On an industry email listserve, someone commented that "the thing that best distinguishes us from the guys trying to start online publications in their basements (besides the really big presses out back and the staff of professional journalists in our newsrooms) is that we have our reader's trust." Here's my response:
That's the official religion of the newsroom. I think it's a dangerous delusion and part of the culture of arrogance that is rotting the foundations of journalism.
Yes, there are people who trust us.
And there are many who don't, and I'm not just talking about political wack jobs.
Anyone who's ever been covered by a newspaper knows just how thin that claim of professional infallibility really is. Sit down with citizens in a blind focus group and you'll find an alarming lack of faith in media.
Take a look at your own actual market penetration -- how many people read you regularly, and how many don't? You'll find that you are not getting a vote of confidence from the public. Look at your own web stats, and not just the junk pageview figures. How many local users visit your site regularly, out of how many in your market? People are voting with their feet and their fingers, and they're going elsewhere.
Inviting the community into the tent doesn't undermine your credibility. It enhances your credibility.
It gives your professional journalists an opportunity to listen, to understand the points of view, the perceptions, the daily concerns of the people-formerly-known-as-the-audience.
It gives you an opportunity, if you take it, to make your journalism better, to make your newspaper better, to make what you do more connected with the community and more relevant to the community. It helps you avoid mistakes, especially mistakes of omission, and helps you discover and correct your mistakes of commission.
You're not "allowing" comment. Comment is going to happen no matter whether you participate or facilitate. When you don't, you open the door to competition that understands how to interact.
The questions are: Will you benefit from that comment, or will you continue to drift away from your community? Will you take an active role in making that community conversation better, or will you allow it to fester into negativity? Will you accept that kind of responsibility?
Many editors will not agree with what I'm saying. But the 35-year downhill slide of newspaper readership testifies to the speciousness of the holy-brand claim.
I believe that if you look deep inside an editor who fears the public, you'll find an editor who lacks confidence in his own leadership abilities and is using control to cover for those shortcomings. What we need is editors who are willing to perform in public, admit their own occasional failures, exercise some humility, and learn from interaction. They'll be better editors for it, and the community will become a better place for it.
Much has been written about our project in Bluffton, SC, and much continues to be misunderstood. We're not replacing reporters with "citizen journalists." We're facilitating an online conversation that helps make our professional journalism better.
The results overwhelmingly refute the notion that comments are dangerous and undermine the holy brand. In less than 12 months the paper, which replaced a failed conventional zone edition, built CAC-audited readership numbers that compare with the best our industry experienced in the 1960s. The brand went from zero to market domination almost overnight.
This does not come without a cost. You don't just toss technology out on the Web and get a thousand flowers blooming. You have to commit your time and energy and your heart, and by "you" I mean the whole organization, not two guys off in a closet labeled "online department." But the payback is there, and the payback is what newspapers and communities need.
Comments
New Media
Newspapers are using too old a formula. They need to invent some totally new not just to survive, but to thrive. Matt--http://digitalartphotographyfordummies.blogspot.com
Cross-posting my listserv response to Steve's great post
Quoting Steve:
Anyone who's ever been covered by a newspaper knows just how thin that claim of professional infallibility really is. Sit down with citizens in a blind focus group and you'll find an alarming lack of faith in media.
I like to say (and often do, in speeches) that "98 percent of what you read in the Tribune is accurate. The exception is the 2 percent of which you have personal knowledge." I go on to explain that the nature of journalism is to synthesize and sometimes omit, as well as to translate for the broadest possible potential audience. Inevitably the people who have "personal knowledge" believe that the process has intentionally omitted, glossed over, downplayed, or misconstrued the single most important fact in the story, when in reality it may even have been the next graf in the old inverted pyramid.
This is part of what leads to lack of faith. The other part is another thing Steve refers to, and frankly this is not restricted to editorial departments. We became so complacent and confident in our community position and commercial success that we stopped listening to the community, at least at most major metros of which I am aware (though I hear similar gripes from people in Hilmar, California, or Wausa, Nebraska, to name two of my favorite small towns). Why did newspapers rush to embrace voicemail in the '80s? At the time, not so much for labor savings as for the interposition of another wall that "protected" us from being "bothered." I remember coming back to the Tribune from California after a business trip in the early 1990's and showing the editor of the paper that the San Jose Mercury News was running reporters' phone numbers in tag lines (yes, this was was an issue long before the Great Email Address Debate). "And what do you think would happen if we did that here?" he asked pointedly, so I took that point and let it drop.
Steve goes on:
Inviting the community into the tent doesn't undermine your credibility. It enhances your credibility.
It gives your professional journalists an opportunity to listen, to understand the points of view, the perceptions, the daily concerns of the people-formerly-known-as-the-audience.
It gives you an opportunity, if you take it, to make your journalism better, to make your newspaper better, to make what you do more connected with the community and more relevant to the community. It helps you avoid mistakes, especially mistakes of omission, and helps you discover and correct your mistakes of commission.
I've been saying in speeches to journalists and journalism students for years -- including a lecture I gave last month to the incoming freshmen at Medill -- that reading email and message boards and blog comments, and listening to readers/users in other ways, gives us so many more data points to include in our reporting that the outcome is better, more accurate stories -- and despite the challenges I list above, a primary responsibility of a journalist is to be accurate. From accuracy our opportunity to have a positive influences on our communities flows; without it, we're just another Photoshop shop.
Well, okay, I only added blogs to the list in the last 18 months. (Shows that even someone who has been working in the same place for 35 years can be adaptable, perhaps.)
Back to Steve:
The questions are: Will you benefit from that comment, or will you continue to drift away from your community? Will you take an active role in making that community conversation better, or will you allow it to fester into negativity? Will you accept that kind of responsibility?
Aren't the right answers -- for us as thinking people, for us as committed citizens of our communities, for us as employees of civic institutions whose continued viability depends on the right answers -- inherent? For once, I see no advantage in ambiguity.
Owen Youngman
http://owenyoungman.com
Good points...
You're right on the money when you mention the thin claim of professional infallibility. In my experience in many different companies, I've come to cringe whenever someone called "looking for background on a story" or "just wanting a quote." I've seen horrendous misquotes that ran exactly contrary not just to what was actually said, but against everything we'd crafted our brand or product to stand for.
In one case, with a small company I'd once owned with my (now) ex-wife, we literally had a shareholder insurrection due to a misquote in a small newspaper, that managed to find itself in the hands of a disgruntled "investor" on the other side of the country.
The journalist in me wouldn't write an article that required edit privledges from someone quoted. The marketer in me wouldn't be quoted without edit privledge.