Ryan Sholin, Steve Yelvington, Shannan Bowen and others have been weighing in on the journalism generation gap. Got me to thinking of exceptions.
Tom Warhover, Executive Editor for Innovation (or something like that) at the Missourian. 50ish. Gets it. Wants more multimedia. Wants more data. Wants to provide it in ways that aren’t measured in inches. Gets excited by the new and wants to try it out.
He has the job of teaching the majority of students at the Missouri School of Journalism (and I’m sure are prevalent in other, similar school around the country), who, you know, want to write for a living and can’t see why they need to do all this other stuff. Oh. My. God. To tell you the times I heard these people prater on about their want to write, and travel, and… that’s about the brunt of it. Take photos? Video? Out of the question. The typical reaction to industry layoffs could be summarized as “More jobs for us!” Er, no. Not you, oh clueless one. Can they ever get it? Sure, but being young is by no means the equivalent of being clued in.
Don Wyatt, Executive Editor at the Springfield News-Leader. Gets it in a big way. Instituted online goals for reporters… reporters! Asked me about the feasibility of providing cell phone interfaces to data. Where’d that come from? His subscription to ESPN mobile, of course. (Are we supposed to acknowledge that 50-ish folks have cell phones?) Made sure to work recorders for every reporter into a tight budget, and even instituted some in-house training. Yeah, he’s 50ish, too.
To cast this split as generational is to ignore key truths. It creates a false Us v. Them along age lines that just doesn’t exist.
You can start cooking up ideas no matter your age. You can fail to see their use no matter your youth. There is no easy litmus test, the proof is in the pudding.
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The thesis of that last post would probably be something like, “Free, useful APIs are routinely overlooked in many newsroom, a policy that should be re-explored.”
APIs offer free content. They’re typically intriguing. And they’re built to be torn apart and rebuilt as you see fit. The negative image of them might be the new thorn in my ass: Sports stats.
“Stats,” in this instance, is all-encompassing. It’s the stats that make up the back of the baseball card. It’s W-L record. It’s divisional standings and game scores, league leaders and historical info. It’s ridiculously compelling, and with so many sources, they’re easy to get and can be rebuilt as you see fit.
The problem is that this time, you’re not getting permission. And that’s a whole new can of worms.
The dichotomy comes into play when we start flipping through the print edition. Vendors typically supply the staples, things like box scores and standings. But the minute we start rolling out aggregated statistics not collected by the vendor, we’re delving into new territory. And often the only way we can do that is by giving credit to the source we stole them from, typically ESPN, FOXsports, cbssportsline, or some other online wealth of sports knowledge. We could even go to the league homepage, where solid, reputable stats are aggregated.
But for some reason, we scoff when the same sourcing must be used for an online application. And that’s a shame. Maybe it’s a residual effect of growing up listening to some version of this before every game:
“This copyrighted telecast is presented by authority of the Office of the Commissioner of Baseball. It may not be reproduced or retransmitted in any form, and the accounts and descriptions of this game may not be disseminated, without express written consent.”
Does anyone have examples of getting around this Catch 22? It’s like we’re going thirsty in the ocean — surrounded by sports stats, unable to use any. Sports information seems like it should be the holy grail of online journalism, a creative, telling visualization would almost certainly draw repeat traffic. It’s continually updated information, it’s highly relevant to a specific demographic. If you don’t believe me, try starting a fantasy football league in your office and start batting away the takers.
The possibilities with this stuff are numerous. But our hands are tied.
Where does fair use begin and end? What’s the public domain, what’s proprietary, and is there any middle ground?
I get a little silly over a good web service. If there’s an API involved, all the better. Programmableweb has a prominent place in my feed reader, and I try to keep fairly abreast of what the rest of the online world is cooking up and how best I can use it.
What worries me is how little of it is allowed to translate into my industry. Even more depressing, I think, is the reasons so little of it is allowed to take root. I think they can be boiled down to a simple character flaw: Pride.
Maybe the best example of this is Yelp. Yelp is a great site, which, at its least advanced, is basically a phone book. But on top of that, it adds a layer of user reviews and social networking, powerful features that have made it the peer-review go-to source on the Internet.
About a year ago Yelp released an API that allows pretty much anyone to bring the site’s reviews, ratings, neighborhood searches, etc. into any other Website.
To me, that’s an application that begs for a newspaper.com to take advantage:
- Few news orgs have truly worthwhile dining/entertainment/calendar sites.
- Almost all, though, make an attempt.
- With resources being what they are, it seems like a natural fit to take what Yelp is offering and use it to cut down the jobs to be done. The cost is zero, and meanwhile, you’ve added a great feature to your site.
In return for having access to Yelp’s data, all a news site has to do is slap a Yelp logo on the results.
And that, unfortunately, is where the wheels fall off the bus. I’ve heard publishers say things like, “If we do this, we’ll legitimize Yelp. And they are the competition.”
Maybe it’s a sign of ow far to the Dark Side I’ve come, but I don’t see it that way. In fact, I see it much the opposite. showing that we are willing to use free data from a “competitor,” when offered, will make us seem that much closer to getting this whole Web thing. Using their data, I think, legitimizes us to the early adopters that have already embraced the useful tool.
To be sure, Yelp is probably the most controversial example of this. Other services based more on functionality than content would probably be an easier sell within a newsroom. But even then, I don’t think we’re taking advantage as much as we could and should.
