Teaching Online Journalism

How to become a (dying) dinosaur:

When I entered Disney, it was like a classic Cadillac Phaeton that had been left out in the rain … The company’s thought process was not, “We have all this amazing machinery — how do we use it to make exciting things? We could go to Mars in this rocket ship!” It was, “We don’t understand Walt Disney at all. We don’t understand what he did. Let’s not screw it up. Let’s just preserve this rocket ship; going somewhere new in it might damage it.”

Trying to hang on to your past success is a sure way to commit suicide, because it will kill all real efforts at innovation and creative growth. Creative growth is vital to future economic growth, even though in the short term, an organization might enjoy economic growth by doing the same old, same old. But this cannot continue indefinitely.

How to foster innovation (according to Brad Bird, director of The Incredibles and Ratatouille; the 10 tips are his, and the parts following the colon are mine, unless in quotation marks):

1. Herd Your Black Sheep: Find the people who are whining and tell them to do a project that they want to do.
2. Perfect Is the Enemy of Innovation: “Good enough” can be fine if it gets the job done in an acceptable manner. Don’t let people fiddle around on a project forever.
3. Look for Intensity: If people are angry, loud, or extra talkative, they’ve got passion. Harness that.
4. Innovation Doesn’t Happen in a Vacuum: Get everybody together in a room and make them talk, show stuff, critique stuff, and throw out ideas. (Remember that the key to real brainstorming is “There are no bad ideas.”)
5. High Morale Makes Creativity Cheap: “If you have low morale, for every $1 you spend, you get about 25 cents of value. If you have high morale, for every $1 you spend, you get about $3 of value. Companies should pay much more attention to morale.”
6. Don’t Try to “Protect Your Success”: Playing it safe doesn’t lead to innovation. Taking risks does. To allow people to take risks, they must be allowed to fail. Failure has to be an acceptable outcome.
7. Steve Jobs Says “Interaction = Innovation”: People have to meet and talk to one another face to face. They have to say, “What are you working on?” — and then listen. They cannot huddle in their cubicles alone and produce good innovative work.
8. Encourage Inter-disciplinary Learning: The photojournalist can write a blog. The reporter can take a class in art photography. Everyone who does audio should teach it to one new person every single week. Everyone should learn a new skill about once a month, and it should be something out of their comfort zone. It’s okay if they do not then USE it in their daily work — it’s learning how it’s done that fosters new ways of thinking in various areas.
9. Get Rid of Weak Links: “Passive-aggressive people — people who don’t show their colors in the group but then get behind the scenes and peck away — are poisonous.” Fire them.
10. Making $$ Can’t Be Your Focus: Even though it seems counterintuitive, you are going to fail if your goal is to make big profits. If instead your goal is to make great journalism that serves your community, then your product will be good again, and people will want it again. (Note: Self-serving columns and op-eds, easy stories, and superficial reports are not great journalism. Neither are 10,000-word boring investigative pieces that don’t show clearly why the issue matters and what can be done about it, even if they do win fancy prizes.)

Original post at GigaOm highlighted by Journerdism.

If you were a fly on the wall inside any North American j-school, I think you would conclude that some faculty members are very forward-looking, some others have chained themselves to the barricades of old, outdated techniques, and a lot more are caught in the middle. There’s a lesson in this for newsrooms.

Vin Crosbie observed this during a one-year teaching assignment at a large private j-school in the northeastern U.S. About the school’s faculty, he wrote:

Perhaps a quarter of them are ardently trying to update media curricula to the 21st century.

But another quarter of the faculty is just as ardently trying to prevent any change. They’re obstructionists because they either deny things are changing (for example, one still thinks the Internet is a fad that will disappear) or they’ve grown too comfortable teaching the same curricula year after year for 20 or more years. They are tenured and so can’t be fired, and the doctrine of academic freedom allows them to teach whatever they see fit.

Meanwhile, the remaining half of the faculty would like to change and be up to date, but they resist taking steps to change, mainly because they don’t have the new skills and fear losing face before students or peers. Add those obstructionists to their number, and even basic changes can be voted down.

I was reminded of some newsrooms I have visited in the past year. I see a few people in almost every newsroom (usually less than one-quarter of the staff) embracing the new ways of communication and trying to spread their journalism and enhance their organization’s outputs via new channels and techniques. I see a lot more people who are worried, even frightened, that there will be no place for them in this new world.

The latter group interests me a lot more than the small number of chained-to-the-barricades dinosaurs (who also exist in every newsroom) — because they are very different from the dinosaurs. They are not resistant because they think the Internet is a short-lived fad, or because they fail to see its potential, or because they are in love with the smell of ink on paper. Rather, they are resistant because they don’t know how to train themselves — they are waiting for someone to hand them a tool and show them how to use it.

One approach to this is to say, well, those dummies should just get up off their lazy rear-ends and learn some new stuff.

But the one-quarter (or fewer) who have already embraced the new ways are the ones who can do that — who have the capacity, the personality, the self-confidence, to do it. The half in the middle (again, ignoring the dinosaurs; someday they will die) are not going to change just because someone says it’s good for them, or even necessary.

In newsrooms, the gang at the top often mouths words about the Web site and online to the effect that “We know that is where the future lies,” etc., etc. Often the Internet director or Online M.E. or V.P. for Online is this person — moving his or her lips along with the music. But not really doing anything about it. Not really making it happen. Not paving a road that will lead there.

I think the majority of online news managers I have met fit this description.

