Poynter Online

When Scandals Strike Celebrities Like Tiger Woods, Try Practicing 'Collateral Journalism'

Televised confessions and apologies have become the modern equivalent of the pillories in the public squares of Puritan America. The sinner is exposed. Jeers and insults are hurled. He becomes not just an object of derision, but a cautionary tale for others who might be tempted by the sins of the flesh.

Friday morning will be Tiger's turn to stick his head into the stocks. Woods will, no doubt, apologize to those he has hurt or disappointed. He will promise to become a better person. He will say how much his family means to him. He will pledge to work as hard as he can to regain everyone's trust. I will be surprised if he cries. Then he will answer no questions.
 
This pseudo-event offers an opportunity to reflect on the coverage of Tiger's fall from grace. That coverage has come in many different forms, responsible and irresponsible. As you'll see, it's not necessary to choose between sensationalism and abstinence. There is a third way. 

With social networks and blogs sending their alerts, with supermarket tabloids shining a spotlight, and with cable news programs hungry for extended soap opera narratives, the traditional press often feels pressured into a level and style of coverage in disproportion to a story's true significance. Such stories, like Tiger's, are always interesting, but are they important?

Editors at traditional news organizations may feel as if they face an impossible choice:

1. Follow the coverage of the tabloids.
2. Turn their backs on all aspects of a sleazy story, making their news organizations vulnerable to less scrupulous competitors.

I'm going to offer another path. For the sake of conversation and argument, I'll give that path a name: "collateral journalism."

In doing so, I walk in the footsteps of others who sought to reform journalism by adding an adjective to it. The most famous were the coiners of the "New" Journalism of the 1960s, even though it wasn't really new. Even practitioners of "investigative" journalism have tried to set themselves apart as an elite tribe devoted to a set of practices and story forms. Gene Patterson gave us the term "explanatory" journalism, which became a Pulitzer category. Pick your poison: "civic" journalism, "citizen" journalism, "computer-assisted" journalism, "online" journalism, "narrative" journalism, "hyper-local-granular" journalism and so on.

I've long joked with Mr. Patterson, one of my mentors, that although he coined "explanatory" journalism, he could neverexplain it. So, in an effort to heal myself, I'll try to explain the potential I see in the adjective "collateral." First, let me say that I almost rejected the word because of the near-cliché "collateral damage." But a quick trip to the American Heritage Dictionary revealed a set of definitions, most of them neutral or positive in their denotations and connotations:

1. side by side; parallel
2. accompanying
3. supporting
4. of a secondary nature
5. pertaining to a pledge in support of a loan
6. coming from a common ancestor, but descended from a different line

Here, then, is my definition of "collateral journalism": 

Any act of reporting or analysis that attempts to take a current story and frame it to view its higher social, political or cultural significance. 

Of course this is not new. Any good nut paragraph achieves this effect in a particular story. Beyond the nut graph, an insight into the news can be so revealing that it might be called a "conceptual scoop," requiring more than a single paragraph. Maybe a nut zone. 

Or perhaps I'm arguing for some variation of "contextual" journalism of the kind described by the Hutchins Commissionin 1947, that a free and responsible press must provide the public "a truthful, comprehensive, and intelligent account of the day's events in a context which gives them meaning." 

I'm about to slide down the ladder of abstraction and bring you back to that moment in time when O.J. Simpson was acquitted of slitting the throat of his wife and her companion. In spite of Simpson's celebrity and the prolonged narrative of a sensational trial, who would argue that the story deserved the level of coverage it received?

At the moment of acquittal, something happened that we still talk about. A meta-meaning was revealed when some white folks and some black folks reacted to the verdict so differently. If you were to write about that higher meaning -- that white people and black people view the criminal justice system differently -- you would be committing collateral journalism. In what is obviously a generalization worth studying, white people see the police as protection; for many African-Americans, the presence of police signifies profiling and containment.

Remember Elian Gonzalez: Collateral stories described the alienation of a hard core of Miami's Cuban-Americans from much of the rest of America.

Remember Natalie Holloway: Amid the never-ending plot twists, a few collateral stories revealed a fear about what happens to our high school sons and daughters when they fly away from home to pleasure islands in the Caribbean.

Remember Britney Spears, the one with no hair and no underpants? I wrote a collateral analysis that questioned the propriety of snarky gossip that ridiculed her at a moment in her life when she may have been suffering from a mental illness.

Back to Tiger Woods. Once we were about three weeks into the story, it became clear that even the most trivial details of the scandal would be advanced by the bottom feeders, such as the paparazzi photo of Elin Woods caught without a wedding ring. More sordid were the inevitable profiles of the dozen or so mistresses who emerged after Tiger's auto accident, including a porn star who recently claimed that Tiger got her pregnant -- twice.

I've spent a lot of time, on the golf course and off, talking about the tainting of the Tiger. Public interest was as high as it could get. Does such prurient fascination require the mainstream press to cover the story in the most sensational ways? To tintinnabulate for the sake of titillation? My answer is no. 

A better path is to explore the story for its higher implications, to help us get beyond the obvious and through the secret doors into American culture.

In the weeks since the scandal broke, I wish I had seen more stories that would qualify as "collateral," such as these:

1. Woods as a prototype of Barack Obama, an African-American with light skin and a proper accent (cf. the oafish Harry Reid), deemed more acceptable to white America.
2. A description of the gender differences revealed by the reaction to the scandal: how women focused on disloyalty, while men seemed more concerned with the stupidity and recklessness that resulted in his getting caught.
3. A story on race and gender focused on the reaction of African American women to Tiger's apparent obsession with light-skinned, light-haired women.
4. Whether or not a wealthy celebrity like Tiger Woods can find justice within the legal system. Does his status get him a pass? Or does it attract harsher penalties?
5. The extent to which a double standard governs cases of spousal abuse. What if it were the Tiger swinging a club at his wife?

