Cautious optimism on Henry’s Globe

John Henry’s recent speech to the Boston Chamber of Commerce has been eagerly dissected by media-watchers here in Boston who want to know what kind of changes Henry will make at the paper that sets the tone for the New England press corps. (Watch the entire speech here, or check this blog post out for some highlights/analysis.) Although he didn’t delve into too many specifics, Henry definitely seems invested, saying he wants the paper to be “aggressively relevant” and that he’ll push a culture of innovation. Reasons to be cautiously optimistic.

To me, one of the most interesting things that Henry’s done came a few days before this speech, when he brought on Former Hill Holiday CEO Mike Sheehan as an advisor.

What I like about the Sheehan hiring is that it doesn’t feel to me like Henry bringing in “his guy,” or just an out-of-town industry insider. I get the sense he looked around, said “I need to be innovative about the way I sell ads,” and simply found the smartest ad guy in town – not the smartest newspaper ad guy. I like it when business leaders do this, and I think it could bode well for the Globe. They already have some really smart newspaper people on Morrissey Boulevard. What might help them transform the paper for the digital age is to bring in some smart folks from other fields.

There was one thing, however, Henry said that gave me pause – he waxed nostalgic about the morning ritual of reading the print edition of the paper. Bezos actually said a similar thing when he bought the Washington Post, and I think it illustrates a quirk of the whole “can rich tech guys save newspapers?” phenomenon. As much as journalism watchers have hope that this trend will help save the industry, I think part of the attraction for these tech guys is the nostalgia of newspapers. While they’re innovative and willing to eschew conventions in the business that made them fortunes, their love of newspapers is rooted in the past. I’d have felt better if Bezos’ first words to the Post staff were: “You know what? I think newspapers are boring and I hate everything about them. We’re going to blow up every aspect of what you guys do and build a new product from the ground up.”

Look, there certainly may be many Globe readers who share Henry’s love of the tradition of a morning paper and a cup of coffee. However, those people won’t be around forever. That shouldn’t be the demographic Henry and his team are focused on. I remember, at one of my first times attending the New England Press Association annual conference, a presentation on a Japanese paper that did an extensive study on the habits of its readers. They found out who was engaging with what product, and when (print in the morning, mobile on the commute, desktop site during the day, and mobile again on the way home, TV/video in the evening, etc.) Then they designed content around it. These are the habits Henry should be focused on. For example, I’d love to see the Globe get away from publishing content and then adapting it for mobile, and start thinking about creating content exclusively aimed at mobile readers, people who may not even read the print edition. That’s the kind of outside-the-lines thinking it’s going to take to really reinvent the Globe. Otherwise, the best Henry can hope for is to slow the bleeding — and that’s not good for those of us who care about journalism in the Hub.

The Kellers, cancer and the columnist

The Keller family is getting slammed across the Web today, and I think rightly so. Both columns come across as insensitive at best and they expose the authors’ complete failure to grasp social media. Like a curmudgeonly weekly newspaper editor in 2002, they lament the “TMI” nature of social networking while completely overlooking the good it can do, both its potential for personal catharsis and its ability to bring people with common experiences together across vast distances. I think to misread what Lisa Adams is doing as “voyeurism” is to phenomenally misunderstand the way people can relate, and often powerfully so, to someone they’ve never met. (And insert joke here about repealing the law that forced Emma Keller to read the tweets.)

But I don’t mean to pile on what’s already been said. What I found interesting about the pieces and the subsequent reaction is what they tell us about a bigger problem with the newspaper columnist in general.

Part of me has always thought that the newspaper columnist is vastly overvalued in the newsroom. (I also enjoy a good snarky takedown of a pretentious columnist.) I cringe at the idea that some columnist is making six figures to write 650 words twice a week while someone doing the real work of journalism, churning out multiple stories a day, covering breaking news, or doing investigative work, is paid peanuts. It seems to me a hold over from a different era of journalism, when news moved more slowly and newsprint carried with it an air of authority, an aura that’s mostly gone now.

Newspapers are an industry more in need of innovation and fresh perspective than any other profession on earth. Yet there’s a sense that young people can’t be powerful voices in the newsroom unless they “pay their dues,” and a newspaper column often seems like a reward handed out to veteran journalists that want to step down from the day-to-day but need an outlet. I can’t think of any regular print newspaper columnist at a major print daily under 30 (and if you know different, please let me know.) I don’t have any insight into the workings of the New York Times newsroom, but it seem like Bill Keller stepped down from his editorship and was handed a column simply because he’s Bill Keller and he wanted one. That doesn’t seem right to me.

