I spend some of my time at The Seattle Times working as a homepage producer. This means that when I’m in the chair, it’s my job to find the best content on the site and from our partner sites (blog posts, wire stories, articles, photo galleries) to create the most interesting, diverse and useful mix on the homepage. Hundreds of pieces of content (and journalism) are being thrown my way, each vying for top real estate above the scroll.  But I only have roughly 10 spots to fill.  How I can I decide what goes where and for how long?

If I made my decisions based purely on metrics, the page would constantly be a combination of headlines about Amanda Knox and any/all sports. We don’t make editorial decisions based purely on metrics, because metrics don’t give  you the full picture. Yet, when it comes to monetizing journalism online, clicks and pageviews are the only metrics we use to make decisions. Our editorial values aren’t aligning with our business values — then we wonder why making money online is so difficult.

What we need to do is find a means of measurement that measures the impact of our journalism, empowers us to keep doing the journalism that creates said impact, and then monetize the journalism that has the most impact.

My handwritten brainstorm about quantifying impact for investigative journalism.

In the spirit of TechRaking, I’m going to focus here on investigative reporting: It’s the kind of reporting we do that has the most impact. It can lead us to public policy changes, resignation of top officials, the eventual saving of lives. The impact it has is far-reaching, but it’s not necessarily the kind of content that gets the most eyeballs. A reporter could spend years gathering data and records on a story like this, yet it’ll end up on the front page of Google News for a day or two, at absolute most, before it falls into the abyss of the web.

When I’m on the homepage or running The Seattle Times’ social channels, those investigations will get love while they’re fresh. Maybe a few days, or a week. Then we’ve moved on to the next thing. Is that OK? The purpose of this kind of journalism is to bring issues to light and create change, regardless of how many people see it, right?

A few questions worth exploring:

• Why do we do the kinds of reporting that we think are meaningful?
• Is the act of publishing enough?
• What opportunities does the web provide beyond publishing and data display?
• In reporting investigatively (i.e. the kind of reporting that has the most impact), we obviously have some kind of agenda, even if it’s a fact-based one. Do we take it too far if we become advocates?
• Do we leave it to the public to be their own advocates?
• Is it still considered “advocating” if we provide a platform for change?
• What would that platform look like?

Now, to try to answer them one-by-one:

We do enterprise, investigative reporting to uncover the truth, bring about social change, reveal corruption, or make sense of mass amounts of data to reveal trends that otherwise would never be brought to light. This is the kind of reporting that could take years of someone’s life.

The act of publishing used to be the end of the story. With the web, commenting comes after publishing, and then comment threads close after 72 hours.  It shouldn’t start or end there (see Daniel Victor’s post about the reader contributions grid). Certain cases of investigative reporting require secrecy before publishing, but many types of reporting provide an opportunity to crowd source information and data. Post-publishing, we can continue engaging, which leads me to…

Do we take it too far if we have an agenda? We know that there’s an increase of methadone-related deaths in Washington state because we have the data. We know the increase in deaths is directly related to the state preferring the drug over other painkillers because of its cheap cost. We know the overdoses are accidental, not from addiction. We know deaths are more frequent in poor areas. We know this is bad and we know that publishing the facts can bring good, can bring change. We know there’s something we want to uncover. Is this an agenda? Some would say yes. Most would probably say that we let the public decide. Either way…

Can we provide our audience with a platform for seeing through the change we hoped to bring? A way to donate to a fund, or write a letter to a senator, or share the campaign on social media (think KONY 2012-esque movements, which newspapers haven’t been able to parallel). In the past, this would be something we leave for other, independent groups to take on — we’re completely unbiased, objective entities, after all. But think of the opportunities for creating an engaged community that you can steer. A community that keeps coming back to do good. A community that is well-informed and about to drive conversation around the issues you cover. A community that’s empowered.

What would that platform for empowerment look like?  Maybe something like Spot.us, where there is a specific call to action for each item, and a progress bar to show amount achieved until the change has been brought about. Maybe this aspect is led by an editorial board, making them relevant again.

