In June 2007, John McClain, who covers the NFL’s Houston Texans for the Houston Chronicle, was getting tired of a league rule that limited the Chronicle to posting no more than 45 seconds of team video on its web site every day. So he and his colleague Anna-Megan Raley decided it was time for a tongue-in-cheek protest. They shot the video you see above, in which they interview several Texans players and officials while racing against the clock to stay within the NFL’s rules — yelling “time” and scampering off to the next interviewee whenever someone took too long to answer a question.

Protests like McClain’s — along with the lobbying of news organizations and associations — got the 45-second limit expanded to 90 seconds a year later. But many journalists still find it grating that the subject of coverage can dictate how it can be covered. (Can you imagine a mayor trying to dictate similar terms to a city hall reporter?) And as we’ve seen, teams and leagues are increasingly using the lever of access to dictate what kinds of coverage news organizations can provide.

What lessons can be learned from the battles sports journalists have fought with leagues that want to limit digital rights? We asked a few people who have been on the front lines, and here’s what they told us. Keep reading »

With no live programming in the morning, MLB Network had to scramble to assemble its crew after the bombshell broke Feb. 7: Sports Illustrated’s Selena Roberts and David Epstein were reporting that Alex Rodriguez had tested positive for steroids in 2003 as a member of the Texas Rangers. But within a few hours, MLB Network had rolled out its stable of talking heads to interview slews of former players and general managers about the newest scandal to rock baseball.

“By 2 p.m., decorated broadcast veteran Bob Costas was interviewing Roberts in studio,” The Washington Times’ Tim Lemke wrote a few days later, praising the network for going “a long way toward establishing itself as a credible source of news” by not dodging the A-Rod scandal.

MLB Network’s A-Rod coverage was heralded by the Los Angeles Times and Street & Smith’s Sports Business Daily, which called MLB Network “no house organ” — a sentiment the pioneering sports blogger Will Leitch made where he wrote, “If the MLB Network ends up being a success, Saturday’s breaking-news coverage of A-Rod will be its Hugh Grant on Leno moment.”

But it’s worth noting that MLB Network’s coverage was being praised primarily for not choosing to ignore (or spin) the biggest baseball news of the year. Simply ignoring a story that huge would have been suicidal. As MLB Network spokesman Matt Bourne told me: “If certain things are not discussed that’s not going to pass the smell test with fans.” The question that remains unanswered is, in a world where leagues are increasingly creating their own media outlets, is it possible to imagine a story like A-Rod’s being broken by MLB Network — or, in other sports, by the NFL Network or NBA TV? If league-owned networks continue to grow in prominence, how will that impact the way sports are covered?

Keep reading »

It’s been more than a week since New York Times reporter David Rohde escaped from his captors in Pakistan, so maybe now is a good time to try and look dispassionately at the massive coverup that prevented news of his kidnapping from being reported for more than six months — a coverup that included not just 40 or so mainstream media outlets but Wikipedia as well, with the personal help of founder Jimmy Wales. Raising such ethical issues seemed somewhat crass in the days following his miraculous escape (although that didn’t stop some observers, including Kelly McBride of the Poynter Institute, from being early critics of the coverup). But those issues deserve to be talked about in more detail.

For the record, I don’t know David Rohde. From all accounts, he is a wonderful friend and colleague, not to mention an excellent reporter who has a great deal of experience working in troubled areas. All of which is — I would argue — completely irrelevant to the issue at hand, namely whether the New York Times and its senior management were right to conceal evidence of his kidnapping, and whether the editors at dozens of other outlets were right to go along with this plan.

I would argue that they were not, and that if anything the coverup has made things harder not just for future kidnapping victims such as Rohde, but for newspapers and other mainstream media outlets as a whole.

Keep reading »

[This is part two of our series on the changing relationships between sports leagues and news organizations. See the whole series here. —Josh]

Before diving any deeper into the growing power of sports leagues over how news organizations do their work, it’s important to trace the legal path that got us to this point. A few landmark cases have played a big role in determining what kinds of influence can be wielded over your local sports section.

