Newsrooms of Future Past

Sometimes it’s worth going back to basics, to remember what I thought I knew, just to make sure I didn’t forget it. Sometimes I find something important.

I was putting together a to-do list the other day for a columnist at a NorCal newspaper I’d like to work at. He wanted to get web savvy and I had a few suggestions I shared over a beer, and more I offered over email. The first of those was a this video, RSS in plain English.

I thought about that video again while I was in Berkeley last night, listening to several panelists talk about the need to “monetize the web.” How do we bring, and keep, more eyeballs on our pages as often and as long as possible?

But I think that’s the wrong approach, and I think it’s wrong because of what I told that columnist the other day:

Content can now go where readers are, and readers no longer have to, or expect to have to go find it.

Consider that thought in the context of this panel:

Everyone is talking about the future of the newsroom in this new digital world where young people get their news from YouTube and Facebook, and traditional print journalists have seen hundreds of their brethren laid off or bought out. Join us for a discussion of how these changes are affecting journalists. What can media workers’ unions do? Should journalists hurry up and learn how to blog and podcast before it’s too late?

With featured speakers:

• Jeanne Carstensen, Salon.com Managing Editor
• Louis Freedberg, California Media Project Director and San Francisco Chronicle former editorial writer
• Luther Jackson, San Jose Newspaper Guild Executive Officer
• Chris O’Brien, of the (possibly defunct) San Jose Mercury News Rethink project

Moderator Rob Gunnison called it “the best discussion of ‘I don’t know’” he’d heard in a long time. Somehow, that doesn’t give me much comfort.

Very little of the talk, in fact, left me with much confidence in the state of professional journalism in Northern California. Were panels like these my major source of inspiration, I’d be as depressed as my friends who went through that j-school and are now with me in the job hunt. Much of the dialog seemed to ask, “How do we do what we’ve been doing, what we’ve been telling ourselves for so long is so great, and now get people who don’t necessarily share that opinion to fund us?”

Plus some blogger bashing, talk of government or non-profit support and vilifying of Google and Yahoo.

O’Brien was by far the most impressive on stage. He brought up a reader survey asking where people went for information. Their answers:

1. Google
2. Other people

“The way you live your life is that your most important source of information is your friends,” he explained. “Someone telling you what movie to go see is more important than Roger Ebert.”

Right, so, this is a delivery problem. Solutions, if I may:

1. Make your content easy to find. SEO the hell out of it. Redesign news organizations’ websites so they don’t make my eyeballs bleed.
2. Make your content easy to share. Add Share chicklets to stories. Offer RSS feeds. Keep links alive, permanently. Build Facebook apps.

These are small things. Incremental. Cheap. But how many newsrooms have done even this much? And of those that have, how many are in Silicon Valley and the Bay Area?

But the larger point may be something else O’Brien said:

People are very nervous about the idea of blowing up the newsroom. To a large degree, people in the newsroom, I’m not sure they really believe there’s a fundamental problem.

If we can’t make little changes, how do we make bigger ones?

Friday, February 22nd, 2008 : News, projects : 2 Comments

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