Poynter Online

St. Petersburg Times Photojournalist Uses iPhone for Weekend Magazine Feature

By Al Tompkins   
The main feature story in this week's St. Petersburg (Fla.) Times "Weekend" section is told through photos that were captured solely on an iPhone. The photos are of iconic places all along St. Pete Beach.

Melissa Lyttle, a photographer at Poynter's St. Petersburg Times, took the photos, noting on the Times' photo blog that "the best camera is the one you have with you." She said it's important to remember that good technology isn't always what makes a good photo.

"I'm always documenting life with my iPhone -- friends, funky places, Florida skies, my dog," she said on the blog. "I'm really impressed with the quality of the pictures from it as well as the ease with which I can post those photos to my blog, Facebook and Twitter, so I don't think I'll stop shooting with it anytime soon."

I talked with Lyttle about the project and what she learned from it in this edited e-mail Q&A.

Al Tompkins: Why did you use a cell phone to take pictures that could easily have been captured with a professional camera?

Melissa Lyttle

Melissa Lyttle: My photo editor saw some vacation photos from Fort Lauderdale, Fla., and the Keys that I took on my iPhone, and he was hoping I could do something similar here. The nature of the assignment lent itself to a different approach. It essentially allowed me to play tourist for a day in my backyard. What says tourist more than photos taken with a cell phone?

How much cleanup and enhancement did you do to make these "paper-ready?"

Lyttle: Almost none.

What did you learn about the iPhone's light sensitivity? Are there pictures you wanted but could not capture?

Lyttle: I know from using my iPhone camera on a regular basis that it has a really difficult time in low-light situations. Everything for this project was shot during the daytime, and 90 percent of it was shot outside. If I wanted to make a picture inside, I tried to do it in a room with lots of available light.

Melissa Lyttle/St. Petersburg Times St. Petersburg's Don CeSar resort

I notice you are capturing both vertical and horizontal photos. Do either work better for a cell phone camera?

Lyttle: Actually, every photo in the piece is a square, as a result of an application I used called CameraBag. I use a filter in the CameraBag iPhone app called the Helga, which is modeled after my favorite cheap, plastic toy camera -- the Holga. It crops the photo into a square, bumps the contrast a little and vignettes it. And it's what I use for 99 percent of the stuff I shoot with my iPhone because it's fun and quirky.

Background on CameraBag and the journalistic application of iPhones

The CameraBag iPhoto app that has the Helga on it is a $2.99 download. The iPhone app blog explains more about what is in the CameraBag app:

1. Helga: this desaturates and adds a vignette border as well as crops the photo.
2. Lolo: crops the photo to a square, adds a white border and increases situation and contrast.
3. Cinema: desaturates photo and adds a blue tone to the photo.
4. Ansel: Adds white border and converts picture to Black & White (grayscale).
5. 1962: converts to black & white (grayscale) and increases contrast.
6. 1974s: adds sepia tone to photo, adds white border and crops photo.
7. Fisheye: Creates a bubble type of effect with your photo (not really fisheye).
8. Infrared: Converts the photo to black & white (grayscale) then Inverts the colors.

Poynter's Group Leader for Visual Journalism, Kenny Irby, expressed some concerns over the journalistic use of iPhones and similar consumer-end cameras but said they have a place in professional photojournalism:

"My concerns are by no means related to technical image quality, as the iPhone camera file exports about a 9 meg file. Lyttle's project offers a tremendous opportunity for fun, innovation and credible creativity. I applaud the dedication to purposeful compositions, dramatic lighting and unique perspectives.

"What does give me cause to pause is the use of post-documentation software and filters that render special effects like iPhone's CameraBag and photo FX. When the applications are used, the journalist must still apply the highest commitment to visual accuracy."

Ellyn Angelotti, interactivity editor and adjunct faculty member at Poynter, says:

"The more comfortable journalists get with using tools they have handy to do quality journalism, the more they can develop and improve their use of these tools. This project is an example of taking cell phone photography up a notch. Also, using a feature story like this instead of a high-pressure breaking news story to try a new application of a tool is a great way to set your newsroom up to succeed when being innovative.

"This story also lends itself really well to audience engagement. Many readers have access to the same equipment Lyttle used to create this, as almost every phone has a camera built in."

