Angry journalist? Let it all out

angrybaby.jpg
Photo by Constantelevitation

Do you ever get upset at the long hours, low pay, public contempt, pinheaded editors or any other tomfoolery that goes on in the newsroom? Well, now you can finally let it all out guilt-free (that is, unless you’re already one of those anonymous Poynter message boarders) at AngryJournalist.com.

There, you’ll find such gems as the following posting:

[Exchange with a newsroom recruiter]
Me: “I just want to be a newspaper man.”
Recruiter: “Oh, don’t say that.”
Me: “What?”
Recruiter: “When you say newspapers people think dinosaur. Let’s not even call it a newspaper, let’s call it a data center .. You know we have a TV studio in our newsroom.”

Go f*** yourself…

Or concise gripes such as these:

bosses sans grammar

And the postings from the students are quite a gas too:

I had to do a story on the janitorial staff in my school and it was a profile. At first they were okay with it, and then they weren’t. I don’t understand why it was so complicated for one thing. JEEZ

Young’un, you don’t know the half of it. Check out AngryJournalist.com for more entertaining rants.

[Hat tip to Will Sullivan]

Google has a free 411 service

I’d attempt to put an online journalism spin on this, but well … whatever. This is just an awesome service.

Google has a free and well-done 411 service that lets you browse their listings via voice. For iPhone-less and Blackberry-less peons such as yours truly, this is truly rockin. Just dial up 1-800-GOOG-411. With absolutely no problem, I just found my favorite Mexican restaurant (I intentionally gave an imprecise city) and a local vegan cafe that have given me trouble on regular 411 and 1-800-Free411.

So cool.

More info: http://www.google.com/goog411/index.html

Now back to your irregularly scheduled Journalistopia…

ComScore releases 2007 year in review

comscore.gifComScore released its 2007 Internet Year in Review report and reports that Facebook, Craigslist, Wikipedia and AT&T have reaped some of the biggest benefits. Internet Broadcasting Systems (IBS) and WorldNow seem to be the only news-oriented properties in the top 20 for audience gains

ComScore reports the following categories as experiencing the most growth from 2006 to 2007:

Politics up 35% (no surprise with the election)
Community – Women up 35% (an area where Gannett has invested significantly)
Entertainment – News up 32%
Classifieds up 32%
Career – Training and Education up 31%
Gay/Lesbian up 28%
Retail – Consumer Goods up 25%
Finance – News/Research up 20%
Teens up 20%
Religion up 20%

View ComScore’s 2007 year in review release here.

Zell’s opinion of Tribune’s site redesigns

New Tribune boss Sam Zell rolled into Hartford yesterday to dish about the future of Tribune. From the Hartford Courant:

Tribune must find ways to more aggressively pursue sales and “attack the Internet area much better, in a much more sophisticated fashion than what we’ve done to date.”

Referring to Tribune’s companywide website platform, he said, “It sucks.”

More from Sam here.

Taking stock of your multimedia skills

January is the time for resolutions and goal-setting, so this might be a good time to take stock of your skills and get started on getting better at what you do.

I came across a post today on Melissa Worden’s blog in which she advocates putting the methods of online production into more hands. She poignantly writes:

I think one way (which is what HeraldTribune.com is doing now), is to put the tools, resources, and the ability to actually post the content via CMS in the hands of the reporters and editors.

Gulp.

Wait a minute. That’s MY job as a multimedia producer.

Gulp, indeed. So it’s time to ask yourself a few hard questions:

Do I have a training plan in place so I can regularly learn the latest multimedia skills?

(Remove yourself from the context of 40-somethings in the newsroom.) Do I really possess uncommon multimedia skills such as audio editing, photo editing, video, programming or others? Are my multimedia skills the equivalent of those possessed by the average tech savvy 16-year-old?

Do I spend most of my time cutting and pasting into a content-management system while exercising limited news judgment? Do I know only the most basic HTML? Am I really doing that much editorial decision-making?

The barrier to entry in the online news world will be rapidly widened as more folks get trained, more youngsters graduate and the tools of production become even easier to use. What are you doing to improve yourself?

