Help me pick a topic

Sorry to step on Ben's post (just below) on evangelicals and environmentalists, but I'm looking for some feedback on the best topic for me to present during my 10 minutes of floor time at a conference for copy editors in Chapel Hill this Sunday. Conference topic: The evolving news business. I've listed some topics on which I'm prepared to riff ... after the jump...

Hyperlocal hype: A riff on the media post I wrote earlier this month about how hyperlocal reporting alone won't save newspapers -- my point being that you need a change in the way you think about profit, quality and the strengths/weaknesses of print and online coverage. 

Credibility and accuracy: Print journalists are fixated on the idea that strict pre-publication controls are the only way to ensure accuracy and protect credibility in the presentation of news. Most don't understand the basic concepts that drive new products like Wikipedia or  produce trust among bloggers and within social networks. This can be a boring topic, but the takeaway is the understanding of how new accuracy feedback systems allow you to actually keep up with the pace of change in ways that traditional pre-pub editing can't match. 

Pros vs. Joes: Making professional mean something. The old bloggers v. journalists argument refuses to go away, and the latest reiteration of this fight is pitting paid columnists and anonymous editorial writers against supposedly irresponsible amateurs. My point: When "professional" opinion writers don't rise to the performance standards set by the amateurs, the problem isn't that the Web now allows everyone to have a voice. The problem is that the addition of talented amateurs raised the bar for opinion and analysis, and the professionals have resolutely refused to set professional standards that would separate them from the  "opinions are like assholes" crowd. 

Tools that scale: I like to ask tech and media people this question: what emerging technologies do you see driving the development of online media in the next two or three years? And they invariably say "hand-held devices." Nobody ever mentions the development of informatics -- better described as information tools that scale to the size of the modern information glut. Getting recycled news to your cell phone is just another medium, but Google's plan to build a tool that spots when politicians are lying is going to radically redefine the roles of journalists. 

Making sense of the medium: Newsroom structures for the 21^st century. TV wins on immediacy and emotional punch; Web wins on thoroughness, scale and customization -- and ties on immediacy. So what do print newspapers win on? Burst efficiency. Twenty minutes with a well-edited newspaper is the most efficient way to orient yourself to an enormous amount of information, and nothing else comes close. Follow this to its logical conclusion and you get a radically different news organization: All assigning editors and reporters (along with a few copy editors) get moved from the newspaper staff to the Web staff, and the new newspaper staff consists only of rewrite specialists, copy editors, page designers and legacy senior management. Web journalism tends to suffer because it is an afterthought to the newsroom religion, in which the holy production cycle is the No. 1 priority. But when the Web comes first, then the newspaper becomes what it should be right now: a tightly edited daily report that presents the best of the news stream to readers who want to be informed but lack the time to keep up. 

News as semi-structured data: New tools, new approaches. I'm preaching the idea these days that the future of media lies in the database business, not the document business. That means we need to be developing brand new news tools and pushing for a conceptual revolution in newsrooms. Today a story is produced with little or no thought given to the ways it will be tagged, categorized and retrieved. In the near future, we'll view a story as a record with lots of data fields: byline, categories, keyword slugs, geotags. The benefits are enormous, the costs minimal, but the hurdle is an institutional culture that not only mistrusts systems but romanticizes ad hoc solutions to problems. 

Standards-based journalism: Websites look, work and adapt better today than they did just five years ago thanks to the Web Design Standards movement. You can still build sites that don't comply to these standards (our company did exactly that in 2006), but you don't because the competitive nature of the Web punishes those who lag behind. So why doesn't journalism begin developing specific standards that are applicable across media formats? 

Improving news the ISO-9000 way: A seal-of-approval for media practices? I don't like the idea of news councils as a way of enforcing accuracy, fairness, etc., on news outlets. Nor do I think that everything that ails professional journalism can be solved via a hybrid form of pro-am reporting. But I'm fairly convinced that a foundation with minimal funding support could produce a set of standards for news practices (funding, investment, staffing, editing and accuracy policies, yada yada yada) that every significant news organization would covet as a seal of professional approval. In other words, rather than trying to improve media by enforcing compliance to standards after the fact, we could improve media performance by encouraging  organizations to treat the news seriously. Such a system wouldn't guarantee that every story was accurate, but it would tell you that the organization complied with the kind of standards that would typically generate quality information.

