The social media hurricane

Here’s how old I am: When I wanted to make a strong impression in accepting my first full time job, in 1972, I sent a telegram. To me, the means of communication symbolized urgency and importance. Today urgency and importance are increasingly signaled through social media, as the convergence of social and news media speed along.

My teenaged children have never sent nor received a telegram. They rarely talk on the phone or send emails, preferring to text friends’ cell phones or, in my son’s case, through game communications in World of Warcraft. He knows many of his friends will be there, just as my daughter knows a lot of dialogue among her classmates is going on through Facebook.

I now check Twitter a couple of times a day, LinkedIn every day or two and Facebook when it alerts me, for signs of what my friends and colleagues are up to.

The widespread adoption of social media in personal and business communication is now working its way into the news ecosystem, with Hurricane Gustav being the latest example.

I picked three news organizations (formerly known as newspapers) with good track records I knew were well-positioned to follow developments, the New Orleans Times-Picayune, Biloxi Sun Herald and Austin American-Statesman. In addition to print and online coverage, each fielded a Twitter presence. New Orleans used its ongoing Twitter account, NOLAnews; Biloxi established FollowGustav and Austin created TrackingGustav.

The advantage of Twitter over the Web is that virtually everyone with a cellphone purchased in the past few years has the technology to receive instant Twitter updates, 140-character bursts  of information sometimes, but not always, linked to a longer Web entry. 

Even the Red Cross provided hurricane information through Twitter. The advantages lay in the instant and portable nature of Twitter and its near universal availability.

Check out the the great interview on Poynter about NPR’s efforts to use social media in Gustav coverage  http://poynter.org/column.asp?id=2&aid=149732

The sickening plunge in newspaper stocks; the human toll

I’m finding it hard to concentrate this morning, so riveted am I by the death spiral of newspaper-related stocks and the carnage in newsrooms.

The day started with a terrible earnings report from Gannett, the largest publishing company. Earnings down 36% on a 14% drop in second quarter newspaper advertising revenue. USA Today ad revenue was down 17%. 

Alan Mutter, my blogging hero, reports that newspaper stocks have lost $4 billion in value since the beginning of the month. That’s his chart at right.

Meanwhile, the bodies stack up, day by day. the Atlanta Journal Constitution reported this morning it will eliminate 8 percent of its employeees, 189 jobs. It will also eliminate its geographically targeted sections, including a Gwinnett County section it has published for 20 years. I remember when it started, with great resolve and fanfare, to beat back a frightening challenge from a New York Times suburban newspaper, the Gwinnett Daily News.

That was a great time for readers, with two formidable competitors fighting for their loyalty with strong, locally-focused news and advertising products. The AJC destroyed the NYT entry. But even with a strong web presence of its own, it can’t compete toe-to-toe with all of the social, economic and technological forces making it more and more difficult for newspapers to prosper.

Will social media someday seem as quaint as fax machines?

I had a couple of invigorating conversations today with Wichita State graduate students about the future of media. Cindy Stanford, a PhD Human Factors student, was telling me about her fascinating interest in Human-Computer Interaction, HCI. She introduced me to Friendfeed.com, rheingold.com and quotably.com in the interest of expanding my understanding of social media.

Later in the day I talked with Bobby Rozzell, a former minister who is one of the impressive grad students in the Elliott School of Communication. Bobby recommended a book, Groundswell: Winning in a World Transformed by Social Technologies. That led to a medium-or-message discussion that reminded me of a long-ago Knight Ridder committee called, tongue-in-cheek, The Edge of Knight.

The idea of the Edge group, circa 1984, was that the people who ran Knight Ridder knew that good ideas were dying because they couldn’t get through the bureaucracy and the budget process. In theory, anyone with a good idea could come to us with a proposal that might be funded independently of the normal process. It didn’t end up working, but I remember one particular discussion about the then hot delivery system — fax machines!

Our wise technical adviser, Steve Landers, urged us to shift our business focus from the whiz-bang platform (we were sure everyone would have one at home someday soon) to the content. He was right, of course. We’re probably at a point where about as many college students will have used a fax machine at home as will have used a typewriter — virtually none.

