Here we are, about to start “News World | Traditions and Transformation” — what fun!

Description: “Traditional (legacy) news organizations have no choice but to continue to change in order to respond to the growth of aggregators and other WeMedia players. Learn how leaders in the field are tackling editorial, business and management challenges in the culture of empowered content creatives.”

Carin Dessauer (senior fellow, iFOCOS) is leading this group, right to left:

• Jennifer Sizemore, Executive Editor, MSNBC.com
• Neil Budde, former VP and Editor-in-Chief, Yahoo! News
• Kinsey Wilson, Executive Editor, USAToday and USAToday.com
• Maria Thomas, SVP, National Public Radio

5:18 Kick off question: What’s each panelists’ definition of success? What’s the model for success?

Carin: 66% of Americans think journalists are out of touch, but 70% say journalism is important to their lives (stat from an earlier session today). How does that shade your yet-to-be-given answer?

Jennifer: There are many different models, not just one. We need to learn to include our readers, to learn from them, to get them talking to each other and to us (the media). Tear down the walled garden. We’re taking baby steps.

Jennifer: At the risk of sounding shrill, I think we need to continue to focus on quality excellent journalism. We can allow the community to talk to itself and yet we need to invest in journalism. Also, we need to figure out the model for advertising after display advertising: partnership, search ads, etc. Google does search ads; can we get a piece of that pie?

Jennifer: We need to focus on emerging platforms other than the Web site. If we focus only on the Web site, we lose opportunities that are coming up quickly.

Neil: The measure of success in the next few years will be continuing to innovate, producing much more interesting products.

Kinsey: We can’t escape the economic results of the digital revolution. At the same time that the newspapers are shrinking, we’re being asked to grow and produce the future successes. You can succeed inside the organization, or outside. He stresses three things:
* Creation of original (great) content
* Social media (that bullet point flew by quick)
* Attracting and holding audience (aggregating audience)

Google seems to be attracting people, but isn’t doing the content. We need to learn from them.

Maria: Going last means you get to agree with everyone, but she’s going to try a different tack given that she works for a non-profit (NPR). She says they need to change from being a B2B (they serve their member stations) radio model, to being a multi-platform publisher. And they need to do even more: help radio itself in America evolve.

Carin: Kinsey, Can you give us an example of how adding citizen journalism advanced a story?

Kinsey: We’ve often been at the forefront of multimedia storytelling, but there’s an endless amount of time you can put into any given story. He looked at stats at the month of January, and found this: 2 things produced 66% of all the traffic on the site. One was November’s Candidate Match Game, and the other was the poll tracker, tracking all the polls of the presidential campaign to date. So you can work all you want on things, and some will catch on and some won’t.

Carin: What about the pharmaceutical company story about error rates on being given incorrect prescriptions?

Kinsey: On a story like that, we found that the comments are often very rich and detailed. Even though they are pseudo-named, they still have a strong ring of veracity, and adds something to the story you can’t get form traditional reporting means.

Carin: That really added editorially?

Kinsey: Yes, pharmacists who wouldn’t speak on the record about the story would post anonymously in the comments and though that has less of an authority, they added value.

5:30: Neil: We did some research in the last year about the behavior of users when they come to the site and land first of all on a story page. Many people now get to a site that way. We looked at what people did on that page. When they come into the front page first, they are news junkies. When they come directly from the front page of Yahoo, they are less committed. Entertainment stories you click on photos, political stories you click on related stories. So if you feature things in different ways on different pages, you get a chance to modify behavior. John Battelle’s site actually recognizes if you come from Google, and places a big box on that page to help you find what you want.

Jennifer: You can tell a story in all sorts of ways but just because you can be all creative, doesn’t mean you should. Example: We have a year-long series called “Gut-check America” — they tell us story ideas, and vote them up and down, and then we dispatch a reporter to cover that. Sometimes we do live Q&As, sometimes we do just video, or just text. One of her biggest peeves: video for the sake of video, which just wastes time.

Carin: Moving onto workflow issues: NPR is a hybrid model — what works there, what doesn’t? What about the Knight Foundation partnership?

