Chris O’Brien

Help for news organizations that collaborate with communities

// April 23rd, 2009 // No Comments » // News Leadership 3.0

Publish2 asks: How can newsrooms do a better job collaborating with their communities to produce higher quality journalism and conversations?

Here’s a new post from regular guest Chris O’Brien, who interviewed Publish2’s Scott Karp about the start-ups new “Digital Sunlight” tools for journalists

By Chris O’Brien

Since launching last year, news start-up Publish2 has been trying to be a catalyst for getting more journalists to embrace the practice of linking to other peoples’ content. That’s a big enough challenge, especially since, as we’ve seen recently, “aggregator” remains a dirty word in some corners of the newsroom.

But even as Publish2 has been making progress in selling the value of link journalism,  co-founder Scott Karp said the company is about to tackle another fundamental problem: How can newsrooms do a better job collaborating with their communities to produce higher quality journalism and conversations?

In February, Publish2 announced that it’s trying to solve this puzzle by developing a new set of tools called “Digital Sunlight.”

“We’re taking Publish2 beyond links, and into what we call ‘collaborative journalism,’” Karp said. “We wanted to continue to expand our usefulness to journalists in the editorial realm to do things that help produce more reporting.”

To understand how that might work, let’s first look at what Publish2 does today. I first met Karp about a year ago and have chatted with him several times since as the Publish2 platform has developed. And I’ve been using it for several months to power a “Recommended” section at The Next Newsroom Project site.

The first thing to note is that Publish2 is designed specifically to serve journalists, one of several things that sets it apart from Yahoo’s Delicious.com social bookmarking service. That will obviously be expanding, to include non-newsroom contributors when Digital Sunlight rolls out.

Today, a journalist signs up for a free account. When they’re reading a story on the Web that they want to share, they can paste the link into their Publish2 account and add as much or as little information as they want. I’ve added a Publish2 button to my Firefox Browser which makes this process even faster. It also gives you the options of sending the link out via Twitter.

As you build lists of links, you have several options as to how to use them. You can embed a Publish2 widget on your Web site or blog. Or you can select a few links and export them as a blog post. This is where I have come to really appreciate Publish2, because it offers me more control over creating the headline for the link-post, where Delicious just creates a generic header that says “Links” and the date, something not very SEO friendly.

The other main feature Publish2 offers is the ability to follow other journalists in the Publish2 network, and create groups around various topics or publications, and invite other journalists to contribute. So journalists help other journalists build lists of links.

Here’s what I like about Publish2, and aggregation in general.

Even with all the search and social tools for finding news and information, the Web still presents a fundamental challenge to consumers that hasn’t been completely solved: How do I find the best stuff? Aggregating and curating links is an opportunity for newsrooms to help their community solve that problem and serve them in a different way.

Next, local news organizations should be trying to become the main source of news and information online about their communities. So pulling together all the best links about your area can only help build that reputation as the go-to place for local information.

Here’s the other important piece. The Publish2 model recognizes that most journalists are already operating at full capacity. The last thing most people in a newsroom want to hear is that there’s some other new thing for them to work into their daily routines. But journalists are reading stuff all day online, so with basically one click they can share the best stuff and create new value without a lot of extra heavy lifting.

For one example of this in action, check out the Chicago Tribune’s Col. Tribune Recommends box on the right of their breaking news blog.

The Digital Sunlight tools will build on this collaborative linking model.

Karp said the idea grew out of an e-mail exchange he had with Howard Weaver, who is an advisor to Publish2. They were discussing how the stimulus bill would be one of the largest “follow the money” stories for investigative journalists. But was there some way to turn this into a widespread collaborative journalism projects? The money will be flowing into thousands of communities, far too many for just newsrooms to track.

”The general lament is that newsrooms are shrinking and there will be less journalism. But there’s still a feeling that we want to do it all ourselves. Those things are going to going to collide here,” Karp said.

At the same time, newsrooms have struggled to really develop models that have produced meaningful contributions from communities on a regular basis. Digital Sunlight will be designed to allow newsrooms to create a structured way to work with members of the community to gather news and information that would be then be open and shared.

