The Newport Daily News kept waiting for someone else to figure out how to make money giving away news online. But with no obvious solution in sight, its leaders have decided to try an answer of their own: charging for access to the news.

Lots of newspapers are considering similar options. What makes Newport different is that they’re charging more to read the paper online than in print. Quite a bit more, in fact. The idea: Charge enough for the online content that the paper-and-ink product looks a lot more attractive. Don’t undercut your primary product with a free alternative that doesn’t make you money. And provide an online edition for those customers who have a compelling reason to pay for content.

“Our goal was to get people back into the printed product,” publisher Albert K. Sherman, Jr. told me. He said some readers, when hearing about the plan, asked “why would they pay for it on the Internet when they can go buy the printed paper? And that’s perfect — that’s what we want.”

The 12,000-circulation Rhode Island newspaper is old school — it still publishes afternoons on Mondays through Fridays, with a morning edition on Saturday. Last month, the newspaper announced a new three-tier pricing structure for subscriptions. Want home delivery of the print paper? That’s $145 a year. Want home delivery and online access? That’s $245. And if you want just online access — to an electronic edition that duplicates the appearance of the print product — it’s a whopping $345.

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[The June issue of Esquire arrives on newsstands Sunday, and there's something unique about its cover photo. Not the presence of an attractive young starlet — that's de rigueur in the magazine business. It's that the photo of Megan Fox was shot with a video camera, not a still one. Photographer Greg Williams shot footage of Fox with one of those jaw-dropping Red One cameras and pulled stills from the resulting video. (As Zach noted recently, Esquire seems to be cornering the market on cover gimmicks: e-ink, mix-and-match flip books, and now framegrabbing.)

I thought that was a perfect reason to post this interview Ted did with Pulitzer-winning photographer (and my former coworker at The Dallas Morning News) David Leeson about frame grabbing — an area where he was an early innovator. —Josh]

To David Leeson, the appeal of frame grabbing seems obvious. It reduces the number of tools a photographer has to juggle, and it enables multiple outputs from the same journalistic workflow. As he wrote about his first experience, preparing to cover Hurricane Katrina in 2005:

The first thing I did upon receiving an HDV camera…was shoot a few seconds of video, import it with iMovie and make a frame grab. The results were almost as magical as the first time I saw a print emerge in a tray of developer. I knew the world of photojournalism as we knew it, would never be quite the same again.

But he’s been surprised by the resistance among many of his fellow photojournalists. Even as each wave of new cameras to hit the market makes frame grabbing an easier option, Leeson still finds himself preaching to the unconverted. The main resistance may be the core belief that the fundamental art of the photograph is timing the decision of when to press the shutter.

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As we noted yesterday, the Pulitzer Prize for breaking news went to The New York Times for its coverage of the Eliot Spitzer scandal. But since breaking news is perhaps the one area where Internet journalism most outshines print, we wanted to take a look at the two other finalists in the category and tease out a few lessons and strategies for when big news breaks.

THE HOUSTON CHRONICLE

The Houston Chronicle was cited “for taking full advantage of online technology and its newsroom expertise to become a lifeline to the city when Hurricane Ike struck, providing vital minute-by-minute updates on the storm, its flood surge and its aftermath.”

Pulitzer Prize Administrator Sig Gissler noted that the Chronicle’s entry was all-online — not a print clip in the lot. Editor Jeff Cohen credited the Chronicle’s “fully integrated” newsroom. “We cover news any way people need news. We cover it online, analog, digital, straight media — any way you can serve it up our staff is serving it up.”

From a planning perspective, a hurricane offers the advantage of several days’ advance notice, and the Chronicle began to ramp up its Hurricane Central page well before Ike reached Texas shores. The site mixed traditional news stories about Ike’s approach with service pieces on storm preparation.

But perhaps the key figure in the Chronicle’s pre-storm coverage was Eric Berger, who blogs about science issues as SciGuy. He began writing about the storm when it was still a distant Atlantic threat, and that both activated the online community Berger had built over his blog’s lifespan and brought in new readers.

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Since organizers of the Pulitzer Prizes announced in 2006 they would allow the submission of online content in all journalism categories, newspapers have gotten better at integrating their printed and online materials, prize administrator Sig Gissler said.

This was the first Pulitzer cycle to welcome applications from certain online-only news organizations. But ironically, the 65 entries from 37 online-only news operations looked an awful lot like those of their print brethren. About three-quarters of their applications were made up entirely of traditional entry fodder — text and pictures — rather than online specialties like video, audio, or interactive multimedia.

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Jack Driscoll spent 39 years with The Boston Globe, ending his career as its top editor. But his most recent clips have covered topics like leash laws and school renovations.

Driscoll is a leader-among-peers at Rye Reflections, a citizen-journalist site staffed primarily by retired residents of his hometown, Rye, New Hampshire. He thinks that projects like his could be part of where journalism is headed.

“My dream is to have a citizen journalism group like this in every community,” he told me recently. “And a greater dream is that they would be linked. The web is such that there could be some really fascinating things done.”

