Printed Matters

Just got back from a talk by Mathew Ingram (@mathewi on Twitter) where he spoke to a small group of students in Ted Fairhurst’s Journalism Law and Ethics course.

I’ve seen this talk before, at PodCamp 2009. He has a slideshow here. I’m not going to go over the whole talk again, but I will highlight some of the more interesting things he said.

When we did PolicyWiki, we didn’t pay a lot of attention to design. We wanted to get it out there and see what people did with it. Newspapers don’t do enough of that.

Normally, as a newspaper, we don’t get a lot of feedback from readers. Maybe we get a letter to the editor, or a phone call. These are all big experiments in getting feedback from readers.

[Newspapers] have traditionally not been part of the conversation that happens around news. That happens at home, in the office, on other sites. We’re having to learn how to be part of the conversation.

The most important thing about Twitter is that it allows us to connect with readers and sources.

At the Globe, when someone wants an answer to “Do you know anybody who…?” and you fill in the blank with anything “…owns a cat,” “…lives near propane storage tanks,” “…knows someone who was shot on a bus,” whatever, they send out an internal email to all staff asking the question. So a lot of stories tend to be about people Globe reporters know. Twitter expands that universe.

A reporter may only have 200 followers but his query may reach orders of magnitude more people, because the question can filter through their followers’ networks, and their followers’ networks, and so on.

Twitter is a just a tool. A tool with a stupid name, but just a tool. Like any tool, you can do stupid things with it if you want. Or you can use it to find out information that helps you do your job.

When people ask me what Twitter is useful for, I say “What is email for? What is the Internet for?” They’re tools. “What’s a pen for? Is typing journalism?“

A lot of people want to connect with our writers. Twitter helps that happen.

Dan Gillmor had a famous line, “The people formerly known as the audience.” Meaning, the concept of a mass audience is being replaced by fragmented niche audiences that form around a topic.

Readers are a vast resource.

All media is effectively becoming social media. Increasingly, when media do not use these tools they are seen as less useful, disconnected, even broken. Links, comments, feedback: all add value for people.

We’re going to be trying more of everything. I don’t care if the tool has a stupid name. I don’t care if they leave Twitter and go to something with an even stupider name. I’m going to follow them there and try that as well.

On disintermediation, the sources going direct:

You still need someone to arbitrate things, to check facts. On the Internet, we can fact-check your ass. That goes for Christie Blatchford as much as it does for Mayor Miller. The functions of journalism are still required, regardless what you call yourself. If you have these skills, you’re effectively a journalist: you are fact-checking, filtering, aggregating.

In fact, today there is even more need for the functions of journalism – to filter out all the crap.

Before, you got a press release, you phoned a single source, you got a couple of facts to add. Boom, you had a story. But now everybody can Google and find out all kinds of information about what you’re writing about. If you’re not adding value to what they can find out on Google, why do they need you? You need to at least do as much research on Google as they can do, and then go farther.

The traditional view of journalism is that of investigative reporters who go with an idea, do some digging and turn up some facts. But that’s actually a tiny portion of journalism. Journalists have always been filters: taking huge amounts of information, sorting it out, organizing it, fact-checking it, and then putting it all in context.

If we don’t have the news – and we haven’t, really, since the advent of TV – then what do we have? As we have less and less a portion of the news, we have to add the context, the depth, the filtering, and the fact-checking.

Nobody knows if we’re liable if we pull in a libellous tweet into a CoverItLive widget. So the lawyers try to stop us from doing it. We’re all just waiting for the lawsuit, because there’s no law on it yet. I continually argue that we should be doing more things, and the lawyers continually argue that we shouldn’t.

If you’re like me, you say let’s have more comments and take the risk.

While the Internet is hugely exciting, and our overall readership is growing, the reality is that 85 per cent of our revenue comes from the paper. We’re trying to change the airplane while we’re flying it.

The more we think of ourselves as a news “paper,” the less we think of ourselves as a news distributor. We’re increasingly NOT in the business of selling stuff printed on dead trees.

Let’s face it, the newspaper is not a great news delivery mechanism. If you find out yesterday’s news tomorrow, then that’s not working any more.

If you’re flexible about the tools, if you can use a whole bunch of different tools to do your job, then you’re in demand.

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