Freelance Unbound

It strikes me there’s a kind of assumption around journalism that it somehow needs bespoke tools to do its job in the new digital media world. But actually I think it should stick to its existing strengths.
In the spirit of research, I’ve just visited the Royal College of Art summer graduation show to check out the cutting edge communications work.
I was quite excited (in a geeky way) to see Guillaume Drapier’s WritingCloud project there. It was pitched as a way of bringing the world of professional journalism together with the blogosphere.
The result would be to enrich the research process and build engagement with bloggers – in place of the sometimes antagonistic relationship the two seem to have nowadays.
WritingCloud is a free web-based platform that allows writers to ask questions and direct them to readers with an interest or expertise in the subject. Readers – or “helpers”, as they are called on the site – receive a stream of questions in their particular field and can then submit answers or other research material. Material can be text, photos or video. Helpers get a credit with a link back to their blog for their trouble.
For his MA project, Drapier created a four-page tabloid newspaper using his collaborative platform. You can see the workings behind it on the WritingCloud blog here. He also used social media, such as a Facebook group.
At first glance, I thought it sounded just the ticket – journalism has to break out of its traditional top-down hierarchy in order to function in the not-so new-media digital world.
But on closer inspection, there are a number of flaws.

• It has to build its network from scratch. This is yet another platform for users to have to get excited about, register on and start to use. But life is short – I think this will be an uphill struggle.
• What’s the compelling USP? The idea of putting journos and bloggers in touch is good on the face of it. But why would the helpers register? Is the promise of a possible link on a news story that compelling? Seems a little like hard work. Does it make you want to register and monitor all the journo questions? I don’t think so.
• It’s too standalone. Related to the above. I registered on WritingCloud to see how it worked. It seems you need to monitor questions and answers via the site. Now, I know this is a student project and so is pretty embryonic. But there’s no provision for email alerts or SMS synching or anything that might mesh this with the wider online world.

That’s the real problem with this idea. Even though its premise is that it’s really cutting edge, it something of the flavour of yesteryear – when the web was much more insular; when you had to download proprietary bits and pieces to make some standalone service work.
And it’s interesting that Guillaume didn’t actually use the WritingCloud site to generate the material for his graduation newspaper. Instead, according to his blog, he asked questions on existing internet forums:
answers.yahoo.com, www.convinceme.net and www.onlinedebate.net.
That’s logical for a limited timeframe student project. But it also indicates the structural flaw in this exercise – it’s much better to go to where people are networking already, rather than try to build one yourself.
Also, people will be networking there for a reason – so you can piggyback off that, rather than trying to be all compelling yourself with your new web platform.
Don’t get me wrong – I don’t want to rubbish this project. I admire its mission to bring the audience for journalism into its production. But I think what it’s trying to do is now, kind of by definition, not what the web is about.
I really like the idea of a “writing cloud” – a kind of soup of ideas, opinions, facts and research that can coalesce into, effectively, journalism. But you know what? We have that already. It’s called Twitter, and YouTube and Flickr and (maybe, if we can figure out how to map it on to journalism) Facebook. And journalists and others are already using Twitter, and other social media, as an effective crowdsourcing tool.
At its root, journalism is basically hanging around gossiping with people. And that’s what journalists, bloggers et al are still doing – except that the hanging around is now being done at forums like Twitter, rather than in a dingy Soho bar.
I suspect the key to success in the online world is not to create brand new tools, but to make better use of the existing ones.

