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.

There are so many problems at play here.

1. News producers are going to have to manually link the bit.ly URLs. So, when the AP says its going to link to “straight pickups” (as in, stories which derive entirely from a member’s reporting), they really mean they’re just going to insert a bit.ly link in to the story. So, for example, the link won’t look like this. It will look like this (http://bit.ly/oOAVhT).

With the lack of producers in most newsrooms and the wealth of wire content that gets shoved onto news websites, I doubt producers will prioritize manual linking on top of their other duties. And even if they do, this is probably two-five minutes of extra work per story published. Which comes out to probably an hour of work per day, depending on how many AP stories get pushed to the web at a particular website.

2. As a result of that, the bit.ly links instead clutter a story, rather than driving traffic. Readers aren’t going to take the time to manually type in or copy/paste a bit.ly link, whether they see it in print or online. It’s less work to Google a search term if you’re interested in reading more about a print story. If the URLs were inline linked, the UX is such that clicking through would actually happen. So, now, we’ll have all these stories with unlinked bit.lys, which is a confusing and unintuitive usage for readers.

3. Adding bit.lys still doesn’t fix the fundamental problem at play here. We are all reposting the same stories over and over. Today, Amy Winehouse died. I saw this on Twitter, then reported on BBC.  I sat at my desk waiting for the AP slug to come across the budget list. As soon as it did, I published the AP obituary. So did about a dozen other newspapers, and probably more afterwards. We do this with national stories every day.

Imagine if we all just linked to the original reports from news outlets who have the stories first. And imagine if part of the AP’s role — if they truly want to be “more like an aggregator and less like a rewrite desk” — was to find those scoops and push those links out to member sites, so we could all link back to the original reports and send traffic where traffic is due, then add our own original reporting when and where necessary. This would increase the value of everyone’s content and save time.

AP is headed in the right direction (kind 0f), but the technology needs to catch up so linking can be done right. Until then, inline, unlinked bit.ly links are probably not going to be hugely useful.

Who: Professors, students, journalists, professionals
What: “Bring a professor” chat
When: Sun., Feb. 22
Where:  www.collegejourn.com
Why: To discuss ways to modernize college journalism education 

Us vs. them

I hate to make this us vs. them, but to be honest, this is an us vs. them situation. Some would argue that “we’re all in this together,” both the professors and the students. But it’s not that way. The students and the industry are in this together. But the professors aren’t impacted directly. If they fall behind, they don’t see the direct consequences of falling behind and thus have no incentive to change. 

It doesn’t have to be us vs. them though. Professors can eliminate the us vs. them by taking the risks students are expected to take.  The classroom should foster that innovation, not hinder it. We can take the risks together. 

“Communication in a communication department would be a start,” said the Mustang Daily managing editor Giana Magnoli when the topic came up in our newsroom. And that’s what #bringajprof chat is about. Bringing that communication between staff and students to a national worldwide level. 

I recently wrote a blog post that sums up the changes I’d like to see in journalism education:

1. Scrap print as a track: There is no such thing as a purely print publication. Thus a solely “print” concentration is pointless. Replace it with a “multimedia” track and keep very minimal print aspects involved.
2. Make video a must for all concentrations: Public relations and news editorial both need to know video editing. Broadcast students who already know how to shoot/edit video need to know how to get it on the Web. All three need to know how to live stream and incoroporate a live chat. 
3. Create a class about social media: Not about platoforms or social networks, though. A class about the community, the conversation, the two-way dynamic of the Web. 
4. Create media business course. Joey Baker said it best in his recent blog post: ”What we need more than anything else is a business model for our industry that is sustainable. Why need students not only to be aware of the problem, but contributing to the brain storming that will eventually lead to a solution.”

“It’s just another social thing,” one guy told me just yesterday. 

Then something like this happens and changes everything:

The photo was posted to TwitPic via Janis Krums @jkrums, a guy who happened to be in the right place at the right time. 

Along with his photo (in fewer than 140 characters) Janis tweeted: “There’s a plane in the Hudson. I’m on the ferry going to pick up the people. Crazy.”

And as our mobile phone picture-taking-quaility continues to improve, so will the value in on-the-go journalism. Janis’ photo, taken from an iPhone, is far better in quailty than the frame grabs taken from local news stations.  His photo was also the first to appear on the web — and, as usual, I found out about the crash on Twitter before CNN ever sent out my news alert.