Driscoll, 74, has a longstanding interest in the future of news; he’s been editor-in-residence at the MIT Media Lab since 1995, and he’s currently an advisor at MIT’s Center for the Future of Civic Media. He retired from the Globe when The New York Times Co. bought the paper, which gave him time to explore the grassroots journalism the web makes possible.

His first effort, a group of senior citizens called the “Silver Stringers,” founded a local site called The Melrose Mirror. He started Rye Reflections in 2005. Its staff of about 20 meets regularly in the Rye Public Library, mapping out areas of coverage — which might include a meeting of the Rye Selectmen to features on ice boating and other local goings-on.

“It’s almost like the old-time discussion clubs where people want to have some sort of substantive activities,” Driscoll said. “I think this meets civic needs and intellectual needs and social needs.” The payoff for participants, he says, is the kind of intellectual stimulation that studies show lead to longeity and better health. “For the participants, there’s value. And for the community, because the participants are reporting on their communities, the communities benefit.”

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The New York Times weighed in Monday on what may seem like a curiosity to some of its print-leaning readers — hyperlocal news organizations. It goes into some detail for three of the organizations it mentions — EveryBlock, Patch, and Outside.in — but skips over the fourth, Placeblogger. So we thought it would be a good time to show you a video interview we did with Placeblogger’s founder Lisa Williams a while back about how she views the phenomenon of citizens writing about their communities without the filters of traditional media. Lisa is the founder of H2Otown, a “placeblog” about Watertown, Mass.; Placeblogger is an aggregator and directory of similar sites around the country and world.

Some of her perspectives:

— Many placeblogs often do things traditional journalism can’t do profitably — like stake out a piece of turf too small to yield much advertising. The Buckingham Herald Trib, for example, covers the Buckingham neighborhood of Arlington, Virginia. At the moment, it’s covering a local elementary school’s request for “two trailers for the fifth grade [to] be placed in the school’s backyard near the playground used by the youngest children, close to the back of the school.” That’s not likely to get much coverage from local newspapers or television stations but may matter deeply to those in the neighborhood.

— Some placeblogs help create something that newspapers, acculturated to their daily news cycle, sometimes fail at: background and context. At H2Otown, the Dramatis Personae page lists in alphabetical order short bios of Watertown politicians, activists, and civil servants. Few newspaper web sites have taken advantage of the opportunity to stockpile that kind of basic information.

— Related: Starting a placeblog is often an act of discovery. Many bloggers are folks who are new to town and start a site to get to know the town better, she says. Many placeblogs are also inherently transient, as bloggers move to new homes and leave their sites behind. “It’s like a traveling show: You pitch the tent the show happens, then you [take down] the tent and go on to the next town,” she said.

A new archive of mug shots on The St. Petersburg Times’ tampabay.com isn’t wanting for viewers: 100,000 people reportedly visited the site in the first three hours after its debut on Monday. And in some ways it’s just a web iteration of the old police blotter — or a technically advanced version of the old Puritan public stocks.

The feature, which posts a linear gallery of faces oddly reminiscent of The Washington Post’s uplifting onBeing — call this one “onBeing Busted” — includes sortable information by height, weight, gender and location. The busts are typically for the usual drug possessions, DUIs, and other charges a newspaper cop reporter would likely rifle past, looking for something more newsworthy.

Unlike The Smoking Gun, to which is has already been compared many times, it does not limit its focus to celebrities or those accused of particularly spectacular wrongdoing. These are people who don’t usually command the public eye. And unlike some previous efforts, this one seems to be posting even people arrested for misdemeanor offenses — not to mention a few for whom the site says it “had trouble” figuring out the exact charge an individual is facing.

How much is this for reader amusement and pageviews, and how much is for civic impact? Does the lens of the web change the way we think about things previously available as public records, but obscured by their location in some booking folder down at the jail? The mugs stay up for 60 days, and the site helpfully notes “those appearing here have not been convicted of the arrest charge and are presumed innocent.” Just like Cops.

It happened that the Poynter Institute’s multimedia guru Al Tompkins was here in Cambridge Wednesday, and we asked him for his take on it, both as a journalist and as a Tampa Bay resident. (Note that Poynter owns the Times.)

Here’s our fourth and final excerpt from our interview with Richard Koci Hernandez. He’s talking about how the traditional grammar of news video — the TV style best summed up by the standup — works online. Or, more accurately, how it doesn’t work:

…what I’m trying to get people to think about is the idea that the web is different and the audience for the web is different. And that we have an opportunity as writers, as still photographers, as people coming into this medium with a clean slate. So essentially what I’m saying is: Don’t adopt something; try something new. I really think that we do have an opportunity to create a new form of what we might call web journalism, or storytelling for the web…

Full transcript after the jump. Keep reading »

Here’s a third quick excerpt from our Richard Koci Hernandez interview. In this clip he talks about the power of astonishment in creating great work online:

…we’re really competing for viewers. We’re competing for eyeballs. We’re competing with everything, you know? I even said, you know like — somebody asked, “Well, who’s your competition when you were at the [San Jose Mercury News] or just in the storytelling business?” Everybody’s our competition! LOLcats, you know? Pretty pictures of cats and funny pictures of dogs. That’s my competition.

