A salute to the Times-Picayune: I hope they again provide an example for journalism

I couldn’t comment right away on this week’s announcement that the New Orleans Times-Picayune is cutting print frequency back from daily to three days a week.

In part I waited because I was finishing timely posts on copy editing and student media and doing some other work, but I could have set things aside to weigh in on the New Orleans news. I waited mostly because I wanted to reflect on this a while.

Some observations after thinking this through for a couple days:

1. The New Orleans Times-Picayune will always hold a special spot among journalism heroes because of its staff’s performance in covering Hurricane Katrina.
2. I have a personal fondness for the Times-Picayune journalists, recalling their support for my staff in Cedar Rapids when we experienced and covered our flood of 2008.
3. I always ache when a newsroom staff is cut, and this is a severe cut, following earlier severe cuts.
4. Advance Publications deserves praise for continuing its commitment to the New Orleans community during and after Katrina.
5. Most newspapers’ future probably is not daily. When a newspaper cuts its frequency, I hope it is not just cutting back, but making the right steps to build a digital future.

Student media need to pursue a digital-first approach

I have recommended digital-first approaches recently to faculty and student media leaders at my alma mater, Texas Christian University, and the University of Oregon.

I am delighted that Emerald Media in Oregon has announced that it will be digital-first next year, stopping Monday-Friday daily newspaper publication in favor of a timely digital news approach and two weekly print magazines. The University of Georgia’s Red and Black shifted to digital first with its move to weekly print production last fall (I played no role there).

TCU will continue publishing the Daily Skiff (I am a former Skiff editor, spring semesters of 1975 and ’76) four days a week, but will produce all content first and primarily for digital platforms. “We are moving from some of the news being produced and distributed first on a digital platform to all of the news being produced digitally with the intent of distributing it first in real-time via a digital platform,” Schieffer School of Journalism Director John Lumpkin told me in an email.

Even where the changes involve cutting the frequency of print production, we should not regard these moves as cutbacks but as moving forward. “This step is critical to expanding news coverage for our audience, in addition to preparing students for the changes in our profession,” John said.

The Schieffer School set the stage for this move by launching a news website, tcu360, that operated largely independently of the Skiff and TCU News Now, the student TV operation. “We made the philosophical decision to go ‘digital first’ in the spring of 2011 by creating tcu360,” John said.

This is the direction student media need to go. Journalism students must prepare to work and compete in the digital news marketplace and journalism schools and student media must do a better job of preparing them.

Copy editing: It’s taught me a lot, but it has to change

I have a fondness for copy editing and copy editors.

I learned more in my copy editing class than in any other course I took at Texas Christian University back in the 1970s (hat tip to my instructor, Jim Batts). I learned as much in my two years on the Des Moines Register’s copy desk, also in the ’70s, as I’ve learned any two years ever in my career. And I worked with an extraordinarily talented group there.

I got to be a pretty good copy editor and self-editor (I’m the only editor of this blog, though I often read a post to Mimi and occasionally she will read a post before publication). But still, copy editors saved me from embarrassment many a time in my reporting days (at the Omaha World-Herald, Sue Truax once asked gently about a drought story if I meant to say the city was encouraging water conservation rather than consumption. As embarrassing as that was, it was so much better than seeing it in print).

Copy editing is the quality control function of a newsroom, and quality matters. But the economics and workflow of the news business have changed, and copy editing must change, too.

Digital First newsrooms in Denver and the San Francisco Bay area have changed their copy-editing operations, as Steve Myers reported in some detail for Poynter. We’re trying two different approaches, each with fewer copy editors and fewer reads before a story is published online or in print. The Denver Post no longer has a copy desk; copy editing is handled by assigning editors (with some former copy editors moved to the assigning desks). The Bay Area News Group still has a copy-editing operation for all its newsrooms at the Contra Costa Times in Walnut Creek, Calif., but some stories will get only one read there, rather than two, after being read by assigning editors.

Expanding on my aggregation points

Response to my post about aggregation merits a follow-up post on three points: verification, a comment I made about the Associated Press and the timing of blog posts.

Verification

Someone asked about where verification fit into aggregation, or suggested that it should be added as a step or a way that we add value when we aggregate.

