Personal media, contrarian journalism provide counterweights to Eastern media’s groupthink

This column appeared April 30, 2002, in the Online Journalism Review. Here’s the version on the OJR site.

By J.D. Lasica

Less than three years ago, a case could be made that the West — particularly the greater San Francisco Bay Area — had become ground zero of the new media revolution.

New York and its cadre of elite corporate media were latecomers to the Net party and, in the eyes of the digerati, worse than clueless. Irrelevant.

Meanwhile, way out West, Wired magazine and its dazzling digital sibling, HotWired, became the instant bible of the fevered plugged-in crowd — those who got it, who understood that the Internet would change everything. Salon magazine, and then Slate, fashioned ambitious sites that were vibrant, smart and required reading — everything the establishment media was not. The Industry Standard (and, at the end, its terrific Web site) came out of nowhere to become the best publication covering the new economy. Business 2.0 wasn’t far behind. Other Bay Area tech magazines — Upside, Red Herring, InfoWorld, PC World — invested in online staffs operating well-done Web sites.

CNET powered its way to become the premier tech news site. More people were reading Yahoo! News than the top 20 online newspapers combined. TechTV and its companion Web site hoped to bring computer news and how-to advice to the cable masses. eCompany Now scrambled onto the Bay Area scene in early 2000, paying its top writers six figures. Knight Ridder Digital moved its headquarters from Miami to San Jose to get closer to the heart of the action. Startups in Silicon Valley, San Francisco, Los Angeles and Redmond, Wash. — many of them content sites (MSNBC, Amazon, ThirdAge, BabyCenter, Women.com, Adam.com, LookSmart, ThemeStream) or service journalism sites (eHow, ExpertCity, Sidewalk, CitySearch) — had begun dotting the media landscape like buttercups.

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Belo, Canada.com, Tribune, Knight Ridder reap the fruits of convergence

This column appeared April 11, 2002, in the Online Journalism Review. Here’s the version on the OJR site.

By J.D. Lasica

Quietly, with barely a glimmer of attention, the largest newspaper chains on the continent have spent the past few months rolling out Web publishing systems that herald important changes for both online staffs and news consumers.

The new systems tie each media company’s Web sites closer together, lowering production costs, smoothing the way for network advertising buys, and enabling editorial staffs to share content much more easily than before.

On the whole, this is good news. From the bean counters’ point of view, eliminating duplicate spending and increasing ad revenues brings news sites one step closer to profitability, viability and vitality.

From the perspective of online news crews — especially small, understaffed teams — leveraging editorial contributions from sister publications can make for a richer offering.

And from the vantage point of users, digital news networks can mean deeper and better news coverage — or a sterile, homogenized product lacking soul, personality or purpose.

When it comes to this flavor of convergence — let’s call it chain convergence — execution is everything.

Belo Interactive

The Winter Games provided a good example of what digital news networks can offer the news consumer.

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Mobile devices give news outfits another bite at the apple

This column appeared April 4, 2002, in the Online Journalism Review. Here’s the version on the OJR site.

By J.D. Lasica

Steve Yelvington remembers the Friday night five years ago when, at the end of a new media gathering in Washington, D.C., a colleague took 20 of the conference-goers out to dinner. “He had an Apple Newton, big as a college yearbook and absolutely unreadable. He had downloaded a dining database, and so we walked, I swear, five miles to find a great restaurant. When we finally got there, it was closed.”

Last summer, Yelvington and two colleagues were looking for a dinner spot in London’s Chelsea district, with one checking his Garmin portable phone, another his Dick Tracy-like Suunto watch/compass with Global Positioning System, and Yelvington his Palm Pilot. “We wandered around aimlessly and couldn’t find a place to eat there either, even though we had tons of electronic gear. We were trying to decide whether to ask directions or try to get lucky with a blonde in a red Ferrari when it turned out to be Fabio.”

