Not worth my 99 cents

Two weeks ago, bloggers and Twitterers got angry about the return of a pretty terrible idea: small payments for each newspaper article, or micropayments. Former TIME managing editor Walter Isaacson thought he had saved newspapers, Steven Brill agreed, and David Carr was all, “Let’s make an iTunes for newspapers“.

The idea won’t work for a variety of practical reasons, outlined best by Clay Shirky and Steve Outing. Basically, people don’t like getting nickel and dimed; iTunes was created to sell iPods, not music; and journalism micropayments fail elsewhere.

But even if micropayments would work, I don’t think newspapers should adopt them because micropayments would further divide society on political lines. In a micropayment system, I won’t be interested in spending money on an article criticizing Obama, and my conservative father won’t be interested in spending money on an article criticizing Bush. People end up only reading what confirms their opinions, and the base of facts that everyone agrees on grow ever smaller.

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Knowing even a little Flash can add a new dimension to your journalism. Here’s why Flash journalism guru Mindy McAdams thinks journalists should learn Flash (emphasis added):

Six hours with Flash is akin to taking a six-hour cooking class about an exotic foreign cuisine that you have hardly ever tasted before, much less tried to re-create in your own kitchen. You are NOT going to know enough after six hours to go home and whip up a feast in the style of that cuisine. But you will be MUCH more savvy and smart the next time you look at a menu in a restaurant of that style.

I have McAdams’s book, Flash Journalism, but it was written 3 years and several Flash versions ago. I wanted a more recent, online introduction and found it, oddly enough, at Kongregate. Kongregate has been called “Youtube for Flash games”, and a couple months ago they put together a series of tutorials on how to make a simple sidescrolling shooter with Flash.

I’ve been going through them, and they get pretty hard. But the tutorials are thorough, and I don’t find myself getting lost as much as I do in other tutorials.  I’ll still use McAdams’s book for journalism-specific techniques, but the Kongregate tutorials are a good place to get a handle on basic Flash.  Just don’t roam over to the site’s games–you’ll never get back to the Flash.

Got the Act passed so you would use it

What a treat the Freedom of Information Act and similar state laws are.  Besides the First Amendment, they might be the best dispensation society gives journalists. For FOIA basics, check out the free FOIA course at NewsU, the letter generator, and the state-by-state guide.

FOIA requests, because of the time and (sometimes) expense they require, are most commonly used on large stories.  The best way to ensure that you’re ready to file FOIAs when that huge story comes along, though, is to supplement everyday stories with FOIA’ed documents. Plus, it’s good to have a working knowledge of FOIA when a public official denies you a document. Here are three easy stories that anyone can pull off using FOIA requests.

Police reports

Even the safest campuses have crimes. If you’re lucky (from a news perspective), your campus gets a good amount of crimes that produce a lot of  public police documents. Some police reports can be picked up at the station, but it’s a good idea to know your open records law in case recalcitrant (or just lazy) officers don’t want to find the files.

Other times, FOIA laws can help you investigate shadier things, like police brutality through police complaints. For example, there’s a theft case at Georgetown that seems to involve students but was never adequately resolved. It’s the perfect opportunity for a FOIA request on all the documents relating to the case.

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"NEWS & INFORMATION IS THE NEW ROCK N ROLL"

Tribune’s Chief Innovation Officer Lee Abrams gets a lot of crap for his energetic memos to Tribune employees.  The memos inevitably leak to Romenesko, where journalists who are about to be unemployed can laugh at that crazy guy who dared come over from radio. But while much of what he says sounds crazy, it actually makes a lot of sense. Take this, from a March 2008 memo.

THE ONLINE ARCHIVES! These are amazing! Yet, a mystery…hidden.

It sounds weird, but there are so many layers in it. Just looking at the memo while writing this post, I realized there’s nothing keeping the Voice from doing a “This Day in Georgetown History” kind of thing. Link back to our archives, get a little sidebar widget, and we get more pageviews. Abrams’s memos are gold mines of inspiration, or Zen koans.

Of course, he’s still a ridiculous character. He looks like a graying Michael Medved, and much of what he says is terrible (emphasis added):

*CASUAL STYLE: What with the suits and ties? I’m not suggesting sloppy…but business casual…maybe even eccentric as the Crime expert could be in a Columbo styled rumpled sweater.

But at least he’s trying! It seems like everyone trying to make reporting profitable again are focusing on dead models (online subscriptions) or things no one cares about (Soundslides). I’ll have a post on my favorite Abrams memos soon, and if things go well he may become this blog’s mascot.

