Knight Digital Media Center Multimedia Training

The Transformation to Digital Journalism

By Paul Grabowicz, Jane Stevens, Jeremy Rue, Jerry Monti

For updates and discussion on this tutorial, visit:
http://kdmc.berkeley.edu/tutorials/digital-transform/

Introduction

Digital technology presents an often bewildering array of choices for journalists - producing slideshows and video, joining social networks and blogging, using map mashups and mobile devices. The list seems endless.

But survival requires understanding all these new technologies so journalists and news organizations can make informed decisions about why and how to utilize them (see Blogs, Tweets, Social Media, and the News Business, in Nieman Reports).

This guide covers the major digital tools and trends that are disrupting the news industry and changing the way journalists do their jobs.

Print and Broadcast News and the Internet

As more people consume news online, news organizations face the dilemma of reallocating resources to attract new readers and viewers while still trying to hold on to their existing, and usually aging, print or broadcast audiences.

Online revenues for most news media are still a small fraction of the income from traditional print or broadcast. And after many years of double-digit annual increases in online advertising revenue, the trend tapered off dramatically in 2008 and 2009, with online revenues flat or even decreasing. 

For newspapers, typically 10 percent or less of total revenues come from online operations (although the Los Angeles Times reported in late 2008 that online income was enough to pay for the paper's entire print and online news staffs).

Magazines similarly get less than 10 percent of their revenue from their digital operations according to an Advertising Age survey of 2008 revenues.

Financial viability for newspapers and most magazines, at least for now, requires retaining as many existing print readers as possible.

Yet the trends are clear: people, especially the young, are turning to the Internet for more and more of their news.

Where People Get News - Internet, TV and Newspapers

*  Source: Pew Research Center for the People & the Press

For other and more detailed statistics on where people get their news see:

While the trend toward online is clear, the shift has tapered off in recent years. As of the end of 2007, about 25 percent of people in the U.S. still said they haven't ever been online.

For print and broadcast organizations, this means a core group of their audience remains wedded to traditional products and often resistant to getting news online.  

For additional statistics on trends in consumption of traditional news media see:

Print Editions Decline

A steady decline in print circulation and a  precipitous drop in advertising revenue in 2008 and 2009, especially classified advertising, have taken their toll on newspapers and newspaper chains.

Some have been forced out of business, such as the Rocky Mountain News, the Seattle Post Intelligencer (at least its print operation - an online-only version continues) and the Ann Arbor News (which also will continue an online edition as well as a print product twice a week).

Others have filed for bankruptcy reorganization, such as Tribune Company, the Minneapolis Star Tribune, the Philadelphia Newspapers company, the Chicago Sun Times, the Journal Register Co., American Community Newspapers, Freedom Communications, Creative Loafing and the Columbian newspaper in Vancouver.

Especially hard hit have been newspapers that were purchased recently, such as the Tribune, Minneapolis and Philadelphia papers, and thus have owners with huge debt loads, or those in areas that still have competing daily papers, such as Denver, Minneapolis/St. Paul, Seattle, Detroit and Tucson.

Newspapers have taken a variety of other measures to save money, preserve the print product, and try to weather the storm:

Some papers are also changing the kind of coverage provided in the print product, focusing less on breaking news, which the Internet is much better suited to deliver, and more on analytical or contextual stories.

For example, compare the front page of the print edition of the Arizona Republic with the home page of azcentral.com, the Arizona Republic's online site.

Arizona Republic Print Edition

 Arizona Republic newspaper front page

Arizona Republic Online Edition

 Arizona Republic online home page

Both editions are from the same day, December 23, 2008.

The print edition contains longer feature stories, "sit-down" news to be perused, or articles about more leisurely activities. 

The website is updated throughout the day with breaking news and shorter articles, and offers searchable services like events calendars, dining guides, etc. to cater to the different interests of an online audience.

Eliminating Print Editions

Some newspapers are going a step further and dropping the least profitable of their daily editions - usually Saturdays, Mondays, Tuesdays or Wednesdays.

Examples of newspapers eliminating editions (see also this list compiled by AP)

The hope is that enough readers and thus advertisers will remain local to the print product that revenues will not decline substantially. But breaking the daily news reading habit threatens to further erode print audience loyalty and accelerate the existing decline in newspaper readership.

To ease the transition for older readers still wedded to the newspaper format, some newspapers also offer a digital edition online. This is an electronic version of the newspaper, which appears in a form similar to the print version and can be downloaded from the newspaper's website.

But there is little evidence that such digital editions are very popular with readers, and critics say they are transplanting a print format into a medium that demands a very different product.

Ken Doctor, a long-time analyst and consultant on digital media, especially newspapers, has said:

"They are essentially counterintuitive products: older readers who may like the idea of 'reading the paper' in its traditional format don't like reading online; younger readers who like reading online find it nonsensical to read yesterday's news -- and pay for it -- when they can news of the moment free online."

Source: In Desperation, Detroit Papers Flip the Switch, Content Bridges weblog

See also this Poynter Online story about the experiences of the Detroit papers a month after they dropped home delivery of the printed paper on some days and launched an electronic edition. MinnPost also has a story and a chart about how successful e-editions have been for newspapers.

Some magazines, especially general interest publications, also are reducing their pages or cutting back on the number editions they publish. U.S. News & World Report went from being a weekly to a biweekly to a monthly in 2008. See this New York Times story about the changes weekly news magazines are undergoing.

National broadcast news networks similarly have considered paring back nightly news shows, which tumbled in popularity during the 1990s, largely due to the advent of cable news and then the Internet. See the New York Times story, Broadcast TV Faces Struggle to Stay Viable.

Local television stations have seen more recent declines in viewership and advertising revenues. See the Wall Street Journal story, Local TV Stations Face a Fuzzy Future.

