(That’s right, we’re PIST!)
Team Members
Rich Gordon
Mindy McAdams
Tom Torok
Steve Yelvington
State of the industry and a vision of the future
Traditional media companies generally lack the technical skills to compete effectively. New media companies often lack the journalistic skills to publish a quality product.
The winning information companies of the future will be those that most effectively marry journalistic standards and objectives to technologies that make distributing information cost effective and fast, and able to reach the largest number of audiences.
What business are we in? The information business: gathering, making sense of, and distributing information. To survive in the Information Age, an information company needs to become the preeminent source of, and guide to, information related to the community (geographic or interest) it seeks to serve.
If you are in this business, we are talking to you.
In the past media world, journalists gathered information and then applied filters based on limited space, a vision of a single mass audience, a short shelf life and a limited publishing cycle. In the Information Age, we have unlimited space, a continuous deadline and a goal of reaching customers individually with information relevant to their particular interests.
We need to be aggregators and guides, as well as filters and editors.
This requires a completely different approach to gathering, storing, and delivering information about the community we are targeting.
Our information should be in a store or databases so it is searchable, sharable, reusable, deliverable in multiple formats on multiple display devices, and migratable (e.g. to new systems that don’t exist yet)
Note: Quark and PDF files do not meet this description.
Once an organization has information in the proper format, it also needs a process in the organization for identifying, evaluating and developing new ideas. This is the starting point for good product development. For example, a newsroom employee with an idea about a new e-commerce web business should have an a venue to propose that idea and be involved in exploring and implementing it, otherwise, that employee will take the idea to another company. An organization also needs project leaders who can work with multidisciplinary teams to bring successful new products to market.
In traditional media companies, many of the journalists who most appreciate the value of structured data are the computer-assisted reporting specialists. Some of them have taken the next step, after acquiring or building databases for reporting projects, to make them available to other reporters. And in many cases, the databases of value to journalists are also of value to the general public.
Investigative reporters and computer-assisted reporting specialists are doing original journalism. This is marketable and can be a revenue-generating strategic advantage. To get the maximum value out of the work that they do, you need to make the information available online, and keep it updated.
The out-migration of online operations into independent companies creates a barrier between the information gatherers/storytellers and those who deliver content to online users–making it difficult to leverage content resources and go beyond automated production processes.
Recommendations and guidelines
Culture
- Creating an environment for teams to solve problems. Teams should include people from technology and editorial.
- Training and/or breeding “bridge people” — or identifying bridge people who already exist — and giving them responsibilities that allow them to have an impact. (Bridge people are those who can communicate effectively with technical people and journalists.)
- Breaking down walls between different functional groups (marketing, systems, editorial, design, online, print).
- Listen to people who are not in supervisory positions, or not in the newsroom–they may be young, or they may be in a different department, but they may have ideas that ought to be considered.
- Value the news research department and, in fact, increase the scope of its responsibilities to become the place where information of value to the newsroom is acquired, stored, and made available to the journalists on the staff.
- Create and encourage a culture of cooperative teams, not of lone wolves.
- Learn to value project management and to hire and/or train people to serve as project managers.
- Have a healthy budget for ongoing training in technological skills, and make sure it gets spent on mid-level editors and those who work under them.
Skills
- One (preferably more) of your journalists should be schooled in server databases, web programming, scripting languages, and other computer languages such as Visual Basic, Java, or Perl.
- Evaluate the technical skills of your entire organization, editorial as well as technical staff.
- Do you have people on staff who can:
- Set up a web server?
- Set up a text search engine?
- Set up a database server?
- Publish a web page?
- Publish a web search page for a searchable database?
- Publish a web page that allows the public to extract and submit information?
- If a company came to you and said they would pay you to send them electronically all of your stories on a particular topic, could you do it (without assigning a staff member to retype or fax them)?
- Set up a web server?
Establish or support training curricula and programs for:
- Journalists in technology.
- Technologists in journalism.
- Journalism students in technology, precision journalism and online publishing.
Note: Training saves money, improves staff retention, and boosts staff morale. Better trained people improve your bottom line.
Tools
- Every staff member needs a personal computer with access to the Internet on his or her desk.
- Every staff member needs a unique e-mail address.
- Replace or upgrade all desktop and laptop computers every three years.
- All reporters need to have access to laptops and cell phones.
- Every staff member needs to have access to tools, including spreadsheets and database analysis software.
- Every staff member needs to have access to a server to store and share databases acquired in the course of reporting.
- All data in the organization needs to be in a format where it can be shared with other members of the organization, and with readers/customers. Examples:
- When a reporter builds a database for a project why can’t it be easily used on the web or exported as a spreadsheet or text file for use by the graphics department?
- When the copy desk has a list of all public officials and the spelling of their names why isn’t that available to every member of the staff?
- When a reporter has the best Rolodex on the staff why isn’t it available to other reporters?
- When a reporter builds a database for a project why can’t it be easily used on the web or exported as a spreadsheet or text file for use by the graphics department?
