Google gets into local news

Posted on February 7, 2008 by Steve Mays

Google News now allows you to localize a section of the stories. Scroll down just beneath the fold for the box to type in your city or zip code.

“This is pretty huge, folks, and it spotlights the need for everybody in the local news business to adopt best practices when it comes to unbundled distribution,” writes Terry Heaton. True enough, as Google News ranked #9 in Nielsen-Netratings for December — higher than USAToday.com and WashingtonPost.com.

If you’re a local news guy and look at this and say, “Ah, but they missed some stories!” … you’re missing the point.

Can getting it wrong be okay?

Posted on January 24, 2008 by Steve Mays

Terry Heaton speaks to the “accuracy” of stories reported online. His case in point was the early –and inaccurate– report that Heath Ledger died in the apartment of Mary Kate Olsen.

“What people are seeing now is an old-fashioned process — reporting — as it unfolds in real time. If the public wants its information as raw and immediate as possible, it’ll have to get used to a few missteps along the way, and maybe even approach breaking stories with a bit of skepticism, like a good reporter would.

So a part of the “process” of news is mistakes, and the ethical question is does it matter in a world of news-as-a-process? I’m not so sure it does, as long as mistakes are corrected — just as, I might add, they are corrected in the news gathering process in professional newsrooms.”

Poll reveals declining trust in news media

Posted on January 19, 2008 by Steve Mays

Broadcast Engineering reports the findings from a new Sacred Heart University poll showing a significant decline in the percentage of Americans who say they believe all or most of media news reporting (compared to a 2003 poll).

“Currently, 19.6 percent of those surveyed said they believe all or most news media reporting, down from 27.4 percent in 2003. Just less than one-quarter in 2007 said they believed little or none of the reporting, while 55.3 percent suggested they believed some media news reporting.

The poll revealed that Americans generally gave the national news media poor ratings in six different areas measured. The average positive ratings were:

* Quality of reporting — 40.7 percent
* Accuracy of reporting — 36.9 percent
* Keeping any personal bias out of stories — 33.3 percent
* Fairness — 31.3 percent
* Presenting an even balance of views — 30.4 percent
* Presenting negative and positive news equally — 27.5 percent

Additionally, the poll showed a growing perception that the media try to sway public opinion, 87.6 percent, up from 79.3 percent in 2003, and public policy, 86 percent versus 76.7 percent in 2003.”

Hmm. Only a third of those surveyed think the media keeps personal bias out of stories. In 35 years, I’ve never met a reporter who didn’t believe he or she was totally objective and free from personal bias. Wonder who’s right?

Too late for web training

Posted on January 11, 2008 by Steve Mays

Mindy McAdams (Teaching Online Journalism) points to a very interesting post by Paul Conley. Mr. Conley has held senior positions at Knight-Ridder, CNN, Primedia/Prism and Bloomberg. He serves on the professional advisory boards of College Media Advisers, the national group that works with student journalists, and Northwest Missouri State University’s Mass Communications program. His clients include Primedia/Prism, Reed Business, About.com and IDG.

“I’m urging employers not to offer any training in Web journalism. There are two reasons for this. Here they are:

1. You cannot train someone to be part of a culture.
For someone to work on the Web, they must be part of the Web. That, after all, is what the Web means. The Web is a web. It exists as a series of connections. An online journalist isn’t a journalist who works online. He’s a journalist who lives online. He’s part of the Web.

It’s a waste of time and money to teach multimedia skills and technology to someone who hasn’t already become part of the Web. And there’s no need to teach skills and technology to the journalists who are already part of Web culture, because the culture requires participation in skills and technology.
Or, to put it another way — I cannot teach the Web. No one can. Yet all of us who are part of the Web are learning the Web.

2. When the fighting begins, the training must end.
We cannot move backward to round up the stragglers and train them to fight. It’s too late to try to convince print journalists that the Web has value. It’s too late to tell them that an Internet connection is worth a few dollars a month. As revenue shrinks, we can’t spend money on training. We can’t gather up the print folks and “prepare them as online journalists.”

You can’t prepare people to dig a fighting (fox?) hole. You just tell them to dig. And the ones who don’t dig fast enough, deep enough or well enough, die.”

Wow. I confess that I agree with Conley but would never say it around my reporter friends. What good can come of telling them it’s too late. The train left the station and they can’t run fast enough to catch it.

Changing newsroom culture

Posted on January 7, 2008 by Steve Mays

“The feeling in newsrooms, especially among the people on the new-media side, seems to be that there are an awful lot of people within organizations that aren’t on board with a vision of changing for the future. Even when top management has developed a new corporate vision for a digital, multi-media and less print-centered future, and communicated it to “the troops,” implementation is being slowed by many people in the organization — including mid-level managers — who still don’t buy into the idea that a total transformation of the news organization is necessary.”

“Everyone’s got work to do to put out the “daily miracle,” but in an era when the old industry model is in decline, we can no longer afford to have a workforce where the majority are solely doing the work of “putting out the paper.”

“The smart news organization in 2008 will be the one that encourages innovation — no, requires it — from ALL its employees. It will get everyone involved: in planning meetings; in committees charged with specific research and/or implementation projects. It will create some time in the schedules of everyone in the organization to do the work of innovation, and make that an integral assignment.”

“Most importantly, it will develop a training program to teach new-media skills to those still lacking, and regularly bring in innovation and creativity experts to guide both managers and employees. With the latter, exposure to and interaction with those experts will be company-wide.”