Web First Publishing

Some newspapers and other news operations are now adopting a "web-first" or "web-centric" approach to organizing their work flow. This means having reporters and editors think first about reporting and producing text and multimedia stories for the web, then writing a text story for the print edition.

This also is sometimes referred to as "reverse publishing."

It marks a major shift from the old "shovelware" approach of newspapers in the 1990s, in which stories were written first for the newspaper and then shoveled onto the web, often with few, if any, changes.

Then in the early 2000s "convergence" strategies started to gain traction at some media organizations, with newspapers, TV stations and radio stations partnering to produce content for a website. But producing stories for the traditional news or broadcast products usually still had top priority.

TBO.com, a partnership of the Tampa Tribune and WFLA-TV Channel 8 launched in 2000, was one of the early examples of this move toward convergence.

In 2008, the Tampa Tribune moved toward a web-first approach.

“People need to stop looking at TBO.com as an add on to The Tampa Tribune. The truth is that The Tampa Tribune is an add on to TBO," Tribune Managing Editor Janet Coats said in July 2008.

In a web-first approach, the main focus often is on breaking news and getting those stories on the web as fast as possible, on a 24-hour-a-day, 7-days-a-week news cycle.

Some publications have set up "continuous news desks" with dedicated staffs that produce round-the-clock breaking news for the web. The New York Times and Washington Post, for example, have continuous news desks (on the Times see "Talk to the Newsroom: Continuous News Correspondent"; on the Post see "Ask the Post").

Other publications have emphasized getting all reporters and editors to focus on putting breaking news and other stories on the web, rather than having a separate staff handle story updates for the Internet edition.

In these cases, the publications usually must undergo major reorganizations of their newsrooms and try to train most or all of their editorial staff in writing for the web and producing multimedia.

Examples of newspapers and other media that adopted a web-first or multimedia strategy

Resources on web-first and multimedia strategies:

Competition Online

News media companies that adopt a web-first strategy face a competitive environment very different from traditional print or broadcast environments.

Their major rivals for the attention of readers and viewers often are not other traditional news organizations, but non-profit organizations, private corporations, online-only startups or even government agencies that have turned to the web to get out their message. They often carve out niche markets on the Internet that compete with the websites of traditional news organizations.

Here are some examples of these websites:

craigslist

While newspapers were trying to figure out how to "up-sell" classified ads from their print product to their online editions, craigslist created a space where people could just post their classifieds free of charge (with the exception of employment ads and some real estate ads).

The site has a very simple design and very few features, but for the community it serves it's highly functional. And its founder, Craig Newmark, puts a strong emphasis on customer service.

The result: craigslist decimated classified advertising in newspapers in many of the cities where it's launched.

MaxPreps

MaxPreps - Missoula, Montana, high school basketball sports page

While in the past newspapers were almost the only source of news about high school sports, online startups like MaxPreps now dominate that market online in many cities.

Founded in 2002 and later purchased by CBS in 2007, MaxPreps includes these features:

Professional Sports

Professional sports organizations have their own websites that provide a depth of coverage on teams, especially statistical data on players, that rivals or surpasses the information produced by newspapers or other local news organizations.

MLB.com, the official website for Major League Baseball, provides in-depth coverage of professional baseball teams that is as comprehensive as sports networks like ESPN. It includes audio and video feeds of games and deep databases on team and player stats.

The National Footbal League's website has similar features. This is the NFL's page on the St. Louis Rams football team.

NFL.com - St. Louis Rams page

As a result, local sports fans are by-passing newspapers or local TV stations to get information on their teams, and some newspapers are cutting back on their coverage of professional sports.

Concerned about the decline in print newspaper sports coverage of local teams, Dallas Mavericks basketball team owner Mark Cuban has proposed that professional sports organizations subsidize sports beat reporters at local newspapers.

NASA

NASA website

When newspapers cut back their staffs, science reporters are often the first to go. NASA, meanwhile, has been expanding its website to directly reach people interested in astronomy. The site has photo galleries, video stories, a live NASA TV channel, interactive graphics and online games for kids.

Centers for Disease Control

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control has a Social Media Tools web page that features widgets, podcasts, RSS feeds, social networks and mobile access to CDC information.

FBI

The FBI's website features databases on crime, RSS feeds of "FBI stories" and "breaking news," a multimedia section that features video, photos, podcasts and "FBI radio" shows, and widgets for embedding FBI content in blogs and websites.

Council on Foreign Relations

This public policy organization's website has a multimedia section that features interactive graphics, photo slideshows, high-quality video, timelines and online quizzes. See especially CFR's interactive multimedia piece Crisis Guide: Climate Change.

Greenpeace

The environmental activist organization has a website that features multimedia stories with video, photos and photo slideshows, staff blogs and a "news" section with stories about Greenpeace actions and environmental issues.

Traffic.com

The Traffic.com website has interactive maps that show driving conditions in cities around the country, traffic alerts, reports on traffic incidents and roadwork, and a drive-time calculator for determining how long it will take to drive between any two locations. Widgets called Traffic Magnets can be embedded on a blog or website to display local traffic conditions.

Web 2.0

The concept of Web 2.0 surfaced in the wake of the dot.com crash of 2001 and discussions about what defined companies that were still prospering during the shake-out. 

The term was first used in 2004 by Dale Dougherty in conversations with Tim O'Reilly of O'Reilly Publishing, John Battelle, author of the 2005 book The Search, people from MediaLive International that puts on trade shows, and others about planning a conference on the Internet. That led to the Web 2.0 Summit, an annual conference that began in Fall 2004.

In general Web 2.0  represented a shift away from software companies that tried to lock people into using their products and media companies that published static content for a passive audience, toward a digital culture of public participation, re-mixing by individuals of data and information, harnessing the power of collective intelligence and providing services, rather than products.