I think the editorial and op/ed pages of most newspapers lack a diversity of perspective. I get the sense that a lot of columnists, or individual writers who are a brand unto themselves, come from similar backgrounds — often privately educated, from wealth. This is a trait that seems to cross political lines, so we get a false sense of “both sides of the story,” when what would really add value is a diversity of ages, geographical locations, family backgrounds, work experience, etc.

Also, there’s nothing worse than reading a bullet point, thrown-together filler column that’s clearly only been filed because it dang it, it’s Thursday and the column’s due — or a spectacularly lazy piece that clearly wasn’t researched seems like an extended Facebook troll.

However, having said all that, I think a good newspaper column can have tremendous value. A well-written column in a major paper can spark a national discussion. And there are columnists I like very much — Yvonne Abraham in the Boston Globe springs to mind, and I enjoy Paul McMorrow’s work in the Globe and Commonwealth Magazine. I was also struck by Evan William’s challenge, as he launched his new social network Medium, to “read less news, more ideas.” That seems like a noble goal in our age of a 24-hour, constant fire hose of information, the nonstop news stream. It certainly made this news junkie stop and think.

Where columns go bad, I think, is when they are too generalized, when the writer believes that simply being a columnist gives him or her an air of authority. There’s a sense of “drive by punditry,” a lack of deep familiarity with the subject matter, in the Kellers’ pieces that I’ve seen in other bad columns. When a column works is when it’s specific, like McMorrow’s pieces on urban planning, a subject in which he is well versed. It can also work when it’s local, and the writer has deep connections and an obvious bond with the community he or she is writing about, as Abraham does.

When a columnist is stretching for an idea, it shows. When a writer is out of touch, it shows. So why do mediocre columns get printed? Why does is seem so hard for newspaper columnists to lose their jobs?

Let’s give some columns to younger people. Let’s give some columns to school teachers, bus drivers, social workers and small business owners. Let’s fire the newspaper columnists and invite more local experts to write guests columns, sharing their unique perspectives and experiences. Let’s find a better way to spark important, needed conversations than sitting at the bottom of a hill and listening to Bill Keller tell us “TMI”.

How to fix weather coverage

I, along with most of the civilized world this week, have been doing a lot of eye rolling as media outlets went full bore on the “arctic vortex” this week, either acting like it’s never been cold in January before or throwing boiling water into freezing air and acting shocked when — get this — it froze. (Well, either that or they burned the hell out of themselves.)

But I couldn’t help thinking: Whenever there’s a big storm, or dangerously cold temperatures roll in, we do want to know what’s going on. We want information. Yet it seems like the news coverage gets endlessly mocked. There’s an obvious disconnect here, but also a clear need. So what can media outlets do better?

First, I think papers have to abandon the way they think about weather coverage, in terms of taking wire copy or other basic information and adding color to it, in the form of local quotes and descriptive paragraphs. That approach might work for something like a car crash, or other kind of story that updates in drips and drabs, where a paper can post a more basic story the night before and print a more fleshed-out story in the morning’s paper. But weather is a funny thing, it’s all about in-the-moment information, and from a reader’s perspective there’s little to no value in a next day story, color be damned.

We print folks often mock TV people and the many tropes they employ during extreme weather coverage, including but not limited to: standing on the beach as waves crash over, picking up snow and describing it (as if we couldn’t see for ourselves), sticking a ruler in the snow, or … this. I think there’s things TV stations can do better, but at least that kind of coverage answers the basic question news consumers are asking — what is happening right now?

So how does a weekly or daily paper do that? A few thoughts:

