Sampling Missouri J-School Tech Summit

The University of Missouri School of Journalism on Friday hosted a technology summit to close out three days of panel discussions and parties celebrating its centennial.

The sessions were short (20 minutes) and organized in three tracks: digital storytelling, disruptive innovation and future economic models. Many (though not all) featured entrepreneurs pitching their start-ups’ products — some of which are not yet in wide release.

It’s impossible to provide a comprehensive single post on the sessions, but you can check out the J-school centennial’s blog for coverage of many of them (as well as those on other topics on Thursday).

In the several sessions I attended, I didn’t see anything that blew me away. But the demos reinforced the reality we in newspapers live with daily: the competition for people’s attention and time is exploding.

In fact, several of the start-ups I saw in the disruptive track, while different in their specifics, are essentially aiming at the same goal: making it easier and faster for individuals to find, consume and share just the content we want. The projects presented here are a sliver of those being pursued to find ways to help people cut through the digital noise. Just take a look at some of the start-ups that won coveted presentation spots at Tech50 and Demo, two of the biggest tech demo events, which were this week in California.

APME/SND: The Digital Chiefs

Running notes from the Associated Press Managing Editors (APME) and the Society for Newspaper Design annual conferences.

APME president David Ledford leads a discussion about the role of editors in digital strategies with Howard Weaver, McClatchy’s vice president of news, and Rob Curley, news website pioneer and now head of the Las Vegas Sun’s digital operations. Video clips of Gannett digital chief Chris Saridakis addressing the same questions are incorporated into the conversation.

Some highlights:

Saridakis: The best way to advance digital strategies is to build a culture of experimentation in the newsroom. Constantly push the envelope of technology and of reporting. Understand how readers use information.

Curley: He explains a benchmarking experiment the Sun is about to do. But first some background: The Sun is in a unique situation (earlier post here) because it can start over, setting distinctly different but complementary missions for its print edition and website.

The Sun pays close attention to traffic trends and now has a home page that is not templated. It is redesigned every day to respond to traffic trends and news. Because breaking news drives traffic, in recent months the Sun has started posting those headlines at the top of the homepage, pushing down the well-designed packages that lead the page at the start of the day.

“It couldn’t be much uglier,” Curley says. Those ugly headlines are getting traffic.

In a couple of weeks, the Sun will begin adding design concepts to those ugly headlines and will watch the traffic. “Whatever wins is what we’re going to do,” he said. (He promises he will blog about this.)

Weaver: Newspapers need to think about a much wider range than their websites. Younger readers, he notes, assume the news will come to them — through RSS feeds, email, etc.

In order to stay true to our mission, which is public service journalism, newspaper companies have to remain a mass medium, but not the same kind of mass medium. “If we can’t find a way to do this that sustains public service journalism, then there is no reason to suffer this bad.”

Curley complains that most top editors know everything happening in print, “but they don’t know how their online site works.”

Ledford asks a question that’s been a topic of conversation during the breaks and informal moments this week: Will things get worse before they get better?

Weaver: He expects the economy is going to get worse, but he’s not sure about the newspaper industry. He believes a big part of the problem is cyclical because three of our biggest sources of advertising revenue — real estate, auto and retail — are in the tank. He acknowledges though that some is secular, brought on by the shift away from print toward online. “It’s not raining on us, it’s just raining … we have to learn to work wet for a while,” he says.

Saridakis and Curley believe things are going to get worse and the secular shift is significant. Saridakis says a bright spot, though is that content is still king, no matter the medium.

When the conversation is thrown open for questions, a journalist notes the deep staff cuts at McClatchy papers this year and challenges Weaver to explain how, in the face of such cuts, newspapers are going to sustain public service journalism.” How do we do it? We can’t do it all.”

Weaver replies: He says he was not intending to minimize the losses in McClatchy newsrooms this year. “This has been an incredibly painful process for us and one that hurts our journalism. What we’re trying to do is get through this the best we can with a mission-centered vision and our mission is public service journalism.”

Another editor in the audience asks: How do you define great journalism — adding that “most what we do that readers love the most would never win the Pulitzer Prize in a mission years.”

