(NOTE: Comments for this reading are due by the start of class on Wednesday)
Mar. 8, 2009
Poynter Institute
Jim Brady to News Sites: Experiment More, Now
By Steve Meyers
After a little more than four years at the helm, Jim Brady left his job as executive editor of washingtonpost.com. Under his watch, the site was one of the top online news destinations and was recognized for innovative storytelling such as Being a Black Man, onBeing and Fixing D.C. Schools.
Brady has been involved in online news in some way for almost 14 years -- two stints at washingtonpost.com, interrupted by about four years at America Online. It won't be long, I figure, before he signs on with another outfit. I asked Brady to fill some of his newfound (and perhaps short-lived) free time by sharing his thoughts on where online news is now and what needs to happen next. Here's our edited e-mail exchange.
Steve Myers: What's the state of online news?
Jim Brady
Jim Brady
Jim Brady: Mixed. I think there are lots of sites doing interesting things journalistically, and I think there are certain changes to the media culture that I hope are with us forever -- multimedia storytelling, treating our readers as partners, pushing content out versus waiting for people to come to our sites, as a few examples.
But I think we could still be more adventurous editorially. Digital journalism is still the Wild West; the rules are still being made. So this is a great time to ratchet up the level of experimentation, since the audience is more forgiving now than they'll be in a few years. And, obviously, the business model is hurting badly. But I don't think there's much of a doubt that digital is the sandbox that future readers will be playing in, so pulling back now would seem shortsighted. We have to figure digital out from a business perspective if we're going to survive, much less thrive.
One of the ways people describe successful online ventures is saying that they're "of the Web," not merely "on the Web." Those sites use the unique advantages of the Web to present information and connect with users, rather than transferring traditional approaches online. Are major news sites these days "of the Web"?
Brady: I think more and more sites fit that description every day. But it's a big shift, and I'd be lying if I said I felt like everyone had made that leap. To me, it comes down to this question: Do you view the Web as a platform or a medium? If you work at a paper or TV station that merely views the Web as a way to distribute content from your legacy product, then I think you're doomed on the Web. If you view it as a platform, as a way to tell legacy stories differently, to share the floor with your audience, to consciously inject your content into the broader ecosystem of the Web, then I think you'll be fine. The business model is clearly trailing, of course, but the business model on the print side is in free fall, and I don't see it coming back. So digital has to pick up the slack, and it's on us to figure out how to make that happen.
What is your assessment of how The Washington Post has made the transition to being a multi-platform news provider? Where did the Post do well, and where did it fall short?
Brady: I think the Post did a terrific job -- supported at the highest levels -- transforming itself from a site that was "on the Web" to one that was "of the Web." We were pretty aggressive on opening the site to readers, experimenting with new storytelling forms, embracing database journalism and trying to experiment with new sites and platforms that emerged over the years. I'm proud of that, and of the staff that's doing great work. I think we fell short in some areas too. We haven't done as good a job as The New York Times at building core technology in-house. They've really committed to staffing up on the technical front, and it shows in how quickly they're innovating. I don't think news sites need to build everything in-house, but they need to decide what's core technology and/or functionality, and own it. The Post is on a path to do that with some recent hires, and I'm confident they'll make up ground. Overall, though, I think we did a pretty good job.
How about legacy media in general?
Brady: I think the level of experimentation has increased a lot in recent years, though I'm always one who feels like there's not enough risk-taking in media. We've done things a certain way for so long that change comes at too slow a pace. But you see great work coming out of big shops, small shops and startups, and that's encouraging. But I do firmly believe that the pace of experimentation has to increase. Launching blogs in 2009 isn't innovative anymore. Launching comments on articles in 2009 isn't innovative. But a lot of sites are just getting to that point now.
Among all the discussion lately about revenue models, some argue that the news industry should reverse course and start charging for content online. Was it wise for news sites to embrace a free content, ad-supported model?
Brady: I was there when this all started, and I can tell you that the second-guessing on not charging misses some key facts: 1) I don't remember this for sure, but I'm relatively positive we didn't have the technology in-house to charge people for content when we launched washingtonpost.com in 1996. 2) Almost no one was willing to enter credit card information in 1996, so adoption rates on charging probably would have been low. 3) If half the papers had charged, the other half probably would have gone free for competitive advantage, so the idea -- as I've heard it posited -- that "we all should have charged" ignores the basic fact that media organizations would never have agreed to act unilaterally. And as long as any good sites were free, the pressure would have been on all of us to pull down the pay walls.
What are the most constructive ways to engage people from the revenue side of a traditional news organization (ad sales, for instance) in the online operations? What obstacles occur in those interactions?
"The idea ... that 'we all should have charged' ignores the basic fact that media organizations would never have agreed to act unilaterally."Brady: Directly. One of the things I like about working online is getting a broader view of all the pieces that make the operation run: sales, technology, marketing, etc. I'm on record as saying that the Chinese wall between the editorial side and the business side has not served us well. I don't see the harm in my knowing what sales is hearing out in the field in terms of what subject areas are drawing interest, and what the broader ad trends are. I know exactly where the church-state line is, and I'll never cross it. But why wouldn't I want to know what challenges sales is facing? It works in reverse as well. My relationship with our sales VP at washingtonpost.com was terrific, and as a result of us talking, he knew where I drew the line and helped hold that line with his folks.
The obstacles that come up are the obvious ones: when an advertiser is offering to pay a lot of money for an implementation that I felt violated our editorial standards. But that's precisely why it's important to have the right foundational relationship with sales; it makes those issues easier to resolve. If you're only talking to sales in those conflict situations, then I think you have a problem.
What role do programmers -- the self-described "geeks" -- have in a modern online news operation?
Brady: Huge. I feel like I'm pretty up to speed on the tools that are at our disposal as journalists, but I sat in a session at Poynter this weekend and walked out of the room with six new sites to check out. There are so many ways to tell stories on the Web, and while most established media companies accept that video and photo galleries are cool Web tools, I still think database journalism is underappreciated.
We did a D.C. schools series last year that used a database as a wonderful storytelling tool. The paper did a terrific series that discussed the plight of D.C. schools at the 30,000-foot level, and we worked with them to compile a database of crime reports, maintenance requests, test scores, etc., that helped tell the story on the ground level. If you had a kid in a D.C. school, this project spoke to you in a more personal way because we could shine a light into the exact school your child was attending. So we have to keep looking for ways to use technology, databases, and tools like those found on sites like Many Eyes or Swivel (those are the ones I just learned about) to speak more relevantly to our audience.
If it were up to you to create a news organization from scratch, what kinds of roles would people have? How would it be different if you didn't have to work within the structure of an established, traditional news organization? What would you lose or gain?
Brady: I think all Web newsrooms need people devoted to technology/databases, video and photo storytelling, interactivity, distribution to other Web sites and mobile, and some resources dedicated to forward-looking experimentation. It's not realistic for every newsroom to have dedicated people on each of those tasks, but I do think isolating a small number of people on specialty areas like this is essential. If all your resources are focused on putting out today's site, tomorrow is going to sneak up quickly on you.
People working on news sites with vastly fewer resources than washingtonpost.com may think there isn't anything they could learn from how your site operated. Can you tell me three successful strategies or methods of running a news site that could be emulated by a site with a limited budget?
Brady: I've heard that a lot over the years. My belief is that the ability to experiment in new areas isn't really a function of staff size, though scale is. We can produce 20 to 30 original video pieces a week; I realize many news sites can't do that. But there's no reason a site can't do four to six a week. So I don't think small staff size is an excuse not to experiment. But building capability in any area that is successful can be a challenge, so I don't mean to underestimate the challenge smaller sites have.
What direction are you headed in, professionally? Do you see yourself running the online component of another traditional news organization or trying something different?
Brady: I'm headed south, literally. My wife and I are leaving on a six-to-eight-week road trip around the U.S., and we're focusing on the South and Southwest. One of the goals of the trip is to really figure out what I want to do, and long stretches of desolate highway are great places for me to think that through. So I can't really answer that question yet. Call me in a month, and maybe it will all have come to me somewhere in West Texas...
Sunday, March 8, 2009
Friday, February 27, 2009
Jason Fried & 37 Signals
The Brash Boys at 37signals Will Tell You: Keep it Simple, Stupid
By Andrew Park, Wired Magazine
To the 300 software developers packed into a Vancouver conference room, David Heinemeier Hansson was more than a programmer. He was a visionary, the creator of Ruby on Rails, a software template that powered an increasing number of hot Internet applications. He was a philosopher-king whose minimalist ethos suggested a new way of thinking about business and software. And he was a celebrity, with boyish good looks, precocious self-possession, and fans who invoked his name so frequently they used his initials as shorthand: DHH. As Hansson took the stage at the British Columbia Institute of Technology for this, the first Ruby on Rails conference, the room was filled with the kind of giddy excitement that greets the opening chords of a Hannah Montana concert.
The program billed Hansson's keynote as a collection of "beloved rants" and "favorite tales from the land of righteous indignation," and he didn't disappoint. He began by congratulating the nascent Ruby on Rails community (and, by extension, himself), citing a litany of impressive achievements: 500,000 downloads of the code, 16 how-to books, mentions in Wired and other publications, and several industry awards — including, for Hansson, the prestigious Hacker of the Year title, bestowed by Google and O'Reilly Media.
But not everyone was convinced of Rails' revolutionary potential. Critics had been saying that Rails wasn't versatile enough, that it couldn't handle large amounts of traffic, and that Hansson himself was arrogant. "Arrogant is usually something you hurl at somebody as an insult," Hansson said. "But when I actually looked it up — having an aggravated sense of one's own importance or abilities' — I thought, sure."
Then he clicked over to the next slide, white letters against a dark background that spelled out his response to the naysayers: fuck you. The crowd erupted into laughter and applause.
Hansson's programmer-with-a-messiah-complex shtick may be a hoary cliché. But in the nearly two years since he delivered this presentation, he and his partners at software developer 37signals have backed up the big talk. Rails has continued its run of popularity; over the years, tens of thousands of programmers have used it to create countless online applications, including podcasting service Odeo and microblogging phenomenon Twitter. And Basecamp, 37signals' Rails-powered, easy-to-use online collaboration software, boasts more than 2 million account holders. Signal vs. Noise, the 37signals blog, pulls in 75,000 readers a day. Hansson and 37signals cofounder Jason Fried are "revered," says business author Seth Godin. "They are as close as we get to demigods online."
What's more, the pair's once-heretical vision — that there is beauty and wisdom in Web-hosted, bite-size software built to accomplish narrow tasks — has become conventional wisdom. In the two years since Hansson's keynote, Google released Apps, the relatively feature-free alternative to Microsoft's bulky Office suite; Facebook opened its platform to independent developers, unleashing a stream of mini-applications that offer everything from playlist-swapping to Boggle bouts; Salesforce.com's AppExchange gave corporate software developers a platform for selling tiny, downloadable programs; widget wunderkinds like Slide's Max Levchin and RockYou's Lance Tokuda became Web celebrities; and venture capitalists opened their wallets in the hunt for the next little thing. "Simplicity is the most important thing in technology," says Paul Graham, cofounder of early-stage venture firm Y Combinator. "And it's only getting more important."
None of this has helped Hansson discover any hidden wellsprings of modesty. He has called Microsoft "entirely optional," referred to Java as "grossly overused," and described Flash applications as "horrid."
But if Hansson hasn't changed much, neither has the programming framework he created or the business he heads. For some, that's a problem. Hansson and Fried have steadfastly refused to grow their company, beef up their products, or explain their plans for the future. Now, critics argue, the pair's reactionary embrace of all things minimal has made their products less useful and could cost them influence, customers, and millions of dollars.
Hansson has a predictable response to such charges. "I don't usually go around saying 'Fuck you' to everyone I meet," he says. "But sometimes it's the appropriate answer."
The defining characteristic of Ruby on Rails is, as the name suggests, speed. Using Rails, an adept programmer can create a simple blogging application in 15 minutes or a photo database in five. Two guys built Twitter in two weeks.
In exchange for that speed, programmers accept a Hansson-knows-best approach to software design. While most programming languages require coders to build every new application from scratch, Rails gives developers a set of configurations that lets them bypass the busywork. That makes Rails ideal for quickly creating lean, sparsely designed Web-based applications, which coincidentally enough is exactly what Fried and Hansson think software should look like: as Fried puts it, "stripped down to the absolute bare necessities."
Fried developed his theory of streamlined software design in 1994 as a junior at the University of Arizona. He was looking for a simple database program to catalog his music collection. "I downloaded a bunch and they all sucked," Fried says. Instead of focusing on the relatively easy task, they were overloaded with options that only complicated the process. "I said, I can make this way better.'" So he created his own program, dubbed Audiofile, and peddled it as $20-a-pop shareware, earning enough to keep himself in beer money.
After college, Fried returned to his native Chicago, where he formed 37signals — a Web design firm, named in esoteric reference to SETI — and posted a manifesto on his homepage that railed against the shortcomings of most software. ("The Web should empower, not frustrate," he wrote. "Just because you can doesn't mean you should.") On his protoblog, Signal vs. Noise, he further developed his philosophy. "Remember — size does matter: A small group of 10 great people will outproduce, outwork, outthink a large group of 50 average people."
Fried's missives struck a throbbing nerve, and before long Signal vs. Noise was drawing a dedicated readership of programmers and designers similarly fed up with bulky, inelegant code and enthralled by Fried's edicts. It was through his blog that Fried met Hansson: In 2002 Hansson, then a student at Copenhagen Business School, provided some programming advice after Fried posted a question about the best way to handle pagination using a programming language called PHP. The two became fast friends. "Our outlook was the same," Fried says: "Keep it simple." So when Fried wanted an online collaboration tool for his employees, he again turned to Hansson. Working 10 hours a week over four months, Hansson wrote the code to support Fried's spare, airy interface. Hansson used a little-known language named Ruby — which most developers felt was too slow and limited to be of much use — and developed a series of shortcuts to help him build the program quickly and easily.
The result was Basecamp, a lean but effective platform requiring no costly servers, tricky installations, or technical support. Although he'd developed it for in-house use, Fried realized the commercial potential of the program after showing it to friends and clients who wanted an inexpensive and simple way for small teams to work together. When he released Basecamp in February 2004, Fried expected the monthly subscription fees, which today range from $12 to $149, to generate sales of $5,000 a month by the end of Basecamp's first year; they reached that target in six weeks. Five months later, Hansson packaged his Ruby shortcuts and released them as Ruby on Rails, which started winning converts almost immediately.
At the same time their software was taking off, so was the duo's cult of personality. In 2005, Fried gave a 10-minute presentation at Tim O'Reilly's Web 2.0 Summit, the influential confab of some of the Internet's biggest minds. The blogosphere lit up
with praise. (The response was so overwhelming that Fried himself posted a blog entry wondering if 37signals had "jumped the shark." Commenters leapt to his defense.) In 2006, the company compiled a list of contrarian dictates — don't plan, don't hire, don't fix every bug — and published it as Getting Real, to rave reviews.
But the key to Fried and Hansson's burgeoning celebrity may have been their $895-a-seat workshops at which acolytes celebrated the gospel of radical simplicity. After attending one, Ryan Norbauer was inspired to tear down Lovetastic.com, a successful personals site that he had spent eight months creating in PHP, and rewrite the entire thing using Rails. Now Norbauer runs a Rails consultancy. "Rails has become a very big part of my life," he says. "I don't think I would be doing programming for a living without it."
That kind of devotion is common. After Sean Tierney read Getting Real, he bought 10 copies for his employees at Grid7, an application development shop, and insisted they read it. "Jason Fried is a genius," says Tierney, who today runs a software startup called Jumpbox. "He's the opposite of everything corporate."
Tucked away on a grubby side street in a gentrifying loft-and-warehouse neighborhood about a mile west of downtown Chicago, 37signals' offices hew to the company's small-is-beautiful edict. Actually, offices is a strong word: Headquarters consists of four desks shoved up against a wall. 37signals leases its 500 square feet of floor space from a design firm whose employees surround 37signals's work area. There is no 37signals sign, no receptionist, no indication that 37signals even exists. The company has just 10 employees, five of whom telecommute and none of whom are expected to work more than 40 hours a week. But 37signals hasn't remained small out of sloth or through lack of opportunity; indeed, it's taken some effort to keep it from growing. Fried says he has rebuffed numerous inquiries from venture capitalists looking to invest in his company. (The sole exception: Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos, whose investment firm, Bezos Expeditions, took a minority stake in 37signals in 2006 for an undisclosed amount. The company has said it accepted the deal because it offered access to Bezos, not because of the money.) Neither will Fried entertain acquisition offers. "Someone on the outside would look at what we do and say, Let's ratchet it up to some enterprise level,'" he argues. "I don't want to make our software more complicated. I really don't understand why everyone's interested in Fortune 500 customers. I just don't get that."
37signals may not be targeting corporate behemoths, but its pared-down offerings may be inadequate for even its smaller clients, some of whom have urged Hansson to adapt Rails so it is better suited to handle popular applications. In March 2007, a Twitter engineer told an interviewer that he was having difficulty getting Rails to handle his company's massive spike in traffic. Hansson responded by sending a heated email to Jack Dorsey, Twitter's CEO, and chastising the company on his blog for playing the "blame game" instead of solving its scaling problems itself. (The two firms have since resolved the dispute.) In January, an executive from hosting provider Dreamhost mused about the difficulty some of his clients were having running Rails applications. Again, Hansson responded on his blog: "Wipe the wah-wah tears off your chin and retract the threats of imminent calamity if we don't drop everything we're doing to pursue your needs."
This sort of hostility can't come as a surprise to anyone who has followed Hansson or Fried, but there are signs that their churlishness is beginning to generate some backlash. The Basecamp message boards are filled with complaints from unhappy users, fed up with the software's paucity of features — functionality of the Opera browser, say, or better version tracking of uploaded files — who have switched to competing products. "They take the position that they're right and everyone else is wrong," says Douglas Karr, director of technology for an Internet marketing firm, who stopped using Basecamp in April. "It really just put me off the company." Harper Reed, CTO of online T-shirt retailer Threadless, says that the belligerence of Rails' followers soured him as well. "It's very much like a religion," he says.
What's more, 37signals' ideological objections to outside funding could make them less able to withstand competition. Nicholas Carr, author of The Big Switch, says companies like 37signals won't have the resources to fight should larger firms with huge economies of scale and backend infrastructure decide to take them on. "They're going to have a very tough challenge," he says.
Fried says he doesn't worry about losing individual Basecamp customers, since none of them pay more than $149 a month. He points out that the company's total revenue doubled in 2007. And in addition to Basecamp, 37signals' other products — subscription-based programs like group-chat app Campfire, content management tool Highrise, and information manager Backpack — pull in hundreds of thousands more users.
But, faced with a seemingly endless buffet of appetizer-size software, industry insiders have begun to question the basic philosophy that Web-based mini-applications are inherently better than their bulkier but more powerful competitors. "Running your application on Rails places a huge limit on what you can do," says Charles Forman, founder of iminlikewithyou.com, who has abandoned the framework for Merb, a rival programming tool. That promises more scalability. A recent survey by the NPD Group found that fewer than 1 percent of desktop PC users had replaced a desktop application — such as Microsoft Office — with a streamlined online alternative like Google Docs, even though the latter is free. Design expert Don Norman, a consultant for Microsoft, says that one reason for the disparity is that customers actually like and use the extra features. "Complexity is a necessary byproduct of the modern age," he says. "When you actually sit down and analyze what you need to get the job done, it's not simplicity."
That's heresy to Fried, Hansson, and their followers. Call it arrogance or idealism, but they would rather fail than adapt. "I'm not designing software for other people," Hansson says. "I'm designing it for me."
Andrew Park (andrewpark4@gmail.com) is a business writer in Chapel Hill, North Carolina.
By Andrew Park, Wired Magazine
To the 300 software developers packed into a Vancouver conference room, David Heinemeier Hansson was more than a programmer. He was a visionary, the creator of Ruby on Rails, a software template that powered an increasing number of hot Internet applications. He was a philosopher-king whose minimalist ethos suggested a new way of thinking about business and software. And he was a celebrity, with boyish good looks, precocious self-possession, and fans who invoked his name so frequently they used his initials as shorthand: DHH. As Hansson took the stage at the British Columbia Institute of Technology for this, the first Ruby on Rails conference, the room was filled with the kind of giddy excitement that greets the opening chords of a Hannah Montana concert.
The program billed Hansson's keynote as a collection of "beloved rants" and "favorite tales from the land of righteous indignation," and he didn't disappoint. He began by congratulating the nascent Ruby on Rails community (and, by extension, himself), citing a litany of impressive achievements: 500,000 downloads of the code, 16 how-to books, mentions in Wired and other publications, and several industry awards — including, for Hansson, the prestigious Hacker of the Year title, bestowed by Google and O'Reilly Media.
But not everyone was convinced of Rails' revolutionary potential. Critics had been saying that Rails wasn't versatile enough, that it couldn't handle large amounts of traffic, and that Hansson himself was arrogant. "Arrogant is usually something you hurl at somebody as an insult," Hansson said. "But when I actually looked it up — having an aggravated sense of one's own importance or abilities' — I thought, sure."
Then he clicked over to the next slide, white letters against a dark background that spelled out his response to the naysayers: fuck you. The crowd erupted into laughter and applause.
Hansson's programmer-with-a-messiah-complex shtick may be a hoary cliché. But in the nearly two years since he delivered this presentation, he and his partners at software developer 37signals have backed up the big talk. Rails has continued its run of popularity; over the years, tens of thousands of programmers have used it to create countless online applications, including podcasting service Odeo and microblogging phenomenon Twitter. And Basecamp, 37signals' Rails-powered, easy-to-use online collaboration software, boasts more than 2 million account holders. Signal vs. Noise, the 37signals blog, pulls in 75,000 readers a day. Hansson and 37signals cofounder Jason Fried are "revered," says business author Seth Godin. "They are as close as we get to demigods online."
What's more, the pair's once-heretical vision — that there is beauty and wisdom in Web-hosted, bite-size software built to accomplish narrow tasks — has become conventional wisdom. In the two years since Hansson's keynote, Google released Apps, the relatively feature-free alternative to Microsoft's bulky Office suite; Facebook opened its platform to independent developers, unleashing a stream of mini-applications that offer everything from playlist-swapping to Boggle bouts; Salesforce.com's AppExchange gave corporate software developers a platform for selling tiny, downloadable programs; widget wunderkinds like Slide's Max Levchin and RockYou's Lance Tokuda became Web celebrities; and venture capitalists opened their wallets in the hunt for the next little thing. "Simplicity is the most important thing in technology," says Paul Graham, cofounder of early-stage venture firm Y Combinator. "And it's only getting more important."
None of this has helped Hansson discover any hidden wellsprings of modesty. He has called Microsoft "entirely optional," referred to Java as "grossly overused," and described Flash applications as "horrid."
But if Hansson hasn't changed much, neither has the programming framework he created or the business he heads. For some, that's a problem. Hansson and Fried have steadfastly refused to grow their company, beef up their products, or explain their plans for the future. Now, critics argue, the pair's reactionary embrace of all things minimal has made their products less useful and could cost them influence, customers, and millions of dollars.
Hansson has a predictable response to such charges. "I don't usually go around saying 'Fuck you' to everyone I meet," he says. "But sometimes it's the appropriate answer."
The defining characteristic of Ruby on Rails is, as the name suggests, speed. Using Rails, an adept programmer can create a simple blogging application in 15 minutes or a photo database in five. Two guys built Twitter in two weeks.
In exchange for that speed, programmers accept a Hansson-knows-best approach to software design. While most programming languages require coders to build every new application from scratch, Rails gives developers a set of configurations that lets them bypass the busywork. That makes Rails ideal for quickly creating lean, sparsely designed Web-based applications, which coincidentally enough is exactly what Fried and Hansson think software should look like: as Fried puts it, "stripped down to the absolute bare necessities."
Fried developed his theory of streamlined software design in 1994 as a junior at the University of Arizona. He was looking for a simple database program to catalog his music collection. "I downloaded a bunch and they all sucked," Fried says. Instead of focusing on the relatively easy task, they were overloaded with options that only complicated the process. "I said, I can make this way better.'" So he created his own program, dubbed Audiofile, and peddled it as $20-a-pop shareware, earning enough to keep himself in beer money.
After college, Fried returned to his native Chicago, where he formed 37signals — a Web design firm, named in esoteric reference to SETI — and posted a manifesto on his homepage that railed against the shortcomings of most software. ("The Web should empower, not frustrate," he wrote. "Just because you can doesn't mean you should.") On his protoblog, Signal vs. Noise, he further developed his philosophy. "Remember — size does matter: A small group of 10 great people will outproduce, outwork, outthink a large group of 50 average people."
Fried's missives struck a throbbing nerve, and before long Signal vs. Noise was drawing a dedicated readership of programmers and designers similarly fed up with bulky, inelegant code and enthralled by Fried's edicts. It was through his blog that Fried met Hansson: In 2002 Hansson, then a student at Copenhagen Business School, provided some programming advice after Fried posted a question about the best way to handle pagination using a programming language called PHP. The two became fast friends. "Our outlook was the same," Fried says: "Keep it simple." So when Fried wanted an online collaboration tool for his employees, he again turned to Hansson. Working 10 hours a week over four months, Hansson wrote the code to support Fried's spare, airy interface. Hansson used a little-known language named Ruby — which most developers felt was too slow and limited to be of much use — and developed a series of shortcuts to help him build the program quickly and easily.
The result was Basecamp, a lean but effective platform requiring no costly servers, tricky installations, or technical support. Although he'd developed it for in-house use, Fried realized the commercial potential of the program after showing it to friends and clients who wanted an inexpensive and simple way for small teams to work together. When he released Basecamp in February 2004, Fried expected the monthly subscription fees, which today range from $12 to $149, to generate sales of $5,000 a month by the end of Basecamp's first year; they reached that target in six weeks. Five months later, Hansson packaged his Ruby shortcuts and released them as Ruby on Rails, which started winning converts almost immediately.
At the same time their software was taking off, so was the duo's cult of personality. In 2005, Fried gave a 10-minute presentation at Tim O'Reilly's Web 2.0 Summit, the influential confab of some of the Internet's biggest minds. The blogosphere lit up
with praise. (The response was so overwhelming that Fried himself posted a blog entry wondering if 37signals had "jumped the shark." Commenters leapt to his defense.) In 2006, the company compiled a list of contrarian dictates — don't plan, don't hire, don't fix every bug — and published it as Getting Real, to rave reviews.
But the key to Fried and Hansson's burgeoning celebrity may have been their $895-a-seat workshops at which acolytes celebrated the gospel of radical simplicity. After attending one, Ryan Norbauer was inspired to tear down Lovetastic.com, a successful personals site that he had spent eight months creating in PHP, and rewrite the entire thing using Rails. Now Norbauer runs a Rails consultancy. "Rails has become a very big part of my life," he says. "I don't think I would be doing programming for a living without it."
That kind of devotion is common. After Sean Tierney read Getting Real, he bought 10 copies for his employees at Grid7, an application development shop, and insisted they read it. "Jason Fried is a genius," says Tierney, who today runs a software startup called Jumpbox. "He's the opposite of everything corporate."
Tucked away on a grubby side street in a gentrifying loft-and-warehouse neighborhood about a mile west of downtown Chicago, 37signals' offices hew to the company's small-is-beautiful edict. Actually, offices is a strong word: Headquarters consists of four desks shoved up against a wall. 37signals leases its 500 square feet of floor space from a design firm whose employees surround 37signals's work area. There is no 37signals sign, no receptionist, no indication that 37signals even exists. The company has just 10 employees, five of whom telecommute and none of whom are expected to work more than 40 hours a week. But 37signals hasn't remained small out of sloth or through lack of opportunity; indeed, it's taken some effort to keep it from growing. Fried says he has rebuffed numerous inquiries from venture capitalists looking to invest in his company. (The sole exception: Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos, whose investment firm, Bezos Expeditions, took a minority stake in 37signals in 2006 for an undisclosed amount. The company has said it accepted the deal because it offered access to Bezos, not because of the money.) Neither will Fried entertain acquisition offers. "Someone on the outside would look at what we do and say, Let's ratchet it up to some enterprise level,'" he argues. "I don't want to make our software more complicated. I really don't understand why everyone's interested in Fortune 500 customers. I just don't get that."
37signals may not be targeting corporate behemoths, but its pared-down offerings may be inadequate for even its smaller clients, some of whom have urged Hansson to adapt Rails so it is better suited to handle popular applications. In March 2007, a Twitter engineer told an interviewer that he was having difficulty getting Rails to handle his company's massive spike in traffic. Hansson responded by sending a heated email to Jack Dorsey, Twitter's CEO, and chastising the company on his blog for playing the "blame game" instead of solving its scaling problems itself. (The two firms have since resolved the dispute.) In January, an executive from hosting provider Dreamhost mused about the difficulty some of his clients were having running Rails applications. Again, Hansson responded on his blog: "Wipe the wah-wah tears off your chin and retract the threats of imminent calamity if we don't drop everything we're doing to pursue your needs."
This sort of hostility can't come as a surprise to anyone who has followed Hansson or Fried, but there are signs that their churlishness is beginning to generate some backlash. The Basecamp message boards are filled with complaints from unhappy users, fed up with the software's paucity of features — functionality of the Opera browser, say, or better version tracking of uploaded files — who have switched to competing products. "They take the position that they're right and everyone else is wrong," says Douglas Karr, director of technology for an Internet marketing firm, who stopped using Basecamp in April. "It really just put me off the company." Harper Reed, CTO of online T-shirt retailer Threadless, says that the belligerence of Rails' followers soured him as well. "It's very much like a religion," he says.
What's more, 37signals' ideological objections to outside funding could make them less able to withstand competition. Nicholas Carr, author of The Big Switch, says companies like 37signals won't have the resources to fight should larger firms with huge economies of scale and backend infrastructure decide to take them on. "They're going to have a very tough challenge," he says.
Fried says he doesn't worry about losing individual Basecamp customers, since none of them pay more than $149 a month. He points out that the company's total revenue doubled in 2007. And in addition to Basecamp, 37signals' other products — subscription-based programs like group-chat app Campfire, content management tool Highrise, and information manager Backpack — pull in hundreds of thousands more users.
But, faced with a seemingly endless buffet of appetizer-size software, industry insiders have begun to question the basic philosophy that Web-based mini-applications are inherently better than their bulkier but more powerful competitors. "Running your application on Rails places a huge limit on what you can do," says Charles Forman, founder of iminlikewithyou.com, who has abandoned the framework for Merb, a rival programming tool. That promises more scalability. A recent survey by the NPD Group found that fewer than 1 percent of desktop PC users had replaced a desktop application — such as Microsoft Office — with a streamlined online alternative like Google Docs, even though the latter is free. Design expert Don Norman, a consultant for Microsoft, says that one reason for the disparity is that customers actually like and use the extra features. "Complexity is a necessary byproduct of the modern age," he says. "When you actually sit down and analyze what you need to get the job done, it's not simplicity."
That's heresy to Fried, Hansson, and their followers. Call it arrogance or idealism, but they would rather fail than adapt. "I'm not designing software for other people," Hansson says. "I'm designing it for me."
Andrew Park (andrewpark4@gmail.com) is a business writer in Chapel Hill, North Carolina.
Sunday, February 22, 2009
"How to Save Your Newspaper"
Thursday, Feb. 05, 2009
How to Save Your Newspaper
By Walter Isaacson, TIME
During the past few months, the crisis in journalism has reached meltdown proportions. It is now possible to contemplate a time when some major cities will no longer have a newspaper and when magazines and network-news operations will employ no more than a handful of reporters.
There is, however, a striking and somewhat odd fact about this crisis. Newspapers have more readers than ever. Their content, as well as that of newsmagazines and other producers of traditional journalism, is more popular than ever — even (in fact, especially) among young people.
The problem is that fewer of these consumers are paying. Instead, news organizations are merrily giving away their news. According to a Pew Research Center study, a tipping point occurred last year: more people in the U.S. got their news online for free than paid for it by buying newspapers and magazines. Who can blame them? Even an old print junkie like me has quit subscribing to the New York Times, because if it doesn't see fit to charge for its content, I'd feel like a fool paying for it.
This is not a business model that makes sense. Perhaps it appeared to when Web advertising was booming and every half-sentient publisher could pretend to be among the clan who "got it" by chanting the mantra that the ad-supported Web was "the future." But when Web advertising declined in the fourth quarter of 2008, free felt like the future of journalism only in the sense that a steep cliff is the future for a herd of lemmings. (See who got the world into this financial mess.)
Newspapers and magazines traditionally have had three revenue sources: newsstand sales, subscriptions and advertising. The new business model relies only on the last of these. That makes for a wobbly stool even when the one leg is strong. When it weakens — as countless publishers have seen happen as a result of the recession — the stool can't possibly stand.
See pictures of the recession of 1958.
See TIME's Pictures of the Week.
Henry Luce, a co-founder of TIME, disdained the notion of giveaway publications that relied solely on ad revenue. He called that formula "morally abhorrent" and also "economically self-defeating." That was because he believed that good journalism required that a publication's primary duty be to its readers, not to its advertisers. In an advertising-only revenue model, the incentive is perverse. It is also self-defeating, because eventually you will weaken your bond with your readers if you do not feel directly dependent on them for your revenue. When a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, Dr. Johnson said, it concentrates his mind wonderfully. Journalism's fortnight is upon us, and I suspect that 2009 will be remembered as the year news organizations realized that further rounds of cost-cutting would not stave off the hangman. (See the top 10 magazine covers of 2008.)
One option for survival being tried by some publications, such as the Christian Science Monitor and the Detroit Free Press, is to eliminate or drastically cut their print editions and focus on their free websites. Others may try to ride out the long winter, hope that their competitors die and pray that they will grab a large enough share of advertising to make a profitable go of it as free sites. That's fine. We need a variety of competing strategies.
