Digital Utopia

The Las Vegas Sun will relaunch their website this summer under the new leadership of Dave Toplikar, who visited U Iowa in March. They want to push the envelope of multimedia storytelling and explore how to tell news creatively with the help of digital tools.

Toplikar sent me the profiles they are looking for, a good guide to understand how the online media industry is evolving. A combination of technical skills and reporting experience is the bottom line:

- Flash Designer: We are looking for someone who is good at building flash
graphics and 3D motion graphics to go with analytical news stories written
by our reporters. This position would also work with photographers on
enhancing their flash graphic skills. And this person would work with our
artist and cartoonist on animating their work.
- Videographer: We are looking for someone who has skills at shooting,
editing and processing video news stories for the Web. I was hoping to find
someone who has shot and produced TV-station quality video who could help
us also help the Sun create a new video identity online.
- Web Content Editor: This person would work with reporters and editors at
building deep, evergreen content sites that would contain granular content
about specific Las Vegas area topics. This person would need to be a good
writer and also have multimedia Web skills.
- Web Technician: This person would have all the skills of a multimedia
reporter, but would mostly do processing work at a desk. The person would
process video, audio and provide other assistance for the multimedia for
our daily updates and for our deep content sites. Skills in editing video
and audio clips, helping to create podcasts and vodcast will be essential.

As discussed by Mindy McAdams some months ago, few Journalism graduates would easily fit these profiles. In my Online Journalism course I’m trying to give the students the basic bricks for a job like these offered by Las Vegas Sun: awareness of the technological options, ability to learn to use new tools and critical thinking to decide when and how to use any storytelling strategy. This might not be enough, but Dave Toplikar told me he really wants to get journalists not just technical staff. And a journalist with the right attitude will quickly learn how to put together the puzzle of multimedia storytelling.

Two weeks ago, in the blooming spring of Tampere, in Finland, I participated in an International Seminar entitled “Towards Participatory Journalism”. The line-up was very exciting, and hopefully a starting point for joint research projects: Jane Singer, currently at U Lancashire, Thorsten Quandt, Ludwig-Maximiliaans U in Munich, Steve Paulussen, U Ghent [the three of them in the picture, discussing in the woods of Pyyniki], Mark Deuze, on a videoconference from U Indiana, and Esa Sirkkunen and Ari Heinonen from U Tampere. You may want to browse the presentations yourself, but let me summarize the rather skeptical perspective that the different presenters shared in very complementary contributions.

Participatory journalism seems theoretically very attractive as a way to improve journalism public service role (or to get back to it, it could be argued), but in practice participatory projects are not easy to develop nor are they guaranteed per se to improve quality of journalism and democracy.

Participatory journalism requires changes in journalists’ attitudes and newsrooms internal organization to be effective, which Steve Paulussen demonstrated to be very challenging; at the same time, it may not foster the participation of the voiceless, it might be restricted to local and worthless stories (at least in terms of democratic collective interest relevance) and media companies may just use it to cut jobs. Real risks that the ideal has when put into practice.

Empirical and anecdotal data suggest that journalists resist to embrace participatory journalism or, at least, to let it change their professional principles. Therefore, participatory projects being developed nowadays may not be effective in achieving the benefits that theoretical approaches to participatory journalism suggest (more responsive and responsible journalists, more civic engagement of citizens, more transparency of the news production process, more power of citizens in defining the news agenda…).

In online journalism, immediacy is the priority and journalists seem have a diminished responsibility on their work (few bylines, mostly editing wires), as Thorsten Quandt pointed out. In citizen media cases, Mark Deuze highlighted that the profile of users is often the wealthy families rooted in their communities, those who are already well served by professional media. Both ends don’t seem to meet in what would be the idealistic intentions of participatory journalism proponents.

Jane Singer defended that journalists need to redefine the grounding for their ethical standards, and I proposed they should have new responsibilities in the new participatory context. They will still be needed, in order to encourage and enhance active audience contributions and reach out for what the audience does not cover, which can actually be the most crucial stories for social debates.

The challenge is detecting what are the factors and strategies that may foster participation that contributes to improve journalism and the overall democratic debate.