It is not that hard to generate these collateral angles. Standard idea mapping strategies will do the trick. All you have to do is to get a chart pad and put the basic story idea in the middle: "auto accident reveals marital problems for Woods." Then, with the help of others, begin to draw spokes of meaning out from the hub. Even an hour of such work can reveal as many as a dozen stories and topics collateral to the main news. (I'll walk you through this method of mapping the next time an appropriate story breaks.)

All forms of reporting have certain dangers associated with them. For collateral journalism, that danger is over-interpretation. The evidence must be strong, and it must come from solid reporting. 

I can anticipate the critics of my thesis, so I'll give them their advanced say:

• "Why give it a fancy name? That's just good journalism."
• "People don't have time to read your analytic thumb-suckers."
• "You are simply justifying putting sleaze in the paper."
• "This kind of thinking will lead to the death of newspapers."

But consider this: There is no way that a newspaper can break a story with the speed of a good blog or Twitter alerts; and there is no way traditional newspapers can out-sleaze their competitors. So what is left? Unless we prefer a form of cultural celibacy that ignores all temptations of the sensational, wouldn't it be better for us and our readers if we offered them a more thoughtful analysis of the news, those collateral concerns that try to answer the toughest and most important news question of them all: Why does it matter?

'User-First' Issues to Watch for at paidContent Conference Friday

By Bill Mitchell

As industry leaders and innovators converge on the Times Center in Manhattan for what paidContent is billing as its "first namesake conference," I'll be on the lookout for answers to several key questions:

• Who has a handle on what is involved in creating the "new value" that is necessary to warrant new payment from users?
  
• To what extent are news organizations (and entrepreneurs) imagining user interactions with news that can translate "paid content" into "paid experience"?
  
• If payment from users is so critical to the future of journalism -- and I believe it is -- what are media executives doing to involve those users in deciding what they'll pay for?

The New York Times, which announced last month that it will begin charging for online news in 2011, conducted user research last summer on possible price points. As the prospects for charging grow more real, I'm anxious to see how the Times and other news organizations are pursuing such questions with users.

One thing I won't look for is discussion of paid content as an established business model. As I concluded in the paper I wrote for my Shorenstein Fellowship, to be posted today on the Shorenstein site, the search for ways to sustain journalism is still a long way from the business model stage.

But it is possible, reflected in the bullets above, to establish a "user-first" framework for conducting the experiments that are likely to yield such business models in the long run.

My paper sorts dozens of user-first innovations into a typology of four categories: paid content, advertising, partnerships and new ventures. 

As vendors such as Steven Brill's Journalism Online roll out their services with early clients, the paid content debate is moving from debate to actual experimentation.

Forrester Research projected spending on online content at about $3 billion for 2009 -- but very little for local news. (The report is not available online for free.) Forrester's Sarah Rotman Epps estimated that only 3 percent of Internet users in the U.S. have paid to access digital information; and such spending was done by a tiny slice of the population -- those with an average household income of nearly $100,000.

Forrester has found such payments flowing almost exclusively from niches -- work-related areas such as financial and government information, along with information relating to personal passions such as wine and sports. Forrester is expected to update its research with a presentation at Friday's conference.

Paid content is not simply about news and information.Media economist Robert Picard argues: "It is not enough to make content informative, relevant, interesting and believable. To gain loyal audiences willing to provide the financial support needed for the future, news organizations must provide engaging, pleasing and memorable experiences to their users."

So far, there are few examples of such "memorable experiences" created by news organizations. But I have seen some experiments that go beyond the blunt instrument of pay walls:

• The Miami Herald's iPhone app for Miami Dolphins coverage. Rather than erect a pay wall in front of such coverage, the paper created an app and sold 13,000 of them at $1.99 last fall. More significantly, the move provided a framework for the Herald to create other apps for other Florida sports teams. 
  
• The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette's PG+ service, which charges $3.99 a month (or $35.88 a year) for access to extra content, mostly focused on politics, music and life in Pittsburgh. Editor David Shribman hopes the service will appeal especially to the estimated 500,000 former Pittsburgh residents around the country and the world. He won't say how many subscriptions the paper has sold, limiting his assessment in a telephone conversation last year to: "We're making  steady progress and we're not going to abandon it."
  
• The Chicago News Cooperative's plans to charge $2 per week for membership in a co-op that founder Jim O'Shea, formerly with the Los Angeles Times and Chicago Tribune, hopes will include user participation in "news interest networks."
  
• Upcoming plans by the online site of the newspapers in Lancaster, Pa., to charge out-of-market users to view obituaries (after they exceeded a certain minimum number of views per month). The experiment by the Intelligencer Journal-Lancaster New Era is expected to be among the first ventures to go public with Journalism Online.

Why Plagiarism Continues & What Writers, Editors Can Do About It

By Kelly McBride

In the first years post Jayson Blair, it seemed like there was a new plagiarism case every month or so. In newsrooms big and small, young reporters -- as well as long-time editors -- got caught by savvy readers, or their victims. For a while, it seemed like plagiarism, along with fabrication, would be the journalism problem of the decade.

Then the bottom fell out of the news business and we started talking more about survival than standards. But plagiarism never really went away. Two high-profile cases, one this week and one last, brought back flashbacks of the summer of 2003, when Blair and several others were exposed. 

First, editors at the Daily Beast suspended, then accepted the resignation of, their chief investigative reporter Gerald Posner. Second, editors at The New York Times suspended, then accepted the resignation of, business reporter Zachery Kouwe. 

Both cases followed a similar pattern. First, an outside journalist pointed out the questionable copy. Jack Shafer of Slate exposed Posner. Robert Thomson of The Wall Street Journal, alerted the Times' to Kouwe's problematic story.

In both cases, when the reporters were confronted, they readily acknowledged their work was flawed and said they were dumbfounded or stunned by the revelation. Then, in both cases, a closer look at their work revealed more stolen words.

Posner and Kouwe said they were completely shocked and baffled by the additional allegations. They each blamed their systems of research and note-taking. They blamed the "warp speed" at which they must work. They blamed the Internet. (Jack Shafer lists the "dirty dozen excuses" plagiarists use.)