As journalism jobs disappear by the thousands, at least from newspapers, it’s time to keep a sharp focus on content. What will the audience want, and who will produce it, remain more important questions than how they will get it.

Saving the classifieds business

Steve Outing and Chris Ryan have a great new website, ReinventingClassifieds.com. Steve asked me for a piece. Here’s what I sent him.

Second thoughts of a publisher turned professor

In nine months since I was carried from the bloody arena of the newspaper business and ascended to the ivory tower, I’ve gained this perspective: Most newspapers don’t need the best new idea to grow their classifieds business. They mostly need to get better at executing what they already know.

I’m not an expert on classified advertising, so I can’t offer advice to anyone else. Here are a half dozen things I wish I’d done about classifieds and what I would do today:

·      Stop obsessing about the national trends.  Here in flyover country, there was no real estate boom and there’s no bust. Employment numbers remain healthy. Wichita Craigslist has been around for a few years, but hasn’t become an established marketplace in any vertical. It isn’t too late to save the business in Wichita or lots of other places in America.

·      Invest in technology.  We dithered endlessly over how to get our advertising and accounting systems to talk to each other. We found a hundred barriers to having our customers place and price their own ads. I should have been more insistently impatient about finding and financing solutions.

·      Invest in people. Newspaper/internet outside salespeople should be the most qualified and the best paid in the market. They should have the technical and clerical support they need to focus their time on selling to auto dealers, Realtors, employers and employment agencies. That wasn’t true at any of the newspapers I worked at over a span of 35 years.

·      Get rid of the newspaper/internet pricing silos. Advertisers should be sold eyeballs, not platforms. Companies allocate revenue to make their web operations look better at the expense of their newspapers. No wonder people think newspapers are failing. The truth is, the local newspaper and its website are a dynamite combination. Sell them that way.

·      Stop tinkering with in-paper presentation. If the type is readable and the classifications are clear, readers will find and act on the ads. No amount of tweaking the color and headers and unpaid content will make a material difference in profitability.

·      Promote. Promote. Promote. God should strike us down for cutting the classifieds promotion budget year after year. We got the results we paid for.

Twittering a murder trial

I’ve been playing with Twitter the past few days, trying to understand the strange appeal of posting and perusing 140-character tweets from friends. Along came veteran Wichita Eagle court reporter Ron Sylvester to demonstrate Twitter’s effectiveness as a news tool. Ron has been following a hot local murder trial, posting frequent updates via Twitter. It’s dramatic, informative and addicting to follow Ron’s posts, known as tweets. Just a few days into the trial, the American Bar Association Journal has posted an online story on Ron’s experiment.

Citizens as gatekeepers

Inexpensive technology has put the tools of mass communication in the hands of the masses, diluting the power of traditional news media. We are in the early days of a rapidly expanding movement of do-it-yourself news, often called citizen journalism. I think it has great potential for serving democracy.

The renowned American cynic, H.L. Mencken, said, “Freedom of the press is limited to those who own one.”

Now everyone with a computer and Internet connection is a potential publisher; everyone with a video-enabled cell phone is a potential broadcaster.

 This unprecedented power shift is not without risk.

In two recent columns in The Wichita Eagle, Davis “Buzz” Merritt, my colleague at the Elliott School of Communication at Wichita State, raised alarm about the potential dangers of iReport.com. It’s a site owned by and run by CNN as a sort of YouTube for news. It allows anyone to post news video with none of the accuracy, fairness and taste filters provided by traditional news organizations.

Professor Merritt raises the excellent point that current law protecting Internet activity gives no ready legal recourse to those who may be harmed by false reports. That should be corrected. 

But we should never go back to the days, just now coming to an end, when a small number of professional journalists, known as gatekeepers, got to decide what everyone should read, hear and see.

Merritt paints an ugly picture of iReport.com’s potential content as “stuff posted directly by any idiot or criminal with a camera and a computer.” That’s not what I see when I actually look at the site.

This week’s most viewed story subjects included the 2008 Presidential election and natural disasters in China and Myanmar. There were also silly videos about bridesmaid dresses, but no content fluffier than you’d find in the features portions of most newscasts.

Merritt finds CNN irresponsible for posting amateur video that hasn’t gone through a professional vetting process. I think CNN and other news organizations are smart to encourage citizen journalism.  Pushing back a frontier always involves danger, but the harm is usually offset by the resulting progress.

