This week marks my fifth month at The Seattle Times, a perfect time for an update about what I’ve been up to. Almost since the minute I walked in the door, Eric Ulken has had me working on an unprecedented project for our newsroom — a WordPress blog.
So here I bring you, The Today File. We soft launched the blog two weeks ago and are now regularly linking to it from the homepage. The slideshow below is the presentation I gave to editors and reporters.
And in an act of irony, I’m duplicating my efforts and re-posting this on my personal blog. I, unlike the AP, though, am inline linking to the original source.
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If anything, the AP’s decision to start linking to original sources is a hindrance. Because now, in addition to news outlets everywhere reproducing the same exact stories, they will all include unlinked bit.ly URLs.
Trust me, I’m all for hyperlinking. It’s the fabric of the web, what makes the web functional, and I think more newspapers should be doing it — and more often. But what we have here is a technology problem and an ideology problem. I’m sure if the AP could write through stories using HTML (and, of course, have that HTML stripped once it hits the print CMS), they would do it. Or at least I hope they would. But their solution of including bit.ly links — in parentheticals — isn’t the way to credit newspapers or drive traffic. Continue reading
If your website’s full of assholes, it’s your fault. Anil Dash is spot on. Part of maintaining a news website is maintaining community and having high standards. He outlines five steps every website should take to keep their community in order. Because whether we like it or not, quality of our comments reflects on how our organizations are perceived, and the quality of comments that will come up moving forward.
Big news today in the life of Lauren Rabaino: I am taking a job at The Seattle Times as a resident producer.
For those of you who don’t know, I left Publish2 at the end of December. Since then, I’ve been blogging, doing freelance design and lounging on the beach — all while searching for the right job. I have finally found it.
The Seattle Times is the second-largest newspaper on the West Coast and has a newsroom of about 200. The team I’ll be working with, led by Eric Ulken, is awesome and loaded with good ideas — and exciting changes on the way.
Detroit Free-Press uses Intersect to map and document Asian carp journey. My personal critique at 10,000 Words on Free-Press’ use of the storytelling tool. Overall, I don’t think it’s a good medium for the content type, but give them kudos for real-time, on-the-spot reporting.
Last week I learned that David Cohn knows how to tell a joke, bust a move and host an awesome conference.
In all seriousness, the Hardly Strictly Young conference was a whirlwind of new people, old friends, big questions, bright ideas and lots of food. About 30 of us got together at the Reynold’s Journalism Institute in now tornado-stricken Missouri for a small conference gathering designed to compile alternate implementations for the Knight Commission’s report on informing communities.
We sat around for a full day in small, rotating brainstorming groups to tear the Knight Commission’s report to pieces and find ways to implement the very vague concepts recommended. Notably, the four topics we discussed:
Yesterday, QuarryGirl.com broke the news after an informal investigation that VegNews — the world’s top vegan magazine — has been publishing stock photos of real meat alongside vegan recipes and articles (while making slight alterations like changing the coloring and removing bones to make it look more believable).
Needless to say, the vegan community is really pissed off about this, including a few of my die-hard vegan friends. I’ve been eating vegan since October, but I wouldn’t call myself die-hard. As a reader of VegNews, I certainly won’t be losing sleep over the issue. But as a community journalism aficionado, I think that the editors of VegNews should be the ones losing sleep for committing the No. 1 sin of niche publications and news organizations in the 21st century: Failing to understand the needs of its community and readers. Continue reading
Hardly Strictly Young. Following Ryan’s lead, I too am honored and excited to be a part of the incredible list of attendees for Hardly Strictly Young, an event at the Reynold’s Journalism Institute. There are lots of new people I’ve been dying to meet, and many old friends that I can’t wait to meet up with again. See ya’ll in Missouri.
In a quest to learn as much as possible about starting a local news site, today I published a post on 10,000 Words about Berekeleyside – an independent news startup based out of Berkeley, California. I did a Q&A session with a co-founder, Tracey Taylor. It was an inspiring story and opened my eyes to the realities of starting my own news site. Here are some of the highlights of that interview:
I bitch a lot. I know. My recent post entitled, “‘We can’t find a web editor?’ Bullshit” was a rant about how behind college media is and how I would quit the school publication and start my own gig if I was still in college.
But I don’t like people who bitch and don’t execute. So I’m going to execute.
For those of you who don’t know, I left Publish2 in December. Since then, I’ve been interviewing at big media organizations across the United States. But every interview feels like a battle. I’m trying to convince people of my ideas and my enthusiasm, but am always countered with the question: “But, we’re a newspaper — how do you pull that off when our culture is so naturally resistant to innovation?” Well, at least they’re finally admitting it. That’s the first step to recovery.
