FCCPA convention: Industry Trends

Note: This seminar was given at the Florida Community College Press Association 2007 Convention.  It is reprinted here with links to the original articles.

“We stand at a crossroads of change,” says John W. Allman, two-time Pulitzer prize nominee and investigative reporter at the Tampa Tribune -

A change in how the news is reported – The traditional nightly newscast and morning newspaper are no longer the first choice of viewers and readers. The Internet has opened the door to 24-hour nonstop coverage. More people read news websites than buy newspapers. Many prefer to catch a ticker tape scroll of headlines instead of sitting through an entire newscast. And bloggers now compete with legitimate media outlets, reporting from their couch about events they never witnessed, gathering facts from sources that often cannot be confirmed.

And a fundamental change in what constitutes news itself.

What makes all this possible?  Web 2.0.

There’s no doubt that one of the biggest trends in the news industry is the online revolution.  Consider this Profile of a Newspaper Web site User:

80% of people that go online use online newspapers (NAA Power Users 2006; MORI Research) A significant amount of data is showing that newspaper site users are highly engaged and a quality audience – they spend more time online, are better educated and have higher incomes than online audiences in general. They are also more likely to make purchases online and to use the Web to decide what to buy.

What online users are looking at -

Q.1 Which of these tasks or capabilities have you used on the Internet? Base: 710 Newspaper Site Visitors;
Source: Newspaper National Network LP 2007, NNN Integrated Footprint Study, Conducted by Scarborough Research

Blogs

Newspaper Web sites are creating a community hub through blogging.  According to the Newspaper National Network LP Nielson NetRatings, the number of unique visitors to newspaper blog pages is up 325% and the number of newspaper blog pages is up 210% in 2006 from 2005 for the top 10 online newspapers.

Look at St. Louis Today as a good example.  There are more than 45 blogs listed, in topics ranging from national and prep sports teams to fashion to business.  Most are written by the St. Louis Post Post-Dispatch staff, while others are written by community members.

Audio and Video

Nearly 60% of news site viewers listen to audio and video.  The New York Times has one of the most extensive lists of video stories.  Journalists are just as likely to be in front of the camera as behind the camera.

Short news casts are also becoming popular.  The Roanoke Times produces a daily vodcast that is very entertaining.

Online Packages

The Internet also allows for more indepth, interactive story packages, like the Vanishing Wetlands series from the St. Petersburg Times.

Reinventing the newsroom

To cope with the changing face of journalism, newspapers have also had to reinvent their newsrooms.  News is pushed online as soon as bits of information come in, and added to as more information becomes available.  Two news organizations produced video to show how the new operation works – The Press Gazette in the United Kingdom and the Post-Crescent, a Gannett paper in Wisconsin.

Smaller Newspapers see value in online

Don’t overlook smaller newspapers.  In the article “Big Profits in Small Packages” Washington Post staff writer, Frank Ahrens says:

If there’s any good news about the businesses of newspapering these days, it can be found at the industry’s littlest papers, which are doing well even as their bigger brothers founder.

Why? Small papers face less competition from other media outlets, are insulated from ad slumps that have hammered big papers, employ smaller staffs of lower-salaried journalists and have a zealous devotion to local news, both in print and online, industry experts agree. Also, there is less competition on the Web for local news.

The small-newspaper division of Freedom Communications generated a 30 percent profit in 2006, up 5 percent from 2005. By comparison, a very successful large newspaper typically returns about 20 percent annually.

The Shelby Star, a newspaper with a circulation of 15,000, has blogs, podcasts and video in addition to print stories.  Online viewership has increased more than 80 percent in the last year, according to its publisher.

Why you need to learn new media skills

What are editors looking for in students?  Not clips, according to Paul Conley, media consultant -

Most importantly, a clip ties a student to the part of the industry that is least likely to hire him — print. When a student hands a clip to a publishing executive today he’s likely handing it to someone who has already laid off a slew of print-only reporters. It’s an exercise in absurdity for students to market themselves as talented print journalists to executives who have laid off talented print journalists by the thousands.

Instead, this is what he looks for -

1. Youth itself: …The simple truth is that youth itself has a value in today’s publishing world. We need people who live online and understand what it means…I want to hire people who send text messages on a PDA, have Facebook accounts and MySpace pages and write blogs about local bands. I don’t need experts in these things. I just need people I can talk to when I want to talk about new products and ideas.

2. Self-taught: When I look at the skill set on a student’s resume I’m most interested in things that are not part of the curriculum. I know how quickly things have changed in our industry. And I know how quickly they will continue to change. And time and time again I’ve seen journalists complain about things that they don’t know how to do because no one has taught them. Then I’ve waived good-bye as they were laid off.
So I want new hires who have enough sense to teach themselves what they need to know. Sure, there are skills and software that I prefer to others. But when I’m meeting students I’m thrilled by someone who taught himself Dreamweaver, whereas I’m not so impressed by someone who took a course in PhotoShop.

3. Entrepreneurial: Back when I was leaving school, with my degree in hand and a ton of clips from a great journalism program, I had the good luck to interview with someone who quizzed me incessantly about my life. And he was pleased and surprised to find that a) I had helped publish a fanzine about music in New York, and b) had been paid $15 a week while a student to type up sport scores from my school and walk them over to a local paper.
Neither of those things were on my resume. But they were the reason he hired me.
Now I’m the old guy. And I look for those same indications of ambition and entrepreneurial sense in students.
That’s why I tell students that the only clips I want to see are the ones they were paid for. Nothing tells me that a writer has value like that fact that someone “valued” his writing.

The Future

Remapping the Universe is an interesting look at how we might gather and use information in the future.

