I have new duty to add to journalists’ jobs: Imagine how readers will use the information news organizations disseminate.

In the past, it was enough to gather the information, accurately explain it, and make some sort of sense of the news for readers. Now, journalists need to imagine what is is like to be the consumer of that information — and to use that knowledge to better craft the messages, regardless of what format (text, video, photo, audio, social media) they employ.

An example illustrates my point. Recently, my family and I were driving back from a New Year’s trip to New Orleans. We were about half-way through the 20-hour drive, when we hit the snow-and-ice covered roadways of Interstate 81 in southern Virginia. We were going along at a decent clip, when suddenly traffic stopped.

Read the rest of the post at Harvard University’s Nieman Journalism Lab.

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A concept that gets bandied about a great deal is that news organizations need to help people “make sense of the world.”  I’ve used the idea myself to show how news organizations need to realize they sell convenience, not news. We all kind of know what we mean by this concept, but it doesn’t have a clear definition.

Last week, I encountered a situation that clearly illustrates what I think it means for a news organization to help its readers/viewers make sense of the world.

At 5:30 a.m. on day, I got a text message from one of  my local television stations alerting me that my kids’ school was closed because of an impending snowstorm. This was a valuable bit of information. Getting it by text was incredibly convenient. My phone buzzed on my bedside table, alerting me to the text.  I didn’t even have to get out of bed. I turned off my alarm and slept in, a rare luxury in my frenetic life.

Read the rest of the post at Nieman Journalism Lab.

Here are some good posts for journalists – or anyone interested in the changing face of media – to read from my surfing around the blogosphere:

Why less is not more:  A post by internet marketing consultant Chris Garrett offers some sage advice on social media use.  In essence, he sayd, for it to work, you have to actually use it. He takes issue with the approach of some (many) who try to automate every aspect of their social media use to save time. Scheduled tweets; interacting only with the big wigs, not the regular Joes; limiting followers. He points out that this would be as foolish as a business limiting how much time it uses the phone.

Garrett’s advice is geared at mareketers, but I think it offers much for journalists. If your attempts at using social media come across as if people are interacting with a computer, guess what, people won’t want to interact with you. Who would? Now I don’t think Garret is saying people should spend their lives on Twitter, and I’m not advocating that either. But if you want a tool to work for you, you need to give it more than half a chance.

Don’t blame the aggregators: Michael Arrington, at TechCrunch, raises an important point for news organizations with this post about the value of aggregators. News sites, at least some of them, hate when aggregating sites compile a list of links that include their sites. And that makes absolutely no sense.  As Arrington explains: 

When someone visits your site they are doing you a favor. Not the other way around. And when an aggregator puts up a link to your site, they are doing you a favor by sending you traffic. Not the other way around.

What would a Google newsroom look like? Owni offers a compelling glimpse of what it might look like, complete with a graphic showing who reports to whom. The idea isn’t what Google looks like. It’s what a newsroom would look like if it followed the principles that Google espouses on the Web. 

The graphic is in French, but if you half paid attention in your high school French class, you can easily figure it out. The story is translated into the English. Best takeaway:  This approach calls for a ” journalism that is not just content production but becomes an on-going process that is based on the strength of the network (information fragmentation, new rhythms, social media, user generated content.)”

What the news biz can learn from food marketers: Tom Cunniff uses a novel food analogy on MediaBizBloggers to explain that news publishers need to better understand what food marketers get so well: You can charge more for what’s rare. He cites the example of Cave Swiftlet saliva,  the main ingredient in bird’s nest soup. This ingredient is so rare, the soup goes for $30 a bowl.

A less-exotic example is one I’ve cited before — cheese. Sliced American is cheap; goat cheese made in small batches is more expensive. Or consider saffron, a spice harvested by hand from crocus flowers that goes for $50 a quarter-ounce. The problem is: If you’re selling sliced American, you can’t charge as if you’re selling Cave Swiftlet saliva soup. Cunniff offers some smart tips for dealing with this issue, such as sell it by the slice, make it bigger, make it smaller, and — my personal favorite — make it more convenient.

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The legacy press or the traditional media or whatever we’re calling newspapers these days has one main challenge for 2010. And it’s not finding a new business model, although, of course, that’s important, too.

But the main challenge has nothing to do with business plans. It has to do with vision. It has to do with being able to imagine a world that does not yet exist.

While the news media’s woes come from lagging ad rates and content that’s scooped up (or stolen, depending on your perspective) by aggregrators, these are all symptoms of the main problem. The true problem for the media is an inability to imagine what media consumption will look like in one, five, 10 years.

