Prescription for SND’s ills

Like many other news and former news folks, I’ve been unable to tear my eyes away from the Society for News Design trainwreck. (Charles Apple’s coverage here) And like many others, I’ve been involved in sotto voce conversations in the wings as the blood spread across the stage.

First, my background: I’m not now nor have I ever been an officer of SND. I let my membership lapse recently, as I’m out of the business. I’ve been a paying member off and on over the years, always (as far as I can remember) out of pocket. A Quick Course in Chapel Hill really turned my head around on newspaper design in the early ’90s and planted the seed for my career.  Many of my friends and most people I would call colleagues are or have been members. I’ve attended three annual workshops — San Jose, Houston, and Boston — on my own dime and felt they were worth every penny. My only other official connection was a lecture session I gave at a Quick Course in Salt Lake City. So, I’m a semi-active former member, not in any way an important voice.

Here’s the upshot: SND needs a wholesale reinvention. SND needs to get into the news business by promoting and incubating journalistic ventures that will eventually compete with the current mainstream press. Yes, I said it, it’s time for SND to bite the hand that’s fed it for decades.

The news industry has let us down. I can’t count how many of my friends and colleagues have lost their jobs or are just waiting for the axe to fall. And the axe appears to have fallen disproportionately on “visual” people. It’s time to fight back, and to do it in a way that genuinely supports the interests of members — by creating jobs.

Who is doing that, right now? A scattering of disconnected ventures, each hoping to be the next big thing, many with little or no money or support, just enthusiasm and big dreams. Those of you who’ve followed my Smartnews misadventures know all about that. These efforts need support: investors, clerical/intern help, good ideas, marketing. These are not necessarily SND’s strengths, but they need to be. News needs that. Those of us who believe in design as a journalistic tool, who love infographics and grids and, yes, even the Typeface du Jour need that.

Jay Small, whom you could call an important voice, is on the right track:

SND must represent the brightest thinking focused on innovation in communicating the news. Typeface du jour? Web width of the month? Hell, no. Attracting and engaging news consumers and enabling communities around the news? Oh, yeah!

SND needs to fill another leadership vacuum: The gap between so-called visual people and word people. Far too many designers, photographers and graphic artists have weak spelling, grammar and reporting skills. Way too many writers and editors have no clue about the synergy of their efforts with those of everyone else. Much has been said about bridging the worlds, but the silos remain. And toss multimedia and Web skills into the mix, too. There are just not enough jobs out there to justify separations of church and state, anymore. Anyone who’s lucky enough to have a newsroom position has to know it all. But so few of us do.

Some of SND’s training does address this: The folks I most respect get it about perpetrating good journalism, about making every word and image count. But it’s in our nature to go for the pretty over the effective. We’ve got to focus on changing that if we want to have a place at the table.

If SND were to do all that, I’m afraid that much of what it focuses on now — the big contest, the annual meeting — would have to take a backseat. It’d be the end of an era. But, let’s face it, folks, we’re at the end of a journalism era.

Should the guvmint step in to save journalism?

Just got my hands on Free Press’ white paper, Saving the News: Toward a National Journalism Strategy. Free Press bills itself “a national, nonpartisan organization working to reform the media.” I’m only just now sitting down with this; thought I’d share before I was done looking at it.

Journalism for those who can afford it?

I’ve been wondering whether we’re headed for tiered journalism — quality news and information available only to those who can afford it, and who have a deep enough interest to bother; bloviation, press releases, gossip, trivia, poorly researched crap for everyone else.

I don’t see a conspiracy, I suspect a pattern. Public interest journalism has been on the wane for a long time. The reality is, more people are interested in the cast of Twilight than in what happened to that $700 billion we gave to the banks. And even those of us who are interested in following the money are liable to get their information from people they feel represent their interests, whether that be Fox and Friends or Paul Krugman.

Even if that tribal dynamic weren’t in play, the bottom has just flat dropped out of the “content” business. If it can be digitized, it can and will be shared, for free. Almost all efforts to build walls around general-interest news or entertainment have failed. Readers won’t pay for stuff they can get somewhere else for free, even if it’s not as high quality.