There’s a lot of talk these days about whether Twitter, blogging and microblogging are the future of journalism. I’m not sure if I’m ready to make that claim, but times like these validate that it’s a hell of a supplement.

• #5 Get away from College Publisher
• #6 …and in the process go Web First

Getting away from College Publisher

That’s right: I said it.  After a recent conference call with Adam Hemphill and Miles Skorpen of CoPress, it’s official. The Mustang Daily is switching to WordPress.

The switch away from College Publisher is something I’ve wanted for the Mustang Daily since before I was even a student at Cal Poly. Not that College Publisher is bad; it’s a great starting point for newspapers who are trying to learn the dynamics of the Web. We used to be that paper. Now we get it. Now we’re ready for new things. We’re ready to generate our own revenue and move on.

Plus, WordPress is open-source. College Publisher is far from it.  If we want to make changes, we have a world of developers to turn to. With College Publisher, change comes in the form of submitting a query to their support team.  That makes it less than easy to be innovative.

This summer I started seriously considering WordPress as a CMS and built a mockup. But there’s a huge difference between saying, “This is what I want to do,” and actually doing it. 

Our former online editor created a Joomla mockup last year, just as I had done with the WordPress, and after getting the “Ok!” from our general mananger, his plans went nowhere.

Why? Fear. Fear of not being able to pass down an open-source CMS to future online editors. Fear of failing. 

That was the same concern that came up when I proposed the idea of moving to WordPress. 

To me, it’s a non-issue. If my future replacement doesn’t “know” the system, then he/she has to learn it.

We’ve all been new to it at one point. The fear of learning something new is possibly what got the journalism industry in the position it’s in now.

After news that CoPress would start hosting college newspapers, I had the final push the editor-in-cheif and I needed to convince our general manager that we’re done with College Publisher.

It’s really a great deal: cheap hosting (off-campus, so we don’t have to follow strict ADA rules and pay the school for space), a support network (so that we’re not relying only on me), and a solid relationship with leaders in college journalism. 

Tentative plans set our launch date for March 14.  Cross your fingers for us. We couldn’t be more excited. 

Structural changes to the Mustang Daily

With our big redesign come huge structural changes. With College Publisher, we were limited to posting stories based on the date of our print issue (although, to be fair, CP5 has improved).  With WordPress, we’re ready to move to a 24-hour news cycle where we’re posting news continuously.

Even if your newspaper isn’t planning a major overhaul, you should still consider ending your shovelware methods. 

It’s what your readers expect from you. Most students are getting their news online from the local paper, CNN, NYTimes, etc. They’re used to getting news updates all day long, and it shouldn’t be any different with a college newspaper. News doesn’t stop during the day just because the print issue isn’t done.

Of course, the change isn’t as simple as posting news updates throughout the day. The way our process is structured requires copy editors to come in around 5 p.m. to start reading over stories. With their red pens, they sit at a table and edit stories that have been printed out.

Hours are wasted between the first Word Doc printout and the flat printout. Copy editors aren’t done with the final changes until 10 p.m. each night (which is when I post the stories. That’s just wrong). 

 I have a few problems with this method:

• Why are the copy editors only coming in at night? Future (meaning this spring or summer) structural changes to the Daily will require copy editors on duty all day long to edit stories as they come in.
   
• During a time when the Web dominates the news industry, why is it our last priority? The web should always be the number one priority on every editor’s list. Not a place to dump stories that don’t fit in print or an after-thought at the end of the night. And while most editors tend to agree, they sure have a hard time putting it into practice.
   
• Why do copy editors need to use a red pen on a printed Word Doc? What about a little thing called a computer? Editing on paper seems so primitive.  Slowly, the Mustang Daily staff has started using Google Docs for assigning article and photo assignments. And WordPress makes editing articles online even simpler.
  As Greg Linch wrote on the CoPress Blog, stories can be edited on WordPress, rather than through multiple Word Doc revisions. This means the copy editors don’t have to come into the newsroom to copy edit. All they need is a computer and internet access.
   
• Also, as Greg notes, when print designers are ready to layout their pages, they simply pull the already-copy edited versions of the articles from the CMS.  It saves time and everyone wins.

Breaking an age-old tradition

Another way the Mustang Daily is breaking the rules this quarter is through implementing a “track” system for our reporters.

Because the Mustang Daily reporters are enrolled in a class (taught by student editors), they get credit for writing. So the syllabus is structured like any other class: you do a little of everything so you can be “well rounded.”