Professionals and researchers met again last weekend at the 8th International Symposium on Online Journalism at the joyfully restless and welcomingly warm Austin, Texas. This was my first time participating in the successful yearly event organized by Rosental Calmon Alves, and I can say it was an awesome experience, in and outside the auditorium!

Convergence, multimedia storytelling and citizen journalism were obviously the hot topics of the conference. After letting the ideas settle down in my mind, the best-practices cases explained by US national and local news sites as well as European and Latin American online media, and the less-than-optimist studies of some scholars may seem contradictory. Well, I think they are not.

While the US bigger national newspapers presented their efforts in converging online and offline newsrooms and the benefits of this strategy, top European dailies (El País and Le Monde) expressed an overt refusal of convergence. “It is too early to close the web laboratory”, stated Jean-François Fogel. He argued that online journalism is still finding its own model and should not be the victim of the crisis of newspapers. 75% of LeMonde.fr users never read the newspaper and have a younger profile. While the newspaper circulation and advertising has been declining since 2002, the web is growing steadily “because we have been more innovative than the competitors”. LeMonde.fr expects to consolidate this online leadership creating its own self-competitor, a different news website that will be launched this summer.

Ismael Nafría agreed that paper and web should have separate teams. “Internet is a different medium, with its own rules, language, users, pace…”. He defended the idea of coordination of newsrooms rather than integration. At Prisa, the media group that owns El País, they have an online company (Prisacom) that staffs 200 (and growing fast) in charge of all the webs of the group. Each website has its specific team and there is a central online newsroom that manages participation, multimedia and innovation projects. They started to be profitable in 2006 with 30M-euro revenue.

The research I presented at Austin, a preliminary study on convergence trends in Spain (PDF) by a team of 25 researchers led by Ramón Salaverría, tries to understand the phenomenon as a multidimensional and open process. In fact, our survey of 58 media companies suggests that smaller local and regional media are more eager to explore newsroom collaboration and professional multiskilling than bigger media. Even in the very same media groups, national media tend to keep independent newsrooms when they foster collaboration in their regional outlets. Overall, convergence development in Spain is very moderate and does not challenge existing routines and values. Fully-fledged convergence has been idealized as the place where every media should be heading, but the fact is that it may not necessarily have positive outcomes to the quality of news.

Forget citizen journalism

At least that is the suggestion of Jan Schaffer, who is leading the analysis of participatory media trends in the US at KCNN.org. She presented a thorough study of the features, strategies and values of sites that foster active audience involvement. “I would rather use citizen media rather than citizen journalism to refer to them”, she said, arguing that many of the initiatives don’t try to compete with news media, but to be a bridge between citizens and the media. Their objectives are mainly creating community debate and helping to cover those hyperlocal issues that mass media usually neglects. Therefore, they measure success by the quality of participation rather than by revenue. The cases from Fort Myers, Florida (more here), and Bluffton, South Carolina, showed that if journalists care about citizen participation, put the means to gather ideas and use them when reporting, there can be very successful experiences starting from mass media.

As Lisa Stone, of the women blog sindication community BlogHer, put it: “Ask, don’t tell”. That’s the starting point to better serve your community. So, we can forget about citizen journalism, but it seems to me that active audience involvement is something that can add value to online journalism… if only you really believe in it. Alfred Hermida (he also comments on the Symposium at his blog Reportr.net), from the University of British Columbia (Canada), presented a study (PDF) on UK online media strategies on citizen participation, and the main conclusion was that they were developing lots of services but at the same time thinking that they were not a worthy contribution to their products. They were basically following a trend (blogs were the most developed form of participation) to be able to say they were innovative, but their professional culture made them see user-generated content as a gatekeeping problem, rather than as an investment. Ismael Nafría explained that at Prisacom they have already hired 6 people to manage citizen participation besides 6 freelances. He calculates that 10% of their audience is an active contributor to the different options they offer.

Multimedia skills for journalists?

BlogHer is an example of how you can do successful business if you find the adequate niche. A similar example is MediaStorm: they have specialized in compelling multimedia storytelling, where video, audio, text and pictures are combined to explain heart-moving journalistic stories. They make auctions to sell some of the stories to big media, and promoting their work on iTunes, Flickr and MySpace. In a lively round table moderated by Nora Paul (University of Minnesota), Brian Storm defended that what media need now is good journalism and critical thinking, and multimedia tools are just ways to explore new forms of storytelling. He defended that the best way to produce multimedia stories is in teams with people with outstanding skills in each of the elements of the story. He was very radical in saying that journalism schools just need to teach the j-basics, good repoting.