These approaches, however, still make a publication completely beholden to its advertisers. So I am hoping that this year will see the dawn of a bold, old idea that will provide yet another option that some news organizations might choose: getting paid by users for the services they provide and the journalism they produce.
This notion of charging for content is an old idea not simply because newspapers and magazines have been doing it for more than four centuries. It's also something they used to do at the dawn of the online era, in the early 1990s. Back then there were a passel of online service companies, such as Prodigy, CompuServe, Delphi and AOL. They used to charge users for the minutes people spent online, and it was naturally in their interest to keep the users online for as long as possible. As a result, good content was valued. When I was in charge of TIME's nascent online-media department back then, every year or so we would play off AOL and CompuServe; one year the bidding for our magazine and bulletin boards reached $1 million.
See TIME's Pictures of the Week.
See pictures of TIME's Wall Street covers.
Then along came tools that made it easier for publications and users to venture onto the open Internet rather than remain in the walled gardens created by the online services. I remember talking to Louis Rossetto, then the editor of Wired, about ways to put our magazines directly online, and we decided that the best strategy was to use the hypertext markup language and transfer protocols that defined the World Wide Web. Wired and TIME made the plunge the same week in 1994, and within a year most other publications had done so as well. We invented things like banner ads that brought in a rising tide of revenue, but the upshot was that we abandoned getting paid for content. (See the 50 best websites of 2008.)
One of history's ironies is that hypertext — an embedded Web link that refers you to another page or site — had been invented by Ted Nelson in the early 1960s with the goal of enabling micropayments for content. He wanted to make sure that the people who created good stuff got rewarded for it. In his vision, all links on a page would facilitate the accrual of small, automatic payments for whatever content was accessed. Instead, the Web got caught up in the ethos that information wants to be free. Others smarter than we were had avoided that trap. For example, when Bill Gates noticed in 1976 that hobbyists were freely sharing Altair BASIC, a code he and his colleagues had written, he sent an open letter to members of the Homebrew Computer Club telling them to stop. "One thing you do is prevent good software from being written," he railed. "Who can afford to do professional work for nothing?"
The easy Internet ad dollars of the late 1990s enticed newspapers and magazines to put all of their content, plus a whole lot of blogs and whistles, onto their websites for free. But the bulk of the ad dollars has ended up flowing to groups that did not actually create much content but instead piggybacked on it: search engines, portals and some aggregators.
Another group that benefits from free journalism is Internet service providers. They get to charge customers $20 to $30 a month for access to the Web's trove of free content and services. As a result, it is not in their interest to facilitate easy ways for media creators to charge for their content. Thus we have a world in which phone companies have accustomed kids to paying up to 20 cents when they send a text message but it seems technologically and psychologically impossible to get people to pay 10 cents for a magazine, newspaper or newscast.
Currently a few newspapers, most notably the Wall Street Journal, charge for their online editions by requiring a monthly subscription. When Rupert Murdoch acquired the Journal, he ruminated publicly about dropping the fee. But Murdoch is, above all, a smart businessman. He took a look at the economics and decided it was lunacy to forgo the revenue — and that was even before the online ad market began contracting. Now his move looks really smart. Paid subscriptions for the Journal's website were up more than 7% in a very gloomy 2008. Plus, he spooked the New York Times into dropping its own halfhearted attempts to get subscription revenue, which were based on the (I think flawed) premise that it should charge for the paper's punditry rather than for its great reporting. (Author's note: After publication the New York Times vehemently denied that their thinking was influenced by outside considerations; I accept their explanation.)
See the worst business deals of 2008.
See TIME's Pictures of the Week.
But I don't think that subscriptions will solve everything — nor should they be the only way to charge for content. A person who wants one day's edition of a newspaper or is enticed by a link to an interesting article is rarely going to go through the cost and hassle of signing up for a subscription under today's clunky payment systems. The key to attracting online revenue, I think, is to come up with an iTunes-easy method of micropayment. We need something like digital coins or an E-ZPass digital wallet — a one-click system with a really simple interface that will permit impulse purchases of a newspaper, magazine, article, blog or video for a penny, nickel, dime or whatever the creator chooses to charge. (See the 50 best inventions of 2008.)
Admittedly, the Internet is littered with failed micropayment companies. If you remember Flooz, Beenz, CyberCash, Bitpass, Peppercoin and DigiCash, it's probably because you lost money investing in them. Many tracts and blog entries have been written about how the concept can't work because of bad tech or mental transaction costs.
But things have changed. "With newspapers entering bankruptcy even as their audience grows, the threat is not just to the companies that own them, but also to the news itself," wrote the savvy New York Times columnist David Carr last month in a column endorsing the idea of paid content. This creates a necessity that ought to be the mother of invention. In addition, our two most creative digital innovators have shown that a pay-per-drink model can work when it's made easy enough: Steve Jobs got music consumers (of all people) comfortable with the concept of paying 99 cents for a tune instead of Napsterizing an entire industry, and Jeff Bezos with his Kindle showed that consumers would buy electronic versions of books, magazines and newspapers if purchases could be done simply. (See Apple's 10 best business moves.)
What Internet payment options are there today? PayPal is the most famous, but it has transaction costs too high for impulse buys of less than a dollar. The denizens of Facebook are embracing systems like Spare Change, which allows them to charge their PayPal accounts or credit cards to get digital currency they can spend in small amounts. Similar services include Bee-Tokens and Tipjoy. Twitter users have Twitpay, which is a micropayment service for the micromessaging set. Gamers have their own digital currencies that can be used for impulse buys during online role-playing games. And real-world commuters are used to gizmos like E-ZPass, which deducts automatically from their prepaid account as they glide through a highway tollbooth.
Under a micropayment system, a newspaper might decide to charge a nickel for an article or a dime for that day's full edition or $2 for a month's worth of Web access. Some surfers would balk, but I suspect most would merrily click through if it were cheap and easy enough.
The system could be used for all forms of media: magazines and blogs, games and apps, TV newscasts and amateur videos, porn pictures and policy monographs, the reports of citizen journalists, recipes of great cooks and songs of garage bands. This would not only offer a lifeline to traditional media outlets but also nourish citizen journalists and bloggers. They have vastly enriched our realms of information and ideas, but most can't make much money at it. As a result, they tend to do it for the ego kick or as a civic contribution. A micropayment system would allow regular folks, the types who have to worry about feeding their families, to supplement their income by doing citizen journalism that is of value to their community.
When I used to go fishing in the bayous of Louisiana as a boy, my friend Thomas would sometimes steal ice from those machines outside gas stations. He had the theory that ice should be free. We didn't reflect much on who would make the ice if it were free, but fortunately we grew out of that phase. Likewise, those who believe that all content should be free should reflect on who will open bureaus in Baghdad or be able to fly off as freelancers to report in Rwanda under such a system.
I say this not because I am "evil," which is the description my daughter slings at those who want to charge for their Web content, music or apps. Instead, I say this because my daughter is very creative, and when she gets older, I want her to get paid for producing really neat stuff rather than come to me for money or decide that it makes more sense to be an investment banker.
I say this, too, because I love journalism. I think it is valuable and should be valued by its consumers. Charging for content forces discipline on journalists: they must produce things that people actually value. I suspect we will find that this necessity is actually liberating. The need to be valued by readers — serving them first and foremost rather than relying solely on advertising revenue — will allow the media once again to set their compass true to what journalism should always be about.
Isaacson, a former managing editor of TIME, is president and CEO of the Aspen Institute and author, most recently, of Einstein: His Life and Universe.
How to Save Your Newspaper
By Walter Isaacson, TIME
During the past few months, the crisis in journalism has reached meltdown proportions. It is now possible to contemplate a time when some major cities will no longer have a newspaper and when magazines and network-news operations will employ no more than a handful of reporters.
There is, however, a striking and somewhat odd fact about this crisis. Newspapers have more readers than ever. Their content, as well as that of newsmagazines and other producers of traditional journalism, is more popular than ever — even (in fact, especially) among young people.
The problem is that fewer of these consumers are paying. Instead, news organizations are merrily giving away their news. According to a Pew Research Center study, a tipping point occurred last year: more people in the U.S. got their news online for free than paid for it by buying newspapers and magazines. Who can blame them? Even an old print junkie like me has quit subscribing to the New York Times, because if it doesn't see fit to charge for its content, I'd feel like a fool paying for it.
This is not a business model that makes sense. Perhaps it appeared to when Web advertising was booming and every half-sentient publisher could pretend to be among the clan who "got it" by chanting the mantra that the ad-supported Web was "the future." But when Web advertising declined in the fourth quarter of 2008, free felt like the future of journalism only in the sense that a steep cliff is the future for a herd of lemmings. (See who got the world into this financial mess.)
Newspapers and magazines traditionally have had three revenue sources: newsstand sales, subscriptions and advertising. The new business model relies only on the last of these. That makes for a wobbly stool even when the one leg is strong. When it weakens — as countless publishers have seen happen as a result of the recession — the stool can't possibly stand.
See pictures of the recession of 1958.
See TIME's Pictures of the Week.
Henry Luce, a co-founder of TIME, disdained the notion of giveaway publications that relied solely on ad revenue. He called that formula "morally abhorrent" and also "economically self-defeating." That was because he believed that good journalism required that a publication's primary duty be to its readers, not to its advertisers. In an advertising-only revenue model, the incentive is perverse. It is also self-defeating, because eventually you will weaken your bond with your readers if you do not feel directly dependent on them for your revenue. When a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, Dr. Johnson said, it concentrates his mind wonderfully. Journalism's fortnight is upon us, and I suspect that 2009 will be remembered as the year news organizations realized that further rounds of cost-cutting would not stave off the hangman. (See the top 10 magazine covers of 2008.)
One option for survival being tried by some publications, such as the Christian Science Monitor and the Detroit Free Press, is to eliminate or drastically cut their print editions and focus on their free websites. Others may try to ride out the long winter, hope that their competitors die and pray that they will grab a large enough share of advertising to make a profitable go of it as free sites. That's fine. We need a variety of competing strategies.
These approaches, however, still make a publication completely beholden to its advertisers. So I am hoping that this year will see the dawn of a bold, old idea that will provide yet another option that some news organizations might choose: getting paid by users for the services they provide and the journalism they produce.
This notion of charging for content is an old idea not simply because newspapers and magazines have been doing it for more than four centuries. It's also something they used to do at the dawn of the online era, in the early 1990s. Back then there were a passel of online service companies, such as Prodigy, CompuServe, Delphi and AOL. They used to charge users for the minutes people spent online, and it was naturally in their interest to keep the users online for as long as possible. As a result, good content was valued. When I was in charge of TIME's nascent online-media department back then, every year or so we would play off AOL and CompuServe; one year the bidding for our magazine and bulletin boards reached $1 million.
See TIME's Pictures of the Week.
See pictures of TIME's Wall Street covers.
Then along came tools that made it easier for publications and users to venture onto the open Internet rather than remain in the walled gardens created by the online services. I remember talking to Louis Rossetto, then the editor of Wired, about ways to put our magazines directly online, and we decided that the best strategy was to use the hypertext markup language and transfer protocols that defined the World Wide Web. Wired and TIME made the plunge the same week in 1994, and within a year most other publications had done so as well. We invented things like banner ads that brought in a rising tide of revenue, but the upshot was that we abandoned getting paid for content. (See the 50 best websites of 2008.)
One of history's ironies is that hypertext — an embedded Web link that refers you to another page or site — had been invented by Ted Nelson in the early 1960s with the goal of enabling micropayments for content. He wanted to make sure that the people who created good stuff got rewarded for it. In his vision, all links on a page would facilitate the accrual of small, automatic payments for whatever content was accessed. Instead, the Web got caught up in the ethos that information wants to be free. Others smarter than we were had avoided that trap. For example, when Bill Gates noticed in 1976 that hobbyists were freely sharing Altair BASIC, a code he and his colleagues had written, he sent an open letter to members of the Homebrew Computer Club telling them to stop. "One thing you do is prevent good software from being written," he railed. "Who can afford to do professional work for nothing?"
The easy Internet ad dollars of the late 1990s enticed newspapers and magazines to put all of their content, plus a whole lot of blogs and whistles, onto their websites for free. But the bulk of the ad dollars has ended up flowing to groups that did not actually create much content but instead piggybacked on it: search engines, portals and some aggregators.
Another group that benefits from free journalism is Internet service providers. They get to charge customers $20 to $30 a month for access to the Web's trove of free content and services. As a result, it is not in their interest to facilitate easy ways for media creators to charge for their content. Thus we have a world in which phone companies have accustomed kids to paying up to 20 cents when they send a text message but it seems technologically and psychologically impossible to get people to pay 10 cents for a magazine, newspaper or newscast.
Currently a few newspapers, most notably the Wall Street Journal, charge for their online editions by requiring a monthly subscription. When Rupert Murdoch acquired the Journal, he ruminated publicly about dropping the fee. But Murdoch is, above all, a smart businessman. He took a look at the economics and decided it was lunacy to forgo the revenue — and that was even before the online ad market began contracting. Now his move looks really smart. Paid subscriptions for the Journal's website were up more than 7% in a very gloomy 2008. Plus, he spooked the New York Times into dropping its own halfhearted attempts to get subscription revenue, which were based on the (I think flawed) premise that it should charge for the paper's punditry rather than for its great reporting. (Author's note: After publication the New York Times vehemently denied that their thinking was influenced by outside considerations; I accept their explanation.)
See the worst business deals of 2008.
See TIME's Pictures of the Week.
But I don't think that subscriptions will solve everything — nor should they be the only way to charge for content. A person who wants one day's edition of a newspaper or is enticed by a link to an interesting article is rarely going to go through the cost and hassle of signing up for a subscription under today's clunky payment systems. The key to attracting online revenue, I think, is to come up with an iTunes-easy method of micropayment. We need something like digital coins or an E-ZPass digital wallet — a one-click system with a really simple interface that will permit impulse purchases of a newspaper, magazine, article, blog or video for a penny, nickel, dime or whatever the creator chooses to charge. (See the 50 best inventions of 2008.)
Admittedly, the Internet is littered with failed micropayment companies. If you remember Flooz, Beenz, CyberCash, Bitpass, Peppercoin and DigiCash, it's probably because you lost money investing in them. Many tracts and blog entries have been written about how the concept can't work because of bad tech or mental transaction costs.
But things have changed. "With newspapers entering bankruptcy even as their audience grows, the threat is not just to the companies that own them, but also to the news itself," wrote the savvy New York Times columnist David Carr last month in a column endorsing the idea of paid content. This creates a necessity that ought to be the mother of invention. In addition, our two most creative digital innovators have shown that a pay-per-drink model can work when it's made easy enough: Steve Jobs got music consumers (of all people) comfortable with the concept of paying 99 cents for a tune instead of Napsterizing an entire industry, and Jeff Bezos with his Kindle showed that consumers would buy electronic versions of books, magazines and newspapers if purchases could be done simply. (See Apple's 10 best business moves.)
What Internet payment options are there today? PayPal is the most famous, but it has transaction costs too high for impulse buys of less than a dollar. The denizens of Facebook are embracing systems like Spare Change, which allows them to charge their PayPal accounts or credit cards to get digital currency they can spend in small amounts. Similar services include Bee-Tokens and Tipjoy. Twitter users have Twitpay, which is a micropayment service for the micromessaging set. Gamers have their own digital currencies that can be used for impulse buys during online role-playing games. And real-world commuters are used to gizmos like E-ZPass, which deducts automatically from their prepaid account as they glide through a highway tollbooth.
Under a micropayment system, a newspaper might decide to charge a nickel for an article or a dime for that day's full edition or $2 for a month's worth of Web access. Some surfers would balk, but I suspect most would merrily click through if it were cheap and easy enough.
The system could be used for all forms of media: magazines and blogs, games and apps, TV newscasts and amateur videos, porn pictures and policy monographs, the reports of citizen journalists, recipes of great cooks and songs of garage bands. This would not only offer a lifeline to traditional media outlets but also nourish citizen journalists and bloggers. They have vastly enriched our realms of information and ideas, but most can't make much money at it. As a result, they tend to do it for the ego kick or as a civic contribution. A micropayment system would allow regular folks, the types who have to worry about feeding their families, to supplement their income by doing citizen journalism that is of value to their community.
When I used to go fishing in the bayous of Louisiana as a boy, my friend Thomas would sometimes steal ice from those machines outside gas stations. He had the theory that ice should be free. We didn't reflect much on who would make the ice if it were free, but fortunately we grew out of that phase. Likewise, those who believe that all content should be free should reflect on who will open bureaus in Baghdad or be able to fly off as freelancers to report in Rwanda under such a system.
I say this not because I am "evil," which is the description my daughter slings at those who want to charge for their Web content, music or apps. Instead, I say this because my daughter is very creative, and when she gets older, I want her to get paid for producing really neat stuff rather than come to me for money or decide that it makes more sense to be an investment banker.
I say this, too, because I love journalism. I think it is valuable and should be valued by its consumers. Charging for content forces discipline on journalists: they must produce things that people actually value. I suspect we will find that this necessity is actually liberating. The need to be valued by readers — serving them first and foremost rather than relying solely on advertising revenue — will allow the media once again to set their compass true to what journalism should always be about.