And while we’re talking about UX/new functionality as a form of engagement… we should make investigations easier to digest. Walls of text are good, but with varying parts to different series, plus dumps of data and source documents and visualizations and interactives and social media and video, etc., it can sometimes be hard to just “jump into” an investigation after-the-fact. Imagine thinking beyond the 65-inch story that contains a few hyperlinks to other parts of the investigation.  A few ideas:

• Include highlights, key findings and/or trends for investigations (idea stolen from State of the Media 2012
• In fact, imagine if you could explore every investigation like you can explore State of the Media: as its own project, a standalone site. Not a news story shoved into a web format after-the-fact, but how you would tell a story if it were only web-based. If that was a 100-page PDF, I wouldn’t have read it all. But I delved into all elements of the State of the Media report because it was easy.
• Each investigation is searchable — beyond the site-wide search
• There’s an easy way of finding previous info and catching up if you missed the earlier part of a series or investigation. (If you took the standalone, project-based website approach, this is irrelevant. People just click the “home” button and can start their exploration there. No, putting it on a “project page” that links back to other various parts of the coverage is not the same thing).
• Give people a way to “explore” beyond a list of links — let them filter down, see an overview where they can zoom in on various elements

If we want people to pay attention, show them how much time went into the journalism. It may seem like you’re tooting your own horn by doing this, but it’s a way of establishing your own credibility and the news organization’s. A few thoughts:

• The hours spent reporting are made public and broken down to see which sources got more time than others.
• All sources are publicly disclosed. Not just in the reporting itself with a paragraph or two about that person’s title, background, affiliation. Full profiles linked to each person’s name with previous employment, affiliations, published papers, etc.
• All transcripts from on-the-record interviews are public, searchable
• All raw data is public with an API for readers/general public to build their own apps/tools off if it, which the organization then republishes

And finally, just as we need to show how much time went into a series, we should also show what resulted. Newspapers sometimes write follow-up stories that reference some sort of legislation change that resulted from a particular piece of reporting, but there’s no way of integrating that back into the project as a whole as a way of showing the community our value. Imagine if, at a glance, the community could see all the change one newspaper has brought over hundreds of years, or the change that one online-only org has brought in a few years? Just one more way of getting communities to trust us.

***

Of course, I opened this entire post talking about how measure impact, and the items above really only address how to more accurately and effectively show impact to the people who matter most – the people who read what we publish, the people who benefit (or don’t) from that impact, the people who can become more engaged to heighten that impact.

After we accomplish that, maybe measurement will be easier to come by. And maybe then people will be more interested in paying for that kind of journalism, because its valuable, reliable, easily-digestible, and very clear to see its value. Maybe.

***

I know I need to do mockups of all this to bring my ideas to life, and I promise to do it soon. Maybe on the plane ride back to Seattle. But, now, sleep. See you in the morning #techraking. As always, thoughts welcomed.

//end braindump

//p.s. though I’ve referenced Seattle Times investigations in this post, these are my own, personal ramblings and don’t represent the motivations behind The Seattle Times, editors, reporters, or in fact any relation to the actual reporting we’ve done. I’ve just drawn from those examples because I am familiar with them.

We are the perpetual groveling employees, beggaring for a few crumbs and generally seeing our jobs and incomes slashed as the web and new digital technologies roll over the old.

And why is that? Why are we such schmucks?

It’s in our nature.  It’s in the image that we have made for ourselves.

It’s true. They don’t teach us how to make money in journalism school. That was what they taught business and advertising students. We’ve always been spoiled in that way — we provide the content and the other side of the company (you know, those people on the eighth floor that we don’t ever talk to), they’ll make sure we get a paycheck.

I’ve always had this theory about business people, though (sorry business people; you can contradict me if I’m wrong). I first observed it in college when business students handled advertising at The Mustang Daily, my college paper. They didn’t care about advertising on the web and they didn’t care about finding innovative revenue solutions because newspapers weren’t at the heart of their industry, their training, or their passion — it was a small subset. These students were going to leave college and work at tech companies, non-profits or other businesses — probably not newspapers.  They will always be able to find jobs in other fields, and, if newspapers go away, that’s only one small part of their entire industry.

