I mentioned that I would be taking a road trip speaking to voters across the US about the issues that would decide the presidential election. After I wrote that post, Grzegorz Piechota with Gazeta Wyborcza in Poland got in touch to ask me about it. Suw and I met Grzegorz at the Transitions Online new media workshops in Prague in July. Grzegorz said that Suw and I helped motivate him to start a blog, Forum 4 Editors. He posted an e-mail interview with me about the trip.

His long journey proves that online journalism is not about sitting at the office and googling for facts. Kevin is going to do an old-fashioned reporting - meeting real people and talking to them - but he will use all the gadgets of the new media - Twitter , Flickr , Dopplr, Twibble, TwitPic, YouTube, Fire Eagle and others.

It’s as I often say, I’ll be doing old fashioned journalism with cutting edge tools. We’re going to try to bring people along with us and hopefully kick off a conversation not only amongst American voters but also with the Guardian’s global audience.

In responding to Grzegorz, I found this blog post by Martin Belam about the history of blogging at the BBC, where I got my start in blogging during the last US presidential election. The post somehow slipped by me when he wrote it. I’ll blame the crush of the holidays. It’s a bit belated, but thanks Martin for the kind words. Martin also pointed me back to my ‘valedictory’ post from the 2004 US elections:

I first got on the internet in 1990 when I went off to university. We had to use Unix commands to do anything, and I never thought it would appeal to anyone without seriously geeky tendencies. The learning curve was too brutal.

But then in the summer of 1993, I played with an alpha version of Mosaic. Even as primitive as this web browser was, I thought to myself that this was going to change everything I do as journalist. And of course, Marc Andreesen, who helped create Mosaic, took his degree, went to Silicon Valley and created Netscape. …

However, I have to say that of all the high-tech projects I’ve done, this blog, which I consider pretty low-tech, probably comes closest to all my university dreams of what online journalism could be.

And I’m really excited about this trip. When I did the trips in 2000 and 2004, there were so many things I wanted to do but the technology wasn’t quite there. Now it is. I’ll be writing posts about how we’re doing on the trip here on Strange and share as much of the lessons I learn as time permits. We leave on 5 October from Los Angeles and will be travelling some 6500km across the US.

If you want to follow along, we’re GuardianUS08 on Twitter. I’ll use my own Flickr account. I’ll post the other details as I have them. If you want to be a part of the conversation, just drop me an e-mail. If you want me to see something, just tag it GuardianUS08. See you on the road.

Stephen Colbert introducing the word 'truthiness'

I was writing a post for the Guardian US Politics blog today using the excellent FactCheck site to cut through the spin, mis-representations and some might argue lies emanating from the Republican Convention speakers. Before someone accuses me of bias, both parties spin, and it’s the job of journalists to counter the spin regardless of the party. FactCheck is a brilliant non-partisan service from the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania, and I will stress non-partisan. They examined Democrats’ claims last week during their convention, and took the Obama campaign to task for airing an ad airing in Michigan that misrepresents John McCain’s current stance on low-cost loans to beleaguered American automakers. Politics is played by representing the facts in such a way as to support one’s world view, but there is truth and then there is ‘truthiness‘.

FactCheck does an excellent job of documenting its sources that allow people to evaluate the source material in total and also see the source immediately. It’s a bit of old school footnotes and new school linking, but it’s an excellent exercise in transparency. Even before clicking through the link, a reader can clearly see that some of FactCheck’s quotes come directly from press releases from Office of Senator John McCain.

I compare this to an AP story on the Huffington Post, on Google and Yahoo News that does the same fact checking job as FactCheck.org but doesn’t have any links. I know that this is syndicated content. But why not include links in the syndicated content? Come on, it’s not that technically difficult. I think that the Associated Press is leaving itself open to charges of bias by not providing links to the source material, and the AP has had to circulate talking points combating charges of bias from MoveOn.org and others against its Washington bureau chief Ron Fournier because he considered taking a position with John McCain in 2006. And now that McCain strategist Steve Schmidt has all but declared war against the media, it would be wise to increase the transparency.

As an internet reader, I’m increasingly suspicious of journalists who don’t link. Yes, if they quote an official that gives me a sense of the source. But why not link to original source material? It also allows me to dig more deeply into the story if I want without having to turn to Google.