The rise of weblogs in the early 2000s was perhaps the best example of this emerging culture.

For news organizations, Web 2.0 means moving away from using the Internet to draw a passive audience to a static publishing platform, and instead embracing the broader network, where communication, collaboration, interaction and user-created content are paramount. 

Practically it means everything from engaging people on blogs, online forums and social networks, to promoting user generated content and providing more personalized content for mobile devices such as cellphones.

Many news organizations are now embracing the Web 2.0 approach. The Bivings Group, in a 2008 survey of the websites of the 100 largest newspapers, found that:

For more background on Web 2.0 and what it means, see:

Comments on News Stories

One of the most basic ways that a news organization can engage people is to provide a way for them to comment on and discuss news stories on the website and postings to staff weblogs.

Newspapers have long allowed public comment in the form of letters to the editor. But online comments are as much about people communicating and interacting with each other, as they are just reacting to a reporter's story.

They are a way of engaging people in a conversation about the news and recognizing that a story does not end with its publication, but rather is a starting point for generating commentary and contributions by the public.

But because online comments aren't as strictly vetted as letters to the editor, they have proved vexing for many news organizations.

Only a very small percentage of readers usually will comment on any given news story or blog posting, and most comments will be made by a relative handful of frequent posters who may not be representative of general readership. This has been referred to as the 90-9-1 rule, which means 90 percent of people won't post any comments, 9 percent will post infrequently, and 1 percent will account for the vast majority of the postings.

On the 90-9-1 rule, see Jakob Nielsen's article on "Participation Inequality: Encouraging More Users to Contribute."

A few people also will post comments that are offensive or disruptive, quickly turning an intelligent discussion into an online food fight. In the blogging community, such posters are referred to as "trolls."

Another major problem is spammers, who will bombard comments with messages hawking products or promoting online scams.

Because of the offensive postings, a number of news organizations have closed down comments - either temporarily or permanently - after the discussions degenerated into name calling or worse. The Washington Post, for example, shut down comments on its post.com blog in January 2006.

As Jim Brady, executive editor of washingtonpost.com, explained the decision:

"...there are things that we said we would not allow, including personal attacks, the use of profanity and hate speech. Because a significant number of folks who have posted in this blog have refused to follow any of those relatively simple rules, we’ve decided not to allow comments for the time being."

For more on the Post's decision, see the online chat with Brady.

News organizations also feel the nasty and offensive comments threaten their brands as reputable sources of news.

Some have argued that news organizations just need to swallow hard and live with offensive comments because the value of opening up  to reader comments outweighs the downsides.

Others have adopted various schemes for trying to regulate the conversations:


Online Forums

Besides commenting on individual stories, many news organizations provide online forums or discussion boards where people can start conversations and post comments. Forums allow more control by users because they can pick the topics they want to discuss, rather than just responding to a news story.

For example, check out the dozens of online forums the Cleveland Plain Dealer hosts on its cleveland.com site.

Online forums have proliferated at many other websites besides online publications. Boardtracker is a search engine for finding online forums by topic.

But online forums face many of the same problems as allowing comments on stories and blog entries - offensive postings by a relative handful of disruptive people and postings by spammers.

The problem of off-topic and offensive postings and spam is one that has plagued the Internet for years. One of the Internet's original online forums - Usenet newsgroups - fell into relative disuse because of the volume of spam and "flame wars" on the newsgroups.

Chat Sessions

Another form of communicating with readers and soliciting comments is an online chat with reporters, editors or people in the news.

Chat has a long history on the Internet, dating to the introduction in 1988 of Internet Relay Chat. In 1991 IRC gained attention because   people were using it to post notes and discuss the Persian Gulf War. For more on Internet Relay Chat, see the Internet Relay Chat help archive.

For news organizations and journalists, online chats improve transparency, allowing people to ask questions about how a story was reported or written and providing insight into how a news organization operates.

One good example is the Washington Post's live chats section.

Blogs

The rise of weblogs in the early 2000s helped define the concept of Web 2.0.

Blogs are a reference to both a form of publishing content online and the software programs that make such publishing very easy for the average person.

Websites that later were referred to as the first weblogs surfaced in the mid 1990s. They often were short postings to static web pages of updates on particular topics by people interested in those subjects. One of the earliest by an individual was Dave Winer's Scripting News.

In 1999 a company called Pyra, which was developing project management software, released a software program - Blogger - that made it simple to set up and constantly update a website. With Blogger a person didn't need to know HTML coding to create a web page or to post content to it.

For the first several years, blogging was mostly done by people working in the technology sector or hobbyists in other fields. And their postings were usually very short and just informative.

The 2001 terrorist attacks on the United States brought to the fore two more aspects of blogging - the ability of people to post first-person accounts of news events and provide commentary on political issues. People who were eye-witnesses to the collapse of the World Trade Center towers in New York City posted what they saw on their blogs. Other bloggers engaged in debate over how the U.S. should respond to the attacks. The term "warbloggers" was coined to describe them.

Blogging then took off and by 2002 several thousand weblogs were being launched every day, according to an estimate by David Sifry of Technorati, which tracks weblogs.

By 2008, the number of weblogs was estimated to be well over 100 million, according to Technorati (although many of these blogs are dormant).

Journalism and Blogging

News organizations initially were very reluctant to have their reporters or editors set up weblogs, and many viewed bloggers with suspicion or contempt. Bloggers were derided as "pajama-clad" amateurs writing late at night from the comfort of their bedrooms or basements, or "parasites" who did no original reporting and instead were just pundits feasting on the reporting labors of traditional media organizations. 

