new media

Journalism organizations are factories.

I don't mean the manufacturing and distribution process of newspapers (printing), but rather the way news is handled. It's shuttled along a Henry Ford assembly line through reporter through copy desk (subeditors to you Brits), handled by a series of specialists, processed by automated machinery, combined, reorganized and shot out the door as a unitary product, whether it's print or online.

A post by Mike Smith at the Readership Institute includes a remark that "Web use of news sites peaks at noon, creating a perfect bell curve." This prompted me to take a look at a typical weekday's composite daily usage curve for Morris websites, which I hadn't done in awhile. It looks like this:

MinnPost.com launched today with a roster of familiar writers (many ex-Star Tribune), a printable PDF edition, and a homepage ad for the St. Paul Pioneer Press "e-edition."

Over the last five or six years we've seen a tremendous shift in power from destination sites to search. Google has been the big winner. In general, newspaper websites have been slow to recognize the implications of this shift, and have adjusted poorly to the new realities.

In the last 24 months a new contender has arisen: social networking sites, which are so "sticky" that they're displacing everybody else, even Google. And again, newspaper sites are slow to recognize the implications.

As more news organizations unite their online and offline efforts, there's a potential for great confusion as print journalists encounter a whole new language.

Dana Eagles of the Poynter Institute and Danny Sanchez of the Orlando Sentinel ride to the rescue with Webspeak, a series of simple definitions. First up: Page views, sock puppetry, mashup, bread crumbs. I couldn't find an RSS feed, but then, if you need the definitions you probably aren't into RSS anyway.

Facebook isn't journalism. It doesn't even try. But like other conversational/participative media, it's brimming with opportunity for journalism, for community-building, and for commerce.

Facebook came from a university setting and precisely targets a poorly met need in the general area of community and communications.

So why was Facebook created not inside a college of communications, but rather by a computer programmer who briefly attended Harvard?

I'm generally a big fan of the Poynter Institute and I often quote Roy Peter Clark, but not in the case of "Your Duty to Read the Paper," in which the great writing coach transforms himself right before our eyes into an Internet troll.

He says journalists should read more newspapers because they have a duty to do so.

I say they should read less.

Toss print aside.

Get out of the office.

Start talking to real people.