Scott Karp of Publishing 2.0 says that it is a waste of resources to throw away all of the research that journalists do, and linking is not important simply in terms of transparency:

…understanding the value of links, and how they connect content, ideas, and people, is fundamental to understanding the value of the web. And understanding the value of the web is the key to unlocking the new business models that journalism needs to survive and thrive in the digital age.

UPDATE: The Feedburner feed has now been fixed, so you should get articles in your aggregator as per normal again.

When we switched Strange Attractor from Movable Type to Wordpress, we borked the Feedburner RSS feed… Oops! Unfortunately, it’s been so long since I started that account that I’ve, erm, lost the password and the password reset seems to have been sent to an old email address that I no longer use… Oops again!

So, if you’d like to still receive Strange Attractor by RSS, then use this feed in the meantime, whilst we try to resurrect the old one. If you want a feed of the comments, then that’s here.

Suw and I are still bedding in, so to speak, with the brilliant new WordPress-powered Strange Attractor, and one of the things that I haven’t quite set up is Del.icio.us auto-posting (although ‘auto’ might be a stretch seeing as the feature seems to work when it wants to). Until we get it working again, I’ll just have to post some of the things that catch me eye.

Convention opportunity costs

I’ve already written about my views on the excessive coverage of the US political conventions. It doesn’t take 15,000 journalists to cover a four-day informercial by the political parties. I would be thrilled if the 15,000 journalists actually cut through the stage-managed crap and told the American people and the world what these candidates actually planned to do, but they don’t.

Jeff Jarvis has much the same view and put it excellently both on BuzzMachine and his weekly column at the Guardian (my day job):

The attention given to the conventions and campaigns is symptomatic of a worse journalistic disease: we over-cover politics and under-cover the actions of our governments. We over-cover politicians and under-cover the lives and needs of citizens. . . .

We don’t need the press to tell us what the politicians say; we can watch it ourselves on the web. We don’t need pundits to tell us what to think; we can blather as they do on our blogs. The rise of mass media - primetime TV - ensured that conventions would never surprise again: they became free commercials. The internet then took away the last reasons to devote journalistic resources to the events - there’s nothing we can’t see and judge on our own.

Brooke Gladstone at On the Media flagged up the childish behaviour of the on-air ‘talent’. At FoxNews, Bill O’Reilly petulantly complained about a newspaper that had insulted him, and MSNBC’s Chris Matthews had a go at colleague Keith Olberrmann for making a ‘yackity-yack’ hand gesture for whittering on. I agree with Ms Gladstone when she says:

After Obama’s speech, true to form, the pundits told us how to feel about it. This week, the cable news talkers told us that Obama had to reveal himself, but so did the news channels. They all saw this week as promotion for themselves, as much as Obama, and they tried to tell us how to feel about them.

But I don’t feel that good, frankly, because they got in the way of the story, because they made themselves the story. Because if this truly was the historic event they kept telling us it was, then they all talked way too much.

Pundits are getting in way of the story. They think we need them to tell us how to feel or think. I don’t think I’m alone in resenting when people try to tell me how to think or feel. Besides, now if I feel the need to entertain myself with anchors behaving like children, I can always watch it the next day on YouTube.

‘Lifecycle of a New Story’

Alison Gow wrote an excellent post of how the journalism work flow differs now in the age of the social media. She expertly and succinctly walks journalists through traditional reporting and how things can be. (I originally wrote have changed, but this is a work in process.) Every step of the reporting process can draw on new social media tools and tap into a broader range of expertise. I’ll flag up one of her five steps:

Step Two

Reporter researches story (Web 1.0)

Phones/meets contacts to verify information; searches Google for background/experts; finds expert and emails questions; includes response in article; sets up photo opportunity with picture desk; writes article and sends to newsdesk.

Reporter researches story (Web 2.0)

Crowdsources idea using social networks; uses blog searches and blog translators to find posts and experts worldwide; uses own blog to post developing and ask for input and suggestions from readers; sets up online survey and poll (promotes these using links to it from own blog, Facebook page and online forums); posts links and questions on specialist messageboards; searches social bookmarking tools for related issues; uses video discussion site to seek views; records telephone interview for podcast; collates findings and discusses package with print and digital news editors; films video report; begins writing detailed, analytical article for print product, accompanied by quality images - some found by picturedesk searching photo-sharing websites’ Creative Commons pool.

