Canadian Association of Journalists conference 2010, Montreal
Online Journalism: You can't fight the future
Panel with Kirk LaPointe, managing editor of the Vancouver Sun; David Beers, founding editor of The Tyee; and Greg Horn, the one-man shop who started and runs Kahnawakenews.com.
From his position overseeing the development of the website and the Vancouver Sun, LaPointe says he watches employees face “profoundly emotional” changes when shifting perspective to accept online media. The employees go from ruling its significance out completely, to backing away from what seems like much more work, to getting discouraged by the small audience. The breakthrough to acceptance only comes with the first positive experience, such as the first time when a reader contacted through Twitter gives a great suggestion. That personal experience is key to a reporter finally seeing the benefits that linking with an online community can bring. Now, he says, community engagement is no longer a frill, and reporters like Kim Bolan, an organized crime reporter, are expected to scroll through the comments their stories generate on the website two or three times a day to make replies and show the writer is listening. They've also done a complete overhaul of their beat system, making people reapply for beats they would like with an outline of how they are going to interact, reach out and publish in online formats. Those new beats will be announced within weeks at the paper.
On the question of traffic, LaPointe says he's much more interested in “engagement metrics,” which take into account retweets and links. The Vancouver Sun paid a high-profile analytics company to study their website readers. LaPointe is expecting that report soon and talks excitedly about the chance to really know who is going to their website and why.
Beers is the founding editor of a regional news website The Tyee, founded several years ago with funding from the labour movement, invested through a trust fund with an editorial firewall between labour and the Beers. The news website continues to run with those funds, plus money from another investor and funds raised from their readers for special projects. (i.e. during a recent election, readers could select an issue and direct funds to increasing coverage of that issue. Afterward, Beers published a detailed account of the spending.) They now run on about $600,000 a year.
The Tyee succeeds despite ignoring all the truism of web publishing, says Beers. They are neither hyper local nor super global, they do long-form and in depth journalism, they don't make editorial decisions based on traffic. But his measure of success, he says, is that they matter, that the stories they write get picked up, affect public policy and expand public understanding. “We want our pieces to go viral, but we want them to go viral to influential people,” he said, then later added that he wonders sometimes if the website hasn't gotten to “egg heady.”
They publish 1,200 to 1,800 word stories with lots of links and a focus on the how's and why's of the news, closer to an analytical news magazine than a continuous reporting of what happened. “The Tyee is all about the how and the why. That's our niche,” he says. “The Internet has unbundled newspapers. I think you're going to see more and more stakeholders in the conversation.”
Horn is a perfect example of that last point. When he lost his job during a changeover at the local paper, he started Kahnawakenews.com with just $150 as a hobby between jobs. He soon garnered a following and now it's turning into a business where it's actually paying bills, he says. Local businesses are buying ads on the site. He serves his own community of 8,000-10,000 and tries to update the website daily with news from around the community. If he sees links to his stories on Facebook, he knows he's doing a good job.
Other links:
Kirk LaPointe's blog on change in the media
Blog post by Elise Stolte,
estolte@thejournal.canwest.com
or follow me on Twitter @estolte
Showing posts with label news magazine. Show all posts
Showing posts with label news magazine. Show all posts
Thursday, June 3, 2010
The future of online media - the Las Vegas Sun?
Canadian Association of Journalists conference 2010, Montreal
Keynote speaker Rob Curley, new media editor of the Las Vegas Sun, on the future of online media.
Rob Curley and the Las Vegas Sun are running an experiment that could become the newspaper model in 20 years. Their print product has become an analytical news magazine, and their website the paper of record.
In print land, the Las Vegas Sun runs as an 8-page insert in its main competitor, the Las Vegas Review Journal, and because of a federally-imposed joint operating agreement, this part is funded by the larger paper. The insert doesn't try to be comprehensive, just more contextual, focusing on the how and the why, says Curley. Twelve reporters (about 20 staff total) work on this side.
The website has roughly equal staffing, but here they cover the 'what' of journalism and try to make everything hyper local. They might have 25 to 45 stories a day on their website and only a handful in the paper. Eventually, they hope, the online will pay for the print edition, and Curley says they are already halfway to making the web portion self-sufficient.
