The big hump in the long tail

Everyone's linking and talking about Clay Shirky's latest thoughts on journalism this weekend. He makes valid points about how news and information have changed in our digital world. He predicts an explosion of experiments and new models to replace news on paper.

He's a big hump in his own long tail in our attention economy, and his words draw attention to a subject near and dear to my heart.

At the same time, I can't help but feel his post is essentially a Cliff's Notes version of Phil Meyer's "The Vanishing Newspaper," written in 2004. Perhaps that's good: His name brings awareness to a new audience.

Still, I worry about the costs in our attention economy. I hope we can move on to examining the next steps instead of merely walking ground that's already been covered.

As a companion piece, many people are pointing to Steven Berlin Johnson's talk at the South by Southwest Festival in Austin. Johnson, one of the people behind aggregator Outside.In, notes that news, analysis and information exploded during the last presidential election, and he notes that local news is quite available in his Brooklyn neighborhood through local bloggers.

His point: The digital revolution has given us more information than ever before.

I don't doubt it, for some places and people. But we need to acknowledge that his examples illustrate, again, the big hump in the long tail. Objective Independent information in this last election season for local judges' races, or small county commissioners' races, was quite difficult to find, outside of media-rich places like Brooklyn.

Local, objective independent information in other places is drying up faster than you can say the word "layoff."

Indeed, the future is coming, and it isn't evenly distributed yet. Society needs to find a way to distribute reporting, analysis and information-gathering resources away from the big hump to the longer tail, so that we don't gorge in some places and starve in others.

Brilliant photographers always remind us that the best shots are those taken when everybody is looking the other way. They say, "Turn around. Look elsewhere."

That advice goes for those seeking answers about journalism as well.

So try looking in different directions:

What Philip Meyer was thinking four years after "The Vanishing Newspaper."

What Matt Thompson says about "us" versus "them."

What reporter Meranda Whatling worries about before she goes on a cost-saving furlough.

What Shannan Bowen and others are launching in Wilmington, N.C.

What Jim McBee and friends are doing to provide a new marketplace for journalists and publishers.

What Steve Buttry is learning about top newspaper editors on Twitter.

What some good people have been hatching in Charlotte.

Local calendars: Our neighbors want them

As the busy holiday and art seasons approach, and as the political year of 2008 nears, our neighbors are crying out for decent social calendar tools.
Someone, or several someones, will figure out the right tools, and then steal our ads or find another way to make money from it, if we're not there first.
I could include many links of what some papers are doing, but the reality seems to be no one has it right yet. Let's keep looking and sharing.
If we share information, we can evolve faster.

Bike versus car (And you can too!)

Apologies to Mr. Colbert on the title.

Wonderful visual presentation of bike-car wrecks from The Oregonian.

We could do it in Charlotte and Raleigh, with information at sites like this one and this one and this one.

I spent about two minutes at the last one and made the (not so pretty) chart shown here. The hard part: The crash data site says, "For a detailed review of crashes in specific locations (e.g., corridors or certain intersections within a community), it will be necessary to obtain such information at the local level."

But it's possible.

Here's another example of mashing up publicly available information to make it useful for readers, from Marc Matteo with McClatchy in California.

Utopian ideas: Foundations could give rewards or grants to creators of such projects so they can take the time to write project "cookbooks" for other papers. Or foundations could fund time for local reporters and graphic artists to develop their own projects, without eviscerating slim newspaper staffs. The ideas are spinning off Ed Wasserman's critique of Propublica.

More praise for Fort Myers

The Fort Myers (Fla.) News-Press, which seems to be an incubator for new ideas at Gannett, won APME's first Innovator of the Year award for its "culture of innovation." This is the paper that has mobile journalists armed with laptops, audio recorders and wireless Web connections out patrolling neighborhoods for "hyperlocal" news. The paper also earned a lot of buzz (on this blog and elsewhere) for its crowdsourced story on sewer problems.

I like the idea of both these things -- allowing community members to get involved with investigating a story and unleashing reporters from their desks. But, man, it seems Fort Myers is getting a lot of traction from one story a year ago and a lot of ribbon-cutting stories. (Have you heard of other crowdsourcing success stories? Know of any people who admit to being devoted readers of hyperlocal news?)

Am I being too cynical?

(Oh, the other finalists for the APME award: The Atlanta Journal-Constitution and the Rochester (N.Y.) Democrat and Chronicle. The AJC was nominated for its newsroom overhaul. The D&C got the nod for its RocDocs, which gives online users access to data, maps and investigative reports assembled by the newspaper.