Isaacson, a former managing editor of TIME, is president and CEO of the Aspen Institute and author, most recently, of Einstein: His Life and Universe.
Friday, February 6, 2009
NOTE: Because of the delay in this material being available, your comments are due by the start of class on Wednesday, Feb. 11 at 5:45 p.m.
From Online Journalism Review,
Annenberg School of Journalism, University of Southern California
Q&A with Travis Fox, video journalist for washingtonpost.com
Emmy-nominated video journalist explains what works on the Web and what doesn't and where he thinks the medium is headed
By Sandeep Junnarkar
Posted: 2006-09-18
Shortly after Travis Fox joined the Washington Post in 1999 as a photo editor, he picked up a video camera that was sitting in the newsroom and slowly began producing a few pieces for the Web. Not that anyone was watching these videos--not even the Website's editors. The joke in the newsroom at the time, says Fox, was that he didn't want the executive editor to watch the videos because the pieces would invariably crash his computer and he worried that might dampen the editor's laissez-faire attitude.
"It was a great place to learn and to let my own style come to forefront," says Fox. "I didn't have deadline pressure, I didn't have editorial pressure, I didn't have many viewers."
How times have changed. Fox is now one of seven "Video Journalists" for the Washington Post. He has produced pieces out of the Middle East, Asia, Europe and the United States, viewable here. This year, two of his pieces "Fueling Azerbaijan's Future" and "Hurricane Katrina Coverage in New Orleans" are nominated for Emmy awards.
Travis Fox in 2004 reporting on tsunami damage to a Sri Lankan fishing village.
OJR spoke to Fox about how the role of an Internet video journalist is evolving at the Washington Post and what makes compelling video for the Web.
OJR: You said that hardly anyone was watching videos on the Washington Post site at first. What was the turning point that led to the creation of a "video journalist" at the Post?
Fox: I think it was the Iraq war. And it was doing stories that are high profile enough that people couldn't help but notice. That's when the top editors both at the Website and the newspaper noticed. They had known me before, obviously, but this was a chance to show that in a high pressure, dangerous situations we can tell stories and we can do journalism that's on par with the newspaper.
OJR: How were these videos different than those on television that they made the top editors want to nurture this media?
Fox: I can't speak for them but the fact that it was different from television was not necessarily so important. It was the fact that we were doing it. And I think my style in general is different from some parts of television but not all. It's not reporter driven and it's not celebrity-anchor driven. That's not to say that it's not heavily reported and heavily narrated because a lot of them are. I would say the ones we did in the beginning were more different from television--they were more character-driven pieces, less narration. We still do those types of pieces as well but we mix it up with more heavily-narrated pieces.
OJR: What is your subject's reaction to being in a multimedia presentation versus being in the print version of the Post? Is there still a preference nowadays?
Fox: I think when I say I am from washingtonpost.com and I have a video camera they automatically think Washington Post and they think video and the two don't match up--much to their surprise. I think it depends on where you are. I do a lot of foreign coverage and I think abroad it is not as surprising as it is here in the States. But I think here especially, in the last year, Web video is becoming so common that it is surprising fewer and fewer people. I should also say that a lot of my pieces do air on television in different forms. So I always say both. I say that it's for the Washington Post online but also for possibly for other places.
OJR: So do you frame shots differently for the Web and for TV, or do you work with the same material for both?
Fox: In terms of the production of the video, I think they are pretty close to being the same. You can make the argument that the video screen is smaller on the computer monitor, therefore we should shoot tighter. But shooting tight is a good technique, whether you are shooting for television or for film. People typically sit closer to their computer screens than to their televisions, so proportionally the Web video looks bigger. I don't think it makes any difference.
In the beginning, there was the notion that you should have everything on a tripod to be stable because any sort of camera shake would cause the pixels to be refreshed, which would slow down your processor, which would slow down your computer. So that's still a concern, if you are dealing with slower computers.
I would shoot it the same way, whether it was for television or whether it was for the web. I have a certain style and a certain way of shooting, that's considered a Web style or Web way of shooting perhaps because that's where I learnt how to do video. But it also works on television.
OJR: Do you cut it differently for TV than you do for the Web?
Fox: These are interesting questions. You know my friends who work for television tell me that I am so lucky because people actually click my videos. That means they want to watch them. Whereas their shows on television are in the background when someone is making dinner. And at the same time I am jealous of them because it's a better experience when you are on your couch and watching it on television than when you are on your computer monitor.
So there are different ways of thinking about how to cut it. This is something we constantly talk about and we constantly deal. How tight and how fast moving to cut it? On television you want it to be fast moving because you don't want anyone to click on their remote control and go to the next channel, right? You want to keep their attention all the time.
Whereas on the web you don't want someone to go to a different Website. Obviously you want it to be tight and you want it to be fast moving. I don't have the answers but it's a different medium and it is interesting to
think of it in different ways.
OJR: What new ways of conveying a news story have you tried with which you were pleasantly surprised?
I think the key is always finding the right balance between the different media. So when to do a video? When to do some sort of Flash graphics? When to do panorama? What's the combination? When to do a blog? And how to integrate them all? How to do that without getting completely overwhelmed by everything?
There are several projects that I think have been successful. Those would probably be ones where you took the various media and combined them in a way that was logical, using a blog for user feedback and conversation; using the panoramas to give you a sense of place; and using videos to give you a sense of people, the character, the location, and then combing the two to give you a full picture of the story. As opposed to just doing a video, just doing a blog, just doing a photo gallery. I think those are the most successful examples.
OJR: What new ways of conveying a news story have you tried that fell flat? Can you tweak it to make that idea work?
Fox: The project I am thinking of is both a success in some ways and a failure in others. I did one in Sri Lanka after the Tsunami. It's using videos to capture the characters' stories, panoramas for a sense of place and destruction, and a blog to update the stories that you initially got from the videos. In the beginning I feel like it was very successful in combining those media and telling the story, but at the same time this was one where we underestimated how much effort it would take to maintain the blog over the days and the months after the Tsunami.
OJR: So when you try something like that again or if you've tried something...
Fox: I'll think twice about it...
OJR: ...you'll think twice about it. That's a big issue: maintaining a blog.
Fox: Yeah, I think the lesson is that you just need to decide whether the story is worth that long-term work commitment or not. Or you see how it is for the first few months and you see what kind of readership you get and
then you decide what to do with it at that point.
OJR: Is there a model that has worked well that you plan to keep working with?
Fox: My job now is really to do evergreen projects. I'm not really doing news. I covered the Lebanon war and Gaza this summer but typically I am supposed to be doing these evergreen-type projects. And I think that's also a good model that we have tried in the past and we've liked so much that it is now kind of institutionalized.
These projects are thematic in nature. The themes will be reoccurring in the news. The themes, the issues that have been in the news, and will be in the news over and over again. The nuclear issue, and Iran, groups like Hamas or Hezbollah, for example. I did a piece a couple of years ago on the fence in the West Bank that Israel is building. This is an issue that's in the news over and over and over again. The piece had stories from each side of the fence, panorama photos, and a Flash graphic showing the route of the fence.
And now every story the Post has about the fence (we have had several and we will continue to have several in the future) this project will be linked to them This project gets traffic over, and over, and over again. Traffic on the web is not like a subscription to a newspaper--the same people reading it over and over again. You are going to get new traffic from different places constantly. Because this project is a couple of years old, our regular users have already clicked on it but the new user who are coming in to the new story from Yahoo or from Google are going to click on it. And it is going to draw traffic and it's going to give depth to the article. Now I am setting out in the next year to do these types of projects that are reoccurring themes that are in the news.
That's not the nuts and bolts but that's an example of trying something that has worked well. This Israel fence story is more than two years old and it continues to get good traffic and that's something that we noticed. So that's essentially a good model--not covering news on a day in and day out basis but the kind of stories that have legs and can go on for several weeks, several months, several years even.
OJR: You started with photography and moved on to video. How do you think your role is likely to evolve over the next five years?
Fox: I am content with video. Video is where I have made my mark. Video is what I want to do. I am not interested in doing still photography. There are many gifted still photographers out there. But it's more difficult for single individuals to produce videos from start to finish because traditionally television news has worked in a crew. It is a more unusual for people like me who produce video from start to finish. I'd like to keep exploring that. This video journalism vision of single authorship throughout the process will get you some really interesting results. And as the technology gets simpler, if more individuals shoot and cut video--like they create writing--you are going to get a lot more interesting styles, and a lot richer body of work as a whole. I am very committed to that process.
OJR: What about the role of video journalist within the paper and Website?
Fox: I think I it will be much more integrated with traditional news reporters at the newspaper. I think we will be working much more collaboratively. I would guess we are going work on their stories or work with them to develop their stories into video. We have had some successes with that but we haven't nailed that down as much as we really need to find the right working relationship. We don't want them to turn into television reporters, obviously. I don't want to produce that type of video and we want to give them the time that they need to do newspaper reporting. But we want to be able to leverage their expertise into the video.
I would say the direction we are headed in is that I will continue to do my own video reporting, but at the same time probably become more integrated with the newsroom--both the dotcom and Post newsrooms are becoming more integrated.
I did a piece in Azerbaijan with Philip Kennicott, a Post reporter, that was nominated for an Emmy. That's an example a successful collaboration. We didn't actually work together ever-- even our trips didn't overlap to Azerbaijan--but we compared notes and we shared the reporting. He went first then I went second. He wrote the script and I voiced the script and then I fed him my reporting and he fed me his reporting and we came up with something. So to me that's the kind of collaborative effort I am talking about.
OJR: Are there compelling pieces like that that you decide not to cover? Not because of time, not because of budget, not because of the topic itself, but that a new media treatment just won't be compelling.
Fox: No, I think there is always a compelling way to cover a story. But I don't think that that means in video. Certain stories are visual and good for video. Katrina, the tsunami, they are good in video and photographs. Certain stories are better in video but not so good in still pictures. And some stories are tough to do in either medium. For example, in Lebanon we did a series on Hezbollah during the war and this wasn't war action stuff, this is more of a behind the scenes of Hezbollah as an organization. I think in video it worked out really well because you get a sense of the characters and how the organization works. But in still photographs that would not be a very compelling photo essay. In southern Lebanon I was working with print reporters and photographers and it was really interesting to see where the focus of each of the group lied. I chose to go do video somewhere in the middle between the print reporters and still photographers.
A story about the new budget on Capital Hill would probably be tough to do in either stills or a video. That would be more of a print story or a Flash graphics story.
OJR: The Azerbaijan piece, did it appear on Web only?
Fox: Online and it also appeared on television on PBS's "Foreign Exchange with Fareed Zakaria", it's on the podcast, it appeared as an article in the newspaper. This is convergence. We are leveraging this over multiple platforms.
We said that in some ways we are functioning like a production company. We are producing videos for the Website, for our podcast. We were also selling them to television.
So this is an example where we sold it to television, which is not only a very good money maker, it essentially pays for the expense of going abroad and covering the stories which aren't cheap. It is also a way to market our content to a lot of different audiences. Something like ten times the people that saw it on PBS saw it on the Website and at the end of the show Zakaria said something like "for more of this video go to washingtonpost.com."
OJR: Collaboration in the newsroom is more of a journalistic change. What impact do you expect from technical changes?
Fox: What's really going to be exciting is the Internet as a delivery means not as an end media. For us to really compete with television, we have to get our videos to your living room television screen. Because no matter how good it is on the computer it's never going to be as good as when it's on your TV or when it's on your high-definition plasma screen, right?
So I think in the next five years--or even sooner than that--we are going to see the Internet used as a means of delivery to compete with cable TV. We are already seeing that it's technically possible. Getting Internet content delivered to your television--either through your TiVo or through the new Apple set-top box that is going to come out or through whatever box--and watching it on television in the same high definition quality as cable television, that is exciting. So think about that when you are setting your TiVo or whatever box you are going to be using in the future, you select a Survivor episode, news reports and the latest Washington Post documentary. And the next day, when you sit down to watch them, they will all look the same but one of them came through the Internet and two of them came through cable TV. But for the user it won't matter.
I think a glimpse of that is through our video podcast that's on iTunes. That's kind of the first glimpse--it's a small screen but it's essentially the on-demand television that we need to get to. We sell the advertising against that. So we reap the benefits of that and we put it up and users download it and do whatever. But you know as soon as we make the jump onto your television, that's really when things are going to get exciting. The industry is excited about Web video not because it's good content or unusual content or it's better than television, but because of the advertising. Advertising on television in general is lucrative and to be able to capture that type of lucrative advertising by bypassing the juggernaut of cable or broadcast is very exciting.
It's not just for me or for newspaper sites, it's for people running their blogs. You can now essentially be your own broadcast station. It's another one of those milestones that we are crossing on the Internet.
Sandeep Junnarkar is an associate professor at the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism (The City University of New York). He has reported for @times, the New York Times' first presence on the Web, as well as News.com. If there is a new media journalist who you would like to see featured in a Q&A, email Sandeep here.
From Online Journalism Review,
Annenberg School of Journalism, University of Southern California
Q&A with Travis Fox, video journalist for washingtonpost.com
Emmy-nominated video journalist explains what works on the Web and what doesn't and where he thinks the medium is headed
By Sandeep Junnarkar
Posted: 2006-09-18
Shortly after Travis Fox joined the Washington Post in 1999 as a photo editor, he picked up a video camera that was sitting in the newsroom and slowly began producing a few pieces for the Web. Not that anyone was watching these videos--not even the Website's editors. The joke in the newsroom at the time, says Fox, was that he didn't want the executive editor to watch the videos because the pieces would invariably crash his computer and he worried that might dampen the editor's laissez-faire attitude.
"It was a great place to learn and to let my own style come to forefront," says Fox. "I didn't have deadline pressure, I didn't have editorial pressure, I didn't have many viewers."
How times have changed. Fox is now one of seven "Video Journalists" for the Washington Post. He has produced pieces out of the Middle East, Asia, Europe and the United States, viewable here. This year, two of his pieces "Fueling Azerbaijan's Future" and "Hurricane Katrina Coverage in New Orleans" are nominated for Emmy awards.
Travis Fox in 2004 reporting on tsunami damage to a Sri Lankan fishing village.
OJR spoke to Fox about how the role of an Internet video journalist is evolving at the Washington Post and what makes compelling video for the Web.
OJR: You said that hardly anyone was watching videos on the Washington Post site at first. What was the turning point that led to the creation of a "video journalist" at the Post?
Fox: I think it was the Iraq war. And it was doing stories that are high profile enough that people couldn't help but notice. That's when the top editors both at the Website and the newspaper noticed. They had known me before, obviously, but this was a chance to show that in a high pressure, dangerous situations we can tell stories and we can do journalism that's on par with the newspaper.
OJR: How were these videos different than those on television that they made the top editors want to nurture this media?
Fox: I can't speak for them but the fact that it was different from television was not necessarily so important. It was the fact that we were doing it. And I think my style in general is different from some parts of television but not all. It's not reporter driven and it's not celebrity-anchor driven. That's not to say that it's not heavily reported and heavily narrated because a lot of them are. I would say the ones we did in the beginning were more different from television--they were more character-driven pieces, less narration. We still do those types of pieces as well but we mix it up with more heavily-narrated pieces.
OJR: What is your subject's reaction to being in a multimedia presentation versus being in the print version of the Post? Is there still a preference nowadays?
Fox: I think when I say I am from washingtonpost.com and I have a video camera they automatically think Washington Post and they think video and the two don't match up--much to their surprise. I think it depends on where you are. I do a lot of foreign coverage and I think abroad it is not as surprising as it is here in the States. But I think here especially, in the last year, Web video is becoming so common that it is surprising fewer and fewer people. I should also say that a lot of my pieces do air on television in different forms. So I always say both. I say that it's for the Washington Post online but also for possibly for other places.
OJR: So do you frame shots differently for the Web and for TV, or do you work with the same material for both?
Fox: In terms of the production of the video, I think they are pretty close to being the same. You can make the argument that the video screen is smaller on the computer monitor, therefore we should shoot tighter. But shooting tight is a good technique, whether you are shooting for television or for film. People typically sit closer to their computer screens than to their televisions, so proportionally the Web video looks bigger. I don't think it makes any difference.
In the beginning, there was the notion that you should have everything on a tripod to be stable because any sort of camera shake would cause the pixels to be refreshed, which would slow down your processor, which would slow down your computer. So that's still a concern, if you are dealing with slower computers.
I would shoot it the same way, whether it was for television or whether it was for the web. I have a certain style and a certain way of shooting, that's considered a Web style or Web way of shooting perhaps because that's where I learnt how to do video. But it also works on television.
OJR: Do you cut it differently for TV than you do for the Web?
Fox: These are interesting questions. You know my friends who work for television tell me that I am so lucky because people actually click my videos. That means they want to watch them. Whereas their shows on television are in the background when someone is making dinner. And at the same time I am jealous of them because it's a better experience when you are on your couch and watching it on television than when you are on your computer monitor.