Read the rest of the post at Nieman Journalism Lab.

Happy 2010, readers! Wow. We survived what was quite the troubling year in journalism, and, I think, really, that journalism is better for it. Yes, there’s been too many layoffs, pay cuts, buyouts. But I think the economic woes have forced news organizations to rethink how they gather and deliver news — and that’s a wonderful thing.

A year ago, I came up with my 10 hopes for journalists in 2009. As part of the introspection that comes with the passing of a year — and a decade — here is my list of 10 hopes for journalists in 2010. (And, by the way, my hopes for 2009 still hold true.) Please share your own hopes in the comments. And here’s to a better year for journalism!

1. Realize it’s not just the economy: I hope in 2010, as the economy improves, journalists will realize that the downturn for newspapers wasn’t just from recession-induced lagging ad sales. Yes, that hurt. Yes, that hastened the pain for newspapers. But it would be a mistake to think that once the economy improves, everything will go back to normal. It won’t. See the recession as the wake-up call that is should be.

My parish priest told a story at Mass a few weeks back that, I think, explains what I mean. He told about a man who was stranded on a desert island with no hope of rescue. He made a life for himself, built a hut and struggled to survive. One day, the hut caught fire and burned to the ground. He thought: Why? Then a rescue helicopter arrived. If it weren’t for the smoke from the fire, the helicopter pilot would not have seen him. The moral: Sometimes our hut needs to burn down, so we can move onto where we need to go. Newspapers, your hut burned down for a reason — so you’d change your business. So do it.

2. Remove the sneer: All too often I read newspaper stories about people using social media that seem to portray the people as oddities. I know that’s part of journalistic routines: The odd is more newsworthy than the every day. But if newspapers continue to subtly portray social media users as exceptions to the norm, the weird techies, they will miss out on understanding what social media means in people’s lives. Yes, we’re in the minority in the general American population, but we’re a minority that going to grow and grow, as social media evolves. And then, dear newspapers, won’t you look silly?

3. Lead don’t follow:  This is a corollary to my point in Number 2. If you’re treating social media use like this weird techie thing, you’re not embracing it. You’re not figuring out how to use it for journalism. That’s a shame and a missed opportunity. Journalists should be leading in how to use and explain social media to readers, not sitting on the sidelines bragging that you don’t get social media as if that’s something to be proud of. It’s not. It’s like the reporters who argued in the ’80s that they’d prefer a typewriter to a computer. It’s just silly. News organizations need to make sense of the world for readers, so they should figure out how to use Twitter or Google Wave and explain that to their readers. Granted, some newspapers are doing a fabulous job of this. Far too many are not.

4. Changing your news-gathering: In the old days, the news gathering followed a pretty simple pattern. Source > Journalist >Reader. This has all changed, and news organizations’ methods of gathering and disseminating news must change with it. Some stories might be Reader>Journalist>Reader. Others might be Source>Reader>Journalist>Reader. Others might drop the linear model altogether and end up with multiple readers offering multiple ideas to multiple sources, and then a journalist uniting it. I’m talking crowd-sourcing here and curating. But I’m also talking more creativity even when the journalist is doing the gathering. (Stayed tune for a specific post on this later this month.)

5. Add some new blood: I know economically news organizations are really strapped, so it’s hardly the time to hire young people. But you must find a way to do this soon. I believe newspapers cannot truly transform themselves without adding some young voices to the mix. It’s not that the old-timers don’t have value. They do. But you need both. It’s unhealthy for an organization to go years and years without hiring new people, especially in an industry that is trying to reinvent itself in a rapidly changing world. If you don’t do this, these smart, young, recent journalism graduates will get jobs elsewhere for digital news operations that kick your butt. A quote from David Carr on BuzzMachine sums up well the value of young journalists: They don’t have to think out of the box because they were never in one to begin with.

6. Don’t play lip-service: I find that many online news Web sites from traditional media outlets offer innovation, but way less than people are growing to expect from interactive news. Having the capacity to comment or vote on stories isn’t enough anymore. That is, as my kids would say, “So 30 seconds ago.” The interaction must be intrinsic to the whole information experience. News organizations need to offer multiple options for receiving and interacting, but they must — and this is key — explain to their readers how to use them. Letting folks vote on stories, but giving no obvious guidelines on how they do this means it will fail. Simple. Only the diehards will try. The regular readers won’t. So you’ll end up with little meaningful interaction and just a lot of flaming.