So – no sign of the post I was expecting on my Twitter account, but Twitterfeed managed to pull out my previous post about the Yemeni air crash.
Something’s working – I’m just not sure what it is.
[Twitterfeed update UPDATE: Of course, this post has made it in. Which looks silly…]

The Online Journalism Blog says RSS is dead and newspapers should abandon their useless RSS news feeds for Twitter.
As the OJB is such an authority, when it says “jump”, I obviously ask “how high?”. And then, sheeplike, I swap my no-doubt useless RSS feed for a link to my Twitter account.
How easy will this be? Actually, not so hard. A few seconds’ search brought me to Twitterfeed.com, which, with suspiciously impeccable timing, offers to do this very thing for me.
The process is easy enough:

1. Sign up to Twitterfeed
2. Click on “Create New Feed”
3. Click the link to “Connect your feed to your Twitter account”
4. Throw security to the wind and reveal your Twitter username and password (go on, how sensitive are your Tweets? Really?)
5. Navigate back to Twitterfeed (NB: the screen hung up on me at that point, but when I logged back on to Twitterfeed it had made the link successfully)
6. Give your feed a name
7. Enter the feed URL
8. Click “Create feed”

It’s a few minutes’ effort – but will it actually work?
Truth to tell, I have no idea – the only way to find out is navigate to Twitter and see. If you see an extract from this post there, it’s a runner.
And then I can add a feed from my Twitter account to Freelance Unbound, which means you can read Twitter posts of blog posts of Twitter posts of blog posts until you have to lie down in a darkened room and not go near the internet again for some time.

History is rewritten by the internet, as yesterday’s five-year-old boy survivor of the Yemeni air crash off the Cormoros islands today morphs strangely into a 14-year-old girl.

I’m sure it’s nice that the incorrect official statements have been corrected. But I’ve noticed that sometimes this has happened without much acknowledgement of the change.

So Google “five year old survivor yemeni crash” and you’ll get loads of results like the one above. But click through to this story from the Canadian National Post, for example, and you get the updated story with no explanation as to why [UPDATE: now the updated story has vanished (15 June 2011), but you can find a ghostly archive reference here].

Yes, way down in the story it does say: “Several Comoran medical officials had earlier reported that a five-year-old boy had been found in the water following the Airbus crash.” But it doesn’t admit to being an updated story itself.

I’m all for process journalism, but I’m a bit suspicious when a story that is all over the web and TV one evening suddenly vanishes from a major news web site.

Then again, it also works the other way around. The Google search results for “yemeni air crash survivor” includes this Telegraph story that looks at first glance like it’s about the teenage girl, but actually clicks through to the original report about a boy toddler being saved (I’m putting the web grab in here, just in case the web story is updated).

Is this important? Well, kind of. With this kind of breaking news, it’s difficult to keep track of rumour and inaccuracies. It all happens too fast to be captured in print. So that makes the web the document of record.

And while we want to know what really happened, it may also be important to know how that knowledge came to be revealed.

Which is why news web sites should probably keep their links fixed rather than fluid. I want a link from yesterday to point me to the same place today, thanks. Otherwise online journalism really does become a bit too Orwellian.

Today I’ve invited another blogger to join me in a discussion about the future of web journalism and the economics of publishing in a rapidly digitising world.
Blogging about the world of amateur horticulture under the name Soilman (well, it’s nice to have a hobby), he also has wide experience in journalism and editorial training. He has seen first hand the radical changes in editorial practice and thinking demanded by the switch from print to online.
We ramble on a bit – the topics covered are these:

• What do readers want?
• Who pays for content?
• The impact of web statistics on journalism
• The strength of niche editorial

What do readers want?
Freelance Unbound: What kind of content are we looking at to drive readership and revenues? And where will the revenue come from?
Soilman: Not news. News is dead. It’s a dull commodity that doesn’t sell anything worth paying for. There’ll always be somebody offering it (badly – but who gives a shit?) for nothing.
I’m more and more convinced that the future, for publishers, means going
 into the software business. Producing applications for use on computers
 and
 iPhones (and others, yet to be invented) that bring the user a valuable, useful, sexy service unobtainable on the web generally, that happens to
 incorporate the stuff we already do (news, reviews, etc), but also gives value-added extras to create a brand new ‘product’.
Who pays for content?
Freelance Unbound: How could the financial model work? There’s been a lot of chatter recently about clever ways to monetise content – in effect breathing new life into micropayments by creating a bastard hybrid with the web subscription model.
Journalists love this. They think readers will happily volunteer to subscribe to a concept called “web journalism” because they value its contribution to a free society. The sticking point has been just how the money can be collected and allocated to the content that web users consume.
But now it seems we are developing clever ways to account for people’s web usage and it might be possible to work out some way of imposing a levy on the web to be parceled out to content producers. Do you think it’s viable?
Soilman: I know there are voices calling for pay-per-page micropayment systems and old-fashioned subscriptions to websites, but I’m still convinced these are (mostly) misconceived. While there remains even one vague competitor, however poor, who offers content for free (even if second-rate), most folks will always be reluctant to fork out for the basic content.
BUT experience shows us they are willing to pay for value-added ideas around the content, ie