As I write this post, there’s an instructor here at Valencia Community College walking around helping other students get their Java compilers working. I’m diving into object-oriented programming so I can get comfortable with from-scratch web development. I don’t want to be dependent on a content-management system or a ready-made set of tools such as Caspio or Zoho. At best, I’ll learn how to build my own if I want. At worst, I’ll have a better understanding of how it all works so I can better manage expectations, make stronger hiring decisions and have a broader understanding of what the online medium is capable of.

So take stock of your skills, and think about whether your job will be around in the next five years. Learn some CSS, do some for-real news editing, cut your own audio clips, write your own web application or learn how to get under the hood and tweak your blog yourself.

The alternative is to fall behind, and that’s something the new media market won’t tolerate for long.

News sites on Facebook

facebook-thumb.gifHas your news site gotten down with Facebook yet?

Facebook recently launched product pages, where businesses can create profiles to promote themselves. While this has, until recently, been the realm of marketers and club promoters, it’s also a great opportunity for news sites to connect with readers and help shed some of that stale online image.

The Poynter Institute has a page (and yes, I’m officially a “fan”). I noticed some fellow online media bloggers are already fans as well. The New York Times has a page (with 7,000+ fans), as do we here at the Orlando Sentinel (minus the plethora of fans, of course). Searching around shows a few other news sites have hopped aboard.
Whether this is a big traffic driver or not, let’s not forget that a major role of a newspaper is being an important presence in the community. That should include online communities as well. So take a little time out of your day, and get your news site a page on some social networks.

Eliminate the “Most E-Mailed” list? Bushwah!

ugliestdog.jpgMy former competitor, the World’s Ugliest Dog

Oh, the poor, frail egos of journalists. If low pay, the threat of a shrinking industry and malcontented, loudmouth editors won’t do their self-esteem in, then the most e-mailed lists on their Web sites surely will.

Jon Friedman argues in MarketWatch that news sites should abolish the most e-mailed, most read and most blogged about lists from news sites because they will cause journalists to “lower their standards and write top-40 stories instead of pieces with actual depth.” It also, says Friedman, “reinforces that we’re a nation of gossipmongers and dummies.” (For a more humorous take on this issue, take a look at The Onion‘s “story” back in April: ‘Most E-Mailed’ List Tearing New York Times‘ Newsroom Apart)

With all due sensitivity to journalists’ egos, it’ll be a fun, freewheeling day in the obituaries section before I advocate getting rid of tools such as the most e-mailed/viewed/blog list. Those lists serve as the original way in which readers can “vote” their stories to the top, often circumventing the filters of newsroom editors. The lists serve as a way of spotlighting interesting content long after the unforgiving minute-by-minute news cycle on the Web has pushed it along. It also let’s readers see what other readers are checking out, giving them an alternative way to consume news on the site. And last but certainly not least, it’s just plain interesting to see. It’s part of why news ranking sites such as Digg are so popular.

The real issue is that journalists can’t stand to see stories such as “What Shamu taught me about a happy marriage” become the equivalent of a perpetual hit on the newsroom pop charts while big Sunday snoozer projects, stories about politics and other Serious Stuff barely register a blip. It boils their ego-rich blood.

The answer is not doing something so foolish as abolishing the most viewed list. The solution to this particular pickle is educating the newsroom to understand metrics a little better.

Many journalists don’t realize (or forget when they see these lists) that the most viewed list is a representation of an audience that reaches far beyond the circulation area of the newspaper or viewership area of the TV station. It also doesn’t show how long a person took with the story nor who exactly read that story. I hate to sound like an elitist, but wouldn’t you feel better about your story if a senator read and reacted to it as opposed to if your average Joe did the same?

Back in August of 2005, I wrote a story for the Sun-Sentinel titled ‘Thefts from cars among top crimes’, which took a look at how thieves break into cars and what readers could do to avoid this particular crime. It turned out to be a popular story. But August also marked the rise of the so-called “World’s Ugliest Dog.” It was to be an epic struggle.