In 1997, the NBA unsuccessfully sued Motorola (National Basketball Association v. Motorola, Inc.) for infringing on its exclusive rights to the broadcasts of games by electronically providing customers with in-game updates. The court ultimately found that the statistics of a game are un-copyrightable facts. In other words, nobody can claim ownership to the fact that a LeBron James slam dunk produced two points or that three Ray Allen three-pointers are worth nine points; that information exists entirely in the public realm, available for everyone’s use.

The flap began when Motorola marketed and manufactured a pager called SportsTrax. The device supplied customers with real-time information about NBA games, including the score, who had the ball, and how much time remained in the contest. The service relied on reporters watching the game and keying stats into a computer. The NBA argued the service infringed on the sale of exclusive broadcast rights, which can be copyrighted because creative capital is expended in the broadcast’s production. The transmitted sounds, images, and graphics are a copyrightable expression of the so-called “facts of the game” or “underlying game.” Legally speaking, however, the court said sports events themselved “are not ‘authored’ in any common sense of the word.”

Keep reading »

Eliazar Parra Cardenas’ new project Backbars doesn’t add any new information to a site. Its aim is to make it easier for your brain to make sense of the information that’s already there. And that’s essentially the name of the game for “information design” junkies like Cardenas.

“The whole point is to make textual information easier to absorb,” Cardenas, 24, told me over Skype from his temporary home in Madrid. “[A well-designed site] should maximize the information that a user can understand — that you can just glance at, or take note of -– without actively thinking.”

Backbars is a small script that only works in Firefox and requires the free Greasemonkey plugin. (GreaseMonkey is a useful tool that lets you customize the way web sites look or act.) It takes numerical data on web pages and turns it into subtle but easily readable bar graphs.

On the social news site Digg [left], for instance, it creates bar charts based on how many times a story has been “dugg.” On the community weblog Metafilter [above], it’s the number of comments users have left on a story. At the social bookmarking site Delicious, it’s the number of times someone has bookmarked the web page. The idea is that these small, unobtrusive graphs allow users to see how popular an item is by simply glancing at it — rather than searching for easy-to-miss numbers and having to recall seventh-grade ratio lessons.

Cardenas says that concept should be integral to the development of text-based sites. When people read online, they don’t read one word after another in a linear way; they “glance around, get the structure of it, jump to the beginning of paragraphs or to the links,” he said, making the well-designed presentation of quantitative data “very powerful.”

Keep reading »

Spot.Us, the non-profit experiment in journalism funded by readers, plans to expand beyond San Francisco by the end of summer, founder David Cohn tells me in the interview above. Seattle and Los Angeles are the most likely candidates for the site’s next iteration, and in the longer term, Spot.Us is looking to the east coast as well.

I caught up with Cohn at the Knight Foundation’s conference earlier this month. He won a $340,000 grant from Knight last year to develop a local news site that relies on small donations from readers for individual projects by freelance reporters. Since November, the site has funded and published 20 stories that you can read here.

Part of the mission at Spot.Us is to test whether and how the broader notion of crowdfunding might apply to local journalism. One persistent criticism of the venture has focused on its structure: How can you raise money for a pitch before conducting sufficient reporting to know if there’s really a story there? In part to address that concern and to test new models, Spot.Us recently began experimenting with beat pitches: The first is for ongoing coverage of San Francisco’s budget crunch by reporters at The Public Press, a non-profit news site in the city.

Cohn’s blog at Spot.Us is a must-read for its consistent introspection. He is the site’s biggest critic, which is fortunate for those of us watching to see how crowdfunding might fit into the future of news. Recently, Cohn laid out a three-month plan that includes finding the right financial model for expansion.

Spot.Us operates on a lean budget: Users who donate $20 to a news pitch are asked to contribute an additional $2 to the organization, and 90 percent oblige. Cohn says that model might be enough to support infrastructure at Spot.Us as he expands to other cities but wouldn’t be able to support a full-time employee like himself to coordinate pitches, publicity, and partnerships with news organizations.

