Trackback and good journalism

Jack Shafer at Slate has reviewed the Blogging, Journalism and Credibility conference and basically decided that bloggers are guilty of overstating their case by a country mile.

In a piece titled Blog Overkill he warns against "fetishising" a new technology or new media wrinkle (which apparently is what a blog is) and concludes: "... we owe it to this prodigious new communications form not to demand too much too soon."

Before then he managed to infuriate Jay Rosen whilst generating a helluva good discussion, both the original and Rosen's response are worth checking out. Here's a sample from one of Rosen's readers:

"I think the very existence of Jack's article is a tip of the hat to the increasing influence of blogs, and the future promise of a Journalism affected by the blogosphere. He's essentially added a Trackback to the end of his column that has enabled his readers to follow the discussion in the blogs and see for themselves where Shafer got it wrong or where he got it right. He didn't have to do this, and had he not, your response to the article would not be as center-stage as it is."

This bloke is right. The trackback feature is interesting, and its use in this instance points to some serious questions, as well as opportunities, for journalists.

Why shouldn't daily news sites publish trackback code on every story? The overhead is a lot less compared to the editorial requirements for comment pages, but the reader value would be high. The combination of the two, though, would be quite powerful. And the loop back to the reporters, in terms of seeing the ways in which their work is used, would undoubtedly enrich their writing.

The intricacies of coding have never been my strong point, but it seems reasonable to expect that any decent content management system could handle this sort of modification.

10 years of theage.com.au

Happy birthday to theage.com.au.

Still in print ... for now

Today's Oz Media has a round-up of projections for the industry in 2005. The main piece by Mark Day looks at the legislative landscape and the likelihood of change, as well as a quick summary of the major players and their probable courses of action. This is packaged with five accompanying breakout pieces looking at the divisions of print, radio, magazines, digital TV, advertising and marketing. Only one of these is online.

In a piece headed "Not yet out of print", Errol Simper writes:

"... Newspapers will spend the year setting the majority of news agendas, just as they did last year. Radio producers, news directors and talkback hosts will continue to scan the papers every morning as bountiful providers of program content. Sometimes the newspapers will receive attribution, more often they won't. The executive producers of any number of television programs will, likewise, comb the papers for stories that can be moved on a metre or two and served up at 6pm."

This is not nearly as true as it once was. And don't forget print editors pay just as much attention to what stories are running on TV and radio.

I wonder if Simper has heard of Newsgator?

Meanwhile, elsewhere in the section, News advises Fairfax, via the wisdom of JP Morgan's media team, to go tabloid and reap millions. Who are these nameless "analysts", and what real value do they add to a debate about newspaper formats? I mean seriously.

The best minds in the business of newspaper design don't automatically favour the tabloid - it suits some markets and some papers, but not all. There are other design options to attract readers and maintain ad revenues.

"Silly and unworkable"

hmm ... This probably seemed like a good idea - just before she said it out loud.

Newspapers, blogs and Technorati

There's a good discussion going on at Morph under the topic heading "Why newspapers still matter". Guaranteed to pique my interest.

It ties in nicely with an earlier Morph discussion on Open source media. The writer, JD Lasica, wrote:

"Good story, except the company that is in charge of the watermarking process isn't returning my phone calls (perhaps understandably). I don't have days to spend on the phone tracking this down to nail it - and if I blog what I've got so far nobody will care."

Maybe, maybe not. Funnily enough it provoked this response from one reader: "I shudder at the idea of blogging a 'draft' post based on a single source to find out if the story is true or not."

To which Lasica replied:

"It already happens dozens of times a day. (It may not rise to the level of a traditional news story all the time, but it still happens all the time.) When it does, readers who may have inside knowledge of the veracity of the report can contribute to the report or disavow the shaky part -- mostly out in the open.

Bloggers who do so should take pains to point out that the information hasn't been confirmed -- but I see no harm in doing so. (The alternative is to sit on the information.) And readers by now should be savvy enough to recognize an unverified report for what it is. (Not all do, but that's an ongoing educational process.)"

So bloggers get into discussions with readers about the finer details of a story. Or readers add their own details. Either way, this is clearly a departure from the traditional definitions of journalism. Jay Rosen has been making this point for a while, and it goes to the reason for holding a conference like the one that took place last weekend (even if the voices were somewhat limited) on Blogging, Journalism and Credibility.

Related to this is the issue of aggregator sites and the role they will play in the distribution of news. It's definitely a whole area for discussion itself, but it's worth noting that some major news sites are recording dropping visitor numbers to their front pages as readers follow deep links from blogs or aggregator sites directly to articles.

Some of the most popular sites are Blogdex and Technorati. These sites harvest millions of blogs and display the most popular ones - calculated by incoming links - or the most recently updated. And they can be sorted by topic into real-time feeds. Readers might continue to check their favorite writers, but these aggregators give every blogger a chance to be read if they write something worth reading. And it means that the brand value of particular mastheads will continue to be broken down unless major media organisations react smartly.

As an illustration of the power of aggregators, a search on Technorati this morning for "Academy Award screeners" has Lasica's post on Morph at number two. So while Lasica wrote that no one would care about the story, such as he had it, it's already out. You can imagine that post prompting enough online discussion to get closer to the truth before the LA Times gets the story published.

Growing demand for online news pages

What do you do if you're a big media company looking to expand your online presence? You could employ more people to produce more stories. Or you could look around the marketplace and size up compatible online publications for purchase.

