heisel.org

Web natives and journalism

Thursday | May 8, 2008 | 5:37 pm  

The Journalism Iconoclast » Web natives need to lead Web operations: “I mean honestly would you stick a bunch of Web people with little print experience in charge of a print publication? I guess if you wanted to fail you might consider that a viable option.

Let’s be real here: Web operations can only thrive when they are staffed by people who get the Web and enjoy using the Web. These are people who categorically prefer the Web over print publications. If this doesn’t describe your journalism organization, then you are doing something wrong.”

He gets my +1

Permalink | Comments (0) | Categories: Business, Journalism, Management, MarsDraft

What is Web 2.0 and why do (some) journalists fear it?

Friday | April 25, 2008 | 5:50 pm  

I thought the guys from the O’Reilly Insight Group did a really good job of summing up what “Web 2.0″ is:

• Listening - To your customers, readers, partners, etc.
• Participation - Joining into the conversations and relationships that those folks are having, and letting them participate in your conversations and relationships.
• Transparency - Opening yourself up, being honest about mistakes
• Ongoing inquiry - Continually asking your audience about what they’re looking for from you, ways to improve, etc.

Don’t those four points sound an awful lot like things that are core to journalism?

• Listening - To your sources, to your readers.
• Participation - Providing information to create better participants in a democracy. Participating in the society via an Op/Ed page.
• Transparency - Isn’t it every journalist’s goal to make as much of the public and private sectors transparent to the community they serve?
• Ongoing inquiry - Beat reporting, investigative journalism. We are an industry of ongoing inquiries.

So if “Web 2.0″ and journalism are so similar, then why are so many journalists afraid or hostile toward “2.0″ features on their Web site and “2.0″ sites in general?

I don’t have an answer, and the Web doesn’t need any more speculation, so I’ll just put that question out there and hope some smarter folks have answers.

Permalink | Comments (4) | Categories: Business, Journalism, Management, Technology

Quote of the day: NITF

Thursday | February 21, 2008 | 2:57 pm  

“OMG I can hear the clunking sounds coming from the NITF website” – IM conversation with Zellyn

Permalink | Comments (0) | Categories: Journalism, Programming, Technology

For journalists, it’s less about business, more about audience

Monday | February 4, 2008 | 1:35 pm  

Yelvington is talking about a bias against the business side of journalism and a class called Business and Future of Journalism.

I would tend to agree that too many members of the Fourth Estate are phobic when it comes to dirty words like: profit, return on investment, and revenue.

I applaud the idea behind teaching more journalists more about the business side. Why wouldn’t you want to know everything there is to know about your profession — at the very least it’d make it easier for you to argue a point to management.

If you can’t know it all, know your audience

If you don’t have the time or the interest to learn about everything, then the most important thing for aspiring and practicing journalists to learn about is the audience.

In my limited travels it strikes me that a lot of journalists either don’t know, or don’t care about the audience research being conducted. The “don’t know” camp can be helped, but the “don’t care” camp scares me. If we’re not here to write, shoot, design and code for our audience… then who are we doing it for?

If you write a perfectly crafted, exquisitely shot and artfully arranged multi-part public service piece about your local government abusing it’s power but no one read it, did you every really serve the public?

(Snarky comment: If we’re not serving the public, and we’re not making money then what are we doing?)

Obviously the business of journalism can’t be summed up as “get lots of readers, get lots of page views” — niche products, advertiser interest and the long tail all serve to make it more complex than that.

However, if you can only know one thing shouldn’t every journalist in a newsroom know about their audience?

In my twisted brain it’s easier to express the idea in code:

while profit > 0:
    knowledge = conduct_user_research()
    newspaper.staff.improve(based_on=knowledge)
    profit = newspaper.revenue - newspaper.cost
 
    if profit = None or knowledge = None:
        raise GameOverMan

Permalink | Comments (2) | Categories: Business, Journalism, Management

Journalism job description tag clouds

Wednesday | January 23, 2008 | 7:23 pm  

A colleague of mine, (whom may or may not remember me from my Dow Jones Online Internship), Eric Ulken built a tag cloud of keywords in postings to journalismjobs.com.

Not surprisingly, “blogs”, “interactive”, “flash” and “graphics” top the list — it seems, so far, that those are the key terms that have been labeled ‘online’ by most newsrooms.

Let me offer folks my ideal tag cloud:

Permalink | Comments (0) | Categories: Journalism, Python

Urban renewal for data ghettos

Tuesday | January 22, 2008 | 8:18 pm  

So, I gather that in newsrooms it’s become fashionable to put public records online.

I totally love the term that Matt Waite coined — calling them data ghettos:

But if you take a step into one of the databases and you get to my second problem with them: couple of search boxes and a button.

Is that really it? Is that the big newspaper.com push into data? Sprawling, barely organized pages to get to a couple of search boxes and a button?

I’ve certainly been guilty of this myself.