This is how it goes.

Plagiarism may have faded from the headlines in the latter part of the 2000s. That doesn't mean editors everywhere stopped catching it and letting people go. If anything, plagiarism became a more mundane, run-of-the-mill crime. When editors call me to seek advice after catching one of their own stealing the work of others, I tell them about the drill. 

It goes like this: You confront the writer with the evidence and see what he or she says. Then you suspend him pending a deeper investigation. Then you randomly go back and check his work. But before you do that, you tell him that you're going to do a check and ask if you're likely to find anything else. Of course he will tell you, "no." But nine times out of 10, you're going to find something. It's not hard. You just drop distinctive phrases from their copy into Google. Then compare the publication dates and time stamps.

Plagiarism will continue to flourish on the Web. It's a crime that will be committed by veterans and novices, by professionals and amateurs. Here are some simple tips for stopping this unoriginal sin (a phrase I first read in a column written by Roy Peter Clark, who got it from someone else.)

If you are a writer:

• Do not cut and paste information from other sources into your notes pages. Instead, create bullet points where you synthesize the information in your own words and note the original source.
• Before you start to research, write. In the middle of your research, write. Expressing your own thoughts and using your own words will force your brain to flex the self-expression neurons, rather than the repetition neurons.
• Develop your own voice. Too much information on the Internet is simply repeated. Even if you aren't doing any original reporting, you can find original expression.
• Do original reporting. It's hard to duplicate the work of others when you have the knowledge to say it better.
• Attribute any information. If you found it, say how. If you read it somewhere, say where.

If you are an editor:

• Require your writers to attribute.
• Learn the style and voice of your writers. When you see something that seems unusual, check it out. 
• Even if the copy is published directly to the Web, go behind and read with a critical eye.
• Ask writers to explain their reporting and research processes.
• Coach all writers, including those with a lot of experience, to make their work transparent. Always assume the reader is asking, "How do you know that?" and answer the question in the copy.

The gold medals for best mobile Olympics sites go to...

By Damon Kiesow

The 2010 Winter Olympics are well under way and the question on everyone's mind is: how do I keep track of the pivotal Canada vs. Sweden curling match on Wednesday from (pick one): [ work | grocery store | dentist | bus ]?

Luckily the power of 3G and the mobile Web guarantee you will never be more than a few smart phone clicks away from all of the schedules, scores, stories, photos and videos you could ever want from Vancouver.

We reviewed about two dozen major sites covering the 2010 Winter Olympics and narrowed it down to five that, together, should fit the bill for any sports fanatic. The criteria included content, design, usability and utility. These are all true mobile Web sites and were tested on an iPhone, but should work on any smart phone with a Web browser.

 

A few bonus apps are also included at the bottom for Android and iPhone fans.

 

So, with the caveat that these are mostly U.S.-centric and totally subjective, the gold medal winners are:

Best Overall Content: NBC Olympics 
(mobile.nbcolympics.com/inf/infomo?site=oly)
As the official U.S. broadcaster for the games NBC has an advantage in the category and it stays ahead of the pack with a solid presentation burnished by a huge amount of mobile-friendly video. Like most of the other sites represented, NBC offers stories, schedules, medal counts, photos and alerts.

Best Reference: Yahoo Olympics 
(http://m.yahoo.com/olympics)
Yahoo has probably the best looking mobile site we reviewed. The home page is topped by a medal count chart and overall the experience is highly data-driven but very user friendly. The best feature: a search box at the bottom of the home page lets you find your favorite athlete, review her medals and get a list of her upcoming competitions.

Best Schedule: Vancouver 2010 
(http://www.vancouver2010.com/mobile/)
The official host site has an absolutely great schedule tool. It provides a full day-at-a-glance including time, sport, competitors and whether or not it is a medal event. Once an event is completed, the results with a box score are also included. There is a simple drop-down menu to allow instant selection of any date. Just keep in mind the times displayed are all PST.

Best Local: Vancouver Sun 
(http://www.vancouversun.com/mobile/)
The Sun is covering the Olympics as a hometown story and has a great mix of event coverage and local impact stories. On Tuesday, alongside results from hockey and snowboarding was a story about a chain link fence surrounding the outdoor Olympic flame, and another detailing the automatic 20 percent gratuity some local restaurants are adding to their bills. If you are in town for the games, you will want to bookmark this one.

Best Read: Washington Post 
(http://mobile.washingtonpost.com/c.jsp?cid=4220539)
Something about the design and mix of stories makes the Post site very clickable and readable. We looked at a fair number of major metro newspaper sites and found this one the most satisfying. It is also the category most likely to draw disagreement, so let us know in the comments what your favorite is.

The Apps
These were not reviewed as part of the competition, but if you are on an iPhone or Android user there are a few Olympic-related apps worth checking out:
> Winter Olympics 2010: The iPhone experience (TUAW)
> 5 Android Apps for the 2010 Winter Olympics experience(Androinica)

NAA Report: Newspaper Inserts "Under Siege"

Bad as 2009 was financially for newspapers, one advertising staple held up pretty well -- preprinted inserts and the accompanying coupons bargain-hunting readers love to clip and use in a tough economy.

 

There are rumblings, however that inserts, like classified advertising before it, may be coming under intense digital competition and other pressures over the next several years. This time, the warning comes from the industry's own Newspaper Association of America.

 

In a little-noticed white paper published in late October, the NAA and Kannon Consulting, warned that inserts, which account for half of retail advertising, are "under siege." The industry, notoriously pokey in providing return-on-investment metrics or in facilitating ease of placement, needs to tone up its act in a hurry, the report suggests. (The paper was proprietary to NAA members and is not linkable).

