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A successful experiment with an online exclusive

What do you do when your investigative reporter wants to write a magazine-style piece, but you don’t have a magazine to publish it in? Why not create a micro-magazine on your Web site?

That’s what we did at The News Tribune earlier this month in what has turned out to be a fantastic experiment in nontraditional, long-form journalism produced exclusively for an online audience.

Sean Robinson approached his editors in late 2006 with an idea to chronicle a case of stolen identity that afflicted a friend. He was determined to write it in a magazine style, which meant it was too long to publish in print (since the TNT doesn’t have a magazine). So he came to me and asked if we could publish the entire work – some 12,000 words – online. I jumped at the chance, if only to experiment with our audience and discover whether they would read a lengthy, first-person investigative narrative. The web, of course, has a reputation for only attracting readers with short attention spans who want “quick hits.”

With this series, A Case of Identity, we were able to dispel that myth (at least in part). The first chapter of the series will finish the month of February as the most popular story on our site. The total traffic for the series would rank it in the top 20 sections on the site, in the same neighborhood as our coverage of crime, Mariners baseball and Sonics basketball.

We used the print product to drive traffic with high-impact teasers on A1 when the series launched and every day thereafter on the features front. (The series launched on a Monday and a new chapter was made available every day through Friday.) Robinson also produced a condensed version (less than 3,000 words) which ran on Friday in the features section so that readers without web access or interest would get a shot at it, too.

The feedback was enthusiastic, including one disappointed email at 4:17 a.m. when the next chapter wasn’t yet available. Readers appreciated the conversational, blog-style form of the series and asked why more of our news coverage couldn’t be done this way. 

The story has a happy ending, too. After the alleged identity thief was (finally) thrown out of his apartment when his cover is blown, he disappeared under the cloud of potential criminal charges. He ended up working at a Bed, Bath and Beyond about 60 miles north of Tacoma where he stirred up suspicion about his character. So his boss googled his name and found our series online. The police were notified of his whereabouts and, yesterday, he was arrested on suspicion of identity theft.

Posted by MarkBriggs on Wednesday, February 28, 2007
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Which video camera should you buy?

While budgets at news organizations are still tight, many are finding ways to upgrade their technology as the pace of evolution quickens. An executive editor at a small daily in Washington told me recently she has $8,000 to spend on audio and video equipment this month.

A common discussion on email listservs and through direct inquires lately centers on the purchase of video cameras. Here’s what we’re using at The News Tribune.

—The Canon GL-2 ($2,000) is a high-end camera for professional documentary videojournalism. It’s pretty much the industry standard for high-end digital video, but is more than most news organizations need to produce quality web video.

—Sony HD ($1,000) is a high-end camera that our Photo Dept. purchased and hopes to use for video and still shots in print (because it’s HD).

—Canon Optura 60 ($450) is a compact, basic camera for all-purpose use. They don’t make this model anymore, but make some very similar for $250-350. I would recommend these for anyone getting started to shoot everything from high school sports to breaking news to interviews.

—Pure Digital 30 ($90-120) is a point-and-shoot camera that couldn’t be easier to use. It’s perfect for reporters who want to shoot a talking head or someone speaking at a small meeting.

An online director I know who has been using Sony Handycams for a few years plans to replace them with Sony 30GB camcorders (about $500 on Amazon). These cameras store the video on a hard drive and avoid the need for DV tape which could speed the editing process.

If you have other tips and suggestions, post a comment or {encode="mark.briggs@thenewstribune.com" title="drop me a line"}.

Posted by MarkBriggs on Tuesday, February 27, 2007
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The book is ‘done,’ now back to the blog

After almost six months of work, with some key additions and revisions by editors and contributors along the way, I shipped 12 chapters of material to J-Lab this week for publication. While I’d like to say that means this project is “done,” I know better. The pace of change in electronic media is so fast that a new technology or innovation will likely be all the rage by the time the book hits the web and print. (Should be sometime in March or April, I’m told.)

That’s why the lessons will be posted online with open commenting encouraged. So the people continuing to break new ground can share best practices as they evolve. I hope it will become a living, growing resource for new and innovative ways to do journalism.

In the meantime, I’ll try to dedicate some of my time back to this blog. I plan to update it with links and discussions about implementing Journalism 2.0 principles in the daily pursuit of better journalism and try to fill in the gaps of what’s already being said in the news industry blogosphere.

Posted by MarkBriggs on Friday, February 23, 2007
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Food for thought: Thinking about the future

The latest issue of Nieman Reports focuses on the changing media landscape, especially as it relates to news. It’s probably the most comprehensive collection of thinking about the future of news I have seen. I plowed through much of it over the weekend and picked out the following snippets as the best “food for thought.” You can read all the essays online here.

“Over time, how will the Web, our first meta-platform, change our media landscape? I suspect our platform distinctions will not be completely eroded—nor will it lead to a total convergence among them, either—since, after all, the various platforms relate to sights, sounds and language, which are the primary channels that humans use to communicate. But the Web will likely force television, radio and print journalists to get to know each other better. By bringing these formats together, the Web should facilitate complementary storytelling approaches, something that should enrich the journalistic enterprise.”