It’s a great post. Keep it handy. Distribute it to your staff, and flag up her conclusion. “I had no idea when I started doing this how thin the ‘old’ opportunities for investigating stories would look compared to the tools at our disposal now; it’s quite stark really.”

Read the comments. Alison talks about the tools she uses.

I’ll be writing more about the tools that I plan to use to manage all the work I will be doing on my upcoming US Election road trip, mentioned in my post about how to geo-tag photos. The blog launches next week, but I’m already reaching out into the social networks that I am part of.

Chrome as a web operating system

Steve Yelvington consistently writes insightful posts about new media, the newspaper business and community. Steve is a journalist through and through, and he also has an excellent grasp of the web and technology. Last year, he told me over dinner how he wrote a Usenet news reader for the Atari ST in 1985.

Steve sees Google’s Chrome not simply as a web browser but as a ‘Web operating system’.

The vision for Chrome, as documented in a 38-page Web comic, is to create an environment that optimally manages and coordinates Web-based applications. That sounds a lot like the classic definition of an operating system: “An operating system (commonly abbreviated OS and O/S) is the software component of a computer system that is responsible for the management and coordination of activities and the sharing of the resources of the computer. The operating system acts as a host for applications that are run on the machine.”

He sees Chrome as a game-changer.

NOTE: People have taken issue with the EULA, saying that by using Chrome you give Google “a perpetual, irrevocable, worldwide, royalty-free, and non-exclusive license” to do what the search giant wants to do with content submitted using the application. Gizmodo says that Google is updating the EULA to ‘be less creepy‘.

UPDATE: Aah the joys of experimentation! Another update to come as soon as a few things are clarified.

Alongside Stephanie Booth and Nicole Simon, I’m organising the Web 2.0 Expo Europe blogger outreach programme which we’ve snappily titled “Blogging Web 2.0 Expo Europe”. The idea is to gather together a community of enthusiastic bloggers who are interested in writing about the event and spurring their readers/colleagues/friends to sign up. In return, they’ll get a complimentary pass to the conference worth, well frankly, lots of dosh!

You probably already know about Web 2.0 Expo. It’s aimed at web designers and developers, product managers, entrepreneurs, VCs, marketers, and business strategists who are embracing the opportunities created by Web 2.0 technologies. It takes place in Berlin, on 21 - 23 October 2008, and keynote speakers include John Lilly (Mozilla), Martin Varsavsky (FON), and Tariq Krim (NetVibes).

The way the blogging programme will work is that we’ll ask participants to do these few things between now and 6th October:

• publish at least 4 Web 2.0 Expo-related blog posts, podcast episodes or videocasts, e.g. announcement of the event, speaker information, speaker interviews, or any other event-related stuff
• encourage readers, friends, and/or community to register for the event
• display the Web 2.0 Expo logo on their blog, with a link to the registration page, until the day of the conference

We think that’s pretty easy, but to help you along, we’ll provide participating bloggers with:

• event badges
• a discount code to share with readers, colleagues and friends
• access to information about the event suitable for re-blogging, such as announcements and speaker information/interviews (when possible)

In return, bloggers will get a full conference pass to either use themselves or give away to readers.

But that’s not all… The five bloggers who have done the best job of promoting the conference, measured both by effort and referrals, will be upgraded to a Premier Blogger Pass with full conference access, e.g. to the press room, to speakers for live interviews and other goodies we are in the process of putting together. We will announce the winners of the Premier Blogger Passes and confirm Complementary Passes on 7th October.

But wait! Even that’s not all! As participants’ discount code will be unique to them, we’ll be able to tell how many people they’ve referred to us, and there will be something special for the person who has referred the most attendees, counted right up until the moment registration closes.

What type of bloggers are we looking for? We want to spread our net wide, so we will welcome blogs, whether monolingual or bilingual, in any of the major European languages. (Indeed, we’ll be trying to ensure there aren’t too many English-only writers!) Size doesn’t matter - whether you’re the biggest Czech tech blogger there is or have a small but enthusiastic audience who you think will be just chomping at the bit to get hold of a discount, get in touch. We’re after passion, enthusiasm, and persuasiveness: It’s your ability to persuade people to sign up that counts!

We’ve a limited number of places on the programme, so act now, and we’ll let you know as soon as we can whether you’ve secured a spot.

We’re aiming to kick things off properly next Tuesday 9th September, so please do email me right away if you’re interested.