— Steve Outing at Editor & Publisher

YouTube Voter Video

Posted on January 2, 2008 by Steve Mays

I should have guessed the Google/YouTube guys would be all over the Iowa Caucuses. They’ve hooked up with The Des Moines Register, arguably the most powerful media outlet in Iowa, to create a YouTube channel:

“Document your caucus experience from start to finish. We want to show the nation what the caucuses are like, so bring your video camera along with you and give an on-the-ground view of your local caucuses. You can also add your own commentary or interviews with people just after the caucuses, offering their reflections on what took place.”

I had to believe bloggers and podcasters and YouTube’ers would be all over this event but wasn’t sure if cameras would be allowed. They are.

“Of course – these are our caucuses, and this a great opportunity to show the nation what they’re like. Just be sure to be respectful of other caucus-goers and to make sure that your video footage is not a distraction to what’s taking place.”

And Google Maps is doing something special. ~~but I’m not sure exactly what or where to find it. I’ll update this post. If I had to guess it would be a map with all the caucus precincts, updated throughout the evening.~~

As I watched a couple of the videos, I was reminded of something I used to hear/say back during the early days of the net. Nobody will watch all of these. Somebody will watch each of these.

How newspapers got into such a fix

Posted on December 31, 2007 by Steve Mays

A fascinating look at how U. S. newspapers got to where they are, by Paul Steiger who spent 26 of his 41 years in journalism at the Wall Street Journal. Thursday is his final day at WSJ.

“Next week I move over to a nonprofit called Pro Publica as president and editor-in-chief. When fully staffed, we will be a team of 24 journalists dedicated to reporting on abuses of power by anyone with power: government, business, unions, universities, school systems, doctors, hospitals, lawyers, courts, nonprofits, media. We’ll publish through our Web site and also possibly through newspapers, magazines or TV programs, offering our material free if they provide wide distribution.

Pro Publica is the brainchild of San Francisco entrepreneurs-turned-philanthropists Herbert and Marion Sandler, who along with some other donors are providing $10 million a year in funding.

The idea is that we, along with others of similar bent, can in some modest way make up for some of the loss in investigative-reporting resources that results from the collapse of metro newspapers’ business model.”

Job outlook for journalism grads

Posted on December 26, 2007 by Steve Mays

Mindy McAdams’ Teaching Online Journalism:

“New U.S. graduates with a bachelor’s degree in journalism or mass communication had a median annual salary of $30,000, according to a survey of spring 2006 graduates. New graduates with a master’s degree in journalism or mass communication had a median annual salary of $38,000. Jobs held by all these graduates included those in public relations and advertising as well as online, print, TV and radio journalism.

Does this mean getting a master’s degree will increase your salary? Maybe in some fields, but not necessarily in journalism. I’d like to see this survey cut the grain a bit finer on the master’s degree data, because in my experience, a hiring editor at a news organization doesn’t give a hoot about your degree(s) or your GPA — a hiring editor cares only about your experience in the field.

This marks a distinct difference between journalism jobs and jobs in some other fields, where the extra one or two years in graduate school are assumed to make the candidate more fit to do the job. In our field, the only thing that makes you more fit is more work experience.”

I haven’t been involved in hiring for our newsrooms for long time, but I think experience would trump grad degree for us.

Covering the Iowa Caucuses

Posted on December 15, 2007 by Steve Mays

The Iowa Caucuses (Jan 3) is a big deal in the national political scheme of things. One of Learfield’s news networks –Radio Iowa– will cover it, just as we’ve done since the network began in 1987.

We’ll provide two 4-minute reports each hour throughout the evening. These audio reports will be fed by satellite to affiliated radio stations throughout the state (and streamed live on our website). The radio stations will air some or all of these reports along with whatever other programming they are doing that night. This is the way networks like ours have operated since… well, since forever.

The editorial edge of state networks is our ability to focus on the "state" angle of the stories we cover. The Iowa Caucuses will be the big national story of the day (evening). Every news organization in the country will be covering the story, wall-to-wall.

So where’s our niche? What do we provide that a listener can’t get more of, faster somewhere else? Is our "target audience" people who can’t be in front of their TV or computer that evening? We have to proceed on the assumption there will be people listening to their local radio stations that night and hearing our reports a couple of times an hour.

I’m not sure where I’m headed with this ramble. I’m just trying to understand how –and to what degree– things are changing for news organizations like ours.

And whither the bloggers? Will they be live blogging the caucuses? Is that allowed? Not sure what that would add, since the news organizations (or the Associated Press) will have –I assume– someone covering each of the caucus locations.

My friend (and Radio Iowa News Director) Kay Henderson has been living and breathing Iowa politics for the last year or so. She probably has the answers to most of these questions. Or at least some interesting insight. I suspect she’s too busy to enlighten us, but watch the comments, just in case. She checks in here.

I think I’ve lost the thread of this ramble… I just know that I’m glad I’m no longer responsible for coming up with long and short term strategy for our networks.

We’ll know how many radio stations are "clearing" our reports on Caucus night. We will NOT know how many people are listening to those reports. That’s a question for the Magic Eight Ball. If I could ask one more, it would be how will all of this change four years from now?

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“I was guided to Lumen’s door by Jesus.” — Severance (Episode 6)

Category Archives: Journalism