The legacy press — or the traditional media, or whatever we’re calling newspapers these days — has one main challenge for 2010, and it’s not finding a new business model. It has to do with vision. It has to do with being able to imagine a world that does not yet exist.

While the news media’s woes come from lagging ad rates and content that’s scooped up by aggregrators, those are symptoms of the main problem: an inability to imagine what media consumption will look like in one, five, 10 years.

It’s a problem that’s not new or unique to the news business. Two examples illustrate my point. Keep reading »

Over the past several months, much has been said about transparency being the new objectivity in journalism. As news organizations figure out whether they’ll use social media, and, if so, how they’ll use it, the phrase has been popping up more and more in the blogosphere.

I agree with that sentiment to a point, and I support the idea of transparency whole-heartedly. But at the risk of sounding like the glutton who wants her proverbial cake and to eat it, too, I ask: Why can’t we have both? Why can’t we aim for both objectivity and transparency?

Objectivity is unattainable in my mind unless robots begin to replace journalists (and even then, there’s still the opinions of the humans programming the robots.) But I think it’s a goal worth shooting for. Journalists should, I believe, try with all their might to show all sides (not just two) of a story, to be fair, to be accurate, to hold their own opinions in check in the telling. Even viewpoints we disagree with should get the airing of open discourse.

I agree with those who say transparency is so important now because it is intrinsic to the way people use the Internet. We want to know why we should trust the people we’re reading. We want to know what they think. But I’d go one step farther and argue that transparency was always important, even in the days of print-only publications before the Web took off.

Keep reading »

The Omaha World-Herald Co. announced this week that it has purchased WikiCity, a hyperlocal site with local content for just more than 22,000 U.S. communities that I wrote about here in August.

WikiCity, which started in late 2008 and launched publicly this summer, is a bit like CitySearch with its telephone-book-like listings of restaurants and businesses and similar to BackFence with its aim to be a user-generated hyperlocal site. But it lets readers update their own communities pages, giving a bit of a Wikipedia feel.

When I wrote about it this summer, I noted that one of the best potential benefits of something like WikiCity would be to team up with local news organizations.

That, in essence, is what happened. The Omaha World-Herald Co.’s flagship publication is the Omaha World-Herald, with a 200,000 Sunday and a 160,000 daily circulation, said Joel Long, the company’s director of public relations. The privately held, employee-owned company owns 9 dailies in Nebraska and Iowa, 22 weeklies, and 23 other publications. Buying WikiCity “offers us a new an exciting opportunity of looking at other avenues of connecting with our readers,” Long told me.

Keep reading »

News organizations, take note: More women than men are using social media, a new study says.

The study, from Information is Beautiful, uses Google Ad Planner numbers to come up with its conclusion that more women than men use many popular social networks. Digg stands out because 64 percent of users are men. LinkedIn and YouTube are tied, genderwise.

You can view that data yourself, but here are some findings I found interesting:

— Twitter: 57 percent women users.

— Facebook: 57 percent women users.

— Flickr: 55 percent women users.

Patrick Thornton at BeatBlogging.Org, which tipped me off to the study, notes that it’s important to understand the demographics of each social network because “news organizations — especially newspapers — have struggled for years to attract as many female readers/users as they do with males.” You can say that again. Keep reading »

When Greg Munno started CNYSpeaks in June 2008, he was the civic engagement editor for the Syracuse Post-Standard in upstate New York. Inspired by the Philadelphia Inquirer’s Great Expectations project, CNYSpeaks was aimed at rallying the Syracuse community around the idea of improving the city, and it included a blog, news stories and residents’ forums. The newspaper teamed up with the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs at Syracuse University to make it happen.

In June 2009, Munno took a buyout from The Post-Standard. But he’s still running CNYSpeaks — paid as a consultant by a grant the Maxwell School obtained. The CNYSpeaks blog still appears on the newspaper’s website. Munno still pitches stories for the newspaper’s print edition, including this piece from last month that led up to a forum for mayoral primary candidates.

To me, this is a great example of the type of collaboration between academia and media that needs to happen more and more as journalism re-invents itself. Keep reading »

To me, one of the most interesting aspects of AnnArbor.com is its reliance on community bloggers for a large portion of the site’s content. It’s also the aspect most likely to give many journalists the heebie-jeebies.

AnnArbor.com launched when The Ann Arbor News closed in late July, ending the newspaper’s 174-year history. It was a sad day for journalism when the News closed, leading to the loss of more than 200 jobs. But it was also the beginning of real-life experiment in this evolving enterprise we call journalism. To me, it’s an experiment all in the world of journalism should be watching. Closely.

While the print daily died, a new Web site, Ann Arbor.com rose with a mission of some original reporting, along with much social networking and community involvement. It publishes a print edition twice a week. (Full disclosure, I spent 15 years working for a Syracuse newspaper owned by Advance, which also owns The News and AnnArbor.com.)