• It has to be live. When editors know a storm is approaching, they should set up some kind of live blog, or application like ScribbleLive, and make sure a reporter and/or editor is in charge or pulling in content throughout the storm. I think people tend to gravitate to TV and radio for weather coverage and there’s an opportunity here for newspapers to elbow their way into that space. But the information people are looking for has to be easily accessible, through a website or social media channels. It also has to be rolling, constantly updated information to draw in eyeballs.
• Leverage partnerships. Any kind of media partnerships can come in handy for storm/weather coverage. Gatehouse Media, where I used to work, had an agreement with Channel 5 in Boston, the Globe has one with CBS/WBZ. If said partner has a meteorological staff, well, that’s one less thing you have to do. Pull those updates into your live coverage so your readers have the latest information on current temperatures and future forecasts.Papers should also leverage their connections with municipal, state and county authorities. Pulling in tweets/posts, press releases and other official alerts from such sources into rolling live coverage will give it depth and authority. This isn’t the time to cling to exclusivity. The goal is to be a comprehensive source for what’s going on, not to be the first outlet reporting every bit of information. If you’re doing it right, even if you link to other news outlets, readers will return to your site because they know it’s got the most comprehensive information they need.
• Forget color, think news-you-can-use. When it’s snowing, roads are flooding, the wind is knocking down power lines or the temperature plunges to dangerous levels, readers don’t care about a few color quotes from that one guy who always plows out all his neighbors’ driveways. They need hard information, thinks like where there are road closures, power outages (and if so, when restoration is expected), when the storm is going to stop, etc. Numbers for emergency services, plowing companies, the location of municipal buildings serving as warming/cooling centers could be on a newspaper site as “sticky” content or worked into the live coverage, along with things like helpful tips from officials or local experts. Again, a lot of this can be done by linking/aggregating. The paper should be a hub for all this information, it doesn’t have to create all of it. A lot of this can be done by a single editor or reporter.
• Crowdsource, but be smart about it. A staple of storm coverage is often the “Send us your pictures!” slideshow. I don’t have a lot of use for this kind of content, and I think savvy news consumers read it as lazy journalism rather than good engagement. However, that’s when said slideshows are put up after the storm has passed. Even a grainy cell phone pic can have news value if it illustrates to readers what’s happening right now. Incorporating reader pics and videos into said live coverage can really help to make your site’s reach seem more comprehensive. Readers may also be able to report things like power outages, road closures and downed power lines before officials sources (although, reporters and editors shouldn’t lose their normal skeptical eyes just because there’s a storm). I also think crowdsourcing can be used for some outside-the-box kind of content. For example, wouldn’t it be great if a newspaper printed, the day after a snow storm, a list of elderly or shut-in residents that need help shoveling out? Editors could ask readers for submissions or work with senior centers and other municipal officials. Or what about a list of items in demand at a local homeless shelter, or animal shelter, after a bad storm?
• For next day coverage, think visual — and short. So what do you put in the next day’s paper? You can’t ignore the storm entirely, right? Well, yes and no. Weather news is a strange animal because it not only seems old in the next day’s paper, it loses it news value almost entirely. So I don’t think editors need to go crazy, even after a major, major storm. I think a lot of newspaper editors have their staff write long storm stories because they think they have to. Don’t be afraid to make storm coverage almost entirely visual. People will read a photo spread or a slide show recapping a storm if the photos are professionally shot and compelling — the day after is not the time for the collection of out-of-focus, low-rez shots from YOU OUR READERS. Photos can be supplemented by short stories that bring something new to the story, things like a local business and how it was impacted by the storm, a story on an accident or major damage caused by the weather, a profile of a long-time plow driver or a fisherman who was trapped at sea during a hurricane. What I don’t find interesting are the next day stories that are very generalized information with a few splashes of color at the beginning and end of the story. I just don’t think that cuts it anymore.

That’s just a couple of my thoughts, but I’d love to start a bigger discussion. How can print outlets be more relevant during extreme weather coverage, and how can media outlets in general be more helpful to readers/viewers?

Return of the blogger

I’m back! I took sort of an unofficial hiatus from the blog over the past couple of months (well, let’s face it, most of the year) for two reasons: I got a new job and my wife and I had our second child, which doesn’t leave a heck of a lot of spare time for blogging.

The thing about the new job is that it isn’t in journalism. I work for a PR firm now called Weber Shandwick, doing corporate communications. At first, I thought I might have to either abandon the blog entirely or completely reinvent it, now that I’m not in the journalism field anymore. But I’ve thought a lot about it, and now I think that’s a silly attitude. First of all, I love media and media criticism. Haven’t stopped reading the major industry blogs or tweeting on major media stories just because I’m no longer official a reporter. If anything, I should be a little freer now to be more of a media critic (although with the obvious caveat that if a story comes up involving a client, I’ll either loudly disclaim it or, far more likely, won’t write about it. With the specific kind of work I do now, I’m not anticipating it to be a huge deal).

The subject matter covered here might expand slightly to cover my thoughts on PR, being a dad, or life in general, but that was always kind of where I wanted to go with the blog eventually anyway. Working on my first true post, which should be up shortly. As always, I appreciate any feedback, and thanks for reading.

What newspapers need to be doing now, part 1

I was looking at my posts about the future of newspapers and realized I’m using a lot of “starting from scratch” and “in a perfect” world-type scenarios. I’m going to continue those posts because I think talking about reinventing newspapers from the ground up is interesting, but I also have some ideas on steps that organization could could take immediately, things that wouldn’t require a massive upheaval to implement. Here’s the first four of seven steps newspapers could take immediately to start changing the culture:

1) Get younger in management: The challenges facing newspapers are deep, complex and have no easy answers. But they’re certainly exacerbated by entrenchment among people at the top of the food chain, especially in bigger companies. I’m afraid there are too many people out there in high positions at media companies that are perfectly willing to use the word “digital” a hundred times in an interoffice memo but unwilling to take the smallest of steps to bring new technology into the newsroom, or to let go of elements of news-gathering that simply don’t work in 2012. The industry needs to take big risks, they need creative ideas and courage. Now, I’m not saying there can’t be people who have spent a long time in the industry bringing those things to a newsroom. But I also think there are hungry journalists in their late 20s and 30s who believe in great writing, strong accountability reporting and good sourcing practices – but who are also comfortable with social media, video and mobile technology. Those are the people who can bring newspapers kicking and screaming into the future and they should be in more leadership positions. Otherwise, those folks are all going to start Web-based journalism products and print media will be fall too far behind the curve to ever catch up.