Maria: The challenge of becoming a multimedia company is tough — we’re not a single publication, we’re a collection of programs: news, music, entertainment (Car Talk, etc.) So what position are we trying to occupy in the much more competitive online space. What purpose are we trying to serve in audience’s lives? Mission: “educate inform entertain” — carefully chosen.

Maria: There was a mentality in her particular role that her group exists to serve the rest of the company, and that’s changing now that they’re also trying to serve the audience directly, not just the shows themselves. The first place this change is occuring is in the news arena. There’s a lot of training going on, thanks to a $1.5 million grant from the Knight Foundation. USC and UC Berkeley are working on that. They’re bringing trainers into NPR to train groups of 12. It’s an enormous undertaking.

Carin: Kinsey, how is the convergence of YOUR operation going?

Kinsey: I gotta be a little envious of the $1.5 million training grant. There’s also some hiring that goes on back and forth in the Washington DC area. The way USAToday has approached it, is they’ve formally merged the newsroom 2 years ago, and are continuing to merge them together in the way they’d be if it was built that way from scratch.

There are two principal ways: 1) separate content and production into different groups. Devote some to breaking and some to enterprise. Devote some to print and some to Web.
2) The other way is to assign small teams: a journalist, a copy editor, a blogger, a producer (sometimes not all those people).

The other thing they’ve done is take the design group which was vertical and removed, and flatten that and “embed” them into various sections so they can be part of the process from an earlier stage.

Question from the audience? Nope, gotta hold that until later.

5:45: Jennifer: They have no choice to be separate from the channel: they’re a totally separate in space (Seattle vs NJ), and in corporate structure. The new boss of NBC news (name escaped me) has really tried to make that relationship get closer. For Virginia Tech, for instance, they sent a blog reporter, as well as a cameraman and reporter. And that worked really well.

It doesn’t always work: for instance, today, MSNBC the site used a CNN photo to illustrate a story of the MSNBC channel Democratic debate.

Neil: To replace the revenue that comes in from newspapers, with the revenue from banner ads, it isn’t there yet. How do you get it there? Second, how do you get the value of each page view to be higher? There was a project at Yahoo to offer higher value targeted ads on pages with contextual, focused ads. Get the right message in front of the right person at the right time. This helps explain Microsoft’s interest in Yahoo — they want the ad platform.

Neil has been working to get local news sites to adopt Yahoo technology, and in exchange drive traffic to them, in an attempt to create a higher value ad network.

Neil: Do high value watch sellers really want to be at the front of the paper in the International News section? Probably not — they just want to prestige and eyeballs. That model is completely blown up online.

Maria: 26 million weekly listening audience, but we’ve underestimated how hard it is to convert a listener to an online visitor:
Listening: intimate, passive, geographically based, time-based
Online: opposite of those things
How does brand NPR live in a visual, active, directed environment? Good question.
The web site draws a lot of “earballs” — they track stats called “media requests” and “podcast downloads” and use that to see how they’re succeeding.

Carin: Does MSNBC have the stickiness of other sites?

Jennifer: You’re right, page views don’t seem to make us sticky. 50% of our users come through MSNBC.com, and come and then leave right away. We know that, and we can cater to that audience who aren’t expecting a lingering browsing experience.

We all want page views, as the stat that matters, to go away. But it won’t — that’s what advertisers want. Most metrics are marketing metrics so you can say you’re #1 in this or that. The REAL measure will be Time on Site. We aren’t there yet, but we like the idea of tracking just how much people hang around.

6:00: Question: 4 Kinsey from Education week. Does your newsroom folks occupy the same space or different?

Kinsey: Used to be Web was separate from print. Now, web editorial is disbursed into the newsroom, and is separate from the rest of the Web team [advertising and tech, perhaps?]

Question: 4 Kinsey from guy who didn’t identify himself: Two features on your site attracted the most traffic, and those features were both “evergreen” — is there a danger that you’d focus on evergreen features over breaking news now?

Kinsey: They’re not exactly evergreen — one doesn’t change much, but is relevant now, not forever. The other actually does update over time, so is featuring the freshest data.