OK, that's me off the top of my head. I think the best topic for this group is probably the one about restructuring the newsroom so it makes sense. Your thoughts?

Comments

[jmsloop]

Dan,

I like the restructuring the newsroom topic and the very first one, the hyperlocal bit. I wonder, since it's only ten minutes, think you can get a camera on you, and youtube it for us? Could be fun.

[Badger]

He could probably film it, but to be on YouTube, it would have to meet certain criteria. For example, it would have to be both downright stupid and oddly catchy - in other words, the next internet craze.

Dan: I propose that you present your notes on restructuring Newsrooms, but set your comments to the meter and tune of "Modern Major General" from "HMS Pinafore." (God knows, that joke hasn't been used enough.)

[Daniel]

You jest, but from a content-retention standpoint, if i DID sing it to the tune of "Modern Major General" more people would probably pay attention.

[Agricola]

Tools that Scale and Semi-structured data seem to have some commonality.......maybe there is an idea at the intersection?

[Tim]

I second Agricola's thought. Why aren't journalists/news organizations the leaders in XML/XSL development and use? (Or are they?)

I'd personally love to hear the ISO-9000 topic, but that's because I'm in favor of news councils.

[Daniel]

We're in desperate need of more journalists with computer skills. Not word processing or web surfing, but the ability to create things using technology. And we need more of these people in decision-making positions.

To put this in perspective, I would bet you right now that if you asked senior editors at American newspapers how to write a hyperlink, 80 percent wouldn't know how. But these are the people who are making decisions about news technology, and they're really just guessing.

The problem, of course, is that asking tech people to make decisions about journalism isn't really all that effective, either. We need more reporters and editors and decision-makers with feet in both worlds, and if we have to wait for the current generation to rise through the ranks, we're going to be too late.

Speaking of XML, Tim, you might be interested in NewsML, which is an XML flavor being pushed as a standard for media companies. I'm planning to output all our stuff in NewsML, even though it won't be a benefit to us in the short-term future.

The ISO-9000 topic is probably my favorite subject from the bunch and something I'd like to spend more time developing. I really believe that giving an organizational seal of approval, based on challenging standards and strict, I.G.-style inspection, is going to be more effective than news councils. But I don't know that. And I don't think I can do it real well in 10 minutes to a crowd of strangers.

[Tim]

Thanks for the point to NewsML. Looks like IPTC is coming out with a 2d Gen version this year. Does it make sense to port to newsml-1 if newsml-2 will be available this year?

IPTC Standards Development
newsml-2

[Daniel]

Good question, but I don't have the luxury to wait for anticipated upgrades in the same way that I can hold off buying a new computer to see how this whole Vista thing shakes out. I haven't studied the NewsML-2 spec, but I'm operating on the assumption that we'll just have to remap tags, which is something we'll have to do forever. Our big push right now is strict adherence to Web Design Standards and the Semantic Web philosophy... if we can establish those principles in all our founding documents, keep versioning control over everything that evolves from them and maintain good documentation, upgrades to all sorts of things should wind up being considerably less buggy.

We're rebuilding from scratch. The difficulty for a lot of sites is that they're conserving parts of their operation, and their code is just a cluttered mess, mixing structure and presentation. For instance, the site we're replacing uses external style sheets, but also has style written into the XHTML and HTML presentation tags. Oi vey.

[Anna Haynes]

Well if you're bandying about the word "opinion", you must be including the op-ed pages, so...

Maybe it's time to work on establishing the brand (the newspaper as a whole, as an entity) as a reader-enlightener. (Which is what we readers once thought newpapers were, until (expert) bloggers came along.)

And the piece-of-cake way to leap forward in this dimension is to follow Andy Cline's recommendation and ask columnists and other op-ed writers for disclosures - providing a forum for payola punditry is not consistent with enlightening one's readers.

(and see Brad DeLong on this)