Their approach to building readership is understanding what their audience wants to read. There are four reasons why people go to the web, he says: for practical reasons such as finding out where a restaurant is, for personal communication as in email, playful/fun reasons, and for porn, which he can't help you with, he says, even if he's from Las Vegas. Beyond that high-level understanding, the paper is unashamedly neurotic about traffic statistics for the site. They only cover what gets clicked on, which is why they cover professional fights and local college football teams. They also cover high school football games and get great uptake, but only for five schools, the ones with a sense of legacy. The rest of the schools get covered from the office because they weren't getting significant numbers of clicks.
On the Edmonton Journal site, minor crime stories seem to get a disproportionate number of clicks when compared to what I would judge as their overall significance, especially when compared to some political and in depth stories. That's what I was thinking about when someone from the audience asked, “What gets lost in the pursuit of traffic?”
Curley played down that concern. “Our readers are very sharp” he said. “Our readers really do want the news.”
Curley also talked about the paper's upcoming launch of a super hyper local website. For the past two years, they have been geo-coding all of their stories. In several weeks, readers will be able to enter their zip code and get crime data, restaurant reviews, gas prices, home prices, advertisements with coupons, and local news, all on a customizable website and for their neighbourhood. They also do things like this history project, which people keep coming back to for years.
The paper has five full time programmers on staff to help dream up and complete these projects, and some of the best writers poached from big newspapers. We need great writers for these web teams: quick, clean and good because, he says, unlike in print land, they don't get the luxury of three copy editors. Plus, all 12 of the web reporters are self-assigning. They all have beats or areas of reporting and send a note letting the editor know what they are doing that day.
Curley's blog post explaining the Las Vegas Sun
A Washington Post columnist's take on Curley's project
City Life article with much more depth, including some challenges to the scheme
Blog post by Elise Stolte,
estolte@thejournal.canwest.com
or follow me on Twitter @estolte
Keynote speaker Rob Curley, new media editor of the Las Vegas Sun, on the future of online media.
Rob Curley and the Las Vegas Sun are running an experiment that could become the newspaper model in 20 years. Their print product has become an analytical news magazine, and their website the paper of record.
In print land, the Las Vegas Sun runs as an 8-page insert in its main competitor, the Las Vegas Review Journal, and because of a federally-imposed joint operating agreement, this part is funded by the larger paper. The insert doesn't try to be comprehensive, just more contextual, focusing on the how and the why, says Curley. Twelve reporters (about 20 staff total) work on this side.
The website has roughly equal staffing, but here they cover the 'what' of journalism and try to make everything hyper local. They might have 25 to 45 stories a day on their website and only a handful in the paper. Eventually, they hope, the online will pay for the print edition, and Curley says they are already halfway to making the web portion self-sufficient.
Their approach to building readership is understanding what their audience wants to read. There are four reasons why people go to the web, he says: for practical reasons such as finding out where a restaurant is, for personal communication as in email, playful/fun reasons, and for porn, which he can't help you with, he says, even if he's from Las Vegas. Beyond that high-level understanding, the paper is unashamedly neurotic about traffic statistics for the site. They only cover what gets clicked on, which is why they cover professional fights and local college football teams. They also cover high school football games and get great uptake, but only for five schools, the ones with a sense of legacy. The rest of the schools get covered from the office because they weren't getting significant numbers of clicks.
On the Edmonton Journal site, minor crime stories seem to get a disproportionate number of clicks when compared to what I would judge as their overall significance, especially when compared to some political and in depth stories. That's what I was thinking about when someone from the audience asked, “What gets lost in the pursuit of traffic?”
Curley played down that concern. “Our readers are very sharp” he said. “Our readers really do want the news.”
Curley also talked about the paper's upcoming launch of a super hyper local website. For the past two years, they have been geo-coding all of their stories. In several weeks, readers will be able to enter their zip code and get crime data, restaurant reviews, gas prices, home prices, advertisements with coupons, and local news, all on a customizable website and for their neighbourhood. They also do things like this history project, which people keep coming back to for years.
The paper has five full time programmers on staff to help dream up and complete these projects, and some of the best writers poached from big newspapers. We need great writers for these web teams: quick, clean and good because, he says, unlike in print land, they don't get the luxury of three copy editors. Plus, all 12 of the web reporters are self-assigning. They all have beats or areas of reporting and send a note letting the editor know what they are doing that day.
Curley's blog post explaining the Las Vegas Sun
A Washington Post columnist's take on Curley's project
City Life article with much more depth, including some challenges to the scheme
Blog post by Elise Stolte,
estolte@thejournal.canwest.com
or follow me on Twitter @estolte
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