Tag: new media

Online Journalism Review goes offline

The Online Journalism Review has ceased publication. I’m stunned, although it did strike me that there was a lack of clarity to its mission. Editor Bob Niles says he’ll continue on his own. I hope that the individual voice will allow him to bring greater focus to his work. I also hope Annenberg plans to keep the OJR archives up and running.

Perhaps this is a sign of online journalism’s growing maturity. After all, the Boston Computer Society and myriad other computer user groups of the 1970s, ’80s and ’90s died off once computers became just another tool. (Via Romenesko.)

Catching up on some recent posts

Following up a few recent Media Nation posts:

Hyperlocal is about conversation, not traditional news. Writing for the Online Journalism Review, Tom Grubisich takes a deeper look at the Washington Post’s LoudounExtra.com site, recently pronounced a failure by the Wall Street Journal. Grubisich’s verdict is that the site falls short in large measure because it doesn’t provide much in the way of interactivity and social networking.

Parsing the financials at GateHouse Media. The financial blog 247WallSt.com last week claimed that GateHouse Media — a national chain that owns some 100 community newspapers in Eastern Massachusetts — could go broke later this year because of its plummeting stock price and $1.2 billion debt. But, in fact, there is some positive news to report as well.

According to GateHouse, in the first quarter of 2008 revenues were $168.9 million, an increase of 78.4 percent over the previous year. And its EBIDTA (earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization) was $30.1 million, up 93.9 percent over the previous year.

A not-so-mysterious increase in listeners. The Boston Globe today profiles “TOUCH 106.1 FM,” a pirate radio station serving the black community that’s been threatened by the FCC. Globe reporter Brian Ballou does a thorough job, but I had to chuckle at his writing that the station’s Internet listenership has recently jumped from 2,000 to 5,000 without offering any possible explanation.

Here is the explanation.

Big media and hyperlocal journalism

The Wall Street Journal reports that the Washington Post’s big bet on hyperlocal, online journalism — LoudounExtra.com — has been a flop.

According to Journal reporter Russell Adams, there have been a number of problems, from a failure to commit sufficient resources to an odd strategic decision not to link to the site from WashingtonPost.com. But I wonder if there’s something larger going on.

To an extent, the Post’s woes strike me as similar to those of Microsoft. For years, Bill Gates, Steve Ballmer and company acted as though they knew someone was going to come along and steal their lunch money someday. And so they moved aggressively, most memorably destroying Netscape and earning themselves a massive antitrust suit in the process.

But, in the end, Microsoft couldn’t overcome the tendency of huge, established companies not to be able to anticipate what’s next. And so Google slipped onto the scene, making a ton of money with online advertising and slowly but surely developing free, Web-based applications that may someday make a program like Microsoft Office (or at least the idea of paying for it) obsolete.

Likewise, when it comes to hyperlocal online journalism, I think it’s more likely that community-based bloggers will start doing real journalism, and embrace professional standards, than it is that big papers like the Post will be able to dominate that turf.

At least the Post has a national and international audience. What about big regional metros such as the Boston Globe, the Philadelphia Inquirer, the Denver Post and the like? If there’s no longer a market for such papers doing international and national coverage, don’t they have to embrace the hyperlocal model?

Not necessarily. It could be that what they really need to do is find the sweet spot — completely dominate regional coverage of state and local politics, business, sports, health and the arts, while leaving the national and international coverage to the Post and the New York Times, and the Little League banquets to community papers and bloggers.

In Massachusetts, Web sites tied to local weeklies (such as GateHouse Media’s Wicked Local project) and dailies (such as the Cape Cod Times and the Eagle-Tribune papers) strike me as being more connected at the local level than the Globe’s site, Boston.com. Local blogs are proliferating; here are a few, covering Brighton, Arlington and Newton.

It will be a tough trick for big papers to pull off. The Post’s failures thus far in Loudoun County are specific enough that it’s hard to generalize from them. But I find it difficult to imagine that the Globe will ever be the first place you’ll want to go to find out what the lunch menu is in your child’s elementary school.

Local focus on the big picture

Here’s an good example of how a large regional daily can use databases to do targeted local reporting.