2) Get a younger audience. One of my frustrations about the local journalism industry is that we seem to have zero interest in reaching out to younger readers. One of the biggest misconceptions in journalism is the idea that young people don’t follow the news. If anything, younger people are more insatiable, voracious consumers of news than the generations before them – they just don’t always get it through print newspapers. So we should just give up? What happens when our current, older audience, and there’s no nice way to say this, dies off? Do we just close the doors and go home? If we reach out to younger people and cover the issues they care about, and deliver the news to them in a way they’ll use (hint: MOBILE) we can capture this audience, which will not only ensure newspapers readers for the future, it will also make selling ads easier because we’ll have readers in a more desirable demographic.

3) Design around design. There’s one constant thread to most newspaper websites I read – the philosophy behind their design seems to be to punish readers for visiting. Seriously, readability seems to be the absolute last priority, and most of them are a jumbled mess of popups and interstitial ads, it’s never easy to find what you’re looking for, and multimedia is often clumsily thrown in rather than flowed into the story naturally. Designing clean, easy-to-navigate websites that read well on mobile devices can massively improve an organizations digital footprint. Think about the readers: find out what they’re looking for, and make those sections prominent. I also think creating easily-explorable sections, like a document archive or a Youtube channel that shows all the videos shot by staff can encourage people to spend more time on site. But the most important thing should be readability, first and foremost.

4) Engage readers. The great sin of anonymous Web comments, in my mind, isn’t the vitriol, it’s that it’s the laziest way possible to engage. I’ve always felt the problem with comments was never anonymity, it was moderation, letting the conversation go off-topic. Moderation has either been absent, heavy-handed or inconsistent. I know orgs have seen the idea of having to approve every comment as a nightmare, but I think there are other options. Limiting the stories where commenting is allowed, for one (I’ve always felt that allowing comments on all crime stories was inviting disaster) is a way to allow comments to be more closely monitored without wasting a ton of staff time. But really, the key is to lead discussion, rather than just opening stories up for drive-by-commenting. Have directed chats, involving staff writers, experts or story subjects. But that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Newspapers should run joint projects with schools. For example, I know a lot of local “kids vote” type efforts have disappeared. That’s a great way to connect with younger readers, give them a civics lesson and train them to become the voters – and newspaper readers – of the future. Host panel discussions, partner with radio and TV. Frankly, I shouldn’t have made this point three – I think directly connecting to readers, in a better way that we do now, is the key to the future of journalism.

3 takeaways from Gawker’s “Manti’s T’eo’s girlfriend was fake” story

Tremendous journalism went into this piece: Deadspin once wrote on its Web site something to the effect of “we may accidentally commit acts of journalism.” Well, this was no accident. Timothy Burke and Jack Dickey, along with the other reporters who contributed to this story, did tremendous work here. It’s clear a ton of legwork went into digging up the girl whose picture was used as T’eo’s girlfriend, and in talking to the family and friends of alleged hoaxer Ronaiah Tuiasosopo. The story is over 3,000 words long and well presented.

There are still a lot of people at more mainstream outlets that dismiss places like Deadspin as serious journalists (ESPN VP John Walsh once told a group of students that “Deadspin has never broken any news.”) There are still plenty of silly stories on Deadspin and articles based entirely on single Tweets, but the journalism world at large should be on alert that the Gawker family of Web sites and their ilk are capable of well-written, well-sourced longform journalism. And as Gawker staffer Emma Carmichael noted, one of these journalists, who just embarrassed basically everyone in the mainstream sports media, is about to start his final semester as an undergrad.

A tremendous lack of cynicism has been exposed: Sports journalists get knocked about for sometimes being fans first, too concerned about access to ask tough questions. This story does a lot to reinforce that notion. Some people have even taken to compiling lists of all the outlets that reported the story without even doing the most basic fact checking, including Sports Illustrated, ESPN and CBS (the video clips in the Deadspin piece are cringe-inducing considering what we know now.) It’s sometimes said that the one true bias of journalists is for the Story, and reporters will sometimes have a blind spot for facts that don’t fit the narrative or that might call a compelling angle into question.