(Interjection — small, unscientific survey: Of the business staff that I knew from my college newspaper, none of them are working at newspapers or anything related to the news industry today.  Of those that I could find online via Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn, these are the places they work: Box.net, SayNoMore! Promotions, Bon Voyage Travel, Triage Consulting Group, Bridge Design, News America Marketing, Merge Healthcare, The Shand Group, Cal Poly University, Target).

From a career perspective, it doesn’t matter to business students whether journalism flourishes or fades away. But for journalists, this is what we do. This is our lives. We have more invested in the survival of journalism. This is our future at stake, and, more importantly,  society’s — the future of free-flowing information, watchdog reporting, and democracy. If we want high-quality journalism to stick around, we have to take it into our own hands to figure out innovative ways to support it.

The reason journalists are “perpetual groveling employees, beggaring for a few crumbs,” as Rosenblum describes it, is because of our oath to objectivity. Once we start thinking about money, our pure motives for obtaining truth at all costs are suddenly obliterated. The aura of unbaisedness surrounding the work we do becomes murky when we try to sell it, because we’re no longer thinking about the better good, but our individual (and the industry’s collective) good. Right? Right?!

Wrong. Because once you’re unable to sell it, there’s something inherently wrong with how you’re doing it. That burden falls on the content producers (journalists), not the content sellers (advertising). Once we have our act together, they can monetize it more effectively.  Journalists are the ones who know the content and the readers. We are the ones with access to the information and data and public records. We are the ones who have to think outside the box, first and foremost.

No offense fellow journalists, but we don’t exactly have track records for being innovative thinkers when it comes to content. We’re creatures of habit, filing our 26 inches of copy and calling it a night. It’s naive and irresponsible for anyone in any newsroom to not be thinking about how we can make money from our content.  To create content that is sellable is to create content that is valuable and relevant.

So far, I’ve addressed journalists working at newspapers. You can’t blame me — I work at one; it’s my frame of context. There’s a big difference between whether we should be actively thinking like capitalists, and whether our cultures invite it. When you’re at a newspaper, your ability to truly think like a capitalist is severely limited by the bureaucracy and tradition surrounding a newspaper — there is a whole other department hired to think about that, and what do journalists know about money, anyway? Quite honestly, a journalist in the newsroom probably won’t have much of an effect on how business works. So what they can do is create unique, useable content that can be “sold” in a different way on the web. Simple examples: sponsored live chats or event/issue dashboards, unique video with preroll, data visualizations that can be sponsored and advertised.  It also has to go beyond content types — journalists need to think about how they find stories, tell stories and distribute stories, and how that impacts value.

When I say “value,” I’m not talking about wraping your content in ads; display advertising isn’t nearly radical enough, especially the way that most newspapers do it (see screenshot to the right — you really can’t miss it). That’s why working outside of traditional media is probably the best way to truly think as a capitalist, though I must admit (perhaps naively) that I still have hope that I can do it at a newspaper. Places like Spot.us (disclosure: I worked with them) or places like, dare I say it, Patch, are good examples of thinking outside the box outside of a traditional newsroom.

Ideally, I’d like to see a world where business and journalism aren’t so far separated. We already have hybrid teams of hacker-journlalists forming at places like The New York Times and The LA Times and The Chicago Tribune. It’s a concept that didn’t exist a few years ago — there were journalists and IT people, but not hackery people doing journalism. Why can’t it be like that with business? Jarvis is on the right track with teaching entrepreneurial journalism, but I haven’t seen traditional newsrooms forming business-journalism teams where businesspeople who get journalism have the final say on creating innovative, effective solutions that are integrated into the entire workflow, process, and mindset of how journalists do their jobs.

So, can a journalist can be a capitalist?

1. Yes, even though the traditional structure of legacy media doesn’t openly welcome or encourage it.
2. Yes, if we care about the future of open information and democracy.
3. Yes, because we’re positioned to do it best, as we’re the ones who know the content and the readers — something hard to initiate, as we haven’t been trained to innovate or make money.