More Bridge Observations

I'm posting this one for Tommy Tomlinson:

"Hey y'all,
Howard Weaver actually has a good idea on his blog about how to do a project on crumbling infrastructure in our community, with the aid of readers who take photos of bad bridges and such. This would be a really cool experiment for us.

http://editor.blogspot.com/2007/08/instant-public-service-project-just-add.html.
~~~~
Back to leslie: Richmond did a similar idea right after the collapse, where you could go to their site and find bridges in your neighborhood. I don't remember it being searchable, but maybe I'm just not looking in the right spots.

Flickr and the MN bridge, part ii

I sent a few of the photo editors the link to the bridge collapse slideshow on Flickr. Gary O'Brien, photo editor and tech guru, had an interesting take on the photos. While I was completely amazed by the quality of the photos that were posted by average joes, he pointed out that there may have been issues around media access. Gary wrote:

"Judging from their surroundings and the taglines, I'm guessing the majority of these weren't taken by citizen-journalists. I think this is mostly the work of a couple of firefighters, first responders or their friends - someone who has access to places the media isn't allowed.

This is increasingly a problem across the country - often, media photographers (as we know from past experience) are harrassed, while non-journalists are left alone or even allowed special access. A recent local example is the funerals of the two slain policemen - a fire department photographer had prime access, even to the point of creating a distraction to the mourners, while I was 300 yards away. We never saw those photos, nor did the public. ...

It makes me uncomfortable that we're now cut out of the equation in these situations and the best photos from the event are being made and edited by non-journalists who are public servants or their friends. They have a dog in the hunt - we won't see anything but what they choose.

I would like to see the work trained professionals could have done given this level of access. So would the rest of the world. "

Citizen Journalism and the MN Bridge

Good summary from Cyberjournalist.net on the citizen journalism that was going on around the collapse of the Minneapolis bridge.

Highlights:

• Twitter was a very quick way for people to keep track of loved ones immediately after the collapse.
• Citizen journalists were surprisingly competent, both with quality and volume of reports and with the quality of photos and video. That's not to say that there wasn't bad stuff. There was.
• Photos are the best example of what the public can do. Check out Flickr (more on that in another post. A photo editor had some interesting perspective on those photos).
• "The eyewitness blog posts, the on-the-scene photography, and even the handheld and cell phone videos complete with their jerky motion and blurry, overcompressed images, all contribute far better than the mainstream media, to giving you a more accurate sense of being there."

Flickr and MN Bridge photos

I can't seem to look at enough photos of the bridge collapse in Minneapolis. When I looked at the Star Tribune site late Wednesday night, there weren't a whole lot of reader submitted photos or stories. Today's a different story. Not as many on the Strib or TwinCities.com sites, but Flickr's seeing all kinds of reader submissions.

Check out the Flickr slideshow.

Backfence, from the horse's mouth, and LoudounExtra, from a resident

Mark Potts, the founder of Backfence, gives lessons for the next generation of hyperlocal websites.

As a counterpoint, it's worth visiting Loudoun Extra and reading Scott Karp's take on it. He lives there, and is one of the many online pundits these days telling us how to do our jobs. But he lives there, so his perspective is intriguing.

If you're like me, you might be a bit tired of "experts" focusing on the kind of work we do every day. (Have blog, will opine). Cutting through the noise to get to the knowledge isn't easy. I hope these links help.

News to Use

So, text alerts aren't just messages about boring traffic reports or sports scores. I just got an alert from the News-Press of Fort Myers, Fla., (for which I thought I'd opted out, but that's another story) that's really important news.

Text of the message:

All four 11:59 p.m. showings of "Harry Potter" for tonight at the Bell Tower Shops have sold out.

The 3 a.m. shift

E&P has a pretty good look at how Gannett's much-touted "Information Center" approach is faring a year after being rolled out. The papers say the approach -- more updates to the Web, a renewed focus to be ultra-local, inviting readers in on conversations -- has generated much more Web traffic. One paper says it's up 72% month to from last year.

• I liked this quote from a Merrill Lynch newspaper analyst:

  "They are giving the reader something rich. People who might not go to the site for news will go to find out home prices. It is an opportunity to serve advertisers better by connecting with the local audience and a number of local advertisers."

• The article does allude to concerns within a few of the operations that each newsroom is being asked to do too much, but there isn't a lot of explanation.

• In Rochester, N.Y., the paper is learning that the online features can drive print circulation. Editors discovered this in September when they prepared a multimedia package on local sex offenders, which included a database of registered felons and various audio and video reports.
  