One thing to note is that not only might things change as the programme develops, but they may change in direct response to your feedback. We’d like to know what you think about this outreach programme, so do leave a comment and give us your thoughts.

Technorati Tags: bloggingw2e, w2e_europe

Yesterday afternoon, Strange Attractor migrated from using a very old installation of Movable Type to using a shiny new version of Wordpress. We’re very happy and excited that this has happened as it’s going to give us a lot more flexibility in the long run to install plug-ins and do cool things.

You might notice that things have subtly changed, e.g. there’s no preview button on the comments now, but hopefully you’ll find the site quicker to load, easier to comment on, and generally better in other ways that we haven’t quite figured out yet. The site may change more over coming weeks as we tinker with it. (The very fact that we can tinker with it makes Kevin and I very happy!)

Thanks to Hylton Joliffe and the team at Corante for making the transition so smooth!

In May, as part of the Carnival of Journalism, Ryan Sholin asked:

What should news organizations stop doing, today, immediately, to make more time for innovation?

I have another take on that question, and it is one that more news organisations are being forced to ask. What can news organisations no longer afford to do? What is your news organisation doing that is either too costly or provides so little value to your readers/viewers/listeners that it’s no longer justifiable? Or put another way, if it’s not unique and it’s not really uniquely relevant to your audience, is there something else that you should be covering that is? What is the opportunity cost of covering that event that everyone and their dog, cat, sister, brother and third cousin covering? What are you foregoing to cover that event?

Why do I ask this question? I give you 15,000 reasons, which is the number of journalists covering the US political conventions. That is 3.75 journalists per delegate. It might be defensible if those 15,000 journalists was actually doing something unique in terms of coverage. But they aren’t. Furthermore, that is 15,000 journalists covering an event that the New York Times aptly described as “effectively a four-night miniseries before an audience of 20 million people or more”.

During a planning meeting, I was asked what kind of news we could expect. I responded: None. The entire goal of the conventions is not to make news, not to have surprises. They are carefully choreographed, scripted and stage-managed. Yes, the candidates will make an acceptance speech that is newsworthy, but the rest of the evenings are designed to net as much free air-time and coverage as possible to launch the candidates’ campaigns.

Political conventions are like class reunions for American press corps. I’ve covered two, and they are great fun and great theatre, but they aren’t great news events. Ted Koppel left the 1996 Republican Convention early, complaining that it was little more than a picture show. This year, he’s there as an analyst for BBC America. His assessment of the coverage is pretty damning:

Amy Gahran, writing for Poynter, called the numbers of journalists covering the convention an unconscionable waste of news resources in light of the current state of the news business. Mark Potts said:

At a time when news budgets are being slashed because of declining revenue, how can a news organization possibly justify sending a raft of people to the conventions? (I suspect the numbers for the Olympics are about the same-and just as ridiculous.) …

What stories are they going to get that the AP can’t supply? Hijinks of the local delegates? Inside info about what the candidates hope to do for the economy back home? Local color on Denver and St. Paul? It’s really hard to understand the need for this kind of bulk coverage.

And I couldn’t agree more with Michele McLellan of the Knight Digital Media Center who says that news organisations must focus on what is unique to their franchise. As I often say, the danger of Google News for news organisations isn’t that it steals your traffic but that it shows how little is unique in most coverage, how much re-packaged wire copy we re-produce. That’s the real danger, and it’s why the average news website visitor views about 2 pages per month. And Michele echoes my concerns about opportunity costs:

I also am frustrated when I thinking about all the stories that thousands of reporters might be covering closer to home as the conventions unfold. With the troubled economy, mortgage foreclosures, health care, the federal budget deficit and rising energy costs, I don’t think it’s possible for journalists to be developing enough stories about the impact of these issues on their communities and the people who live in them. Not to mention creating and linking to resources for people in trouble and holding officials accountable for their share of the problem (or explaining why they have no share).

At the end of the day, the Columbia Journalism Review lays out the naked truth, of the 15,000 journalists:

7,500 aren’t doing much at all. This isn’t surprising. Only a small number of reporters actually have a reason to be here. The rest are conventioneering—seeing old friends, eating Democratic-themed menu items (“Barack Obama’s Turkey Chili”) in pandering local restaurants, brandishing their press passes at all comers, looking for free things, and spending about 14 percent of their time trying to rustle up enough stories to justify their presence to their editors. These reporters are the ones mostly writing about themselves, or their friends, or their experiences exploring Denver with their friends (“I was enjoying some turkey chili with David Broder yesterday…”). At least they’re open about the fact that they’re enjoying themselves.

