Rethinking the newsroom and journalism

I’m sharing a few quotes I’ve excerpted from Gina Chen’s excellent post, “Journalists must change thinking to change industry.” Chen was inspired by Jeff Jarvis’s recent blog entry about the need for journalists to add value in their newsrooms. And while Chen frequently cites Jarvis’ What Would Google Do?, her own observations are equally compelling:

• In my experience, the hurried newsroom culture doesn’t encourage deep thinking.

Indeed it doesn’t. To give but one example: Journalists on a beat are forced to quickly write stories both large and small, with no time to step back and consider, “Is my daily routine serving my readers in the way they would — and should — expect?”

• We forget that we’re a service industry: We’re in the business of helping readers make sense of their world, not of selling them news.

And yet how many times have we read articles that are little more than notebook-dumps of information? Journalists, in the rush to make deadline, have little time but to toss half-baked, confusing stories upon their readers — readers who need knowledge, and don’t care whether we’ve included a minimum of three sources, or have written an award-worthy nut graf.

Gina Chen’s open letter to newspapers

Gina Chen of Save the Media has an outstanding post today that tells newspapers what she as a consumer expects from them.

 Here’s Chen on:

Wanting original, well-reported articles:

While we still have a newspapers, don’t fill it just with 6-inch stories and snippets of yesterday’s news. I’ve read those already online. What I haven’t read already onlineis enterprise, a well-written profile that really digs deeply into a person, investigativepieces that expose government waste, inequity and greed. The short, shallow story isn’t going to save newspapers.  And if that’s all I get in the print, honestly, I don’t need the print at all. …

… There’s really no excuse for running most feature wire stories these days with a few exceptions, such as movie openings or some science and technology pieces.  And if you must run it, please make sure it has some additional information to localize it. That can be as simple as: Can I buy the product here? Is the trend happening here? What’s the local impact.  And, please, please, don’t tell me you don’t have enough reporters because you’ve laid them all off or cut their hours or furloughed them. That may be true, but as a consumer, I don’t really care. …

… Every reporter should be doing enterprise reporting on his or her beat. Some stories may be simply noticing a trend in a community; that’s fine. Not every story has to be Watergate. But there should be many stories that tell me something I can’t get anywhere else.

On integrating print and Web:

More Twitter tools for journalists

Gina Chen can always be depended upon for sharing with journalists great tips to improve their work. And she comes through again, with six Twitter tools for journalists.

This is a topic that Chen has covered before.

Two of the newly discovered tools that interested me most were Retweetist and Back Tweets. Check them out.

Break these blog rules, journalists

Once again, Save the Media’s Gina Chen is lighting the way for reporters who want to thrive in the digital age.

This time, she covers “10 journalism rules you can break on your blog.” My favorite is number 2:

Tell part of the story: Journalists are trained to wait until they have the full story before telling any of it. I’m not asserting that blogs shouldn’t be accurate; they should. But they should be immediate even if that means telling only the story as you know it at that moment in time. The beauty of a blog is you can update immediately as more details become apparent or earlier reports are disputed. This isn’t publishing lies; this is giving readers evolving information in real time.

Journalists and community building

Respond to readers’ comments, connect with them via Twitter and Facebook, read blogs in niche areas of coverage: This is just some of the valuable advice Gina Chen offers at Save the Media on creating communities of readers. The benefits, as Chen explains, is that journalists will increase their readership while learning what those readers want to know:

You follow up by listening to your readers’ friends’ ideas, including them in the conversation and connecting with them through social networks. Eventually, your readers will start promoting your blog or your stories by tweeting them or posting them as links on their Facebook page. You may gain readers outside your geographic area who are interested in your topic; embrace that. We’re in a global world.

Twitter, time management and journalism

Gina Chen at Save the Media offers her take on a typical day in an online newsroom, and it’s an essential read for  journalists trying to manage their time. From Twitter to Facebook to Google Alerts, Chen covers a lot in a short amount of space.

Her best piece of general advice:

You have time to do what’s valuable to you. Make the time. Get organized and get into a rhythm. You don’t need to check every social-networking site every day or even every week. Dip in and out.

Organizing the online newsroom

Gina Chen at Save the Media offers the second part of “What’s an online-first newsroom.” A few highlights of Chen’s recommendations:

• The best of the Web should come back to print
• Fellow reporters should follow each other on Twitter to cross-post tweets
• Traditional walls between editorial departments need to come down so that reporters can work together for the benefit of readers
• More writers than a traditional newsroom
• Organize the website along topics
• A thoroughly revamped print product

Ingredients for an online newsroom

At Save the Media, Gina Chen offers six attributes of an online first newsroom. Her list includes immediate blogging and Twittering, interactivity, getting journalists to work on multiple platforms, connecting with readers, curation and crowdsourcing.

Great tips for journalists

In Steve Yelvington’s post about the roles local news websites should play in their communities, one quote really stuck out for me:

Show me one single local newspaper site, just one, that has done a great job of building topics pages. Yahoo has topics pages. Cnet has topics pages. Newspaper sites? They have stories. Incremental stories that beg to be placed in context.

Ouch. Take THAT, online dinosaurs! I found Yelvington’s insightful comment via Gina Chen’s excellent Five Tips for Journalists on the Web, at Chen’s Save the Media blog. Here are some other links I’ve added to my growing list of bookmarks: