During our Week 1 session we covered the following topics:
HISTORY
We discussed the history of newspapers going digital, specifically the onslaught of newspaper-based websites in the mid-1990s. Timeline histories from the Poynter Institute, most interestingly, include 1991, 1994, 1995 and 1996, which can all be accessed here.
What stood out in the timeline was that the bulk of major newspapers, including the Los Angeles Times (1996), launched in their sites in the mid-1990s.
I made the point that newspapers at the time only saw websites as mirrors of their core product, the newspaper. They were seen as ways toward "alternate delivery" of the paper that could cut print costs.
We got some laughs watching a video, "The Tablet Newspaper," that demonstrated that point. In it an editor says that new technology will provide "a bridge of familiarity" for newspaper readers as they go digital.
NEWS ORGS TRY TO MAINTAIN
I argued that this mindset remains today: That newspapers and TV news operations have not fully embraced the inevitability of online migration and the dominance of digital news.
In broadcasting the story's the same, but via a different tact: Local news stations see online as a way to drive viewers to the telecast, not vice-versa, which one of you pointed out was the way most people see a TV news site.
The reason? They want to capture younger eyeballs they're losing during newscasts, which are still cash cows, albeit diminishing ones.
An ad in a newspaper is worth about 10 times, often more, than what it's worth online. The contrast is even larger for television. The flipside?
The DIY revolution: It often takes far fewer people to put together a digital news operation, and thus the advertising scale can actually make it profitable for some.
BLOGGERS RISE
The rise of the blogger in the early '00s put traditional journalists on the defensive. There were actual debates, for example, about whether bloggers who did not have traditional print experience should be credentialed by political conferences and police organizations, with many print and TV journalists saying they shouldn't.
Why was the blogger so threatening? Well, she demystified the profession of journalism. While long thought to be in the arena of lawyers and other educated people, bloggers demonstrated all you really needed to be a reporter was a notepad, a camera, a laptop and a nose for news.
The DIY aesthetic had infected journalism and burst the bubble of The Media Elite.
MUCKRAKING JOURNALISM
The news heyday in the late 1800s and early 1900s saw a generation of newspapers that were written in plain English, accessible to the people, sources to learn English for immigrants, and places for muckraking journalism that sensationalized political scandal and cut leaders down to size.
As journalists went from being journeymen to sometimes highly educated professionals, newspapers started to sound like the people they covered -- elite.
TONE
Bloggers brought the news business back to the people in a good way, often via irreverent tone. News blogs are conversational, controversial and often uncompromising.
Gawker has become the holy grail of new school online news not only because it has a very small staff and mostly just rewrites other people's news but because of its audacious, snarky tone. (And I noted, it makes a reported $10 million a year in profit, although that kind of money wouldn't even float a big news operation like the L.A. Times very long).
I explained that while newspapers had for decades run on the dry, wire-style writing based on the"inverted pyramid," the new school news blog throws out that formula.
I used as an example my coverage of a stabbing in Santa Monica, for which I used various linked sources, including Facebook profiles and local news outlets. I also noted that what I did was called ...
AGGREGATION
It's a staple of Gawker, Huffington Post and news blogs everywhere, but what is it and how is done properly? Aggregation is basically rewriting someone else's news. Often it's a way to take a dry, inverted pyramid story from, say, The New York Times, and make it snarky.
While some might say that's stealing, if Gawker does it, they're probably sending a lot of traffic to the original publication.
Still, it's probably proper to write only three to five grafs and send people on their way to the original sources if they want to read more.
And certainly, time willing, it's always good to make a phone call or two that can advance a story.
HYPERLOCAL NEWS
We discussed the rise of hyperlocal news as a business, particularly with AOL's Patch and massive investment the parent company has made in it and in Huffington Post. I mentioned this piece.
I argued that while hyperlocal news was thriving for small DIY operations like Venice311, it would be hard to see an operation like Patch, which establishes blogs in mostly upscale communities, making a go of it, particularly because it doesn't come from the community and its tone is newspaper-like.
VIDEO
There are two ways to use video: As the story, or to support a story you already have.
More likely than not the cases in which video is the whole of the story for you are going to be rare.
So in instances when the video is the story, it will likely be someone else's video, and you'll be embedding it/aggregating it from YouTube.
In using video to bolster a story, you will probably see yourself doing this way more often. Mostly I'll use YouTube or even LAPD video to support a text story. But sometimes I'll have my iPhone with me or a Flip camera and I'll capture a soundbite or two during an interview. Keep it short.
HOMEWORK
Compare a day's front pages from Gawker and The New York Times. Turn in a few paragraphs comparing and contrasting tone, subject matter and how the content is presented.
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