The future of news and why “digital first” matters
Covering the news used to be fairly simple. Reporters wrote things down and then sent them to editors, who then sent them to the printer to be published in the newspaper. But things are a lot more complicated now: News has become an ongoing process rather than a finished product, and it’s composed of many different pieces, including blogs and video and Twitter and so on. In a recent post at the 10,000 Words blog, Lauren Rabaino of the Seattle Times does a good job of looking at how confusing this can be for newspapers and other media entities. More than anything else, it reinforces the need to rethink how the news gets written and distributed.
As Rabaino notes in her post, the way that news stories emerge now — whether it’s a story about the Occupy Wall Street protests or an earthquake in Japan, or even a more local news piece — is different now because the germ of a story can come from anywhere: from Twitter, from a photo or a video posted to YouTube, or from a blog. As blogging pioneer Dave Winer has pointed out, the “sources can now go direct,” in the sense that anyone who is at the center of a news event has publishing tools available to them to get their own story out. This “democracy of distribution” (as Om has called it) created by Twitter and other tools changes the dynamic dramatically.
The news is now a process, not an artifact
So as author and journalism professor Jeff Jarvis says, news is a process now. A story may begin with a simple tweet or retweet of a fact, and then evolve into a traditional story; or it may begin as a tweet and turn into a blog post but never become a story in the print edition. In many cases, while the reporter working on that blog post or story is putting it together, the nature of the news will change. For example, when readers contribute their knowledge on Twitter or via comments on the blog post (New York Times media writer and former blogger Brian Stelter, among others, does a great job of incorporating responses from Twitter into the coverage of whatever news event he is writing about).
But as Rabaino notes in her post, this can be confusing for newspapers, which are used to predictable print-based publishing schedules and a process of news flow developed long before the web even existed. The questions that come up in many newsrooms, she says, include:
- Do we tweet if we don’t have a link to direct users to?
- When do we write a story as a blog post vs. a web story?
- When do we append an update to the top of a post vs. writing a new post?
- When do we stop writing blog post updates and switch over to the print story?
- How the hell do we make this all make sense to our users?
Those questions give you just some idea of how much confusion there is in the average newspaper newsroom when it comes to merging print and digital — not in a theoretical sense, but in a practical, every-day reporting sense. When it comes to making good use of the web for covering a breaking story, Rabaino mentions the BBC’s live-blogging-style news story, which it used for the shooting attacks in Norway (of course, the BBC doesn’t have to worry about coming up with a print version). The New York Times does something very similar with its Lede news blog when there is a breaking story, both aggregating links and trying to pull together facts and responses.
Digital first is about a change in mindset
But do those updates make it into the newspaper’s print version? That depends on the paper. In digital form, that kind of thing is easier, whether it’s on the web or through apps like the New York Times iPad app, which is updated in some cases when a story is dramatically altered, and includes a time stamp. Some sites go further: SB Nation has something it calls a “story stream,” which allows readers to see all the previous stories on a particular topic in chronological order. And some bloggers such as Salon founder Scott Rosenberg have advocated a “versioning” approach, where readers can click and see the previous versions of a blog post or story as changes were made.
John Paton, the new head of the Media News Group newspaper chain, and a leading advocate of a “digital first” approach to publishing, has said he believes newspapers need to fundamentally shift the way they think about their businesses if they are to survive, and including making the web come first instead of last in the production process. Many newspapers continue to focus their energy on the print version, then post things to the web, which results in stories without links, and static versions of the news that don’t evolve as the story changes and new information emerges.
In a memo to her staff about a reorganization (and layoffs) at the paper, Roanoke Times editor Carole Tarrant put it well when she said the redesign of the newsroom (including a new content-management or publishing system) was aimed at making it easier for reporters to act like bloggers. As she put it:
What the “digital first” mantra means, in practical application, is putting the power of online publishing in all of our hands, extending the ease of blogging to all of our content.
Newspapers as a distribution system just aren’t equipped to handle news as a process; printing a single version of a news event with no links and no updates (until at least the following day) fundamentally doesn’t make sense in today’s news environment. Looking at the news from a blogger’s point of view — as an amalgamation of Twitter and Storify and video and photos, with comments and updates and links — makes a lot more sense, but it doesn’t translate well into a print-focused culture. When it gets right down to it, that’s what Paton’s message is about.
Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr users Sandy Honig and jphilipg
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Lots of smart insights here about the questions legacy newsrooms face as they embrace digital platforms. But the story seems to mostly concern breaking news. And the change is happening because it’s what readers now expect in breaking news.