But when NYTimes.com speaker, Andrew DeVigal, said that their better hires lattely have been two Flash developers with no journalistic experience, I somehow prefer to think that the more the students can get at the university, the better. The key: teaching them to learn to learn new tools and skills. The videos linked at the first paragraph of this post are by Lindsay Meeks, a creative local multimedia journalist I met at the conference… She will graduate at UT this summer, and she has a bright future ahead. Lindsay conducts on her own video interviews with two cameras (one on a tripod) and creates Flash containers. A brave online journalist you would like to have in your multimedia storytelling team!

Dave Toplikar is the man my Online Journalism students needed to meet. He is the real thing, a multimedia journalist at Lawrence Journal-World, with years of experience as a newspaper reporter, self-trained web editor and now beating education news for the paper and the web in a converged newsroom.

Dave was at the University of Iowa this week, sharing his expertise with different courses in the School of Journalism as a part of a very nice “Professionals in residence” program. This week my students were editing the video for some original reporting they are preparing as web stories. This are the tips that Dave sent me for them today:

I really appreciated their questions about how to decide when they should use a video camera or an audio recorder to add multimedia to a story. It’s something that I’ve struggled with too over the last few months. But I think the best answer I can give them now is to try to prioritize stories by importance and by timeliness. If a reporter has a lot of time to do everything himself or herself, then they could do the whole package.

But if it’s a breaking story, or a story that has to go in the next day’s paper or on TV that night, you’re going to want to spread out the workload and give it to the best people who can do the best parts of the job in the amount of time they have. For example, I wouldn’t want to send one person carrying a still camera, a lens bag, a video camera, a tripod, lights, an audio recorder, a notebook and a pen out to a
story, unless I was going to give them plenty of time to get the information, then plenty of time to write, process the photos, make an audio slide show and make a web video.

Sometimes, all I have time to do is write the story before I have to go on to the next story. So I depend on a web producer to add some other elements to my story, such as scanned documents, outside links or links to archived stories.

This is probably pretty obvious, but I would recommend students who are already good at shooting and editing video to work on their writing skills. And if a reporter is already a good writer, that reporter can move on to learning multimedia skills, such as photography, video and sound editing. And let’s not forget editors: If an editor is good at laying out pages in Quark, they probably would have no trouble at all learning how to lay out and design Web pages. Having multiple skills will help them find jobs much more quickly.

What I most appreciated of Dave is his avid attitude to learn new things. That is what make him who he is, and the Lawrence Journal-World website. He showed me his own videos in his iPod [photo], and still told me that he wanted to learn more from the TV guys.

Some other relevant things he explained us that can let you understand why the LJW is regarded as a lab of the newspaper of the future (NYTimes dixit):

• There are no reporters for the web. Newspaper and TV reporters negotiate who covers each story (sometimes both, sometimes one passes data to the other) and the 3 online journalists (“web producers” at LJW) build on that reporting to create web stories that have more than just the text or the video when needed.

• The web does not cover national or international news, and therefore the online journalists avoid the silly routine of editing AP wire. They wisely assume that who wants national news goes to CNN.com or NYT.com. The newspaper is a different product, where readers expect a summary of what’s going on in the world without having to buy another paper.
• A big multimedia story requires planning and 2-3 weeks of work in newsgathering and production. But their web is also attractive for breaking news (the reporter usually tells on the phone the first data to the web producers) and evergreen content (U Kansas basketball background data, local restaurants guide…).
• Newspaper reporters don’t feel comfortable producing video; TV reporters prefer not to write paper stories. Everyone prefers what they are used to and editors want their reporters to prioritize their own product. It takes a while to get used to be multimedia! A “managing editor for convergence” tries to push everyone further and journalists receive training in house by peers.
• The bottom line is still doing good reporting, no matter what formats you use. That is the priority for Dave. The online strategy evolves constantly, exploring possible options, and thinking about the future “everything is possible”. Convergence, audience participation… are just part of the experiment!