I'm still trying to digest everything I saw and heard at the Online News Association conference in Toronto, a lively city with a Chinatown, Little Italy and about 5 million residents who apparently don't jaywalk.
The conference was optimistic, with lots of discussion about how to use social networking in news coverage, if a bit heady at times. For instance, folks didn't spend a lot of time talking about how they'll make money with all this neat stuff. The conference even had its version of a rock star -- Adrian Holovaty, who opened everyone's eyes to the potential of
easy-to-browse online databases and won a
$1.1 million Knight News Challenge grant this year to expand on the concept.
Here are some themes from the conference, in no particular order and by no means comprehensive. Please add your thoughts below.
Free is the new paid. (And flat is the new up.) No one was talking about charging for content, and Meredith Artley, executive editor of LATimes.com, predicted that in the next few years more online archives will be available for free. All with the idea of free access to content driving such paid services as advertising, of course. On the legacy side, meanwhile, flat looks like up to many print and broadcast outlets fighting steady erosion of their traditional customer base.
Database the news. Think of news as data, and collect it in databases so interesting that users will browse them as well as search. Such databases can bring bring the serendipity of print to online. Examples: Washingtonpost.com's
Loudoun County restaurants and Holovaty's EveryBlock project. Along these lines, Northwestern University's Rich Gordon won a Knight News Challenge grant to clone Holovaty -- rather, to encourage more programmers to become journalists.
Everybody is talking video, but what form will it take? Take a look at Washingtonpost.com's
onBeing, which won a special prize at the awards ceremony.
Multimedia is moving into a more central role on sites, with a drive to integrate graphics, videos and text in comprehensive presentations rather than creating standalone "sidebars." The best multimedia stories are conceived as multimedia from the start. That obviously was the case with "
Not Just a Number," a multimedia package about the impact of homicides from the Oakland Tribune. The presentation won two awards, including the Knight Award For Public Service, which carries a $5,000 prize.
Traffic measurement is a moving target. Web audience measurement companies want to gauge user "engagement," not just unique visitors and pageviews. The issue was raised in a
Monday article in
The New York Times. But the formulas are far from universally accepted. Some examples of measuring engagement: time on site, how recently a user visited, whether users left a particular page for another site, if users post comments or subscribe to a feed.
The Web's strength is in providing
"narrow comprehensiveness" -- reporting almost
everything about
something. For example, Lisa Williams' placeblogger.com
catalogs blogs according to location, and Williams mentioned New York-based
Slice, a group blog devoted to everything pizza.
News organizations are anxious to get into social networking, but have yet to settle on the best combinations of social networking, crowdsourcing, citizen journalism and local news. A Saturday story in
The Globe and Mail about grown children who refuse to empty the nest illustrated the possibilities of crowdsourcing. Other examples:
Along the same lines, many folks are trying to figure out how to
bridge the gap between real and virtual communities. Williams' placeblogger received a $222,000 grant from the Knight News Challenge to enable people to find hyperlocal news through the promotion of blog "geotagging," or placing geographical identifiers on content. (Unfortunately, Williams apparently
wasn't as satisfied with the discourse in Toronto as I was.) Steven Clift, the head of
e-democracy.org, is
blogging about how to use online citizen engagement to foster participation in local communities.
There's still
a lot of work to be done in developing content management systems (the systems that manage online content) that can showcase and integrate multimedia presentations. Speakers at one session said they had to overcome technical obstacles in order to get their systems to place video or interactive graphics on content pages.
The world of user comments is still in disarray. More and more news outlets are enabling user comments on more and more of their content, but there's little agreement on how best to deal with them. CNN.com screens all comments on its
Political Ticker, for example, but employs "an army" to do so. Many questions at a session on user-generated content focused on how to deal with reader comments and whether anonymity debases dialogue. Anil Dash of Six Apart thinks so, declaring at the last panel of the conference, "Stop having anonymous comments on your sites … People act like jerks when they're anonymous."
Google is the interface of the Web. When writing online headlines, put yourself in the shoes of someone typing terms into a Google search box. More and more users come into a news site through search, not the home page. On a related note, The Associated Press' deal with Google News will lower traffic for news sites that once got traffic from news searches, but some wonder how valuable that traffic was in the first place. There are rumbles from some news organizations as AP contracts come up for renewal.
Despite widespread cutbacks on the print side,
there's a whole lot of hiring going on online. LATimes.com, Freep.com, MSNBC.com and NPR.org all said they're looking.
The journalist as personal brand. A session about the ethics of blogging included a discussion about the importance of voice and digital identity as individual journalists establish their
personal brands as well as that of their employers.
Be considerate of other humans, regardless of whether you're doing your reporting with social networking sites or a notebook. At a session discussing how social networking was used to cover the Virginia Tech shooting, student Austin Morton, who was Seung-Hui Cho's resident assistant, discussed what it was like to be besieged by the press. Students resented the e-mails, calls on their cell phones, even a reporter sneaking into Cho's dorm, she said. Morton said she perceived reporters' condolences as hollow statements designed to elicit comments from students who didn't want to talk.
Her comments brought to mind the fundamental rules of journalism: tell as much of the story as you can, maintain individuality, minimize harm and be accountable.
Amid all the discussion of journalism and community, one of the convention keynoters -- Michael Oreskes of the
International Herald Tribune -- pointed to work probing some of the particulars of the relationship between the two.
Oreskes, a former deputy managing editor of
The New York Times who has served as IHT executive editor since 2005, quoted research by Tim Besley of the London School of Economics. Besley's research links the growth of press freedom with higher rates of national income per person -- and lower rates of corruption.
"Prof. Besley's study used a measure of newspaper press freedom," Oreskes said. "But there is no reason to think that the method of distributing our journalism is the crucial factor … Communication is what is fundamental. So is discovering what is happening and using information to control one's destiny."
Quoting Mathias Döpfner, head of the Axel Springer publishing empire, Oreskes urged journalists not to abandon core values in their effort to survive. Or as
Döpfner put it:
Let's not commit suicide out of the fear of dying.