Angelotti said there are opportunities in a project like this to interact with readers online. Invite readers to send their own cell phone pictures of local landmarks or to recreate the photos that a staff photographer has captured. I have seen newspapers show tiny portions of a landmark, such as part of a sign or an object on a wall, and ask readers to guess where the object can be found. It's usually great fun.

Editor's note: Some of Lyttle's responses in this Q&A were featured on the St. Petersburg Times' "All Eyes" photo blog.

Are My Clips Too Old for Me to Apply?

Q. I have enjoyed reading your column since before I landed my first internship. Your advice has proved invaluable in helping me with both internship and job applications, and I feel certain you will not fail me now.

I am preparing to apply for some jobs that will (I hope) give me more opportunities than my current small-town daily reporting position does to stretch and grow.

One position for which I'm applying is for a large metro daily. The job posting says that viable candidates must possess a demonstrable interest in politics and policy. However, since I haven't had many opportunities to cover national politics in the last year while working at a small-town paper, my clips representing such interest are rather aged.

To be specific, they are nearly two years old. Despite their age, and although they come from an internship I held with an online news source inside the D.C. beltway, they are strong clips and garnered a lot of attention from other national news sources at the time. My question is this: Would it be acceptable for me to use one or two of those clips in my application for this job?

Thank you,

Politically Inclined

A. Handle this in the cover letter. "Demonstrable interest" is not the same as "recent experience." If your cover letter, those old clips and anything in your academic record add up to a sustained interest in politics, you qualify.

Someone may beat you for the job, but you are in good standing to apply for this job.

Cover letters are ideal for describing our interests and passion in ways that resumes and clips can't.

Coming: She has already had an informational interview with an editor and now has one with a recruiter. What should she expect?

By Joe Grimm   

New York Times Asks Subscribers: Is It Wrong to Charge for Online Content?

By Bill Mitchell   

The New York Times is testing a price point of $5 a month for access to nytimes.com, with a 50 percent discount for print subscribers.

The Times e-mailed a survey to print subscribers Thursday afternoon inviting their reaction to that pricing plan and asking a range of questions about online pricing.

A portion of the Times' survey on charging for access to its Web site. (Click image for larger version.)

New York Times Co. spokeswoman Catherine Mathis confirmed in a telephone interview that the Times had sent the survey, but said no timetable has been set for a decision and no decisions have been made about online pricing. 

(The Independent reported that its Friday editions will quote a Times executive as telling the newspaper that The Times will choose between "metered" and "membership" models. The UK paper said Scott Heekin-Canedy, president and general manager of The New York Times Media Group, said in an interview that a decision will be made by next month.)

The survey distributed Thursday reads: "The New York Times website, nytimes.com, is considering charging a monthly fee of $5.00 to access its content, including all its articles, blogs and multimedia. All of this content is currently available for free.

"When answering the following questions, please think about whether you would be willing to pay for continued unlimited access to nytimes.com.

"How likely would you be to pay a $2.50 monthly fee -- which would be a 50% discount for home delivery subscribers -- for continued, unlimited access to nytimes.com?"

"The one thing I advise people on this is that we've got a very large [online] revenue stream," Mathis said. "We looked at 30 different companies -- Weight Watchers, ESPN, Consumer Reports -- to see how much money is being generated from Web sites. What we saw is that we're doing a pretty good job monetizing content with advertising."

Of $352 million in digital revenue reported by the Times Co. in 2008, about $237 million was generated by its newspaper sites.

"People talk about how we've got to charge for content. We already do have a revenue stream for advertising, and the two are related. You start charging and it can affect the other," Mathis said.

She noted that the Times previously generated $10 million in annual revenues for Times Select. 

The survey asks print subscribers if a fee for online access would affect their print subscriptions.

Offering respondents a range of choices from "strongly agree" to "strongly disagree," the survey also seeks to measure attitudes about these assertions:

• I think it is wrong for The New York Times to charge anyone for access to nytimes.com.
• I would pay for access to nytimes.com because it offers more than The New York Times print newspaper.
• I think that as long as subscribers get a discount, charging them for access to nytimes.com is fair.
• I would pay for access to nytimes.com because it offers valuable content and features I can't get anywhere else.
• I would gladly pay for access to nytimes.com in order to support the Times' quality journalism.