And you’ve got ad buyers abandoning media. So general interest and public interest news are shrinking, maybe toward a singularity. Newspapers, TV stations, magazines just can’t afford their staffs anymore.

So you’ve got a deepening sea of news and info out there, but less and less of it, proportionally, is what we think of as traditional, paid, professional, supervised, vetted, edited journalism. Even though everything’s digital, there’s a low signal-to-noise factor, kinda like those cheap cassette tapes you may have bought as a kid (if you’re a geezer like me.) Lotta hiss, distortion, pops and breakages.

Meanwhile, some mad scientists are tinkering with noise reduction schemes and boutique operations that produce (presumably) crystal clear news for specialty markets — but only for elite customers who can afford it. Who would that be? Big corporations, mainly. Government agencies, maybe. Well-heeled nonprofits, I suppose.

Here are a couple of examples:

My cousin, a Washington technocrat, turned me on to Stratfor several years ago. Basically, it started as a newsletter founded by author and futurist George Friedman. He looks at world events through the lens of “intelligence” (you know, CIA stuff) rather than journalism. So Stratfor treats the same stuff as the New York Times or Wall Street Journal, but in a way that’s of particular interest not so much to the many, but to those who have lots at stake. And it costs $399 a year to subscribe.

Now, $399 might not sound that atrocious, but keep in mind, with Stratfor you get geopolitics: analyses “without bias,” breaking geopolitical news, and monographs and assessments “which offer rigorous forecasts of future world developments.” No art reviews, no comics, no gardening section. No local crime or City Hall. (By the way, Stratfor is looking for an online direct-marketing copywriter.)

Here’s another example, a startup I just found out about today. Psydex, a company that searches and analyzes news sources “in real time” just launched Psyng, a “portal that scours newswires, Internet feeds, TV closed captions, blogs and other sources of ‘chatter.'” Psyng claims to cut through the noise to reveal “statistical patterns and trends in social networks, human behavior and financial markets.” Then they plan to sell access to that to media and corporate interests.

The example they cite: “When US Airways Flight 1549 landed in the Hudson River in January, Psydex’s algorithms detected—within seconds of the incident—unusual chatter levels well before the news was broadly disseminated.”

So if you really want up-to-the-second info — ahead of your competitors, Psydex would say — you should buy it from Psyng. “Whether your Topic of interest is Oil Refinery Explosions, Apple Computer or Mergers & Acquisitions, Psyng can instantly alert you to key news events, delivering correlations and projected impacts as the news happens,” the site boasts.

Apparently, there’s a network journalists may join, but I’m not sure how that works or what, if any, remuneration there might be for “professional journalists, editors and other intelligent observers.”

Want to get back at evil corporate greedia? Carving each other up ain’t gonna do the job

Lots of bitterness and fury from people whom Tribune has canned recently. Hell, I just got a 10 percent pay cut in my non-newspaper job, so I feel — well, a sliver of the pain, myself.

It appears the head-rolling — which seems disproportionately distributed among “visual” folks — has brought long-built tension over how much value designers and copy editors add to a newsroom to a head. Couple that with resentment toward the survivors, and you’ve got a bloodbath.

OK. I get it. Newspaper owners don’t think we’re worth as much as writers (I say “we” because, though I have a writing job now, the better part of my news career was in layout, copy editing and design.) Many of our jobs have become, as The Yelv points out, obsolete.

What I don’t get is journalists turning on each other.

If you want to make a future for yourself in news, you’re going to need every friend you can find. Now’s not the time to burn bridges — at least not with our colleagues. I will go so far as to say that corporate news has already burned our bridge — and this time, I mean “our” in the sense of all journalists.

I’m not saying this to be a pollyanna. I’m saying we need a better survival instinct.

I won’t lie; publishers and executive editors have disappointed me a little in the lack of enthusiasm for Smartnews. You would think that now would be the time they’d take an interest in something that could reduce costs. They are so shellshocked, however, they cannot even begin to look two steps forward in their game. And they don’t really have a lot of leeway; I understand the money is tightly controlled right now. No one wants to play guinea pig.

I can live with that. They don’t owe me anything.