So there are different ways of thinking about how to cut it. This is something we constantly talk about and we constantly deal. How tight and how fast moving to cut it? On television you want it to be fast moving because you don't want anyone to click on their remote control and go to the next channel, right? You want to keep their attention all the time.
Whereas on the web you don't want someone to go to a different Website. Obviously you want it to be tight and you want it to be fast moving. I don't have the answers but it's a different medium and it is interesting to
think of it in different ways.
OJR: What new ways of conveying a news story have you tried with which you were pleasantly surprised?
I think the key is always finding the right balance between the different media. So when to do a video? When to do some sort of Flash graphics? When to do panorama? What's the combination? When to do a blog? And how to integrate them all? How to do that without getting completely overwhelmed by everything?
There are several projects that I think have been successful. Those would probably be ones where you took the various media and combined them in a way that was logical, using a blog for user feedback and conversation; using the panoramas to give you a sense of place; and using videos to give you a sense of people, the character, the location, and then combing the two to give you a full picture of the story. As opposed to just doing a video, just doing a blog, just doing a photo gallery. I think those are the most successful examples.
OJR: What new ways of conveying a news story have you tried that fell flat? Can you tweak it to make that idea work?
Fox: The project I am thinking of is both a success in some ways and a failure in others. I did one in Sri Lanka after the Tsunami. It's using videos to capture the characters' stories, panoramas for a sense of place and destruction, and a blog to update the stories that you initially got from the videos. In the beginning I feel like it was very successful in combining those media and telling the story, but at the same time this was one where we underestimated how much effort it would take to maintain the blog over the days and the months after the Tsunami.
OJR: So when you try something like that again or if you've tried something...
Fox: I'll think twice about it...
OJR: ...you'll think twice about it. That's a big issue: maintaining a blog.
Fox: Yeah, I think the lesson is that you just need to decide whether the story is worth that long-term work commitment or not. Or you see how it is for the first few months and you see what kind of readership you get and
then you decide what to do with it at that point.
OJR: Is there a model that has worked well that you plan to keep working with?
Fox: My job now is really to do evergreen projects. I'm not really doing news. I covered the Lebanon war and Gaza this summer but typically I am supposed to be doing these evergreen-type projects. And I think that's also a good model that we have tried in the past and we've liked so much that it is now kind of institutionalized.
These projects are thematic in nature. The themes will be reoccurring in the news. The themes, the issues that have been in the news, and will be in the news over and over again. The nuclear issue, and Iran, groups like Hamas or Hezbollah, for example. I did a piece a couple of years ago on the fence in the West Bank that Israel is building. This is an issue that's in the news over and over and over again. The piece had stories from each side of the fence, panorama photos, and a Flash graphic showing the route of the fence.
And now every story the Post has about the fence (we have had several and we will continue to have several in the future) this project will be linked to them This project gets traffic over, and over, and over again. Traffic on the web is not like a subscription to a newspaper--the same people reading it over and over again. You are going to get new traffic from different places constantly. Because this project is a couple of years old, our regular users have already clicked on it but the new user who are coming in to the new story from Yahoo or from Google are going to click on it. And it is going to draw traffic and it's going to give depth to the article. Now I am setting out in the next year to do these types of projects that are reoccurring themes that are in the news.
That's not the nuts and bolts but that's an example of trying something that has worked well. This Israel fence story is more than two years old and it continues to get good traffic and that's something that we noticed. So that's essentially a good model--not covering news on a day in and day out basis but the kind of stories that have legs and can go on for several weeks, several months, several years even.
OJR: You started with photography and moved on to video. How do you think your role is likely to evolve over the next five years?
Fox: I am content with video. Video is where I have made my mark. Video is what I want to do. I am not interested in doing still photography. There are many gifted still photographers out there. But it's more difficult for single individuals to produce videos from start to finish because traditionally television news has worked in a crew. It is a more unusual for people like me who produce video from start to finish. I'd like to keep exploring that. This video journalism vision of single authorship throughout the process will get you some really interesting results. And as the technology gets simpler, if more individuals shoot and cut video--like they create writing--you are going to get a lot more interesting styles, and a lot richer body of work as a whole. I am very committed to that process.
OJR: What about the role of video journalist within the paper and Website?
Fox: I think I it will be much more integrated with traditional news reporters at the newspaper. I think we will be working much more collaboratively. I would guess we are going work on their stories or work with them to develop their stories into video. We have had some successes with that but we haven't nailed that down as much as we really need to find the right working relationship. We don't want them to turn into television reporters, obviously. I don't want to produce that type of video and we want to give them the time that they need to do newspaper reporting. But we want to be able to leverage their expertise into the video.
I would say the direction we are headed in is that I will continue to do my own video reporting, but at the same time probably become more integrated with the newsroom--both the dotcom and Post newsrooms are becoming more integrated.
I did a piece in Azerbaijan with Philip Kennicott, a Post reporter, that was nominated for an Emmy. That's an example a successful collaboration. We didn't actually work together ever-- even our trips didn't overlap to Azerbaijan--but we compared notes and we shared the reporting. He went first then I went second. He wrote the script and I voiced the script and then I fed him my reporting and he fed me his reporting and we came up with something. So to me that's the kind of collaborative effort I am talking about.
OJR: Are there compelling pieces like that that you decide not to cover? Not because of time, not because of budget, not because of the topic itself, but that a new media treatment just won't be compelling.
Fox: No, I think there is always a compelling way to cover a story. But I don't think that that means in video. Certain stories are visual and good for video. Katrina, the tsunami, they are good in video and photographs. Certain stories are better in video but not so good in still pictures. And some stories are tough to do in either medium. For example, in Lebanon we did a series on Hezbollah during the war and this wasn't war action stuff, this is more of a behind the scenes of Hezbollah as an organization. I think in video it worked out really well because you get a sense of the characters and how the organization works. But in still photographs that would not be a very compelling photo essay. In southern Lebanon I was working with print reporters and photographers and it was really interesting to see where the focus of each of the group lied. I chose to go do video somewhere in the middle between the print reporters and still photographers.
A story about the new budget on Capital Hill would probably be tough to do in either stills or a video. That would be more of a print story or a Flash graphics story.
OJR: The Azerbaijan piece, did it appear on Web only?
Fox: Online and it also appeared on television on PBS's "Foreign Exchange with Fareed Zakaria", it's on the podcast, it appeared as an article in the newspaper. This is convergence. We are leveraging this over multiple platforms.
We said that in some ways we are functioning like a production company. We are producing videos for the Website, for our podcast. We were also selling them to television.
So this is an example where we sold it to television, which is not only a very good money maker, it essentially pays for the expense of going abroad and covering the stories which aren't cheap. It is also a way to market our content to a lot of different audiences. Something like ten times the people that saw it on PBS saw it on the Website and at the end of the show Zakaria said something like "for more of this video go to washingtonpost.com."
OJR: Collaboration in the newsroom is more of a journalistic change. What impact do you expect from technical changes?
Fox: What's really going to be exciting is the Internet as a delivery means not as an end media. For us to really compete with television, we have to get our videos to your living room television screen. Because no matter how good it is on the computer it's never going to be as good as when it's on your TV or when it's on your high-definition plasma screen, right?
So I think in the next five years--or even sooner than that--we are going to see the Internet used as a means of delivery to compete with cable TV. We are already seeing that it's technically possible. Getting Internet content delivered to your television--either through your TiVo or through the new Apple set-top box that is going to come out or through whatever box--and watching it on television in the same high definition quality as cable television, that is exciting. So think about that when you are setting your TiVo or whatever box you are going to be using in the future, you select a Survivor episode, news reports and the latest Washington Post documentary. And the next day, when you sit down to watch them, they will all look the same but one of them came through the Internet and two of them came through cable TV. But for the user it won't matter.
I think a glimpse of that is through our video podcast that's on iTunes. That's kind of the first glimpse--it's a small screen but it's essentially the on-demand television that we need to get to. We sell the advertising against that. So we reap the benefits of that and we put it up and users download it and do whatever. But you know as soon as we make the jump onto your television, that's really when things are going to get exciting. The industry is excited about Web video not because it's good content or unusual content or it's better than television, but because of the advertising. Advertising on television in general is lucrative and to be able to capture that type of lucrative advertising by bypassing the juggernaut of cable or broadcast is very exciting.
It's not just for me or for newspaper sites, it's for people running their blogs. You can now essentially be your own broadcast station. It's another one of those milestones that we are crossing on the Internet.
Sandeep Junnarkar is an associate professor at the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism (The City University of New York). He has reported for @times, the New York Times' first presence on the Web, as well as News.com. If there is a new media journalist who you would like to see featured in a Q&A, email Sandeep here.
Wednesday, January 28, 2009
Tweets, Diggs, MoJos: Reporting 2.0 Explained
NOTE: Please respond to each of these articles separately.
Roanoke, Poynter Develop Ethics Guidelines for Journalists Using Facebook, MySpace and Twitter
By Kelly McBride
Poynter Institute
Jan. 19, 2009
As part of our new Virtual Poynter training, I spent an hour last week discussing social networks as a journalism tool with the journalists from The Roanoke Times. In that short time, the staff at the paper produced the skeleton of a guideline for journalists everywhere.
No one argued against using social networks in reporting stories and delivering them to the audience. It seems like everybody's mom, dad and boss has joined Facebook, turning the site and its technology into something almost as common as e-mail and not just for the young and savvy, like Twitter sometimes seems.
In Roanoke, the journalists grouped the pressure points into three categories: How to use Facebook and MySpace as a reporting tool, how to use the sites as a promotional tool and finally, how to balance your personal and professional images.
As a reporting tool, it's easy to argue that Facebook, MySpace and Twitter instantly connect journalists to stories that in the past would have taken days or weeks to surface. Last year, the Orlando Sentinel discovered a Facebook group devoted to the lack of water at the University of Central Florida's brand new football stadium. The group provided immediate access to dozens of sources who'd experienced firsthand the opening game in 95-degree heat.
In Roanoke during the Virginia Tech shootings, the newsroom staff used Facebook and MySpace pages to help chronicle the lives of the slain and injured students. And later, a newsroom reporter discovered that the university president was battling cancer, thanks to the Facebook group "We support Paul Torgersen."
But the journalists in Roanoke quickly pointed out that social networks have their challenges. It's easy to deceive and make things up, so everything must be independently verified. If all your sources came from the Internet, they would skew toward the more affluent and educated. And when you interview people digitally, you miss a lot of good information.
When it comes to promoting your work, we all agreed it was a good method for getting stories out. But when we started to look at the journalists who use it in a provocative and edgy way on a regular basis, such as The Washington Post's Howard Kurtz or ESPN's Jemele Hill, we recognized the need for some caution and best practices. Status updates are by their nature short, like a story tease. They should be catchy, even pithy, yet accurate. In the effort to simplify, it's easy to go too far and mislead the audience. Good headline writers and television writers recognize this tension.
Balancing the personal and professional turned out to be the thorniest issue. Many of the journalists in Roanoke aim to keep their Facebook or MySpace pages completely private, used only for connecting with personal friends. For the folks whose names are out there, such as reporters and photographers, that might be a losing battle. Sources tend to find you and friend you. Rejecting them is awkward. Letting them in blurs the boundary between your private life and your work. Either way, the journalists in the workshop agreed that a social network is like your car or your front yard. Because you're a journalist, you have to exercise restraint when it comes to making political statements and revealing your own biases.
Even if you keep your page completely private, you must assume it's public and that people will use it to judge you and your newsroom. So all the guidelines that apply to putting bumper stickers on your car apply to your Facebook page.
Here are the guidelines as we developed them in Roanoke. It's a work in progress. What would you add?
A newsroom guideline for using social networks: As a reporting tool
Social networks are ubiquitous enough that journalists who insist on avoiding them are likely to miss good opportunities and great stories. To that end, we encourage responsible use of such networks to form connections, find story ideas and locate sources.
* Making connections is good. And journalists should ensure they are using a full array of tools for gathering information, including face-to-face interviews and shoe-leather reporting.
* Journalists must compensate for the skew of online reporting. You are likely to find younger, whiter, more affluent sources online. Journalists should constantly strive for diverse representations in their stories.
* Information gathered online should be independently confirmed offline. Interview sources in person or over the phone whenever possible. Verify claims and statements.
* Ensure informed consent. It's easy for sources to misunderstand your intentions. It is your responsibility to tell them who you are, what you are doing and where your work will run.
* Take special consideration with children and other vulnerable people. When contacting children, make sure they connect you with a responsible adult.
* Be transparent with the audience as well as sources. Let them know how you contacted people, in what context you gathered the information and how you verified it (or didn't).
A newsroom guideline for using social networks: To promote work
It is important and valuable to promote our work through social networks. Individual staffers bear most of this burden. But the newsroom as an institution is responsible for some of this work. When promoting your work:
* Be accurate. It's easy to sensationalize or oversimplify.
* Be clear. If you are not a good headline writer, seek some training.
* Always include a link and make sure the link works.
* For ongoing issues or stories, editors are responsible for crafting a quick strategy for promoting and branding our work.
* Editors and online staff should identify work that should be branded and promoted on an institutional basis.
A newsroom guideline for using social networks: Balancing the personal and the professional
Some journalists use social networks as a professional tool. Others use it strictly as a personal endeavor. Still others blend the functions. It is increasingly difficult to keep your social networking page strictly private and personal. To that end, journalists must recognize that everything on their Facebook or MySpace pages has the potential to influence their reputations and by extension the credibility of their newsrooms.
* Don't post information that could embarrass you or your newsroom, even if you believe your page is private.
* Use the tools, such as limited profiles and privacy settings, to restrict access to your most private information.
* Recognize that your actions can be misinterpreted. You may sign up for a group to get story ideas, but people may see you as a fan. State your intentions often, in wall posts and other notifications. When appropriate, tell groups when you are signing up that you are looking for story ideas.
* One strategy might be to sign up for lots of groups. If you become a fan of a political party, become a fan of the other parties as well.
* Manage your friends and their comments. Delete comments and de-friend people who damage your reputation.
----
Mobile Journalism on Moving Ground
By Pat Walters
Poynter Institute
Dec. 6, 2006
Ever try to use your laptop in the car? I have. I set mine on the dashboard once to track down unsecured wireless networks in the town I was covering -- for a story, of course.
It was a pain in the neck.
What for me was an annoying afternoon is, for Chuck Myron, a normal one. A story in Monday's Washington Post tells me that Myron is a mobile journalist, or MoJo, at The News-Press in Fort Myers, Fla. He's just one of a fleet of journalists thrown into an experiment by parent company Gannett. He and other MoJos cover local news to the extreme, writing brief dispatches about everything -- from a minor traffic accident to a cat in a tree -- and posting them to zoned sections of the newspaper's Web site.
The Post story, written by reporter Frank Ahrens, came to me via an e-mail from a friend. Preceding the story was a note from one of her colleagues. "If this is the future of journalism," it read, "I better cash in my 401(k)."
There are lots of reasons to be concerned about the MoJo experiment. Most of the content created by MoJos wouldn't meet the standard definition of news. Much of it appears only online. And, according to the Post story, little MoJo content is proofed by an editor.
Ahrens tells me he likes the idea of getting reporters out of the newsroom and into the communities they cover. In some ways, he says, it's good, old-fashioned shoe-leather journalism. But, based on what he saw in Fort Myers, the experiment has a long way to go.
"At times it seems like there's a lack of discrimination in the material," Ahrens says. "It doesn't matter if it's a school lunch menu or a city council meeting."
No doubt, there are flaws. MoJo journalism does "some things that really stick a thumb in the eye of journalism orthodoxy," Ahrens says. But he is quick to point out that this is an early edition of an innovative project. In essence, it's a draft.
One of my colleagues, Poynter Online associate editor Meg Martin, wondered what difference there is between a MoJo and a citizen journalist. The MoJos are, of course, paid by the newspaper. But despite their expensive college degrees, they produce content that, for the most part, requires very little in the way of journalistic training.
What if a news organization were to turn the Gannett formula on its head? Instead of paying professional journalists to produce basic local content, locals could be paid to do it themselves. According to a Gannett news release, that's part of the plan -- MoJos are expected to spend half their time training locals to post dispatches of their own to the newspaper's Web site.
But to find an example of a full flip of the formula, we need only look to a recent move by Yahoo News and Reuters. According to a story in Monday's New York Times, the two news organizations have partnered to place user-submitted photographs and videos throughout their Web sites. If Reuters decides to distribute one of the photographs to the subscribers of its news service, the Times reports, the citizen photojournalist will be paid accordingly.
"This is looking out and saying, 'What if everybody in the world were my stringers?' " Reuters media group president Chris Ahearn tells the Times.
Despite the flaws inherent in experimentation, one thing is certain: It is not going away. As circulation and ad revenues continue to fall, news organizations will continue to seek ways to pull them back up -- and to find entirely new ways to make money.
Most editors agree that enhancing local coverage is key.
Ahrens, the Post reporter, knows that. On his washingtonpost.com blog Monday, Ahrens wrote that his newspaper recently underwent an attitude adjustment, shifting its unspoken slogan from "If you don't get it, you don't get it," to "If it's important to you, then it's important to us."