The moral of the story, Fabio aside, is that you can have all the cool toys in the world and it won’t do you much good unless you’re hooked up to a reliable information network, and that’s still years away from coming together, says Yelvington, vice president of strategy and content for Morris Digital Works.

That’s not to say that mobile devices aren’t making headway among info geeks today — they are, especially in Europe and eastern Asia. But we’ve only seen the crest of the coming wireless tsunami.

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Continued | Back to Personalized services

What does all this mean to journalists about to enter the field? “Journalism students shouldn’t be scared off by all the technical talk about parsing data and setting up personalized news hierarchies,” said ZDNet’s Farber. “The content people don’t need to be involved in the technical back end. For a journalist, it’s all about understanding how readers use those tools and then going out to gather the information most relevant to your readers.”

Today, news gathering often involves more than heading out to cover an assignment with a pencil and notebook. It might involve bringing along a camcorder, digital camera, handheld tape recorder, laptop computer or palm-held personal digital assistant for instant transmission back to the newsroom or directly to users. It might involve tracking down source materials on floppy disks so that the editors and tech people back at the office can transform that raw data into news and information that’s relevant right down to the individual user level.

In a multimedia world, young journalists need to use their imaginations to grasp the possibilities for making the news more personally relevant to each reader. Content does not need to be written for one reader, but that reader should be able to access and move through the information in a unique way.

In the rough-and-tumble world of the Web, it’s still uncertain who’ll win the battle for the hearts, minds and eyeballs of news consumers. Will news sites ultimately be the place where users go to get their daily dose of personalized local information? Will it be the portals? Weblogs? Who knows? Perhaps it will be a new source of news not yet invented.

Some analysts believe that users will eventually stop surfing to news sites and portals alike. Instead, a personal desktop application, trained to learn your likes and dislikes, would go out and fetch the news each morning from a dozen different sources, assembling it into an integrated package of interesting news stories, features, analyses, mailing list commentaries, humorous e-mails, shopping bargains and a live Webcast of your favorite sporting event. Already, you don’t have to surf to the New York Times or ABC News Web sites to catch breaking news. You can download small programs that let you see scrolling headlines and stock quotes from those sites on little pop-up windows on your computer screen.

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Continued | Back to Personalized context

Newspapers’ historical role as the hub of the community puts them smack dab in the center of the local marketplace of news and information, civic discourse and public policy, commerce opportunities and personal services. Consider the rich “content” that newspapers can draw upon: not only hard news, but a reservoir of features, advice columns, community announcements, gardening tips, home furnishings, comics, horoscopes and advertising. That’s right: Ads are content. Job listings, apartment for rent, storewide sales — all of that is useful information to some consumers.

Over the decades, news organizations have erected artifices to maintain a separation between church and state, and that division has resulted in a tradition of editorial independence from business considerations. When reporters and editors keep faith with the readers rather than cater to the company’s bottom line, journalism is well served.

With the advent of the Internet, journalists face the challenge of embracing a medium where the ethos is still a work in progress and the divisions not so neatly delineated. The reality is that the Web is not first and foremost a publishing medium; it’s primarily a tool for retrieving information, communicating, and making transactions. On the Web, users don’t want to merely read about people, businesses, products and services. They want to be connected to them.

A user who reads a music review on RollingStone.com expects to be able to buy the CD with a couple of more mouse clicks. A high school student reading a roundup of best colleges in a major news publication appreciates an additional link that lets him submit an application online. The fact that RollingStone.com and the news publication receive a small commission for those transactions may upset ethics purists, but the real violation of trust would occur if Rolling Stone published a favorable review to increase sales or the news publication listed only colleges that paid them a fee and failed to disclose that arrangement.

On the Web, service journalism has transformed into transaction journalism, a term I coined in 1997 to describe the phenomenon of news sites giving users the opportunity to participate in an immediate commercial transaction. The practice can take the form of giving users the option to buy a book or CD they’ve read about on a news site — a useful service, in my view. Or it could cross the ethical line — something that is occurring with disturbing frequency, particularly by sites that have no journalistic traditions from which to draw upon.

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