But some news organizations embraced blogging early on, with blogs written by columnists, editors or reporters, often on technology beats. These early adopters of blogs included:

In Fall 2002 the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism launched a weblog - biPlog - to cover digital copyright and intellectual property issues.

As blogs gained widespread public adoption in the mid 2000s, more and more media companies embraced them. Columnists and reporters set up  personal blogs, usually on their beats, and some news organizations began hosting blogs by members of the public or linking to popular blogs in their coverage areas.

The Spokane Spokesman Review hosts a number of staff written blogs and also has a directory to other bloggers in the Spokane area. The Lawrence Journal World has about 3 dozen staff blogs and also hosts weblogs by readers. Other papers are now following suit - see MediaShift's story, Newspaper Try Again with Local Blog Networks.

Other papers began using blogs to report on breaking news stories - everything from political campaigns and elections to courtroom trials and natural disasters. See for example the Philadelphia Inquirer's From the Source breaking news blog (and this story about the blog by Chris Krewson, the Inquirer's executive editor of online news).

Despite the now widespread acceptance of blogging by news organizations, tensions remain over the role a journalist should play as a blogger and how news organizations should handle their staff produced blogs.

Most successful bloggers have their own voice or point of view. That's fine for a columnist who starts blogging, but it can be at odds with the traditional media definition of the objective, impartial reporter.

Blog postings are usually not polished editorial products, like a heavily edited story, and a premium is put on doing frequent postings, especially on breaking news. The demands of individual blogging thus can clash with editing and fact-checking functions of news organizations.

News organizations have responded by adopting standards for postings by their in-house staff bloggers. Some publications require that blog posts be edited before being made public, while others allow a reporter to go public with a posting, and then have editors review the postings afterward.

Blogging is not for everyone. Some reporters take to it with enthusiasm, but forcing reluctant reporters to blog is usually a recipe for boring blogs and a demoralized staff.

For reporters who like blogging, it can be an invaluable form of personal branding - establishing themselves in an online community, connecting and engaging with the public, getting feedback and story ideas, and participating in the larger conversations going on all over the Internet.

Blogging Software

There are many software programs for easily setting up a weblog, either hosted on the blog software company's website or on a web server at your news organization or at a private hosting service. Blogging software even can serve as a basic content management system for many publications.

Blogger, which helped touch off the blogging revolution, provides simple blogs hosted for free on its website.

Two other popular and more versatile and sophisticated blogging programs are WordPress and Movable Type.

We use WordPress for our blogs at the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism. See our tutorial on Using WordPress.

If you pick one blogging program and decide later you'd prefer a different one, check out Google's Blog Converters, which allow you to transfer your data, such as postings, from one blogging platform to another.

RSS - Syndicating Content

RSS, which stands for Really Simple Syndication, is just that - a very easy way to distribute news content to people, rather than requiring them to visit a news website.

RSS software, created in 1999, lets a website set up a feed of its content such as news stories that people can download and read using an application called an RSS Reader.

The reader can be a software application a person installs on their computer, such as NetNewsWire for Mac computers and FeedDemon for Windows machines.

Or a person can sign up to use a reader hosted on a website, such as Google Reader or My Yahoo!.

RSS feeds also are a way to distribute your audio or video to mobile devices like the iPod or iPod Touch.

News organizations increasingly are offering RSS feeds of their news stories. For examples, see 

Blogging applications such as WordPress and Movable Type also make it easy to provide RSS feeds of postings to a weblog. For journalists who have their own blogs, RSS is yet another way of extending their personal brand by providing a feed of stories they produce.

Social Networks

Beginning in the early 2000s, a new form of online social interaction emerged - social network websites.

Social networks provided people with a way to set up a personal page or profile to which they could post updates on what they were doing, while also keeping track of the activities of family, friends and colleagues.

People also can engage in group activities online and display feeds of information on their home pages - everything from personal photo slideshows and videos to musical playlists and calendars to weather reports and news stories. The applications that allow social network users to display this information on their profile pages are called widgets.

Some of the early social networks were Friendster, started in 2002, and Tribe, launched in 2003.

News organizations had experimented with a form of social networking in the late 1990s, trying to form online communities for local community organizations. One popular platform for this online community building was Koz.com, co-founded by a former executive editor of the Raleigh News & Observer and founder of the paper's Nando.net online operation.

While these efforts by news organization aimed at community groups generally didn't gain a lot of traction (Koz.com went out of business and the Koz.com domain was subsequently put up for sale), independent social networks that served individuals took off.

By 2008, 35 percent of adult Internet users had created a profile on a social network, quadruple the percentage in 2005, according to a Pew Internet & American Life Project survey in December 2008. The numbers are even more striking for younger people - 75 percent of Internet users aged 18-24 have a social network profile.

Journalism and Social Networks

For journalists and news organizations, social networks provide an opportunity both for connecting with people and distributing news stories.

Reporters can join the networks, converse with people and showcase their stories. It's yet another way for reporters to develop personal brands for their work.

News organizations can develop widgets that provide feeds of news stories that can be displayed on the personal pages of social network members.

See for example the New York Times Widgets page that people can used to embed news feeds from the Times on their personal profile pages or on blogs or other websites.

News organizations also can set up their own social networks, using third-party software or their own homegrown platforms.

Some have even speculated that social networks will supplant news websites as the place where people get news.

Social Network Examples

Among the significant social networks now are:

MySpace

MySpace launched in 2003 and initially attracted a lot of young music lovers because of its MySpace Music feature. This let bands post their songs on the site, which other people then could add to their personal profile pages.

MySpace quickly evolved into a more general interest social network, mainly for young people. It was purchased by News Corp. in 2005. By 2006 MySpace claimed to have more than 100 million users.