Last Thursday the Boston Globe published a story in its four suburban supplements about inconsistencies in the way that applications for concealed-weapons licenses are handled from community to community. The story, by Globe database wiz Matt Carroll, is based on statistics provided by the state’s Criminal History Systems Board.

Carroll’s story was customized in each of the four supplements, reporting the same basic facts but quoting local people. The chart accompanying the story was customized as well. Here are the versions published in the North, NorthWest, West and South editions. In City Weekly, Carroll teamed up with Ric Kahn for yet another version that was published yesterday.

This sort of approach isn’t entirely new. Heck, I was customizing regional stories on a town-by-town basis when I was working for the Daily Times Chronicle of Woburn in the 1980s. But there are a lot more meaningful stories that can be told this way now that government statistics are readily available online.

Threatening “the voice of Black Boston”

Interesting story in the Dorchester Reporter on “TOUCH 106.1 FM,” a pirate radio station serving the black community that’s been targeted for elimination by the FCC. Managing editor Bill Forry writes:

Touch FM (officially LP-WTCH Boston) — which sprang from the bosom of the Grove Hall Neighborhood Development Corporation offices in the fall of 2005 — is unlicensed. They admit it. They’re pirates.

And they are unrepentant, even in the face of the most recent broadside from the government: A May 7 forfeiture order from the FCC that levies a $17,000 fine on station founder Charles Clemons. The ruling stems from a pair of site visits made to the suspected TOUCH offices at the corner of Cheney Street and Blue Hill Avenue in 2007. The order accuses Clemons of “willfully and repeatedly” using the frequency without a license and for “failing to permit a station inspection.”

This is the Catch-22 of radio. The Telecommunications Act of 1996 destroyed local commercial radio and gave rise to corporate-owned, lowest-common-denominator pap.

Touch FM’s 100-watt signal — broadcast from an undisclosed location — puts it between WMJX (106.7 FM) and WROR (105.7 FM), two stations owned by Greater Media, which also employs the likes of right-wingers like Jay Severin and Michael Graham on another of its stations, WTKK (96.9 FM). Who’s doing more to serve the local community, TOUCH or Greater Media? Does the question even need to be asked?

Last June I covered a hearing by the FCC on localism in broadcast media. The agency claims to be very concerned about local content. Well, if officials would like to travel to Dorchester, they will find some.

Duxbury’s Afghan connection

Here’s something you don’t see every day. The weekly Duxbury Clipper recently sent columnist Bruce Barrett to Afghanistan to cover the opening of a girls school funded by the Duxbury Rotary Club. Barrett did his reporting in the form of a blog, complete with photos, video, a map of the area, even a real-time weather report from the Afghan capital of Kabul.

An excerpt from Barrett’s final dispatch:

Kalashnikovs. In Duxbury, a band of men armed with assault rifles attending the opening of an elementary school would make the national news. But the Zabuli School for Girls isn’t in Duxbury. It’s in Deh Sabz, Afghanistan, a gritty town of 1,000 families on the outskirts of the capital city Kabul. Out here, standing among men armed to the teeth is calming, not frightening. It means that security is strong. Fear comes when standing among men who have turned their attention toward you, and you can’t see their weapons. More unsettling, perhaps, are the moments when you can see their weapons and the barrels are pointed up. That’s when they’re ready for action.

Not only is the series evidence of some terrific enterprise on the part of Barrett and the Clipper, but the online implementation is state-of-the-art.

Going deep and narrow online

The Outraged Liberal, a former journalist and a good one, offers some useful observations on how newspapers can best employ their Web sites. He specifically singles out the Globe, which yesterday published a medium-length, interpretation-heavy story on Gov. Deval Patrick’s speech about his $3.8 billion bridge-repair plan and the cool reception it received from state Treasurer Tim Cahill.

You can like the Globe’s story or not. Mr. O.L.’s point is that the Globe missed an opportunity by not using its Web site, Boston.com, to run the full details of Patrick’s plan (Blue Mass Group did that), or a video of Patrick’s speech (ditto), or the spin from the governor’s office (taxpayer-supported and thus free for the taking).