Curley agrees enthusiastically and offers an example: The Sun recently published an extensive story on water that a reporter had spent a year on. It got a little over 200 page views. A report report on the death of Mojave Max, a turtle used for years to teach Las Vegas school kids about the desert, got 22,000 page views. “If you’re not going to do Mojave Max, you’re screwed.”

Weaver challenges the either-or assumption as a false dicotomy. He says public service journalism is not necessarily massive projects. It’s aggressive coverage of local government; it’s holding public officials accountable; it’s journalism that creates community cohesion.”

SND: Crazy, uncompromising ideas on news web design

Running notes from the Associated Press Managing Editors (APME) and the Society for Newspaper Design annual conferences.

Bill Ostendorf says he started out in journalism thinking he was going to be another Mike Royko, only to discover that he wasn’t funny in print. So instead, he’s had a career of many morphs. And in person, his sense of humor and high energy make for a fast-moving session that veers across a lot of territory but somehow is crystal clear.

Ostendorf is an award-winning photo editor and designer. After leaving the Providence Journal a few years back, he founded Creative Circle, a consulting firm that works in design, training and culture change. Since 2000, he has led about 200 redesigns.

Ostendorf says newspaper websites “stink” — including most of those that regularly win major awards. “This is because of the lemming effect in newspapers,” he says. “Newspapers feel comfortable in doing what others do.”

He offers 10 tips on how to “fight the ugliness”:

1. Scrolling is out. Penetrating is in. He shows a slide of eyetrack research on a long web page. It shows that nobody read to the bottom. He flips through slides of several newspaper websites that have been redesigned recently. They are wider and cleaner, he says, but almost all are also longer. And they have too many links.

2. Don’t copy from newspapers, because newspapers are dumb. “There’s this incredible notion that other newspapers know something … No, they are just as lost as you.” He uses this riff to reinforce Tip 1, interspersing slides of newspaper websites with some from which he gets inspiration — Apple, Dell, Google. There’s no scrolling and fewer links.

Ostendorf says news websites he’s recently redesigned without scrolling are getting more page views, longer time on site (stickiness) and more clicking on links. Users also are clicking on more ads. It’s too early to draw firm conclusions, he notes.

3. It’s not how many links you have. It’s how fast I get to what I want. In focus groups done for these recent redesigns the message was loud: people want fast.

4. Learn from newspapers: hierarchy, consistency, variety.The great thing about a well-designed newspaper page: the reader has no doubt what’s important. But on many newspaper websites, everything is the same volume (and usually low.) Ostendorf says web designers are often limited by crappy software and rigid, limited templates. He advocates using multiple templates that give greater flexibility and set up hierarchy.

5. Credibility comes from your print heritage. Good branding is important. He’s a fan of niches; it’s important for newspapers to do them. But they should somehow carry the parent brand.

6. Web sites need a sense of place. They should use images and words that make it clear where they are, what communities they are serving.

7. Think life, not news. Online, cover life, he says, not just news. Ask yourself: where do people go, how can we connect with them, how do they mark their lives — anniversaries, weddings, Bar Mitzvahs.

8. Pictures are big. Really big. He shows some more generic-looking sites. The photos are tiny; the text is dense.

9. Don’t think of one dimension on a flat screen. He’s been watching what younger users — college age or so — do when they sit in front of a computer. (He shows online game slides.) He says he’s working on figuring how to make news sites three dimensional.

10. Don’t just be a website. Be a community. Be my community.

SND: Worldwide convergence

Running notes from the Associated Press Managing Editors (APME) and the Society for Newspaper Design annual conferences.

Dietmar Schantin takes this session on a tour of newspapers around the world that are in various stages of moving beyond publishing once daily in print. Schantin directs the Newsplex unit of IFRA, an international media consulting firm, advising newspapers on integration of various publishing platforms.

“It’s not about a single channel (of distribution) anymore,” he says. “It’s about breadth.”

He describes a cycle of publishing when big news breaks, which starts with an SMS news alert to mobile users, followed quickly by posting of the first online report, then continuing updates and SMS alerts (which also direct mobile users to the newspaper’s website for more information) through the day. In the evening, the story is prepared for the next morning’s paper, which will include a promo urging readers to visit the website for the latest updates.

Schantin says newsrooms publishing on multiple platforms are currently structured in one of three ways, and he gives examples of each:

Newsroom 1.0, multiple media newsroom.
Reporters and photographers (he calls them content gatherers) mostly focus on print, there are production teams for each platform and an editor with overall responsibility. There are usually one or two editors “running around a newsroom begging for content for online.”