“There’s a really small number of people who are motivated to do the work outside the newsroom,” Karp said. “But what a larger number of people may be able to do is contribute information. Think of it as a tip line. What if we could get information flowing in that the newsrooms wanted to report on, in a highly structured way?”

Publish2 is currently building a Web form that newsrooms can customize to fit different topics. The form would be attached to various stories or topic pages in the same way comments and forums are now. The form would lay out different questions or categories of information that newsroom is seeking. Those forms would then feed into a database journalists could then access, verify information, and build it into stories.

The database wouldn’t be published, but rather it would become a set of information and leads for people in the newsroom to verify, or to guide their reporting. Ideally, that database will also be shared across newsrooms. Karp acknowledges that this will be a “radical idea.”

Karp hopes that this will improve reporting, but also the conversations happening on news sites. “There’s the endless debate about the value of comments on the story,” Karp said. “The problem is whether you ask the wrong questions. Rather than asking people to just sound off, let’s try asking, ‘What do you know?’”

As for timing, the Publish2 team is still developing the tools. Karp’s blog post announcing the project said, “…we are baking as fast as we can and will have an update shortly.”

Another work in progress is Publish2’s business model. The company raised $2.75 million in venture capital in March 2008. And Karp said they still have plenty of “runway” with that money.

From blog to print

// March 26th, 2009 // No Comments » // News Leadership 3.0

Chris O’Brien: While mass newspapers struggle, entrepreneurs are developing new forms for print news print news

Discussion of the future of print news focuses on the difficulties that established print news organizations are experiencing. But an either-or framing—print is dead or print will live—often misses small experiments with print media that are worth noting. So I asked Chris O’Brien, business columnist for the San Jose Mercury News, for an update working efforts to find a place for print in a digital world.

By Chris O’Brien

For all the talk about whether newspapers should kill the print edition, there are plenty of entrepreneurs headed in the opposite direction. They come from digital backgrounds, but believe as passionately in the future of print as the most ink-stained wretch running a newsroom these days.

Count Josh Karp in this counter intuitive crowd.

“Our thing is the printed word,” Karp said. “There is tremendous power in the printed word. I’m a big believer in the physical commodity.”

The Chicago-based entrepreneur has catapulted from obscurity to buzz worthy shortly after word leaked earlier this year of his plans to launch The Printed Blog. As the name implies, Karp says the company will pull together content from various blogs and Web sites and publish it onto good old-fashioned dead tree products. At first blush, the effort seems to mirror a number of other Web-to-print models (some of which are listed below).

But Karp’s plan is different, complex, and ambitious. He’s attempting not only to reinvent the workflow of a traditional newspaper, but also the manufacturing and distribution components.

I’d been eager to meet Karp, because I count myself among those who believe that print has its place in the future newsroom. Print needs to be reinvented. And it should take its place as just one of many equals in a multi-platform newsroom. But calls for killing the print version are misguided. It’s bad for business, and it’s bad for the thousands of people in each community who still prefer to get their news and information in print.

That said, I think printed news is ripe for innovation. And Karp thinks so, too.

I met Karp and his team on a sunny morning at the famed Buck’s Diner in Woodside, a legendary spot where entrepreneurs and venture capitalists in Silicon Valley have been coming to strike deals for decades. Karp had flown in for a week from Chicago to meet with a series of angel investors and venture capitalists. Karp says he’s got some tentative agreements, but won’t say with who or how much until any deal is signed.

Karp is here with two members of his team: Jenn Beese, the social media manager, and Michelle Doellman, assistant publisher. They’re part of a dozen or so folks currently working on the project, which has been self-funded to this point by Karp. For the most part, all these folks are donating their time, and Karp is hoping that any initial funding will allow him to start paying some salaries.

One of my first surprises came when Karp eagerly handed me some copies of The Printed Blog. These are not slapped-together print-outs from someone’s home printer. They were printed on high-quality, glossy, magazine style paper. It looks and feels slick and professional, thanks to the work of some design interns.

For now, these prototypes are being printed once a week, mostly for demonstration purposes, and being distributed in just a handful of cities. The team keeps a Google Reader full of blogs submitted by writers how have agreed to have their content re-printed. An editorial team reads them and selects the best, solicits photos, lays out the pages, publishes it, and then hands it out in various locations

His goal is print 2,000 versions of The Printed Blog. Every day.

