, infighting and inaction.

And that made me an angry person. But that’s not who I am. That’s not who I want to be.

There were so many days when it felt like I was running to stand still.

I want to keep moving forward. I want to help make this world a better place. It became clear to be me that journalism was not going to be the best way for me to accomplish that.

Most of the work I’ve done in journalism has been with newspapers. I’ve worked for them and most of the people I chronicled at BeatBlogging.Org worked for newspapers.

Loss and destruction have been almost all that I’ve ever known in journalism. Sure, there has been great work along the way, almost always at the individual level. But many of those innovators that I chronicled at BeatBlogging.Org moved on to other jobs and other fields.

And that was depressing. These were our beacons of light, and they couldn’t make it. The journalism industry has lost a lot of journalists and many of those that it lost were the best, brightest and most innovative.

But the real problem isn’t a journalism problem. Journalism is moving forward. It’s a business model problem, and that’s something I can’t help that much with.

But enough on newspapers. There isn’t much more to say about them. And soon most of what will be said about them will be said in history books.

Journalism will live on. It will one day thrive again. The people that will be producing it and how they will produce will be foreign to us. We’ll know the light at the end of the tunnel when we see it.

For now, journalism is just beginning its trek underground, searching for a ray of light and fresh air. I needed a break from that long, dark trek.

Will I ever return? I don’t know. I’ve stopped worrying about what the future will hold for me.

I will be continuing my work at BeatBlogging.Org because I believe it is important work. If I’m going to be involved with journalism, it will be focused on the future of journalism, not on what journalism was. BeatBlogging.Org doesn’t have anywhere near full-time funding, and I don’t know how much longer we’ll have money for.

But we’ll find a way to tell the stories that need to be told.

I’ve moved on to a different full-time job in a different field. I’m now the community and social media manager for RarePlanet.org, a social network for Rare, a conservation organization. And I’m happy.

I’m not sure if anything made me more aware of my own mortality than working in journalism while newspapers are dying. I’m a third of the way through my life, it’s time for me to start moving forward.

I don’t regret anything. But it is time for something new.

It was a moment in time

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Last week my Web site was hacked. That may seem like bad news, but it provided a moment of clarity.

It was time for a change.

The Journalism Iconoclast is no more. That’s not who I am anymore. More on that later.

My new blog is Endemic. It’s a blog on being. On being a member of this world. On being of a generation that grew up with the Internet.

That’s the lens that frames my world view. And my world view is no longer just on journalism. This is a blog about being a human being.

It’s going to break all the rules of blogging that I have exposed. Whereas The Journalism Iconoclast was laser focused on journalism and new media, this blog will be about anything that strikes or moves me.

I won’t care about SEO or catering to a narrow niche. I don’t have to. So I won’t.

I still have BeatBlogging.Org. That has tons of SEO and a tight niche. That’s where you’ll find my journalism thoughts and work.

But I’ve always been more than just a journalist. I’ve always cared about more than just journalism. I want a personal Web site that reflects that reality.

Here, you’ll find me and only me. One day it might be my thoughts on education, while another is about media. And another day you might find some pictures that I took while walking in nature.

I am who I am. And I don’t care about SEO or page views. I just want to write what I want to write when I want to write it. So I will.

The Journalism Iconoclast was a moment in time. That time has passed.

The Web owes us nothing

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Just because a company and an industry thrived off of legacy media, doesn’t mean the Web owes them anything.

The Web doesn’t owe us money. It doesn’t owe us market share. And we can’t force consumers to not enjoy the Web and want to get products and services over it.

That’s not how things work. We have to court the Web, not the other way around.

If you want to make money off the Web, make something cool and useful. Make something that people really want. You know, like what people did back in the day.

Andy Dickinson put it well:

It (the Web) doesn’t care that you have been doing this for years, you have to earn your eyeballs like everyone else. Telling us that you deserve special treatment sounds a bit like a multinational bank saying it needs a handout because of the credit crunch. Cause and effect.

Obviously, this applies to the journalism/newspaper industry, where many journalists openly yearn for the “Good old days.” Those might have been the good old days for some people (technologically challenged journalists and publishers), but they certainly weren’t for our readers and our audience. People love getting news on their computers and mobile devices.

I’m tired of hearing about crippled Web products that are designed to get people to buy the print version. We should be able to make money off of our Web products, without a print tie in.

But this isn’t some journalism-specific phenomenon. Just about every major media industry believes the Web owes it something.

The recording industry and the idiotic RIAA are trying to get Congress to subsidized their last-century business model with a tax on everyone’s Internet service. As if Americans should be forced to pay a tax to prop up an industry that refuses to adapt and adjust. That’s not our problem. That’s ridiculous.

The movie industry and the MPAA has been fighting joining the digital revolution even more fiercely than the RIAA. Yes, some movies are finally available to download or digitally rent, but the MPAA makes new releases wait a month after their DVD release before they can show up on the Web.

Why? Because the MPAA can’t give up on DVD sales. The MPAA is hoping people will want to see a new release so badly that they’ll buy the DVD in that month time frame. You know that month when a new release is ridiculously overpriced, sometimes well over $20 for a single movie.

The television industry also has had a tough time embracing the Web. In fact, CW has to be the poster child for not getting the Web. CW’s premier show, Gossip Girl, was a huge hit on the Web. Such a big hit, that CW is hoping that by no longer offering it on the Web it will boost TV ratings.

I couldn’t make that up if I wanted to. You have a large, loyal following (most of which are young and tech savvy), but they aren’t following the medium you prefer, so you are going to risk alienating them in order to force them onto a legacy medium? That has to be one of the stupidest things I have ever heard.

In fact, looking back on things, the journalism industry might be the least backwards. We’ve got some great Web products in the journalism industry. Heck, we’ve even got some newspapers going online only.

Maybe our new goal should be to do the opposite of whatever the RIAA and MPAA do. That means giving our customers exactly what they want. That should always be our goal.