But I love the solution that my team came up with at work for a Georgia names project that went live tonight.

They provided both a searchable interface and some pre-set searches that highlight interesting names.

The best part is that Zellyn made it so that journalists, developers, designers, or anyone in our group can create new lists on the fly in our neat-o keen Django application.

It’s the first time at work that we’ve built a tool around a set of data. Normally we lump our work into two camps:

• Data-driven applications like my purchase card project expect that the only human interaction is our loyal readers contrasted with…
• Tools like our gallery publishing system expect staff users on the ‘backend’ and loyal readers to interact with them on the ‘front’ end

This the first time that we’ve merged aspects of both and I think it provides some urban renewal to what could otherwise be a data ghetto.

Permalink | Comments (0) | Categories: Databases, Journalism, Programming

AJC development group mentioned at APME

Saturday | October 6, 2007 | 3:29 pm  

We’re in film!

Robin Henry, our Digital Managing Editor extraordinaire, spoke at a recent Associated Press Managing Editors conference and screened this Soundslides presentation that Emily Murphy and the AJC’s multimedia group put together.

I look and sound like a total dweeb, but wanted to take a chance to pimp the developers, designers, DBAs and sysadmins at work who make all the cool stuff we do possible!

Permalink | Comments (0) | Categories: Django, Journalism, Programming, Python, Technology

Two takes on agile development worth discussing

Monday | January 8, 2007 | 5:50 pm  

Over at Code Craft Kevin is arguing that agile methodologies make for more code, rather than less.

It’s an interesting idea — that the waterfall model introduces some sort of Darwin-esque survival of the fittest trials that only worthy features/products can make it through.

I’d argue the opposite — that, if done right, agile methodogolies (esp. when combined with dynamic languages) bring about less code. And that the agile process, especially if it’s augmented by user monitoring/metrics, creates an actual Darwin-esque feature ecosystem.

If you can write a feature in less code (with Python, Ruby, PHP, your dynamic language here), in less time and deploy to users quickly — then your code and business processes are much closer to the “pulse” of your userbase.

On the other hand, a long waterfall process probably errs on the side of the personal tastes and preferences of the managers and stakeholders in the review process. If that’s mated with a more-code oriented shop then you’re dangerously removed from that “pulse.”

Post-Agile?

Meanwhile… back at Creating Passionate Users they’re asking the question what comes after agile in the evolution of development processes.

Right now agile/xp seems like the be-all, end-all, as fast and as good a process as you could ask for. But then I also thought doing pointer arithmetic and remembering the semi-colon was fun.

Change is constant, there’ll be something better… let the battles begin.

Will my Mom ever grok RSS?

Slightly off topic, but still worth mentioning Wisdump thinks RSS will never go maintstream.

I’m not strongly inclined to say it’ll never go mainstream, but I am surprised that it hasn’t gone more mainstream already.

Will RSS only ever be the de-facto simple REST API for content providers?

Or will my Mom ever sign up for Google Reader, Bloglines or MyAJC?

I think this one’s still in play, for now, it’s an interesting idea that RSS may be a primarily power user- and developer-focused technology…

Permalink | Comments (0) | Categories: Journalism, Programming, Technology

Best sig on AIM today

Tuesday | May 16, 2006 | 5:05 pm  

“The user-generated content would create the site.” (via Laura)

Permalink | Comments (0) | Categories: Business, Journalism, Web design

Lessons to be learned from the miner debacle

Thursday | January 5, 2006 | 8:11 pm  

My former news editor, the honorable Fred Vultee has a great discussion going about what you can, can’t, and definitely should put in a headline about the status of trapped coal miners.

I wasn’t paying terribly much attention to the story until the story became about the story — metajournalism?

I couldn’t believe the shoddy sourcing the papers, and TV, were using. (Ok, I could believe TV was using such shoddy sourcing.) The governor heard from a relative at the church who got a phone call from someone else — give me a break!

While I was reading about the aforementioned shoddy sourcing I kept hearing this voice in my head saying, “says who?”

“Says who?!”

The voice was Fred’s. That phrase was one of many I’d often hear him saying to me, or the copy editors we we’re supervising at the Missourian.

Fred’s got a great listserv for current and former Missourian copy editors, headsup, that’s always been a fun time, at least for people who think copy editing is fun (a small minority of which I’m proud to be a member).

Bowing to Web 2.0 pressure, or just because he can, Fred has added a blog aptly named headsuptheblog.

So, to make my long blog entry short, Fred’s got some great thoughts on the whole miner debacle going that you should read, but I thought this was a particularly good nugget o’ wisdom ™(patent pending):

It reminds us, or ought to remind us, of a few phrases that ought to be translated into Latin and etched in stone above the copy desk, so we can point to them when needed:

1. If attribution is part of the story, it’s part of the hed.
2. Speculation isn’t confirmation.
3. Repetition isn’t confirmation.

Permalink | Comments (0) | Categories: Journalism