Traditionally, it’s always (and I mean forever) worked this way– Each quarter (10 weeks) every Mustang Daily reporter writes:

• Four news stories
• Four arts stories
• Three sports stories
• One feature story (1,000+ words) 
• An opinion piece
• + four miscellaneous (from any section) 
• Last year, we added a multimedia requirement to that list. Starting in summer 2008, it jumped to two multimedia pieces.

But now we’re breaking the rules. We’re switching it up. Reporters are now on a track system, which works like beats. We have sports writers, news writers, arts writers and general reporters. Each reporter will do two multimedia pieces for their respective tracks.

The system is seemingly common-sense. Reporters build up their contacts in their tracks and get story leads. They get the kind of experience they’d have in a real newsroom.

We made the switch because we had crap stories for our sports section. Reporters who knew/understood sports couldn’t write for the section because they had to fulfill news/arts requirements, and news/arts writers who knew nothing about sports were trying to cover soccer games. It doesn’t work that way.

Yet somehow, for uncountable years, the system continued. Not because it worked, but out of fear of change. Because the world supposedly wanted journalists who could cut out diverse clips to paste into their portfolios.

Well the industry is changing. Physical clips don’t exist (or at least they shouldn’t). Students need experience that reflects the real industry as close as possible. College newspapers need to mirror those industry changes, or even better — come up with innovative changes the professional industry hasn’t yet.

I challenge you to look at aspects of your newspaper that have always been the same, and ask yourself if those strategies still work. And even if you think they do work, come up with ways to make them work better.

Change is the only way to win. Are you up for it?

I’ve always learned that e-mail interviews are an absolute last resort. The criteria: the interviewee has to be on the other side of the world, on a spaceship or in jail.

But as e-mail and other web-based networks (Twitter, Facebook) become such a huge part of the communicative landscape, e-mail interviews don’t have the same “unprofessional” vibe they used to.

I’m not suggesting that an e-mail interview should entirely replace a phone or face-to-face interview, but it’s a great supplement.

Freelance journalist Kim Lisagor said in a recent conversation that she was shocked when reporters e-mailed her regarding her book, Disappearing Desinations. As a traditionally-trained journalist, she always saw e-mails as a last resort too. 

But she made an interesting observation:

“The only articles that were accurate were the e-mail interviews,” Lisagor said.

The great thing about e-mail interviews is that you can pull quotes directly from the e-mail, verbaitim.

Ways to effectively use e-mail interviews:

• As an introduction: If you have some time to work an a story, shoot your primary sources a quick e-mail. Let them get the gist of your story. Tell them to be expecting a call from you. I’ve found that this makes my sources a lot more comfortable, and that means a better interview. You can do this introduction through Twitter or Facebook too.  Example: “Hello Mr. Doe, I’m a student reporter at the College Daily and I’m just giving you the heads up that I’ll be calling you soon to talk about an article I’m writing. I’m interested in investigating faculty salaries and I know you’ve been vocal about the topic in the past. Looking forward to talking to you. 

• To get the basics. Names, places, times, etc. If you have this in an e-mail, you can always resort back to it, directly from the source.
   
• As a fact-checker: Are you unsure about a few statistics or a sequence of events? Rather than finding the time to meet in person again or facing the difficulty of trying to sort out details over the phone, e-mail can be the best way to see the facts straight-forward.Example: Hello, Ms. Doe. I am the College Daily student you spoke with earlier. I want my story to be accurate, and I was hoping you can confirm a few facts:
  • CSU employees will maintain regular pay until the budget is passed
  • The support budget consists of federal money remaining from the 2007-08 school year
  • When that money runs dry the CSU will pay employees from student fees Thanks in advance for the clarification!
    -Student journalist 

When you shouldn’t use e-mail interviews:

• Really hard news. If there is a scandal with the mayor, it’s likely that an e-mail response would be written by a PR person. To get to the root of it and fish through the BS, phone and in-person will produce the best results.
• Really fluffy features. If you want to capture the sparkle in someone’s eye or tone in someone’s voice, e-mail just won’t do the trick. That doesn’t mean cut it out all together. You can still use the e-mail to do an introduction to your subject, then after the interview, send an e-mail to get clarifications you need.

E-mail may last forever. Once sent, it can be forwarded to strangers. So keep it professional at all times.

Identify yourself as a reporter.

Apply the same critical thinking and fact-checking skills that you would to any other information source.

