Future of Journalism

Google's new Wave tool is transforming newsrooms, Mashable writes, as some companies use it to increase reader engagement, crowdsource story ideas, and build community.

Google Wave, if you recall, is a tool launched in May that allows for group communication and collaboration. The editors at the Chicago Tribune's Redeye (a free daily publication targeted at young, urban professionals) host a daily session on Google Wave to discuss the day's top story. The Austin American-Statesman uses Google Wave to create town squares where readers can talk about the day's news among themselves. The Los Angeles Times has used it to crowd-source story ideas.

"It's not too often that legacy media learns a new mass communication tool along with its audience," writes Leah Betancourt. "But that's exactly what's going on now."

The big news on the right coast this week is Bloomberg has stolen away TIME.com managing editor Josh Tyrangiel to become the new editor of BusinessWeek.

So what does this have to do with us over on the left coast? Not much, except for this interview that Beet.TV's Andy Plesser did with Tyrangiel earlier this year, which provides one of the best summations we've run across about how to make the Web work for news organizations.

And Tyrangiel, who previously worked at Rolling Stone, Vibe, and MTV, should know what he's talking about: During his tenure at TIME.com, traffic jumped from 400 million page views in 2006 to a projected 1.8 billion page views this year.

So what does Tyrangiel have to say about delivering content online?

The Web is a medium. And so, if you take TIME magazine and put it on the Web and ignore all the challenges to the medium, you haven't really done much for people.... People read the Web, for news, between 11 and 2 every day. They're at their desks, they got their lunch, the boss is at the door, the voicemail light is on.

...

What we tell our journalists when they're writing for the Web is our goal is to make people smarter while saving them time.... So the challenge is: How do I be smart and stylish, but get to the point and get people the information they need right away?

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95% of TIME.com stories are original to the Web. If you look at our traffic, while some of the magazine stories do very well because they're news-breaking, a lot of it doesn't do that great. It's just too long.

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The more sensitive you are to people's needs... the more messages you send that say: "It's going to be quick, and we're going to get you what you need," the more audience loyalty you build.

(3:21)

With all the hubbub going on these days about paywalls (Newsday, New York Times, NewsCorp), the mediabistro.com blogs decided to crowdsource a prediction as to whether these new payment systems would bring salvation to struggling newspapers—or spell their doom. To do that, we created a poll that ran over the past week and asked readers: "Do you think paywalls will save newspapers?"

The poll closed last night. 1,682 people participated. Here's what they said:

Today's the last day for the mediabistro bloggers' poll: Will paywalls save newspapers? (See the backstory here.)

As of this writing, the vast majority of respondents think paywalls will be the beginning of the end for newspapers. Do you agree? Log your vote. Poll closes tonight.

Do You Think Paywalls Will Save Newspapers?(trends)

The California Media Workers Guild has launched a new Freelance Unit, focused on independent journalists. The unit, which plans to accredit freelancers, advocate for them on legislative issues, and explore the possibility of group medical coverage, is the first freelancers group in the country associated with a local office of The Newspaper Guild.

The move is spurred in large part by deep newsroom cuts which have sent many previously staffers out on their own. "The Guild is working with community groups and other partners to strengthen the safety net and equip writers, photographers, web content providers and graphic artists the supports they need to work independently without sacrificing security," the Guild said in its announcement.

The Guild says the unit is open to any working freelancer. "Our goal is not to exclude anyone based on the type of journalism they practice or the platform they use to publish or broadcast their work," the Guild announcement said. But they added that they will apply rigor to the credentialing process. "We need to separate the dabbler, the dilettante and the publicist from the ranks of freelance working journalists," the announcement said. Longtime freelancer and religion writer Don Lattin will oversee the credentialing process.

For more, see the new Guild Freelancers Web site.

Do you think paywalls will save newspapers? That's what we're asking mediabistro.com readers in the poll below.

The issue is coming to a head. The New York Times is going to decide "within weeks" whether to erect a paywall. And Newsday already has. Some in the journalism business think newspapers won't be able to survive unless they start charging readers to read their stories on the Web. Others think it'll be the beginning of the end, as readers flee to free sources of news—with advertisers close behind.