Question: McArthur Foundation: Do any of you have a secret plan for rescuing user comments. Large sites have lower quality comments, don’t you think?

Neil: We took comments off because they weren’t generating a lot of traffic, nor a lot of revenue. One person said she was so mad she was gong to cancel all 8 of her Yahoo accounts. We haven’t yet gone back to adding them, but at some point the plan is to. Rating comments (up or down) is one way to handle it. Fixing your identity to one person, with a reputation, is another way. When people came in from the front page from yahoo, comment quality went down. People who came in through new section pages made better comments.

Kinsey: It’s not about giving people a place to sound off. It’s about building a network. And you can wait for the tools to be perfect, or you can step in now, at some risk, and learn. Remember that only 10% will actually participate, and they need to produce value for the other 90%.

Jennifer: We recently bought Newsvine.com and their smart technology should help.

Question: Real Girls Media (Divine Caroline): What are your syndication plans for small publishers’ content?

Maria: We don’t see ourselves in the same league as MSNBC and Yahoo. Our content lends itself very well to syndication. We have a saying: “The story is the atom” as opposed to the program. Programs might have beginnings, middles and ends and their producers like that. But from the digital media perspective, it’s about the story, and they might re-present a set of stories for other media and other products. Like movie reviews. Or books. There’s no one programs. But there are a lot of stories.

Question: Creditcards.com: How do you deal with the size and dynamics shift to a digital newsroom?

Kinsey: We had 75 people in the digital space, now we have 465 (the whole newsroom) (the numbers might not be exactly what Kinsey said). Increasingly, all reporters will be digital. Will that number 465 hold? We’ll see if the model will support that.

Jennifer: To the extent that we’ll (the industry) continue to be doing journalism, we’ll be doing it in the online space.
6:15: That’s all, let’s go for drinks in the courtyard.

We’re about to start this panel, located on a floor accessible only by two elevators, so people are coming in in batches of 8.

The topic: “Who can you trust in the We Media landscape? Where’s the line between commerce and information? No more is it a question of parsing the biases of individual media outlets: It’s time to define a global media-education agenda so everyone can understand how today’s media works, and how best to use it. Our goal: Create a set of guidelines for media literacy today.”

Panelists: Sam Grogg (dean of U. of Miami), Vinta Srivastava (professor at Ryerson), John Bell (managing director, 360 Digital Influence at Ogilvy)

11:35: Bell welcomes us. Explains his job title: the way we’re influenced today has changed fairly significantly. Introductions. Interestingly, Vinta is being introduced but hasn’t arrived in the room yet. Consider it a pre-introduction.

Bell talks about Paper Tiger television, was popular in NYC. A group that analyzed media structure and bias. But they just had to deal with magazines, tv, radio, newspapers.

Now, we have to look at the devices (cell phones, PDAs, computers, TiVos) that deliver the content, and who owns them, and who owns the advertising. Bell has a complicated metro-style chart that shows how complicated things have become.

Grogg studied film literacy, previously in his career. He tried to educate students about this, but found it was quite difficult. His curriculum here at U of M is aiming to be an integrated look at spoken, written, visual, online, and any other imaginable form of literacy and how to become more literate over time.

Grogg: We’re forcibly becoming literate multitaskers, but we’re still not properly studying it. The faculty here has banned laptops in the classrooms; he thinks this is a big issue (i.e. a wrong decision, though he was circumspect about saying so in front of so many bloggers).

11:45: Srivastava, was a journalist for about 15 years, inc. NYTimes. Became disillusioned with mass media roung about Sept. 11, and felt that the our (journalists) media literacy fell out the window and patriotism replaced objectivity. She went (back) to Toronto to teach, and started an empowerment project.

Srivastava feels there are 4 pillars to media literacy (which leads to empowerment):

Access
Assess
Analysis
Production

Training people (journalists and public alike) in these skills, leads to better journalism especially in times of crisis.

At one point, Srivastava went on a leave of absence to South Africa. In Soweto, she asked hundreds of kids what they wanted to do: They all wanted to open Internet Cafes.