Sports stories especially can be dry, and if there’s anyway to fit a narrative – like say, an athlete rising above personal heartache to win a football game – into a game story, writers will jump all over it. My guess is that’s what happened here. College sports journalism especially feels like it lacks a lot of the built-in cynicism a good journalist should always have, ignoring the negative aspects of the beat like rampant rule-breaking and egomaniacal coaches. Have to wonder how much that played into a reluctance to dig deeper into a college kid who maintained a long-distance relationship with a girl he claims to have never met in person.

I’m not one of those people who thinks Gawker-type journalism is the answer to all things, or that more mainstream outlets have become irrelevant. I actually think there’s room for both, there’s sports reporting that Deadspin will never do, sports reporting that is necessary and that people want. But they will catch stories like these that fall through the cracks, and news consumers are better for it.

The story shows the power social media: I’m only guessing here, but it seems like the Deadspin reporters didn’t travel for the story, doing most of the work through the phones, social media and Google/Lexis-Nexis searches. Part of the story here, the part that should have more established outlets doing some earnest soul searching, is that a simple Google search would have raised red flags. (There supposedly was no obituary, nor any news stories about the car crash.) It looks like Burke and Dickey tracked down a lot of their sources through Facebook and Twitter, and they used the related image function on Google to track down the woman whose picture was used to fake Lennay Kekua’s social media profiles. I got a memo from an executive at my company a few days ago talking about how we need to start paying attention to this Twitter thing, and that he personally was going to try to tweet twice a day. Time for people to stop looking at social media as a cute trend we should probably be getting on board with, and look at it as a powerful reporting tool.

(Sorry for the big gap between this and my last post, hoping to start posting more regularly.)

Bias part 2: Slaves to the Story

Since I recently posted a rant about the idea of media bias, I thought it only fair to talk about this Gawker piece.

(Since I posted that blog, David Carr at the New York Times has a column much more eloquent than my thoughts on the subject. The Gawker story is, in large part, a response to that.)

I knew I was going to like this story from the first line:

First off—there is no such thing as “the media.”

THANK YOU. That’s a terrible catch-all term, and it’s used too often to evoke a vaguely-defined boogey-man (straw man is more accurate, I guess) against which one can rail. When someone complains about “the media,” that person’s audience nods sympathetically and imagines that the term encompasses the newspapers, TV talking heads and bloggers they dislike while excluding the ones they agree with.

But I digress.

In the story, John Cook argues that the media’s bias against Mitt Romney is not political, but narrative. Pretty much nails it in this graph:

Many of the reporters, producers, and editors managing coverage of the political campaign may be culturally or politically liberal, but their first allegiance isn’t to the Revolution. It’s to the Story. And the Story So Far of this campaign is that Romney is a hapless, robotic, buffoon who insists on repeatedly detonating his campaign in an escalating series of Inspector Clouseau disasters.

When I get into arguments with friends and family members about supposed media bias, I’m usually defending my fellow scribes. But if those on the other side of the argument are savvy enough to bring up the idea of “the narrative,” that’s when my defenses fall.

As a print reporter, I show up to a lot of events where there are also TV reporters. I’ve never been to a scene with one TV camera crew and reporter. If one shows up, they all do. And when they get there, they move in a herd. They crowd around the same people to get the same quotes. When they set up to do live shots, they line up next to each other, so the view on the TV screen seems the same no matter what channel you’re watching. It’s as if they’re terrified to have a story that differs in any way from their peers.

I pick on TV people, but to some extent all journalists are susceptible to this. We tend to hook on to narratives, when stories take on that “extra element” that feeds in to a bigger discussion.

When I was a new reporter, I worked on a story in East Bridgewater where a young boy was killed crossing the street to pick up his family’s mail. Initially, there were reports that he was wearing “Heelies,” sneakers that have a wheel in the heel that allows the wearer to glide around. That made the story go viral, getting picked up nationally. When it was just a tragic accident, people weren’t interested. When it could be plugged into a bigger story, “Are Heelies safe?” that’s when people got interested. (The Heelies thing turned out to be false, by the way, and the national coverage faded away almost instantly.)

To some extent, that’s what Cook is saying is happening with the Romney coverage. It’s not enough to simply report events. Political reporters are plugging individual incidents into the “Romney is gaffe prone” narrative, incidents that on their own might not be newsworthy.

I think Cook pulls of the contrarian thing well here, but I have mixed feelings. I don’t think he’s wrong that media members can form a herd mentality and fall into the trap of subconsciously seeking stories that fit into a bigger picture. I think journalists are much more likely to fall prey to this kind of “bias,” to the Story over the story, than they are to let personal politics seep into their work. (For the record, Cook says in the piece he’s not a Romney fan.) But I think there are times when it’s OK to frame a story in a larger context – it’s not always a bad thing to look for a narrative arc when you’re on a beat or chasing a larger story.