How is he going to achieve that scale?

“It’s about creating a platform for a new, newspaper production,” Karp said.

To understand how Karp hopes to get there, let’s break it down into three pieces:

1. Content: Anyone can submit content from a Web site or blog. The editorial team will give way to an online system to allow a community to vote or rank the content. The top-ranked content will be pulled into an automated layout and production system.

2. Advertising: Local businesses and services will be able to buy ads that will be paired with related content by content and location and the printed versions aimed at their communities. Karp says he has fewer qualms about pairing a printed ad to a story based on content than a traditional newspaper might. Creators of content will get a percentage of the revenue generated by any ads that run on the same page as their work.

3. Production and Distribution: Karp’s plan is to create a chain of Printed Blog production franchises. In this case, the franchise owner would be both the new printing press and the new newspaper delivery boy. A Printed Blog franchisee could be just someone working out of their home, or in an office. They would be provided with the printer and paper. Karp is convinced that he can get both at reasonable prices in bulk over the long-term to make the plan cost effective. The franchisee would get to keep some percentage of the revenue generated by ads that run in their edition.

Once in place, a franchisee would be responsible each day for printing the content that is promoted by the community. The franchisee would then distribute it by taking it to various public places around town.

This franchise part seems to be the trickiest, and the key to making this work. The more franchisees sign up, the more targeted the content can be and the more likely bloggers might see some money.

Pulling all of this off will be the biggest professional challenge yet for Karp.

Over the years, Karp has held various programming and consulting jobs. More recently, he started his own company, Free Rain Systems, which built software to help companies manage their logistics. About two years ago, he sold it for a modest sum. The experience left him wanting more, and he began kicking around various ideas.

He thought about The Printed Blog a year ago, but friends gave it a thumbs down. By November, though, he couldn’t get it out of his head. So he committed some of his own money, and began fleshing out the concept and technology. Just a few weeks later, word of the project hit the Web, and Karp found himself being interviewed by such outfits as the New York Times, though he had no product to show yet.

So what exactly did Karp see as the opportunity?

“I’d thought a lot about business models,” Karp said. “Were there principals I could take from the online world and bring them to the newspaper world?”

In this case, he wondered if print could be produced real-time, and be made into a rich, interactive experience.

Who knows whether this will work? But I do like the underlying philosophy of providing some choice to the community. Digital technologies are just beginning to deliver on the promise of mass customization. You can see glimpses of it in start-ups like The Printed Blog.

As for the newspaper industry, it’s way past time to deliver what print readers have been saying they have wanted for years. They want choice in how they receive the newspaper. They want customization, even personalization. Right now, most papers are still stuck delivering one product, at one time, in one form. That product doesn’t fit into the lives of most people anymore.

Whether The Printed Blog proves to be the right model for solving this, time will tell. But hopefully it will begin to open up the possibilities and change the tone of discussion around print from “kill” to “rethink.”

Here are a few of other in intriguing Web-to-print efforts that will be worth following over the next few months:

DailyMe: This Hollywood, Fl.-based start-up aggregates content from across the Web based on your interests and can be set to automatically print your personalized news choices to your printer any time of day.

Printcasting: This is the “people-powered magazines” initiative at the Bakersfield Californian that was funded by a News Challenge Grant from the Knight Foundation. The team just recently launched Printcasting this month.

Time Magazine: According to a recent AP story: “Time Inc. is experimenting with a customized magazine that combines reader-selected sections from eight publications as it tries to mimic in printed form the personalized news feeds that have become popular on the Internet.

I-News: Under development by MediaNews (disclosure: I work as a columnist at the San Jose Mercury News, whose parent company is MediaNews), the company is about to trial the Individuated Newspaper. According to Editorsweblog.org:

“The “I-News” project will be a targeted and customized online newspaper that allows the reader to select the types of news they want delivered…I-News will be delivered to subscribers via their computers, cell phones, or a special stand-alone printer plugged into a phone line. The printing manufacturer and the publisher participating in the (MediaNews) experiment may subsidize ink and paper prices to offset users’ costs.”

