The Next Newsroom Project

Tip of the hat to the Innovation in College Media blog for pointing out this fun presentation by UNC Daily Tar Heel’s Sara Gregory.

Twitter tips

The latest roundup of stories we’re reading around the Web about the future of news.

In praise of quick and dirty: when the pursuit of excellence is the enemy of success | yelvington.com

Steve Yelvington writes:  “Increasingly I believe that we in the media business doom ourselves by our devotion to quality. Before you get out the gunpowder, let me explain myself. I love excellence. Awesomeness is, well, awesome. But the premature pursuit of excellence can kill you.”

USA Today to Throw Open its Data This Month

“Media Content providers are increasingly opening up their vast amounts of data to developers. The latest to announce this is USA Today, with plans to provide much of its content via an API later this month. The nationwide newspaper aims to raise internal awareness about its databases first, with public access and a developer contest to follow.”

PJNet – Blog – J-Lab’s Lessons Learned from 55 Citizen News Projects

“J-Lab has funded 55 projects since 2005 with small grants, about $25,000. Many of these efforts sought to train citizens to generate stories for the site. Some were university projects. Others were launched by so-called “civic catalysts” – those bumblebees that pollinate a lot of community groups and carry a lot of knowledge about their communities.”

Betaworks and The Times Plan a Social News Service – NYTimes.com

“The News.me product has been in the works for the last six months and is due out sometime later this year, Mr. Borthwick said. It will initially debut as an iPad application, although a Web version may be introduced at some point.”

More Thoughts On Demand: A Referendum of Sorts on Google and Social – John Battelle’s Searchblog

“I find Demand’s IPO interesting for several reasons, but the one that really gets me thinking is the company’s positioning – a new form of media company that leverages technology, algorithms, and scale. It reminds me of Yahoo – which picked up Demand-like Associated Content recently.”

What Apple’s new App Store rules mean for news orgs: Some new clarity, but still plenty of fuzziness » Nieman Journalism Lab

“After loads of criticism for unexplained decisions, inscrutable rules, and what appeared to be a desire to protect the public’s morals and the feelings of the powerful, Apple has decided to finally state what the rules are for getting your app accepted into the App Store for iPhones, iPads, and iPod touches. (The change comes packaged with another shift of interest to many developers: allowing them to use non-Apple tools to code their applications.)”

Like It or Not, Twitter Has Become a News Platform «

Matthew Ingram writes: “There’s been plenty of debate lately about whether Twitter has become “mainstream” or not, but examples continue to pile up of how the social network/microblogging platform has worked its way into our lives, to the point where it has become a form of media unto itself. Whether it will ever become mainstream in the sense that it gets used by your aunt or grandmother is almost irrelevant — the reality is that, for all its flaws, Twitter is a publishing tool, and an increasingly powerful one. And it can be used by anyone, journalist and non-journalist alike.”

NPR Takes ‘Web-First’ Approach to Blogging. What Does That Mean? – San Francisco News – The Snitch

“Tomorrow, National Public Radio will formally launch the Argo Project, a group of 12 topic-based news blogs hosted by different NPR affiliates across the country. Two of the blogs are Bay Area-based: KALW’s The Informant, which focuses on criminal justice issues, and KQED’s MindShift, which looks at how technology is changing the way students learn.”

MediaShift Idea Lab . What the Spot.Us Community Thinks of Objectivity | PBS

Twitter won me over. Yes, I admit I was wrong Jon Friedman’s Media Web – MarketWatch

In a few months, Microsoft will begin selling its Kinect for Xbox 360. The technology is based on the company’s Project Natal technology that allows users to interact with video games without use of a controller or a wand.

In this TED presentation, Peter Molyneux, head of Microsoft’s European gaming division, unveils a new form of interactive storytelling which incorporates Kinect and artificial intelligence. The user interacts with young boy named Milo without the need for any devices. It’s obviously beyond the reach of most newsrooms to leverage this at the moment. But it still provides an interesting glimpse of a new form of storytelling that will begin to evolve over the next decade.

Molyneux says:

“When I saw a piece of technology called Kinect — it was called Natal — I was inspired, and I thought for a moment, maybe it’s possible to address that one problem of storytelling, to create a character which seemed alive, which noticed me, that could look me in the eyes and feel real, and sculpt a story about our relationship.”