Cook compares what the press is doing to Romney to what they did to Kerry and Gore, noting that like in those instances, many of the anecdotes about Romney’s wooden-ness and inability to seem normal have an element of truth. But then he says this:

But too many of the producers and reporters who covered those campaigns ultimately made no serious attempt to slice through easily established narrative to focus on the issues at stake.

I find that statement really hard to disagree with.

What does the newspaper of the future look like?

Like all brilliant ideas, it came to life in a bar.

It was after some event, I think a local selectmen’s debate, that my paper the Whitman and Hanson Express had hosted. My boss, Duxbury Clipper Publisher Josh Cutler, and I went across the street to grab a post-debate beer and started talked about the future of newspapers. Our papers were weeklies, but we started talking about what we’d do if we owned the local regional daily papers.

Most of the good ideas in that conversation came from Josh, but I’ve always wanted to elaborate on that beer-fueled brainstorming session and really outline in detailed form what I think the newspaper of the future would look like.

Couple things to set the stage here. I think there will always be niche publications, organizations that focus on finance, or international affairs, or politics, and who have a dedicated audience that will follow them from print to online. They don’t need to be substantially reinvented, just moved. I’m putting the national papers, your Washington Posts and New York Timeseses into this category as well – there’s an audience and a need there, the news they deliver will survive even if the ink-and-pulp disappears in a few years. I think they need to reinvent their delivery system, not necessarily their content.

But the type of papers that need most to adapt or face extinction are the regional and metro dailies, that’s the business model that simply doesn’t work any more. And I think the metro daily, something like the Boston Globe, will have to turn itself into a basically a big regional daily to survive. So my example is going to be a regional daily.

So, our fictional newspaper of the future is a regional daily whose parent company also owns (or owned, a the case may be) a chain of weeklies.

What’s also important is why this matters, why it’s important that this country has thriving regional dailies. This may seem simple, but there needs to be entry-level journalism jobs. While I think those national papers and niche products I described a few paragraphs ago will survive, with very few exceptions people aren’t going there straight out of college. So if those jobs are there, more college students will be interested in journalism, and there will be a trickle-down effect.

Also, local news matters. And I think the whole hyper-local Web crazy is fizzling. Mid-level newspapers are the only coverage some communities have, and an informed and active citizenry is essential to the health of said communities.

So what does the newspaper of the future look like?

The first and biggest change would be to take the current relationship between dailies and weeklies and turn it essentially upside-down. Right now, at regional papers, the daily paper’s content filters down to the weeklies. The Internet killed that model a long time ago. Repackaged, days old content is not interesting to readers in this age where being minutes behind the curve can make a story old news.

It can also create a situation where a regional daily covers an area where the company also owns weeklies, but the daily paper swoops in for bigger stories and the weekly reporters are left to pick up the fluff/municipal meeting stories. It’s always struck me as an inefficient and not-cost-effective system, and I don’t know how you attract talented, agressive and hungry reporters to those papers.

The other part where the current model doesn’t work is it ignores the fact that while people are turning to other sources like the Web for what they once looked for in a daily paper, all signs point to weeklies making a comeback. There’s still a desire there from people who want to hold a paper in their hands, and therefore, those papers can be attractive to advertisers. People still consider print advertising part of the the content in newspapers, it’s not as easily ignored as a TV commercial or a pop-up ad so I think there’s still value there.

And while people turn to the Web for breaking news, I think they’ll still read a print paper (even if that paper eventually goes digital as an e-edition, I’m still considering it “print” because it would be approached in a different way from a Web-based product. One of the attractive parts, to me, of adopting this business model is that you could phase out the paper product without reinventing the wheel.)

So here’s what you do: Stop the presses on the daily paper. Take that brand and turn it into a Web only product, sort of a local aggregator that collects content from the “weeklies.”

Reporters for the weekly papers will basically turn into Patch-style municipal reporters, people without an office who are based in their communities, armed with iPhones and laptops, ready to report news as it happens. Even though there’s a print product, these reporters will have to think digital first, reporting breaking news as it happens. I’m also assuming if there’s a bigger city/town that’s the “home base” of this organization, there’s a weekly there as well.

The print papers would be built around a few longer stories and event coverage that can be planned out in advance, packaged with a collection of the news that happened that week. Things like police items can be presented like a rundown, I think that content can be put into the paper with minimal tweaking without reading like old news as long as it’s presented well. These papers would also have the traditional staples of community papers, things like event calendars, Around Town/social page information, upcoming meetings, school lunch menus, etc.

The news staff from the daily paper can now become reporters who focus more on project reporting, or multi-town beats like courts, county commissioners, etc. (There will also be a small sports staff that will work with the town reporters. One think I never liked about the Patch model is they ask their reporters to do a little too much sports coverage. I think sports can work in this model if short game results are posted immediately and the paper contains summaries of the week’s games, features, previews of big games the following week, etc.)