Verify your sources and their online identities. Remember, e-mail addresses can be faked.

Steve Enders, Cal Poly alumnus and senior product manager at Yahoo! News, gave a keynote lecture Thursday at Cal Poly’s journalism week and shared some interesting perspectives.

A few things Steve emphasized:

“I never thought I’d be where I’m at today. I graduated with an interest in newspapers. I wanted to be a reporter and editor.”

If you’re going to get into journalism, you need to be ready to change. It’s a constant evolution, and if you’re stuck in your ways, you’re not going to last long. Have an open mind. Accept new challenges. Steve’s career path is a perfect example of flexibility:

• He graduated in 1997 with a journalism degree
• After graudation, he worked at Metro, a newspaper
• After Metro, he switched gears to Click, a magazine
• Made a huge leap to television, working for Tech TV
• Finally made the jump to the web with Yahoo

• World’s No. 1 news Web site in terms of unique users to the site each month
• Only 10-15 employees on the editorial staff
• Processes 13,000 pieces of content every day
• About 10 percent is original content, the rest is aggregated

“Now we’re starting to care about, ‘Well, if you’re interested in a story, I probably am too and I’m going to read it.’”

Promote yourself using social networks that most people are already using and familiar with. It will drive traffic to your site, (it’s something I’ve previously blogged about; it’s good to know a professional agrees)

• Put your newspaper on Twitter
• Start a Facebook page for your publication
• Upload your video to YouTube

While Steve as a speaker did very well overall, I was disappointed with the low student turnout. Instead, random guests of the older generation (people who aren’t impacted by the changing industry) showed up and asked questions like “Can you track searches directly back to my name?” or, my favorite: “So, is it like deadline all the time?” Um, duh?

Students should have taken advantage of the opportunity to make an industry connection and get a glimpse into what the industry is like right now (what it’s really like, not what we learn about in class).

On a happier note, I had somewhat of an epiphany during the lecture. Although I’ve recently been pessimistic about journalism as a whole, something Steve said stuck with me:

“What an exciting time to be getting into this industry.”

That statement goes against a lot of sentiments I hear from professionals and peers. A fellow journalism major with a public relations concentration told me yesterday, “I’d be terrified to be in print journalism right now.” It’s the general attitude most students at Cal Poly — and the industry as a whole — have.  Sure, we’re going through a tough time, but it’ll come around, and aspiring journalists are going to be the people who fix it.

The industry isn’t dying. It’s changing. And the upcoming generation of journalists gets to redefine news and its delivery.

Richard Koci Hernandez seems to fit that description in the realm of multimedia.

I first met him at an ACP conference in San Francisco last spring. It was the most inspiring seminar I’d ever witnessed. He talked about breaking the rules and going against the grain. He shared his views on the future of HDV instead of DSLRs. His message was sincere and presented in a fresh way. Since the conference, I’ve kept a close eye on his blog and am always interested in what he has to say.

The following is the result of a recent e-mail interview with him:

The written version:

Where it started

When Richard Koci Hernandez took a family trip to Yosemite as a child, he saw nature photographs by Ansel Adams and his life was forever changed. Koci Hernandez took a Nikon FM film camera, which his uncle had traded his lawn mower for, and set out on a quest to be the next Ansel.

“I sucked, of course, and soon found my family members as better subjects than the rocks,” Koci Hernandez said.

At the time, he was in a Catholic seminary and wanted to help people. Because he loved photography, he felt journalism was the best way to continue to help society while doing what he enjoyed most.

“A little naive,” he admitted, “But that’s what got me started.”

Koci Hernandez attended Ventura Community College’s liberal arts program until 1990 and graduated from San Francisco State University with a BA in journalism in 1993. He started his professional career as a photojournalist in 1989 and has worked at the Ventura County Star, Kansas Wichita Eagle and San Jose Mercury News.

Taking the initiative

About four years ago in 2004, Koci Hernandez and another Mercury News photographer Dai Sugano embarked on a six month journey to teach themselves Flash, Final Cut Pro, CSS, HTML and more to create a multimedia site for the Mercury News.

“That’s the short version,” Koci Hernandez joked.

In a lecture at Berkeley in 2007, Koci Hernandez explained that he and the other staff photographers felt the need to create the site when there was no more room for their photos to run in print.

“You were lucky if you came back and you got one photo in the paper,” he said at the lecture.