One Investment Firm Plays Role in 3 Biggest Newspaper Bankruptcies

By Rick Edmonds

After I reported that several distressed newspaper companies may soon be owned by banks and other creditors, a tipster said I was on the right track but undershot the mark: a single New York investment firm -- Angelo, Gordon & Co. --  is a lead secured creditor in the bankruptcies of Tribune Co., Philadelphia Newspapers and The Star Tribune in Minneapolis.

 

News accounts and court records confirm Angelo, Gordon's role in all three proceedings.

The Star Tribune has agreed to hand control of the company to secured creditors and a new board of directors of their choosing, on which Angelo, Gordon will doubtless be represented. And should ownership of Tribune Co. and Philadelphia Newspapers ultimately pass to secured creditors as well, Angelo, Gordon would have an ownership role in metros in three of the nation's six largest cities -- Los Angeles, Chicago and Philadelphia -- as well as in Minneapolis, Baltimore, Orlando and Fort Lauderdale.

 

Who is this company and why its sudden interest in the business?

 

A call Wednesday to Bradley Pattelli, lead banker on several (if not all) of these deals, was not returned. I will add to this if I hear back later.

 

But Angelo, Gordon's Web site is clear that it is a "specialist in nontraditional investments" -- especially distressed debt.

 

This January, in a non-bankruptcy transaction, American Media Inc., publisher of The National Enquirer and The Star, handed ownership to a creditors group that included Angelo, Gordon. While longtime National Enquirer executive David Pecker retains the titles of president and publisher, Pattelli is part of a new four-member board of directors that actually controls the business. 

 

Angelo, Gordon's site says it has $15 billion under management and argues that down markets provide good opportunities for its approach. The firm has been in business for roughly 20 years, and its principals, John M. Angelo and Michael L. Gordon, both came out of the now-defunct L.F. Rothschild firm and the leveraged-buyout boom of the 1980s.

 

In newspaper bankruptcies, like others, there are three main groups: owner-debtors who file for bankruptcy protection, secured creditors who have an ownership claim if the company defaults, and unsecured creditors (like suppliers) who haven't been paid and likely will recover pennies on the dollar.

The bankruptcy judge sorts out the best and fairest solution. In any scenario, much of the debt is wiped out. Sometimes current owners retain a role; other times the company goes to the secured creditors, who oust management and install their own.

 

A specialist firm like Angelo, Gordon can buy secured debt at a substantial discount from an original bank lender (which may otherwise face the possibility of losing nearly the full amount of the loan). It employs various complex debt structures and tax considerations, along with potential "hedges," to maximize its chance of a return over time.

 

To my knowledge, there are no regulations on what kind of entities can own newspapers or limits on how many major publications a single ownership group can control. In fact, the newspaper industry is not especially concentrated compared, for instance, to soft drinks, in which Coke and Pepsi together control almost 75 percent of the U.S. market.

 

The Chicago Tribune recently reported that negotiations "in early stages" would transfer control of Tribune Co. from Sam Zell to senior creditors. In the case of The Philadelphia Inquirer and the Daily News, in which CEO Brian Tierney and fellow investors hope to retain control, proceedings have not yet reached the stage of determining ownership.

Under Journal Register Co.'s newly approved plan to emerge from Chapter 11, ownership will pass to a creditors' group, but it looks like a recently installed management team will stay for now.

 

Several other major newspaper groups -- McClatchy and Lee -- find their stock trading at less than $1 a share. Credit rating agencies have recently predicted they will ultimately default. So there is the prospect of additional newspaper company bankruptcies and more opportunities for Angelo, Gordon and similar firms.

Mobile Phones with Augmented Reality Applications Could Change News Experience

By Will Sullivan   

A new bleeding-edge technology is being developed using advanced mobile phones that could drastically affect the way audiences interact with news and local information. It's called augmented reality.

Very early applications using this technology were primarily built for gaming, but as the technology evolves it's being developed to deliver rich, local information to users.

io9, a science fiction blog, put together a great blog entry introducing two real world examples of the technology, as well as a great summary of the very techie concept:

"In a nutshell, what augmented reality does is provide you with an information overlay for your daily life. In [Vernor] Vinge's latest novel "Rainbows End," the scifi author and computer scientist imagines a world where everybody has computers networked into their glasses and clothing.