Take Twitter. Totally, 100 percent free. Great functionality, out-of-the-box SMS support, solid and growing base of users, etc. Those are things any news site could use. Slowly, I think, we’re coming around to that. We tweet blog posts. But there has to be more there, more that’s available to us because, again, they’ve given us the keys.
It seems like a simple script could turn the Twitter API into something much like OhDontforget. Does that have a place on your newspaper’s entertainment site?
There’s another argument to be made here, but I’m late for work. More to come.
Over the past few weeks, a sort of taboo subject has continued to bubble up. More buyouts at some of the best news orgs in the country. Plunging stock prices. An intriguing article on the relationship between the newsroom and print advertising.
As if fated to be seen in contrast, the Pulitzer winners were announced, and some fantastic work got the credit it was due. Google beat out Wall Street projections and posted a profitable first quarter. And some yayhoo railed against Rob Curley, calling him a schlub because his products don’t make money (I have no clue whether that’s true or not, but, regardless, the barb was lofted).
So I ask, with both feet firmly planted in the journalism camp: At what point does all of this become our problem? At what point do we, as journalists, as the webby voices in the good ol’ MSM, start actively thinking about how we can make it better?
If there was a theoretical continuum mapping out the stance on this problem in the average newsroom, I’d wager the needle would be staunchly on the “Not my job” side of things. Any product of a worthwhile J-School has heard the horror stories: Staples Center, the CBS New Year’s Eve gaffe, various examples of ad placement for story coverage or spiked stories to preserve an advertising relationship. The overall message many students walk away with is, “If you think about how any of your work will make money, you’re dirty.”
This isn’t true. What’s more, it’s hurting us. Go over to TechCrunch and check out the list of startups. The plurality of those applications would have been ideal undertakings for a news organization. Those ideas were cooked up to make life better or more interesting, sure, but they were also meant to make money. Generally, they’re succeeding at both.
We’re doing good work, too.
But too often, we’re leaving it in the hands of advertising people to see that it makes money. Their solution, inevitably, is, “Slap an ad on it!” “Upsell X, Y and Z!” or my favorite, “You can’t do that, we sell something similar in print.”
These aren’t wrong answers. Well, except for that last one. Unfortunately for all of us, it isn’t working. It’s time for a new plan. What about allowing subscription cell phone updates for our best apps, or a choice for ad-supported and free? What about harvesting user information and allowing for targeted, premium advertising (The Facebook model)? What about sponsorship?
The journalists who are doing this kind of work are spilling over with ideas. We’re passionate. We love what we do and we want to keep doing it. And I honestly believe that if we started thinking about this, from Project Day 1, we’d come up with something that could work.
To be clear, I’m talking about turning our best ideas into sources of money, not building ideas around sources of money. That’s an important distinction, and a tougher pill for our bosses to swallow. We don’t have to compromise our passions to make this go. Doing so would subvert the entire undertaking. But the belief that our employers should let us do good work because that’s just what news organizations do is somewhere between dead and dying. We have to prove ourselves.
And we can.
ADDENDUM #1: Any and all comments appreciated. If you think this means I lost my soul, please say so.
ADDENDUM #2: Heard from an advertising/marketing person who was looking to repair a relationship with a news editor after mentioning that a new product was mostly being created because it would lead to new revenue. At the very least, that denial of the business side of this business gotsta stop.
A few weeks or months back, over on Matt Waite’s blog, Derek asked about the chances that DBTools — the system we use for rapid processing and posting of data at the News-Leader — would go open source.
Well, if you’re within Gannett, I’ve got good news.
Gannettoids, the tool is open to you. Shoot me an e-mail at my work account and we’ll get you a copy. Jennie Coughlin over the the Staunton (Va.) News Leader has already implemented it, and I think she’s had fairly positive results. It’s built with PHP, requires a MySQL connection and a webserver that can sit between the two. Get those, and it’s pretty easy to implement. That’s not to say it doesn’t have its bugs, but they mostly become apparent after installation. I’m hopeful that tapping into the collective Gannett reservoir of wisdom will help us create a tool that is free and user-friendly. Right now it only scores about 1.5 out of two.
I’d be interested i talking with folks about creating something with the express purpose of going open source. If anyone wants to explore that, get in touch.
1) Facebook, et. al, are criticized for not fully opening up the troves of data they collect. “It’s the data, stupid.”
2) Online newspaper ads stall.
3) Conde Nast rolls out Tastebook, which allows people to create real, live cookbooks from a variety of recipe sources for a mere $35. Cost of printing book? Far less. Hard profit ensues.
4) Wired runs a story about Manga finding new niche audiences by allowing their content to be, er, appropriated… (thanks to Patrick Beeson for the link).
5) A major newspaper implements tag-driven content.
In the past few weeks, it seems, stories suggest that openness and embracing change leads to riches. Not opening up –in other words, whatever the hell newspaper companies are doing — is leading to stagnation. My conclusion? It’s time to open up.
This isn’t a complete deviation. We already allow free syndication via RSS in a bevy of categories. And our print product costs roughly cover the cost of materials. and to do nothing, it seems, isn’t halting the inevitable march of progress. We should take charge of our content — allow readers to serve it up as they see fit. Our content is our content, but it’s fully transitory without being categorized, tagged and coded in such a way as to be useful later on.
I’m not pushing for a NYT API. Okay, I am. But there’s more to it. What’s limiting Tastebook to recipes? Allow, say, Yankee fans to create their own books from the photos, clips and interviews we amass during the course of our business.
The content is there. To allow new ways of serving it up is just good business sense.