A looming crunch issue for some sites is a revenue squeeze that's partly a result of their own success. According to the New York Times (reg rq'd) news and information web sites are back in town.

The problem is that advertisers want prime page positions, but the available inventory of pages is in limited supply. On the spectrum of problems for online publishers this is up the friendlier end of the scale, but nevertheless it's real.

So bidding wars are happening over businesses that only a short time ago were seen as undesirable.

"Online advertising is expected reach $9.7 billion in 2004, or about 3.7 percent of United States advertising spending, according to a recent Merrill Lynch report. Still, that number is expected to grow 19 percent this year as the nation's largest advertisers shift budgets from print and network television to cable and the Internet, the report said.

As a result, publishers are being forced to confront a potential advertising inventory crunch. There is no physical limitation to the number of Web pages, of course, but advertisers want to be placed on the most popular pages and those which cater to their most profitable audiences. And those kind of pages are in shorter supply. "

Looking for common ground

To time with the Harvard webcred conference, this piece in the Wall Street Journal continues the mainstreaming of blogs. ABC radio were on the phone this morning for a comment on a morning drive program (for the Northern Territory) - at least they recognise it's a genuine phenomenon.

There's a bunch of stuff in response to the conference on aggregators here and here. But the best one-stop roundup comes from Jay Rosen. Jay lists six key moments he took away from the two day meeting:

1. Public involvement leads to information hunger
2. Profitable for whom? How blogging makes money
3. There is no continuum on which journalists and bloggers fit
4. A passion for neutrality and the challenge from Wiki News
5. The podcasting era dawns for Powerline
6. Keep Your Eye on the Open Archive.

Number 3 came from Dave Weinberger. Dave is a respected authority on blog matters and co-author of the Cluetrain Manifesto, but I'm inclined to think that insisting there is no common ground between bloggers and journalists relies on an overly narrow definition of both.

I'm in full agreement with Jay on Number 6, though.

Marked man

In what can safely be described as a copout, former opposition leader Mark Latham took a swipe at the media as he exited the top ALP job:

"When I was hospitalised in August, for instance, the media frenzy was over the top, with photographers shooting through my hospital window. Accordingly, I have done everything I could to keep subsequent episodes as private as possible.

Unfortunately ever since the recent bout became known, and even though I was on annual leave, the media has been harassing people in our street, forcing our neighbours to call the police on several occasions."

Bad behaviour by individuals in the media is inexcusable, but Latham was the alternative Prime Minister. What did he expect?

Max Suich unravels some of the Latham angst:

"Latham was seriously ill and tried to hide it. When his illness was reluctantly revealed (after a suggestion from the Government that his absence deserved inquiry) he offered no intelligent explanation for the secrecy and the true seriousness of the illness was not revealed.

He appears to have had no members of his office who were competent - or, more likely, perhaps, trusted - enough for him to rely on to manage the essential affairs of a leader while ill.

Once a crisis blew up, largely because of this inept and secretive management of the news of his illness, almost the entire party leaked the desire for him to go. "

And the MEAA reported today:

"On Tuesday NSW police threatened to arrest journalists waiting for comment after Mark Latham's resignation announcement. Police attempted to use Section 28F(b) of the Summary Offences Act to restrict the movement of journalists covering the major political event. The Alliance wrote to the NSW Police Minister demanding that police immediately stop threatening journalists with a law generally used for harassment or to disperse gangs."

Photo: Penny Bradfield / theage.com.au

Explode the newsroom

Great post from Tim Porter on First Draft about the failure of current newsroom structures to deal adequately with changing media technologies, reader expectations, and the needs of reporting staff for clear direction and resources so they can "go out and commit some journalism".

Porter writes: "It is time to explode the newsroom and remake it in ways that bring flexibility, creativity, awareness of audience and collaboration to the forefront."

He offers six suggestions as starting points for a newsroom revolution, and concludes:

"There are principles of journalism that should remain inviolate, but there are no permanent rules about how to put those principles into practice. Nowhere is it written that the current structure of newspapers is the only way to do journalism. In fact, we've arrived where we are more by happenstance than by purpose, often by mimicking a singular innovation that moved the industry in a new direction. The introduction into newspapers of comics, of photography, of color, of editorial pages, even of the notion of objectivity, each broke a rule of its day and eventually enticed others to follow.

The future of newspapers belongs to those bold enough, and skilled enough, to invent their own rules. Who among the traditional newsrooms is going to lead us into tomorrow by being the rule-breaker of today?"

Jeff Jarvis makes some similar observations:

"Thanks to the internet - and the consumer control and choice it enables - the mass market is dying ... How do we serve a mass of niches instead of the mass audience? How do we afford to do that? How do we assure we do not ghettoize and marginalize those publics?"

Getting the story straight

Here's a New York Times (reg req'd) story from yesterday about a blog run by three Baghdad brothers. The article is free here.

Jeff Jarvis is highly critical of the reporter for sloppy work and for the decision to name the bloggers in full and then speculate on their relationship to US authorities in Iraq.

Interestingly, there's a conference at Harvard University this weekend titled Blogging, Journalism & Credibility. Jarvis will be there and promises to thrash this one out with the other participants. The conference will be webcast live. Check out the del.icio.us tagged page for updates.

Also attending is Jay Rosen who has written a terrific essay on Pressthink as part of his contribution to the conference. Jay says the blogging v journalism debate is over, not so according to Red Herring.