Budget cuts hurting? Here are some free ideas to improve your news organization

The current topic at the Carnival of Journalism is:

What are small, incremental steps one can make to fuel change in their media organization?

(Yes, we’d all like to swing in our newsroom, lay some boot heels on chests, hoist the black flag and change everything by the end of business on Monday — but the reality is, that ain’t happening unless you have a couple buckets of cash to buy a paper of your choice and a rusty saber.) So what are some realistic, real-world examples of free (or cheap) ways you can help fuel change at your newsroom.

Spend 15 minutes with the links on this page. You'll get at least one idea you can use today.

And if I can talk my way into this party, here are some additional ideas I'd throw on the table:

1. Get to know local bloggers. Email them. Introduce yourself. Grab a coffee with. Link to them. You'll find they have a good pulse on the community. It may be a different pulse than yours, but that's a good thing. Be generous with your links to them, and you may find your organization with deeper tiest to the community.


2. Get in front of community groups. You and your reporters should be hanging with the Rotarians and the Community Organizers if you want to make a stronger connection with your local market. They're just as plugged-in as the bloggers, but may not be blathering on about it on their blog. This is also a great jumping-off point for efforts to create a more-focused Citizen Journalism effort. What if you gave a Flip Mino (customized with your logo and message) to a neighborhood organization or school in exchange for a promise of weekly upates?


3. Encourage corrections. At the end of your postings/articles, ask a question: Did we get it right? Include a link to a form to add corrections, clarifications, and suggestions for further reporting. Great ideas and deeper connections follow.


4. Encourage your reporters to think like curators. I've beat this particular drum previously, so I'll keep it short here. But you've got a roomful of subject-matter experts; having them just report is wasting more than half their brains.


5. Link. If you don't link, you're a dead-end.

Tweets of hope at daily newspapers

The revolution isn't always heralded by sweeping redesigns. Sometimes, it's just an unexpected bit of polite conversation. Like this:

Imagine that. A major metro newspaper thanking a small blog for a link. It's overcoat weather in hell, apparently.

And look at the second tweet: friendly, sensible advice! Why, if the newspaper could do this, maybe the story wouldn't be as dire next week when the September circulation figures are released.

I kid, but I think this stuff is great.

I'm seeing a lot more of this lately, as the people inside of large media organizations smash against the walls of expectation and intertia to create little surprises like The Sun's civil discourse, or Chicago Tribune's @coloneltribune character/feed on Twitter.



From what I hear, these aren't being slavishly tracked for ROI, but treated as little experiments in connecting with readers in news ways. Good.

Why the AP will change or die

Here's a shocker: An Associated Press editor thinks it's a bad idea for local news organizations to withdraw from the AP.

Really?

In an awfully one-sided report on E&P, AP's Kathleen Carroll says that going through with the move will burden local news organizations and their web teams, who will be unable to replace the service, not just in print, but in its multimedia offerings as well. "We are moving an ocean of content," she says.

That's great, but that doesn't address the chief complaint against the AP: that they charge their members (a lot) for the privilege of giving away their locally-unique content in exchange for access to commodity national and world news now available through other channels.

The Associated Press is a collective - owned by the member organizations (read: newspapers) that exists to facilitate the sharing of news across the borders of cities and countries. So far, so good. If it didn't exist, bloggers would probably be agitating for something like it.

But the problem is two-fold:

1. It was created at a time where its greatest benefit was carriage. Getting a news story or photo from halfway around the world was nothing short of a miracle. In 1849, when it was formed. Today, in the age of instant communication on the internet, the AP's primary function has been rendered moot.

2. It unfairly treats original reporting by (mainly) newspaper companies as a commodity, laundering stories wholesale so that they can be picked up by competing media outlets (television, radio, local and national internet competitors) easily and with a clean conscience. This means that a story that a local paper may invest a week of time reporting can be re-reported with no effort - and no attribution - by the local tv station.

And, for this privilege, the current contracts have the newspapers paying dearly.

In a time when local newspapers are struggling to convince their markets that they're valuable, the fact that the entire front page is leading the noon broadcast on Action News doesn't help make the case.

Ultimately, there is a crying need for news organizations to share content. I think, though, that moves like Tribune's to withdraw from the collective will become much more common in the coming months, as news organizations rethink the value of the AP in reaching the goal of better and more efficient news coverage. Also, bolder moves, such as those described by Scott Karp in his discussion of the link economy, may emerge as viable - and much less expensive - alternatives.

No matter what, the AP as we've known it, will not live to see 2010.

Newspapers: Unlock the vaults to readership and revenue

Go to a lot of online news sites and search the archive, and you'll soon hit a pay wall. If you want to dig into the history of a city, the richest repository of that information usually wants you to pay for the privilege, with one shining exception - The New York Times - which opened up vast swaths of its archive to free browsing.

For years, the argument that was floated against making news archives free was that newspapers had too much revenue at stake. People would surely pay a few dollars for access to articles they wanted. Once that was put to rest (the numbers, relative to even just the current online revenue at most papers are small), we moved on to another argument: It's too expensive to store all those articles.

Upon some poking and prodding, though, the expense turned out to be not the archiving of the articles and photos - after all, storage is as close to free as it's ever been, and getting cheaper every day - but backing them up. The expensive hosting providers many news organizations use for their reliability and speed also charge usurious bandwidth rates for backup. And when you're backing up years of data every single day, that does, in fact, get expensive.

So why not this: Don't back it up. Or, just back it up monthly or quarterly. Having a 99.9% chance of an article from 2003 being available is infinitely better than not having it available at all, which is the case now when many newspapers simply throw away old articles after a few weeks.

Anyway, TechDirt (via Journerdism) has an interesting look at what opening up the archives has meant for the New York Times. There's not a lot of new data here, but the conclusion is still valid: newspaper archives are a readership (and, if you're doing your job right, revenue) goldmine.

Thieves steal printed newspapers to keep story from being published, forget completely about the internet

This is right up there with video of liquor store thieves falling through drop-ceilings.

Apparently some person or persons wanted to "stop the presses" on a story about a college homecoming queen who had been outed as a former pole-dancer. So they stole 3,500 copies of the student newspaper that reported the story.

The story you can read here. Online. Even though there are no more papers.

Police did not say whether their chief suspects are fusty, old-school reporters and editors who believe a story does not count until it's ink on paper.

If your site can't handle inbound Drudge traffic, are you really in the news business when it matters?

Seriously. If your calendar says 2008 or later, and you're a metro-market news site, and you can't handle a wave of traffic from Drudge or Digg or Slashdot or any of the popular linkfarms, you should rethink your server budget.

(Yeah. I know. I should be so lucky.)

UPDATE: I questioned posting this, because I thought it bordered on unfair. But now two hours later, the same article on tampabay.com is still being linked by Drudge and is still making their server swoon. Unsolicited advice: make it a static page for now.

UPDATE 2: As of 12:15 pm, the site appears to be stabilized. Glad they're back.

Just because you have a tool, doesn't mean you have to always use it

I like what two Liverpool newspapers are doing: geotagging certain news stories and plotting them on a map.

But I like what they're not doing even better: tagging every single story.

“We don’t use them for everything; there would be no point in geotagging Liverpool town hall for every council story, for example. But for location-specific articles they work really well.

I don't know how many times I've heard the "everything would be geotagged to City Hall" argument against location metadata. Well, there you have it: just don't tag those stories.

If the location metadata adds to the story, use it. If it adds unnecessary complexity, don't

The map is here, though it seemed to be struggling with load when I checked last.