Next semester, I’m leading a group of students in a service-learning class at UNC-Chapel Hill that be using online reporting and publishing techniques to dig in to the story of North Carolina’s rising high school dropout rate. As part of this experiment, we’re working with news outlets in the state on a collaboration that will live both on their individual sites and on a centralized site at UNC. If you’re interested in participating, please take a look at our draft plan of attack here .
Category: Online Newsrooms
Len Downie’s Rules for Good Journalism
The former executive editor of The Washington Post laid them out recently in a speech at Harvard:
1. All journalists should accurately identify themselves.
2. Conflicts of interest should also be disclosed, if not avoided altogether.
3. News and opinion should be clearly differentiated.
4. Photography and video should not be doctored or misleadingly used, unless it is obvious it has been altered only to entertain or express opinion.
5. Journalism should serve the public interest rather than the personal whim of bloggers or special interests of any kind.
Finally, he says, “Too much concentration on the philosophical questions about journalism in the digital world runs the risk of ignoring the most important question before us. Who will pay for the news?”
Those seem pretty straightforward and not too onerous. I have a quibble with his third and fifth points because I’m not sure these can be accomplished in a way that convinces and builds trust with the audience, even when done by the most well-intentioned journalists. Some people know the difference between opinion and fact, and for them labels are meaningless. Other people don’t know the difference between opinion and fact even when it’s labeled, and for them labels are also meaningless. “The public interest” I think is also a bit elusive and is phrase that has been so widely used by policy advocates on all sides that I’m not sure it has much ability to build or sustain credibility. Instead, I’d replace those two points with one — that journalism should be “evidence-based” and respect the scientific method.
Survey of Journalism Want Ads
I can’t wait to read the results of this study by Serena Carpenter at Arizona State University.
I’m particularly interested to see whether there’s a disconnect between the words that hiring managers use in their postings and the words that journalists themselves use to describe online news jobs. Also, job postings are an important “leading indicator” of changing duties and skills in the industry. My survey describes the present state of affairs, and it doesn’t do a good job predicting what the future will be or what hiring managers WANT the future to be.
Newsroom-Classroom Panel at ONA: A Bridge to Nowhere?
As yesterday’s Online News Association conference panel about collaboration between universities and newsrooms drew to a close, it was becoming clear that intellectual transactions were just waiting to be made, that a new marketplace must be created. The room had decided that the news biz did indeed have problems and that the academy just might be stocked with the resources needed to solve them.
The only thing standing in the way of better collaboration had been the difficulty so far in matching the problems with the resources. We would need to create a Match.com of journalism innovation, I said, where newsroom leaders could submit RFPs and where educators could post the research and technical resources of their students.
So with 10 minutes left in the panel, I whipped open a Word document and projected it on the screen at the front of the room. I was ready to start brainstorming right there and begin making a quick list of research questions and innovation projects. Oh, the excitement of a panel discussion that would be more than just talk! The bridges that would be built!
But then we hit just one small snag. Of the hundred or so people in the room, about 90 percent were from the classroom. Somehow, on an otherwise unremarkable Friday afternoon in Washington, the Statler conference room at the Capital Hilton had transformed in to an ivory tower. We had built a bridge to nowhere.
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At Small Paper, Breaking News Boosts Audience
The Pilot in Southern Pines, N.C., is small by circulation but not by ambition. In the September newsletter for the N.C. Press Association, president Rick Thames notes that the paper, which circulates 14,584 copies three times a week, boosted the number of daily unique visitors to its Web site from 5,000 to 5,700 in six weeks. How? By posting more stuff more often.
The lesson, Thames writes: “The more you post, the higher your numbers will climb.”
Yes, and there’s a good reason for that.
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Newsroom Skills: The Bosses Speak Out
(After years of watching CNN with envy, I finally get to use the verbose phrase “speak out” in a headline.) Writing and overall computer skills are the most essential skills for newsroom reporters, according to a survey of 259 top editors at daily newspapers in the United States. The survey, which was posted this morning, … Continue reading “Newsroom Skills: The Bosses Speak Out”
(After years of watching CNN with envy, I finally get to use the verbose phrase “speak out” in a headline.)
Writing and overall computer skills are the most essential skills for newsroom reporters, according to a survey of 259 top editors at daily newspapers in the United States. The survey, which was posted this morning, ranks multimedia skills and data analysis skills at the bottom of the list of five choices that the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism gave editors in the survey that was conducted earlier this year.
The full table …
Reaction: Survey of Online Journalists
The survey of journalists working online at North Carolina newspapers has begun to receive some insightful feedback from others, both on this site and around the Web. It’s a good time to summarize some of the responses here. I’m looking forward to hearing from more people, especially if you have a question that the data I’ve collected might help answer. For me, two big questions remain:
- Can we come up with a somewhat standardized set of job titles and descriptions for online newsrooms circa 2008?
- Is there a way to look at newsrooms skills and organization structures to determine “the best” way to structure an online news operation?
Journalism Programming: Supply and Demand
One of the reasons I’m so struck that online journalists in North Carolina have such an emphasis on traditional skills and duties is that it starkly contrasts with the skills I hear editors at top national sites tell me that they are looking for in recent j-school grads. The Knight Foundation believes that programmers are in such high demand in newsrooms today that they gave Northwestern $638,000 to fund nine full-ride scholarships for programmers who want to get a master’s degree in journalism at Medill.
One of the scholarship recipients, Brian Boyer, writes about his career prospects over at the MediaShift blog.
Listed below are the job titles he thinks are available to him. He’s most interested in becoming a “applications developer” or a “hacker journalist.” Are any of these jobs available in North Carolina?
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Traditional Concepts Most Important to Online Journalists
Once again in my survey of online journalists at North Carolina newspapers, we see a return to tradition. They say that news judgment and the ability to work under time pressure are the concepts that are most important to their jobs, while community management is far and away the least important of the 10 choices I gave them.
Also bringing up the rear of concepts that online journalists said were important to them: the ability to learn new technologies and awareness of new technologies.
And, interesting to note for those of us who teach students that it is more important to get it right than to get it first, the online journalists in my survey said that ability to work under time pressures was more important than attention to detail. As a group, they gave deadlines a higher average importance than details. As individuals, 63 percent of the respondents ranked time pressure more important than accuracy.
Oy vey.
At this point in my analysis, I have to conclude that one of two things is happening here:
- EITHER There is wide disparity between the skills, duties and concepts that I personally think should be emphasized in online newsrooms and in the skills, duties and concepts that are perceived as the most prominent and/or important in actual online newsrooms at North Carolina newspapers.
- OR This survey is totally FUBAR. Perhaps I asked the wrong questions of the wrong people.
To help me sort this out, I’m going to turn to a panel of experts — both in survey methodology and in online newsroom leadership. And, of course, your comments below are always helpful.
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Journalism Education: Training the Trainers
Earlier today I wrote about the duties of online journalists. One of the underlying purposes of my survey is to find out how journalism schools can better prepare students for the near future, and there were two popular duties that stood out as “soft skills” that are not emphasized in classrooms — teaching and training other people in the newsroom, and “project management.”
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