Bell asks the room: how many self-identify as belonging to the media: (most people) — education (a few)? — non-profit (a few) — business (more than a few).

Bell: What’s changing in the marketplace? Emerging digital media forms are creating:

* openness
* transparency
* understanding

Bell says that helping citizens to understand media — the media they consume and/or create — ensures an informed and engaged citizenry (which is good).

Grogg: Young people are coming to companies without the overall media / technology skills necessary. They can use facebook, and email, but they can’t necessarily move across platforms and not get stuck. Companies need nimble, innovative workers. Young kids are reading, constantly, hours a day, but not as often books as what their friends are writing.

Srivastava: Facebook and MySpace aren’t part of being an informed citizen

Bell: What about people who use MySpace [and Twitter] to track blackout news?

Srivastava: But that’s probably the exception, isn’t it?

11:55: Srivastava: Who’s creating the power structure? It’s not just about who OWNS the media outlet. Its about who’s participating and who’s missing in the production process. Grogg: And, who is (and isn’t) consuming it…

Bell puts up a slide: Rupert Murdoch runs a very large media empire. But smaller blog owners, like Birdie Jaworski of beautydish, also have their own sphere of influence.

Srivastava: Small bloggers still need to have enough time, and access to the tools. This isn’t a luxury that all people have. That blog is run by, probably, a middle-class, middle-aged woman. Spent time doing research with kids (African-American teens) in her neighbourhood in New York. They say life today is “white-knuckle fast” and actually said they long for the “golden age” simply because the pace of life was so much more manageable.

12:05: Audience question: New Voters Project (dang, I missed it while looking for the link. Blogging hazard.

Second question: Students don’t necessarily make the connection between the tools they use (blogging) and the influence those can have. They don’t just have to be about your life and a personal journal. They can break stories and be influential, but students don’t always make that connection or see the potential.

Bell: Marketing. The pressure in the marketplace is between privacy and advertising. Facebook’s “adventure” with Beacon (a way Facebook could amalgamate your shopping and Web browsing habits) illustrates these opposing pressures. Marketing is not necessarily transparent, and this causes issues.

Grogg: The speed of life today, for the young man Srivastava was referring to, is a common issue. Checking Facebook during class is a necessity to keep up with life (at least, students sometimes try that excuse). Grogg says, you shouldn’t feel the pressure to use technology just because it’s there. Peel yourself away from it at times — smell the roses, take a walk. But advertising is the thing creating this pressure.

Question: Given the changes questioner has seen in the past 40 years, is it even realistic to expect that someone (i.e. students) can be trained in the diversity of knowledge that encompasses all media and all skill sets? Grogg: There is a basic, broad set of skills that students would benefit from, and employers want. Srivastava: Every message has cash behind it, someone who WANTS someone else to listen, and understanding that is critical to being able to parse the message. Media literacy has to start in kindergarten.

12:15: Srivastava: In the span of one year, 2005 to 2006, students went from not understanding the term “spin” to totally getting it. Why? John Stewart.

Grogg: Students today are truly, legitmiately focused on concerns of the fate of the planet. They’re serious about figuring out what to do about the big issues facing us today. They’re not disinterested.

Bell: Personal Information. Postulate: There’s a general expectation among youth that they can transact (share) personal information in order to get something. This is a frequent issue they encounter, and an acceptable tradeoff, depending on the value on each side.

Audience: Let’s not be totally focused on kids. Adults, like speaker’s father, clicks on bold blinking text and probably needs additional media literacy training.

Grogg: Part of the power of this is in the personal. Connecting with people at a personal level. The other issue is the intellectual property issue. Two students here are doing a documentary on a Miami politician named Art Teele who committed suicide. They used unlicensed songs in their work, and when told they couldn’t, were rather surprised and said that they would certainly expect that their own work would be reused, remixe,d posted around, and so therefore were unprepared for the licensing rights associated with the documentary music they’d used.

Bell: Facebook page of man puking in toilet — will this affect the job opportunities of youth, if they don’t understand the effect of media? Audience: Depends on the job. Srivastava: I teach a class in these issues, and how to write a proper email, and so forth.