Offbeat Guides: This San Francisco-based start-up allows you to create personalized travel guides. Go through the site to select the place and time you’ll be visiting, and it will create a customized, bound travel guide that contains the general information about a destination but also specific information about things happenings on the days and times you’re visiting.

LA Times embraces, chases social media

// February 17th, 2009 // No Comments » // News Leadership 3.0

Chris O’Brien returns with a guest post about Andrew Nystrom and The Los Angeles Times’ initiatives in social media

I’m pleased to welcome Chris O’Brien back to this blog. Chris, business columnist for the San Jose Mercury-News and leader of The Next Newsroom Project, has written about new roles and practices for newsrooms. Today, he interviews Andrew Nystrom, the new senior producer, social media, at the LA Times.

By Chris O’Brien

There’s been a lot written on this blog about the new jobs needed in the newsroom. Given the opportunities and challenges confronted by news organizations, it’s time to rethink the roles and types of people who work in a newsroom. Granted, in the current economic environment, that’s not easy to do. But it’s still a necessary investment.

And that’s why I was excited when I stumbled across Andrew Nystrom on Twitter. In late November, the Los Angeles Times announced that Nystrom had been appointed “senior producer, social media.” Nystrom had already been working at the latimes.com for two years, most recently as Senior Producer of Travel.

The Times’ official announcement described the thinking behind his new role this way:

“We are using “social media” to describe sites and services outside of latimes.com we can use to engage new readers, spread the word about some of our best work, and do a better job of listening to the larger conversation on the Web. Think about Digg, Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, YouTube and other sites that provide opportunities for us to share what we do and better connect with readers.”

That’s smart. Too often, newsrooms still get stuck trying to think about how to bring people to their Web site. They need to take the next step and push content and conversations out to where the community and audience are. It should be part of everyone’s duty in the newsroom to think about how to build networks of sources and readers, and how to get their content – their photos, their stories, their blog posts – out to those networks.

But that creates two challenges. First, a lot of folks need encouragement and some training to really engage with these new tools. And second, there’s so much content to push out, it’s easily requires one person dedicated to the task full-time. .

That’s what the Times has done. It’s worth following closely what the Times is doing online these days given their phenomenal online growth over the past year. The Times reported that its online audience grew 143 percent in the past year. “I just think it’s fantastic that the organization made this commitment,” Nystrom said. “I think it plays into the larger commitment we’ve made online.”

Nystrom said his new role evolved out of a lot of informal work he was already doing around the newsroom. “Every day, questions would come up in the newsroom about social media, and the bosses kept sending them my way,” Nystrom told me. “And so this kind of made it official.”

Nystrom and the online team sit in the main Times newsroom. He said his duties had rapidly evolved over the two months he’s taken on the new social media role. But so far, they fall into three main categories.

First, Nystrom helps to train his newsroom colleagues on these new tools. “There are plenty of people who are already using social media,” Nystrom said. “And there are some who have never heard of a lot of this. I’m certainly not thinking that everyone needs to be fully immersed in social media in our newsroom. I’m trying to think about who can benefit.”

Next, Nystrom acts as an internal evangelist, constantly looking for opportunities to wrap social media in reporting and storytelling. For instance, he helped advocate internally for using the sensational photo of the Hudson River plane crash taken by a citizen journalist on the front page of the Times and several other major newspapers.

Finally, Nystrom is actively listening to and participating in conversations taking place throughout various social media channels. He’s looking for interesting threads or information that can be brought back into the newsroom. And he’s listening for conversations about the Times and its coverage. “I’m especially looking at the conversation going on beyond our outlets, our Web site,” Nystrom said. “I want to find appropriate ways for us to participate.”

It’s too early to measure any direct benefits from Nystrom’s work. The Times’ online success hasn’t made the company immune from the effects of the crumbling economy, as its recent layoff announcement shows. And it remains under the umbrella of a corporate parent that is in bankruptcy.

But rather than using these as excuses to sit still, the Times has shown a commitment to experimenting and innovating. That’s example worth following.

What does ‘online first’ mean in your newsroom?