Things I would have like to touch more on in this post:

• Back to the basics: How are we defining “journalist” in this context?
• How can we create hybrid teams in our newsrooms — similar to the hacker-journo, but in the realm of business/innovation-journo? What are the benefits and would it work?
• Does thinking about money really make us non-objective?
• Who is doing it right/wrong? Who can we learn from?
• How ingraining technology and the web into the culture of the newsroom will give journalists more ideas and inspiration for pursuing more creative and effective content on the web.

As always, your thoughts and criticism are welcomed.

The quick back story: I started using “laurenmichell” as a username for various accounts in high school, back when it wasn’t quite cool to use your first + last name. It was a middle ground between anonymity and true identity, and the spelling of my middle name is unique enough that I was able to grab that handle (mostly) everywhere.  After using it for a few years, I’ve been scared to change it. 

Reasons I’ve been to afraid to change it up to this point:

• “What about SEO?!” I always asked myself. Yeah, well, if you search for “Lauren Michelle,” you get photos/websites of porn stars anyway (do it — I dare you).  After speaking to a journalism class at Pacific Luther University today about Twitter/blogging, then a separate conversation later in the evening with The Seattle Times’ business systems admin about the death of SEO, it just kind of clicked that it was time to finally kill off the old handle. I’m well-known enough at this point (at least to the people I care to be known by) that it’s not going to dilute my “online brand” (I know, I sound like a tool). In the long run, it’ll be better. People will find good, valuable content no matter which domain name its hosted at.
• I thought I’d have to create a whole new Twitter account and start from scratch, thus losing all my @-replies. But Twitter actually makes it super-easy these days to swap out your handle while retaining all other information associated with your account — from followers, to tweets, to DMs, the whole shabang. More sites should make it that easy to change out your username.
• I thought some day I’d get married and change my last name. By using “laurenmichell,” I wouldn’t have to worry about confusing people if I someday changed my name to Lauren McDreamy (I kid, I kid). I thought I’d be able to change my name as many times as I wanted in the future, and “laurenmichell” would always be the constant. But I’ve thought a lot more about it and if I ever do marry, I’m probably keeping my last name.  So there.

Next step: Change out my primary site domain to laurenrabaino.com (currently just redirects to laurenmichell.com). I’ll get around to it. Also grabbed the Facebook vanity URL: facebook.com/laurenrabaino. After that, I’ll have to slowly start changing out my bajillions of accounts… or maybe just start using the new username from here on out for new accounts. I’m not going to overthink it.

Being involved with AAJA is a reality check for me because I’ve always been involved in circles like ONA and Hacks/Hackers — very distinct tech circles of the journalism community. This is the first time I’m involved with an organization more representative of the actual tech skills that everyday journalists have. It’s been fun teaching them about blogging and sharing my philosophies on social media, web journalism, etc. In my role as VP of Programs, I plan to host workshops and training for basic tech skills, even though that’s slightly out of the scope of the role. My main responsibilities lie in organization and promotion around student scholarships.

AAJA Before

AAJA After

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.

What it is

1. A home for breaking news. Prior to the launch of The Today File, we had a crime blog, weather blog, politics blog and a ton of other niche-topic blogs. If any other random in-between news broke (traffic, education, general metro), there wasn’t a home for it except as a “full story” i.e. something that originates in our print CMS (CCI) and goes through the standard workflow of being published to the web. It could sometimes take 10 or 15 minutes to get an item up on our site, and it could only be done from within the building.

Not only is this a many-step process, but it’s a print-centric one that doesn’t allow us to easily do things like hyperlinking, dropping in maps, sharing on social media, etc. WordPress, of course, changes all of that.

2. A place for us to be more transparent. It’s not as radical as The Guardian opening up its news budget to the world every morning, but it’s a start. Every morning, a metro editor posts a Morning Memo which outlines the day’s weather and morning traffic, stories we’re pursuing and a few items worth reading before you walk out the door.

3. A place for us to be more personal. If you read one of the aforementioned Morning Memos, you’ll see that they’re casual and fun. Everything else we post on The Times’ site is very straight-forward, who, what, where, when, why.  This is a place for us to relax a bit and have some fun if it’s appropriate.