7. Learn the lingo: Nothing makes the legacy press seems like the ancient, out-0f-touch press than not understanding the current technologies. I’d argue that pretty much any paper of any size today should have someone covering technology, blogging about it, and explaining it to readers. As I said in Number 2, being out of the loop is nothing to be proud of. It’s not a sign that you’re a true journalist fighting for a return to the old-time newspapering in a world that has gone all crazy 3.0. It just makes you look out of touch. Journalists are supposed to know how to explain things in which they are not experts. So do that. (And I don’t just mean the one or two people on staff who are into the new stuff; I mean everybody.) Read blogs, not just news sites. Experiment. Find out the buzz. Get educated.

8. Market yourself: At newspapers, the advertising and marketing folks are often on a separate floor from the newsroom. It’s a physical split that follows a philosophical division between those who gather the news and those who sell it. I believe this split is still important. However, journalists need to learn a bit from their marketing colleagues about selling themselves. Marketing works. If you’re doing something amazing or innovative, you need to let your readers know that loud and clear and more than one. If the print tells of a great interactive graphic online, but the reader can’t find it, you’ve lost. So many newspapers are doing wonderful, creative experiments, but readers need some help in finding these things. They spend seconds on your site, and if they can’t find what they’re looking for, they’re gone. You can change that. Make things easy to find, and shout it. Don’t feel like you’re breaching some journalistic ethos by bragging. If you whisper, no one will hear you.

9. Brand yourself: It used to be that journalists, at least at newspapers, were anonymous almost. Sure, they had a byline, but who read that expect pundits, other journalists, and angry government officials. TV reporters got recognized on the street, but those with a face for newspapers didn’t have to worry about that. Today, journalists must create their own persona online. They need a blog, a Facebook page, a Twitter account. They need to use their real name and picture. Yes, support the news organizations’ brand, but journalists also need to develop their own brand on the Web.

Why? The Web is based on what Wired editor Chris Anderson calls “reputational currency.” People gain believability on the Web as they build their own personal reputations. (Not just the reputation of their employer.) R. David Lankes, a Syracuse University professor, writes the people view others as credible on the Web today based on reliability, not authority. So you believe blogger A because she says the same thing that four other bloggers you like says, not because she’s a bonafide expert. Tom Kelleher and Barbara Miller, professors at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, found that the people see online communications that use the “conversational human voice” as more trustworthy than more static communication.

To me, these concepts converge. To be seen as credible, journalists need to have their names out there so they can build a reputation. They also need to use the conversational human voice and fit their message into the context of online communities. If they do that, people will feel like they kind of know them, so they’ll trust them more.

10. Have fun again: It’s been a tough year. It’s understandable that journalists feel beaten down, bewildered, angry, confused, bitter, ambivalent. The list could go on and on. But being a journalist is, as a friend’s father told her when she choose the career two decades ago, a noble profession. It still is. And it’s fun. There’s nothing like the adrenaline rush of breaking a big story, beating your competition, standing up to authority and making changes. I know in the past year, it was hard to remember this as it appeared the floor was collapsing beneath you. I know because I lived it, too. Newsrooms are full of sadness today, for lost colleagues, a lost way of life. That’s normal. But, please, remember why you got into the business. Rise to that occasion. Have fun again. Your readers need you.

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I can hardly believe it has been more than a year since I started this blog. Back in those early days, I had hardly any readers. I was writing for myself, but bit by bit some of you started to read. I thank all of you for that. I appreciate your comments, your interest in what I have to say, and your ideas for the transformation of journalism. I hope to see you around the blogosphere in 2010.

Here are the 10 posts from Save the Media that you made popular in the past year:

1. 10 “journalism rules” you can break on your blog. This one raised the biggest buzz of anything I’ve written. Some liked it. Others didn’t. But it is safe to say this post got a lot of people thinking, which is always a good move in my book.

2. How Journalism Can Change. The credit for this one goes to my former Post-Standard colleague, Amber Smith. She blogs about health and fitness.

3. Top Twitter told for journalists. How to use Twitter as a journalistic tool, not just for telling people what you had for lunch.

4. A journalist’s guide to the ethics of social media. Is ethical social media use an oxymoron? I think not. I explain that ethics in social media are just like ethics anywhere else. Right is right.

5. Is blogging journalism? Yes and no. Blogging, I write is a tool, like newsprint or airwaves. Blogging can certainly be used for journalism, but not every blog is journalism.

6. The “hyperinterest” approach to news. What’s hyperinterest? It’s tailored to the niche. It’s specific to the audience.

7. Twitter etiquette, style rules for 2010. My take on the rules of Twitter.

8. How journalists can use Facebook.  Facebook is fun, but it’s also useful as a reporting, crowd-sourcing and community-building tool. Here’s how.