Facebook

Facebook, founded in February 2004, started as a service for college students but then opened its doors to anyone to join. As of 2008 it claimed 140 milion active users.

In May 2008, Facebook also launched Facebook Connect, which lets other websites utliize Facebook users' profiles and networking features. Thus a news website can have users register at the site using their Facebook accounts and then explore content on the site that they can share with their friends on the Facebook network. Thus a news organization can integrate a social network into its website without having to create one itself.

For one implementation of Facebook Connect at a news site, see the News Mixer project developed by students at Northwestern University's Medill School of Journalism.

LinkedIn

LinkedIn is a social network that targets professionals and promotes itself as a way to find business contacts and jobs. It launched in 2003 and as of 2008 claimed to have 30 million users.

Several companies provide tools for news organizations to set up their own social networks. They include:

Ning

Ning is a website founded in 2004 that allows easy creation of a social network, hosted on Ning's site for free. Some news organizations have used Ning to create social networks for the communities they serve.

Pluck

Pluck provides a suite of tools for websites that want to create social networks, as well as blogs, forums and comments.

Here are some news sites that have set up their own social networks:

Bakersfield Californian - Bakotopia

The Bakersfield Californian newspaper developed a home-grown social networking application - Bakotopia - that people use to create their own profiles and personal pages. Bakotopia started in 2005 as a preemptive move against craigslist by providing an online classified ad service. As it evolved other features were added, including social networking.

Denver Post/Denver Newspaper Agency - YourHub

YourHub is a series of local online communities developed by the Denver Newspaper Agency, in which people can create profiles and blogs, and post their events, personal stories and photos.

New York Times - Times People

At the Times People page you create a profile and "share articles, videos, slideshows, blog posts, reader comments, and ratings and reviews of movies, restaurants and hotels."

Resources and Readings

The Fastest Growing Social Sites - Mashable, Apri 20, 2009

The End of News Websites - Online Journalism Blog

Women use social media more than men: what’s news orgs’ response? - Nieman Journalism Lab

Aggregators - Selecting and Sharing Content

Rather than having professional editors at news organizations determine the important stories of the day, people are taking on this role themselves at aggregation sites where users select and share what they deem the most important news or websites.

Users submit stories or websites to be listed on the aggregation sites, and other users then vote on or help rank the importance of the stories or sites and how prominently they should be displayed.

Examples of of aggregators include:

Aggregators also have widgets people can use to embed story feeds on their blogs, websites or personal pages on social networks.

And news websites can place icons for the aggregation services at the end of stories, so readers can click on the icons to submit the stories for inclusion in the listings by the aggregators.

See for example, the CNN website. Click on a story there, scroll to the end and click on the Share button.

Widgets

A widget is a bit of code that can be embedded on a website, blog or a personal page on a social network to display all different types of content drawn from other websites, including a feed of news stories.

Widgets can be used to display everything from weather, traffic and stock reports to event calendars and personalized maps.

Many news organizations developed widgets to provide feeds of their news stories and other content that can be embedded on other websites and social networks.

One simple example is National Geographic's "Photo of the Day" widget for Facebook.

Here's the widget the Windy Citizen news site in Chicago provides for adding their news feed to  a social network or blog (scroll down to the section on "Add today's top stories to your site").

For more information on how widgets work, see the wikipedia entry for Web Widgets.

See also our tutorial on Creating a Publication Widget.

API

API, which stands for Application Programming Interface, is a way a website or service can allow integration of its content into other websites. The API allows a computer system to interpret and use data created on another system, even if it used a different programming language or structure.

A good example is the Google Maps API, which Google released so other websites could embed customized Google maps on their pages.

Programmers are needed to create an API, and APIs often have to be customized for different types of websites that want to utilize them, such as different social networks.

See Google's OpenSocial project that is developing common API's that can be implemented within a variety of proprietary web services.

News organizations can develop APIs so their content can be customized and mashed up with additional information at other web sites. It's one more way for a news organization to participate in and make its content available to a larger online network.

See for example:

Twitter and Microblogging

When Twitter was publicly released in August 2006 there were plenty of skeptics. The idea was to give people an easy way to post very short - 140 characters or less - notes about what they were doing in their daily lives.

Postings from people saying they were about to go to lunch or board a plane seemed trivial.

But Twitter took off, launching the "microblogging" phenomenon. Twitter had 7 million visitors to its website in February 2009, a 1,382 percent increase over a year earlier, according to Nielsen Online. By March 2009, Twitter was growing at a 2,565 percent annual rate, according to Nielsen Online data.

The Pew Internet & American Life Project reported in a December 2008 survey that 11 percent of online adults in the U.S. had used a service like Twitter.

(although Twitter's growth will inevitably slow, and a relatively small percentage of Twitter users actively post - see the studies in the Readings and Resources section below)

People can set up accounts on Twitter for free and then post the short messages (called "tweets") to their personal pages on the Twitter website. The notes can be posted by going to the Twitter website or by sending text messages from cellphones or other mobile devices.

Others then can follow a person's postings by subscribing to them (referred to as "following" a person) on the Twitter website. The notes can be viewed on the website or by having the text notes sent to a cellphone or via email or an RSS feed. They also can be embedded in a personal blog or website.

People use Twitter to report on news events they witness or participate in:

Interestingly, Twitter's main demographic is not young kids, but rather middle aged, professionals in metropolitan areas.

The largest age group using Twitter was 35 - 49 years old, according to a Nielsen Online report in February 2009. And only 22 percent of 18-24 year olds use Twitter, according to a Participatory Marketing Network study. See also this article in Mashable: Stats Confirm It: Teens Don’t Tweet, and this analysis of Twitter usage data at TechCrunch: Why Don’t Teens Tweet? We Asked Over 10,000 of Them.

See also this Current TV video on Twouble with Twitters for one take on the Twitter generation gap.