When I graduated college in December 2009, I didn’t want to work at a newspaper because I didn’t want to be stifled. Lately, I’ve jumped off my high and mighty tower and decided that if newspapers are going to get anywhere, they need to hire more people like me who can help revolutionize from within (take Greg Linch, for example, hoppin’ on over to the Washington Post after leaving P2. Young brainz permeating big media). But now I’m in a new state of mind: If I want to be a part of the media revolution and help news along its winding journey, I can do that from outside of a traditional newsroom. In fact, I can start my own newsroom.
So here’s the buried lede. I am very seriously considering going back to my hometown of Porterville, California to create a news startup. I’ve bitched enough about, “Oh, I’d do it this way” or, “Oh, you should do it that way.” Time to put my money where my mouth is. Continue reading
In a few hours I’m giving a talk at the Associated Collegiate Press conference in Hollywood about creating digital-first newsroom strategies. To most of you who read this blog, it’ll all sound like old news, but you’d be surprised how far behind colleges are in terms of rethinking mindsets and workflows. It shocks me every time.
I’m posting the presentation here so conference attendees can follow along as I go.
Daniel Victor’s true motivation behind a month-long series about dating. It really was about infusing reader contributions into the reporting process and breaking down the wall between pre-publication and post-publication.
This tweet by Joey Baker hits it spot on:
Newspapers: classifieds got Craigslisted, coupons beat by Groupon. Next to fall is syndication to aggregation, last will be investigation.
Daniel Bachhuber is seeking questions on his blog about the Populous Project. Writes he:
The Populous Project is (was?) an open source, student news content management system which received $275,000 from the Knight Foundation’s 2008 News Challenge. It was supposed to be the panacea for college media, solve all of our College Publisher woes, and offered everything but the kitchen sink. CoPress talked to Anthony and Dharmishta a few times in October 2008, was promised an alpha to play with later that fall, but the project shortly dropped completely off the radar.
What ever happened to the Populous Project, and the Knight Foundation’s smooth $275,000?
Questions I have about the project:
Is Jim Brady a serial innovator? Rapid innovation, followed by a launch, followed by departure and on to the next awesome project. In any case, here’s Twitter’s reaction to the sudden, unexpected announcement. I use Storify to round up reactions
Continue reading
I am enormously proud to be a part of the team that is reinventing the way news content is distributed.
Monday at TechCrunch Disrupt, Publish2 CEO Scott Karp announced the company’s newest product, the Publish2 News Exchange. The entire Publish2 team sat huddled around laptops throughout our various locations in the U.S., cheering him on through our backchannel IM conversation. It was a momentous day for which we’ve all been working very hard.
We placed in the top five for the startup battlefield competition (Congrats to the winner, Soluto), and have gained tremendous momentum in the past five days. From here, we’ll continue to sign up beta users, roll out a full launch, and revolutionize publishing as we know it.
Here’s a video of Scott’s presentation:
These are just a few of my favorite tidbits from bloggers and tweeters around the web in response to the launch of P2x. This morning Ryan Sholin posted a far more comprehensive list of reactions.
[...] they are courageously pivoting into a new business model but based soundly (as far as I can tell) on the learnings and proximity they have had with publishers and journalists in the last few years. It doesn’t hurt that their CEO is a domain expert and that they have a strong advisory board. I believe in lean startup thinking but I don’t believe that pivoting blindly will usually lead to success -Darryl Siry
One feature of News Exchange that fell under the radar at TechCrunch is a story ideas database – basically an RFP for story assignments. Editors can post a request for coverage; other members can respond with an existing article or a commitment to write something. -Rob ORegan
The beauty of News Exchange is it opens the door to bring non-traditional content into traditional products. As with any new venture, particularly one that turns tradition on its head, there will be bumps, even moats, in the road. But the prospects of lively yet professional content from new voices are too much to ignore….AP can no longer stand on its laurels and take baby steps in re-inventing itself. That clock stopped ticking earlier today. Logan Molen
Because the News Exchange is still in beta and has yet to be rolled out, there are some missing features. The big one publishers will be concerned about is being able to track how your story is used by your subscribers. … However, Sholin said a form of analytics will come … The goal, he said, is to provide news orgs with data on how their content is used, and as News Exchange gets rolled out, Publish2 is going to play with different variation of analytics and reporting though it may require a manual effort from news orgs using the content. -Vadim Lavrusik
And this tweet from Ryan Sholin sums up what we have to look forward to over the next months:
ryansholin: My job right now is talking to brilliant journalists on the phone all day and show them cool new tools. I love my job.
Intrigued yet? If so, sign up for beta or email contact@publish2.com if you have questions.
Yes, this post is a bit delayed, but now that I’m on a flight home to Cali, I finally have a moment to finish it.
My BCNI experience finished with a bang thanks to Major Highfield‘s roundtable discussion on news site design and mobile news design. For those of you who don’t know Major, the former newsie is now the mobile tech lead for ING Direct. His roundtable was an open discussion about what works and what doesn’t in current news design, and a look forward at new ideas and trends.
He identified the following most common types of design we see in news:
Very reminiscent of print design, “column”-based news sites have thin vertical modules. The most well-known example is the New York Times.
