Archive for category Journalism Practice

Date: August 11th, 2010
Cate: Advertising/Business, Current Affairs, Journalism Practice
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Are the Paper Cuts Over?

In 2008 there were roughly 15,992 layoffs or buyouts. This was followed by 14,783 layoffs or buyouts in 2009.

I know this because Erica Smith knows this. These numbers are arrived via her site Paper Cuts which she started as a non-scientific way of estimating newspaper layoffs.

Here’s the nut graf: Eight months into 2010 and we are still shy of 2,000 layoffs or buyouts. Now, if there were ever a number you’d want to see lowered, it’s this. But it does raise an eyebrow.

This is a dramatic shift. I thought maybe it was a mistake so I contacted Erica, who I’ve had the pleasure of meeting, to see if it was accurate and if she had any thoughts. Her quote below.

Either I’ve gotten back at tracking them down or, more likely there’s no more meat on the bone. There’s not much bone left either. The only cutting left seems to come from outsourcing and consolidating. Granted, there are several black pins on the map [for 2010] — those are “unknown” markers — but not enough (I hope) for 14K.

I do expect I’ll be adding more layoffs in the next two months, though. A few details are coming out on Gannett’s consolidation plans. Here at the Post-Dispatch, our “no-layoff” guarantee ends Sept. 28; I don’t see that ending with punch and cookies. And as more fiscal years come to an end, more papers are going to be looking at their budgets and making cuts … somewhere.

I don’t know what the drop in cuts signifies. It could be a good thing (newspapers are bouncing back – unlikely) or as Erica notes – it could mean they’ve cut down to the bone and there is nothing left to tighten. Either way this is something to note. Something has shifted.

Date: July 7th, 2010
Cate: Current Affairs, Journalism Practice, Journalism Theory/Analysis, Web/Tech, Weblogs
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Five Lessons to Learn from NewsTilt

Note: This is the second attempt at this post on a sleepless Saturday night. The first and better draft was lost. Alas, this one may be less robust.

I’ve always wanted to see a Crunchbase for journalism startups. If this is a time of experimentation then we need to keep better track of projects that start and fail. When I talk to young journo-entrepreneurs that don’t know what Backfence was, I’m concerned we are going to reinvent the wheel. Or worse – reinvent a squeaky wheel.

All of this is to say – we can learn from projects that fail (failure is not a bad word). Recently a Y Combinator project “NewsTilt” launched to great fanfare only to shut down three months later, returning money back to the investors. I want to examine this not from a high-horse position, but because from my point of view the speed at which this happened allows us to hone in on specific lessons.

1. Under Promise and Over Deliver

This is a general rule of thumb whenever you are going to try something for the first time aka a web-startup. When you launch, you probably only have one iota of functionality. That is the functionality you can promise. From their press release: “NewsLabs aims to save journalism by building community around news.”

Stop right there. No ONE thing will save journalism. You will never find me claiming that Spot.Us is going to save journalism. I often say that Spot.Us is PART of the solution or PART of the future for journalism – but there is no silver bullet. As awesome as you think your startup is, don’t claim that you are inventing the coolest thing since sliced bread. If you have indeed done that, others will say it for you. When Spot.Us launched my stated goal was to fund 4-6 enterprise reporting projects in the first year. Looking back that might have been a VAST under-promise. But hey, I delivered and then some.

Meanwhile NewsLabs (the company of NewsTilt) claimed “This is the future of journalism.”

It seems the CTO also learned this lesson as stated in his farewell note:

In retrospect, I now believe that we should never have made promises about building your online brand or large amounts of traffic (early email threads about how to deal with large number of comments now seem very ironic).

2. Duty and Teamwork

It is easy to start speculating here because of the nature of how this venture shut down. The CTO wrote a farewell post noting that the CEO had left two-weeks earlier. There was also mention that for one of the three months the startup was around the CEO was on a honeymoon. This leaves room for a lot of WTF questions which I won’t go into, but my friend Matt Mireles does (glad somebody asked these questions and pointed out the craziness). I’m less interested in the drama that probably occurred behind the scenes than I am from the lesson we can take here – which is around the role and relationship of founders. (note: Hacker News has a thread where the CEO says he will give his own postmortem explanation).

I was lucky to meet Paul Gahram the week before NewsTilt shut down. He gave a talk about successful startups and his first rule is: Founders, founders founders (to the tune of – location, location, location).

The idea and technology behind a startup is not nearly as important as the founders. That is the heart and soul of a startup. He went on to talk about dynamics of founders, the number of founders and the relationship between founders. Bottom line, it’s important that they have a strong and trusting relationship. Things WILL get tough and you need to be able to lean on each other. The analogy Paul used was that of soldiers. They form a bond with each other such that they don’t want to let each other down. Marines go through hell during training to become “brothers” so that in the thick of battle you don’t show a tint in your armor. It’s not because you aren’t scared – but because you don’t want to cause concern for your other brothers. When things are tough, you smile and carry on, usually bearing more than your normal load. The startup world moves so fast that if both founders feel that bond, they’ll both smile, carry more than they can – and will often come out of it with a stronger startup than when they entered the tough times.