The Web is about to undergo an important shift with the adoption of HTML 5 and CSS3. I’ve been hearing about this for some time, and I’ve been talking to people about the new standards and trying to understand just what they mean. But nothing beats a good demo to break through some numbing techno babble. And this past week, we got a thrilling demonstration thanks to Arcade Fire and Google.

The Canadian band and Google teamed up to create what they’re calling an HTML 5 film called, “The Wilderness Downtown.” Though some critics have really noted that the film shows off HTLM 5 and CSS3.That’s an important technical distinction for developers. But what interests me is the greater dynamism and interactivity they allow. And that will create opportunities to rethink the way news organizations approach multimedia projects.

Many of us first heard about HTML 5 when Apple’s Steve Jobs starting talking it up while declaring war on Adobe’s Flash, the technology that powers most of the video we watch on the Web. Jobs criticized Adobe for not being more innovative with Flash, which he also called a processing hog. Adobe fired back. But this dispute seemed for most of us to be rather obscure. For that matter, I still don’t the rationale to keep Flash off the iPhone and iPad.

With the Arcade Fire film, we can now see what Jobs is talking about. And I have to say, I’m blown away.

To get the full effect, let me suggest you download Google’s Chrome Browser first. The film has been optimized to play in Chrome. (which brings up another issue that I’ll get to later.)

Then you go to The Wilderness Downtown and type in the address of your childhood home. This can be hit or miss, because the film is integrated with Google’s Street View. So the address needs to be one that Street View has filmed. If none of yours work, you can view my film here.

What unfolds next is astonishing, in my opinion. The film pulls in your address and mashes up the film with Google Maps and Street view. You see a video of a boy running down a suburban street, while his outline is also imposed into a satellite view of your neighborhood. As the music picks up pace, various panels open and close, like pop ups, showing different perspectives. At one point, as the boy spins around in one panel, the Street View spins around in another panel in sync revealing your/my house.

It’s hard to explain why, but this is deeply affecting. And it becomes more so when a postcard pops up, asking you to write a note to “your younger self.” You can then click on the postcard while the video is still playing and type a note, and draw, with your mouse, right on the postcard. Matched with the music, this becomes a powerful, emotional experience.

When it’s done, you can immediately see the potential for a new, more interactive multimedia storytelling. HTML 5 and CSS3 can be hard to understand from a technical perspective. But let me share the best explanation I’ve heard.

As the Web works now, when you want to do something like watch a video, you have to stick an object inside a container put it in the browser. One such container is Flash. But when you put something in Flash, it’s like putting plastic wrap around it. You can’t search on it. You can’t interact with it much. With HTML 5, you can now run video in the browser without the plastic wrap around it.

So in the case of things like the Arcade Fire video, you can let people interact with it in real time, and you can continually mash it up with different things on the Web.

In the case of a news organization, I can imagine all sorts of ways to build a crowdsourced video of some event by putting the initial video on the Web, and then allowing other people to contribute data to it so that it morphs the video, or in some instances, allows them to personalize it. Looking back at the Haiti earthquake, imagine starting with a reported segment that then allows people to enter different addresses to view damage in specific areas. This would be hard to do for a breaking clip, but if you created a huge database of crowdsourced photos and video that were geo-tagged, there’s an interesting possibility.

And of course, this is just one example. You can see other Chrome experiments here.

For another perspective on the shift to HTML 5, take a few minutes to watch this video of Scribd founder Jared Friedman talking earlier this year at the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco. Scribd allows you to upload documents and view them through a Flash file. Earlier this year, the company made a bold decision to scrap Flash and move to HTML 5. Among the advantages: The text of the documents placed inside Flash can’t be searched. But with HTML 5, now they can be read by search engines.

Here’s Friedman:

And here’s his slides:

Scribd: HTML5 & The Future of Publishing

One final note: While this is all very exciting, it’s also going to be a potential pain. HTML 5 standards are still being worked out, and it’s expected they’ll be implemented over the course of a decade. Each browser developer must bake the new standards into their product, and many will do so at different paces. That means we could be headed for a long stretch of compatability issues, like the ones we had in the 1990s with Navigator and Explorer. (When every site had a ‘this site best viewed in…’ sign somewhere).