On a national level, the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation is encouraging community foundations to develop local experiments in citizen journalism.

I’m working with the Wichita Community Foundation to put together a local group to brainstorm ideas for Sedgwick County. If you want to be involved, send me an email. Or a video!

News and Advertising: Hanging together or separately

When the nation’s key editors and publishers met in Washington this week, one of the topics was “Making the Publisher/Editor Partnership Work.” These days, that often means editors understanding they need to take down some of the wall with advertising departments, as Louis Hau describes at Forbes.com. That doesn’t mean giving up a bit of responsibility for producing an honest news report. It does mean being smart about finding the sweet spot where reader and advertiser interests overlap and both are served by cooperation between news and advertising. One example I can point to proudly is the Business Today section in the Wichita Eagle, now about 18 months old.  Editor Sherry Chisenhall, Advertising V.P. Wendell Funk and their staffs were in close contact all through the development of the section. It turned into an outstanding reader and advertiser success, as Sherry told the Readership Institute at Northwestern University.  The bottom line on cooperation is that profits, readership and advertiser satisfaction are all served when newsrooms and advertising departments find ways to cooperate.

Newspaper heaven in Frankfurt

 On a recent visit, I found Frankfurt am Main International Airport  is a little bit of heaven for newspaper readers. The photo on the left shows newspapers for sale. On the right is the rack of free newspapers provided by Lufthansa. They’re mostly in German, but the Financial Times, International Herald-Tribune and USA Today are available in English. There are also lighted billboards throughout the airport advertising German newspapers.

Frankfurt Airport billboard I

Frankfurt Airport billboard II

The Pulitzer Anachronism

Franz Kafka’s short story, “A Hunger Artist,” is about an entertainer who makes his living by demonstrating his unusual ability to starve himself. Eventually, public interest wanes but the man continues, driven by pride in his craft, memories of previous fame and, of course, by madness. In the “Semiotics of Hunger,” Efraim Sicher wrote:

Kafka’s story works beautifully in its cruel paradoxical logic, yet it leaves us without a solution, not necessarily because there isn’t one, but because in the world in which the hunger artist’s performance is no longer visible, the performance can only work if we understand why it is impossible. 

I was thinking about Kafka’s story when I read about this year’s Pulitzer Prizes in Journalism. I applaud the work and congratulate the winners, but think the prizes themselves have become marginalized.

When I was Managing Editor of the Fort Wayne News-Sentinel, we were fortunate enough to win the Pulitzer for coverage of a devastating local flood. That prize was one of the best experiences of my professional life and helped me get a promotion to the Miami Herald. I was in newsrooms for other Pulitzers in Detroit and Miami, and I twice got to participate as a panelist in the Pulitzer judging process at Columbia University, when I was publisher in State College.

So my feelings don’t stem from bitterness. I just think maybe time has passed for Pulitzers that focus only on newspapers and their web sites. It’s time for prizes that disregard platform and focus just on outstanding journalism, in whatever form it appears.

A model media executive — Jay Smith

Jay Smith today announced his retirement as president of Cox Newspapers, which owns the Atlanta Journal Constitution, Austin American-Statesman, Dayton Daily News and other excellent local newspapers. I’ve known Jay since our first journalism class together at Ohio State 40 years ago. In my completely biased opinion, he’s been one of the outstanding media executives of our generation. The proof is in the quality improvements in the newspapers Jay has served as publisher (those above) and in other Cox papers in Palm Beach and elsewhere. Jay chaired the Newspaper Association of America, served on the board of Associated Press and held other key industry roles. In each case, he been an untiring advocate of quality journalism and the public’s right to know. He’s still a young man, so more great things are expected. In an email to friends this morning, Jay said:

The challenges facing newspapers are daunting, but the men and women of Cox Newspapers are up to the task. As long as we remember to exist for others, not for ourselves, we will do fine. How will it all turn out and what route will get us there? Darned if I know, but I’m confident of a good outcome. And may you never lose sight of the fact that newspapers and, increasingly, their Web sites are vital to an informed and active democracy. 

Jay goes out as he has always been, a class act.