I don’t think an aggregator needs to verify every point from a source you aggregate from. For instance, in yesterday’s post, which aggregated several links, I did not verify that Media General sold 63 newspapers to Warren Buffett. I had seen the number in several other pieces I had read and I used it in my aggregation of Dan Conover’s blog post about the purchase without verifying the number from the Media General announcement or the Media General website. I also didn’t check Dan’s math on the average cost for each of the newspapers, though it looked right using round numbers in my head.

I do think aggregation requires some assessment of the trustworthiness of the sources you’re aggregating from. If you trust the sources, attribute to them and link to them, I think that should suffice. Taking the time to independently verify every fact from sources you attribute to would limit how much you can aggregate. Just as aggregation has value, I believe trust has value and the work of other journalists and news sources has value. If you’ve attributed to a trustworthy source, I think you can aggregate without independent verification.

Links about journalism, education, hashtags and paywalls

A quick roundup of pieces I don’t have time to break down in detail:

Journalism and education

Ken Doctor

In The newsonomics of  News U, Ken Doctor suggests that news organizations can expand their community news and information role and play a formal role in education in the community:

As the tablet makes mincemeat of the historic differences among newspapers, magazines, TV, and radio, we see another bright line ready to dim: that seeming line between what a news organization and what a college each do.

I’m not going to try to summarize Ken’s piece, but I encourage you to read it. I will respond to one of Ken’s suggestions for the news business:

Aggregation guidelines: Link, attribute, add value

I have added three updates, marked in bold, since posting this originally.

Aggregation has become a dirty word in much of journalism today.

Bill Keller, former editor of the New York Times, last year wrote: “There’s often a thin line between aggregation and theft.”

Patrick Pexton, Washington Post ombudsman, in an April 20 column called plagiarism “a perpetual danger in aggregated stories.”

Actually, aggregation has a long, proud and ethical history in journalism. If you’re an old-school journalist, don’t think Huffington Post or Drudge when you think about aggregation; think AP. The Associated Press is primarily largely an aggregation service*, except that it its members pay huge fees for the privilege of being aggregated (and for receiving content aggregated from other members).

The New York Times and Washington Post also have long histories of aggregation. In my years at various Midwestern newspapers, we reported big local and regional stories that attracted the attention of the Times, Post and other national news organizations. Facts we had reported first invariably turned up in the Times and Post stories without attribution or with vague attribution such as “local media reports.” I don’t say that critically. When I was a reporter and editor at various Midwestern newspapers, we did the same thing with facts we aggregated from smaller newspapers as we did regional versions of their local stories.

My point isn’t to criticize these traditional newspapers, just to note that aggregation isn’t a new practice just because it’s a fairly new journalism term. It’s one of many areas where journalism practices and standards are evolving, and I believe standards are actually improving in most cases.

After the Washington Post case, Elana Zak asked me and others if journalists needed to develop guidelines for aggregation.

It’s time for newsrooms to start creating guidelines for aggregation. If we have them for social media, why not for aggregating news?

— Elana Zak (@elanazak) April 21, 2012

.@SteveButtry @jenconnic @margafret Would anyone like to start a project with me to crowdsource guidelines for news aggregation?

— Elana Zak (@elanazak) April 22, 2012

I’m happy to contribute to that conversation with some thoughts about aggregation. I’ll start with discussing what I mean by aggregation (and its cousin or sibling, curation):

Geofeedia, slideshows, cleaning up and a snake

I’m just doing some aggregation here, pointing to excellent how-tos by Buffy Andrews and Ivan Lajara and a great engagement story by Nancy March:

• Buffy tells how she used an outstanding new tool, Geofeedia, to find social media content from a particular location. This could be hugely useful in covering events or breaking news.
• Ivan provides a great how-to for using Storify to make a slideshow of Pinterest pins. I’ll be trying this out soon. Ivan’s a great problem-solver.
• Nancy tells about a community cleanup project (on Mother’s Day morning!) led by The Mercury in Pottstown, Pa. The Merc is building on the success of its food drive to continue engaging the community in community improvement. Community Engagement Editor Diane Hoffman also has pinned lots of the photos, including a snake, on the Mercury’s In Our Community board.

Source: Uploaded by user via Pottstown on Pinterest