At The News-Press, that means deploying a team of MoJos armed with laptops, cameras and recorders. At the Post, Ahrens says, it means hiring newspaper Web site designer Rob Curley, known nationwide for his groundbreaking work in creating an intensely local and interactive Web site for the Naples (Fla.) Daily News and the Lawrence (Kan.) Journal-World. And, across the board, it might simply mean that regular reporters start to act a little like MoJos.
Look, for example, at the image of Myron, the Fort Myers MoJo, that ran alonside the story about him. It wasn't made by a photojournalist. Ahrens did it himself.
Roanoke, Poynter Develop Ethics Guidelines for Journalists Using Facebook, MySpace and Twitter
By Kelly McBride
Poynter Institute
Jan. 19, 2009
As part of our new Virtual Poynter training, I spent an hour last week discussing social networks as a journalism tool with the journalists from The Roanoke Times. In that short time, the staff at the paper produced the skeleton of a guideline for journalists everywhere.
No one argued against using social networks in reporting stories and delivering them to the audience. It seems like everybody's mom, dad and boss has joined Facebook, turning the site and its technology into something almost as common as e-mail and not just for the young and savvy, like Twitter sometimes seems.
In Roanoke, the journalists grouped the pressure points into three categories: How to use Facebook and MySpace as a reporting tool, how to use the sites as a promotional tool and finally, how to balance your personal and professional images.
As a reporting tool, it's easy to argue that Facebook, MySpace and Twitter instantly connect journalists to stories that in the past would have taken days or weeks to surface. Last year, the Orlando Sentinel discovered a Facebook group devoted to the lack of water at the University of Central Florida's brand new football stadium. The group provided immediate access to dozens of sources who'd experienced firsthand the opening game in 95-degree heat.
In Roanoke during the Virginia Tech shootings, the newsroom staff used Facebook and MySpace pages to help chronicle the lives of the slain and injured students. And later, a newsroom reporter discovered that the university president was battling cancer, thanks to the Facebook group "We support Paul Torgersen."
But the journalists in Roanoke quickly pointed out that social networks have their challenges. It's easy to deceive and make things up, so everything must be independently verified. If all your sources came from the Internet, they would skew toward the more affluent and educated. And when you interview people digitally, you miss a lot of good information.
When it comes to promoting your work, we all agreed it was a good method for getting stories out. But when we started to look at the journalists who use it in a provocative and edgy way on a regular basis, such as The Washington Post's Howard Kurtz or ESPN's Jemele Hill, we recognized the need for some caution and best practices. Status updates are by their nature short, like a story tease. They should be catchy, even pithy, yet accurate. In the effort to simplify, it's easy to go too far and mislead the audience. Good headline writers and television writers recognize this tension.
Balancing the personal and professional turned out to be the thorniest issue. Many of the journalists in Roanoke aim to keep their Facebook or MySpace pages completely private, used only for connecting with personal friends. For the folks whose names are out there, such as reporters and photographers, that might be a losing battle. Sources tend to find you and friend you. Rejecting them is awkward. Letting them in blurs the boundary between your private life and your work. Either way, the journalists in the workshop agreed that a social network is like your car or your front yard. Because you're a journalist, you have to exercise restraint when it comes to making political statements and revealing your own biases.
Even if you keep your page completely private, you must assume it's public and that people will use it to judge you and your newsroom. So all the guidelines that apply to putting bumper stickers on your car apply to your Facebook page.
Here are the guidelines as we developed them in Roanoke. It's a work in progress. What would you add?
A newsroom guideline for using social networks: As a reporting tool
Social networks are ubiquitous enough that journalists who insist on avoiding them are likely to miss good opportunities and great stories. To that end, we encourage responsible use of such networks to form connections, find story ideas and locate sources.
* Making connections is good. And journalists should ensure they are using a full array of tools for gathering information, including face-to-face interviews and shoe-leather reporting.
* Journalists must compensate for the skew of online reporting. You are likely to find younger, whiter, more affluent sources online. Journalists should constantly strive for diverse representations in their stories.
* Information gathered online should be independently confirmed offline. Interview sources in person or over the phone whenever possible. Verify claims and statements.
* Ensure informed consent. It's easy for sources to misunderstand your intentions. It is your responsibility to tell them who you are, what you are doing and where your work will run.
* Take special consideration with children and other vulnerable people. When contacting children, make sure they connect you with a responsible adult.
* Be transparent with the audience as well as sources. Let them know how you contacted people, in what context you gathered the information and how you verified it (or didn't).
A newsroom guideline for using social networks: To promote work
It is important and valuable to promote our work through social networks. Individual staffers bear most of this burden. But the newsroom as an institution is responsible for some of this work. When promoting your work:
* Be accurate. It's easy to sensationalize or oversimplify.
* Be clear. If you are not a good headline writer, seek some training.
* Always include a link and make sure the link works.
* For ongoing issues or stories, editors are responsible for crafting a quick strategy for promoting and branding our work.
* Editors and online staff should identify work that should be branded and promoted on an institutional basis.
A newsroom guideline for using social networks: Balancing the personal and the professional
Some journalists use social networks as a professional tool. Others use it strictly as a personal endeavor. Still others blend the functions. It is increasingly difficult to keep your social networking page strictly private and personal. To that end, journalists must recognize that everything on their Facebook or MySpace pages has the potential to influence their reputations and by extension the credibility of their newsrooms.
* Don't post information that could embarrass you or your newsroom, even if you believe your page is private.
* Use the tools, such as limited profiles and privacy settings, to restrict access to your most private information.
* Recognize that your actions can be misinterpreted. You may sign up for a group to get story ideas, but people may see you as a fan. State your intentions often, in wall posts and other notifications. When appropriate, tell groups when you are signing up that you are looking for story ideas.
* One strategy might be to sign up for lots of groups. If you become a fan of a political party, become a fan of the other parties as well.
* Manage your friends and their comments. Delete comments and de-friend people who damage your reputation.
----
Mobile Journalism on Moving Ground
By Pat Walters
Poynter Institute
Dec. 6, 2006
Ever try to use your laptop in the car? I have. I set mine on the dashboard once to track down unsecured wireless networks in the town I was covering -- for a story, of course.
It was a pain in the neck.
What for me was an annoying afternoon is, for Chuck Myron, a normal one. A story in Monday's Washington Post tells me that Myron is a mobile journalist, or MoJo, at The News-Press in Fort Myers, Fla. He's just one of a fleet of journalists thrown into an experiment by parent company Gannett. He and other MoJos cover local news to the extreme, writing brief dispatches about everything -- from a minor traffic accident to a cat in a tree -- and posting them to zoned sections of the newspaper's Web site.
The Post story, written by reporter Frank Ahrens, came to me via an e-mail from a friend. Preceding the story was a note from one of her colleagues. "If this is the future of journalism," it read, "I better cash in my 401(k)."
There are lots of reasons to be concerned about the MoJo experiment. Most of the content created by MoJos wouldn't meet the standard definition of news. Much of it appears only online. And, according to the Post story, little MoJo content is proofed by an editor.
Ahrens tells me he likes the idea of getting reporters out of the newsroom and into the communities they cover. In some ways, he says, it's good, old-fashioned shoe-leather journalism. But, based on what he saw in Fort Myers, the experiment has a long way to go.
"At times it seems like there's a lack of discrimination in the material," Ahrens says. "It doesn't matter if it's a school lunch menu or a city council meeting."
No doubt, there are flaws. MoJo journalism does "some things that really stick a thumb in the eye of journalism orthodoxy," Ahrens says. But he is quick to point out that this is an early edition of an innovative project. In essence, it's a draft.
One of my colleagues, Poynter Online associate editor Meg Martin, wondered what difference there is between a MoJo and a citizen journalist. The MoJos are, of course, paid by the newspaper. But despite their expensive college degrees, they produce content that, for the most part, requires very little in the way of journalistic training.
What if a news organization were to turn the Gannett formula on its head? Instead of paying professional journalists to produce basic local content, locals could be paid to do it themselves. According to a Gannett news release, that's part of the plan -- MoJos are expected to spend half their time training locals to post dispatches of their own to the newspaper's Web site.
But to find an example of a full flip of the formula, we need only look to a recent move by Yahoo News and Reuters. According to a story in Monday's New York Times, the two news organizations have partnered to place user-submitted photographs and videos throughout their Web sites. If Reuters decides to distribute one of the photographs to the subscribers of its news service, the Times reports, the citizen photojournalist will be paid accordingly.
"This is looking out and saying, 'What if everybody in the world were my stringers?' " Reuters media group president Chris Ahearn tells the Times.
Despite the flaws inherent in experimentation, one thing is certain: It is not going away. As circulation and ad revenues continue to fall, news organizations will continue to seek ways to pull them back up -- and to find entirely new ways to make money.
Most editors agree that enhancing local coverage is key.
Ahrens, the Post reporter, knows that. On his washingtonpost.com blog Monday, Ahrens wrote that his newspaper recently underwent an attitude adjustment, shifting its unspoken slogan from "If you don't get it, you don't get it," to "If it's important to you, then it's important to us."
At The News-Press, that means deploying a team of MoJos armed with laptops, cameras and recorders. At the Post, Ahrens says, it means hiring newspaper Web site designer Rob Curley, known nationwide for his groundbreaking work in creating an intensely local and interactive Web site for the Naples (Fla.) Daily News and the Lawrence (Kan.) Journal-World. And, across the board, it might simply mean that regular reporters start to act a little like MoJos.
Look, for example, at the image of Myron, the Fort Myers MoJo, that ran alonside the story about him. It wasn't made by a photojournalist. Ahrens did it himself.
Wednesday, January 21, 2009
NOTE: Please reply to both of these articles. You do not have to connect them in your analysis, but I would like to see comments on both subjects.
More Journalists Switching Platforms to Work Online
By Regina McCombs
Poynter Institute
Nov. 17, 2008
When I left television news 11 years ago to do multimedia at a Web site based at a newspaper, I didn't know anyone else who had made such a change.
In October, Brett Akagi, the director of photography at one of the best TV photojournalism shops in the country, took the job I recently left at StarTribune.com. These days, he's not alone in switching between mother ships. More and more journalists are finding opportunities just by crossing the street.
On the Web, news organizations are directly competing in ways they never quite did when they were simply newspapers and television stations. As newsrooms grow their Web sites, they are discovering gaps in skills within their own staffs and searching for ways to fill those gaps.
Recently, they've started looking where they have rarely looked before -- at the competing TV stations and newspapers in town. Newspapers are finding video skills at television stations, and stations are finding interactive thinking at newspapers.
"TV and newspapers are going to be a lot alike in how they produce content, so why not move people from place to place?" Akagi asked.
The lure of another platform
Journalists with certain skills suddenly have options they haven't had, and they are taking chances on jobs in a new medium as a way to grow their careers and maintain passion for their work.
Akagi was lured away from TV by the chance to learn Web skills and share his video skills with new people.
"Since I've been here at KARE over 10 years, I've grown so much as a journalist and as a manager," he said. "For me, it's time to push in a different direction where there's going to be continued and future growth, which is the digital side of journalism."
Others are moving in the other direction, from newspaper sites to television sites. John Cutter, former deputy online editor at orlandosentinel.com, took the job as digital media manager at WESH.com in August because "I was interested in being the manager of a Web site day-to-day, the senior manager who dealt with other people in the building."
After trying to piece together live online video solutions at a newspaper, Cutter was attracted to having equipment already in place at a television station -- "having access to live trucks (and a helicopter, he joked) instead of trying to use a sling box that only worked some of the time."
Some of Akagi's friends suggested that leaving the Gannett-owned station was crazy, especially given the Star Tribune's financial problems. But he thinks he will have better long-term prospects by moving online.
That's why Pete Soby left KETV in Omaha, Neb., 10 months ago to become the first video photographer at the Omaha World-Herald. "I definitely saw growth in the Internet," he said, "and I thought newspapers would be in the best position to serve that audience."
Scott Utterback also switched from TV to a newspaper-based Web site, moving from WAVE-TV in Louisville, Ky., to The Courier-Journal just over a year ago. For him, it was a way to broaden his skills.
"I was a television news photographer for 17 years before I realized I was playing for the wrong team," Utterback said. "I still shoot video almost every day, but I do it online. I am not sure what the future holds anymore, but I do know I trust the newspapers to forge a better future for the Internet than my former brothers. The greatest thing about my transition, however, is I am now learning the greatest craft of all time: still photography."
Keith Jenkins and John Poole each left different divisions of The Washington Post to head another direction entirely -- to National Public Radio. Jenkins took a buyout from the Post in May, where he was multimedia director, and assumed the same role at NPR. Poole left washingtonpost.com a year ago to be NPR's first video producer.
"I had been looking at NPR, storytelling-wise, for a long time," Poole said, "and kind of thought in the back of my mind that if NPR ever figured out how to do video, wouldn't that be fantastic?" For him, combining NPR's top-of-the line storytellers with news photography "felt like the Holy Grail."
Poole said one of the big differences at NPR is that his colleagues will turn off the pictures and just listen to the audio, which he never would have considered doing before. "I think it's been really good," he said, "in filling in that second half of the equation for me."
Unlike the others, Jenkins has made the switch before. He worked at washingtonpost.com and AOL before the Post Magazine.
"I really wanted to work on a Web site, rather than working on the side of the legacy media," he said. "Looking around at organizations, a lot were tied to newspapers, and that wasn't appealing. A lot of newspapers are looking at the Web sites to save them, and that doesn't make for a good environment -- it makes for a desperate environment."
Most of these journalists don't think of these moves as transitions between newspapers, TV and radio. Instead, Cutter said, "It's going from being a digital journalist to a digital journalist."
The appeal
Tom Dolan, president of the recruiting firm Dolan Media Management, recruited Cutter to WESH.com from orlandosentinel.com. Dolan said he's been scoping out people who work at newspaper Web sites as he tries to fill similar positions at television sites.
"Some skills can be taught and quickly mastered, but the Web is a culture unto itself. What we're talking about is immersing yourself in the Web culture," Dolan said. "It's more interactive and immersive, which is very different from TV, which has traditionally been a one-way street."
For instance, one can't underestimate the value in understanding interactivity, he said. "Time on the page is an important metric, and user interactivity is good for time on the page, and that's good for advertising. The early adopters on the newspaper side seem to understand this much more quickly than the TV side, although TV people are coming around to it."
Newspaper Web sites have also been quicker to adapt multimedia storytelling in ways that Dolan calls "building out the story," with interactive maps, databases and time lines. "We think some of these advanced Web editors," he said, "will help TV with that kind of content."
Meanwhile, newspaper sites are discovering that it can take awhile to develop video skills. "If you want to get good at video quickly," Dolan said, "you can hire a TV video person until your print staff gets caught up."
Cutter said it was obvious during his job interviews at WESH.com that the people there liked his background. “I had managed a staff and increased their participation in breaking news and in user participation, and they want to do that here.”
As journalism organizations change (and with that, the jobs within those organizations), how we think about what we do is changing as well. The photographers in the group, not unexpectedly, see visuals as increasingly important for everyone in the industry. But they also see the importance of a broad range of skills. Soby, for instance, said he knows he must work on his writing because the paper sometimes needs a story to refer to the online video, and he's often the only representative of the World-Herald at a news event.
"Journalists have to have a wider range of skills, period. Those skills need to include writing and audio skills, but visual skills as well," Jenkins said. "There will always be the need for professional photographers and professional videographers, but there needs to be a greater level of visual literacy among all journalists because that's the world we live in now, thanks to the Web."
It may be that this is actually the bright spot in the industry today: that those willing to expand their knowledge have many more places to find work.
"Why not add a copy editor to a TV newsroom? That would be awesome," Akagi said. "Why not add a TV reporter, a producer, to a newspaper newsroom? You'd be stupid not to think about using people from television. And for TV stations ... if we want to do better interactive graphics and better copy, why not hire people from the newspaper?"
It made sense to me 11 years ago, and it makes even more sense today.
---
Bloggers and Other Online Publishers Face Increasing Legal Threats
By David Ardia
Poynter Institute
Sept. 22, 2008
There is a widely held belief that the Internet is a legal no man's land, where people are free to publish what they wish without fear of censure or repercussions. While this may have been true back when the Internet was populated largely by techies swapping information on obscure Usenet groups, it is no longer true today. Perhaps it's a product of the maturing of the medium that lawyers are starting to take notice. Perhaps it's because some bloggers and Web site operators, albeit a small number, are making money from their online publishing activities. Whatever the reason, there has been a steady –- and dramatic –- increase in the number of lawsuits filed against online publishers.
In the last 10 years, we have seen the number of civil lawsuits filed against bloggers and other online publishers increase from 4 in 1997 to 89 in 2007 (See Figure 1). We aren't just talking about the CNN's and New York Times' of the world. At the Citizen Media Law Project, which I direct, we have cataloged more than 280 such lawsuits filed in 43 states and the District of Columbia, ranging from copyright infringement claims against celebrity-gossip bloggers to defamation claims against operators of hyper-local journalism sites.