 

Among the problems they cite:

• Stalwart preprint advertisers are restive. Sears demanded an across-the-board 15 percent rate cut.  J.C. Penney's chief marketing officer said he worries whether newspaper inserts can hold their own given big circulation losses and poor penetration among younger users.
• Digital coupon use, while still relatively small, is growing quickly, as are specials offered on companies' own Web sites.
• Over the last several years the cost to advertisers of printing the inserts (with paper more expensive) and distributing (with fuel more expensive) hit at a time when marketing budgets are tight. (Paper prices fell in 2009 but are likely to head back up later this year).
• Return on investment and other measures of effectiveness have been sweeping through advertising/marketing circles. Newspapers are adapting, but slowly, to providing the specific information marketers demand and opportunities for ZIP code level targeting.
• The complexity for a national advertiser dealing with placements in many papers causes many to turn to "third-party intermediaries" to manage the transactions, adding another layer of expense.

Much of the NAA report is technical and operational -- suggesting mechanisms for better cost management, targeting and communications. All this, the report says, is familiar to news managers. Some helpful responses are beginning to emerge. 

 

The Dallas Morning News and Gannett have addressed diminished reach of the basic print edition by offering special products delivered free to customers in desired ZIP codes who opt in.  For the Morning News it is a compact news report together with all the inserts. For Gannett, it is "Sunday Select" -- essentially all the preprints without a surrounding newspaper.

This may help the Morning News and Gannett, but the report points out, "advertisers tell us that for our industry to be truly effective with them, we need to be scalable. A great idea is less great if only one or two markets do it and if those two don't do it the same."

The NAA itself has set up an "Advertisers' Exchange," allowing newspapers to communicate quickly if they are changing Web width or modifying distribution patterns. The Audit Bureau of Circulation has a separate "Preprint Projection Center" with several hundred newspapers participating to provide up-to-date information on circulation rather than waiting for the every six-month publishers' statements.

 

That's good as far as it goes, according to Kannon and the NAA, but not enough.

 

"Creating a third-party clearinghouse with a national sales function for newspapers representing the top U.S. markets would be one evident solution. Speed is a key desire for advertisers who desperately need to accelerate the pace to market.

 

"Anything that newspapers can do to help reduce time will be an important component of what we do."

 

I'm beginning to see the difficulty of getting newspapers to act collectively on anything as a huge and recurring issue. On self-service ad platforms, charging for online content, or a uniform online audience metric (highlighted by incoming NAA chairman Mark Contreras in a Biz Blog item last month), the industry could help its customers and itself by agreeing on something simple and uniform.

 

However sound the logic, proposals for a collective response to an obvious industry problem tend not to happen. Blame inertia, blame the big papers and big companies who want to do it their own way, blame executives who can't stomach the expense of abandoning a current vendor or internal system and creating a new one.

 

Urgent business distress doesn't sweep away the objections. I get the difficulty of collective action (check out Congress). I wonder, though, if the execs were absent from eighth grade history class when the other boys and girls pondered Benjamin Franklin's Revolutionary War aphorism: "We, indeed, must all hang together, or assuredly we will all hang separately."

Thoora Shows How Publishers Can Use Real-Time Audience Data for Editorial Decisions

By Dorian Benkoil

To the list of companies that say they measure audience sentiment to help publishers' editorial judgment, add the name Thoora.

The Toronto-based startup promises to gauge how well individual news stories are doing by analyzing and calibrating real-time data from blogs, mainstream news sources and Twitter. Thoora's software uses more than 100 attributes to determine not only the most popular content but also the highest quality, using measures such grammar and spelling and the authority of sites that link to the content.

The company said the data could be used to figure out, for example, where to position an article on a page (aiding internal data from Web logs and analytics), how to apportion resources to cover a developing story or even how to follow up on offshoots that you might not have considered. It could help a news organization determine where its individual story ranks against competitors covering the same thing.

CEO Mike Lee said this is the first time that a tool has approached audience sentiment for news at the story level rather than the topic level. For example, after Serena Williams lashed out at a line judge at the U.S. Open, Thoora spotted a tennis pro in upstate New York writing quality stories about tennis rules -- stories that ranked in quality and authority with any of the larger news services and covered the topic in a way they hadn't.

"We notice there are disparities between how specific stories are dealt with, interpreted and continue to drive reaction and conversation, where it may have dropped out of the news cycle itself," Lee said. Thoora could see that after President Obama mentioned funding of high-speed rail in his State of the Union speech, conversation persisted awhile after traditional news coverage had trailed off.

Thoora, chosen last September as one of the TechCrunch 50, is part of a growing trend of attempts to measure audience sentiment, though Lee said his company is the only one that focuses strictly on news. Demand Media has gotten a lot of coverage for using algorithms to gauge popular search terms and matching them with evergreen stories such as "how to" articles. AOL is basing a large part of its editorial strategy on a demand algorithm for its dozens of sites. Aggregators like DayLife are pushing news stories to the fore based on measures of what's most popular or important.

But, Lee said, many aggregators push to the top whichever stories are about the most popular and current topics, using recency and volume as a proxy for what is valuable and worthy of attention. "We hope to not just be a quantity aggregator but to actually drive quality to the surface," Lee said.

At the recent OnMedia conference in New York, Thoora showed off Web-based charts and graphs representing its real-time data. Lee said Thoora uses subject-matter experts to vet and hone its computer selections, much as the site Pandora does with its Music Genome Project to group songs with similar characteristics.

Thoora does not yet have any clients, but Lee, a co-founder of the company, said it is in talks with a major Canadian news organization and a Canadian sports publisher. After the TechCrunch 50 presentation, Lee said, the firm got many publisher inquiries and decided to position itself as an enterprise solution, offering data to publishers rather than focusing primarily on the consumer news aggregation site at Thoora.com.

The consumer site allows people to browse stories based on similar algorithms. Lee says the company may at some point release its APIs or a free version of its platform to enable people to input their stories and see how they match up against others.

While it's impossible to say if Thoora, which is backed in part by the Canadian publisher Rogers, will succeed, I believe that editors and publishers need to be increasingly comfortable with using all the data at their disposal to make editorial and business decisions.

Journalists are finding sources and story ideas through Twitter and Facebook. Perhaps their editors can use data from those networks and others to help decide whether and how to position a story on a home page, even as Web analytics may indicate a different action based largely on page views.