• A targeted software delivery vehicle, or indeed a bespoke software plus hardware solution
• Cleverly aggregated and focused one-stop-shops of other people’s material
• Tailored DNA-specific packages of content for individual clients, or tailormade ‘widgets’ and/or feeds delivering focused your own brand’s content to individual clients
• Tailormade business software incorporating your own products’ feeds and databases for added client value… ie a software package to run a media grid for companies in any particular sector, which automatically assimilates feeds and data services from your magazine sites.
• Sponsored search within your own sites
• Top-level ‘premium’ content for a charge (while basic is free)
• Sponsored editorial

There’s absolutely no reason why this couldn’t be more widely adopted in business brands. It just requires clever and imaginative ideas.
Many of those ideas rely on technical software solutions, requiring a focus on technical development over and above mere browser and database coding.
I’m not aware that many publishers have even begun to explore this in their business plans and budgets for technical departments. Obviously it’s outside their comfort zone and it’s not cheap. But, equally obviously, if it brought in revenue it might not look so expensive.
How does knowing visitor statistics affect the practice of journalism?
Freelance Unbound: What do you think about the way web metrics are changing the responsiveness of journalism to audience behaviour?
Not so long ago there was a discussion piece at Journalism.org about how the availability of copious web audience metrics has changed the way that publications choose and prioritise their content.
Former washingtonpost.com executive editor Jim Brady argues that, while it is important to watch daily numbers carefully, the Post did not let “real-time, hourly information drive [its] editorial strategy”.
This meant he was willing to nurture a columnist whose readership was relatively small, but very loyal. He wasn’t seduced by the occasional casual traffic spikes generated by a link from a high traffic environment such as Yahoo or Google.

“If The Washington Post decided to promote stories on its home page based purely on traffic potential, what makes it unique would quickly evaporate. So any analysis of traffic also has to keep this in mind”

Former Salon.com Washington bureau chief Walter Shapiro is even more hostile to the “tyranny that comes from real-time readership numbers”.

“What this meant in practice at Salon was that an article might have as few as six hours to prove itself with readers before it was yanked out of a position of prominence.”

The result? Fluff and partisan political ranting scored much higher than thoughtful, in-depth reporting. As a result, he argues:

“Salon’s internal culture and stray comments by editors worked to discourage writing about important topics (campaign-issue analysis, non-war-related foreign news) because they invariably earned lower readership numbers.”

Is this a problem for journalism do you think?
Soilman: I think both of them are stone wrong. Phrases like this from Walter Shapiro sum up the problem:

“But what Internet journalism requires are self-confident editors (and
 owners) who can resist the blandishments of quick-react readership statistics and allow laudable stories time to build their own audience. Otherwise, we will all, reporters and readers alike, find ourselves stuck in heavy traffic with nothing but fluff to read.”



This, to me, is old ‘printie’ thinking at work. Both these guys come from a place where journalism has some higher purpose than mere commerce. It has noble aims, entwined with the preservation of democracy etc.

If there’s one thing that seems crystal clear to me (and to Clay Shirky, in his admirable essay recently), it’s that attitudes like this are only possible in the print legacy world, where large profits generated from that 500-year-old ‘model’ (high barrier to entry, advertiser-as-hostage, small
ads pay for Baghdad bureau) make the ‘higher purpose’ possible. It’s no longer possible. It’s gone, busted, over. Period.
Freelance Unbound: I think the first argument was about a bit more than that. He was
saying, basically, that you should be careful how you interpret your
traffic. Huge spikes in single page views are not necessarily as
valuable as content that draws in a much more loyal readership. It’s the
”big post” argument. There are some interesting views on this on John Scalzi’s Whatever blog here and here.