Where I’m much more disappointed is in the utter lack of heart I keep finding among my colleagues to do something concrete about their predicament. Apart from a job search.

Look, it doesn’t have to be Smartnews. Maybe a journalist doesn’t see the value or the future, or doesn’t trust us. I can live with that, too.

Do something creative. We pride ourselves on our creativity, do we not? The possibilities are infinite. Do it yourself, like my friend Ernie with Short Form Blog. That’s a great example of a designer/editor redirecting his efforts to the Web. Before, he was a curator of news for print. Now, he curates for the Web. Get involved with Publish2. Take an ad sales person out for drinks and pick her brain.

Breaking out the machetes ain’t gonna work, folks. We’ve lost one war, already.

Would news by any other name still smell as … inky?

I got an interesting comment on my LinkedIn status line, which is “Jim would like to collaborate (or just brainstorm) with you on putting laid-off newspaper journalists back to work.”

The respondent said “Create a Truth Syndicate. The day is coming when when consumers will pay for vetted information.” The comment sparked a minor mudslide of questions that I thought I’d allow to spill into this blog.

I wonder in what way would a “truth syndicate” be different from what we now refer to as news. Not that news or journalism has ever had the truth market cornered. One thing I’ve learned for sure in my time in the biz: Facts are slippery little bastards. And truth is bloody vaporous.

Even well-intentioned sources get things wrong. Even diligent reporters screw up, miss a crucial detail, misunderstand the context. And there’s the vast ocean of disagreement. Not just on politics. Hell, it might be disagreement on what happened during that shootout. Or whether the refs are biased (as a long-suffering N.C. State fan, I can attest that they are. Grossly. In favor of Kerliner.)

Meanwhile, we’ve all learned to suspect that the news media harbor serious political biases. What those biases appear to be may depend on your politics, of course. But it’s common wisdom that Fox News is in the pocket of the GOP and MSNBC is not-so-secretly Team Obama. An awful lot of the “news” comes to us through the distorting filter of pundits. It’s hard to find a story that touches on national politics that isn’t infected with talking points that originated in the DNC or the RNC.

So how would a truth syndicate operate? Would it fact-check the news of the day as reported by other outlets? Or would it break news like any news organ? Would it be strictly enterprise and investigation, or is there room for sports and that jumble of everything else we call “features?” Would it just be a news wiki?

I have heard tell of corporations hiring journalists; perhaps they are performing a similar function privately, helping the bosses slog through the mire of he said-she said to find the meaningful gobbets in the day’s news. (Or maybe they’re just hacking out lame internal newsletters, I really have no idea.)

I would love to read your thoughts on what a truth syndicate might look like. What would the market be? On which media would it thrive? What’s the truth syndicate’s business model?

Daydreaming about a graphics-heavy newspaper (or Web site)

I’ve been contemplating the rash of layoffs among the specialists who draw maps and charts and explanatory diagrams for newspapers: graphic artists and graphic reporters.

If you’ll check that link, in the comments, Michael Dabrowa daydreams about a paper that converts to an exclusively infographics format. I’m no graphics whiz, but I’ve dreamed that dream, too. I once imagined that the ideal staff for SmartNews (back when it was a newspaper) would be a graphics reporter, a features reporter and a copy editor/designer. (And me, of course.) I just have a tremendous feeling for the power of polished, well-thought-out explanatory graphics. Done correctly, they provide insight at a glance that might take 500, 1,000, 20,000 words.

Graphical reporting is gravely underrated. If you want to make efficient use of shrinking newshole, build a graphic.

We have so many talented visual journalists already on board with SmartNews — really, a surfeit of skill and passion. Would love to find a way to get them involved in a salable project.

Big thanks for a small post*

Thanks to Ernie at shortformblog for the shout. Smartnews thinks shortformblog is smart news. Smartnews is biased. Ernie is a good friend. Seriously, you should bookmark shortformblog, and follow it on Twitter. Ernie has a great voice and distills the news of the day beautifully, skills he learned at now-defunct Link (a young-adult oriented news tab) in Norfolk, Va.