To those in the industry who would complain that the ever-shifting sentiment of the crowd is replacing editorial judgment, I would say they should look at these as an adjunct to our judgment. The better we can learn to use the data, the more we enhance our input into decision-making.

News organizations that are in a fight for their lives are going to have to use every tool to attract and hold audiences that are enticed -- via their own RSS readers, friends' recommendations via social networks and guidance from aggregators like Google News -- to rely on something other than editors' picks. 

No longer do geographic or distribution boundaries allow news organizations to offer the same story as everyone else and expect users to remain loyal. In another era, "people could not pick up a Denver Post so easily" if they weren't in the Denver area, Lee said. 

"Now you have to spend a lot of time thinking of how different you are," he said, "and you have to communicate to your customers why they should come to you rather than XYZ news outlet or feed. But it's impossible to do that unless you start to understand the underlying data of how you are measured and used relative to others."

Or put it this way: Editors and publishers must figure out how to provide something for their products that major consumer brands have had to grapple with for years: differentiation. How are my automobiles, my sodas, my pairs of pants -- or my individual news stories -- any different, better and more satisfying than anyone else's? 

MediaNews Plans New Content, Expects More Traffic After Pay Walls

By Steve Myers

 There are two provocative elements to MediaNews' paid content plan, which will be tested at two sites, the York Daily Record in Pennsylvania and the Enterprise-Record in Chico, Calif., in April or May:

• The chain is developing new types of content that will deliver a better experience for all users, including those who never pay anything, said Howard Saltz, vice president for content development. 

Without going into detail, he said that content involves "using dynamic tools to scour the Web for content that's appropriate for its market." This approach will employ geo-targeted, personalized, user-generated and aggregated content, and will include classifieds and local directories.

• Because the company is creating this new type of content, Saltz said, "I am right now guaranteeing everyone that we will put content behind the wall and we're going to grow traffic."

Saltz said the MediaNews pay wall -- internally, it's called a "premium content model" -- is styled after the Financial Times, which requires registration or payment to view more than a certain number of articles a month. That comparison makes sense, considering MediaNews is using Journalism Online's Press+ paid content system, and Steven Brill used the Financial Times as an example when he told me how Press+ would work. 

MediaNews executives are still working on details and pricing, but here's how their plan will work.
 
What's not free

"The kind of content that goes behind a wall is the kind of content that paid, professional journalists do," Saltz said, such as investigations, enterprise, analysis, columns and reviews. That's what newspapers do well, he said, and "the kinds of things that you really couldn't count on bloggers and Web enthusiasts to do."
 
What is free

The sites will place content outside the pay wall if it's necessary to remain competitive with other news outlets, Saltz said. Breaking news and multimedia fall into that category. And all of the new types of content that Saltz referred to (more on that below) will be free.

MediaNews has established some guidelines on what will be free and what will be premium content, but many decisions will fall to editors and producers. "If someone robbed a bank, that's in front of the wall," Saltz said. "The story of how bank robberies increase when the economy goes bad, behind the wall." 

Who gets what

Subscribers will be able to access everything online. "We're not going to cut that person off; we have a relationship with that person," Saltz said. (In this group he counts subscribers to the print and e-editions, not Kindle and similar e-readers, though that could change.) 

People who don't subscribe can pay for online access to everything on the site, said David Bessen, vice president and chief information officer for MediaNews. The tentative (he emphasized "tentative") price is $3.99 per month.

Someone who doesn't want to pay, but is willing to register and provide some personal and contact information, will be able to access 25 premium-content articles per month. Such a person, Saltz noted, "is making a payment of sorts -- not money, but registration info is currency." 

What information does MediaNews want? Right now, Bessen said, it's "registration lite": e-mail address, ZIP code, gender and age range. The e-mail is key, so MediaNews can send newsletters with advertisements.

If someone doesn't want to pay or register, he will be able to access 10 articles per month, Bessen said. 

By keeping the pay wall permeable for such casual users, the company hopes to maintain traffic that comes from search engines and other referring sites. Such referrals make up half of all traffic on some of the company's sites. "Nor do we want to automatically create ill will" by walling off all content, Bessen said.

Users may be warned at some point before they reach that threshold (which is what the Financial Times does). And the sites may differentiate premium content by placing an icon next to those headlines.

How new types of content will increase traffic and revenue

"We'll add content types -- geo-specific presentation, aggregation, some personalization -- that make terrific sense for the online reader, and that print could not do by its nature," Saltz told me. 

For competitive reasons, he wouldn't give me any specific examples, just broad descriptions. From our conversation, it appears that this approach will include -- and may even rely on -- non-narrative and programmatic uses of information, the sort of information-based Web services that don't normally appear on news sites. Some of that content will direct people to other sites, he said.

"If we could go back in time 15 years, knowing what we know now -- invent Web sites 15 years ago -- this is what we would've done," Saltz said. "Even though the online consumer isn't going to get a lot of things for free anymore, I think overall it's a better experience."

This content has been programmed by MediaNews developers and vendors to be dynamic -- automatically updated -- and not require additional work by people in the newsroom. Small papers especially can't spare any resources, Saltz said. "If we were to hinge our Web strategy on doing things that require labor," he said, "then we'd be setting ourselves up for failure."
 
How they will judge success

"The strategy underlying all this is to protect our print product," Bessen said. "Success is a leveling-off of decline in circulation numbers and/or less of a need to have heavy sales efforts to maintain the numbers."

I responded that some people may conclude that MediaNews doesn't "get it" if the company's online strategy is set up to protect the print product. He said he understands that perspective, but the company also needs to explain to the public that news costs money.

"We need to market why we're doing this. We're countering the sentiment that, hey, I can get my news for free online, so why should I pay? ... The public in general doesn't understand where that free news comes from."