4. A way to use modern technology. Our print and web CMSes are old (surprise, surprise). Old technology means old workflows, old workflows mean old mindsets and old mindsets lead to the inability innovate which means we lose relevancy which means we lose readers and attention, so on and so forth. In my mind, changing the technology is the first step at showing people what’s truly possible so they can dream big and adapt.

A quote that I recently read in Stijn Debrouwere’s blog has been ringing in my head for days: “If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up the men to gather wood, divide the work, and give orders. Instead, teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea.” You connect the dots.

5. A place to freely experiment. Without going through a formal request process and waiting for IT resources to push out something new, we can implement it on a small scale on the blog and quickly rollback if we don’t like the results. For example, we’re trying Facebook comments for a short time to see how our comments are impacted by removing anonymity (I’ll report back later on the findings of this experiment, promise). Because of the vast amount of documentation and array of plugins available for WordPress, we don’t necessarily need developers to roll out new features.

6. A means of disaster publishing. In the event of a huge snowstorm or a fire in our building, all of our web servers would be at jeopardy for our main site. With an off-the-reservation WordPress blog, we now have a place to keep publishing, using software that our editors and reporters are already know and are used to using.

 A few details

• Running: WordPress v. 3.2.1
• Hosting: EC2 instance (soon to be load balanced across a few instances)
• Caching: Amazon Cloudfront  + memcached
• Metrics tracking: Omniture and Chartbeat
• Commenting: Facebook comments (temporary experiment)
• Internal documentation: Internal wiki
• Training: One-one-one with editors, mostly done my me
• Users: All reporters are authors with the ability to edit others’ posts, editors are editors, special user type for producers (between admin and editor)
• Workflow: EditFlow to notify specific editors when posts are ready to be edited
• Photos: Our photo desk drops in photos via FTP (using Add From Server), reporters/editors also manually upload photos
• Shortcodes: For easily inserting Brightcove videos, Document Cloud embeds, links to Seattle Times photo galleries
• Polls: Polldaddy
• Mapping: Using Google Maps Shortcode plugin for crime bloggers to easily drop-in locations

A huge interdepartmental success

What I really love about working at The Seattle Times is how well all the departments work together. This project has been an example of developers, designers,  metro editors, reporters and web producers putting their brains together to create a new product. So here are a few shoutouts:

• Joel Hartshorn, our software development manager, has been a lifesaver for the blog — couldn’t have done it without him. He configured our server, set up all the bells and whistles to make the blog sing under load, helped me during moments of panic, and has generally been excited and open to trying something new.  Thanks to his whole team, too.
• Eric Ulken for being the project manager and setting all the pieces in motion. Also for trusting me enough to take on a big chunk of the project.
• Nick Provenza, a metro editor who has been at The Times for 27 years. He is the gatekeeper of the blog who gets to the newsroom at 5:30 a.m. to write the Morning Memo. He’s our newsroom evangelist who encourages other editors to post. His content is the heart of this thing.
• John de Leon and other metro reporters for filling the blog with Blotter crime content.
• Matt Ironside, our technical producer, who spearheaded the integration with our web CMS so we can easily pull blog headlines onto the homepage.
• Suki Dardarian, Mark Higgins, Kathy Best, David Boardman + all senior editors for their support and helping craft the mission.
• + everyone else who will be dragged into this project in the future

Next steps

The blog is a continually-evolving beast. We’re still trying to figure out which workflows (that word again!) are most efficient, which tools work best, how to integrate with the rest of our site, etc. But the bigger-picture step looking forward will be to institutionalize the blog so that instead of being an off-the-radar side project, we have the right kind of support and resources (yes, that word again, too) to keep it going strong.

Adoption

People in the newsroom seem to love it. Compared to our outdated version of Moveable Type and our current homegrown web CMS, WordPress is glorious. Even the least-tech-savvy of editors took to the interface with a few minutes’ training.

We recently used it for our week of live “viadoom” coverage (closure of the viaduct, which stretches along a major highway) and we’ll be using it for the Nov. 8 election.

The biggest complaint from within in the newsroom so far: “Why aren’t all our blogs on WordPress?” Not a bad idea. Stay tuned for awesomeness.