But what if reporters acted like bloggers as they reported their longer-term investigative, beat or “feature” pieces? Can — and should — the process be part of EVERY story?
Ideally I think it should, yes. Thanks for the comment, Jeff.
I can´t imaginen Hemingway sitting in a barber chair thinking in how it was a hairdressing school and tweeting at the same time. If we do multitasks we are doing one task, stop, do the other, stop, etc. Our brain isn´t multitask, in that way we put less deep atention to each task. I love to read chronics from journalists like Hemingway or Kapuuscinski (even they brote them in other century) and sometimes I feel that today we have millons of writers and words and less and less to read. Sorry for my poor english.
Mathew, Marc Andreessen said several years ago that newspapers should immediately shut down their print operations and go online only. He said it would definitely cause some short-term pain but that was better than the long-term pain they would experience if they didn’t make the jump. What’s your opinion of this?
I’m not sure if I asked you this question before but if I did, have you changed your opinion?
I think Marc’s advice is the kind that is easy to give when you don’t have to actually run a newspaper company or answer to shareholders :-) But I think he makes a good point — the focus is not where it should be at most companies.
I can’t stand getting bits and pieces of news from dozens of different sources. I want to read well-written articles that have checked facts, gotten statements, and summarized everything that has happened to date. And yes, this means I don’t watch TV news either.
Hey Mathew. No mention of the Raw news aspect? Curious to hear your thoughts on pure data as news content from everyday people. It’s a longer discussion but seemed to be a perspective that was missing.
Jeff Jarvis’ statement that news is a process now seems a little silly to me. News-gathering and reporting always has been a process, and it really has not changed all that much with the advent of new media. Information is always evolving, even as a reporter gathers it and begins writing, because not all information is immediately available. What has changed is the process for disseminating that information on digital platforms, which by its very nature is a radical departure from the traditional processes. That is part of what makes this such an exciting time for the industry. that said, it also is a painful time — I’m among the thousands of journalists who have been laid off in the last four years, and I was a Web content editor when that happened. While I am not certain whether I will return to the profession (I want to), I will watch with great interest as our industry evolves.
You’re right that ‘story as process’ is a great paradigm shift for many types of news stories (disasters, election results, opening days of a war, dumb comments and the reactions and resignations that follow), I think others just aren’t (conditions in Congo mineral mines, deep explanations for financial crises, reviews of events). And if you update everything endlessly with new alleged facts, does all news turn into a kind of wikipedia? :)
It seems the best way to distribute this content is some sort of multimedia app for each story… which would confuse subscribers and flood the store with as many apps as there are stories.
If there were only a way to nest apps with apps so I can open up the Times (pick any one :) ) and read my curated paper but follow a particular story in a storify like experience, maybe flipbook-esque, that way I’m following the story as if it were a beat, with all the raw news, data, interviews, video, links, appropriate Twitter hashtags fed into the ‘sub app’ within the app…
Thus my print subscription of the daily news that lands on my doorstep is much more an analysis of events, like a Harpers but everyday.. . more focused on Knowledge Based Journalism like http://journalistsresource.org/ and my iPad like device is serving a more daily function combining all delivery platforms – video/audio/print/photo/infographic
Just my one eyed, one cent observation.
I’m with Nicolas: A big challenge here is to avoiding shutting our brains off, or avoiding limiting our brains to byte-sized thoughts. The process this article describes in inevitable, and good IMHO (as a reporter), but I do struggle with how to remember the point that Nicolas made.
Aggregating analyses of a news story would seem to be most appropriate for a reader who is interested in complexity; what about the reader who is not a “news junkie,” who just wants a capsule summary, but who might have a question and want to dig deeper into a story? A reader who is not usually interested in politics of news reporting,historical or social science perspectives?
Another question: What about validity of sources? Many readers don’t want to “vet” what they read.
“…of course, the BBC doesn’t have to worry about coming up with a print version…”
Of course, neither does it have to worry about profit and loss.
Guaranteed public funding, extracted at threat of imprisonment for non-licence-fee-payers, is a great financial support for this type of innovation. But it’s also a huge distortion in a world where everyone else is trying to make payroll.
It amazes me that the US media hasn’t woken up to this, because the nature of digital means the BBC’s influence and inbuilt advantage now stretches far beyond Britain’s borders.
The licence fee is a hangover from the analogue age. No-one would dream of introducing it now if it didn’t already exist.
That system was introduced In Korea at 2004 by Kookminilbo (kukinews.com)