And I blame journalists as much as their editors. Yes, trips have always been used by editors to reward good journalists, but there are journalists who have come to treat the profession like their own personal travel bureau. They come up with the flimsiest pretence for extravagant travel that is of little journalistic value and of little benefit to their audience, who in the end are footing the bill.

No journalism organisation has ever had unlimited resources, and now, newspapers are fighting for their very existence. It is not a time for profligate spending, as if it ever were. If we are true to our word that journalism is essential to a healthy democracy, then we have to use our limited resources judiciously and for the benefit of our audience. If we provide them relevant information, then, hopefully, they will support our efforts. If we continue these wasteful ways, then our lofty arguments about our essential democratic role will be seen as disingenuous and self-serving.

Disclosure: Yes, I am taking a trip in October to cover the US Elections. But I am keeping a close eye on the bottom line. The quality of coverage is not directly proportional to the cost. I use digital technology to undercut the traditional cost basis of journalism. It’s what we all need to do. We must use disruptive digital technology to reduce the cost basis of what we do. It will give us more resources to do journalism and to innovate.

I have one prediction that I am reasonably confident in making. In 2012, there will not be 15,000 journalists. Not because news organisations finally come to their senses but because so many have ceased to exist.

I have an article in The Guardian today (in the paper and online) about email, how it’s getting out of control and what we can do about it. It contains some of my thinking on email, operant conditioning, and how social tools can help us reduce the amount of email we send (and therefore, hopefully, receive). Here’s a taster:

Back in the early 1990s, email was a privilege granted only to those who could prove they needed it. Now, it has turned into a nuisance that’s costing companies millions. We may feel that we have it under control, but not only do we check email more often than we realise, but the interruptions caused are more detrimental than was previously thought. In a study last year, Dr Thomas Jackson of Loughborough University found that it takes an average of 64 seconds to recover your train of thought after interruption by email. So people who check their email every five minutes waste 8.5 hours a week figuring out what they were doing moments before.

It had been assumed that email doesn’t cause interruptions because the recipient chooses when to check for and respond to email. But Jackson found that people tend to respond to email as it arrives, taking an average of only one minute and 44 seconds to act upon a new email notification; 70% of alerts got a reaction within six seconds. That’s faster than letting the phone ring three times.

Time out
Added to this is the time people spend with their inbox. A July 2006 study by ClearContext, an email management tools vendor, surveyed 250 users and discovered that 56% spent more than two hours a day in their inbox. Most felt they got too much email - by January 2008, 38% of respondents received more than 100 emails a day - and that it stopped them from doing other things.

Dr Karen Renaud, a lecturer at the University of Glasgow, and her colleagues at the University of the West of Scotland discovered that email users fall into three categories: relaxed, driven and stressed. “The relaxed group don’t let email exert any pressure on their lives,” Renaud says. “They treat it exactly the way that one would treat the mail: ‘I’ll fetch it, I’ll deal with it in my own time, but I’m not going to let it upset me’.” The second group felt “driven” to keep on top of email, but also felt that they could cope with it. The third group, however, reacted negatively to the pressure of email. “That causes stress,” says Renaud, “and stress causes all sorts of health problems.”

Read the rest on The Guardian website or in the paper.

Thanks to everyone who helped me out with this article, especially Tom Stafford who was my original inspiration!

Tip of the hat to Martin Stabe for highlighting this link as he does with so many must-read media stories. Vin Crosbie has a lengthy and thoughtful post, nay essay, on why the US newspaper industry is in dire straits in two parts, see Part 1 and Part 2. Vin’s prediction is this:

More than half of the 1,439 daily newspapers in the United States won’t exist in print, e-paper, or Web site formats by the end of next decade. They will go out of business. The few national dailies — namely USA Today, The New York Times, and The Wall Street Journal — will have diminished but continuing existences via the Web and e-paper, but not in print.

Predictions like this might seem common, but what is unique is the rational argument that Vin presents. He goes through an extensive examination of media history and media economics. The conclusion is that newspapers have violated the principle of supply and demand and failed to adapt its core product.

It is almost impossible to overstate how utterly the supply of news and information available to most Americans has changed during the past 35 years. Within a single generation, the Supply & Demand equation has gone from relative scarcity to certain surplus. People now have so much access to information that some are complaining about ‘data smog‘.