  The Web package was prominently placed on the home page on Sept. 28 to promote much of the same material in a Sunday print presentation three days later. The effort resulted in the biggest Sunday single-copy sales of the year, with 4.9% more than any other Sunday. That record was broken two months later when the same approach was used for a report on police overtime.

• In Phoenix, the paper partnered with Arizona State University to pay 15 students $10 an hour to cover local news online during early-morning hours.

• In Parsipanny, N.J., where a Web editor works the overnight shift to keep feeding the Web and trying to grow the overnight audience, the editor says the approach has changed the mind-set of staffers.

  "It is less of a print-driven approach," he says while chatting in his office, "being absolutely as local as we can be and getting readers involved as often as possible." The early jump on the Web is key, he adds, noting that the paper's monthly page views jumped from 3.3 million in March 2006 to 4.9 million in March 2007.

The Impact of Google Maps

More from this month's Wired: How Google Maps are Changing The Way We See the World
It's one of the cover stories.

"...In the past two years, map providers like Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo have created tools that let anyone with an Internet connection layer their own geographic obsessions on top of ever-more-detailed road maps and satellite images. A host of collaborative annotation projects have appeared — not to mention tens of thousands of personal map mashups — that plot text, links, data, and even sounds onto every available blank space on the digital globe. It's become a sprawling, networked atlas — a "geoweb" that's expanding so quickly its outer edges are impossible to pin down."

Really fast, really local news

A couple of blogs are beating charlotte.com and The Observer.
Davidson News is all over the town's local cable issue, which now has statewide implications. Last posting was about 11 hours ago.
Under the Water Tower shows that Fat City wasn't the only building to get its facade ripped off by storms.
Both sites benefit from the skills of people who are former reporters. In "Under the Water Tower's" case, former-reporter-turned-teacher Lolo Pendergrast uses new technology to become a photographer.
Both sites depend on people doing this work for no money, and postings depend on vacation and kids' schedules and other intrusive life events.
But how can we work with them now? Google Reader gives an easy way for our reporters and editors to monitor and get news tips. Can we start?

In AJR's words, "Rolling the Dice"

Story from June/July issue: Media companies have high hopes that hyperlocal news online will bolster their newspapers’ futures. But early returns suggest the financial outlook for such ventures is not bright.

Read AJR's story here.

Free slideshows

Problem: We have at least 100 "Draw Your Dad" submissions for readers and no way to get them in the paper or online with existing staff and software.
First obvious solution: Purchase Adobe Photoshop CS at $499 each for seven locations, total cost of $3,500 plus training for clerks. Add web staff from redeployed newsroom people to upload and position slideshows.
Alternative solution: Use free software and server space from outside sources built for individuals and small independents to accomplish the same goal.
Avoid adding another clog in our existing production pipe. Use a different pipe, with a different destination, and link from our website to that different destination. Use the paper to direct readers first through our website, with one image each on regional pages, then link from there to Flickr. We don't need to save these images in our servers. Don't worry about the loss of hits to the website. More on that later.
Specifics: Use Flickr (free), Picasa (free) and gmail (free) to email and resize the images for Flickr. Cutlines (metadata) can be edited before uploading. Captions show up on top of the images if the viewer clicks on the "I" in a slideshow. See advice on the Internet to find out how to upload easily. Use one existing photo-savvy clerk reporter like Lukas or one Flickr-savvy copy editor like Adam to do the work, over two days, max. Make sure the scanning is spread out over several locations, and make sure there's one networked place where all those images can be gathered.
If the space limitations of a free Flickr account are too small, spring for one $24.95 Pro account for the whole newsroom.
But again, what about web traffic? Isn't that why we're encouraging reader interaction? What happens when the hits go to some outside company instead of us?
We direct readers from the regular newspaper to regional webpages to find the slideshows. We use one image on those pages as a visual refer. From there, we use a direct link to the specific set at Flickr, so it's only two clicks for readers.
TV stations regularly send viewers to their websites to get links to outside information. We can too.
Readers do not have to create an account or come up with another password to see the slideshow at Flickr. If they want to comment, that's when they have to sign in.
Yes, Flickr gets the page views and not our website ... but we preserve and build our relationship with loyal readers. We brand our presence at Flickr and broaden our audience. And consider the alternative: no slideshows or hits at all.