9. More on newspapers social media rules. This was about the ongoing hub-bub about The New York Times, The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal coming up with rules for how their staff use social media.

10. So what’s journalism? Folks on Twitter and yours truly tried to come up with a definition in today’s changing media climate.

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Haven’t done short-takes for a while, so seems like it is time for my list of interesting stuff from around the blogosphere.

Great blogs: I love lists. I think they are a very useful way to convey a lot of information quickly in a format that’s easy to read.  Journalistics has compiled a great list of blogs about all things journalism — from citizen reporting to commentary to academia. Full disclosure: I’m humbled to have made the list, but even if I didn’t, I’d be linking to it and saving it as a delicious bookmark for future reference. You should, too.

Twitter list:  Have you started listing on Twitter yet? If not, you should. At the very least, it’s an easy way to keep track of the people you follow on Twitter by categorizing them into topics (journalists, academics, moms.) I find my lists are a good way to sort through the people I follow and to find smart new to follow from the lists of other people. Twitter lists also can be a powerful branding tool, Daniel Honigan writes on Old Media, New Tricks. Twitter lists can be part of building “reputational currency” on the Web, or as Honigan calls it: showing other people how well-rounded you are.

RSS feeds: I used to be one of those people who subscribed to blogs through e-mail, but that quickly became annoying. My inbox would fill with blogs I didn’t have time to read at that moment, so I would delete them. Then I discovered RSS. I have 67 blogs in my Google Reader right now, and I check the reader every few days or so. These are not the only blogs I read, mind you.  I’ve memorized the URL to the ones I’m really addicted to, so I don’t use a reader to get to them. But an RSS keeps everything there for me, so I can read it when I have time. To me, that’s one on the important factors in media today. Media should be tailored to fit the timen needs of  the reader of the message, not the sender of the message. Anyway, I know some say that RSS is passe, but I still find mine useful. Beat Blogging offers a thorough how-to for beginning RSS users with some examples of how journalists use RSS.

What not to cover:  Sometimes doing good journalism is about knowing what not to cover. That’s the point Jeremy Littau, a j-prof at Lehigh University, makes on his blog in a post about the Texas Tribune deciding not to cover the Fort Hood shooting. (I realize his post is from more than a month ago, but I think his point is timeless.)  The new journalism model, Littau writes, means: “You need to figure out what you are, then be who you are.” I agree. In a niche-dominated world, the old mass medium idea of serving everyone no longer makes sense. If you try to be something to everyone, you’ll end up being nothing to no one. A niche needs to be narrow, specific, and meaningful to a highly interested but perhaps small group of readers. The value is in reading multiple niches.

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I heard the news about Editor & Publisher closing as I hear many things these days – through Twitter. Patrick Thornton (jiconoclast) tweeted: “Does anything better symbolize the state of print media right now than the closure of E&P? Yes things are very bad.” At first, I hoped his tweet didn’t mean what I knew it meant. But a quick search of Twitter yielded proof. Yes, E&P had told its staff Thursday that it was shutting down its print and online operation.

This shook me even more than when Gourmet announced its closure a while back. (By the way,  I found about a Gourmet’s death on Twitter, too.)

I read E&P almost religiously in my early years as a journalist. The magazine had a bright purple cover back then. I’d pretty much devour it when it arrived in my mailbox. As time went on, I didn’t renew my subscription. I’m not sure why.

The thing is I enjoyed E&P’s articles. I appreciated the reporting. In fact, in the last few years, its Web site became one of regular online haunts to find out what’s going on in the news business. Sometimes, I’d head to the E&P Web page myself, but more often I’d be drawn there by a well-worded tweet or a blog post from someone whose opinion I valued.

Read the rest of this post at Nieman Journalism Lab.

Over the past several months, much has been said about transparency being the new objectivity in journalism. As news organizations figure out whether they’ll use social media, and, if so, how they’ll use it, the phrase has been popping up more and more in the blogosphere.

I agree with that sentiment to a point, and I support the idea of transparency whole-heartedly. But at the risk of sounding like the glutton who wants her proverbial cake and to eat it, too, I ask: Why can’t we have both? Why can’t we aim for both objectivity and transparency?

Objectivity is unattainable in my mind unless robots begin to replace journalists (and even then, there’s still the opinions of the humans programming the robots.)  But I think it’s a goal worth shooting for. Journalists should, I believe, try with all their might to show all sides (not just two) of a story,  to be fair, to be accurate, to hold their own opinions in check in the telling. Even viewpoints we disagree with should get the airing of open discourse.

Read the rest of the post at Nieman Journalism Lab.