Soilman: Of course, you’re right: I just home in on the shit that irritates me about the ‘responsibilities of great journalism’ etc. It drives me nuts.
Quantity versus quality is a tricky one, though, because the advertisers and media buyers are only just beginning to look beyond sheer volumes of uniques and impressions. Click-through and click-through-to-sale are becoming more important, though.
I call this the “Eldorado metric”. It means the ad on a website that actually encourages a browser to click and buy straight from an editorial page.
On a consumer technology site, for instance, it’s would be the golden moment when you’ve had the viewer seeing reviews pages and they click on a manufacturer advertisement that says something like “Buy this product here!”… And then they do. The advertiser can see they came from your site, and that they
made a sale as a DIRECT result of the ad.
Clearly, this is gold dust from a CPM (cost per thousand impressions) point of view – you can suddenly charge for an ad the kind of money you might once have expected from a print display ad. 
Unfortunately, it’s a rare scenario… And specific (probably) to a particular kind of editorial product.
The strength of niche editorial
Freelance Unbound: So, basically, that means from a revenue-generating point of view editorial generally can’t rely on advertising any more.
Does this mean we’ll start seeing a heavy bias towards review-type editorial that can generate this kind of ad?
I guess we’re seeing this already – lots of web sites set up for the sole purpose of plugging a set of products with supposedly independent
reviews, but which are said to be funded by the companies themselves. Web hosting review sites are a good example. 
Perhaps there’s a place here for the trusted brand element of publishing…
Soilman: I do wonder. Certainly, websites that are highly vertical, highly focused on a particular subject seem to me to have an in-built advantage online. You can do detail –down to the ‘nth’ degree – online in a way that simply wasn’t possible in print. Plus if I were a marketing man today, and wondering how to spend an ad budget, I’d be looking for the most targeted, niche, directly-relevant ad vehicles that I could find… And the more specialised and focused a website, the more interested I’d be.
Why on earth would I want to advertise on a generalist site like a newspaper site? It may attract thousands of eyeballs, but I know that only a fraction of them are specifically interested in what I’m selling. Far better, surely, to go straight to the specialist site with PRECISELY the right audience (albeit smaller). If 100% of readers are definitely interested in what I’m flogging, I’m not wasting a penny. Plus online I can see from statistics precisely how those people react to my ads… which is, in itself, market research. Valuable market research, potentially.
Certainly the kind of journalism you want to be in would have this kind of potential… just as doctors are well advised to specialise in diseases of the rich.
In conclusion
So, there you have it. Print is dead, news is dead, and we all have to spend our time writing software applications and writing niche reviews to get advertising revenue. 
I’m not sure how well that will go down in the UK’s journalism degree courses. 
More views on this are obviously welcome – comment at will…

Yesterday I suggested journalism students should read Jeffrey Goldberg’s financial feature “Why I fired my broker” from the May issue of The Atlantic magazine.
But I’m well aware that most student journalists aren’t that keen to write insightful business articles. 
Instead, I’m sure a lot of you want to write witty and amusing columns of your clever observations about life. I don’t blame you. It’s a lot easier: there’s much less research and it’s more fun to produce.
But often these kinds of column are not so much fun to read. If you don’t know what you’re doing, they turn out to be self-indulgent and flabbily written. The columnist is often the only one enjoying themself. Although they seem as if they should be easy, writing a humorous and topical column that actually works is very hard indeed. 
But some writers do it very well. One is Danny Wallace, who writes for London lifestyle freesheet ShortList on a Thursday.
He should be good at this. He writes for radio and TV, as well as turning out books. More importantly, he’s been writing since he was at school. It takes time and practice, after all.
Why is his self-indulgent humour column worth reading? Mainly, timing and structure.
He has a certain formula – pick a social event and bring out the embarrassing misunderstandings. This piece starts with an old schoolfriend inviting him to meet up and asking if he can “suggest a date”.
They meet with an awkward moment as Wallace goes for the handshake and his friend for the hug – then they head out to dinner, only for it to slowly dawn on Wallace that he’s in a gay restaurant. 