While only a few of these lawsuits have resulted in liability, seven cases in our database resulted in verdicts or settlements in the six-figure range (See Figure 2). For example, the largest judgment to date involved a $11.3 million defamation verdict against a woman who criticized an organization she hired to help remove her son from a boarding school in Costa Rica, referring to the head of the organization as a "crook," "con artist" and "fraud." Scheff v. Bock (Sept. 19, 2006 Florida Circuit Court).
In fact, every time someone publishes anything online, whether it's a news article, blog post, podcast, video or even a user comment, they open themselves up to potential legal liability. This shouldn't come as a surprise because the Internet, after all, is available to anyone who wishes to connect to the network, and even the smallest blog or most esoteric discussion forum has the potential to reach hundreds of millions of people throughout the world.
Often the legal risks are small, but not always. Whether you are seasoned journalist or just someone who occasionally posts online, you will benefit from a basic understanding of media law. Let's start with a few of the more obvious risks.
First, if you publish information that harms the reputation of another person, group or organization, you may be liable for "defamation" or "false light." Defamation is the term for a legal claim involving injury to reputation caused by false statements of fact. False light, which is similar to defamation, generally involves untrue factual implications. The crux of both of these claims is falsity; statements of opinion and truthful statements and implications that harm another's reputation will not create liability, although the latter may open you up to other forms of liability if the information you publish is of a personal or highly private nature.
Second, if you publish private or personal information about someone without permission, you potentially expose yourself to legal liability even if your portrayal is factually accurate. For example, in most states you can be sued for publishing private facts about another person, even if those facts are true. The term "private facts" refers to information about someone's personal life that has not previously been revealed to the public, that is not of legitimate public concern, and the publication of which would be offensive to a reasonable person. This would include such things as writing about a person's medical condition, sexual activities or financial troubles.
If you use someone else's name, likeness or other personal attributes without permission for an exploitative purpose you could also face liability for what is called "misappropriation" or violation of the "right of publicity." Usually, people run into trouble in this area when they use someone's name or photograph in a commercial setting, such as in advertising or other promotional activities. But, some states also prohibit use of another person's identity for the user's own personal benefit, whether or not the purpose is strictly commercial.
Third, if you allow reader comments, host guest bloggers on your site, operate an online forum, or if you repost information received from RSS feeds, section 230 of the Communications Decency Act will likely shield you from liability for problematic statements made by your users, guests and other third-parties. You will not lose this immunity even if you edit the content, whether for accuracy or civility, and you are entitled to immunity so long as your edits do not substantially alter the meaning of the original statements. Keep in mind that this important federal law will only protect you if a third-party –- not you or your employee or someone acting under your direction –- posts something on your blog or Web site. It will not shield you from liability for your own statements.
Finally, if you publish or use the creative work of others without permission, you may expose yourself to legal liability under copyright law. It is a widely held misconception that works on the Internet are not covered by copyright and thus can be used freely. This is not true. Copyright law applies to online material just as it does to offline material. Fortunately, an important legal doctrine called "fair use" may make it legally permissible for you to use a copyrighted work without permission for purposes such as commentary, criticism, parody, news reporting, and scholarship. Whether or not a use is lawful usually depends upon how different or "transformative" the use is from the original.
David Ardia is a fellow at Harvard University's Berkman Center for Internet & Society and the director of the Citizen Media Law Project, which provides legal assistance, training and resources for individuals and organizations involved in online and citizen media. Prior to coming to Harvard, he was assistant counsel at The Washington Post and before that he practiced law at Williams & Connolly in Washington, D.C., where he handled a range of intellectual property and media litigation.
More Journalists Switching Platforms to Work Online
By Regina McCombs
Poynter Institute
Nov. 17, 2008
When I left television news 11 years ago to do multimedia at a Web site based at a newspaper, I didn't know anyone else who had made such a change.
In October, Brett Akagi, the director of photography at one of the best TV photojournalism shops in the country, took the job I recently left at StarTribune.com. These days, he's not alone in switching between mother ships. More and more journalists are finding opportunities just by crossing the street.
On the Web, news organizations are directly competing in ways they never quite did when they were simply newspapers and television stations. As newsrooms grow their Web sites, they are discovering gaps in skills within their own staffs and searching for ways to fill those gaps.
Recently, they've started looking where they have rarely looked before -- at the competing TV stations and newspapers in town. Newspapers are finding video skills at television stations, and stations are finding interactive thinking at newspapers.
"TV and newspapers are going to be a lot alike in how they produce content, so why not move people from place to place?" Akagi asked.
The lure of another platform
Journalists with certain skills suddenly have options they haven't had, and they are taking chances on jobs in a new medium as a way to grow their careers and maintain passion for their work.
Akagi was lured away from TV by the chance to learn Web skills and share his video skills with new people.
"Since I've been here at KARE over 10 years, I've grown so much as a journalist and as a manager," he said. "For me, it's time to push in a different direction where there's going to be continued and future growth, which is the digital side of journalism."
Others are moving in the other direction, from newspaper sites to television sites. John Cutter, former deputy online editor at orlandosentinel.com, took the job as digital media manager at WESH.com in August because "I was interested in being the manager of a Web site day-to-day, the senior manager who dealt with other people in the building."
After trying to piece together live online video solutions at a newspaper, Cutter was attracted to having equipment already in place at a television station -- "having access to live trucks (and a helicopter, he joked) instead of trying to use a sling box that only worked some of the time."
Some of Akagi's friends suggested that leaving the Gannett-owned station was crazy, especially given the Star Tribune's financial problems. But he thinks he will have better long-term prospects by moving online.
That's why Pete Soby left KETV in Omaha, Neb., 10 months ago to become the first video photographer at the Omaha World-Herald. "I definitely saw growth in the Internet," he said, "and I thought newspapers would be in the best position to serve that audience."
Scott Utterback also switched from TV to a newspaper-based Web site, moving from WAVE-TV in Louisville, Ky., to The Courier-Journal just over a year ago. For him, it was a way to broaden his skills.
"I was a television news photographer for 17 years before I realized I was playing for the wrong team," Utterback said. "I still shoot video almost every day, but I do it online. I am not sure what the future holds anymore, but I do know I trust the newspapers to forge a better future for the Internet than my former brothers. The greatest thing about my transition, however, is I am now learning the greatest craft of all time: still photography."
Keith Jenkins and John Poole each left different divisions of The Washington Post to head another direction entirely -- to National Public Radio. Jenkins took a buyout from the Post in May, where he was multimedia director, and assumed the same role at NPR. Poole left washingtonpost.com a year ago to be NPR's first video producer.
"I had been looking at NPR, storytelling-wise, for a long time," Poole said, "and kind of thought in the back of my mind that if NPR ever figured out how to do video, wouldn't that be fantastic?" For him, combining NPR's top-of-the line storytellers with news photography "felt like the Holy Grail."
Poole said one of the big differences at NPR is that his colleagues will turn off the pictures and just listen to the audio, which he never would have considered doing before. "I think it's been really good," he said, "in filling in that second half of the equation for me."
Unlike the others, Jenkins has made the switch before. He worked at washingtonpost.com and AOL before the Post Magazine.
"I really wanted to work on a Web site, rather than working on the side of the legacy media," he said. "Looking around at organizations, a lot were tied to newspapers, and that wasn't appealing. A lot of newspapers are looking at the Web sites to save them, and that doesn't make for a good environment -- it makes for a desperate environment."
Most of these journalists don't think of these moves as transitions between newspapers, TV and radio. Instead, Cutter said, "It's going from being a digital journalist to a digital journalist."
The appeal
Tom Dolan, president of the recruiting firm Dolan Media Management, recruited Cutter to WESH.com from orlandosentinel.com. Dolan said he's been scoping out people who work at newspaper Web sites as he tries to fill similar positions at television sites.
"Some skills can be taught and quickly mastered, but the Web is a culture unto itself. What we're talking about is immersing yourself in the Web culture," Dolan said. "It's more interactive and immersive, which is very different from TV, which has traditionally been a one-way street."
For instance, one can't underestimate the value in understanding interactivity, he said. "Time on the page is an important metric, and user interactivity is good for time on the page, and that's good for advertising. The early adopters on the newspaper side seem to understand this much more quickly than the TV side, although TV people are coming around to it."
Newspaper Web sites have also been quicker to adapt multimedia storytelling in ways that Dolan calls "building out the story," with interactive maps, databases and time lines. "We think some of these advanced Web editors," he said, "will help TV with that kind of content."
Meanwhile, newspaper sites are discovering that it can take awhile to develop video skills. "If you want to get good at video quickly," Dolan said, "you can hire a TV video person until your print staff gets caught up."
Cutter said it was obvious during his job interviews at WESH.com that the people there liked his background. “I had managed a staff and increased their participation in breaking news and in user participation, and they want to do that here.”
As journalism organizations change (and with that, the jobs within those organizations), how we think about what we do is changing as well. The photographers in the group, not unexpectedly, see visuals as increasingly important for everyone in the industry. But they also see the importance of a broad range of skills. Soby, for instance, said he knows he must work on his writing because the paper sometimes needs a story to refer to the online video, and he's often the only representative of the World-Herald at a news event.
"Journalists have to have a wider range of skills, period. Those skills need to include writing and audio skills, but visual skills as well," Jenkins said. "There will always be the need for professional photographers and professional videographers, but there needs to be a greater level of visual literacy among all journalists because that's the world we live in now, thanks to the Web."
It may be that this is actually the bright spot in the industry today: that those willing to expand their knowledge have many more places to find work.
"Why not add a copy editor to a TV newsroom? That would be awesome," Akagi said. "Why not add a TV reporter, a producer, to a newspaper newsroom? You'd be stupid not to think about using people from television. And for TV stations ... if we want to do better interactive graphics and better copy, why not hire people from the newspaper?"
It made sense to me 11 years ago, and it makes even more sense today.
---
Bloggers and Other Online Publishers Face Increasing Legal Threats
By David Ardia
Poynter Institute
Sept. 22, 2008
There is a widely held belief that the Internet is a legal no man's land, where people are free to publish what they wish without fear of censure or repercussions. While this may have been true back when the Internet was populated largely by techies swapping information on obscure Usenet groups, it is no longer true today. Perhaps it's a product of the maturing of the medium that lawyers are starting to take notice. Perhaps it's because some bloggers and Web site operators, albeit a small number, are making money from their online publishing activities. Whatever the reason, there has been a steady –- and dramatic –- increase in the number of lawsuits filed against online publishers.
In the last 10 years, we have seen the number of civil lawsuits filed against bloggers and other online publishers increase from 4 in 1997 to 89 in 2007 (See Figure 1). We aren't just talking about the CNN's and New York Times' of the world. At the Citizen Media Law Project, which I direct, we have cataloged more than 280 such lawsuits filed in 43 states and the District of Columbia, ranging from copyright infringement claims against celebrity-gossip bloggers to defamation claims against operators of hyper-local journalism sites.
While only a few of these lawsuits have resulted in liability, seven cases in our database resulted in verdicts or settlements in the six-figure range (See Figure 2). For example, the largest judgment to date involved a $11.3 million defamation verdict against a woman who criticized an organization she hired to help remove her son from a boarding school in Costa Rica, referring to the head of the organization as a "crook," "con artist" and "fraud." Scheff v. Bock (Sept. 19, 2006 Florida Circuit Court).
In fact, every time someone publishes anything online, whether it's a news article, blog post, podcast, video or even a user comment, they open themselves up to potential legal liability. This shouldn't come as a surprise because the Internet, after all, is available to anyone who wishes to connect to the network, and even the smallest blog or most esoteric discussion forum has the potential to reach hundreds of millions of people throughout the world.
Often the legal risks are small, but not always. Whether you are seasoned journalist or just someone who occasionally posts online, you will benefit from a basic understanding of media law. Let's start with a few of the more obvious risks.
First, if you publish information that harms the reputation of another person, group or organization, you may be liable for "defamation" or "false light." Defamation is the term for a legal claim involving injury to reputation caused by false statements of fact. False light, which is similar to defamation, generally involves untrue factual implications. The crux of both of these claims is falsity; statements of opinion and truthful statements and implications that harm another's reputation will not create liability, although the latter may open you up to other forms of liability if the information you publish is of a personal or highly private nature.
Second, if you publish private or personal information about someone without permission, you potentially expose yourself to legal liability even if your portrayal is factually accurate. For example, in most states you can be sued for publishing private facts about another person, even if those facts are true. The term "private facts" refers to information about someone's personal life that has not previously been revealed to the public, that is not of legitimate public concern, and the publication of which would be offensive to a reasonable person. This would include such things as writing about a person's medical condition, sexual activities or financial troubles.
If you use someone else's name, likeness or other personal attributes without permission for an exploitative purpose you could also face liability for what is called "misappropriation" or violation of the "right of publicity." Usually, people run into trouble in this area when they use someone's name or photograph in a commercial setting, such as in advertising or other promotional activities. But, some states also prohibit use of another person's identity for the user's own personal benefit, whether or not the purpose is strictly commercial.
Third, if you allow reader comments, host guest bloggers on your site, operate an online forum, or if you repost information received from RSS feeds, section 230 of the Communications Decency Act will likely shield you from liability for problematic statements made by your users, guests and other third-parties. You will not lose this immunity even if you edit the content, whether for accuracy or civility, and you are entitled to immunity so long as your edits do not substantially alter the meaning of the original statements. Keep in mind that this important federal law will only protect you if a third-party –- not you or your employee or someone acting under your direction –- posts something on your blog or Web site. It will not shield you from liability for your own statements.
Finally, if you publish or use the creative work of others without permission, you may expose yourself to legal liability under copyright law. It is a widely held misconception that works on the Internet are not covered by copyright and thus can be used freely. This is not true. Copyright law applies to online material just as it does to offline material. Fortunately, an important legal doctrine called "fair use" may make it legally permissible for you to use a copyrighted work without permission for purposes such as commentary, criticism, parody, news reporting, and scholarship. Whether or not a use is lawful usually depends upon how different or "transformative" the use is from the original.
David Ardia is a fellow at Harvard University's Berkman Center for Internet & Society and the director of the Citizen Media Law Project, which provides legal assistance, training and resources for individuals and organizations involved in online and citizen media. Prior to coming to Harvard, he was assistant counsel at The Washington Post and before that he practiced law at Williams & Connolly in Washington, D.C., where he handled a range of intellectual property and media litigation.
Wednesday, January 14, 2009
Photojournalism: How To Get The Shot
NOTE: Because there was a technical issue with the readings not being available until Tuesday morning, your deadline to post a comment has been extended until the start of class at 5:45 p.m., Wednesday, Jan. 21.
Flickring Out
What will become of photojournalism in an age of bytes and amateurs?
By Alissa Quart
Columbia Journalism Review, July/August 2008
Clichés are sometimes true. Here’s one—photographers don’t like to give speeches. At a recent event, photographer Antonin Kratochvil screened slideshows of his work: American soldiers coolly observing the Iraqi distressed and dead; Lebanese militant youths standing restlessly near decaying walls; American evangelicals speaking in tongues. The photographer then clambered onstage, ruddy and scarf-wrapped (“The Bedoins wear them!”) for his talk, but he was no Christopher Hitchens. He hated talking about himself—as uncomfortable in the role of sage as the rest of us would be in a war zone—and he left the stage with half the time for his “speech” unused, encouraging his audience to spend it smoking cigarettes instead. Kratochvil is not alone in his taciturnity. When I recently asked one of the greats of the form for his thoughts, he e-mailed the aphorism: “To live happy, live hidden.”
Perhaps this distrust in the verbal complaint—so loved by windy print journalists—is why we don’t hear so much about the difficulties facing photojournalism, from street corner news photographers to the deans of the eminent agencies Magnum and vii. They’ve been struggling with downsizing, the rise of the amateur, the ubiquity of camera phones, sound-bite-ization, failing magazines (so fewer commissions), and a lack of money in general for the big photo essays that have long been the love of the metaphoric children of Walker Evans. Like print journalists, photographers are scrambling not only to make sense of the new world, but to survive in it intact.
Yet, paradoxically, visual culture is ever more important. It seems that everyone now takes photos and saves them and distributes them, and that all these rivulets supply a great sea of images for editors to use. This carries certain risks. If they are taking snapshots, amateur photographers are likely not developing a story, or developing the kind of intimacy with their subjects that brings revelation. So what’s the actual photojournalistic value of all of these millions of images now available on Flickr and other photo-sharing archives—so many that they can seem like dead souls? And what about the fate of photographers like Kratochvil, whose ashily stylish images honor Modernist photography? He will clearly continue shooting—and avoiding public speeches—but what of his tradition?
At photo agencies, or in private conversations with newspaper and magazine photographers and editors, you hear the same end-of-the-world-as-we-know-it dirge that plays in the print world. But these worries don’t tend to go public in speeches about The State of Photography. There are few deathbed panel discussions about the genre, unlike all the discussions about in-depth reporters shuffling to the graveyard. Maybe part of it is that while photojournalism may be harder to practice, there is no shortage of photos—we are deluged by images. I am optimistic about the future of photojournalism, but not of the photojournalism I most admire.