Last month, I won the student contest at Reinventing Classifieds for new ideas to reinvigorate newspaper classifieds. The gist of my Soundslides audio slideshow (embedded below the fold), is that most newspaper classifieds are too boring and don’t appeal to a broad enough section of newspaper readers.

Because they’re boring, they only attract people who are already committed to buying something. My idea–Laughs & Facts–offers incentives for sellers to create more entertaining ads, thereby creating more value for the paper.

In the pro side of the contest, the New York Times’ David Kiessling won with an idea about using consignment in classifieds.  As a former consignment store employee, I heartily approve. It was awesome to have my work judged by Reinventing Classifieds’ founder Steve Outing, whose blog and Editor & Publisher columns I’ve enjoyed for a while.

Check out my entry, after the fold

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When the critic was king...

What are most newspapers–especially college ones–doing wasting space and money on reviewers? In almost all cases, readers can get opinions from more respected tastemakers for free online.

Reviewing is a blast, and can be wonderful to read. There are definitely places reserved for small publications, like reviews of art shows, theater, or local bands that won’t be covered by more authoritative outlets. But when a reader can just as easily go to Rotten Tomatoes or A.O. Scott, there doesn’t seem to be a point in covering mass-market releases.

It especially blows my mind that college papers still have reviewers. Any student interested in music is getting their taste from the Top 40 or Pitchfork, and students who love TV are (or should be) reading Alan Sepinwall’s blog. The only reason I read college reviewers now is to compare their tastes to writers at more respected publications: if they agree, they’re wise but dull; if they disagree, they have no taste.

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Georgetown has two competing papers: the Hoya and the Voice, my paper. The Hoya comes out twice a week and is the more official paper, while the Voice is supposed to be the counterculture alt weekly (we thought Vampire Weekend was the 2nd best album of the year, though, so take counterculture with a grain of salt).

This isn’t official official yet, but it’s clear from a somewhat on the record conversation I had with a Hoya writer that the Hoya’s long-running independence campaign is succeeding and the paper will be going independent from the university this summer. This is awful news for the Voice, since we can’t go independent and will now look like the administration’s lapdogs.

How can the Voice compete with the Hoya when the Hoya is more free of university influence? I have some ideas that could also be used by any other college paper facing a newly-independent rival:

• Keep up vociferous blog reporting. The blog can be as embittered towards the lackluster school administrators as it wants to be. Administrators are less likely to see the online side of the paper, so it has greater freedom than the print edition. Besides, blog aesthetics allow for the journalist’s watchdog to have a stronger bite. If you don’t have a general campus blog, get one.
• Stay on the technological cutting edge. If you can’t impress the kids with your ethics, at least you can distract them with live streaming video or Twittered updates.
• Take actual reporting 10 times more seriously. I know that’s easier said than done, but the difference between great reporting (FOIAing, source developing, and newsroom coordination) and mere good reporting will overcome any independence disadvantage.
• Take advantage of the opportunity to sell more ads. My former roommate sold ads for the Voice and told me a lot of businesses only wanted to advertise with the “official” or “main” campus paper. With the Hoya (or your campus’s equivalent) moving off-campus, you have a great opportunity to re-present your paper as the official campus one.
  

This isn’t an issue that would often come up for non-college papers since few of them are subsidized by the people they report on. The only analogue I can think of is the government-funded BBC versus independent outlets like Sky News.

I’m interested in hearing ideas from other people, especially other college journalists. If we just can’t go independent, how do we look more credible than a paper that is?

Me with the patron saint of journalism

Hello, and welcome to the blog that has journalism’s new business model hidden somewhere within its folds. I’m Will Sommer, a student at Georgetown and a writer for the Georgetown Voice. To help us get to know one another, I’ll fill out a survey:

• What can I expect from this blog? Coverage of journalism issues, especially college media and the move online.
• What tendency will you try but fail to limit in your blog? Online triumphalism.
• What new media guru is literally your spiritual leader? Jeff Jarvis. He invented Entertainment Weekly!
• What is your favorite African country? Western Sahara.
• Have you found a summer internship yet? No! Help me.

Journalism’s great, and this blog is about doing my small part to save it. But in my year and a half of reading other journalism blogs, I’ve never seen a good idea come from just one person. So comment, talk with me on Twitter, and let’s keep ourselves in jobs.