Now we are two men in a dimly lit restaurant inches from each other’s faces, our hands almost touching, lit only by flickering candlelight.
“Well, this is unusual,” I think.

If this were the 1970s, that would be the joke. But because we’re in the 21st century, the humour comes from Wallace’s desperate – and futile – attempts not to say anything offensive. 
And he’s getting more and more worried that “suggest a date” means “suggest a date“. How can he let his friend down gently? 
The faux pas come think and fast. Wallace is so desperate not to seem homophobic that he can’t say anything right. Each time he tries to dig himself out, he digs his hole deeper. 
The finale comes with the farewell. This time, Wallace remembers to hug, but his slightly unnerved friend goes for the handshake. 

I ignore this, and just hold him. Tight. 
“I’ll be back in London soon,” he says, looking a little uncomfortable.
“It’s a date,” I say.

The structure works well – by the end of the evening their roles are reversed and therein lies the humour. The timing is good too – he doesn’t labour things and the punchline is really nicely done.
I’m really not keen on the personal column format – it’s so rarely done well. But I actually make a point of picking up ShortList partly to read its Danny Wallace Is A Man page. If you want to write humour, he’s well worth reading – and stealing from in terms of style (before you develop your own unique voice, obviously). 
The ShortList web site is a bit weird, in that it has its archive of back issues in some electronic reader format rather than HTML. But all the back issues are on the site if you want to trawl through them.

A little while ago, I suggested journalism students should read Raymond Chandler instead of just reading journalism. But I also promised some suggestions for really good journalistic writing to read. (Well, it’s summer, so what better way to relax on the beach?)
I’ve got two suggestions – one, which I’ll look at today, is a great example of lively and interesting business/finance writing.
The other, which I’ll post tomorrow, is a consumer-focused humour column. Each in its own way is difficult to do well, so there are lessons to be learned from them.
The first is from the excellent Atlantic magazine. The Atlantic is always worth looking at, as the standard of its writing is consistently high. It also has one of the better old-media web sites around.
From the May issue comes “Why I fired my broker” by Jeffrey Goldberg. It’s a business story that manages to dissect the failures of Wall Street during the whole subprime mortgage debacle, while also being witty and entertaining.
He sets the tone at the beginning:

Even at its top, my investment portfolio was never anything to write home about. Its saving grace was that it was mine. And I imagined that when we did cash out, at 60 or 65, I would pass my time buying my wife semisubstantial pieces of jewelry and going bass fishing like the men in Flomax commercials.

Well, goodbye to all that. I took a random walk down Wall Street and got hit by a bus.

Wry, self-deprecating – this is personal finance journalism meets financial analysis at its best. He weaves his own story in with the dysfunction and self-interest of Wall Street to explain clearly and succinctly how it all went wrong:

It was more than a decade ago that our first Merrill Lynch adviser put us in a company called Boston Chicken. A Merrill analyst described it as “the restaurant concept of the ’90s.” It went bankrupt in 1998. Only later did I learn that Merrill had underwritten the initial public offering for Boston Chicken stock, and so had an interest in selling the company to its customers.

And there’s a wealth of quirky anecdote here as well. In his quest to find out why Wall Street brokers and money men let down retail investors such as him so badly, Goldberg finds himself interviewing survivalist Cody Lundin in a foot of snow in the mountains of Arizona.
Lundin believes the world of Wall Street and consumer capitalism is a con that traps consumers into a life of debt, and that civilisation is a thin film over the underlying chaos.

Lundin was arguing so cogently against the American culture of easy credit, in tones far more thoughtful than one hears on cable television, that I forgot for a moment that he wasn’t wearing shoes, or socks. He was standing in the snow barefoot. Also, in shorts.

The irony is not lost on Goldberg, and he milks it amusingly.