"These wearable computers allow people to do things like google information straight into their eyeballs while chatting on the street corner - or project a map overlay on the street in front of them, labeling every store. Or turn the local vacant lot into a wonderland filled with Pokemon characters ready to do battle. This is an augmented reality scenario. Now our technology can actually do this, using smart phones as a crude mobile interface."

To me, one of the most exciting (yet technologically lame) features of the new iPhone 3Gs is the compass integration. It brings mobile users much closer to creating a virtual world with rich layers of information similar to what the global design firm IDEO has envisioned. 

Layar, one of the Augmented Reality browsers for Android mobile phones that io9 points to, is functionally similar to IDEO's augmented reality vision. Except these aren't sketches. It's real information on a real mobile phone.

The combination of GPS technology, a broadband connection, cellular tower triangulation and now a compass integration means these mobile phones could ultimately be highly accurate when determining a user's orientation, location and direction.

Beyond new interfaces, augmented reality allows for a new layer of location information that could help fuel more mobile crowdsourcing, collaboration, gaming and more.

'InvestigateWest' Launch Continues News, Business Experimentation

By Steve Myers   

As American newspapers shrink and close and journalists look for ways to continue their work, you could say that the news business has moved into a phase of "rapid development," to borrow a term from software developers. Journalists are launching a series of start-ups, some short-lived, with different approaches to coverage, audience and funding.

The process continues today as a group of former Seattle Post-Intelligencer journalists unveils InvestigateWest, a regional, nonprofit investigative news organization.

InvestigateWest will conduct investigative journalism on "issues that resonate across the West," seeking to fill the "vacuum that has developed with the closure of four western newspapers in the past years and literally thousands of jobs lost," said Rita Hibbard, the group's executive director and editor, in a telephone interview. Hibbard supervised the Post-Intelligencer's investigative team before the presses stopped in March and most of the staff was laid off.

Today's announcement comes two days after a group of Denver journalists retooled their vision of a post-newspaper news site: the Rocky Mountain Independent.

After the Rocky Mountain News folded, some of its reporters started publishing their work on I Want My Rocky. They moved to a new site, In Denver Times, after a few businessmen came up with a plan for a local news site based largely on subscriptions for premium content. When that fell far short of its goal of 50,000 subscribers, the businessmen and most of the journalists parted ways.

The Independent is designed to be a central hub affiliated with a group of independent niche sites, which sometimes will share content and hopefully will help attract advertisers, said Steve Foster, one of the journalists behind each of the iterations. (I Want My Rocky, meanwhile, has shifted to journalism news and advocacy.)

For the journalists who have lost their jobs, Foster said, "our choices are really to leave the industry or reinvent the industry."

"I'll be honest, I'm skeptical myself. We haven't stumbled on the great model yet," he said. "But I don't know that anyone else has, either. ... Not just us, I think everyone right now, we are in this experimental phase."

This is part of the rapid development mindset: think of an idea, roll something out, see what works and doesn't, quickly improve upon it in the next version. "Fail fast, fail cheap" is an expression you hear from people who use this method to develop software and Web applications. For instance, Foster said these three sites in four months have taught him that original content, not aggregation, is key, and that a fledgling news operation can't compete on everything. And as for cheap, well, none of these journalists in Denver or Seattle is getting a paycheck.

"People in this group are making sacrifices to continue doing this kind of work," Hibbard said of InvestigateWest's six journalists and one development director (who is married to one of the journalists).

Though InvestigateWest is a new venture, it, too, is an another iteration of the new, new journalism:

• It will cover a broad geographic area but a narrow topical one: investigative projects that deal with the environment, social justice and health. (OK, those are still broad, but the staff is not trying to duplicate the daily coverage of their former newspaper, everything from features to sports.)
• Rather than rely on its Web site as the primary outlet, InvestigateWest aims to sell its work to partners -- local and national newspapers, television and radio stations and Web sites.
• The group is looking to collaborate with freelancers and citizen reporters.
• It has assembled an advisory board made up of journalism leaders from across the country.
• It will rely on a combination of foundation funding, content sales and public radio-style memberships.

Think of it as a smaller, targeted ProPublica -- but without the Sandler Foundation, at least so far.