News Organizations Twittering

News organizations soon picked up on Twitter, using it to post quick updates on breaking news stories or just provide a more general feed of links to news stories.

See this list of news organizations using Twitter compiled in February 2008, and another list that's more up to date. One example is the New York Times feed on Twitter of links to its news stories. Also read the postings by Knight Digital Media Center journalism fellows about how their news organizations are using Twitter.

Twitter feeds on breaking news can be a mix of postings by reporters and by citizen eye-witnesses.

Readings and Resources

Twittering Tips for Beginners - David Pogue column in the New York Times.

Twitter Fast Growing Beyond Its Messaging Roots - Wired Magazine story on how Twitter is being used by people to monitor home appliances and even get alerts on when a houseplant needs water.

The Twitter Explosion - American Journalism Review story on how journalists are using Twitter.

Is Twitter Really That Big - ReadWriteWeb summary of data that Purewire, a web security company, gathered on Twitter users. Among the findings: 40 percent of Twitter users haven't tweeted since the first day they created a Twitter account.

Twitter Hype Punctured by Study - BBC report on a Harvard study of Twitter users that found 10 percent of them are responsible for more than 90 percent of the postings.

Rules of Engagement for Journalists on Twitter - Mediashift story about guidelines for journalists using Twitter

MuckRack - site that aggregates Twitter postings by journalists.

‘Not a Ban, Just Guidelines’: ESPN Responds To New Twitter Policy - Mediaite interview with ESPN spokesman

ESPN.com's Rob King Discusses Guidelines For Use Of Social Media - Sports Business Daily

Who Rules the Social Web: Chicks Rule - Information is Beautiful website

Mobile

The explosion in cellphone usage during the 1990s and 2000s poses a major challenge and huge opportunity for media companies to get their content distributed to mobile devices.

While home computer ownership has been creeping up very slowly in recent years (approximately 70 to 75 percent of U.S. households have a computer), cellphone usage is nearly ubiquitous. But websites developed by news organizations display poorly on mobile devices, requiring new strategies for delivering stories and other content to cellphone users.

Media companies usually create mobile versions of their websites that are compatible with cellphone screens. Check out the mobile site for the New York Times and CNN's mobile page.

News organizations also provide news feeds for mobile devices that deliver stories via text messages. Here's the New York Times text messaging service.

Other companies such as foneshow work with media companies to deliver audio feeds of news stories to cellphones, which can be heard on older, less sophisticated devices.

Cellphones equipped with GPS (Global Positioning System) technology provide another opportunity for news organizations to deliver stories and information to people based on their location. Thus feeds of information like restaurant reviews or stories on traffic problems could be tailored to where a person is at any given moment.

iPhones

Apple's introduction of the iPhone in June 2007 revolutionized the web browsing experience on a cellphone. The display and touch screen technology made web browsing easier, more functional and much more aesthetically pleasing.

With the introduction of the 3G version of the iPhone with GPS technology in July 2008, information could be delivered to an iPhone based on the user's location. See for example Apple's description of how to use the iPhone to get maps with GPS.

News organizations are developing applications for the iPhone that provide customized feeds of news stories. See for example the ABC News iPhone application.

iPods and Podcasts

Another Apple device that has exploded in popularity is the iPod. While this portable device is primarily used for downloading music, news organizations also are providing audio podcasts of news stories that can be downloaded via RSS onto an iPod.

See for example NPR's directory of podcasts.

Cellphones and User Generated Content

The flip side of delivering news to cellphone users is their ability to use photo and video cameras built into many of the devices to create and publish their own content, especially eye-witness accounts of news events. A classic case was the execution of Sadam Hussein captured on a cellphone video camera.

Readings and Resources:

Your Guide to the Mobile Web - MediaShift

Moving to Mobile - Newspaper Association of America

There’s an App for That. But a Revenue Stream?  - New York Times story on iPhone

User Generated Content

Blogs, mobile devices, social networks, microblogging and other digital tools have allowed people to publish their own stories and cover their own communities.

YouTube, which was purchased by Google, is a wildly popular site where people can post videos. It's motto is "Broadcast Yourself."

Flickr is a site owned by Yahoo! where people can upload and share photos.

This proliferation of user generated content (UGC) represents yet another challenge and opportunity for news organizations.

Citizens can bypass mainstream media entirely and produce content and communicate directly with others. Many journalists have decried this rise in "citizen journalism" as the triumph of amateurism over professionalism.

But many news organizations are also inviting citizens to co-produce the news and contribute to the news organizations' websites.

The Bivings Group, in a 2008 survey of the websites of the 100 largest newspapers, found that:

Examples of user generated content at news organizations include:

See this list of local community news sites and services that draw on citizen journalism, some created by news organizations. some by online start-ups, and others entirely by citizens. 

Wikis

Perhaps the ultimate form of user generated content is the wiki.

Wiki software was developed to promote collaboration in producing content, relying on the collective wisdom of the masses rather than the specialized knowledge of a limited group of experts.

It became hugely popular with the creation of the expansive wikipedia online encyclopedia, which now dwarfs traditional encyclopedias like Britannica in the amount of content it contains. Whether wikipedia is more credible than Britannica remains a subject of continuing analysis and debate. See the Guardian's research study, "Can You Trust Wikipedia," and a study by Nature magazine.

News organization experiments with wikis have been very tentative thus far. Part of the reason was the disastrous experience the Los Angeles Times had when it set up a wiki in 2005 to collectively write editorials. The wiki was inundated with obscene photos and other inappropriate content and shut down.

Other news media sponsored wikis include:

Websites

For news media organizations, the focus on Web 2.0 tools and strategies that gathered momentum in the mid-2000s has mainly been about using the Internet to distribute stories to and participate in a larger network. Blogs, widgets, social networks, mobile devices, etc. are being used to reach people wherever they are engaged on the Internet.

