Blogging for the Knight Center

This summer I'm working as a blogger for the Knight Center for Journalism in the Americas, housed here in the J-school at UT. The Knight Center is moving away from its traditional weekly newsletter about journalism in the Americas toward a "news blog" format that aggregates items throughout the week. So, that might mean fewer posts here (not that I was posting that often, anyway!) as I post more there.

Journalists and technology

I've been wondering for some time how the profession has been absorbing the massive changes that have been buffeting the news biz of late—from external (read: financial, audience) pressures to internal (read: technological, cultural) changes, to a whole lot that fall somewhere in between, a veritable 360-degree squeeze.

When I left the industry for grad school in 2006, even with the recent demise of Knight Ridder and the increasing troubles for newspapers, a print-first attitude was pervasive—after all, old habits die hard, and the print version remains the cash cow in many places. And yet, since that time we seem to have reached a tipping point, a sort of inflection point at which the legacy media realize that the problems with audiences and the Web-first necessity and the social networking phenomenon and the citizen-empowered environment—taken together, this train has left the station, and there's no looking back to ink-and-paper only for help.

But what's striking is that anecdotal and survey data now seem to tell us that the hand-wringing over technology and its impact on their livelihoods—that fear and anxiety that used to grip the newsroom—is beginning to fade. Perhaps the most interesting account of this came in the State of the News Media 2008, released earlier this month by the Project for Excellence in Journalism. Read the full report on a 2007 survey of journalists here, and a key section on technology is below:

The journalists here do not sense that the Internet has become all-consuming or that new technology has become the core of what they do. That is evident in the fact that majorities of both print and broadcast outlets say their organizations’ main focus is still the legacy media.

And that is borne out in how journalists spend their time. A good portion of those surveyed still work only or mostly on the original product. Around a quarter spend no time on the Web product. (This holds true for journalists at both the national and local levels.) The multimedia work also appears to be going on more at a national level. National journalists are more than three times as likely as local to devote half or more of their time there (19% versus 6% of local). And it is perhaps a harbinger of the future that national print journalists are the most likely to be multimedia. More than a of quarter of them (26%) spend at least half of their time producing Web content. This was true of just 9% of national TV and radio journalists.

Nor did we find evidence, as some might have expected, that journalists resent having to split their time. Those who do straddle technologies tend to see it as a good thing. About half say it has improved their work, twice the number that has doubts. This could be self- selecting. The doubters may have resisted or even taken buyouts. But, one way or another, the profession is becoming more accepting. ...

And that connects to another change — the decline in concern over journalistic cynicism. In 2004, roughly four in ten said cynicism of the press was a valid criticism. That number has now dropped down to three in ten. Technology, while posing profound economic problems, seems in some ways to have alleviated the concerns about disconnection and isolation, key elements of what many considered the credibility crisis of the a decade ago.

On "30"

On Saturday I turned 30. And while I could wax all philosophical and ontological and epistemological about turning 30, I'll just note this one thing: In journalism, especially newspapers, the tag "- 30 -" traditionally has meant the end of the story—that's it, there's nothing more, that's all she wrote, finito. When I was 16 and wrote my first newspaper story (on a high school football game, attended by maybe 75 people), I remember how my dad, a newspaper veteran from the hot-type days, made certain that I ended with "30."

So, let's hope I'm not "finished" at 30—heck, I haven't even finished school, so life has only just begun.

on the future of news

Our semester in Max McCombs' "Future of News" course is wrapping up and we're about to write chapters for our forthcoming book on the subject—or, at least draft chapters, since getting this work in order for publication will take longer than one semester, of course. My chapter will cover the future of participatory news. I'll try to post a draft as I go. Meantime, I've collected some possible material for the chapter—on citizen journalism here, and the future of news generally here.

Bubbling over ... is over

This is off-topic, but as the bottom falls out of the housing market around the globe — and particularly in Ireland and Spain — I'm reminded of this little piece I wrote for Foreign Policy after my fellowship as a Fulbright Scholar in Madrid. Back in 2006, such bubble-pricking economic turmoil seemed somewhat inevitable, and yet so distant, disinfected, even quaint. Not so anymore.

Online Journalism Symposium

UPDATE: Photos from the symposium, such as the above: Paul Alonso and I hard at work (?) in the symposium newsroom.

I'm here this morning at the ninth annual Online Journalism Symposium put on by the J-school at the University of Texas — or, more specifically, by the remarkable Rosental Alves. I'm working the "newsroom" of this operation as the copy chief, returning to my former role of sorts.

As usual, the conference is packed with great panels, paper presentations, and more (see program here and research papers here); you can read about it here or watch it live via webcast.

I thought about trying out Cover It Live, this nifty (and free) liveblogging tool, but I have so much else to squeeze in today that I might defer instead to the "official" blog and liveblog.