"We were very aware of wanting to address a need, both for readers and for media clients, that exists out there," Hibbard wrote in a follow-up e-mail. "We feel if we do that, we will be successful. Some of the organizations that have failed haven't had a clear idea of filling an unmet need. "
   
How this group will do its journalism is both familiar and uncertain. The stories under way are the kind that require expertise, digging and time. She said the group is working on three stories now: one about misuse of public land, another about health problems related to inadequate job protection and another connected to climate change. The first story will be ready sometime in the late summer or early fall, she said.

But she said the organization won't adhere to the traditional newspaper model of dumping all its work on readers at once through multi-part series. She said her reporters are ready to tell their stories in whatever medium makes sense. (Three members of the team have gotten or are getting radio experience, and the group has contributors who can do multimedia, she said.) Some portions of a project may be presented on InvestigateWest's site or a partner's as the reporting is ongoing. And she said the group wants to team up with other news organizations, freelancers and the public.

Some national news organizations have expressed interest in working with InvestigateWest, she said. The group also wants to offer stories to smaller clients on a secondary basis, as teaching tools -- for example, providing a database and suggesting ways that a client can use it to report in its own community.

Hibbard said she'll measure success "by the impact of our stories. ... We're looking to do stories that set agendas and make change. And empower citizens."

But as many unemployed journalists can attest, this effort probably won't sink or swim based on its reporting. "The easy part is doing the good journalism, you know that," she said. "I guess failure is not getting any amount of funding to launch our first year of operations."

This is not a cheap venture. The group has scoped out a first-year budget of $1.35 million, 77 percent of which Hibbard said will be "spent directly on producing journalism." That percentage is comparable with what some other online news operations have said they spend on news, and much more than newspapers. In the first year most revenue, $850,000, would come from foundations, and about $500,000 would come from content sales and memberships (which will cost $60 a year, or $30 for students). By the third year, she said, foundations would not make up the majority of revenue.

"I think foundations are starting to understand that this [type of reporting] is an important part of community service," Hibbard said. And "maybe this is wishful thinking -- but maybe an appreciation in the public will develop for this resource as it becomes scarcer."

The group has almost none of that in hand. It has gotten a $3,000 grant from the Fund for Investigative Journalism for one of its stories, for which InvestigateWest had to demonstrate interest from a news organization: MSNBC.

"It's something we are not undertaking lightly. We have put a lot of foundational work into this, thinking about our business plan [and] what the pitfalls are," Hibbard said. "It's not a fairy tale. We're not laboring under the illusion that all we have to do is set up shop, start doing great stories and everything will be all right."

In the months since the Post-Intelligencer went Web-only, Hibbard said she and her colleagues have been talking with journalism leaders and investigative centers about collaboration, legal issues and the business plan. A Knight Digital Media Center news entrepreneurship bootcamp was "a huge help for honing the business plan and considering new technologies in the mix." And the organization is part of a new investigative network that came out of a meeting last week.

Vikki Porter, director of the Knight Digital Media Center at the USC Annenberg School for Communication and one of 11 people on InvestigateWest's advisory board, praised InvestigateWest's efforts to round up partners. "They have done their homework far better than some efforts (i.e. In Denver Times)," she wrote in an e-mail.

"I believe it has as much chance to survive and prosper as any other attempt to provide watchdog journalism in this fragmented environment," she continued. "And I hope we see many more efforts to do the same thing, with multiple funding options and new models being invented, discarded and replaced."

Entries for Online Journalism Awards Due Wednesday

By Amy Gahran

Did you publish what you believe is award-worthy online journalism between June 1, 2008, and June 30, 2009? The deadline to enter the Online Journalism Awards competition has been extended until Wednesday, July 8. (Here's the entry form.)

This year the categories are:

• Knight Award for Public Service
• General Excellence in Online Journalism
• General Excellence in Online Journalism, Non-English
• The Gannett Foundation Award for Technical Innovation in the Service of Digital Journalism
• Breaking News
• Specialty Site Journalism
• Investigative Journalism
• Multimedia Feature Presentation
• Online Topical Reporting/Blogging
• Online Commentary/Blogging
• Community Collaboration Award
• Outstanding Use of Digital Technologies
• Online Video Journalism
• Student Journalism

Eligible content: Entries must have been published on Web sites on which journalists either originate content or select and amplify it -- highlighting the importance of journalistic aggregation. Search services, portal sites, and wire services also may enter their content. (Terms of entry and contest rules)

For the Technical Innovation award, any organization (journalistic or not) may enter a digital tool it created that "significantly enhances the practice of online journalism."