The first thing you notice at AnnArbor.com, as has been noted before at the Lab, is it looks nothing like a news site — or what we expect a news site to look like.

Once you explore a bit, you’ll find an aspect of the site that you’ll either love or hate: It offers blogs from community members. Lots of them. About 70 people blog for the news site, in addition to its approximately 60 paid staffers, says Edward Vielmetti, blogging leader for the community team, which means he oversees the nonjournalists who blog for AnnArbor.com. You do the math: That’s more community folks than actual, bona fide journalists. Keep reading »

WikiCity is one of the latest to jump on the hyperlocal bandwagon, which includes traditional news sites, blogs, and hybrids. WikiCity started in late 2008, but announced itself formally this summer with local content for just more than 22,000 U.S. communities. It’s a bit like CitySearch with its telephone-book-like listings of restaurants and businesses and similar to BackFence with its aim to be a user-generated hyperlocal site. Yet, when you check out WikiCity’s more robust listings, such as the one for Wahoo, Nebraska, it seems like Wikipedia.

It appears WikiCity is trying to be a bit of all these things — skimming off the best of each and amalgamating those ideas into a new hyperlocal form that readers can update on their own.

WikiCity founder and owner Pat Lazure says the aim initially was to target smaller communities, with 20,000 or fewer residents that may not have a daily newspaper serving them. To get the ball rolling, he and a partner seeded the site with business listings. That way businesses in small communities can use WikiCity as their own Web site if they don’t have one, and readers will have something to see to spur them to jump in and add their own stuff. (Or, at least, that’s the hope.) Eventually, Lazure hopes to spread WikiCity throughout the United States and make money mainly through revenue partnerships with businesses such as travel companies and perhaps some traditional advertising.

What each community’s Wiki page becomes is up to that community in a sense. The page begins with business listings, but it can become a news site of sorts if readers add stories recapping a recent high school sports game or write about the latest controversy in town. This allows each community to customize its WikiCity to reflect the local flavor. “We’re going to let the masses hold the voice, hold the keys,” Lazure explains.”It’s going to be those locals and those communities that will make it.”

Keep reading »

For decades, news organizations have tried to figure out how to capture those illusive female readers. A room full of editors — likely by and large white and male — would metaphorically bang their heads against the wall, trying to conjure what that confounding group that makes an estimated 80 percent of the buying decisions in the American home wants.

The result, often, was as far off-point as when my husband guesses what I mean when I tell him “I don’t want to talk about it.”

News for women

Women’s news got ghettoized in the features section, and women readers were served up lots of fluff. Stories about face cleansers and nail polish and decorating the nursery. As the Web took hold, news organizations jumped onto the mommy blog bandwagon, and moms’ sites on newspaper Web sites like this one proliferated.

I’m not knocking mommy sites; they have a valuable place. In fact, I spent two years working on the online parenting page for The Post-Standard in Syracuse, N.Y. But women need more than mommy sites. All women aren’t mothers. And all women, mothers or not, need news. Real news. News about topics important to them and delivered in a way that makes sense to them.

As news organization try to figure out new business plans, they can’t afford not to give more attention to the estimated 149.1 million American women (or more than 3 billion worldwide). News organizations really cannot wait until they figure out how to make money before they woo women readers — because by then, many of them will be lost to the blogosphere.

Why? Because the blogosphere is chatty, conversational, relationship-oriented, friendly, approachable. In short, it’s not like a typical newspaper Web site, but it is just the type of place many women like.

I’m not saying news organizations need to dumb things down for women. Not at all. What I am saying is that the way news organizations have been delivering news hasn’t served women readers for decades, and now woman have many other options. Keep reading »

I’d never heard this term until Dave Hendricks, who blogs at Attentionization, used it when he wrote about my post regarding what newspapers could learn from the decline in the ice harvesting business. (Read more about how he explains artisanal news in the comments on that post.)

I like the term. So I started to think about what it might mean.

Artisanal, we know, means something produced in limited quantities often using a traditional method. When I hear the word, I think of cheese or bread, not news — as I’d guess most people do.

I’ve been mulling the idea of artisanal news quite a bit, and I believe it would mean radically altered news organizations, very different from the ones we’re used to seeing. Here’s what I think an artisanal news organization might look like, particularly ones covering small and mid-sized communities.

Focus is niche, not mass: The news organization no longer strives to make every story as relevant as possible to everybody. Instead, it aims to make individual stories highly relevant to small groups of readers who collectively add up to lots of people. (Think Camembert for me; classic goat cheese for you.) Beats are constructed to tap into existing communities that appreciate the particular “cheese” or “bread” you are offering. Keep reading »