11 Strategies for Publishers to Get Their Share of Local Online Advertising

By Bill Mitchell

If I were headed back to a local news operation today instead of trying to escape the blizzard that is shutting down Manhattan, here's what I'd be focused on from the Borrell conference on local online advertising:

1. Help advertisers with their digital lives. Jeff Jarvis uttered this line within the first few minutes of his keynote kicking off the conference, and it set a theme for pretty much everything that followed. News organizations "have always told advertisers, 'We want to help you with your business,' and now we gotta mean it," Jarvis told a crowd of 400 conference-goers seeking local routes through the digital ad terrain. The new approach, he said, requires a transition "from selling space to selling service."

Such help often has nothing directly to do with ad placement. Many small advertisers simply want help showing up in Google results. Others are worried about how their reputations are being enhanced or undermined by such reputation-makers as Yelp or Angie's List. A sales rep won't be able to solve these problems herself, but she can provide a valuable service to her customer by connecting them with such services as Yodle or Marchex. And in the process, she can build a relationship with a potential advertiser.

2. Help advertisers improve their relationships with customers. "Most local, small businesses don't manage their customers," said Chris Hendricks, McClatchy's vice president for interactive media. "They just wait for them to come back." Advertisers who learn to interact effectively with customers in digital environments that their customers find useful and interesting -- Facebook, Twitter, foursquare -- are apt to do more and better business with those customers.

3. Help advertisers help publishers with content creation. When I asked members of the conference's opening panel what they were doing to improve those relationships, Chris Jennewein of San Diego News Networkdescribed the blogs he set up for advertisers to post their own material. SDNN charges advertisers $500 a month for unlimited postings (they recommend two to three per week). Only a handful of advertisers are using the service, though SDNN just launched it last fall.

The idea, Jennewein said, is to create useful content as well as generate additional revenue. Advertisers' posts are labeled "Sponsored Blogs" and appear in such sections as Living and Business as well as the Opinion section of SDNN. 

In an interview at the conference, Richard Anderson, CEO ofVillageSoup, described a more extensive version of this approach. At the weekly paper he owns in Maine, he said hundreds of advertisers have become "bizMembers," posting material directly to their blogs on his site. (I'll return to the topic of advertiser blogs in a subsequent post.)

4. Help advertisers help publishers with advertising creation. A number of vendors are providing self-serve ad creation solutions that publishers can use to reduce their cost of doing business with small advertisers. (I'll be returning to this topic to see what GrowthSpur, PaperG and others are up to.)

5. Devise a strategy to connect your local users with national advertisers. More often than not, this means joining one of the ad networks created by Yahoo, Google orMicrosoft. Each offers pluses and minuses depending on your circumstances, but if you can find a good match, it can add significant revenue.

6. Get familiar with recommendation sites such as Yelp so you can discuss them knowledgeably with advertisers who are worried about their impact on their businesses. Even before most publishers -- and advertisers, for that matter -- have come to grips with these recommendation services, second-level services such as Marchex are emerging to help advertisers manage and improve digital reputations resulting from online raves and rants.

7. Get in on the coupon craze. Newspapers are understandably worried about the future of their inserts business; those coupons and flyers stuffed inside Sunday papers can amount to as much as 50 percent of a paper's ad revenue. Revenue from online coupons is more modest so far, but sites such as Zip2Save are producing results for publishers as well as advertisers.

8. Get serious about training your sales staff. Especially if you're asking your legacy staff to sell digital ad products, they must understand what they're selling. Newsrooms have had to train their staffs in multimedia journalism; now it's the business side's turn.

9. Keep it simple. Forget about selling on a CPM (cost per thousand) basis with small, local advertisers. You can track CPM on your back end for internal accounting purposes, but create ad packages that advertisers can relate to -- so much per month with a minimum number of impressions -- rather than a deal they can't understand.

10. Get familiar with location-based, online services such as foursquare. Dave Morgan, one of the nation's most successful serial entrepreneurs (Real Media, Tacoda and now Simulmedia) points out that these kind of services, which enable playful interaction among customers of various businesses based on where those customers are at a given moment, have caught on mostly in New York and San Francisco. If you're somewhere between those high-tech meccas, you still have time to get a step ahead of your advertisers. (Chris Kouba's report on Morgan's take on the future of digital media is worthwhile, by the way.)

11. Get some of your eggs out of the advertising basket. Morgan, who worked as a First Amendment attorney for newspapers before launching his digital career in the early '90s, said he believes news "will be much more subscriber-supported" than it has been in the past. A board member of Belo Corp., which owns The Dallas Morning News, Morgan noted that stiff increases in the paper's circulation prices have resulted in relatively small circulation declines. In a brief interview after his conference remarks, he said he told New York Times executive editor Bill Keller just the other day that he'll gladly step up and pay for the online edition of the Times. 

McClatchy CEO Gary Pruitt (also a former First Amendment attorney) told the conference that he's quite comfortable with advertising as the main revenue source for McClatchy's digital businesses. But McClatchy also plans experiments with paid content in areas where there may be more money to be made from subscribers than advertisers. By way of example, Pruitt mentioned the legislative information service run by McClatchy's News & Observer in Raleigh, N.C.

Speaking of paid content, I'll be back in New York next week to cover PaidContent's one-day conference on the topic.

In Down Year, Some Award Entries Up Thanks to Online Journalism

By Roy Harris

Could this be the year online journalism really crashes the party at the Pulitzer Prizes? With entry deadlines having passed for the Pulitzers and many other contests, the prospect that Internet-based work might take home major awards is one of many questions on prize-watchers' minds. Initial indications are that both online-only and collaborative online-print projects will be stronger this year.

Another question: How will overall contest submission numbers fare compared to last year, as the financial damage among publications deepens, squeezing staff sizes, investigative-reporting resources and award-entry budgets? While most competitions are still preparing for the judging process, many are reporting that online and multimedia work seems to be boosting their total entry count.

Let's start with the Pulitzers: the oldest, most prestigious U.S. journalism awards, which are paired, of course, with honors for arts, letters and music. 