3. Your value is NOT just for journalists

NewsTilt had a good proposition for writers, as Spot.Us contributor Matt Baume noted, but it needed to be checked with an appeal to a larger audience. I’ve ranted about this recently. NewsTilt was not the startup I was discussing in that original post – nor do I think they are 100% guilty of this journo-startup-sin, but I think a comparison with True/Slant gets my point across.

In fact True/Slant and NewsTilt are VERY similar (they should have studied True/Slant. The technology NewsTilt offered wasn’t that much better.
Both had a shot at marketing but True/Slant‘s efforts were more geared toward attracting readers (same with The Faster Times). NewsTilt started by appealing to and attracting to reporters. Great for a discussion in the journalism community among journalists who discuss the future of journalism – bad for the other 99.99 percent of the population.
An interesting side note: True/Slant was bought by Forbes, although it was not a true acquisition Forbes was an early investor and the founder was a former editor of Forbes and is now head of innovation. This could have been a signal to NewsTilt that potential exists are tough.

4. It takes more than three months

If your goal is traffic and engagement (for the sake of traffic) it will take more than three months. Plain and simple. Which is to say – don’t quit on your startup. Granted if lesson #2 (duty and teamwork) is hitting the fan, you have other issues and maybe should throw in the towel – but you can’t quit after three months because the traffic isn’t where you want it to be. Iterate, learn and adapt. Three months is not enough time to evaluate if you are able/unable to achieve your under-promised goals. The lesson here: The best way for your startup to fail is if you quit.

If you build it – they will come only works with ghosts and baseball fields. Websites don’t possess that power (except for Kevin Costner’s website)

5. Technology won’t necessarily solve a social problem.

Journalism faces a lot of problems. Some of them are technical. Or better yet, some of them are the inability of news organizations to become technical. Or better yet, some of them are a result of technology changing the way we exchange information. Or better yet, some of them are about how technology is changing the economics of content. Or better yet, some of them are related to how technology is changing the way people spend their time (I know you’d rather be LOL Cating right now).

Point is: Technology is very much a part of this discussion – but it is not necessarily the solution to what is a very deep and nuanced social issue. I think (although I certainly don’t know) the folks at NewsTilt put too much emphasis on their tech-wizardry and the idea that they would build tools for journalist and all the sudden POOF – journalism would be solved.

Again – technology is certainly a PART of the solution, but it needs to be integrated within the fabric of a social context – where the problem exists.

Date: June 16th, 2010
Cate: Journalism Practice, Open Source and Community, Social News, Web/Tech
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Meet the 2010 Knight News Challenge Winners

Mark Glaser at PBS Idea Lab has the FULL scoop.

As a past winner I try to help out at the PBS Idea Lab blog when I can, so I interviewed a few of the winners. The video is below.

It should also be noted that one of the winners PRX is going to work with the Spot.Us code! I included a video of Jake Shapiro explaining what exactly they are going to do.

Winner: Brad Flora from Windy Citizen. For details on his project check out the PBS Idea Lab post.

My friends at USC Tom Grasty and Nonny de la Peña and their creation Stroome!

The folks from Davis Wiki are launching Local Wiki

From Arizona’s School of journalism: City Seed

The folks from Front Porch Forum

Jake Shapiro explaining PRX’s StoryMarket

Date: October 12th, 2009
Cate: Advertising/Business, Art and Design, Crowdsourcing, Internet/Technology/Gadgets, Journalism Practice, Web/Tech
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Lessons in Web Development – Good, Fast and Cheap: Pick Two

Whenever people ask me about the process of building a website, here’s how I explain their choices: “There is good, fast and cheap — you get to pick two.”

Spot.Us has quietly started development again. I’ll be putting up sketches of a much needed re-design on the Spot.Us blog soon, but you can see a sneak peek at the bottom of this post, courtesy of Lauren Rabaino. Looking back at what has almost been a full year of work, this is the part of building something from the ground up that plays to one of my strengths. It comes down to project management, weighing expectations with reality, and being able to make tough choices. In this post I will share a fundamental lesson you should keep in mind before building any website from scratch. Perhaps it’s also a “life lesson” that can be applied to engaging in any large scale project.

Back reading: other thoughts of mine related to building large scale projects or start-ups:

Today’s lesson: There is Good, Fast and Cheap — You Get to Pick Two.

Perhaps this “good, fast, and cheap” philosophy goes for all things in life. First, let’s define the options.

Good: Of high quality. Something that will last and perform as expected.
Fast: Something produced quickly. Below par.
Cheap: Something produced at low cost. Below par.

When building a start-up you get to choose two. Sometimes the choice is made for you (i.e. If you are bootstrapping).