We’re in a strange moment in American history when a mouse-eating barefoot survivalist in the mountains of Arizona makes more sense than the chief investment strategist of Merrill Lynch.

From all this, the lesson is that Goldberg is a master of comic contrast for serious purpose. There are great comedic moments scattered throughout this piece – he is deft at bringing out character, describing hedge fund manager Bill Ackman as “tall, prematurely gray, and immoderately self-assured, the sort of winning figure who could be elected to the Senate one day, if the country ever decides to stop hating hedge-fund managers”.
At a charity fundraiser, Goldberg asks Ackman where an average investor should do with, say, $200,000. He realises his error when he looks around:

The wizards in the room were having difficulty calculating figures of such humble size. I had thought $200,000 sounded like a large and unembarrassing number. But the room reacted as if I had asked, “Bill, I have 75 cents in my pocket. Do you think I should buy Twizzlers or a big red gumball?”

But it’s easy to write for laughs – the key is to convey the serious information. This piece is full of meat about money, investing, Wall Street and the economic cycle.
Making financial writing readable is a tough gig, but this piece does it fantastically well. If any journalism student – or practising journalist, me included – can do it half as well, they should count themselves lucky.
Finally: if anyone wants to delve deeper into the financial side, try  this other very good financial piece from Condé Nast’s sadly defunct Portfolio magazine on last year’s Wall Street meltdown. Written by Liar’s Poker author Michael Lewis, it also manages to bring out all the drama and greed that brought the financial world low while explaining tough financial concepts clearly.
Stand by for lighter reading tomorrow…

It seems that “the long tail of blogging is dying”. For those who prefer English to techie jargon, the long tail refers to the millions of blogs with few incoming links, compared to a relatively small number of dominant blogs with many thousands of readers and lots of presence in the wider web. 
But this is actually pretty good news for committed bloggers – and for journalism graduates.
According to the Guardian blog post, blog pingbacks to the paper are declining rapidly and many blogs on the author’s RSS feed had not been updated in 60 days. 
Why? Anecdotally, it seems that people prefer the quicker and easier route of Facebook updates and Twitter notes. 

Writing a blog post is a lot harder than posting a status update, putting a funny link on someone’s Wall, or tweeting. 

So why is this good news for bloggers? 
The same reason, actually. The great thing about the web is that it allows anyone to publish globally for very little outlay. But of course the human element can work against this. Not only do you have to actually want to write and post material online regularly, but you have to actually do it.
This is harder than it appears. I’ve run into the blogger’s brick wall, and I’m sure nearly everyone else does. It’s a bit like exercise – easy to start out with good intentions, but much harder to stick to.
Writing is a muscle too, and it needs a regular workout. Luckily, writing is more interesting than going to the gym (OK, I know I’m biased). But even so, there are times you’ll have to force yourself to do it. 
The upside of this is that it puts you in a similar position to the two people in a forest who meet an angry grizzly bear. To escape, you don’t have to outrun the bear – just the other person. 
If, as Technorati found in 2008, just 5% of the blogs it tracked had been updated in the past 120 days, that means 95% of any blogger’s competition is likely to fall by the wayside. Simply to get in the top 5%, all you need to do is not give up. 
This means that, if you have anything to say at all, and can say it engagingly, you are likely to do reasonably well.
How heartening is this for journalism? The key point of the argument is not that people aren’t consuming the web, just that they aren’t always up to producing it too – at least in a more substantial form. While access to production is wide open, its usage still depends on individual effort. 
Whether this means there will still be money for journalism is another matter. A natural limit like this does temper my argument that the web tends to raise the supply of content to infinity, but the supply of online content is still vast. 
However, it does suggest that perseverance and ability can still help you build an audience – and, with that, influence. 
In fact, this is a pretty good filter for journalism students. I look at the students I teach, and I can spot immediately the ones who seem to have potential. Not by the quality of their polished prose, but simply by whether they bother to update their blogs or other writing more frequently than when tutors tell them to. 
For journalism graduates this goes double. It’s tough in the industry now for employment, and it’s more tough because of the sheer number of journalism graduates coming off the conveyor belt. 
But the 95:5 rule works here, too. The vast majority of the new journalism graduates will give up at the first hurdle of not being handed a job on a plate simply because they are a “qualified journalist”. More will drift away as the pressure grows to find any old work for real money to pay off their student overdraft. 
To boost your own chances, therefore, you simply have to stay in the game.

