New York Times: early burnout risk for young Online news journalists

If you’re feeling the strain from constant deadlines and draining every resource you have to find something new to break to your readers, you may take some solace from the fact that you are far from alone.

When the Washington-based Politico’s two top editors sent their reporters an email on April Fools’ Day last year saying that they would be required to start at 5am, not everyone saw the funny side, reports The New York Times. One girl even started crying.

This, says the report, is just one indication of the early burnout that young journalists can suffer in the online news business where, they say, the pressure of meeting a deadline for a paper can now be felt at any point of the day where the emphasis can be on getting something out as fast as possible before your rivals get the scoop.

It describes how the vibe of the newsroom is now “frantic and fatigued” with young reporters chained to their computers, rather than living the romantic notion of travelling the globe in pursuit of a story, to write articles that will “impress Google algorithms” and “draw readers their way”.

Like with The Washington Post and The Los Angeles Times, The New York Times displays a “most viewed” list on its home pages. Some media outlets, including Bloomberg News and Gawker Media, now pay writers based in part on how many readers click on their articles.

It’s perhaps a familiar tale of woe and one that adds fuel to the fires of those who argue that journalism quality will suffer as focus shifts to the numbers rather than the stories.

But, as Politico’s Editor-in-Chief John F. Harris told The New York Times: “Everybody in the audience is his or her own editor based on where they want to move their mouse or their finger on the iPad,” said the editor in chief, John F. Harris. “And if you’re not delivering to that reader, you’re going to lose them.”

Politico may not be a harbinger but when next you feel your head dropping towards your chest as you rush to break the latest news, you can at least stop and think - to borrow a phrase from our new Prime Minister - “we are in this together”.

(With thanks to Heather Chin for link)

New iPad app offers "world's first fully personalised newspaper"

A new news app for the iPad, Apollo, aims to offer "the world's first fully personalized newspaper," according to a report on the World Editors' Forum blog.

The app is loosely based on the music platform Pandora, which suggests to users new music that it thinks they will like, based on their preferences. The Editors blog reports that after its release on Friday by Hawthorne Labs, Apollo quickly jumped to number 11 in the Apple iPad store, according to co-founder Evan Reas. It is priced at $4.99 (or €3.99).

Quoted by TechCrunch and others as saying that the app aimed to "deliver the final blow to the newspaper industry," Reas stressed to the EW that he did not in fact intend to destroy news providers, but simply that he believed that print newspapers were becoming less relevant to younger people, and that digital news was the future.

"What I was trying to express is that the traditional newspaper (and system that surrounds print news) is dying," he wrote on his blog.

Reas has stressed that he did not want Apollo to be seen as a threat to the news industry. "We believe that we are a friend to traditional news sources, helping them get new views from a new medium," he said, adding that "we think it is mutually beneficial for us and the content sources."

Apollo aims to help readers discover new content that they will like, based both on their expressed preferences - they can like or dislike specific articles, and favourite sources - and on which articles they read, how much time they spend on each, and what 'similar' users like.

The news is separated into different category groups, which are displayed as boxes along the bottom. Each of these has a choice of several different subcategories, which were chosen following extensive user testing, Reas said.

The categories are intended to prompt users to read different types of news, and maybe to discourage them from only reading about the topics with which they are already familiar.

The Editors Weblog write how, one of the arguments against personalized news is that it takes away the element of serendipity, the chance to discover something totally new, but Reas said that the categories and the fact that Apollo is continuously bringing in new sources and articles will retain an element of this.

Apollo selects news from thousands of sources, both established news sources and blogs, using their public RSS feeds to link to content within the app. No content is licensed, and as the RSS feeds are public this should not be a problem.

Multimedia skills not valued by journalists

Journalists feel multimedia production is a manual skill not a tool that helps them tell a story.

This is the surprising find from Henrik Ornebring of the University of Oxford (pictured), giving a quick overview of his six-nation comparative study of journalism skills at the International Association for Media and Communications Research 2010 conference in Braga.

The three-year project, highlighted by Alfred Hermida, run from 2007 to 2010 covers the UK, Germany, Italy, Sweden, Poland and Estonia.

Ornebring conducted a non-representative online survey with 2,200 respondents and a response rate of 4.3%.

He also conducted qualitative research with 62 interviews of journalists.

Among the top skills rated by journalists were writing and working independently. In Italy, Poland and Estonia, networking was also considered a top skill.

As for the lowest skills, all journalists agreed that they did not need management skills.

Without knowing more about Ornebring's methodology for his qualitative research, perhaps these findings can be taken with a pinch of salt, what with such a low response rate to the survey and with the online survey being non-representative.

Otherwise it seems the debate over the importance of multimedia is set to run for quite a while yet.

The 10 laws of multimedia

We can get ourselves into such a fluster in our hurry to add the latest innovation to our websites that we may lose sight of what exactly it's meant to be doing for our readers.

So it's probably a good idea to take a step back from time to time and take stock.

