In my first Journalism class, we were assigned to read a report that suggested ISPs should subsidize newspaper sites. One year ago, I sat in a Missourian lecture hall full of people who couldn't understand why forcing commenters to use their real names was a problem.
A friend of mine who recently graduated from the newspaper sequence used to espouse that "nobody knows how to make money on the Internet" as if it were an absolute fact. The shortlist of people who'd quit their day jobs for web start-ups didn't seem to change her mind.
So I spent a few years being really outspoken, and almost enjoying it.
I still have no problem playing devil's advocate. I really dislike the idea of making iPod touches/iPhones required for freshmen (they're cool, but why should we target a single arbitrary mobile platform? In the real world there are Blackberries, Windows Mobile, Google Android, and some shell of Palm OS. Why should we pick an arbitrary platform when we could... well, this is an argument for another day.)
Anyway, something changed. The journalists and the technical people are starting to speak the same language. And today's presentations were not only in the same language, but on the same page.
Matt Thompson's experiments with context speak directly to Paul Boll's realization that journalism should make people smarter. It's related to the same discussion we've had about what belongs on Money Commons.
And he may not know it, but his discussion of clutter on news sites was really about usability. That's as web-geeky as it gets.
Jane Stephen's idea is essentially a way to rapidly establish niche media outlets in a standard, repeatable manner with a very small staff. This takes an idea straight out of the blogosphere and tries to localize it. Since quite a few bloggers have managed to make a living with this on a global level, it makes sense to try and apply it to local journalism.
And of course, there's Jen Reeves, Community, and Money Commons.
Money Commons is not a failed project, it's an experiment that provided insight. I learned a lot about RSS, XML, Wordpress, php, workflow, aggregation, XAMPP (Apache MySQL PHP and phpMyAdmin), and a few... we'll call them principles.
- Never assume you'll be able to dismantle someone else's code. That's only true if it's clean and documented, and if you don't always do that yourself, why should anyone else?
- Wireframing is not something you can skip. If you don't know the content structure of a website before you design it, you will be unhappy later.
- Great content works a lot like trees that fall in the middle of the forest. Yes, it happened, and it was pretty impressive, but nobody gives a damn.
In the weeks before our Salad Daze premiere, we pitched the story to every newsroom in Columbia, in addition to a list of other promotional efforts. We did this because we wanted to spread the message to large, existing audiences.
KOMU, and the other newsrooms, already have audiences, so rather than building them, what we need to do is interact with them better. I have a creeping suspicion that part of the reason we're having trouble with this is that journalism is used to being a mass media. Journalists sent stuff to the Audience, period. And so all of our traditions in how we "do" news aim at that, rather than building relationships with and interacting with audience.
That's what Money Commons, Smart Decision, Ning, Twitter, and all the other things we've been playing with are meant to do.
We already know that some, if not all, of these things are really good at doing just that.
I just installed a new system called BBClone for monitoring traffic on BeTheShoe.com. It's faster and gives me better data, but for the past two years we've been able to see what kind of traffic we get. And in looking at the data, we've found that when we do things that engage our audience, traffic spikes.
The days around a premiere, a trailer release, a news story... you can pick these events out on the timeline without even knowing when they occur. And that makes sense, because every time we do one of these things, we plug the website everywhere we can, directing every audience we put ourselves in front of to go look at that content.
With that in mind, it's really obvious how to make these engagement projects work: push them to our existing audiences beyond just word of mouth. Can we have an on-air Twitter graphic? A prominent Twitter link on the front page of KOMU.com? Can we do that for Ning too?
In other words, if we're up to things, we should tell our entire existing audience about them.
One last thing: There was a woman in the audience this afternoon who was asking about research. Of course I like the idea of having data that tells us a little more about the measurable impact of these new technologies and techniques, who doesn't? But I think it's easy to forget that we're just getting started. The computer geeks of the world know where the technology is going, and the Mike Fanchers, Matt Thompsons, and Paul Bolls of the world know where the journalism needs to go. But the details about how to make the pieces fit together - which is really what Money Commons and Health Commons are about - are still napkin sketches.
But there's something to be said about napkin sketches. They tend to point to exciting times.