We’ve entered into what will probably be a lengthy period in which a typical newspaper’s print product will continue to produce most of the profits, even as it shrinks, while the Web site grows and becomes increasingly important to the bottom line. Most newspaper Web viewers read the print product, too. So it’s crucial that the two sides work together.

Among the larger challenges facing news Web sites is that people spend far less time with them than with the print edition. A recent study by the Project for Excellence in Journalism shows that the average visitor to a newspaper Web site spends less than 50 minutes per month, a number that I think is based on flawed assumptions. (I might spend a minute or two per month at the San Francisco Chronicle’s site, for instance, thus pulling its numbers down.)

But there’s no question that news-site editors need to find ways to bring people back over and over, and to spend some time once they’re there. Now, I like Red Sox pet photos as much as the next person (actually, that’s not true), but that’s not going to induce me to keep coming back. I think there are various ways to do it.

You do it through multimedia presentations of some of your best journalism, stuff that holds up well beyond the week it was published, as the Globe does with its special reports. You do it through databases that invite repeat visits, such as the Globe’s gubernatorial political-contributions map from 2006 or, as Mr. O.L. notes, the Herald’s database of state-employee salaries. You do it by inviting a conversation built around your journalism. Boston.com has discussion boards and the Herald lets readers post comments to stories, but the more interesting news conservations are taking place elsewhere, at sites such as Universal Hub and Blue Mass Group.

And you do it be offering deep information on narrow subjects. The idea behind Mr. O.L.’s post is that Boston.com should have been the first place people thought to go to find out more about the governor’s bridge proposal. In this case, if they thought of it, they wouldn’t have found much.

Re-editing the agenda with NewsTrust

For the past week students in my Web journalism class have been immersing themselves in NewsTrust, a social- networking site that bills itself as “Your guide to good journalism.”

Last Wednesday Rory O’Connor, NewsTrust’s editorial director, led us in a presentation and workshop, highlights of which you can see in the embedded video below. Since then, we’ve been posting and rating stories related to the global economy, which was NewsTrust’s featured topic.

NewsTrust’s strength is also its weakness. Unlike Digg, which simply allows you to vote on whether you like or don’t like a story, NewsTrust asks users to rate stories on a wide range of criteria, including whether you think the news organization is reliable, how well sourced the story is, whether it’s fair and whether the story offers enough context.

In all, there are 12 different criteria, each of them demanding a rating of one to five stars. Though you may leave any particular criterion blank if you choose, that’s still a lot — and you haven’t even gotten to writing a comment, adding tags and filling in several other forms. That’s quite a bit of work.

Still, the idea is a good one. It’s a way for ordinary readers — well, ordinary readers who happen to be news junkies — to re-edit the news, to judge for themselves what are the best and most important stories rather than relying on the editors of the New York Times, the BBC or what have you. Some readers who don’t want to submit or even rate stories may be intrigued by the idea of tapping into the wisdom of the NewsTrust community to find news they might otherwise never see.

According to O’Connor, testing has showed that journalists and non-journalists give stories similar ratings, which suggests that the NewsTrust system, though cumbersome, actually works. Perhaps the biggest drawback at the moment is the NewsTrust demographic, which O’Connor compares to the PBS audience: well-educated, aging and very liberal. Lack of ideological balance could hinder NewsTrust from becoming the well-respected guide to which its founders aspire. They understand the problem and are hoping to come up with some solutions.

Another interesting feature is that users themselves are rated in terms of how transparent they are about their backgrounds, how often they submit and rate stories and what other users think of their ratings. This, as well as community judgments about the reliability of different news sources, all gets figured into the algorithm that comes up with a score for any given story.

According to my students’ blogs, NewsTrust could be improved if it were less text-heavy and loaded more quickly.

As more people begin to use NewsTrust, its ratings should become more useful. I’ve submitted and reviewed several stories and felt like I was shouting into the wind, as no one else rated them. I do think it would be interesting if there were some way of knowing how many other people had at least read the story.

Social networking is the hottest trend in media today. By trying to combine social networking with serious journalism, the founders of NewsTrust have hit upon one of the more promising experiments in online journalism.