Deb Wenger has a report, on the Advancing the Story blog, of a talk given by multimedia expert Al Tompkins (pictured) to educators at the Poynter Institute listing what he calls the 10 laws of multimedia.

He told them: "To be great, multimedia has to make the story better than it would be in a legacy form.”

The rules include making the site interactive, being search engine friendly, and tapping into local passion groups.

“The most important reason to do multimedia is to improve the journalism,” Tompkins told the group.

Of course, many people have what they consider to be a good multimedia strategy but it's always good to look at what other people suggest doing. You never know, you might be missing a trick.

Comment is not free (not at The Sun Chronicle anyway)

The comments section of websites can be a bit of a minefield. Now popularly lampooned in satirical magazine Private Eye, they can attract postings that are trying to be funny, are full of ignorance, full of spite or all three. But one US newspaper is trying to nip the abuse in the bud.

The Columbia Journalism Review has flagged up a Guardian article which looks at an interesting use of paywall technology – purely in the comments section.

The Sun Chronicle, a paper in Massachusetts, has put the paywall in place to try and prevent the appearance of what they describe as abusive, obscene or “otherwise nasty” comments.

In an interview with CJR on Wednesday, Sun Chronicle publisher Oreste D’Arconte explained that money has nothing to do with the decision.

The one-time fee of 99cents, she says, is to cover the charge of processing the credit card, which they use to verify the user’s name and location before discarding the details.

The Web staff felt they were wasting too much time deleting inappropriate comments and policing repeat offenders. D’Arconte and his staff wanted a way to encourage dialogue, while holding people accountable for what they said. Those who pay the fee and post abusive material will be banned from the comments section.

It may make life easier in terms of moderation but whether the 15,000-strong readership feel that their comment is important enough to warrant the joining fee and hassle of entering their card details remains to be seen.

Friday round-up: lessons from Brazil, going straight to the source and writing like J.K Rowling

Protecting the print product when you go online

We start with a story from the WAN-IFRA editors' blog on how the southern Brazilian newspaper Zero Hora has created a proactive online strategy that will protect its print edition, a product that got 2% circulation bump last year.

Zero Hora has 210 journalists working in its integrated newspaper. Although there are specific teams allocated to print and online, these teams are fluid and journalists are expected to understand the work of others and be flexible in what they do.

Speaking to the blog Editor in Chief Altair Nobre says that as a result of the internet newspapers constantly have to strive to be more original and creative, working harder to convince people to read the paper.

The online version is designed to be very interactive. For example, the Porto Alegre region has a rather unstable climate, explains Nobre, and so Zero Hora editors invite readers to send in pictures and short reports when there are storms.

Other key factors in the paper's success come from having a "young attitude" which attracts new readers from the younger generations and having a carefully planned out social media presence.

Ben Goldacre calls for unedited source material on one website

Journalism.co.uk is one of many to highlight Dr. Ben Goldacre's suggestion for a website that would have a variety of features to improve media transparency over their primary sources for certain stories as well giving readers “unmediated/unedited access to full comments from interested parties”.

The Bad Science author (pictured) suggested the site could do the following:

• Give each news story a unique ID;
• Any involved party can add/upload a full press release or quote to that story’s page;
• Anyone can add a link to a primary source;
• Anyone can vote these up or down like on digg/reddit;
• You can register as a “trusted source” and not need to be modded up or down;
• Anyone can add a link to media coverage of that story.

Who do you write like?

Finishing on a lighthearted note, if you grew up hoping to be the next Hunter S. Thompson, there's a handy little web tool that lets you analyse your writing and see which famous scribe you are most like.

I Write Like takes a pasted bit of text and compares it to the writings of hundreds of famous authors, giving you a result in seconds.

As one college media blogger points out, the results vary wildly depending on which text you submit. For example yours truly writes like Chuck Palahniuk, H.P. Lovecraft and J.K Rowling depending on which blog post is submitted.

It's all a bit of fun for a wet Friday afternoon. Just don't come crying to me if you're told you write like Barbara Cartland.

Project GStyle: Google gets some fashion sense

An interesting find today from blogger Adam Tinworth – Google have decided that fashion bloggers have got the best grasp of social media.

Above all those bloggers who choose to cover other industries, it’s those dedicated followers of fashion that are the cream of the crop when it comes to their understanding of social media tools.

Google have set up GStyle, an internal research project helmed by blogger Tony Wang of post.fashionism fame, to quiz fashionistas on how they use the internet, what their biggest challenges are and how Google can help them reach the upper echelons of blogger fame.

As Tinworth points out, the automatic assumption would be that the tech industry would be top of the tree. But, he writes, personal experience has show that there are vast swathes of the tech industry that don't "get" social media at all.

It makes you wonder how far off the mark journalists and media people are with their own understanding. The information may be for Google’s eyes only for now, but if it is released, there could be a lot to learn from it.

In the meantime, perhaps one should check out the list of the most influential fashion bloggers and see how they do things.