The World’s Ugliest Dog and my car-theft story duked it out for the title of Most E-Mailed Story. I climbed to the top of the list first. Then the hideous little fiend inched me out. Then, in a surprising turnaround, my story knocked him down a spot. Alas, when the next day came, the repulsive canine had permanently bumped me from the top, where he remained “top dog” for several weeks.

But I wasn’t offended. I had been “hip to the Web” so to speak and understood that interest for the ugly dog’s ran far beyond the corridors of Broward and Palm Beach County. I also had seen quite a few metrics reports before and had a more balanced understanding of what becomes popular on the site. Lastly, I knew my story was helping the readers who viewed it in a very real way. Those readers most likely spent way more time on the site reading my story then examining the dog. They e-mailed my story to their friends likely because they thought reading it would help their pals too.

The lesson is that the “top” lists on news sites should be taken with a grain of salt — but they should definitely be taken. Editors dare not ignore page view reports, time spent, visitor paths and other critical metrics. They must receive and read them regularly so that they’re not shocked by outliers. They have to understand what works and what doesn’t on the Web, even if it’s more art than science. If that affects our journalistic sensibilities, well, too bad. It simply is not an option to close our eyes and ignore the interests of our readers — prurient though they may occasionally be.This doesn’t mean our whole news site needs to be composed of frivolous content. When an item like the Shamu story or the ugliest dog occasionally bubbles to the top, we tend to ignore the hordes of other “serious” news that our readers find interesting. Just because we consume page view metrics doesn’t mean we need to perpetually pander to the lowest common denominator of the public’s interest. Do readers want our site to be a showcase of Britney Spears and animal freaks?

Despite what our metrics occasionally say, do you in your heart really believe that is what our loyal readers want our news sites to become?

A look at Google’s “20 percent time”

googlenews.jpgThe New York Times gives us a closer look and some philosophizing about Google’s famed “20 percent time” during an interview with Google software engineer Bharat Mediratta.

In a nutshell, 20 percent time is the amount of time given to Google employees to work on self-directed projects. GMail and Google News both stemmed from 20 percent time, says Mediratta.

During the ONA conference on Wednesday, I blogged about Lisa Williams’ talk and how important it is to take some cues from technology companies on how to be competitive online. Check out the Times article for starters and keep looking into how tech companies do their thing; I know I will.

PLUS: Google News “goes social” with a new Facebook app.

DOUBLE-PLUS: Toronto has a really cool project called Murmur, which provides interesting local audio stories to visitors via cell phone call or download. I’m sticking around Toronto for the weekend and took the audio tour of Spadina, which really brought the neighborhood to life for me. This’d be a neat type of project for local news sites…

Poynter, Orlando Sentinel launch WebSpeak glossary column

poynter-thumb.gifIs the concept of a “mashup” turning your brain to mush? Does the idea of “crowdsourcing” leave you feeling … lonely?

Today Poynter Online launches the new WebSpeak column, penned by yours truly and Orlando Sentinel staff development editor Dana Eagles.

And I’d really like your help.

I’d love to hear about the very latest buzzwords you come across, as well as your take on what they mean. Eventually, we hope the glossary will become a comprehensive –and evolving– list. We’ll be putting out weekly terms on Poynter’s site .

So all you online media wordsmiths, help me out with some suggestions and please provide feedback!

(Now back to the ONA conference…)

Get yer free Ruby on Rails PDF book

ruby on railsSitepoint.com is offering its 439-page book, “Build Your Own Ruby on Rails Web Applications,” for free as a downloadable PDF on its Web site. I got mine, and it’s fantastic (especially at the low price of $0)! Check it out here.

Ruby on Rails, or RoR for short, is a programming language and framework for web applications that specializes in working with databases and is all the rage nowadays. See these Orlando-based misfits and their RoR commercials.

The free PDF version of the book, which sells for $26.37 on Amazon, will only be available on Sitepoint.com for 60 more days.

And, if you’re looking for a different Rails book, most of the Rubyheads here in Orlando highly recommend “Agile Web Development with Rails.”