There have been fewer journalism entries in recent years, with 1,028 coming in last year, Pulitzer administrator Sig Gissler said in an telephone interview. He noted that the office was still dealing with the "traditional room full of boxes," and did not have a total count or a sense of the print-online breakdown.

 

The 93-year-old Pulitzers have been encouraging submissions by online-only operations by expanding the criteria (although the rules still bar Web sites affiliated with magazines and broadcast outlets). Last year there were no purely-online winners, and only one online finalist –- for a Politico political cartoon -- although the St. Petersburg Times's predominantly Internet-based PolitiFact project was the National Reporting winner, and also a finalist in the Public Service category. (Disclosure: Poynter owns the St. Petersburg Times).

The Pulitzers' two-tiered judging process in 14 journalism categories for print and online entries starts the first week of March. Jurors meet for three days, and forward their finalist nominees for decisions by the 19-member Pulitzer board that will be announced Monday, April 12.

 

Contest Entries Tally
Goldsmith: Down slightly
Pulitzer: No count yet
IRE: Up 15%
Scripps: Even
ASNE: Down slightly
Selden Ring: Down slightly
Bingham Prize: Up slightlyIn an early contest sometimes considered a predictor of the Pulitzers, Harvard University's Shorenstein Center announced six finalists on Jan. 29 for its Goldsmith Prize for Investigative Reporting -- including a project that involved the independent non-profit ProPublica, exposing white vigilante violence in the days after Hurricane Katrina in 2005 and raising questions about the New Orleans Police Department's use of force then. 

The project was conducted with the Nation Institute, in collaboration with the Times-Picayune and National Public Radio's Frontline. Other Goldsmith finalists were reporters for Raleigh, N.C.'s News & Observer, and for The Boston Globe, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, Washington Post, and Houston's KHOU-TV. The winner will be announced at a March 23 dinner.

Alex S. Jones, Shorenstein's director, commented via an e-mail that while total submissions decreased slightly, "the number of high quality, competitive entries has never been higher." He added, "The work we saw this year was ambitious, innovative, imaginative, and showed initiative that ranked with any year we have had the award." 

Another early prize announcer was Investigative Reporters and Editors, with its Philip Meyer Award, for work that involves social-science research. Its top prize went to USA Today for its report on air pollution levels near American schools. The Seattle Times won second place, and the Chicago Tribune third, with the Arizona Republic winning an honorable mention.

The wider IRE Awards program received more than 450 entries, an increase of more than 15 percent from last year, with online entries in that contest, too, being higher this year, executive director Mark Horvit said in an e-mail. "We're still not where we were before all the cutbacks, but we're very pleased with the response and believe it is another indicator that newsrooms traditional and new are producing important journalism with impact." The awards of that IRE contest, judged separately from the Philip Meyer Award, will be announced in early April.

 

At the Scripps Howard National Journalism Awards, which had a Jan. 3 deadline, print entries may have been off slightly, but there, too, online entries made up the difference, according to Mike Philipps, president and chief executive of the Scripps Howard Foundation. 

"It looks like we're going to be even with last year," with entries in the mid-600s, he said. "We're getting more calls from individuals, too. They used to have their work submitted by the newspaper, but often there's nobody at the paper doing that anymore."

Winners will be announced March 12 by the Scripps Howard Foundation, which offers awards in 15 professional areas, and which for the first time is letting online entries compete directly against print, rather than in their own category.

 

Representatives of Internet-only news sites seem to be gearing up for a good year in award-winning.

 

Asked about its Pulitzer submissions in particular, the editor of the online St. Louis Beacon, Margaret Wolf Freivogel, said it had two, aimed at three categories -- Public Service and Local Reporting for one race-related project, and Explanatory Reporting for its health-care coverage. 

"Over the last year, online news organizations have not only grown in number but also have become more widely recognized as sources of reliable, insightful reporting," said Freivogel in an e-mail. "The stereotype of the online journalist as a blogger in pajamas is gone. The growth of serious journalism in the digital world is well under way," added Freivogel, who was a Pulitzer juror in the National Reporting category last year.

 

The online publication MinnPost submitted just one Pulitzer entry, down from several last year, according to chief executive and editor Joel Kramer, although he considered the Pulitzers "welcoming" of online work. Kramer explained in an e-mail that "we are limiting our contest entries because they take a lot of time (and sometimes money) and our resources are limited."

 

Voice of San Diego editor Andrew Donohue said in an e-mail that his online operation had turned in one Pulitzer package, as it did last year. "While we're tremendously proud of a wide selection of our work from the year, we are realistic and disciplined in our awards submissions. (With a small staff and a limited budget, you don't really have a choice.)" Added Donohue, "Awards like the Pulitzers and the Polk are really on the cutting edge in that they are allowing online to compete directly with print."

 

Long Island University's George Polk Awards drew 430 entries this year -- the first year it has kept an entry tally. Winners will be announced next Monday, Feb. 15. In an e-mail, LIU journalism department chair Ralph Engelman, faculty coordinator for the Polks, observed that the current crop reflect:

"fewer examples of investigative journalism from major mid-sized regional papers; a significant growth in the submission of entries in which news organizations have partnered with one another; a growing importance of special funding sources for investigative reporting ...; more online material, but generally not stand-alone, rather part of a multiplatform entry ... [and] an encouraging spike in good radio entries, primarily public radio stations doing local invesgitative work, perhaps a result of the vacuum caused by the crisis in print."

With less support nowadays for investigative journalism, "those who are still doing it are understandably and legitimately making more strenuous efforts to gain recognition," Engelman continued. "Perhaps major awards like the Polks assume greater importance in this environment."

The American Society of News Editors said total entries in its 31-year-old ASNE Awards -- offered in nine categories, including a first-year Online Storytelling division -- slipped a little to around 275. The judging is this week, with winners scheduled to be announced Feb. 21.

 

Two competitions offering exceptionally high prize money -- the $35,000 Selden Ring Award and the $20,000 Worth Bingham Prize -- also are watched closely for indications of who might win Pulitzers. (Pulitzers come with $10,000, except for the non-cash Public Service prize, which is accompanied by the Joseph Pulitzer gold medal.)