Yet events like the one where Kratochvil showed his images—a four-day photography festival in Brooklyn where the magi of photojournalism appeared—inevitably raise the question of whether these super talents will soon be supplanted. Photographic storytellers are competing with the millions-strong army of amateur photographers whose work is housed on Flickr, which editors cull for cheap or free images, and the rise of amateur-supplied agencies, including iStockphoto—owned by the largest stock agency of them all, Getty Images. There are also outlets that claim to separate the digital wheat from the chaff, like PhotoShelter, a “global stock marketplace,” or the jpg Magazine, which threshes out a few hundred images submitted by Web amateurs and publishes them on paper. As Magnum photographer Chris Anderson glumly puts it, he and other professionals are “watching the decline of editorial sales of images, both what we are assigned to produce and the buying of editorial images—and I am waiting for that moment when that decline drops straight off a cliff.”
Meanwhile, local newspapers, while featuring photography much more prominently than they did in the past, are increasingly limiting their payments and their hiring of shooters. At The Record, in Bergen County, New Jersey, a paper known for quality photography until now, for instance, staff photographers are struggling with the paper’s decision to fire them all and then allow them to reapply for their jobs. (Those who are fortunate enough to be rehired will likely receive lower salaries and fewer benefits than before.) Like so many others, photojournalists are also facing the ugly downsizing euphemism—“mojo,” or mobile journalist, for print journalists who are given autofocus digital cameras to do the work that they once did. A photographer at the Baltimore Sun tells a less extreme story but also notes that there is no new hiring at his paper. When someone retires, his or her job line ends. Some (but not all) photographers also complain about the insistence that they go “multimedia” and that their still images are sometimes getting overwhelmed and undone (although also sometimes improved) by the sound and moving images that accompany them. The most salient critique of this practice is not the rise of the slideshow, but how it is replacing the still image. Movies and television may light up and flicker but they disappear, while photos, even photos in magazines and newspapers, are objects and, unconsciously or not, often feel more personal to the observer. After all, we tend to remember still images, not moving ones.
Photojournalists also question the journalistic reliability of the images of their amateur rivals. Photographers like Anderson, a thirty-eight-year-old well known for his conflict photography, wonder about the lack of “vetting” of the millions of images that are supposed to be carrying the truth to readers. “There’s a case already of an iReporter whose photos were bullshit,” says Anderson, speaking of media companies publishing the work of amateur photographers. “News organizations will get burned by photographers they don’t know and blur the lines between what is credible information and what isn’t.” (Of course, there have been pros who have faked images as well, but they are rare.)
What Magnum is selling “is the story aspect of the craft,” says Mark Lubell, the agency’s New York bureau chief. Anyone can take a decent photo, as the bromide goes, through talent or luck, but few can extend it into masterful narratives. There’s still a special recipe to be a “real” photojournalist, and it’s not just the “trained” or “expert” eye but rather the sheer hours put into each assignment and the ability to sustain a thought, image, or impulse through a number of images, not just a single snapshot. This brings to mind the art photographer Steven Shore’s remark that photography is like fly-fishing. It takes extreme patience—a sort of intelligence about time.
But is the rise of still-photos-as-films and “citizen photojournalism” only a big nightmare? Or is it also a liberation?
Some would say yes. There are bright spots to the amateur-image revolution. Lots of photos of “my girlfriend’s feet,” true, but bystanders also now often shoot the most crucial events of our day. Amid the chaff are photos of oil flares in West Africa and of the 2005 London bombings. Combat in Iraq is often shot by the soldiers themselves. The photos from Abu Ghraib, of course, are the most striking and horribly spectacular case for the new power and impact of amateur photography-of-fact. The photographs that define a war gone wrong are amateur ones: the amateur snappers’ presence altered and also helped create the scenes of violence and humiliation. Abu Ghraib’s most iconic image was of the hooded prisoner: an occult pantomime of the suffering that was actually going on elsewhere in the same facility. It was evidence of what Susan Sontag called “picture-taking . . . as an event unto itself.” There will, for better or worse, be many more occasions of image-making by participants in news events in the future.
While professional photographers are suffering, news photography and photography of all kinds is flourishing. Citizens around the world can cheaply photograph and distribute images of their own countries and cities, places like Dhaka and Freetown. Citizen journalism projects like Rising Voices teach photography in Africa and elsewhere. Local image-makers challenge both the valor and necessity of the American or European photographer shooting in a foreign clime, a model that has a certain amount of voyeuristic baggage, as the critic W. J. T. Mitchell has written—a dynamic where a “damaged, victimized, and powerless individual” is “taken” by a photographer who is a “relatively privileged observer, often acting as the ‘eye of power.’ ” Instead, we will have amateur photographers—some lucky people at the right awful place at the right awful time (Nigerians who are at the next explosion of a pipeline, say). And I hope that innately gifted photographers will emerge as well—a Chinese Kratochvil, a Nigerian Gilles Peress.
According to some, the rise of the amateur news image itself is a thing of value. “What distinguishes the icon is not professionalism,” says Robert Hariman, a professor of communications and co-founder of No Caption Needed, a blog about photojournalism as a public art. “The Challenger photo was a screen grab. All the photos at Tiananmen Square were not good photos—they were too far away.”
There are also some bright spots for the professional photojournalists, though they aren’t the predictable ones. Right now, as its value on the open market of news magazines falls, photojournalism’s prestige, paradoxically, rises: a Dorothea Lange bread line photo from 1932 sold for $720,000 a couple of years ago; a dozen New York City galleries showed Magnum photographers’ work in 2007. Magnum’s enormous back catalog of everything from Castro in a paroxysm to Paul McCartney as a pre-tabloidal Beatle to Cambodian refugees will soon be for sale. (Some already line the walls of a boutique hotel in Manhattan, although most likely none is of famine victims.) In a sense, following all genres and fields whose commercial power has faded or is evaporatinge—what they lose in income and the more ineffable “heat,” they gain in the rarified status of art object.
Yet this status of photojournalism as art, or even as an accessory in a new waterfront condo/loft apartment, won’t necessarily help photojournalists as they try to conceive, shoot, distribute, and get paid for complicated images of difficult places.
We’re all journalists, but writers—scarf-free and spell-checked as we are—know deep down that photographers are different. Despite all the critics who have claimed photos are “a grammar,” images are more like a half-language (as John Berger, the critic who wrote Ways of Seeing, said), always both objective and freighted with meanings that even the photographer and her audience only sometimes understand. Good photography somehow can tell more, with its pulp and its present-ness.
That combination of directness and mysteriousness that is part of being a half-language must be preserved into the future. Despite the fact that amateurs have made iconic images in the past—the famed 1970 image The Picture From Kent State was taken by a student working in the college’s photo lab—there have been many more iconic images that are actually extremely professional: Robert Capa’s Death of a Loyalist Soldier, from the Spanish Civil War, or Eddie Addams’s General Nguyn Ngoc Loan executing a Viet Cong prisoner in Saigon, from Vietnam.
If we are to keep this history alive, we need to find ways to support professional photojournalists outside of the magazine and newspaper industry. Some of the future Kratochvils of the world—those not capturing the moment but capturing the context—will in twenty years be seen primarily as artists of fact, their images bought for a pretty euro in London and Berlin. But meanwhile, they must live and work. And perhaps those of us who “paint with words,” or what have you, and have gotten good at complaining about our own fate, should start to speak up on photojournalists’ behalf as well.
Flickring Out
What will become of photojournalism in an age of bytes and amateurs?
By Alissa Quart
Columbia Journalism Review, July/August 2008
Clichés are sometimes true. Here’s one—photographers don’t like to give speeches. At a recent event, photographer Antonin Kratochvil screened slideshows of his work: American soldiers coolly observing the Iraqi distressed and dead; Lebanese militant youths standing restlessly near decaying walls; American evangelicals speaking in tongues. The photographer then clambered onstage, ruddy and scarf-wrapped (“The Bedoins wear them!”) for his talk, but he was no Christopher Hitchens. He hated talking about himself—as uncomfortable in the role of sage as the rest of us would be in a war zone—and he left the stage with half the time for his “speech” unused, encouraging his audience to spend it smoking cigarettes instead. Kratochvil is not alone in his taciturnity. When I recently asked one of the greats of the form for his thoughts, he e-mailed the aphorism: “To live happy, live hidden.”
Perhaps this distrust in the verbal complaint—so loved by windy print journalists—is why we don’t hear so much about the difficulties facing photojournalism, from street corner news photographers to the deans of the eminent agencies Magnum and vii. They’ve been struggling with downsizing, the rise of the amateur, the ubiquity of camera phones, sound-bite-ization, failing magazines (so fewer commissions), and a lack of money in general for the big photo essays that have long been the love of the metaphoric children of Walker Evans. Like print journalists, photographers are scrambling not only to make sense of the new world, but to survive in it intact.
Yet, paradoxically, visual culture is ever more important. It seems that everyone now takes photos and saves them and distributes them, and that all these rivulets supply a great sea of images for editors to use. This carries certain risks. If they are taking snapshots, amateur photographers are likely not developing a story, or developing the kind of intimacy with their subjects that brings revelation. So what’s the actual photojournalistic value of all of these millions of images now available on Flickr and other photo-sharing archives—so many that they can seem like dead souls? And what about the fate of photographers like Kratochvil, whose ashily stylish images honor Modernist photography? He will clearly continue shooting—and avoiding public speeches—but what of his tradition?
At photo agencies, or in private conversations with newspaper and magazine photographers and editors, you hear the same end-of-the-world-as-we-know-it dirge that plays in the print world. But these worries don’t tend to go public in speeches about The State of Photography. There are few deathbed panel discussions about the genre, unlike all the discussions about in-depth reporters shuffling to the graveyard. Maybe part of it is that while photojournalism may be harder to practice, there is no shortage of photos—we are deluged by images. I am optimistic about the future of photojournalism, but not of the photojournalism I most admire.
Yet events like the one where Kratochvil showed his images—a four-day photography festival in Brooklyn where the magi of photojournalism appeared—inevitably raise the question of whether these super talents will soon be supplanted. Photographic storytellers are competing with the millions-strong army of amateur photographers whose work is housed on Flickr, which editors cull for cheap or free images, and the rise of amateur-supplied agencies, including iStockphoto—owned by the largest stock agency of them all, Getty Images. There are also outlets that claim to separate the digital wheat from the chaff, like PhotoShelter, a “global stock marketplace,” or the jpg Magazine, which threshes out a few hundred images submitted by Web amateurs and publishes them on paper. As Magnum photographer Chris Anderson glumly puts it, he and other professionals are “watching the decline of editorial sales of images, both what we are assigned to produce and the buying of editorial images—and I am waiting for that moment when that decline drops straight off a cliff.”
Meanwhile, local newspapers, while featuring photography much more prominently than they did in the past, are increasingly limiting their payments and their hiring of shooters. At The Record, in Bergen County, New Jersey, a paper known for quality photography until now, for instance, staff photographers are struggling with the paper’s decision to fire them all and then allow them to reapply for their jobs. (Those who are fortunate enough to be rehired will likely receive lower salaries and fewer benefits than before.) Like so many others, photojournalists are also facing the ugly downsizing euphemism—“mojo,” or mobile journalist, for print journalists who are given autofocus digital cameras to do the work that they once did. A photographer at the Baltimore Sun tells a less extreme story but also notes that there is no new hiring at his paper. When someone retires, his or her job line ends. Some (but not all) photographers also complain about the insistence that they go “multimedia” and that their still images are sometimes getting overwhelmed and undone (although also sometimes improved) by the sound and moving images that accompany them. The most salient critique of this practice is not the rise of the slideshow, but how it is replacing the still image. Movies and television may light up and flicker but they disappear, while photos, even photos in magazines and newspapers, are objects and, unconsciously or not, often feel more personal to the observer. After all, we tend to remember still images, not moving ones.
Photojournalists also question the journalistic reliability of the images of their amateur rivals. Photographers like Anderson, a thirty-eight-year-old well known for his conflict photography, wonder about the lack of “vetting” of the millions of images that are supposed to be carrying the truth to readers. “There’s a case already of an iReporter whose photos were bullshit,” says Anderson, speaking of media companies publishing the work of amateur photographers. “News organizations will get burned by photographers they don’t know and blur the lines between what is credible information and what isn’t.” (Of course, there have been pros who have faked images as well, but they are rare.)
What Magnum is selling “is the story aspect of the craft,” says Mark Lubell, the agency’s New York bureau chief. Anyone can take a decent photo, as the bromide goes, through talent or luck, but few can extend it into masterful narratives. There’s still a special recipe to be a “real” photojournalist, and it’s not just the “trained” or “expert” eye but rather the sheer hours put into each assignment and the ability to sustain a thought, image, or impulse through a number of images, not just a single snapshot. This brings to mind the art photographer Steven Shore’s remark that photography is like fly-fishing. It takes extreme patience—a sort of intelligence about time.
But is the rise of still-photos-as-films and “citizen photojournalism” only a big nightmare? Or is it also a liberation?
Some would say yes. There are bright spots to the amateur-image revolution. Lots of photos of “my girlfriend’s feet,” true, but bystanders also now often shoot the most crucial events of our day. Amid the chaff are photos of oil flares in West Africa and of the 2005 London bombings. Combat in Iraq is often shot by the soldiers themselves. The photos from Abu Ghraib, of course, are the most striking and horribly spectacular case for the new power and impact of amateur photography-of-fact. The photographs that define a war gone wrong are amateur ones: the amateur snappers’ presence altered and also helped create the scenes of violence and humiliation. Abu Ghraib’s most iconic image was of the hooded prisoner: an occult pantomime of the suffering that was actually going on elsewhere in the same facility. It was evidence of what Susan Sontag called “picture-taking . . . as an event unto itself.” There will, for better or worse, be many more occasions of image-making by participants in news events in the future.
While professional photographers are suffering, news photography and photography of all kinds is flourishing. Citizens around the world can cheaply photograph and distribute images of their own countries and cities, places like Dhaka and Freetown. Citizen journalism projects like Rising Voices teach photography in Africa and elsewhere. Local image-makers challenge both the valor and necessity of the American or European photographer shooting in a foreign clime, a model that has a certain amount of voyeuristic baggage, as the critic W. J. T. Mitchell has written—a dynamic where a “damaged, victimized, and powerless individual” is “taken” by a photographer who is a “relatively privileged observer, often acting as the ‘eye of power.’ ” Instead, we will have amateur photographers—some lucky people at the right awful place at the right awful time (Nigerians who are at the next explosion of a pipeline, say). And I hope that innately gifted photographers will emerge as well—a Chinese Kratochvil, a Nigerian Gilles Peress.
According to some, the rise of the amateur news image itself is a thing of value. “What distinguishes the icon is not professionalism,” says Robert Hariman, a professor of communications and co-founder of No Caption Needed, a blog about photojournalism as a public art. “The Challenger photo was a screen grab. All the photos at Tiananmen Square were not good photos—they were too far away.”
There are also some bright spots for the professional photojournalists, though they aren’t the predictable ones. Right now, as its value on the open market of news magazines falls, photojournalism’s prestige, paradoxically, rises: a Dorothea Lange bread line photo from 1932 sold for $720,000 a couple of years ago; a dozen New York City galleries showed Magnum photographers’ work in 2007. Magnum’s enormous back catalog of everything from Castro in a paroxysm to Paul McCartney as a pre-tabloidal Beatle to Cambodian refugees will soon be for sale. (Some already line the walls of a boutique hotel in Manhattan, although most likely none is of famine victims.) In a sense, following all genres and fields whose commercial power has faded or is evaporatinge—what they lose in income and the more ineffable “heat,” they gain in the rarified status of art object.
Yet this status of photojournalism as art, or even as an accessory in a new waterfront condo/loft apartment, won’t necessarily help photojournalists as they try to conceive, shoot, distribute, and get paid for complicated images of difficult places.
We’re all journalists, but writers—scarf-free and spell-checked as we are—know deep down that photographers are different. Despite all the critics who have claimed photos are “a grammar,” images are more like a half-language (as John Berger, the critic who wrote Ways of Seeing, said), always both objective and freighted with meanings that even the photographer and her audience only sometimes understand. Good photography somehow can tell more, with its pulp and its present-ness.
That combination of directness and mysteriousness that is part of being a half-language must be preserved into the future. Despite the fact that amateurs have made iconic images in the past—the famed 1970 image The Picture From Kent State was taken by a student working in the college’s photo lab—there have been many more iconic images that are actually extremely professional: Robert Capa’s Death of a Loyalist Soldier, from the Spanish Civil War, or Eddie Addams’s General Nguyn Ngoc Loan executing a Viet Cong prisoner in Saigon, from Vietnam.
If we are to keep this history alive, we need to find ways to support professional photojournalists outside of the magazine and newspaper industry. Some of the future Kratochvils of the world—those not capturing the moment but capturing the context—will in twenty years be seen primarily as artists of fact, their images bought for a pretty euro in London and Berlin. But meanwhile, they must live and work. And perhaps those of us who “paint with words,” or what have you, and have gotten good at complaining about our own fate, should start to speak up on photojournalists’ behalf as well.
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