What do you think? Together, all of mediabistro.com's blogs (including FishBowlNY, WebNewser, FishBowlLA, and the rest of your favorites) are going to try to "crowdsource" the answer. The principle of the "wisdom of crowds" says a large group of people can correctly predict the answer to a question like this. So tell us what you think. And then get your colleagues and friends to answer as well. The more people who participate, the more likely we'll get the right answer.

Do You Think Paywalls Will Save Newspapers?(trends)

New Yorker writer Ken Auletta appears on C-SPAN's "Q&A" program this weekend to discuss his new book Googled: The End of the World as We Know It.

In the 3-minute excerpt below, Auletta says, "One of the things I take away from this two-and-a-half-year visit to another planet, including visiting back with traditional media companies, is that I am harsher on the traditional media companies than I am on Google."

"Another planet?" Hmmm... As a Bay Area native and technology veteran, watching two 60+ East Coasters talk about Silicon Valley as "another planet" gives us new insight into what it must have been like to be one of Margaret Mead's subjects.

(Per C-SPAN, the show airs on Sunday, November 1, at 8pm ET and 11pm ET, and Monday, November 2 at 6am ET. Check your local listings and all that.)

Looks like a few media outlets are deciding to hang together, rather than hang separtely.

The death of investigative reporting is one of the biggest gripes circulated in the newspapers-are-dying dirge. So Mother Jones is doing something about it.

The San Francisco-based magazine is gathering up a group of publications to collectively report on climate change. According to Mother Jones coeditor Clara Jeffery, the organizations involved could include Slate, Grist, The Atlantic, Wired, Pro Publica, and the Center for Investigative Reporting, in addition to Mother Jones. The group, which is planning to meet for the first time in December, won't necessarily produce a single report, Jeffrey tells AdAge, but rather will work collectively in covering the issue on an ongoing basis.

"We each have different strengths, but working together we can cover this story better than any of us could on our own," wrote Jeffrey and coeditor Monika Bauerlein in the current issue of the magazine.

"Rules of engagement are to be hashed out in the big confab we're having around Dec. 1," says Jeffrey. "But in all of the one-off talks we've had, everyone seems agreed that a combination of enlightened self-interest and threat of group shame can prevent turf wars."

Over 60 Silicon Valley thought leaders gathered in the downtown San Francisco offices of frog design on Friday to brainstorm ideas for NPR's digital future.

The "Digital Think In"—perhaps one of the largest collections of tech brain power outside of the usual conferences (and the Google offices)—originated over coffee last spring between Kinsey Wilson, NPR's senior vice president and general manager of digital media, and Roland Smart, a San Francisco-based Marketing 2.0 consultant. Wilson wondered if it might be possible to get some of the folks working on cutting edge technology to help NPR think about how to move into the digital world. Smart started making calls, and the result was the daylong event.

The conclave generated over a 100 ideas for things NPR could do online to "create a more informed public." Wilson said NPR will probably post many of those on the Digital Think In Web site, so anyone who's interested can help further refine them.

Wilson speaks to the group, while NPR CEO Vivian Schiller stands to the side.

More pix, after the jump.

continued...

Over 60 the smartest brains in Silicon Valley are converging on San Francisco Friday to help NPR rethink how it does everything from content creation to revenue models.

The day-long "Think In" brainstorming sessions, initiated by NPR and hosted by NPR president and CEO Vivian Schiller and General Manager of Digital Media Kinsey Wilson, is being faciliated by frog design, the global innovation firm that has helped bring to the world everything from the Windows Media Player, to Disney consumer electronics, to Louis Vuitton premium luggage.

The list of attendees reads like a list of the who's who of Silicon Valley innovation and entrepreneurialism, as well of as some of the leading local thinkers on the future of journalism. Among them: Craig Newmark of Craigslist, Reid Hoffman of LinkedIn, Mozilla Chief Innovation Officer Chris Beard, Jesse James Garrett of Adaptive Path, Google News creator Krishna Bharat, Sue Gardner of Wikimedia, McCann Erickson Executive Creative Director, Digital Alastair Green, Diego Rodriguez of IDEO, Technorati Media President and CEO Richard Jalichandra, private equity firm Elevation Partners co-founder Roger McNamee, Joshua Benton of the Nieman Journalism Lab, David Cohn of Spot.Us, KQED Vice President of Digital Media Tim Olson, Holly Kernan of KALW, and Susan Mernit of Oakland Local.