12:25: Bell slide: Dan Lyons aka Fake Steve Jobs — it’s parody, and requires media literacy. You have to know who is out there, in order to be able to participate and succeed as a journalist, and on the flip side, as someone who might be interacting with journalists. Grogg: This is true, and also, media literacy allows you to avoid the media (advertising, too) that you don’t want to participate in.

Question: ESPN has to send out internal emails from time to time with guidelines about how to search effectively, and not to use wikipedia, and how to deal with anonymous sources and tips. Even within a journalism organization, these tools and skills are sometimes lacking.

Grogg: Doctors around the country use WebMD to help diagnose folks in emergency situations. 90% of the time it works, 10% of the time it doesn’t. Grogg has talked to someone who’s working on a better search tool for these sorts of emergency situations. Srivastava: SEO is driven by market forces, and you don’t want a diagnosis to be arrived at based on which sites appear at the top of a search engine, because that’s influenced by money spent on SEO, not necessarily on what’s the best answer to the question.

Bell: 80% of Internet users start on one of these 5 sites: Google, Yahoo, MSN, AOL Search, Ask.com

Question: Professor talks about a technology literacy general education course – “Infomatics: Computers and Your World” that’s going to be a requirement in his college. Excel, basic HTML, things of that nature. Students aren’t coming in knowing as much as we (adults) are giving them credit for. He will provide the syllabus if you want it. Ask Leonard Witt, at Kennesaw State University.

Question: Web 2.0 / del.icio.us / flickr is intimidating. Classes have been very popular, and word of mouth (about the classes) is driving a lot of traffic.

Srivastava: Let’s keep building around the 4 pillars. The questions we’re asking aren’t going away.
Grogg: It’s not easy to create media education courses in the public education system in the U.S. because that system is so slow to move. Education systems in other countries are years in advance of the U.S.’s. Eventually, the kids will demand it, or demand to know why they weren’t taught it.

Joe Lewis wrote an interesting opinion piece, positing that Yahoo’s focusing on social search in an attempt to outflank Google.

But that’s actually a positive spin on a negative situation for Yahoo. While it’s true that Yahoo has been doing significant development in terms of buying or building content sites powered by social networks, I don’t think that Google is doing any worse.

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Communicating with each other online might turn out to be more than just a fun way to spend time — it may keep us sane, or even save our lives.

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What does it really mean to be an independent journalist, reporting on the activities of the titans of industry? Well, it means that you can be exposed to some tremendous risk, financial and otherwise. But a recent California appellate court legal decision puts bloggers and other citizen journalists on slightly firmer ground.

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If you’ve been a little bemused or underwhelmed by the goings-on in Second Life (Swedish embassy, Reuters news bureau) this Get a First Life parody will probably hit the spot.

First Life is a 3D analog world where server lag does not exist. Find Out Where You Actually Live! Go Outside!  Membership is Free!

What’s especially notable, other than the dead-on humor, is that Linden Labs, creators of Second Life, responded with a direct anti-”seize-and-desist” letter. It’s nice to see a company that allows, even encourages, parody and derivative creativity — though given Second Life’s ethos, I’d have been surprised by any other response.

If you have some time, check out the webcast of Jan. 27th’s Web 2.0 session from the World Economic Forum, called “How Web 2.0 will mould the future.” The panelists focused on social networking and some discussion of the emerging 3D avatar worlds like Second Life and World of Warcraft. . .

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Congratulations to Steve Yelvington for being named 2007 Online Innovator of the Year by the Newspaper Association of America.

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From The World Economic Forum comes the news that YouTube will start paying those who upload videos.

First of all… at the World Economic Forum… a YouTube announcement? Shouldn’t the folks there be talking about, I don’t know, currency trading or real estate speculation or climate change?

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I find the phrase “citizen journalism” is in some cases far too weighty a label for the most interesting examples of the activity. Not every CJ site is about global warming or local democracy in action. . .

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Yahoo was downgraded today by S&P to “sell” from “hold.” Why?

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