I could imagine, down the road, a site like shortformblog that distills the content from an institution like Smartnews. Throw in some Facebook-style app-madness and “social networking” and you’ve got the Next Big Thing™. Yeah, all you venture capitalists take a number, all right? Our people will get in touch with your people.

Heh. If you’re gonna dream, dream big.

Well, back to the gritty reality of writing about colonoscopy coding.

*All of the posts at Shortformblog are small, so we’re not denigrating the chunky-text mention.

Check out this new online pub: The Paris | SF

I ran into Jes Alexander, the publisher of The Paris | SF, in a LinkedIn.com discussion on the future of news. I was intrigued by the format of the model for The Paris, l’Herald de Paris: essentially, a free newspaper online. But built from scratch instead of on the back of an existing print version.

Alexander also runs Irreverent Homemaker, an online magazine.

I can’t tell you how successful these products are or will be, but I’m fascinated that folks are trotting out new online ventures with original content underneath the din of ad revenues plummeting, publication staffs being laid off, newspapers crashing and burning.

News items of interest to Smartnews enthusiasts

A couple of interesting Forbes items I ran across via Twitter this afternoon.

First is last year’s article on newspapers’ revolt against Associated Press. Buried down in there is some fun stuff about the amount of money at stake. According to Forbes, AP only derives about 30 percent of its income from newspapers. That surprised me.

U.S. newspapers paid about $215 million in annual content fees to AP last year, even as they provided up to 30% of the reporting that composes AP’s daily state news coverage. AP’s fees currently average around $143,000 per paper, but the actual amount a newspaper pays per year varies greatly from paper to paper, with the largest dailies paying well in excess of $1 million a year.

That’s a boatload of cash. Maybe not AIG money, but still.
And then this:

… any alternatives would have a hard time matching the breadth and timeliness of AP’s daily news report, particularly on state news, breaking national news, photography and sports. Still, that hasn’t stopped editors from shopping around. For instance, sports news agency PA SportsTicker has experienced an uptick in inquiries from U.S. newspapers about its services, according to Sales Director Jay Imus.

Naturally, we envision a network of journalists so broad it could really begin to make a dent in this argument. Erica Smith has tallied up nearly 8,000 layoffs and buyouts at U.S. newspapers in 2009. How many of those are writers, editors, photographers, graphic artists, designers, Web developers? If just one-tenth of them sold content through Smartnews, that’d be a hell of an amazing body or work.
Meanwhile:
The other article describes Rupert Murdoch getting on the ‘hey, maybe we should sue Google’ bandwagon. (This article’s where I found the link to the item about AP.)
Here’s an interesting thought at the bottom of this article, from Anthony Moor, deputy managing editor of the Dallas Morning News Online.

“I wish newspapers could act together to negotiate better terms with companies like Google. Better yet, what would happen if we all turned our sites off to search engines for a week? By creating scarcity, we might finally get fair value for the work we do.”

Would newspapers have the balls to try something like that?

At what cost free publicity? Heh.

MediaBistro’s WebNewser picked up on Smartnews A Smarter Way to Gather Content, But at What Cost? It’s hard to complain about a little publicity, but any time you end up in the news, you realize what our sources go through when they open the paper (or turn on the TV or what have you) — you see all the niggling little things that the reporter got wrong.

So at the risk of sounding ungrateful (and I’m not, I’m glad to get the word out), here are my quibbles:

I’m pretty sure neither Randy nor I live in Raleigh, N.C. I used to live in Raleigh, but that was many, many moons ago — long before Smartnews was a twinkle in my eye. We do live in the Carolinas, however, so … pretty close.

The last sentence was a little off, too: “The cost to a small publisher (weekly circulation of less than 100,000) could run as little as $1 and go up to a flat fee for exclusive, unrestricted content for $1,000.”

Yes, content can go for as little as $1 a pop for small publishers. However, only large publishers could ever shell out $1,000 for exclusive, unrestricted use of an item on Smartnews. So, as far as the headline, I’ll tell ya at what cost: Rock bottom prices! That’s what cost. Especially when you consider our contributors. A few bucks for a Charles Apple graphic or Martin Gee illo? Good Lord, yes.