I’ve said this before. So many journalists that I meet still believe that there is something exceptional about what they are doing and producing. They still operate on the assumption that information is scarce, which is why the industry has largely failed to adapt to the information and media-saturated society that we live in.

And for journalists angry with the internet. That anger is misplaced. Half of the newspapers’ decline relative to readership and population happened before 1991, a few years before public access to the internet and awareness of interactivity and multimedia. In the US, readership began to decline in the 1970s. As Steve Yelvington has said, “Even if the Internet had never happened, newspapers — especially big-city papers — have long been headed for a dangerous inflection point at which their market penetration would not be sufficient to sustain a mass-media business model.”

I don’t think that the news business in general and newspapers in particular will make the changes necessary to survive until they come to grips with the new reality of information consumption. The printing presses of newspapers are no longer a licence to print money.

This is not necessarily about the emergence of the internet or the development of multimedia as both Vin and Steve have said. I think that Steve summed it best, when he said, “It’s a problem of content relevancy in an increasingly rich media mix, and not specific to the emergence of the World Wide Web.”

If it’s not about adopting new technologies, then the questions become more fundamental and problematic. They are not questions about platforms and integration but rather about core assumptions about journalism. Newspaper editors select stories based on two criteria, Vin says:

1. Stories about which the editor thinks everyone should be informed.

2. Stories that might have the greatest common interest.

Vin challenges some core journalistic beliefs. Pardon the lengthy quote, but I think it’s an important point:

Newspaper editors’ use of those two criteria to select stories for publication has become so ingrained after 400 years of analog technology that few editors or newspaper executives are able to fathom any other possible or apt practices for story selection.

Moreover, they came to believe that producing a common edition for everyone is their raison d’être, forgetting it arose as a limitation of their technology. Fitting psychologist Abraham Maslow’s statement that “If the only tool you have is a hammer, you tend to see every problem as a nail,” the editorial production limitation of Gutenberg’s technology has led most newspaper editors to believe that they set the ‘common agenda’ for their community and likewise that their community’s readership is somehow homogenous because it reads the same newspaper edition on any given day.

Vin says that newspapers general-interest product has become obsolete. People aren’t going online to consume news and information but to seek out information and entertainment that the generic package of information produced by the news industry doesn’t provide. I’ll leave you to read Vin’s essays and his conclusions.

‘Muted response’, but required reading

I agree with Mark Hamilton. I’m surprised that response to Vin’s post has been so muted. Vin’s two posts are more than just a recounting of the bleak state of the US newspaper industry. We all know the statistics both in terms of media consumption and economic trends. Vin’s posts go further and provide a very clear and cogent analysis of the why.

Why the lack of response? Mark quotes Scott Karp or Publishing 2.0 who said on Twitter:

…(there’s) a lot of searching for a new model that validates all of the old assumptions about the practice of journalism.

Mark expands on Scott’s comment in his own post:

It seems to me, that encapsulate a lot of what Vin is writing about, as well as a lot of the current angst (and blindess) that prevails in the newspaper industry. The idea that things will be all right once the economy picks up, or once someone (else) figures out this online thing is still fairly rampant in a lot of the mediascape. So is the idea that newspapers only need to find a way to keep doing what they’ve always done and everything will be okay.

Vin sees not a Dark Age for American journalism but a “Gray Age”. Amy Gahran, writing at Poynter doesn’t agree.

It seems to me that the nature of news and journalism are transforming. It’s not just about the “news business,” and definitely not just about “newspapers.” It’s possible that the era of traditional journalism may be on the wane — but does that mean that people will do without news or information? As I wrote last week: I don’t think so.

On another post at Poytner, Michelle Ferrier echoes Vin’s call for customisation and greater relevance:

At its core, what Crosbie states is that news values are changing — what used to not be a story now is a story, to someone. It’s this long tail of highly diverse, niche content (often produced by community members) that newspapers should be concerned about, rather than getting the right story mix on a dying page 1A.

It is like the famous comment that if all the deer have guns, you better get into the ammunition business. Most newspapers should radically shift to focus on their unique selling point: Local information, and build a platform (or multi-platform strategy) on which staff and the community can co-create news that suits their needs.

I didn’t ask this question, although I think about it quite frequently. Mohamed Nanabhay, the Head of New Media with Al Jazeera, posed the question on Twitter:

Twitterverse : If you were building a news website from ground up what would be the most important things to include?

