Journalists are good people. Remember the pizzas the Chicago Tribune sent to the Globe newsroom?

In the same vein, I received an email this morning from Marc Samson, founder of Pressfolios. (I have written so much about the digital portfolio site, I’m afraid you are going to start thinking I have stock in the company. Full disclosure: I don’t. They just email a lot.)

The news came down this morning that there are going to be hundred of Patch employees laid off in the coming weeks. That stinks. That also means there are going to be lots of really good journalists looking for work. Samson and his Pressfolio team wanted to spread the word that they’re offering their Pro version for free to any one affected by the slow demise of Patch.

You can contact them directly here to get all of your work archived in one place as you make your way into the job market.

It’s a sort of lemons into tangy lemonade type situation.

Got me thinking: we’ve all been there before. What are your first steps when the ax comes down?

There’s more happening at the Washington Post than Jeff Bezos. Last week, they launched two new shows to PostTV, focused on getting in depth with politics. ‘In Play,’ and ‘On Background,’ were added to the lineup to complement the ‘The Fold,’ which launched last fall, a weekly sports show and original reporting videos. You can watch the shows live, in full on the web or snack on shorter clips after they air.

I was able to get senior video editor Andrew Pergam on the phone to talk about how the shows fit into the Washington’s Post’s overall brand of journalism.

Are People Watching?

He wouldn’t get into numbers, but he assures me that yes, people are watching. What’s more important to the video team is that they create good content and grow their audience.

It was really important in creating all of this that we create content that we ourselves want to watch, and that we would want to share with other people, and grow our audience. That there’s a way to bring people into it in a different way…That was a founding principal. Video is very ‘of the web,’ this is where our audience is, let’s go meet them there.

Sharing and engaging with audiences online is also very of the web. The shows are an extension of the traditional reporting the Post is known for and with video, it’s very easy to get caught up in the obsession to go viral.

The journalism and the story is still it. That’s what we’re after. What we’re doing is creating really good journalism that on top of it all, is also ahre-able. It’s pretty important that we create journalism that matches our reputation.

What were trying to do is have an ongoing conversation with our audience. We’re trying to be as flexible as we can and figuring out what works and what doesn’t. Now we know how people are watching and how they’re engaging with it and then we can adjust accordingly.

Trial and Error

As your own organization makes moves towards creating video (and if it hasn’t, it should be), there are two things to keep in mind. The first is to actually be a part of the newsroom. Video teams don’t need to be replacements for wordsmiths:

I think everyone should be exploring video, it’s a big way that a traditional news organization can enhance its brand going forward… The Post has been successful at integrating video into the daily activity of the newsroom. We’re very much a part of this newsroom, I’m a senior editor in the newsroom, we’re in the same editorial meetings, the politics team works closely with the video team. It’s an unprecedented addition to this newsroom, as opposed to the video group being outside the newsroom, we’ve added a whole new group of journalists to the newsroom, which is very cool.

Pergam also notes that your video content doesn’t have to be perfect, though it should be authentic:

It’s important to figure out what you’re good at and what your audience can connect to…One of the things that’s attractive about the web is that it doesn’t have to be fully produced. The unfiltered, the raw, the grainy, sometimes that appeals to viewers because they feel a connection to that. Find the right voice for your operation, and be authentic. That’s what it all adds up to.

 

If you’ve skimmed the media-hive headlines this week, there’s every reason to wonder about your career choice. There’s a ‘sad state of journalism’ from a Huffington Post blogger and Cleveland reporters waiting by the phone to see if they have a job. Even The Onion has declared print — and therefore, good ol’fashioned journalism — dead.

I won’t have any of that. Sure, it’s hard to get a job and I can count myself among a slew of writers still waiting to get paid for longform pieces in start-up publications. But it’s all about transitions. (or so I mumble as I refresh my checking account summary, waiting for deposits). There are reasons to be excited about your work.

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Today, Quartz open-sourced the code for their in-house application Chartbuilder on Github, so we can all make charts worthy of our reporting, and without driving the graphics editor insane. There’s a minor learning curve, but you don’t have to be a graphics whiz to make them.

David Yanofsky, a reporter for Quartz and the creator of the application, writes on Nieman Journalism Lab that everyone benefits: reporters become more independant in working with their own data and it makes life easier for our colleagues over at the graphics desk, who can get bogged down with requests for data visualizations.

The charts are easily customizable to match any newsroom’s standards, they provide ‘immediate visual feedback’ so you don’t have to update and preview to make sure you didn’t mess anything up, and you can work on them offline if you download the source code. Most importantly, it’s simple. Yanofsky writes:

A reporter’s understanding of an image file is exponentially higher than a reporter’s understanding of an iframe embed code snippet. Content management systems’ understanding of an image file is exponentially higher than a CMS’s understanding of an iframe embed.

You can get started right now, and if you are one of those reporters who starts zoning as soon as you hear “source code,” bring it to a developer in the newsroom. They’ll probably thank you.

If you see something, share something. That’s the motto and logic behind a new video sharing app called ifussss. Say it with me now: EYE- FUSS. 

While Twitter and Facebook already have us all gathering images and looping videos, ifuss is targeted to news organizations. Co-founder Edward Brooks explains:

Right now, it’s a ton of effort. Users are looking for good content, they’re interested in things happening in their area. If you know a story’s already broke, you can go to Facebook or YouTube, but even if you find the content, you don’t know if you can use it, if it’s been used before — the whole process in the middle is difficult. 

The concept is the same as, say, Instagram. You see traffic on a bridge, for example. You shoot and upload it to the ifussss network. It’s automatically geo, time, and hash tagged. News editors can search and monitor the ifussss newsroom platform and, this is where it gets interesting, buy the content. 

They still haven’t worked out the kinks on pricing, but it’s going to be a “very low cost” price, says Brooks. ifussss collects that revenue and pays a percentage to the citizen journalists who took the video in the first place. 

Brooks mentions that a contact of his in a local New York City newsroom says they had five or six people combing through user-generated video after Hurricane Sandy. 

It would make that process much easier. We’re not asking you to change that behavior, but now the archive is there, it’s verified content, and ready to use. 

There’s been much discussion around Twitter’s Vine and Instagram video, but both of the behometh’s continue to tell us that they aren’t a media company. ifussss could fill in that gap. The big question is: will newsrooms pay for user generated video content? Brooks thinks they should.