Yes, SXSW was what I expected it to be: Exciting, exhausting, full of great people. I won’t write about that, because most of you who have been there will know that. So I asked myself: What about journalism? Did I come back with innovative ideas to redesign the media landscape of today, or rather tomorrow?
The answer is: Never before did I see the gap between entrepreneurs and journalists clearer than at SXSW, and never did it seem harder to bridge.
Spend some time in the Silicon Valley and you will inevitably find yourself (or at least your view of the media business) transformed by it. The mantras here are many, and they are ubiquitous: Dare to fail. It’s better to try and fail than to be afraid to try. Innovation is king. Be the disruptor, not the disruptee. Innovate or die.
There is, to be fair, a buzzword-alarm going off inside my head when I hear yet another epilogue on the culture of failure and innovation. But still, it makes me think: Wouldn’t traditional media and journalists be wise to embrace innovation and optimism?
One of the most asked questions about journalism is whether the big players in media today will still be the big players tomorrow. Will the New York Times, Der Spiegel and Le Monde still exist in 20 or 30 years? Or will businesses like Google rule the journalism world? Richard Gingras, head of News Products at Google, talked about this and other questions regarding the future of media at a recent Knight Fellowship seminar.
“We are going through a disruptive period, and that means that old leaders are replaced by new institutions. The disruptors often win,” he said. The reason for that lies in their flexibility to adapt to changes. “They start with a clean plate, and therefore can build something completely new.” So is Google teaming up to be the main player in the world of journalism? Not necessarily. “I do not see Google in the content production business,” said Gingras. “Google creates platforms for content, not content.”
But he sees an unwillingness in existing media to adapt to new realities and changing environments: “We have to rethink the mission of journalism. We have to rethink what an article looks like, what a news page looks like. Journalism has to redefine its reason to exist and its ethics.”
He sees disruptive times for professional journalists, too.
“Perhaps in journalism it will be like it was in music for a long time: there are a lot of people doing great stuff, but only a handful, the stars, will be able to make a good living out of it. Most will be doing it for a nickel and a dime, out of passion instead of profession.”
Trends in media
One of the biggest trends is social media, which is why Google started its own social network G+ in 2011. Gingras notes that G+ is one of the projects that Google is working on intensely. “Social is the way in which people will get their news in the future; it already is for some”, he said. That’s what he sees as the core mission of Google: “How do you connect people with knowledge – and I think that’s a beautiful core mission”.
And then there is another issue he wants news organizations to think about: Trust. “For too long, newspapers have operated on a ‘trust us because we are us’ basis – and that’s just bullshit. If you want people to trust you, give them a reason to do so. Explain who your writers are, how you do research, what your policies are.”
Gingras does not agree with all the so-called media trends. One that he sees as a bubble is the personalization of news. “I do not think that a person who read 24 articles about Tahrir Square is necessarily interested in Egypt in general,” he said.
“We put news in front of over a billion people a week, all over the globe,” said Gingras, who does not see himself as a journalist but as a product architect and technologist. And still, you notice in his talk that he cares about journalism, something you might not expect from a person responsible for Google News, sometimes seen as the ultimate nemesis of newspaper publishers.
“I believe that the future of journalism will be better than its past. If newspapers don’t adapt to the changes fast, start looking where their readers come from and what they want, they will not survive it,” he said, but added that it might already be too late: “Transformation can mean a lot of pain. The cycle of change is unstoppable.”
Jonathan Hewett, Director of the new Interactive Journalism Master at City University London, about the skills journalism students need to have today to be prepared for a changing job market and the importance of talking to “ordinary” users.
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You started an Interactive Journalism Master at City University last autumn – what does that Master involve, and how is it reflecting changes in journalism?
We started it because it was clear that enough news organizations and related bodies were moving towards including more participative thoughts into the journalism they were doing. Thats what we tried to focus on in our syllabus.
So how will journalism – and journalists – have to change?