 

Orlando retools newsroom

Online News Squared posted a memo from Orlando Sentinel  Editor Charlotte Hall on the downsizing and reorganization of the newsroom.

Here’s the rationale: 

We would restructure our newsroom even if did not have to reduce our staff. Why? Because we need to change the way we think and act so we can succeed in the new world, both in print and online. We need to be quicker, less hierarchical, more entrepreneurial and more flexible. We need to lead change, not resist it.

It’s an interesting read for us as advisers.  More and more newspapers in Florida are going to online reporting.  Are we preparing our students for that, both in terms of the skills needed and the mindset to think of multiple and quick deadlines within a workday?

And it’s also interesting as far as the reorganizational aspect.  At The Corsair, we are still struggling with trying to provide more than shovelware online with minimal staffing.  We’ll be looking at this structure as we redesign our newsroom over the summer.  We’ll post our plan when it’s finalized.

 

Let students experiment

I found an interesting read via Commmon Sense Journalism on Three Job Tips for Students.  Paul Conley talks about why students should be focusing on living online, learning beyond classrooms and thinking as an entrepreneur rather than relying on print clippings for a resume. 

One paragraph really caught my eye -

So I want new hires who have enough sense to teach themselves what they need to know. Sure, there are skills and software that I prefer to others. But when I’m meeting students I’m thrilled by someone who taught himself Dreamweaver, whereas I’m not so impressed by someone who took a course in PhotoShop.

There are only an handful of FCCPA schools that have any online presence and even fewer that are interactive, meaning that students can post at will and in different formats (video, audio, podcasts).  As advisers, we may not know how to do or teach all this “new media” but there’s no reason we can’t let the students experiment.

Two years ago, I grabbed a student from our college multimedia program and together we learned Premiere Pro and editing and compression.  I learned as much, if not more, from him as he did from me.  He became our multimedia director.

 Our first multimedia story was real trial and error but the same photojournalist, two years later, produced his first multimedia story from start to finish with great results because he  had worked with and learned from other journalists who also took the time to experiment with new forms of storytelling.

So, find students who aren’t afraid to try new things, and jump in with both feet.  And learn alongside them.  You don’t have to be an expert yourself to get started. 

 

Owens sets a blueprint for j-schools

Check out this fascinating interview with Bryan Murley of Innovation in College Media and Howard Owens, director of digital publishing at Gatehouse Media, Inc.

Owens sets out a beautiful blueprint for advisers to follow to redesign their journalism programs -

ICM: Just as an overview, what are some of the things you are attempting to do in these papers that might be adaptable to other situations like college media?

Owens: Of course, a fair question might be, what can we learn from college media, especially about appealing to a younger audience, and filling a niche? But I think there are things that might be universal.

Web-first publishing – publish quickly and often, everything you know that might be of interest to your audience, and on print deadline, pick the bet of what you published online, maybe (if needed) flesh it out a bit and print it.Second, think like bloggers, everything published on the web: write in an authentic voice, be real, be honest, be transparent. Related to web first publishing, publish what you know, don’t wait for for the perfect fact or quote to make your story.Third: multimedia, especially video, is critical to engaging an audience. Create video that is highly watchable, fun, authentic, interesting, well thought out to the context of how it’s being used. That applies to both pro and college media, I think. I should add, it doesn’t address the issues around UGC (user-generated content), but they are relative easy for existing media to capture.

Owens also talks about blogging and the need for advisers to learn and embrace new forms of journalism.  Quite an interesting read.

At PJC, we are adding blogs to our site this semester.  College Publisher can create a template for CP sites.  Is anyone else considering adding blogging or publishing the news in blog templates?

 

How are we connecting with readers?

Rob Curley, formerly the director of new-media and convergence at the Naples Daily News and now at the Washington Post, was selected as one of “20 under 40″ winners in the NAA’s Presstime Magazine.  You can read his bio and interview here, but I especially like a couple of comments he made: 

“[Bill Snead] emphasized to me that what our industry really is about is connecting with our audience. Technology is nothing more than developing new ways of connecting with our audience and giving them something that they never knew they needed, but love having.

Bill always said we have to give our readers these little gifts and surprises whenever we can. The key is the connection, not the delivery method or the software. With every project, I now ask myself a million times, “How does this connect to our readers and what are they getting out of this?” Taking newspapers into the digital world isn’t about the coolest software; it’s about the coolest connection we can make with our audience.” (Emphasis added.) 

And some more food for thought from the interview:

Newspaper companies should no longer just be in the business of putting news on paper, Curley says. Instead, they should “document the living history of the community and give it to residents however and wherever they want it.”

As we move into a new semester, I will pose two questions to the staff: 

1. Are we connecting with our readers?
2. Are we documenting the living history of the campus community?

 

How will we respond to change?

Our world of journalism, as we know it, is changing.  Rapidly.

Seemingly overnight, media giant Gannett announced a move to 24/7 Information Centers.  Can you imagine walking into a newsroom that looks like this - Gannett: The Seven Desks 

Even in our own backyards, the role of reporters is changing.  In Fort Myers, reporters have become mojos, or mobile journalists, working on the road, filing several stories a day from laptops in their vehicles.  

At the Pensacola News Journal, reporters are asked to collect audio and video to supplement stories (scroll down to related articles).

How will we, as community colleges, train our future reporters to maintain journalistic integrity and professionalism and still meet not just daily deadlines now, but hourly deadlines as well?  Is it within the realm of our curriculum to teach them how to collect audio and video in a basic reporting class or lab?  Should we?

 What are your thoughts?  Are you experiencing similar change in newsrooms near you?  How are you responding to change?