Also important is the need to create news websites that draw people to them. This is reminiscent of discussions that occurred back in the 1990s over "push versus pull" strategies for online news sites, which then meant pushing out content via email story feeds versus pulling people to more in-depth stories and content on news websites.

Pulling people to news websites serve two important functions:

The problem of generating revenue from news content is exemplified in the struggles of newspapers. Most newspapers boasted big increases in unique visitors to their websites in 2007 and 2008, due in part to their distributing links to their stories via blogs, social networks and other Web 2.0 techniques.

But most of those new visitors dive in, glance at a single story and then leave (behavior referred to as a website's "bounce rate"), spending little time on the newspaper's website and developing no sense of loyalty to it.

Thus while the number of unique visitors to the average newspaper site increased in 2008, the average time spent by each person on a site only crept up, or, in the case of most major newspapers, declined. Check Editor & Publisher for their monthly reports on time spent at top newspaper sites and reports by the Newspaper Association of America: Newspaper Web Site Audience Rises Twelve Percent In 2008. and Newspaper Web Sites Attract Record Audiences in First Quarter (which showed a decrease in average time spent online in the beginning of 2009).

The average visitor spends about 1.5 minutes per day on a newspaper website. Compare that with the 15 to 20 minutes per day the average newspaper reader spends perusing the print product, according to various studies.

Increasing time spent on news sites and developing engaged and loyal audiences requires creating more focused and in-depth topical content and making use of multimedia and digital tools like databases and games to engage people.

Resources and Readings

Times Extra Aims to Reclaim the Digital Page One - Content Bridges

Staking out newspaper survival in Web analytics - Online Journalism Review - measuring online engagement to attract advertisers

NAA/Nielsen stats show newspapers own less than 1 percent of U.S. online audience page views, time spent - Nieman Journalism Lab

Hyperlocal

Newspapers, TV and radio news shows and general interest magazines generally built audiences by bundling together a variety of content - general news, sports, weather, business reporting, lifestyle and entertainment, and so on.

The Internet dismantled those bundles, creating opportunities for niche products in each topical area that competed with general interest publications and networks.

See, for example, the book "Blown to Bits: How the New Economics of Information Transforms Strategy" by two Boston Consulting Group executives. The book grew out of a 1997 Harvard Business Review article they wrote, in which they pointed to newspaper  classified advertising as a prime example of a product that could be un-bundled from the print product and done better online.

General news stories have increasingly become a commodity, available at numerous websites such as Yahoo! News or Google News or a variety of other online news aggregators.

Some general interest publications will survive in this environment, such as major national newspapers like the New York Times and USA Today, or cable networks like CNN, Fox News or MSNBC.com. 

But local news sources, especially metro newspapers that serve a wide geographic area with a variety of content, have been forced to re-think their online strategy in the face of a new competitive environment online in which a myriad of highly focused sites chip away at the traditional bundled product.

Some news organizations are forming alliances with competitors to share more generic news stories and thus reduce the cost of providing news that is easily obtainable from a variety of sources. See the Associated Press' round-up of these efforts: Some news-sharing alliances that emerged in 2008.

Instead they're focusing on a hyperlocal strategy. Rather than delivering one product with commoditized news to a large geographical area, they're creating locally focused products for individual communities that offer more extensive and in-depth coverage on local issues.

And within those very local communities, online sites can slice up content even more, creating "verticals" on specific topics of concern to local residents. Thus a local site would have sections on crime, education, health care, etc. similar to the beats of traditional newspapers but with much deep and richer "evergreen" content (stories supplemented by databases and background information). See for example the Online Journalism Review story urging local newspaper sites to create online sections on health care reform - Newspaper websites offer no cure on health-care reform.

Besides newspaper, the local market has attracted many independent community news sites, as well as start-up companies that have rolled out platforms for creating hyperlocal websites across the country.

See this long list of the different types of hyperlocal websites.
 

Niche Sites

Publications such as magazines that don't serve a particular geographic area also face a much more competitive environment online. General interest publications and broadcast networks have found their audiences chipped away by niche products that offer more in-depth coverage of particular topics.

This trend toward specialized niche publications, often referred to as "verticals," parallels what happened in the magazine business in the 1980s when there was an explosion of more narrow interest magazines serving audiences with specific interests.

The Internet has exponentially increased the economic viability of publications that serve smaller audiences interested in particular subjects. For one perspective on this, see Chris Anderson's "The Long Tail."

Examples of niche sites:

Beliefnet - which provides news and information on religious issues

Politico - a site focused on national politics

timteblog - A site about football star Tim Tebow, created by an espn.com columnist and blogger

Many news publications are being forced to define what their core competencies are - that is what particular niche can they stake out and what specific kind of information can they deliver to effectively compete in this new environment?

And how can they best organize the stories and other information they produce on their websites to serve people with more narrowly defined interests?

Readings and Resources

Web-based Niche News Sites and Networks - list at Jurnos wiki

The Nichepaper Manifesto - Harvard Business Review blog posting by Umair Haque

Shells

One strategy for news organizations to compete in an environment in which narrow-interest competitors abound is to re-organize the content on their websites into topical "shells," which are sometimes referred to as "verticals."

Instead of trying to lure people to a home page with a variety of general interest news stories, sections of a news site are built out with deep content in each to serve the more particular interests of people within the publication's broader audience.

A shell will feature not just news stories, but other kinds of information about a topic to give people a sense of context and continuity on the subject. Thus a topical shell will include a lot of "evergreen" content such as background information and searchable databases, as well a strong online community component so people with common interests have a place to gather online and discuss those interests.