The goal here is to have a fluid newsroom structure that can respond quickly to breaking news events, while the staff still has the resources to pursue more in-depth projects and investigative work. Being freed from the daily paper grind should substantially free up those central newsroom staffers, but there would still be quality local news delivered to readers on a daily basis.

I don’t want this post to go on forever, so I think I’ll just post bits of it from time to time, things like what the papers and web site itself will look like, what a typical day for a staffer would be, how the business model would work, etc. Would love to hear feedback, so comment away!

Reporters are people too

When I first started working as an editor at a weekly newspaper, we got two very different complaints within a few day of each other.

Everyone who has ever worked at a college or small-town paper has probably had to do the “question of the week” feature, ask a question of five different people, get their response, run their headshots, etc. We had a guy refuse to answer the question of the week because he thought the paper was liberally biased. Within days, I got an earful from a town official calling us a Republican rag because we’d run something positive about the Republican state representative.

That’s how I’ve always seen the whole idea of bias. It’s completely in the eye of the beholder, meaning people project what they want to see on the newspapers or media outlets they don’t like.

It’s one thing that’s always bothered me, not because there’s never any truth to it – because there are obviously isolated incidents. I’m not saying it never happens.

But for the most part, the myth of “the mainstream media is liberally biased” is lazy, boring, tired and not true. It’s just a canard that feeds into a particular ideology. If you perpetuate this myth, anytime there’s a story that paints your side in an unflattering light you can brush it off as “that biased media again.” It’s a built in excuse, and it’s just lazy. It’s victimization culture at its absolute worst, and it prevents any kind of self reflection when you can’t see negative articles as legitimate criticisms.

That time the man refused to answer my paper’s question of the week because he thought the paper was biased toward the left? At the time, the editor was an arch-conservative who freelanced for a right-wing magazine. Again, people see what they want to see.

In fairness, the idea of bias is a complicated one. A study done during the 2008 presidential election cycle found that at the same time people were perceiving that the media was “going soft” on then-candidate Barack Obama, he was actually getting more negative stories written about him. But other studies show that most reporters identify as liberal. From my own experience, I’ve found that most editors and publishers/owners skew conservative, and most (but certainly not all) reporters in the newsroom tend to be liberal.

But what does that mean? Does that self-identification have any kind of automatic transfer to the work produced?

Frankly, I don’t think how people identify politically has to have any carry over whatsoever into their work. I’ve always thought it was the easiest thing in the world to separate my personal feeling – especially on political matters – from what I was covering. If anything, when I have strong feelings on an issue, I’m even more careful to include all perspectives in a story. When bias leaks in to what should be straight news reporting, it’s usually more about lazy reporting that it is some deliberate ideological agenda.

Again, it’s not like there aren’t isolated incidents where people don’t seem to be able to separate their feelings from their coverage, like this reporter who landed in hot water after covering the Chick-Fil-A gay marriage controversy, then ranting about it on his Facebook account. But even that raises questions for me. Is anyone alleging this guy’s coverage was tainted by his opinion? Would this have been a story without the Facebook post?

This post by Matthew Ingram tackles the question head on, and I think he’s totally right: Why are we pretending reporters don’t have opinions? That Pew study I linked to shows that reporters tend to be liberal, but where’s the evidence that means you can’t write a fair story? Or that consumers of news aren’t savvy enough to process the reporter’s point of view along with the content of the story? That’s where this whole bias thing falls apart for me.

This is the example that’s been rattling around in my head when thinking about this issue. Chris Faraone is a staff writer for the Boston Phoenix (now just the Phoenix). The Phoenix hold no pretensions about where they stand politically. And Faraone didn’t make any attempt to hide his politics as he wrote about the Occupy movement.

As the Occupy Wall Street movement spread from New York to Boston and other parts of the country, Faraone became the movement’s official scribe, even writing a book, “99 Nights with the 99 Percent.” He gave us the fullest picture of the movement as it exploded across the country. As others either idolized or demonized it, Faraone simply showed it for what it was.

Here’s the thing: Faraone is the most knowledgeable reporter out there on Occupy. Some other reporters have done good work on the subject, but I’d be surprised if anyone has traveled to as many sites and spent as much time in the encampments as he. While others sat in newsrooms and TV studios and guessed what the occupiers were thinking, Faraone did something crazy: he asked them. He was reporting from the front lines. So what if he clearly has an opinion? So what if he had an affection for the twenty-somethings in the tents, and a sometimes antagonistic view of the cops who moved in to clear them out? How does that make the facts he reported, and the scenes he described from the trenches, any less true? So he didn’t hide how he felt about the people he reported on. I, frankly, find that refreshing. It’s not like he made things up. And if he did, that wouldn’t be bias, it would be unethical. Two totally different things.