 

Geneva Overholser, director of the University of Southern California Annenberg School for Communications' journalism school, which administers the Selden Ring, said in an e-mail that entry numbers may be down this year. But while it is "too early to know anything about the quality" of entries, "a quick glance surely looks reassuring to me." The entries will be judged next week, with winners announced shortly thereafter.

 

An initial review of entries for the Worth Bingham Prize from Harvard's Nieman Foundation showed 88 submissions, four more than in 2009, according to Nieman curator Bob Giles, who noted that the number includes online-only entries that were permitted for the first time this year.

 

As was the case for the Scripps competition, more Bingham entries came from individuals this year, rather than from their employers. "A number of checks to cover the entry fee were sent in by the reporters themselves," said Giles, "but they sometimes get reimbursed by their papers, so it's hard to know if that's a sign of the times."

 

Two papers with strong Pulitzer-winning traditions that have kept on processing submissions for that and other prizes are the Charlotte Observer and Seattle Times. Rick Thames, the Observer's editor and vice president for news, said in an e-mail: "We're actually slightly up from last year's Pulitzer entries," although in some other competitions the paper did not increase entries. "I'd say our commitment, in general, is the same as it was last year." The Seattle Times, too, submitted more Pulitzer entries, executive editor David Boardman said in an e-mail. 

 

He added, "Certainly, the manner in which many contests have opened up to online entries encouraged us to showcase some of our best digital work, especially around breaking news."

 

That has paid off already in the Goldsmith investigative competition, in which the judges gave the Times a special citation for its breaking news coverage of the murder of four police officers.

 

Roy Harris is the author of Pulitzer's Gold: Behind the Prize for Public Service Journalism, now updated to include the 2008 and 2009 Pulitzer Prizes, and available in paperback.

Borrell vs. Potts: Can Local Advertisers Be Sold on Local Online News?

By Bill Mitchell

Borrell vs. Potts: Can Local Advertisers Be Sold on Local Online News?  

Posted by Bill Mitchell at 6:16 AM on Feb. 8, 2010

		RELATED
		2010 predictions by Borrell Associates: Joining a chorus declaring the Year of Mobile, they envision a doubling of mobile ad revenue, 18 percent of it local. Forecasting an "endless campaign," they see a surge in political ads, most of it local but only 1 percent online. Projecting big growth on a small base, they say ads in movie theaters will grow 82 percent, mostly from frustration with other venues.

Gordon Borrell is a former reporter who says it pains him to conclude that local news online is doomed to be "a loss leader" that will never pay its way. 

Mark Potts is a former reporter who says Borrell "is smoking something," and argues that the main reason local news has never generated much advertising support is that "no one has ever tried."

Borrell and Potts are among an array of execs, entrepreneurs and experts sharing the spotlight this week at Borrell's annual conference examining local online advertising. (I will attend and tell you what I learn.)Kip Cassino, Borrell's vice president of research, will project an online ad landscape for 2010 that predicts modest recovery of 15 percent from the pits of 2009, about a third of it local. 

"We're still bumping along the bottom of a well," Cassino told me in a telephone interview last week. With revenue prospects still relatively low, the stakes get higher for each and every segment of potential growth.

"I am highly skeptical of 'local news' on the Web as a sustainable business model," Borrell said in an e-mail. "It won't be supported by subscription fees anytime soon, and people DO NOT see display ads on news sites. And I can prove it."

Borrell & Associates Gordon Borrell

Borrell, whom I first encountered at an audiotext conference in 1991, started out as a reporter at The Virginian-Pilot before heading Landmark Communications' new media operations and, in 2001, launchingBorrell Associates to advise media companies on local advertising.

"I love my local newspaper, but I don't use my local newspaper's Web site unless something really big is happening," he told me in a telephone chat Friday. "I just don't think local news has the value online that the newspapers think it has. The value is very low." 

Borrell is much more bullish on such non-news startups aszip2save, a national coupon site customizable by ZIP code, and yourLI, which provides merchant coupons on Long Island. "We don't find advertisers clamoring to buy advertising around local news," he said. "They're clamoring to attract the eyeballs of people who already have their wallets open."

In a move he describes as "brave or stupid," Borrell has invited Potts, Jeff Jarvis, Chris Jennewein, Chris Hendricksand others to his stage to try and prove him wrong.

Mark Potts

Potts, a former Washington Post reporter and new media exec, founded the hyperlocal BackFence site in 2005 but shut it down two years later when it failed to gain sufficient traction.

Among his takeaways from BackFence: the difficulty of mastering content creation, marketing and advertising all at once. Rather than tackling all three in his next venture, GrowthSpur, he settled on one: the challenge of local advertising. 

"Local advertising is relevant content," Potts argued. "It's a different kind of advertising" than the typical effort to interrupt an editorial experience with a banner ad message unlikely to interest users.

Hyperlocal advertising has never worked, he said, because neither legacy news organizations nor startups have figured out a way to enable small businesses to spend small fees to reach small audiences. (That is one of the goals of the New York Times-CUNY partnership on its hyperlocal blog The Local.)

"The cost of selling the ad and the cost of making the ad has got to be pretty close to zero," Potts said. New tools are helping publishers and advertisers approach that price point, he said, but that's only part of the challenge. Publishers are still struggling with big gaps in the training and guidance it takes to sell to the hyperlocal market -- precisely the niche he hopes GrowthSpur can help fill.  

"All this is coalescing into the next generation of community newspapers." -- Mark Potts"We're at the early stages of what some people think is a late stage," he said. "Local advertising hasn't really been tried and that's been mistaken for failure. There are unbelievably cheap publishing tools available now, along with out-of-work journalists creating thousands of community sites that didn't exist three or four years ago, and great tools for creating advertising. 

"All this," he said, "is coalescing into the next generation of community newspapers."

So what do you think: dawn or dusk for selling local advertisers on local news online?