Newsecology-samoan
(Notes by Bill Densmore -- typos etc. will be cleaned up overnight -- please return if you're printing or linking)
JTM-Poynter on Sunday night -- the Samoan Circle
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.”
[http://www.ustream.tv/recorded/1203471 WATCH ARCHIVED VIDEO STREAM OF THIS SESSION
“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 to Hanna Miller, who is working on the Journalism Matters project 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."
Peck's replacement: She heard about the Hudson River crash on Twitter an hour before she found it on a website. A giant newspaper can't be all things to all people anymore -- the society has become too fragmented. Go for the niche group, she suggests.
Hanna Miller talks about having been a newspaper reporter before she became involved with campaigns. People don't know where to go for information they can trust. It is up to journalism to take leadership of that and of what we know about the world. "If we don't use what we know and our resources and our backstory, if we can't communicate the back story ... they everybody is going to be at sea."
Neil Budde: Talks about niche content and info targetted to people. Online, he says, "millions of opportunities have cropped up because other people have given them up." When he was on Yahoo, he found world news was one of the top categories of interest to people. DailyMe has a "DailyMe literati" on the Kindle and it is from second to 10 of the most popular blogs on the Kindle "because it fills a niche . . . there is still intense interest in a lot of things out there . . . and that is where your opportunities lie . . . everytime somebody cuts something back there is an opportunity."
Joe Shea: Talks about the mid-1990s, he saw that strict journalist content could be aggregated in an electronic daily newspaper. AT The American Reporter, everyone who wrote got a penny a world from the publication and revenues would come from people who bought the online publication. And he would get 10 percent for aggregating and editing it all. It was 18-20 hour days at 1,200 baud. A total of 30 people jumped on as reporters. . . we began with this idea that jouranlists should own the publication, not publishers ... and we can with that model ahve journalists all over the world reporting for us. ... that idea is still alive today at The American Reporter, and that is what we have been doing for 15 years.
Talks about a person who started the North Portland Community Media Project Five years ago our front-desk receptionist got an original grant for $10,000 to help people set up email accounts. The video project and it never occurred to me to invite people to buy a subscription. That would have been really cool.
Barbara Iverson: How do people want to read news. She invites us to consider they we each of us consumes the news. "NO one is going to recapture the audience because the audience has split into 1,000 pieces."
Susan Moeller at the Cape Cod Times: "I am stunned by the number of young journalists who work for a product every day that doesn't interest them . . . I don't have $25,000 but I have maybe a couple of Borders certificates that I can use in my newsroom to encourage innovation."
Hannah Miller points out that over half of Philadelphia's residents don't have access to the internet.
A discussion: The idea and impact of payment
"They have a great product. They should charge for it always. The NYTimes should lock down their website. So should Gannett, so should McClatchy. . . . we are the experts why are conceding this to the so-called citizen journalists." "We own it, we are the experts, charge for it. If they don't pay for it, we go out of business."
"Why does that work for you?" asks one commentator. Cmmentator asks: "Why should Newsday have to walk the plank?"
Jose: "You want to charge for content your fate is sealed. You are going out of business."
Michele McLellan: "Unless we get away from the idea that we can charge for content because we put effort into creating it . . . we are going to fail. That is not going to work."
Warner Sabio from Newsday explains that Cablevision, which owns Newsday, is in a unique position. Other papers couldn't do what Newsday is doing because they don't own a cable company.
New seat holder: There is a trust issue for the newspaper to step into the world of Twitter. Editors want to step in and be the editor, as the honest trust broker. The reader wants someone else to do that.
Rinearson: The little company eventually takes over?
Peter Rinearson: Newspapers have had community content for a long time -- classified advertising. It was created by the community. Economists talk about network affects. You had to go to the classifieds of a big newspaper if you wanted to know what was for sale. That's what eBay is in auctions. Newspapers in order succeed, has to own the community-created content. The place where people go to express themselves. So a little company develops community content and has no marketshare. Eventually they will get attention, and eventually the big newspaper will fail. From 1996 to 1999 he got to know the leaders of many big newspapers who said, "Once we find the model that succeeds, we'll embrace it." He says the industry is upset because it didn't embrace community content. "You as the publisher want to own the place where the community comes together to express its views."
New seat holder: She is a full charge bookkeeper. Is anyone in the room an accountant? In the newspaper industry, newspaper accounting is a hybrid. YOu are not considered a good where there is cost of goods sold, nor a service. As a result funds are not allocated for marketing of newspapers or into other areas that would normally be part of business. Do newspaper accountants and business people need to come to talk about the business side of journalism. Second, newspapers haven't done a good job of cultivating the online audience.
At it's height, in the 19th century it had two million subscribers, it last for 100 years, it was called the Youth Companion. It came out of the youth pages of the Boston Post. It's a matter of create an appetite for a new generation of news consumers.
Jackie Hai: A closing parable
Jackie Hai of Amherst Wire: Sharing a parable she heard from her mother before she came to this conference. In ancient China, there was once an emperor who had a love for great big musical arrangements, so he assembled a royal orchestra. One musician wanted to join this orchestra for the fame or the money, but didn't want to work particularly hard, so he learned the minimum requirements for getting in and just passed the audition. For many years, he blended in with the orchestra and rode on its coattails to prestige. But eventually, the emperor died and was succeeded by a new one. This new emperor's taste in music was for the individual melodies of soloists, so he asked each member of the royal orchestra to step up and perform a piece solo. The lazy musician, called out on his bluff, packed up his instrument and went home. "The taste of our audience has changed. Are we going to continue to try and sell the same thing we've been doing all along and wonder why we're out of a job? Or are we going to raise ourselves to a higher standard, to have the flexibility to perform in a big orchestra and the creativity to produce high caliber, one-of-a-kind material that is worthy of being supported?"
We adjourn for the night