// December 18th, 2008 // No Comments » // News Leadership 3.0

Chris O’Brien: Jobs and practices that reflect a truly online newsroom

Michele writes: Chris O’Brien is business columnist for the San Jose Mercury-News and is wrapping up The Next Newsroom Project. While working on that project, Chris frequently offered insightful comments about news organizations and how their practices and attitudes must change if they want to thrive online. So I’ve asked Chris to write an occasional guest post for this blog and I’m please to offer the first one today. Here’s Chris:
Thanks to Michele for inviting me to join the discussion here. I hope some of the lessons I’ve learned, and continue to learn, at The Next Newsroom Project will be valuable to this community.

In getting started here, I wanted to pick up on a thread that Michele has been talking about lately involving the relationship between print and online in the newsrooms. I couldn’t agree more with her sentiment that it’s time to “shove the print newspaper off center stage.” While I think print will have a long future, it needs to be one of many platforms, rather than the primary one. Digital is the future, and it’s well past time for newsrooms to be thinking online first.

But here’s the next question: What does being an online first newsroom actually mean? It seems that everyone now claims their newsroom is online first. In reality, for most newsrooms that means they post their content online first. Otherwise, it’s business as usual. The newsroom, the conversations, the planning, the jobs, and the culture are all still organized around a legacy designed to create the print edition of the paper.

Being online first requires far more change. If you’re wondering whether your newsroom is online first, ask yourself how you measure up against the following criteria:

Planning and Workflow: Are the morning budget meetings and planning decisions still being driven by the need to create centerpieces and fill this section or that section? Are your critiques still driven by hanging the morning paper on the wall and discussing story placement? If these are the central conversations that are driving newsroom planning, then you’re not online first.

Instead, the discussions about content creation should start with the subject and then explore whether to tell that with text, audio, video, or some data product. The critiques should be a continual process throughout the day of evaluating traffic, comments, and updates. There should be a team dedicated to taking all this content and turning it into a print version, but they shouldn’t be driving the process.

Deadlines: If someone asks when deadlines are, do you still say 5 p.m.? Time to turn that on its head. For most folks, their Web traffic peaks around 9 a.m. or so, when their community wanders into work, powers on their computers, and browse the news before getting on with their day. What they find on your Web site has to be more than the articles your staff filed the previous afternoon. To change that, there needs to be a big push early in the morning to get more folks in creating fresh stuff and then updating throughout the day. According this post from Shannon Bowen, an online journalist at the Wilmington Star in North Carolina, the newsroom there has adopted the mentality of an afternoon paper, requiring the bulk of the staff to be in early and file in the morning by 11 a.m. It’s a good start. But it needs to be even earlier to hit that traffic peak, which means getting more folks in even earlier.

Jobs: Are the type of jobs in the newsroom much different than they were 10 years ago? If you’re an online first newsroom, they should be. To optimize the online experience, it takes a whole different set of jobs. Get a community manager to moderate comments, solicit the best contributions from community members, and generate a lot of conversation. Get a multimedia editor who can really build the audio and video contributions from the whole staff. Get a couple of programmer journalists in the newsroom to build everything from news widgets to Flash presentations to data-rich products like this Campaign Tracker that The Washington Post created for the recent election season. These types of information products are great journalism and they fit the way people like to consume information online by allowing them to click around and discover things.

And remember that it’s not about getting folks to come to your Web site. You have to get your content out into other people’s networks. Get a network manager whose role is to promote content using social media tools like Twitter and Facebook, building relationships with bloggers, and in general thinking past the Web site and finding ways to get content into streams where the potential audience resides.

Linking: Are journalists able to create links in the stories they file? Does your content management system even allow reporters to create links? If not, it’s time to get a new content management system. And looking at this from the other end, can the audience link to your content? Are your archives free? This seems to be a harder change for many newsrooms, which in some cases have contracts with third parties to operate paid archives. Even worse, many news sites intentionally break their links every few days in order to drive folks to these paid archives. Which means that essentially they’re not letting other people link to their content.

I’ll end with this thought: In truth, we all should be thinking about moving toward multiplatform newsrooms: print, radio, online, mobile. Wherever your community is, you need to be there. And be prepared to embrace new platforms that are bound to emerge over time.

But first things first. Let’s get the transition to online right, and then go from there. These are my criteria. What are your criteria for an online newsroom? And are there any newsrooms out there that folks believe have really, truly become online first?