In recent weeks, the subject has reached a crescendo with the strategic power plays between Rupert Murdoch, Google and Microsoft’s Bing.

However, there’s some light at the end of the tunnel for  journalism, with the story of the Ann Arbor Chronicle and its success as a post-digital news organization, available exclusively online. It was founded before The Ann Arbor News, the local printed daily, closed.

What’s of particular interest is the untethered, web worker philosophy underpinning the Chronicle’s success and the incredible story of the husband-and-wife duo — Dave Askins and Mary Morgan — who act as editor and publisher.

The team’s working practices and tools will be very familiar to web workers:

• Askins and Morgan work out of the Workantile Exchange, a local coworking community.
• The team publishes 10 “heavily reported and edited posts” each week, edit columnists and sell advertising, using a blogging platform.
• A one-hour editorial meeting takes place each week in their home office.
• Twitter is used for story leads (often republished as a local feed) from readers, and a dozen Google Alerts tracked with key phrases.

The Nieman Journalism Labs article focuses on the punishing work rate that Askins and Morgan have, but also on the journalistic freedom they both enjoy, as well as the conversational nature of the publication they have created.

There are lessons here for larger news organizations struggling to transition into digital culture, but notably the Chronicle’s success is a vindication of many of the trends, technologies and themes we’ve been covering here at WebWorkerDaily: coworking, conversational media, use of social media and working from home.

Read more at the Nieman Journalism Lab’s “WordPress, Twitter, the Elks Club: 10 new routines at a news startup“

How do you see the future for print journalism?

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Interview by Email

Personally, I think this is the best form of interview, for the simple reason that you don’t have to ask someone if you can record the conversation, but also because it’s far harder to misquote someone when you have their answers in their own writing.

Email also lets you relax and lay out your interview strategy and the actual questions. In theory, you can do that when speaking live to someone, too, but depending on who you’re interviewing and how confident a person you are in social settings, talking live may muddy the process a bit and leave you flummoxed to the point where your interview quality is significantly affected.

Regardless of how you choose to conduct your interview, because some will no doubt maintain that live is a much better alternative, perhaps because you have a greater chance of catching your subject off guard (a valid point), the advice that follows still applies.

Keep It Simple, But Focused

Ask open-ended questions. This should be self-evident, but if you ask someone a question they can answer with a simple “yes” or “no,” many often will. Instead of crafting an impressive, incisive 25-word question that’ll net you a three-word answer, try to keep your end of things relatively light and allow for plenty of expansion on your interviewee’s part.

But open-endedness can also be a double-edged sword. If you ask too vague a question, you might get a wealth of information, but it might not be useful, pertinent or interesting information. The key is to keep it on point. So, for example, instead of asking “What motivates you?” to someone like Ashton Kutcher when your publication focuses on social media, ask, “What motivated you to become so involved with Twitter to begin with?”

Care to Elaborate?

If your initial interview questions don’t elicit what you were looking for, or one answer in particular takes you in a new and potentially more interesting direction, don’t shy away from contacting your source again for further information. Think of the initial interview as a collaborative first draft process.

An exchange of two or three sets of questions and answers isn’t unusual. I always find it better to do this sort of thing over email, since you don’t have to worry about setting up times for face-to-face meetings or phone conversations for follow-up questions, and you can view the entire threaded conversation in your inbox when you later go to write the article. You could also use IM, but as with phone conversations, always make sure to get your interviewee’s permission before logging the conversation.

Post-interview

There are many ways to conduct a post-interview. The simplest is just to send a thank-you note, along with a publication date for the content that will result, and a promise to follow up with a link when it goes live. Depending on the purposes of the interview you’re conducting, more or less may be required.

If you’re just starting out with a source that you’d like to retain in the future, and who might be sensitive to how they are portrayed, you may want to forward an advance copy of the finished piece so that they can give you input before publication. Generally speaking, this isn’t advisable, though, since it puts too much control in the hands of the person being interviewed. If that person is your company’s CEO, and your piece if for the corporate newsletter, then by all means, forward it for his or her approval first.

Interviewing for the web resembles interviewing for print, but it doesn’t necessarily mirror it. It’s hard to give broad advice when the type of content you’re producing makes such big differences in how you go about the task, but hopefully the advice above gets you off to a good start.

If you have any good interviewing tips, share them below.

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Recently, I’ve been talking to many local journalists about the unfolding implosion of the newspaper industry and its implications for their profession.