The grid news design has less emphasis on hierarchy and gives equal balance to story display. Although Major used CNN as the example, I’ve included Newser as a more ideal example of the grid layout.
Bucket designs group stories by topic beneath a main header.
Timeline view or “river” view are also common terms for a list layout which is as it sounds: A list of headlines, like Digg.
The Toronto Star combines these different possibilities by offering the user different modes of viewing news, although Major noted that this isn’t ideal UI. The Toronoto Star manages multiple layouts from which the users can choose their favorite:
Major said you should push out the best user experience and not force the user to choose. Based on the heavy emphasis the Star’s designers put on evidence-based design, I’d venture to guess that they’re collecting data about which display is used most often in preparation for something radical. But that’s just a guess. 
Traditionally, display ads thrown into random columns and headers of news sites was the preferred advertising style online, as adapted from a print model. The new type of advertising comes in the form of embedded ads (i.e. ads displayed inline with the rest of the editorial content). We see this manifesting in LA Times’ decision to sell keyword ads within articles this week. A bad example of this can also be seen on CNN.com:
A good example of embedded advertising is in the free desktop version of Tweetie:
I think the reason CNN’s embedded ads fail is because CNN isn’t being honest with its customers. Tweetie clearly labels its ads as such and implements them elegantly into the design of the app. It also helps that the ads are very targeted at the user. CNN’s embedded ads try to look like editorial content and it’s deceitful. They’re also not very useful or pretty.
So the point of all this is that news sites still suck. One nugget that really stood out was in our conversation about news site navigation. We still categorize stories under sports, arts, news, opinion, etc. because this is how the print product was laid out. But is that what’s relevant to readers? I know that when I browse news, I don’t care about the topic. I care about the timeliness and its relevance to me, no matter what “section” it falls within. I don’t necessarily want to read about crime and sports, but if it’s happening within a three block radius of me, then I do care. So maybe instead of categorizing news sites into traditional categories, we can make the main navigational elements more relevant with categories like “time” and “location” (see the Spokesman Review for a great example of this).
One revelation that came about for me during this discussion (which might ironically deem this entire blog post irrelevant) is the fact that news design doesn’t matter at all when we’re all subscribing to news via RSS. Is there really any type of news site experience that will be more convenient and relevant? Am I ever going to want to visit 40 different sites each day, all of which are designed differently, and hunt down news that’s relevant to me within each of those sites? Or would I rather leave my Google Reader extension active in the browser, open in it in between tasks, quickly be presented with news I already know is relevant to me (distraction-free), and carry on with life? The latter is the news consumption pattern that fits best into my daily routine and allows me to consume the most news in the least amount of time. The fact that Google Reader’s social features push me the most relevant news being shared by the people I follow only increases its relevancy.
So maybe the question we should be asking ourselves as news designers isn’t how to make our sites better, but how to create an experience that surpasses that of the Google Reader experience. And maybe that’s the topic of another post. Stay tuned…
Howard Weaver was at BCNI to talk about a new news model in Hawaii from the Honolulu Civil Beat (an outlet from Peer News) that wants to challenge the notion that “people won’t pay for content” (disclosure: it is a venture to which he was a consultant and he now has a diminishing role).
The site will focus on community news in Honolulu and charge a $20/month subscription fee to access content. There will be a few-dollar fee to even access the site because the founder, Pierre Omidyar, believes in a capitalist economy that won’t be sustainable if you give anything away for free from the start.
All Howard’s opinions were his only. He does not represent Peer News or the Civil Beat, although he was a consultant for them.
“Why is a Facebook beer worth more than your news story?” Howard asked in a recent blog post. People pay for fake gifts on Facebook, but won’t pay a dollar for a news story. This is a problem. We first have to answer it before moving on to charge for content.
An atomic unit was a “news article” in the past. But an atomic unit of journalism is going to change radically in the new era of journalism. News can’t be “articles” but a service. The Civil Beat is drastically changing the way they view the final product.
The atomic unit of journalism is tied to co-creation. We see evidence of their mindset in the fact that the job title for their staff members is “reporter hosts” (because reporters are servants in the process of gathering the news).
An important part of the news site is the living story. Although Google launched “living stories,” Howard noted that they were really like topic pages. Peer News wants to approach stories realistically. For example, if there’s a new zoning law, it’s based on something initiated 10 years prior. A traditional news aritcle throws in background information in a few grafs, but the living story doesn’t assume the reader will do his/her own background research. The living story is fully contextual.
Some people in the audience were skeptical about the paywall. A few questions that were asked:
Although the Civil Beat doesn’t intent to include advertising, Howard’s suggestion to them would be to connect with local blogs and build an ad network. The Civil Beat will cover elite topics, but not nightlife and food and entertainment, etc. If local blogs can fill that space and they can share advertising, everyone would profit.
The site will launch officially with full content May 4.
