During Week 8 we talked about using Twitter as a channel to spread news. I noted that some AP reporters were recently chastised for breaking news via Twitter before the wire service had spread the information.
I argued that AP's thinking on this might be a little behind the times. It's good for reporters to live tweet events on a few fronts: First it establishes them as a brand and makes followers want to go to them for news. This only benefits their organizations. Second it teases the news. As you know Twitter is a limited medium. If you want to dig deeper and find out details, you'll have to go to the news outlet in question for the bigger picture. Finally, live tweeting events (as many reporters did during coverage of the Occupy L.A. evictions this week) breaks down the wall between news product and process, letting readers in on the raw material of news and allowing them to make their own conclusions.
I'm all for breaking news first on Twitter and driving readers to your site afterward to explain the bigger picture.
We also talked about how using the buddy system to live-blog big events can be a life-saver. There are situations where you're not going to be able to take notes and photos and write a story from the field, especially if things are chaotic or if you don't have internet access.
If you have a fellow reporter / blogger you can send quotes, pictures and background to, they can write it up from the comfort of their laptop, and you can share the glory. This often leads to faster posting, and you can beat the competition, like LA Weekly did in its coverage of a Venice triple shooting last summer.
I talked briefly about the death of Steve Jobs and how his product principles could be applied to web design when it comes to news. His skill was said to have been "editorial," not inventive. In other words Jobs was a master at paring things down. His ultimate archival contribution might be the single button (as in the iPhone's "home" button). Imagine if that kind of thinking were applied to news sites. We certainly would see more that looked like Gawker, with a few key stories placed before you, and less like the more-is-more chaos of a newspaper site or the Huffington Post.
We also discussed the controversy surrounding the last day of journalism's founding blogger, Jim Romenesko, at the Poynter Institute. He was found to have been using exact words and phrases in his aggregation. While we sympathize Romenesko (I have personally followed him to his new destination), it's true that doing so without using quote marks or block quotes is not the way to go. His experience taught us that lesson in a new world of online journalism whose rules are still being written.
We discussed last week's assignment -- to write a post and use social networking (Twitter, Facebook) to get someone to comment. As many of you found out, that's not so easy, even though it's an increasingly important part of the business. Most of you, however, are naturals at integrating reporting and social media and using Twitter and Facebook to promote your work and engage friends and followers.
Finally, we talked about whether the concept of "pay sites" have a future in the business. While some niche publications have had some success with online subscriptions (The Wall Street Journal, perhaps The New York Times), I argued it was too late for the rest of us:
If we had all erected a pay wall and stayed behind it 10 years ago this model might have had a chance. But the preponderance of aggregation and echoing content -- even that of pay sites -- means that it's almost impossible to keep a lid on news content these days.
I mentioned the concept of the "long tail" in culture, where instead of having a centralized broadcaster (I used the example of Elvis in the 1950s), we now have a myriad of micro-casters (I used the example of mini-stars in the multitude of music genres available today). That only bolsters the evolution of choice and the explosion of niche blogging. While there might be niches that could tap into audiences willing to pay for content, there's so much competition willing to give up the information for free (and willing to aggregate your content under the cover of "fair use") that it would be hard to argue for a pay-site future for any of us.
Niche, however, does attract advertisers, and so do eyeballs, which, as you know, are increasingly migrating online.
Our assignment for Week 8 was to read a free excerpt of Chris Anderson's book Free and write a short essay arguing for or against a pay-site future in journalism.
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