In the case of the Arcade Fire, there’s been some grumbling that the site seems optimized for Chrome, and tries to steer you there, when Firefox also has some HTML 5 baked in, as does Microsoft’s next version of Explorer. For more on that potential headache, read this solid write-up from TechCrunch about the “Coming Browser Wars.”

This past week we learned that USA Today was launching a major rethinking of its newsroom structure. The Associated Press reported:

“USA Today, the nation’s second largest newspaper, is making the most dramatic overhaul of its staff in its 28-year history as it de-emphasizes its print edition and ramps up its effort to reach more readers and advertisers on mobile devices.”

The goal is to focus less on print, more on the Web and mobile, and the search for a new audience. Sounds good so far. But it’s the details where things start to get interesting:

“The newsroom instead will be broken up into a cluster of ‘content rings’ each headed up by editors who will be appointed later this year. The newly created content group will be overseen by Susan Weiss, who had been managing editor of the Life section. As executive editor of content, Weiss will report to USA Today Editor John Hillkirk.”

That move was applauded by design guru Mario Garcia:

“Indeed, out go the traditional departments that have been the cornerstone of newspapers worldwide; in comes an approach where the tyranny of departmentalizing goes out the window, to allow for a more flexible and content driven force to prevail in the newsroom.”

Here’s what’s good about it. The traditional departments are tied to the print sections. As along as they remain in place, the core culture of the newsroom is built around the print edition. And incentives remain tied to print, because section editors are thinking everyday about how to serve the print beast which needs things like centerpieces to make them work.

Pulling away from that way of thinking will require more than just re-organizing the newsroom into different groups. Remember, just four years ago, Gannett was revolutionizing its newsrooms, turning them into “information centers.”

At the time, one Gannett exec said: “We will no longer be print-centric. We will be multi-platform ready 24/7.”

It’s not clear to what degree if any that USA Today got on board with this change. But if not, why not? Why, four years later, is USA Today suddenly re-discovering the wisdom of moving away from a print-centric newsroom? The point is that it takes more than memos and slideshows and layoffs and job title changes to reinvent the culture and the product.

Because the print product will still be there, and it will still have the same needs. Where this new approach will succeed or fail is in the dozens of decisions that get made every day in the newsroom about where to focus efforts. The people on the frontlines, the editors and staff, have to buy this new approach and fight to make it work every day. As the AP story notes:

“Although USA Today still makes most of its money from its print edition, the reorganization revolves around smart phones and computer tablets such as Apple Inc.’s iPad, which are creating new ways to sell subscriptions and advertising.

‘We have to go where the audience is,’ Hillkirk said. ‘If people are hitting the iPad like crazy, or the iPhone or other mobile devices, we’ve got to be there with the content they want, when they want it.’ “

Absolutely the right mindset.

Now, here’s the part where students of tradition will pause, and swallow hard:

“In a move that may raise conflict-of-interest questions, Weiss will have a ‘collaborative relationship’ with USA Today’s newly appointed vice president of business development, Rudd Davis, according to one slide.”

At this point, with revenue in a nosedive, all news organizations need to be exploring new ways of generating income. And in theory, there should be nothing wrong with creating more ties between business and editorial sides. Traditionalists seem to forget that back in more flush times, newspapers always ran special sections around certain topics that were initiated by the business side, largely because they could sell ads, and then the newsroom trotted along to create relevant stories to fill the section.

What USA Today must be careful to navigate is what is truly driving newsroom decisions. For instance, there’s nothing wrong with launching a green tech micro-site because the paper sees big advertising potential there. But the content can still be hard hitting and thought provoking and critical, without just being Valentines written to potential advertisers. If that happens, or appears to be happening, then the paper’s credibility will take a big hit.

Finally, what the story didn’t mention, but was hopefully in the presentation to USA staffers, was talk of new job descriptions in this new newsroom. Will there be new community managers, journalist programmers, etc.? I hope this is a part of the big change, but we’ll see. It’s no fun to see them cutting 130 jobs. But hopefully some of that leaves them room to bring in non-traditional newsroom employees who can infuse this new structure with some radical thinking.