I'll post some thoughts via Twitter.

Mark Dewey: Present trends predict the future

OK, we're finally catching up after spring break and a long hiatus from the blog. Below is my write-up on a Future of News lecture by UT professor Mark Dewey, a former journalist at CNN and a new media expert from his days at AOL.

Also worth mentioning: Dewey's self-described controversial letter that appeared recently in American Journalism Review.

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Mark Dewey sums up the competitive nature of the new media model this way: For traditional media, competitors offer information—all kinds of information, from sports to weather to news to social networking—that is better, faster, and cheaper.

Oh, and in most cases, it’s free.

The problem for traditional media, especially newspapers, is that they haven’t figured out how to navigate this new landscape.
They have failed to recognize what value (or core competency, in business speak) they can (and can’t) bring to the media environment.

“Editors don’t understand their core competency,” Dewey said. “They think it’s picking stories. That is dead wrong. If you want proof of that, look at Matt Drudge. People are more interested in how Matt Drudge picks stories than the editors at fill-in-the-
blank newspaper.”

Rather, journalists’ value-added comes in their local coverage—but because they have missed this, and missed opportunities to provide can’t-find-it-anywhere-else coverage to drive traffic, “digitalization has left the papers behind,” Dewey said. As evidence, he points to the top 100 sites on Alexa; only one newspaper (The New York Times) makes the list.

He sees three key trends emerging in the future of journalism:

1. Digital distribution: “With digitalization comes complexity [think multimedia storytelling]. It’s not just writing, not just inverted pyramid. It takes the realm of communication so far beyond the inverted pyramid.”

2. Specialization (aka disaggregation): “It’s a decoupling of ad revenue from news categories. It’s blowing up our old paper of news, weather, sports, and other categories. It’s a whole different model, and it’s changing the game.” One result of this: It’s not just old media breaking news anymore. It was a niche publication, Wired, that broke the story of wiretapping, thanks to the documents provided by Mark Klein, an AT&T worker with knowledge of NSA’s secret access to Internet traffic. Why Wired? Because the Los Angeles Times turned down an opportunity to investigate and publish it, Dewey said.

3. Too Much Information: There’s more data than we can ever absorb in a lifetime. [See “shift happens” on YouTube.] The result: “News becomes worth less. Not worthless, but worth much less than before.” One problem: We have so many reporters covering the same thing, rather than deploying those resources to cover specialized, localized things. Meanwhile, there are more and more ways for dealing with and aggregating this TMI through widgets such as Digg, reddit, del.icio.us, etc. Dewey also pointed to a couple of interesting sites—Globalincidentmap.com and Daylife—to illustrate the power of visuals to communicate a lot of information in a digestable way. “As artists improve on the Internet, there’s no way the piece of paper can ever communicate all this information.”

What's so different about Web 2.0

More on "digital ethnography" here.

Paula Poindexter: Will there be an audience for news in the future?

Introducing her new book, UT journalism professor Paula Poindexter raised the question: Given current trends, will there be an audience for news in the future? “The answer to this question,” she said, “is directly related to the future of news media, the future of education, and the future of democracy.”

Perhaps the short answer is, well, maybe. If news organizations continue with business as usual, reporting in a distanced and detached way, not to mention with little attention to issues that interest women and young people, then there’s no hope, Poindexter said. “Unless there is something done on multiple fronts, there may not be an audience for news in the future. This isn’t just a problem for TV, or for newspapers, etc. It’s a problem for all of us.”

To better illustrate the present landscape of news audiences, Poindexter introduced a taxonomy of news user types:

1. news enthusiasts—who are strongly connected to the news because of their passion for it;
2. news monitors—who are connected to news so they can keep track of things of personal interest;
3. news betweeners—who are connected to news one to six days a week;
4. news eclectics—who are more or less connected to the news but have no pattern for news use nor have an allegiance to a specific medium or type of news;
5. news accidentals—who have a weak connection to news and whose news consumption is non-purposeful (e.g., stumbling upon news while reading mail in Gmail or Yahoo);
6. news intenders—who plan to read or watch the news but always find something gets in the way;
7. news avoiders—who deliberately shun the news and prefer to stay disconnected. (see Table 1.2 on p. 9)

Poindexter further introduced a model of the factors and forces influencing how people approach news; it can help us think about what we (that is, journalists) can affect in changing consumers’ relationship to news, she said. The illustration in her book is much easier to understand, but I’ll try to walk through it here:

1. Individual differences—demographics such as age, income, social status, and education—are preeminent, the first and most important factor in guiding news-use decisions and habits;
2. These differences feed into socialization, which is a process that takes place throughout life as our peers, assumptions (say, about what is newsworthy, or whether it’s important to follow the news), family background, and other socio-cultural factors combine to shape our outlook toward journalism;
3. These factors, combined with attitudes, normative beliefs, and motivation, lead consumers to arrive at a “decision” (conscious or not) of the type of news user they are going to be—an avoider, an intender, an accidental, etc.