• Pick your chosen specialism and cover it
• Start early (ie before you graduate. Preferably even before you start college)
• Keep writing. Regularly. (I know it seems like there’s no time – but try doing it when you have a day job)
• Get better at it 
• Take the time to learn about blog design – and pick up some tech skills

When you graduate, you should aim to have a two- or three-year blog as part of your portfolio that shows (a) your commitment to journalism and (b) your ability to get your head down and meet deadlines. 
It will also be a very useful grounding in all the stuff about building an audience and driving traffic that will be part of a journalist’s skillset in the coming years.
There’s a certain amount of box-ticking that goes on in media HR departments now that means entry-level staff are required to have some kind of graduate qualification in journalism. I think this is wrong – as do editors of my acquaintance – but, hey, you can’t change everything.
But once you have that piece of paper, your CV and experience count for a hell of a lot more with the editors who will employ you.  They really don’t care whether you got a 2:1 in your degree. Show your mettle and present them with a decent, long-running and interesting blog or web site, and they will be much more likely to give you your break into the industry. 
[HT: Paul Bradshaw – who says he is blogging less these days. Maybe there’s an opening there?]

FleetStreetBlues is offering a fantastic opportunity to blog about your search to find work in the journalism business for no money at all. 
But you do get, you know, exposure. Go on, give it a go…

Here’s a very interesting post by, of all things, a Belgian linguistic researcher, about the differences between print and online journalism.
I like its academic slant (something which often puts me off), as it actually helps to illuminate the murky way that news journalism is constructed and then passed off as something whole and authoritative. 
Often web content (news, semi-news, rehashed news, comment, vitriol etc) is condemned by “real” journalists for being a mess. But Tom Van Hout points out the hidden intervention that conceals exactly the same process going on in the print newsroom. 
In essence, he is saying that print journalism shares a lot of the so-called failings of web journalism, but is much less transparent about it. Or, more crudely:

The messy, opinionated, incomplete, rumorladen, shit-show that is actual news production is hidden away.

[Update: in the spirit of process journalism, Tom Van Hout reminds me that the quote is not directly his, but is from a post by Cody Brown on similar topics. My fault for blurring Tom’s post with his authorship. I was a bit sloppy, in other words…]
I also really liked this quote [which is from Tom]. Comparing the process of journalism with sausage-making, Van Hout says:

Online, ‘readers’ can see how the sausage is being made and promptly start making sausages themselves. This inevitably leads to discussions about sausage making.

In essence, his point is that online journalism is about process, not the perfect finished object. And that authority evolves online – through a kind of peer review of linkage and comments.
This view of the web as mutable and living very much chimes with how I see journalism (content/services) evolving to meet technological, and social, change. 
There’s a link to a very good account of process journalism here, which is referred to in the Tom Van Hout blog. In it, TechCrunch founder Michael Arrington outlines how the site often uncovers the truth of a story by an iterative process that sees foggy rumour crystallise into hard news over time – something that print media outlets are often loath to allow. 
Crucially, for all the critics who say that underfunded or volunteer web journalism can never compete with the professionalism of the print newsroom, the process of process journalism also drives the uncovering of truth. 

The fact is that we sometimes can’t get to the end story without going through this process. CEOs don’t always take our calls when we’re asking about speculative rumors. But when a story is up and posted, it’s amazing how many people come out of the woodwork to give us additional information.

It’s a new environment, and I’m sure there are kinks to be ironed out. But while the new world of web journalism will be fragmented and lack the instant authority of old-style media, it has a real future – despite, or perhaps because of, the web’s perceived limitations.
[HT: Bill Bennett]