In our interview, I skipped the basics of Spot.Us and focused on what Cohn has learned since launching in the fall. One key lesson, he said, has been that volunteer editors work better than poorly paid ones. Spot.Us had reserved 10 percent of funding for each story to pay an editor, but that rarely amounted to much. “I’ve found so far that volunteer editors who sort of come in, not because of money but because they just want to be involved in journalism, have been doing much more thorough better job of the editorial workflow,” Cohn said.

A full transcript of the video is below. Keep reading »

Continuing on a theme: I’ve been discussing the apparent disconnect between the quality of a news site’s design (as perceived and rated by professionals) and how much time people spend there; as well as the kinds of things that count more than design: reader engagement, interaction, community, personality — real life behind and around the content.

In a comment on the second post, Phil Buckley, whose commentary I had quoted and linked to, asked: “If you were starting a news organization today, where would put your initial efforts?”

I like this, because it’s the key question that all news organizations should be asking themselves.  If tackled correctly, it can be a transformative question, a way to self-disrupt the organization, a way to get through the wormhole of reinvention that newspapers are facing, and come out on the other side with a workable business model.

And indeed, forward-thinking news organizations are asking it. But in some news organizations (like Phil, I try to call them that instead of newspapers), the process of dealing with this question leads to an uncomfortable realization: the business model for news in the future is so radically different from today’s legacy newspaper business that there is no way to get from here to there without “a major restructuring event,” which is a euphemism for bankruptcy.

In other words, the viable business model they can glimpse — consisting, perhaps, of a weekend-only or twice-weekly printed byproduct of an online-first publishing operation — represents such a downsizing of the enterprise that it can’t possibly carry the company’s legacy debt load, so the only way to make the transition is first file Chapter 11.

Keep reading »

[Today, we're starting a four-part series by our friend Justin Rice on how the media tables are turning in the world of sports, where the subjects of coverage are becoming the creators of coverage — and what implications those shifts have for the rest of the news business. —Josh]

Thirty-eight days after Major League Baseball launched its own cable channel, MLB Network, in January, the new station found itself covering one of the sport’s biggest stories in years: the news in the baseball world that Yankee slugger Alex Rodriquez had tested positive for steroids in 2003. MLB brass boasted that the coverage — praised by many — was evidence of their ability to cover all the bases of baseball news, whether good, bad, or ugly. The network was praised again last month for jumping on the story that Dodgers outfielder Manny Ramirez was suspended 50 games for taking a banned substance.

We’ll spend the next three days looking at the broader implications of what happens when media power shifts toward the institutions journalists cover. Journalists are still adjusting to “the people formerly known as the audience” and their new publishing power; what about the people formerly known as our subjects? What happens when the people and organizations we cover also cover themselves? Are they our sources, competitors or some sort of hybrid? In many cases our sources and subjects have better access to the readers and viewers than news organizations do — not to mention the ability to put artificial limits on reporters’ access or coverage. They also have the same, if not better, technology we consider tools of our ever-changing trade.

This disintermediation of media isn’t limited to the sports world. We all know about candidate Obama using his own web site to connect directly with voters and citizens. Government agencies have launched their own “news services” to get around their traditional path to citizens, newspapers and TV stations. The rich and powerful can now use social networking tools to speak directly to their desired audience; when Shaquille O’Neal was traded to the Cleveland Cavaliers last week, he did most of his talking about the deal via Twitter, not via a reporter.

Keep reading »

As I laid out on Wednesday, there seems to be no discernible correlation between the overall quality of a web site and how much time readers spend there.

In the heydays of printed newspapers, we had some similar anomalies: newspapers with terrible designs (as judged by the designer elite) would have market penetrations equally strong as those following the latest design trends and gimmicks.

So what keeps eyeballs on sites, once they’ve landed there? Here are some recent views of interest:

Phil at 1918.com has a nice post building on Dave Brubeck’s breakout “Take Five”, raking over the coals the lackluster site of the News & Observer (once an internet pioneer), and agreeing with my conclusion that it’s not really about design: Keep reading »