The combinations.

Good and fast: Means the project is not cheap.
Fast and cheap: Means the project is not necessarily good.
Cheap and good: Means that it was most likely not fast.

Do these rules apply 100 percent of the time? Of course not. Nothing is 100 percent. But if I were a betting man, I’d predict the following outcomes for each scenario:

1. Good and fast: If you went for good and fast it most likely means you hired top notch folks. This is a boon to any website project starting out — but it also means you need to watch your cash flow because it won’t be cheap. Unless you are rolling in cash, the cost should be a concern. Still, going this route can save you money in the long run. If you are able to get something to market before you cut off development, you’ll be able to lean on what you’ve produced and it will work reliably. In contrast, I know plenty of projects that went with option number two…

2. Fast and cheap: If it works out then you’ve won the lottery. Again, I’m not saying quality is impossible here. But I personally know projects that went the fast and cheap route and in the long run it hurt them. What they ended up bringing to market failed. Most users are not as forgiving as they are to Twitter. If your site breaks, they won’t come back. It often takes an organization twice as much money and time to build a stable website if the initial site was built fast and cheap. If you are not a tech-minded person, you might wonder why everyone doesn’t outsource or go with the cheapest labor out there (and there are cheap developers on the market). To them I offer the following analogy: you could pay an Amish wood craftsman to build an heirloom cabinet that will last generations, or you can get something from Ikea that will last two to five years and require some assembly and maintenance on your part –but will cost a tenth of the price. There is no right or wrong answer. It often depends on where you are in life. When I was in college it was Ikea all the way, baby! In either case the trade-offs are apparent. That’s the difference between options number one and number two.

3. Good and cheap: The typical scenario here is that you have a great web developer (an Amish craftsman of code) who is ready to donate some of his/her time to your project. This is great. It means you can get quality at a cheap price. But this also usually means the development comes at a pace dictated by the volunteer, not you. Set all the deadlines you want in your mind — the reality is that you’re at their mercy. Again, this isn’t a bad thing. It’s just a trade-off. The good news is that when something does finally get put out, you’ll have quality and it won;t have broken the piggy bank. If you aren’t in a rush this can even be ideal (for example, maybe it’s something you are working on as a volunteer as well).

Final Thoughts

As always, these lessons aren’t prescriptive — they’re descriptive. I don’t think there is a right/wrong option to take. But it is important to know the trade-offs that you or your project manager are making. Journalism is becoming more entrepreneurial. “Entrepreneurial” itself is a buzzword that should be defined, but it either means journalists as innovators (entrepreneur as a person who is pushing boundaries), or journalists as self-employed (entrepreneur as small business owner). In either case, this lesson, which I call “pick two,” applies.

Now, as promised, below is a sneak peak at what a rough re design of Spot.Us. (It’s very rough — see the Spot.Us blog for details).

Date: August 4th, 2009
Cate: Advertising/Business, Journalism Practice
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What Kinds of Leaders Does Journalism Need

I recently came back from a week in Big Bear where I volunteer every year as a camp councilor. There are all kinds of reasons why I volunteer at this camp. One of them is that I learned to be comfortable with myself and around my peers there. As a councilor I get to witness kids interacting with each other. Maybe this is something parents experience all the time, but for me it is always interesting to see a group of 10 or more kids in a room, given a task, and the internal politics that takes place before they can tackle that goal.

It comes down to leadership.

There are different kinds of leaders. Some lead from the front. William Wallace comes to mind. But, in war at least, we haven’t had a General lead from the front since Alexander the Great. It simply drains a person too much to lead from the front. Especially in a modern battlefield where too much is happening all at once.

Some lead like ants: working hard and getting others to follow in line. Others lead like owls, giving sage advice in a calm and zen like manner. Others lead like a puppy; bringing an unparalleled enthusiasm to galvanize others into action.

So the question is. What types of leadership does journalism need now?

A generation ago we needed business savvy leaders. People who could take a small newspaper and turn it into a thriving business. People that could lead because of their stature, cut-throat competitiveness, and biz-savvy. The journalism industry has different goals and needs now. Today we need flexibility, innovation, community, collaboration and tech-savvy, to name a few.

Which begs the question: Do we need new leaders? This isn’t a question relating to specific people, but characteristic traits.

I have often used the chessboard as an analogy for the state of journalism “Content is king, collaboration is queen, the board itself is transparency,” but the game of chess needs a leader. Somebody that can step back and look at the board and make decisions.

Just as a William Wallace type General would be ineffective in a modern battlefield could a Randolph Hearst make it in today’s journalism environment? What new characteristics would Hearst need to nurture and what would be outright foolish in today’s journalism environment?

So I went to my Tweeple for some thoughts.

Digidave: What makes somebody a good leader? What kinds of leaders do we need in journalism? What needs to change of our current leaders? Thoughts….

about a day ago

Tue Aug 04 15:43:20 +0000 2009