Journoz: Updates for Australian Journalists

ONA Conference report

Dr Stephen Quinn, author of Newsgathering on the Net, is currently based in the US. He attended the annual Online News Association conference held in Chicago on Nov 14-15 (http://www.journalists.org/2003conference/) and had the following report to make.

What's next? someone in the audience asked Jack Fuller, who gave the keynote address on the first day.

"I don't know," he said. "You probably don't either. Things are changing very rapidly." He spoke about lessons in humility he had learned from the online world: what we need to do is to experiment and assess the results, and adapt, and do it over and over again - not get wedded to ideology about what people want. Newspapers are notoriously difficult to change because readers get upset at change. Newspapers must experiment and adapt. Humility means recognizing oour own lack of knowledge - ignorance in the true sense. Recent research had shown that newspapers are conservative, perfectionist and reluctant to change, similar in culture to the military and hospitals. Fuller said he understood why there were some reasons to preserve some aspects of this culture - you want people to be perfectionists when they are doing delicate operations. Fuller said he hoped that newspapers had the potential to change. Read more about Fuller at http://journalism.nyu.edu/pubzone/ReadMe/article.php?id=243.

Ideas for generating convergence kept being asked from the floor in several of the sessions. Here are the consolidated thoughts:

• create competition (some newsrooms have whiteboards where people track successes)
• leadership from top
• awards (one paper has a golden Mr Potatohead award which is given weekly
• encourage recalcitrants through carefully worded performance reviews
• provide tools via training
• ask reporters: "What do you need? What do you want?"
• establish a convergence mission statement: defining urgent news. "An event of community news or significance," one reporter said of his newsroom.
• reporters care more about profession than their employer. They will respond to ways to improve their journalism.
• Give them people they respect as their leaders.
• know how to talk reporters' language.
• Support from top down.

How to attract a young audience was a common theme. Here are the thoughts of Don Estes, editor of chicagotribune.com

Estes spoke about the tao of FLOID. Fresh, local, often updated, images and interactive, aimed at the young demographic. Here are details about each:

• Fresh: Day starts with shovelware at 6am but updates from then. Signals with timestamps, update tags. Morning: hard news; noon more utilitarian (mortgages, better deal on cell phone); evening more entertainment.
• Local: breaking news with local angles "Our franchise is not Iraq or Washington, it's local news. "Concentrate on utilities - schools, weather, crime stats, traffic - what you can't get from our competitors."
• Often update, never stale: aimed at work week 6am-6pm, Mon to Fri. "The story people see at 9am is very different from the story at 3pm that day."
• Images and interactive: readers love photos (the most viewed feature). Polls and message boards. "For things that people care about these things take off like a rocket."
• Demographics: young are targeted: "Advertisers love that. We have those demographics in mind when we design the site each day."

Blogging was another popular subject. The other keynote speaker was Andrew Sullivan, who runs a popular blog at www.andrewsullivan.com

Read the blog from conference attendees. See http://www.journalists.org/2003conference/blog/

Publishing unedited blogs on news sites is "a suicide pact," says a lawyer with Dow Jones & Company. See http://onlinejournalism.com/topics/brief.php?briefID=64468. Posted by belinda at November 18, 2003 08:44 AM

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