Entry fees: $100 per entry/per category for ONA members ($175 for non-members). Students and sole practitioners pay $50 per entry/per category for members ($125 for non-members).

Reporter Uses Twitter to Connect with, Provide Insight into Sources

By Amy Gahran   

It used to be that journalists interviewed sources or otherwise gathered statements from sources and then worked those quotes into a story. With the advent of social media such as Twitter, there's a new way to let communities know what sources have to say: just retweet them.

That's what Ken Ward Jr., environmental reporter at The Charleston (W.V.) Gazette has been doing. Ward, one of the country's top reporters on the coal beat, noticed recently that a couple of coal company executives (Don Blankenship of Massey Energy and Gene Kitts of International Coal Group) started tweeting.

So Ward started using Twitter to try to engage the executives in public discussion. Intriguingly, he also started retweeting some of their tweets:

• June 26: RT @DonBlankenship Massey CEO on #ACES "Only pompous pols could think of such a bill" (Note: #ACES is the hashtag for the American Clean Energy and Security Act of 2009, the major climate bill that recently passed the U.S. House of Representatives)
• July 1: RT @DonBlankenship Coal is America's Energy. Oil is Iran's Energy. Which do you want to depend on?

Ward also is using Twitter to publicly ask Massey for hard information:

• July 1: @DonBlankenship What were Massey's profits on $756.3M in export coal revenue last year? (Cont.) 10K says that was 30 percent of coal revenues ... what share of profits was it?
• July 2: Still wondering ... @DonBlankenship What were Massey's profits on $756.3M in export coal revenue last year?

So far, Blankenship has not responded to Ward on Twitter.

And when, on June 30, Gene Kitts tweeted: "Reading Patrick Michael's Climate of Extremes -- recommend for anyone who hasn't surrendered their ability to think independently," Ward retweeted that and responded: "@gkitts -- What about Patrick Michaels funding?" (Cont.) "Michaels has 'published little, if anything, of distinction' in scientific literature on climate change http://tinyurl.com/386rf9" [PDF].

Kitts briefly responded to Ward: "Kenwardjr says Michaels has 'published little of distinction' but still he refers to Al Gore's 'Inconvenient Truth'?" Ward rebutted this: "@gkitts -- Where exactly did I refer to 'Inconvenient Truth?' And by the way, Gore won a Nobel Prize. How many of those do you have?"

Ward blogged about his experience retweeting the coal executives and expanded it into an intriguing exploration of the role of social media, citizen journalism, public relations and transparency in shaping public understanding of coal issues. It's worth reading.

In a comment to his blog post, I asked Ward to say more about why he's chosen to retweet the coal executives, and whether he plans to do the same for environmental activists, government officials and other key players in the coal industry. He replied:

"I have retweeted Blankenship and Kitts mostly to get the fact that they are tweeting out to a larger audience -- and in some ways less to spread the particular comments or message they posted.

"On the other hand, I have found that there are different discussions going on concerning coal and climate change, and the two sides rarely talk to each other -- Blankenship and his followers talk to each other; the enviros talk to each other.

"It seems to me they need to talk to each other, and LISTEN to each other more, and perhaps if I retweeted the coal guys' comments, enviros (and environmental journalists) who follow me would engage them in discussion online."

I think Ward's example is worth emulating. If you're on Twitter and haven't yet experimented with this approach, give it a try. And be sure to use relevant hashtags to reach an even wider interested audience.

Oh, and as Ward noted regarding an Associated Press story mentioning that Blankenship had started tweeting: "If you're writing about someone's Twitter feed, give us their screen name."

Five Lessons from a Laid-Off General Manager on His 'Dark Side' Year

By Chris Lavin

We had a rule back at the old Rochester (N.Y.) Times-Union. We would produce a staff obit on any prominent or newsworthy person or on anyone whose family asked.

Obviously, it was that last category that tested the news staff. It meant that on any given day all reporters were potential obit writers. At times of big demand, even the most senior writer might need to take an hour away from his project to interview a grieving family and find some way to make the most private of lives notable in its ending.