It’s a good question, a pressing question. I think that there will be a site with related services that radically disrupts the news industry. Last month, I wrote a post that asked the question of what had prevented newspapers from being successful in the digital age. Steve Yelvington, who has great depth of experience in journalism, digital or otherwise, left a left a great comment and concluded:

This ain’t just another channel. The new players, coming into the game without any frame of reference other than what’s right in front of them, are much more able to recognize that than those of us from legacy media.

What would you do with a blank tablet? What would you do without the legacy business? What do you think would be most important in launching not just a news website but a digital news service with no baggage?

Mohamed started thinking about three guiding principles for visitors: Relevance, discoveribility and depth, and Robin Hamman, of Headshift, suggested wrapping all of this in a social media layer. Lars Plougmann, also with Headshift, suggested “syndication, participation, embeddable content, bridges to the flow on the web, mobile access”.

Mandy De Waal, editor of MoneyWebLife, had several interesting ideas.

1. Story tracking tool - which stories most popular, searched for etc ala Google, live chat with newsroom at certain times.
2. Satire… satire… satire! A section showing people how to easily become vloggers, Thought Leader type guest columns, polls.
3. Live feed of the newsroom in action - (but not close enough to see what they are writing about
4. Ticker tape of hyper links showing breaking story - this could be a new form or type of content aggregations.

I re-tweeted Mohamed’s question and got some great responses. John Thompson, of journalism.co.uk says: “Automatic semantic tagging, related links, user-customisable RSS, SEO friendly URLs, Apture-style auto linking, good comments system”.

Paul Bradshaw, Senior Lecturer in Online Journalism and Magazines at Birmingham City University and the man behind the Online Journalism Blog, also had a number of good ideas:

1. RSS at every juncture - automating all activity so it’s publishable: bookmarking, twittering, blogging, email, browsing.
2. pingback in all external linking. I’d also move away from one big powerhouse towards a network of little niches.
3. and I’d set it up so journalists got alerts or digests when people comment on their stories, with time set aside for response

On the last point, I think that commenting systems should have RSS. With Movable Type, I occasionally use CoComment to follow the conversations that I participate in.

Revenue

And I think Craig McGinty has an excellent bit of advice: “Be as creative in making it pay as editorially.”

We all realise that the business model for newspapers is broken - especially in the United States - and it’s time to consider revenue models and multiple revenue streams. This would be especially critical for an all digital news service. The cost basis of a digital news service could be much lower than a newspaper or broadcast outlet, but the reality is that the revenue is also lower for digital right now.

Businesses need to look at new revenue streams. PaidContent (recently acquired by the folks who pay my wage) has built a successful business not simply by focusing on the digital content vertical but also by building a successful events business. I don’t think the business conferences are the only events-based businesses that content companies could sponsor. And events aren’t the only new revenue stream that a digital business should develop.

Cost basis

Legacy media companies haven’t taken advantage of the disruptive economics of digital technologies. I see a lot of newspaper companies getting into video, but instead of using low-cost digital technologies, they are chasing television and buying high-cost broadcast technology.

Smart companies are leveraging open-source technologies, but many companies suffer from ‘not made here’ syndrome, delivering projects over-budget and behind schedule.

The digital project would also start with a much leaner staff. Jeff Jarvis had this suggestion on the Guardian’s media blog:

But on my blog, I took a hypothetical newsroom staff of 100 as a round number, then cut by 30% - not draconian by today’s precedents - and asked what the priorities should be when the cutbacks come. In my hypothetical newsroom, reporting is the highest priority. The more original journalism that is done, the higher the value of the paper and its web service, the better the opportunity to stand out in links and search. Breaking news is worthwhile, but I come down heavily on the side of beat reporting: journalists who are devoted to watchdogging an area.

The Social Layer

I agree with Robin. The successful site would have a social media layer. The site has to have attention data (most viewed, commented, linked, Dugg, etc), recommendation, rating and several levels of participation.

However, I think the social-ness of the strategy can’t stop with the technology. I think the news site of the future will also have a staff focused on building community around the content. People make technology social. Journalists connected to their communities provide more relevant content to those communities and build deeper relationships with them. Social journalists, comfortable creating social media and facilitating social interaction around that content, will be the core of disruptive digital business coming to a community near you.