Full transcript after the jump. Keep reading »

Here’s the second excerpt from our interview with Richard Koci Hernandez. Here he talks about overcoming his natural fear of technology:

This is not a time for wusses! Those that survive and continue to tell stories in the future are going to have to get their hands dirty more than they ever did. I’m not ever saying that our job was ever easy. It’s not easy to be a reporter, it’s not easy to be a photographer, it’s not easy to be a storyteller in general. But I don’t think that, with the tools, with the technology, with the way everything is going, is that we have — we can’t just sit back any more. There’s going to be a lot of hard work for everyone, no matter.

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We’re finishing up posting the videos we shot with speakers at the Nieman Conference on Narrative Journalism. Over the next few days, we’ll be posting excerpts from our session with Richard Koci Hernandez — ex-newspaper photographer, multimedia maven, and now a fellow at UC Berkeley. He was one of the big hits of the conference, and he spoke to us directly about the adjustments journalists have to make when they are confronted with work online.

Here he talks about how he tries to convince recalcitrant journalists to invest time into learning the online medium:

And that’s what I tell people now. I say: “You know, if you even have the slightest notion that you want to [tell stories], then in some sense you need to get with the program and do something in this new medium that you love. Because you’re going to be competing with me.” In two years, when [my time at] Berkeley is up, I’m back out there. And so you know, I try and…appeal to that kind of sense of urgency, that they need to start thinking about these things.

Full transcript after the jump. Keep reading »

Jennifer Crandall of the Washington Post has been assembling a sum of many parts, the highly-regarded onBeing series that runs weekly on washingtonpost.com. (It’s been on hiatus for a while and is supposed to relaunch sometime soon.)

The series, which features interesting people saying interesting things in a spare white environment that strips away context and puts full attention on the words, is reminiscent of Studs Terkel’s oral histories — sharing the notion that ordinary people have extraordinary points of view. Crandall conducts the interviews in a small studio, shooting with a single Sony HDV camera then editing with many jump cuts and focal lengths. But what matters is the people she finds, and she spoke at the recent Nieman Narrative Journalism Conference about the work that goes into finding the
right people to interview.

Between sessions, we also got a chance to ask her for some advice on creating and working on sustained and innovative projects such as onBeing.

Today was a day for dueling e-book readers. Amazon just announced its update to the Kindle, which is significantly sexier than its predecessor (although, at $359, it’s no less reasonably priced). And market newcomer Plastic Logic announced its first content partners for its larger-screened device, which include USA Today and the Financial Times.

We’ve been hearing for years now that the future of news distribution was in portable e-paper devices. And while news on Kindles or similar gadgets is still a very small niche, there is some real momentum gathering in the news business’ big sister, book publishing.

I spoke recently with Russ Wilcox, the CEO and president of E-Ink — the Cambridge company behind a lot of the sector’s technology. He said that it made sense to introduce the tech through book readers. Because earlier displays required a second to reload, that lag imitated the time it took to turn a books page and could have been frustrating with the back-and-forth that comes with reading multiple news stories. And those devices’ text-only environment were a decent facsimile of the book-reading experience.

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[Here's part two of Ted Delaney's interview with NBC News digital journalist Mara Schiavocampo. Part one ran yesterday. —Ed.]

Mara Schiavocampo’s workflow has evolved as her job has.

It was only little more than a year ago that NBC named Schiavocampo its first “digital journalist” — a job whose mandate covers reporting, writing, photography, video (both shooting and editing), and being an on-air presence. It was an experiment to help define what a journalist could produce with all the technology now available — but without the team of professionals that have historically been involved in producing news videos.

Schiavocampo’s workflow centers on her Sony HVR-V1U camcorder. It does triple duty as video recorder, still camera and notebook replacement. “I’m very scaled-down — it’s just bare bones for me,” she said when we talked in her NBC office. “I’ve merged all my work down to one workflow,” she says. “I’m never taking notes because I’m tape recording.” Everything, she says, “is merged around my camera.”

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[Our Ted Delaney interviewed NBC News digital journalist Mara Schiavocampo recently about her leap into working in multiple media. You may remember Mara from our earlier post about her. Today, a look at her gear; part two, on her workflow, comes tomorrow. —Ed.]

When Mara Schiavocampo started out as a digital journalist, she was largely making it up as she went along. Beyond Kevin Sites, Yahoo.com’s “Hot Zone” reporter, there weren’t many models for her position with NBC News, which had her shooting video, recording audio, producing multimedia, and writing stories. On any given day, her work is just as likely to appear on an NBC web site as on the Nightly News.

But through trial and error, Schiavocampo’s come to her own conclusions about what workflows and equipment work best for her — the result of the evolution of both the gear available on the market and her own approach to digital storytelling. She’s come to very particular preferences about the things she carries — especially since each additional ounce of gear is one she lugs through airports, carries in the field, and maneuvers through the crowds at Rockefeller Center on her way to the office.

To carry it all, she uses a customized photo backpack, with wheels and a pull handle. Here’s what’s inside:

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