Journalism increasingly starts to treat its audiences as active participants instead of passive recipients. That involves getting into a discussion with readers and using them as a source of information, be it via crowdsourcing, social media use or simply by entering the discussion regarding ones articles.
It’s been a while that Google+ has been around, and many news organisations and journalists are already experimenting with it, either with their private accounts or with the recently allowed business pages. I feel that Google’s social network can be a great playground for media professionals. Here are my top 5 G+ tips for journalists – focusing on specifics of Google’s network.
Yesterday, we had the opportunity to talk for some hours with Tom Rosenstiel from the Pew Project for Excellence in Journalism. He said a lot of very true things and made me think about the direction (online)journalism is moving towards.
The idea in Tom’s talk that I found most intriguing: He implied that the online journalism we do is still basically based on what print journalism looked like in the 19th century.
Recently, I had the honor to do a “Twitter for journalists”-workshop for my fellow Knight Fellows, and in preparation for that I updated my knowledge about Twitter apps and tools. First: Gosh, there are HUNDREDS of them. Some help you build your brand as a journalist (or as a media organisation), some organise your social media life, some are useful research tools for newsrooms and many are just for fun.
Here is the ultimate, non-comprehensive and very subjective list of my favorite Twitter tools for journalists, in random order.
One of the first things someone notices who moves from Europe to the US is the kind of schizophrenic approach to “freedom” and “privacy”, especially online. What I did shortly after I arrived here was buying a prepaid card for my Iphone. (that data contracts or prepaid cards are incredibly expensive and offer a terrible coverage is another story and perhaps also worth investigating some day). I happened to be in Berkeley the first day I had my new data package, and we happened to have some hours between appointments, so we wanted to visit a Sake brewery. Well, we would have visited it, if our phones would have let us research the opening hours.
After typing in the search, my phone told me: “Webguard does not allow you to visit this site”. Webguard? Who is that, and how did he get my number? That’s what T-Mobile’s homepage says about it: “Web Guard is an optional add-on feature which restricts access to adult-oriented (over 18) material on your phone”. Besides the fact it was not optional but default, and that, for heaven’s sake, a Sake brewery is perhaps the least likely place to lead minors to a life as an alcoholic – it says a lot about the American culture.
Kwan Booth is the co-founder and community manager of the hyperlocal news website “Oakland Local”. In this interview, he talks about why it is okay to cover a community you are part of, how to get high-quality user generated content and why talking to a community is a little bit like communicating in a large family.
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When you decided to start the Oakland Local, you obviously felt something is missing in mainstream media. What was it?
I actually missed a lot. One important thing was the lack of genuine coverage of certain communities, like immigrant and minority communities. When Susan Mernit and I started in October 2009, it was a time when communities in the Bay Area started to raise their voices. Oscar Grant’s death (he was shot by a police officer in Oakland on New Years Day 2009, edt. note) led to huge protests, and it showed that certain voices were just left out of the conversation in mass media, that very little in-depth analysis happened. But people were furious about the things happening, and they really wanted to have and share information.
Oakland, we felt strongly, needed a platform that is part of the actual community. That’s what the Oakland Local is, and we represent the actual community as well – our staff, for example, is 75 percent of colour.
Evan Hamilton, Community Manager of Uservoice, about the problem with Justin Bieber-stories, nasty anonymous users, and why “hotguy27″ is not the best pseudonym in an online community. He also answered my questions about major mistakes of news organizations in dealing with their communities and why they urgently need to overcome their fear of getting feedback.
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Picture: Uservoice
Let’s start with the obvious question – what is Uservoice?
Uservoice makes customer service tools, and it tries to make customer service experience really easy and pleasant for both sides instead of just one. Companies understand their customers better, the customers are happier, the company makes more money – win, win, win.
Any media outlets in your portfolio?
We have over 7000 customers signed up, so I might not know every single one – But not that I am aware of, no.