As the industry struggles to adapt to a world which is moving onto the web, journalists are not only learning to blend social media with traditional reporting, but as UK-based multimedia journalist Adam Westbrook explains, some are also exploring how distributed work teams could replace the newsroom.

Westbrook’s piece introduces the philosophy of Noded working: principles for forming distributed teams for particular projects.

The Noded concept is explained in a book. A downloadable preview describes the philosophy as:

“A group of individuals, often but not necessarily geographically distant, that come together to form temporary or recurring project teams. Unlike ‘distributed teams,’ Noded teams work for a wide range of clients and any member of a Noded team can take the lead to bring in work, manage work and choose their team members.”

Delving deeper, the Noded philosophy can be summarized as seven discrete principles:

1. Personality — Individualism is celebrated, enabling all members of a Noded team to define their own values and vision, but with a shared agenda.
2. Team — Each member is treated as an independent business owner or freelancer. Collaboration is driven by the needs of each project, often involving various combinations of members.
3. Leadership & Roles — There are no fixed roles. Traditional team leadership is replaced by project leadership, likely rotating between members who bring in the business.
4. Goals — There’s no collective group goal, only a range of individual member goals, which together form a kind of autonomy with shared purpose.
5. For Everyone — Anyone from employees of large companies to freelancers and indie workers can be part of a Noded team.
6. No Branding — A noded team isn’t branded discretely, but is a representation of the brands of each member, accompanied by an icon illustrating the Noded nature of the group.
7. Means Business — Noded teams are formed for business purposes.

The Noded philosophy seems to codify many of the existing principles of freelancers who work as part of project teams, defining a set of structures for establishing loosely coupled joint ventures.

Though many web workers are likely already members of Noded-like teams — whether they are aware of it or not — there’s something useful about having the Noded philosophy expressed that, now articulated, makes it easier to understand how to form project teams that cross organizational and disciplinary boundaries.

The Noded philosophy is analogous to co-working in many ways, with one major difference. Where the originators of co-working explicitly encourage others to modify and extend their values, the people behind the Noded concept appear to be establishing sole ownership over the philosophy and seeking to establish their own brand. This is understandable, but somewhat in contrast to their own stated beliefs.

Do your working practices already follow the Noded principles?

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Likewise, writers can’t just keep producing the same kind of content for a different medium. The web, and its readers, demands a different kind of writing, delivered in a different way. It can hard to find the right mix, especially if you’ve spent your entire professional life writing one way, only to be asked to completely change that up. Here are some tips and resources to help get a handle on just what kind of change is required.

Practice Makes Perfect

It’s an old maxim, but one that doesn’t seem to lose its validity no matter how much time goes by or how many technological changes we may experience. If you want to learn something new, you need to practice it. For online writing, there are a number of different ways you could go about it.

First, there’s good ol’ rewriting. Find a source, or better yet, a number of sources of writing samples that resemble the type of working you’re aiming to do. Then try to produce a similar piece, maintaining the spirit of the original(s), but incorporating your own take. When you’re examining your sources, pay special attention to what they all share, and, when you’ve written your own version, look for things that your piece has that the others don’t. It may be a useful innovation, but maybe it’s something from print that’s extraneous to web writing.

You could also use a prompt, which is not just a useful tool for creative writing, no matter what you may have heard in high school. You could try coming up with your own, based on the area you’re interested in, but you might also want to use a prompt list or generator. Creativity-Portal.com has one specifically created for blogging and online writing, so it’s probably a good place to start looking.

Twitter Is Your Friend

I can hear some of my old English professors cringing at what Twitter could potentially mean for the future of the English language. Regardless, if you plan on writing online, you should get better acquainted with the beast. And it doesn’t have to be an entirely one-sided relationship, either. There’s a lot your writing can gain from Twitter. For example, it trains you to respect brevity, a key skill for writing online.

It can also benefit you in other ways. You can find a healthy list of those benefits over at Write for Your Life, in an article called “How Twitter can help you improve, market and publish your creative writing”. A large number of the advantages he lists focus on the networking advantages Twitter presents. All you have to do is partake in #editorchat or #journochat to see what’s possible. Also check out #writing for tons of great tips, comments, and worthwhile people to follow.

Those are just a few general ideas to get you started, but at least you won’t feel adrift in an unfamiliar sea. Perhaps most importantly, you have to give yourself time to adjust, because otherwise it’s easy to make missteps and end up making an early gaffe if you venture in without taking the lay of the land. Stay tuned for more tips on making the switch.

Have you switched from writing for print to online? Share your tips in the comments.

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