I know not everyone can take the perspective of an alt-weekly reporter, and as much as I love the Phoenix I’m not suggesting paper can write stories with the naked ideological honesty of Faraone’s missives from the front lines, tents and bus seats of Occupy. But I agree with Ingram, reporters would be better off dropping the whole pretense that we’re emotionless robots. I have many opinions on the subjects I cover, sometimes strong ones. But it has absolutely no bearing on my ability to write a fair story.

So how do we get past this? I’m not sure we ever will. The media can stop setting itself up for accusations of bias by stopping political endorsements, but that’s just one thing. People can also get out of the newsroom like Faraone did. It’s easier to avoid accusations of bias when you’re in the thick of what you’re reporting about, just telling people what you see. But especially when it comes to politics, where every minute thing is used as leverage against the “other side,” I’m afraid this trope of “biased media” will never go away. The only thing we as reporters can do is to push back against the echo chamber, and not let it prevent us from doing our jobs, from telling the stories that need to be told and holding people in power accountable, no matter how they vote.

Everyone’s a critic, and a photographer, apparently

Know I’m over a week late to this, but I wanted to at least briefly weigh in on this article BU professor Dan Kennedy wrote for Nieman Lab last week about a young photographer whose photos of conservative politicians are in high demand – yet all he asks for is credit through the Creative Commons license.

The article was posted last Tuesday and almost instantly the comment section turned into a war between professional photos and the “amateur” blogger types.

The Creative Commons license website has a much better explanation than anything I can write, but basically it’s a way to share intellectual property like photos for free, as long are you are properly credited. (There are some subtleties, for instance you can choose a license that allows for commercial use or limit it to nonprofits, etc.) Flickr and Vimeo have big Creative Commons communities, and you’ll occasionally see photos on blogs, newspapers and TV station websites with Creative Commons photos.

But Creative Commons is just the mechanism, there’s a bigger issue at play when it comes to media, and that’s where to draw the line between professional journalists and contributions from citizen journalists as the industry reinvents itself.

When I was the editor of the Duxbury Clipper, and I’m sure this is the same for a lot of weekly and smaller newspapers, I depended on submitted content. When I say depended, I mean depended. I was the sole staffer for a two-section paper that ran 50-plus pages. I had a part-time sports reporter and basically one freelancer. Every week I looked at a lot of blank pages that weren’t getting filled unless I got some submissions from the community, in the form of pictures, announcements/write-ups, columns, event briefs, etc.

By “submitted content,” I mean material sent in by readers that received no compensation. At the weekly, this was things like photos from a high school award banquet, Rotary Club news, travel stories, historical articles, a little bit of everything. And there were times I felt a little guilty not being able to pay people who were doing a not-insignificant amount of work.

There’s probably always been some aspect of that at weekly, small-town papers. But now you’re seeing the user-submitted trend creep into bigger media outlets. CNN has the iReporters (that’s a great example because the cable channel is making it sound as if these folks are on the payroll.) I’ve seen reader-submitted photo galleries on sites like the Boston Globe and local TV stations. And many newspaper sites have legions of “community bloggers,” most of whom are unpaid.

I don’t think news orgs are doing anything wrong by the submitters when they use such content. That person gets something out of the deal, whether it’s clicks on personal blogs, exposure for themselves or their organization/event, etc.

The real question is it fair to the professional journalists who are getting squeezed out because management’s getting people to do their jobs for free.

Bloggers/commenters aren’t replacing reporters because it’s not really the same material. (Although there are examples where commenters and readers drive a lot of the conversation, like Boston’s Universal Hub, and the founder/site owner plays referee in addition to his original reporting.) I think as newsrooms shrink, people more people will be asked to submit their own write-ups. That’s an effect of journalists losing their jobs, not a cause.

I think the trickiest part of this is photos/video. Amateur photographers aren’t ever going to produce work to rival the quality of the top photojournalists. But with advances in camera technologies, it seems like everyone’s an aspiring photog these days. There’s a lot of passable work out there, and passable may be good enough, especially for smaller outlets.

I think media outlets have to draw a line. User submitted content works great for certain types of stories. Severe weather and breaking news are good examples, because even a relatively large staff can’t be everywhere at once. The best photojournalist in the world can’t get video from a breaking news scene the way someone in the thick of the incident can. I also like it when people do the whole, “Share your memories of …” thing, it’s good reader interaction. But there are other stories where you really need trained professionals doing the reporting, sorting through information and putting things in context. So I hope newspapers recognize that photojournalists are journalists too and their work needs to be valued and respected. But if some of those angry commenters under the Nieman Lab article are working photogs, they might have a reason to be worried.