There are a lot of print holdouts in top Web positions at news organizations around the country. I’d want at least a few Web natives at the top of my organization. I’ve seen newspapers try and purpose a lot of features and changes that make little sense, because I think the people at the top don’t really understand the Web and what users want. (Pat Thornton, May 5)

Vin was talking about j-schools in his post, and I think we see this same situation in many j-schools too. The dean, director or department chair says a lot about convergence and updating the curriculum, but then sits back and waits for the faculty to somehow magically transform themselves from worried, frightened people (or just plain overworked people with no spare time) into the innovators and early adopters who have already made the change. These are different types of people. The worried ones are not going to change into the other type.

However, the worried ones are not the same as those crouching behind the barricades with a barber’s basin on their head. The worried ones can and will learn, but they can’t do it without help. That’s the difference between them and the early adopters.

This is a key point, and I think it’s very often overlooked.

Mark Glaser interviewed some experts and came up with this list (see the full post for important details):

1. Get inbound links and link out as well.
2. Headlines and title tags should have key words up front.
3. Web addresses for your blog posts or articles should include key words.
4. Page descriptions should be unique or eliminated.
5. Highlight your best content on every page.
6. Create theme or category pages, and run more special series.
7. Limit tags and categories to the most important ones.
8. Create a Google News [sic] site map and optimize images.
9. Get into offline conversations as well as online ones.

I think No. 2 deserves a bit of highlighting — far too many so-called Web designers either do not know what the HTML title is, or they do not realize how much it matters. Moreover, an HTML title is completely different from any HTML heading, and — just one more thing — headings are often improperly handled (e.g., the tags H1 and H2 are misused).

This is not a matter of pickiness, along the lines of choosing to use a serial comma or not — these practices do have an effect on where your stories, pages and posts rank in Google and other search engines.

If you are reading this blog post on my blog’s home page, the title (look at the bar at the very tippy top of your Web browser window) is: “Teaching Online Journalism.” If, on the other hand, you opened the individual post, that title is: “Teaching Online Journalism » Better SEO for news sites, blogs.” And I’ll tell you a secret (well, not really very secret): The SEO would be better if the title were: “Better SEO for news sites, blogs » Teaching Online Journalism” (as my friend Craig once goaded me; I replied, “Yeah, yeah, when I have time, I’ll fix it”).

You might think your Web people know all this. You might be surprised.

For more tips, see SEO Copywriting 2.0 at the excellent blog Copyblogger — five easy lessons are provided there. (And check out the title bar there — not lazy, like mine!)

Awesome post from Melissa Worden:

Looking from the outside in

She explains how she consumes and follows news now that she is no longer a working journalist. She is still a news junkie, obviously — but one who never reads a printed newspaper. And she’s clearly online-savvy.

• I subscribe to news Twitter accounts. CNN posts breaking news tweets, and I love that it doesn’t overload me with updates. When I get a tweet from them, I pay attention. I enjoy USATODAY.com’s “On Deadline” tweets. They give me a great overview of what’s going on nationally during the day. More newspaper Twitter accounts are out there, but none for my local or city area.
• I get news stories from friends on Twitter. It’s like standing around a virtual water cooler. Sometimes tweets are chit-chat. Sometimes they’re gossip. And sometimes they’re news links.
• I depend more on links shared by friends via Facebook.
• I depend on my del.icio.us network even more to keep up with blogs and news sites.

… Social networking is more than creating a community on your own site (which is definitely an important step). It’s creating a community around your news that’s off your site, too …

As someone who works with 19- and 20-year-olds almost daily, I thought about them a lot while I read Melissa’s post.

Final grades are due this week, commencement will be held this coming weekend, and I’m about to go to Southeast Asia for two months.

Posts to this blog, therefore, are likely to be few and far between until late in June.

While I’m abroad, I’ll be keeping a trip blog here:  Trip Log: SE Asia.

Feel free to browse the categories here, e.g. audio, video, multimedia.

Selamat tinggal, y’all! (That’s “goodbye” in Malay. You can wish me selamat jalan, or “safe travel.”)

Khoi Vinh, design director of NYTimes.com, was answering readers’ questions online for the past five days.

What he looks for when hiring a new employee:

[A]n ideal applicant would have very strong traditional graphic design skills; in-depth training in usability and interaction design; practical experience coding XHTML, CSS, JavaScript and Flash; a commercially viable comfort level with database and application programming; and last but not least sound news judgment based on a deep understanding of current affairs.

Mind you, almost nobody possesses this exact combination of skills. If there’s a school or curriculum somewhere that’s turning out these kinds of candidates regularly, I’d be very interested to know.

On serving many masters:

… we have to achieve a delicate balance between the concerns of our newsroom, our business, our technological infrastructure, our brand and, most important, the people who use the site. Just about anything that appears on any given page is tied to some intricate combination of editorial judgment, revenue, technical restriction and user behavior. …

There’s no magic formula for this, unfortunately. In some cases we do find it better to design a feature so that people are required to click through it. In other instances, we find scrolling or simply presenting all of the available options up front is the better course. And at times there are design solutions that everyone feels are the simplest and best, but that can’t be implemented due to some pragmatic constraint imposed by any of the many interdependent factors driving the site.

On working with editors and reporters:

[B]logs are a great example of how we work together. Each blog we create begins as a conversation between editors and designers. Because they’re so highly focused on specific subject areas, we really try hard to create the right design solution for those particular editorial needs.

… Over the past two-plus years, as The Times newsroom has embraced blogging with tremendous alacrity, we’ve created over 150 blogs, and over a third of those remain active today.

More at the source.

I don’t know what inspired the clever folks at the Las Vegas Sun to concoct this, but it is great fun for a frequent flyer such as I:

Flight Delay Calculator

See what bad records some airports have for delayed flights — all over the United States. Look up your most hated airline (tough choice!) or how long it takes to go through security. All data are pegged to McCarran International Airport, in Las Vegas, but it’s enjoyable to compare the standings even if you never fly to or from McCarran.