Newsecology-samoan

(notes by Bill Densmore -- typos etc. will be cleaned up overnight -- please return if you're printing or linking)

This evening we’re experiencing a “Samoan Circle.” Four empty chairs are placed in the middle of the room and four “starters” get a discussion going. Anyone in the room has the right to tap one of the four chairs’ occupants and the person seated yields the seat. The new occupant can then offer their thoughts.

Starting in the Samoan Circle are Chris Peck, editor of the (Memphis) Commercial Appeal; Jim Kennedy, vp strategy of The Associated Press; Neil Budde, editor/publisher of DailyMe.com and Michele McLellan of the Knight Digital Media Center and Jim Brady, former editor of WashingtonPost.com

Jim Kennedy starts by talking about an ethnographic study The AP started and is continuing focusing on young adults ages 18 to 34. They picked six cities – Philadelphia, Houston, Kansas City and San Jose, Brighton (U.K.) and one other city. In each of the cities they asked pre-selected participants to keep a journal and the anthropologists spent time with the participants at home. “They synthesized it into a model that has really been a breakthrough for us.”

“The anthropologists didn’t know how big of a breakthrough they had,” said Kennedy. The researchers found the participants felt bombarded by news and wanted to get more depth and couldn't. "They wanted to get deeper into a story, they wanted to know what the context was, they wanted to know what was going to happen next. They were bored with what we were giving them . . . our old products were failing."

Says Neil Budde: "This is very important research that very few people in this industry have read."

Michele McLellan is now asked by Chris Peck to talk about what's going on. She's has been with The Oregonian, one of the best papers in the country as a political editor, a projects editor and an ombudsman. "I'm not coming at this from outside." She realized on election day, she noticed that virtually all of the election news she was following "was coming from links from people I follow on Twitter."

"That is a really basic, fundamental drastic shift," she says. "It's because I trust them more . . . it is because they are very transparent."

Jim Brady says he understands that "my friends have a better sense of what interests me than the newspaper." He says you have to go to where people are on the web, not build big websites and expect people to come to that websites. He thinks the power of brands has diminished incredibly on the web. "Some people will come seek us out, but a lot of people are just going to go to a (search) engine . . . . "

Chris Peck asks Neil Budde to explain: Is this what DailyMe is trying to do? Budde says part of the problem is the way people are finding news has changed. They do it with search now, vs. the old fashioned way of looking at the front page. There's not much in between. He asks this question: How do I find news by going to a website that adapts to my interests? He thinks it will be a combination of approaches: (1) Things my friends recommend (2) Things a website knows about me because I've told it.

Jim Kennedy says the old media has got value, but it is in print. The new media is a sea of indistinguished things. "We are not setting a logical, relevant path to news . . . and these young people are very frustrated at us that we are not doing that . . . you've got to apply intelligence so I can be automated or curated in a semi automatic way."

Elise Ackerman of the San Jose Mercury News now bumps Chris Peck out of his chair. She recounts a conversation with Larry Page, a founder of Google about what he wants in news. Page said he wants the news at the top, like a WikiPedia page that is custom for him.

WikiPedia, Craigs List, Facebook and Google are most popular with the 18-34 types. None of those innovations came from the newspaper industry. "We've got to go back at this with a sense of innovation and recapturing the audience with what interests them."

Jim Brady says the newspaper industry mocked them all, treated them with derision. "We all handled this so poorly as an industry."

Jim Brady yields his chair to Joe Shea, a founder of The American Reporter, the first online newspaper, started in 1994.

Jim Kennedy says it is about reclaiming time spent in other media forms.

Jim Kennedy yields his chair and Chris Peck yields his chair.

Michele McLellan says as long as advertising is the principal supporter of journalism, "we are going to fail." She says she stopped subscribing to The New York Times because she didn't want to see the papers piling up for something she only read a bit of. "If the New York Times set up a way for me to pay for their investigative journalism in Washington, D.C., I would pay for that. I would pay a lot . . . but the New York Times has failed to ask me to pay for that. They send me a letter a month asking me to subcriber. I'm not going to do it."

McLellan says she is also shocked that in local communities, local news organizations aren't covering vital news. She says if she lived in a community that didn't have anyone covering city hall or schools and a couple of reporters offered to do it, "I would subcribe to that service."