Examples of shells:

Here's what Martin Nisenholtz, senior vice president of digital operations at the Times, had to say about the Times Topics sections:

"..we are now grouping many of our articles in things we call 'Times Topics' (see the tab at the top of nytimes.com home.) This introduces a new taxonomy to our site, one that is based on persistent topics with links to resources under those topics, rather than the traditional section and article structure. This makes it much easier for our content to be found in search, as the engines can look at a single URL for any given topic.

"The development of our Topic architecture is a critical one for NYTimes.com"

See also the testimony (pdf file) of Marissa Mayer, Google Vice President, at the U.S. Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation, on May 6. 2009, in which she discusses the "atomic unit of consumption" of news and praises the New York Times' Topics approach.

Mayer argues that news organizations need to focus on developing topical web pages that are "a consistent reference point that gains clout and a following of users over time," and where an "evolving story (is) published under a permanent, single URL as a living, changing, updating entity" with "obvious and engaging next steps for users."

Salon.com is taking this approach at its site. At a UC Berkeley Media Technology Summit in September 2009, Salon Chief Executive Officer Richard Gingras said "'the core of the matrix'" for news outlets in making transactions is no longer an entire website but individual stories. Because at least half of the audience on most websites arrives there after an Internet search, stories become much more attractive when they are enriched with articles, graphics, reader discussion and the like, Gingras said." (this summary of Gingras' remarks was in a Los Angeles Times story about the conference by James Rainey)

Also look at the approach taken by the hugely popular wikipedia, which embeds breaking news in the context and background for the topic that's in the news.

Young people in particular are interested in background information on a topic, especially if it's well organized, uncluttered and accompanied by visual elements like photos and graphics. See the Northwestern University Media Management Center study on "Teens Know What They Want From Online News: Do You?"

Readings and Resources

The ‘hyperinterest’ approach to online news - Save the Media blog, blending niche and hyper-local content

More details on the ‘hyperinterest’ approach - Save the Media blog

Of Living URLs, Newspaper Rankings & California Fires - Search Engine Land article that explores Google's Marissa Mayer's recommendations for topics pages and for assigning permanent "living URLs" to stories, and points out the limitations Google's own Google News poses for such approaches to story organization.

Databases

One very effective way to add depth to a particular topic on an online news site is to include interactive databases and map mashups that people can use to explore subjects on their own according to their particular interests. Databases have proven very popular, with people spending extensive amounts of time on a news site exploring the information in the databases.

Gannett newspapers have been pioneers in adding databases to their local websites, as part of their Information Center online strategy. See MediaShift's October 2008 story on Gannett's Information Centers strategy. 

And check out these examples of databases and map-mashups at online sites.

Games

Another effective way of increasing participation in and time spent at an online news site is adding news-related games.

Games by definition are more engaging for people, and well designed games can lead people to spend hours of their time playing them online.  Games are particularly popular with young people, an age group many news organizations are struggling to attract as readers or viewers.

On the general popularity of video games, see the Entertainment Software Association's Industry Facts section of its website.

Many news organizations have experimented with adding games to their websites. One of the early classics was MSNBC.com's baggage screening game that showed people what it was like to screen baggage at airport security checkpoints.

At the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism we developed Remembering 7th Street, an online virtual world and video game that re-created Oakland's 7th Street blues and jazz club scene from the 1940s and 1950s so people could experience this important part of the city's cultural heritage.

For more examples of online games developed by news organizations, see this list.

Online Community

Also essential to engaging people in topical sections of an online news site is to create online communities around the different subjects that provide an avenue for people to exchange ideas and discuss issues.

These can range from creating news forums or social networks on particular subjects at websites, to providing space for user-generated content that is topically organized.

One very popular example of an online community organized around a particular topic is the "mom" sites that many newspapers, such as those in the Gannett chain, have launched. See for example the Indy Moms website (now called Moms Like Me) launched by the Indianapolis Star. Here's a directory of all the Moms Like Me sites Gannett runs across the country.

For a valuable guide to creating online communities, see the "Online Community Cookbook: Recipes for Building Audience Interaction at Newspaper Web Sites," produced by Rich Gordon at Northwestern University's Medill School for the Newspaper Association of America" (a pdf file).

Multimedia Stortelling

Many journalists entered the profession for a simple reason - a love of storytelling.

And the enjoyment of a good narrative is something that appears to be hard-wired into the human brain. See the Scientific American article on "The Secrets of Storytelling: Why We Love a Good Yarn."

Many fear the Internet threatens to wash away the narrative in a sea of information and raw data. Younger people in particular are said to lack the attention span for reading in-depth stories and are turned off by long and complex narrative.

But the reverse may actually be the case. A 2008 study of 18 to 34 year olds by Context-Based Research Group found they suffered from"news fatigue, meaning they were overloaded with facts and updates and had trouble connecting to more in-depth stories. Participants yearned for quality and in-depth reporting, but had difficulty immediately accessing such content."

Rather than undermining the traditional narrative, the Internet should be viewed as an opportunity for more in-depth, multi-dimensional storytelling that people crave.

Space constraints that limit the amount of information a journalist can convey in traditional print media do not exist on the Internet.

Different aspects of stories can be told in different media formats - text, video, audio, photo slideshows, graphics - to make storytelling more engaging.

The best multimedia storytelling on the Internet combines these two elements - deep information on a particular topic presented as a multimedia package, with each part of the overall story told in the type of media most appropriate to it.

Check out these examples of multimedia stories.

Or spend time viewing the multimedia packages on these sites:

And read our tutorial on Multimedia Storytelling to learn about how to put together a multimedia presentation, and our tutorial on Picking the Right Media for Reporting a Story on how to take advantage of the different characteristics of video, audio, photos, text and other media forms.