Tireless hours went into learning all the basics on their own. The Mercury News was very anti-multimedia at the time, so the photographers set out on a journey of their own. After presenting their mockup to the Web team, they, once again got a negative response. They were told that hosting their photo site on the newspaper’s server would “crash everything.”

For $9 a month out of the photo budget, they bought the server space from an outside company to host their work. The result was MercuryNewsPhoto.com — a site that housed photography and multimedia projects by the Merc staffers.

“This was not for glory, we never got anything for it. We did it all on our own time,” he said at the Berkeley seminar. They never promoted the site, but quickly started to see the number of pageviews go up. When the stats were high enough, the Mercury News agreed to start linking to some of the photographers’ work from the main site.

Two years after MercuryNewsPhoto.com launched, Koci Hernandez’s title was changed from “staff photojournalist” to “deputy director of multimedia, photo and video.” As of 2007, the site was getting 100,000 visitors a month — half the newspaper’s circulation.

“When I realized that the future of newspaper was an online model, I knew that photographers and their images — mixed with audio — was going to be a valuable way to inform the public and tell deeper stories,” Koci Hernandez said.

Newsroom to classroom

In August 2008, Koci Hernandez made the leap from the newsroom to the classroom. The National Photographer’s Press Associated reported in August that he left his deputy director of multimedia job at the San Jose Mercury News to accept a Ford Foundation multimedia fellowship at the UC Berkeley with a goal of developing digital news sites for under-served communities.

When asked if he made the switch to get out early before the journalism industry goes up in flames, Koci Hernandez said, “Kinda, but not really.” He’s a newspaper optimist and said he still believes in a strong future for journalism.

“I guess I have a naive vein in me,” he said. “But I thought I might actually be able to ‘save’ journalism or do something positive in my new role here at Berkeley, more than I could have by staying at a newspaper.”

He’s currently teaching the J200 class– intro to reporting — to help maintain community news sites through multimedia, audio, video and interactive production. The switch from newsroom to classroom has been easy.

“I was already teaching in the newsroom, so it was a seamless transition,” Koci Hernandez said. The best part, he admitted, was that students still see the world of journalism as a glass half full. But, he still misses the daily grind of newspapers and the rush of deadline.

Winning an Emmy

In reflecting on his journalism career so far, Koci Hernandez said his favorite and most famous work was a multimedia production he co-produced at the Mercury News before he left. Titled “Uprooted,” the video chronicles the story of two families as they were evicted from their mobile home park to make way for new development. The piece recently won him and former colleague Dai Sugano an Emmy. Even though it was created collaboratively, Koci Herandez said it’s his best work.

“Good things are done in groups,” he said. “No one is an island in this world of multimedia.”

HD video instead of DSLR

Koci Hernandez regularly attends conferences and gives lectures on the use of HD video instead of traditional still frame photography, a technique he’s switched to in recent years.

“I woke up one day about three years ago and had a personal epiphany,” he said. “It’s not about the tool, it’s about the image. It’s not about what brush I used to paint the picture, it’s about the picture.”

With that in mind, he left behind the world of DSLR and moved on to HD video.

“Video is just still photography on speed. It means I have the fastest motor drive around,” he said.

But his innovative epiphany hasn’t gone without resistance from traditional photographers.

“Everybody is afraid of change,” he said. “Mostly, people are afraid of picking up a tool they are not familiar with and failing to make great images right off the bat.”

He said the process of getting better is about failure, and that the experiences he’s most proud of are the times he picked up a camera and failed.

One the side

In his spare time, Koci Hernandez maintains a blog at MultimediaShooter.com which provides tips and tricks for producing multimedia. He also shares interesting productions there for inspiration to others. He enjoys spending time with his family and is currently building a real, working, old-fashioned photobooth with his daughter for her 11th birthday party.

The future of photoj

As for the future of photojournalism, Koci Hernandez said there will be fewer traditional opportunities, meaning fewer jobs with newspapers and magazines.

“We are living in the most visually stimulating culture that feeds off images of all kinds,” he said. “There will be opportunities around, but in areas we might not be used to entering or have yet to be created.”

He is convinced that the industry is at its most creative and innovative peak in history and that student journalists shouldn’t be discouraged.

“The industry has been preaching doom and gloom for years,” he said. When Koci Hernandez was in school a decade ago, people were telling him the same foreboding stories of a dying industry that many students are fearing now.

“If you want to tell stories bad enough . . . if you have the passion, you will get work, I promise,” he said.