Newsroom 2.0, cross-media newsroom.
The content gathers provide for print, online and sometimes broadcast. Each platform has an editor who decides which of this content it will use. There are packaging/production teams for the platforms.
He says about 4 percent of newsrooms work like this.

Newsroom 3.0 media integrated newsroom.
This is similar to the 2.0 version, but with one layer missing: an editor for each platform. Instead, editors of news departments (sports, business, local news, etc) are responsible for that department’s content on all platforms. In this structure, only the production specialists focus on one platform. “It’s about topics, not platforms,” he says.

Schantin says so far only two or three newsrooms in the world have moved to this degree of structural integration. One is the The Telegraph newspaper in London, which recently made the transistion. He shows a video in which Telegraph journalists and executives describe the operation. (In the U.S., he says, the sports department at the Tampa Tribune comes closest.)

APME: Google and newspapers

Running notes from the Associated Press Managing Editors (APME) and the Society for Newspaper Design annual conferences, which are being held concurrently this week in Las Vegas.

Richard Gingras, a senior adviser to Google, begins this APME session by making it clear he’s never been a journalist. (He has helped launch some news products.) But he’s come to reinforce CEO Eric Schmidt’s recent statements that Google intends to be friend, not foe, of newspapers.

Schmidt drew quite a bit of attention a few months back when he said the company has a “moral imperative” to help newspapers figure out new revenue models.

Gingras says Google shares one of the main concerns of editors: How to stimulate and sustain original reporting during these times.

At Schmidt’s request, Gingras has spent the past year looking at many aspects of our industry — from website traffic patterns and evolving business models to ways to help make public records easily accessible. He shows a few slides about trends that are well-known in this crowd: Reliance on print, television and radio for news is declining, while use of online sources is growing. About half of most newspaper websites’ traffic comes in through sources other than the homepage — primarily through search.

Gingras explains the key factors that contribute to a high search ranking in Google. One of the most important is page rank, which evolves mostly from links that drive people to a site.

He points out — a couple of times — that Google News does not monetize its pages directly and sends traffic (about 700 million visits per month) to news sites. He says Google is trying to figure out how to more quickly surface on Google News significant, exclusive stories done by newspapers.

Google crawls about 40,000 news sites all over the world every 10 minutes. “Our definition of a news source is something that is of constant debate internally,” Gringas says. Google looks for sites that have some editorial process behind the content, as well as an organization behind them “so we can feel the information is credible.”

Finally, Gingras urges editors to take a lesson from Wikipedia’s redefinition of the encyclopedia.

Although it has no original reporting, Wikipedia is becoming a popular source for news. To illustrate this, Gingras shows a recent Google search on the anthrax attacks. The first result: a Wikipedia article. The second: The site of a man who has been researching and following the case for several years. People are going to these sites, and referring others to them, in large enough numbers to drive them to the top of page rankings, he says.

The Wikipedia article is nearly 5,000 words and also has multiple sources linked. On big news stories, Gingras argues, Wikipedia’s contributors usually go a good job of pulling together a lot of reliable material — often from newspaper sites — and updating it continually.

He offers a premise: the atomic unit of news content has changed. That’s what happened with music. Until a few years ago, the atomic unit of music was albums. But with the development of mp3, it became the song. “It’s not about your site, it’s about the article,” Gingras says.

He is echoing recent comments by one of Google’s top executives, Marissa Mayer, vice president of search and user experience. Mayer is co-chair of a panel convened by the Knight Foundation and the Aspen Institute to propose ways to help American communities meet their information needs.

He believes newspapers can capitalize on their ongoing coverage of certain topics by rethinking how they structure content online. Don’t make users go into an archive to read your paper’s past coverage, he says. He urges editor to create “living stories or topic pages,” that have stable (standing) URLs. The web rewards URL stability, improving page rank, placement in search engines and, in turn, this creates stronger sharing and engagement with the content. (He acknowledges not every story is worth this effort.)

And leverage the value of who you are, he tells the editors, by giving the audience information about the editorial process, the backgrounds and prior work of reporters. “People don’t understand journalism … Give the public some indication of how you do your work.”