But this practice was indicative of a newspaper that knew its key role in the community, in the lives of its readers. They trusted us with the intimate details of their lives -- births, weddings and deaths. Hatch 'em, match 'em and dispatch 'em, we used to joke, while spending most of our ambition on sexier murder, political and in-depth feature stories.

I found myself thinking a lot about the Rochester T-U obit practice in recent years. As my metropolitan newspaper struggled like all of its kind for readership and revenue, there was much talk about the need to "go local," but not much consensus on what that really meant. As the economy worsened and revenues fell even more precipitously, we were absorbed with the immediate demands of cost-cutting while most plans for really "going local" appeared costly and inaccessible.

At a time when we needed staff to be writing those obits, births and weddings, we were turning them out onto the streets with severance packages. And with the departure of each writer, the newspaper would become by necessity less local, more wire, leaving the staff remaining struggling to keep up with the big stories.

A little over 18 months ago -- no doubt inspired by the dramatic drop he was seeing in revenue -- the CEO of the newspaper I worked for in San Diego decided to make a dramatic move. Rather than tinker with the Union-Tribune while hoping for an economic rebound, he decided to reconstruct it.

Part of that effort was to try and bridge the divide that years of tradition had established between his newsroom and the rest of the newspaper's business operations. He asked me -- a senior editor with more than 30 years in newsrooms from New York to Florida and now California -- to move to what we in news had always called "the dark side." He hoped I could help align the efforts of the sales teams with those of the newsroom's print and Internet operations.

This was a risky move for me but I also saw it as an opportunity to fully involve news people in the process of better connecting a broadly focused metropolitan newspaper to its varied community parts -- in both news content and advertising services. In the end, it was in many ways the most fascinating yet traumatic year in a 33-year career.

There were clear lessons this newsman learned in his year on the dark side.

1. Keeping the newsroom isolated from business operations may have made good sense when the money was rolling in, but it resulted in a culture of deep misunderstanding and suspicion among key work groups as the time for quick, thoughtful and timely innovation came and went.

It became clear to me that if newspapers were to retain their crucial, central role in the community, the management would have to align business and news operations so that each section of the newspaper, each portion of Web operations could point to specific readership and revenue figures that make providing that service to the community a worthwhile and profitable endeavor. We need to be local in all things and we need to prove it with readership AND revenue. It remains good business judgment not to compromise the integrity of the journalism for any advertiser, but journalists would need to develop the skills to maintain that goal while working more closely with the sales and marketing operations.

2. Newspapers that treat the Internet as simply another place to display their newspaper work, will lose their dominant role in local news and advertising as they have lost their dominance in classifieds.

Build targeted news and topic Web sites that do for distinct reader interests what Fandango and Craigslist achieved: a focused, easily accessible service on the 'net whose success can be clearly quantified. News editors should be judged going forward by their ability to build a combined audience in print, online and in mobile distribution of the news they generate for specific targeted audiences. Imagine a news editor being rated on his or her ability to gather memberships to her community Web site.

3. We need to become the "Advertising Agency" to our customers.

Advertisers almost universally hate dealing with separate print and Internet sales teams from the same newspaper. They are increasingly confused by the ever more complex job of reaching their targeted audiences. Newspaper sales teams must continue the transition from "order takers" to sophisticated, highly incentivized account executives who can sell the correct mix of print, online, e-mail and mobile advertising that will meet a client's needs.

We can either be the answer to confusion advertising clients feel in today's market or someone else will be. We can produce the type of information our readers need and deliver it to them in the manner they want, or someone else will serve those audiences. The Fandango of local news is in gestation already in many communities.

4.Despite the continuing dominance of the print product as the source of newspaper revenues, we need to re-engineer the production of news content and advertising services to serve Internet, mobile distribution and print production agnostically.

The speed with which the needs of advertisers and readers are changing suggests we should build our news content and advertising services to be equally adaptable and move easily to meet customer needs. That will mean rethinking some of the basic ways we produce the traditional newspaper. The days of every piece of type moving through a process that includes reporter, editor, copy editor, to final edit and design must end. Too slow. Too expensive. Too many people.

Building a news operation to combine print, online and mobile production suggests we deploy our troops and build for the Web first and re-engineer the construction of a print newspaper from that Web flow -- accentuating those things that are best handled in print -- depth, analysis, watchdog journalism.