Drilling down on this picture of the news consumption process, Poindexter turned to another breakdown—of “attitudes and dimensions of the news-centered object” (p. 30). Here, we recognize that all-important attitudes toward news are shaped by dimensions (or characteristics) of news—such as the medium, institution, cost, time, access, complexity, multitasking capability, and “feel.” (Those latter two are especially important for the next generation of news consumers, for whom newspapers don’t “feel” right—being so bulky and hard to recycle—and for whom communication is a multi-way blur of Facebooking, text messaging, Twittering, and more all at once.)

In the what-can-we-do-about-it category, Poindexter said the focus should be on socialization.

“The present young adult generation, in college now, is lost, but we can help the upcoming generation. One way to do that is [Newspapers in Education]. NIE studies have shown that young people exposed to newspapers in schools have become newspaper readers. Same goes for young people exposed to newspapers at home. So there are two key areas of socialization: home and school.” (But for NIE to be done right, she said, it can’t be presented as a “textook,” which then makes it feel like “work.”)

To our audience of mostly Ph.D. students, she concluded: “What does it mean that there may not be an audience for news? There will be no advertisers spending money to reach no audience that’s not there, which means there will be no newsrooms, which means there will be no money to pay journalist salaries or invest in journalism, which means there will be no reporters and producers to create the news. If there are no reporters, there will be no need for journalism schools, which also means there will be no journalism professors.”

Rusty Todd: The fate of civic information as the media fragment

Picking up where Wanda Cash left off, figuratively and literally, UT journalism professor Rusty Todd posed a question during his lecture Wednesday: Does democracy really need the press? How central is a good and honest and effective news media—a news media focused on public affairs reporting and civic information—to the preservation of freedom and maintenance of government?

The answer, he suggested, may be more complex than we think, and it might challenge our dominant idea—indeed, the very starting point from which we consider journalism’s purpose and place in the public sphere—that good democracy is dependent on good journalism. “This bothers the hell out of me because I spent most of my adult life thinking the answer is yes,” Todd said.

Why such worries? As he has studied journalism’s past, Todd has found that “some of this country’s ‘finest moments’ came during times of irresponsibility on the part of the press.” So, even as hard news goes soft, and Britney Spears and Michael Vick drown out reporting about schools and the environment, Todd sees the present spike in political participation as evidence that, well, maybe public affairs news doesn’t matter like we thought it did. Perish the thought. What’s more likely, however, is that we have more “drones,” as he calls them: uninformed folks who get involved and vote.

But what of the future of news? (It’s worth mentioning here Rusty’s definition of news: “Stuff you need to know, but you don’t know you need to know it.”) First and foremost: “Newspapers eventually will die, and they will die when their readers die.” He cites as the National Observer, a smart weekly paper around during the 1960s and 70s; it had one of the highest subscriber-retention rates around, but it also had one of the lowest new-subscriber rates because its high cost. So, as its older readers eventually died, so did the paper.

Next: “We’re going to gather news all the time. The news cycle is dead.” Think of news as one continuous RSS feed, although there will still exist “structured” products—such as story packages—that appear on, say, TV broadcasts. But the trend will be toward a fluid, always-updating flow of information, aimed toward increasingly specialized audiences.

Speaking of which, an obvious point from Rusty: The mass media are scrambling to figure out to reach the increasingly fractured audience. Consumers are cracking, cracking, cracking into ever-smaller niches, so in the future information will be gathered once and sold many times via multiple media to multiple audiences. (Something like this has happened in the past with specialized financial news wires, but it’s becoming more apparent in media convergence today.) It’s the Long Tail at work in news: “If you can find a tail that’s profitable, you don’t really care about the big bulge.”

In the future, he said, the market for national public affairs news will shrink but remain viable. One interesting twist has been the way in which news media today are turning Election 2008 into an “American Gladiator” style contest of this character vs. that character. Rusty considers this framing of politics as sport an entertainment as a last-ditch—and possibly successful?—attempt at hanging on to a mass audience for public affairs news.

The puzzle, he said, is getting civic information to these mini-audiences without resorting to gladiator-style reporting, even as aggregation online (think of Google and Yahoo news personalization) make it easier than ever to avoid public affairs journalism. Perhaps the upshot to all this “new” media, ironically enough, is a return to something akin to the “old” news media of the 1800s: fragmented, partisan, and hucksterish. “I’m afraid where we’re headed is back to the pre-mass media age where public affairs journalism is only read by the elite,” Rusty said.

Is that any way to run a democracy? I guess we’ll find out.

("Disclaimer" of sorts: I am the teaching assistant for Rusty's copy editing class.)