Jon Palfreman is KEZI Distinguished Professor of Broadcast Journalism at the University of Oregon.

“The old newspaper model is on life support, and we need to recognize and ride the meta-trends playing out in communication. Newspapers are no longer an all-powerful gatekeeper for news and information; anybody with a computer can be a publisher. News has become a multilayered conversation, not a monologue. Power resides in the individual, not a central authority, and newspapers ignore the power of the individual and the network at our peril. “No longer are we purely media companies; we must become technology companies, too, and that means we must raise our technology IQ to compete in a digitally transformed world. A big part of our success will be tied into rethinking what type of people we hire. The premium, moving forward, will rest on attracting more innovators into our midst and finding ways to give them the freedom and the backing they need to experiment and help move us into a new realm in which we can preserve the journalism and make a robust business model work.” Michael Riley is editor of The Roanoke Times.

“I wonder if we could begin by just throwing a few notions onto the table. Not that we’d seek to agree on them. Just put them out there, take care of everyone’s itch to proclaim—and see if this could kind of ease our way into the heart of things. “Let’s say, for instance, that longtime journalists can be confoundingly oblivious to the vast opportunities of the digital world and insufferably sure that their way is the only way. Let’s say new-media hotshots tend to confuse hooting something down with analyzing it and are possessed of a regrettable infatuation with the charm of their insults. Let’s say it’s not our fault that citizens are entertaining themselves silly rather than feeding at the deep pool of substance. And also that the wisdom of the many is far greater than the wisdom of any single journalist or news organization. Let’s say that Wall Street ... well, enough. You get the drill. If we throw out a few of these gotta-get-it-said messages, can we then move on (as we so rarely seem to do) to the challenge: How do we guarantee to our democracy a continued supply of the information essential to it?” Geneva Overholser is Curtis B. Hurley Chair in Public Affairs Reporting at the Washington bureau of the Missouri School of Journalism.

“The problem is that everybody wants progress but nobody wants change,” I told them. “If we want to keep our jobs, we have to develop ourselves and the way we work with journalism. But the consequence of progress is change; we have to do something else than we are used to doing and that brings with it insecurity. We get through it together, if we dare.” I then told them that in 10 months our regional newspaper, now slipping into a deep crisis, would become the most ambitious media house in Europe. “It will be tough,” I reminded them, “but when we’ve made it, we’ll have a future in which it will be fun going to work every morning and a newspaper in which we will make good stories.” Ulrik Haagerup is editor in chief of Nordjyske Media in Aalborg, Denmark.

“During the next few years, the migration of news media to the Internet will start to become a background reality, a given. Paper publishing will still be around, as will over-the-air broadcasting. But both will be on their way to becoming niche artifacts. The technological superiority of online distribution for multimedia presentation and its vast potential for interactivity will make the Internet the principal venue for news and topical commentary.” Edward Wasserman holds the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation chair in journalism ethics at Washington and Lee University in Lexington, Virginia.

“Change starts at the edges. That’s where people—our readers and viewers—probe new practices. That’s also where their emerging culture is forming, a culture in which they look at media from a different perspective. And so journalists’ new thinking needs to begin at the periphery, where change comes quickly among the younger generation of users, and a lot more slowly for us. Tomorrow’s potential readers are using the Web in ways we can hardly imagine, and if we want to remain significant for them, we need to understand how. Yet news organizations have been all too slow to notice movement in places that are away from what has been their center. “The real difficulty is that the broad participation of others through Web 2.0 challenge journalists’ share of the power they once held as conveyors of news and information as much as it does their ethics and sustainability. Their ideas will continue to bring change from the edges that will affect the work of journalists, as blogs did when they first appeared on the media’s margins before being adopted by many mainstream news organizations. But change does not need to happen in this way. Rather than assuming a defensive position to these challenges, journalists ought to join in conversation with those who aren’t trained as we are and find ways to help them understand and acquire the values and skills that make what we do socially useful. ” Francis Pisani, a 1993 Nieman Fellow, is a freelance blogger and columnist.

“This journey toward the new begins with the basics—and this means learning the characteristics of the Web. A journalist might ask why anyone needs to know something so seemingly arcane as the characteristics of a communications medium, but when you don’t know how a game—football, soccer, baseball—works, it’s hard to play it. And if you don’t understand foreign words, you can’t speak the language. Another way to look at it is this: The first film was a recording of a theater production, and film isn’t theater. The first TV production was a radio program, and we know that television isn’t radio. But when the Web came along, newspapers thought it was a place to put text and still photos; radio news thought it was a place to put audio files (and text scripts of audio files), and television news treated it as a place to put videos (and text scripts of video stories). ” Jane Ellen Stevens teaches multimedia reporting at the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California at Berkeley.

Posted by MarkBriggs on Tuesday, February 06, 2007
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