Similarly in advertising, as local news audiences increasingly move online, local advertisers' budgets have been shifting to reflect that. We need to maintain our ability to offer effective online and mobile advertising to meet these customers' needs as this trend continues.

5. And one final lesson of a year on the dark side was the hardest of all in many ways. Despite efforts to re-engineer the newspaper, I was, like much of my staff before me, turned out on the street by the paper's new owners.

Thirty-three years after walking into a newsroom as a 17-year-old high school senior, I now face the prospect so many of my friends and colleagues have already confronted: being a journalist without an institution to call home.

I am not bitter. I am not angry. But I am concerned that we find a way quickly to solve this riddle and continue to supply our communities with the journalism that is crucial to its success and happiness.

A few days after being informed of my layoff, I ran into a friend who had just suffered a terrible tragedy, the death of her 24-year-old son. The family was struggling with producing an obit they hoped to place in my former newspaper.

"Can you help?" I was asked. "We are not writers. You know what should be said."

So I sat with the family and, through their tears, gathered the material. The obit, when published, was cut out and posted, folded and carried in wallets, the last public memorial of a life ended too soon.

It was a reminder to me, too, of the essential job of the journalist -- and perhaps a subtle guide as many displaced journalists look to carry on their craft in new ways.

Chris Lavin, 50, was until July 6, the general manager for lifestyles, entertainment and niche publications for the San Diego Union Tribune. Previously he was assistant managing editor of Poynter's St. Petersburg (Fla.) Times and executive city editor of the Rochester Times-Union.

ProPublica Editor: Three Strategies for Developing Citizen Reporting Team and Using Their Work

By Steve Myers
As ProPublica's new editor of distributed reporting, Amanda Michel has spent the past few months building a team of citizen reporters that is looking into how economic stimulus dollars are being spent. In a post that was published today, I interviewed her about how this type of reporting fits in with ProPublica's work, what her reporters have learned about the stimulus so far and the challenges of using this reporting method for investigative projects.

In this portion of that interview, she discusses how citizen reporting will fit in at the nonprofit news organization.

Steve Myers: What's your strategy for building a corps of citizen journalists at ProPublica?

Lars Klove Amanda Michel

Amanda Michel: We have three strategies for building a corps of pro-am journalists and integrating them into ProPublica's mission. Everything will be done under the auspices of the ProPublica Reporting Network, our pro-am journalism initiative, which we launched about a month ago.

First, we'll coordinate collaborative reporting projects. Like major metro dailies that often publish stories drawing from reporting by a half-dozen or so reporters and stringers around the country, we'll manage assignments that draw on the insight and experiences of many people. I call them assignments because we're not inadvertently scooping up old news -- we're intentionally organizing people to report.

Second, we're going to make available data and documents hidden from public view and hold them up to public review. This technique was, I believe, pioneered by Talking Points Memo and is quickly becoming an industry staple. Just two weeks ago The Guardian in the United Kingdom asked its readers to go through almost half a million MP [Members of Parliament] expense reports.

Here at ProPublica we published the financial disclosures and ethics waivers filed by the Obama administration that we obtained through the Freedom of Information Act. Even in a newsroom as young as ProPublica's, reporters are sitting atop massive stacks of documents. We won't just cherry-pick from documents sitting around the office -- we also plan to ask our readers what documents they'd like us to FOIA on their behalf.

Third, we'll create resources that people can use to critically assess what's happening in their towns and cities. Take a look at our recent post detailing ways to perform a background check on a company. Our suggestions aren't exhaustive, but they are tools available to anyone who wants or needs them. Most of the time these resources will accompany an assignment, but they'll live in perpetuity online, too.

Those are our big vision strategies. However, my role in the process is more personal and hands-on, especially during the beta phase. We're not throwing assignments up online and waiting for something to happen. Two weeks ago I hosted a conference call for a handful of our most involved members. We brainstormed our strategy for reporting the stimulus and came up with ideas for next assignments and projects.

I'm basically knee-deep in stimulus data. Getting into the thick of things shows me firsthand what to troubleshoot and develop before we scale up to the next stage. When we get bigger, my colleagues won't be telling folks that I'm off hiking the Appalachian Trail. I'll still work alongside people, but numbers will change my role dramatically. We handled the beta phase for OffTheBus much the same.

Read the full interview here.