1. South African Paper's Mobile Site Focuses on 'Nowness'

Knight News Challenge, May 24

It pains us to see news organizations devote so much of their limited resources to platform-specific apps — frequently at the expense of their mobile sites. Apps are costly to develop, tedious to update, and, for all their trouble, serve only a fraction of the market.

On top of that, too often, they're more flash than substance, merely repackaging regular Web content rather than catering to mobile users' unique needs. 

For all these reasons, it was a breath of fresh air to read about Grahamstown NOW,  a nuts-and-bolts newspaper mobile site focused on "nowness."

It's not fancy or shiny - on the surface it appears to be just another mobile site. But there's a lot of depth below that surface. What it lacks in glitz and glam, it makes up for in its ability to serve up a snapshot at any given point in time of what's just happened, currently happening, or about to happen in Grahamstown.

2. Tag-team journalism: A case study of the California Watch distribution model

California Watch, July 27

News organizations are getting that serving more than one platform at a time and collaborating with the folks formerly known as the audience are no longer choices.

What they're not getting quite as well is that they don't have to use all platforms at all times and that the same technologies they're using to work with the folks formerly known as the audience should be used to work with the folks formerly known as the competition.

Investigative reporting nonprofit California Watch is an exception, as the education package — involving almost 20 media partners — detailed in this case study makes plain.

If we had one word to describe our distribution model it would be this: flexible. We craft a new distribution strategy for each story we produce, depending on the topic and the intensity of local interest.

3. The kids are alright, part 2: What news organizations can do to attract, and keep, young consumers

Nieman Journalism Lab, Aug. 19

Observers and especially practitioners can get so absorbed in anticipating the future they overlook that the future is right down the street at the neighborhood school. I wrote as much in my very first blog post for grad school last fall.

Today's young people are your (or someone else's) future users. They're already exhibiting some of the habits and tastes you will have to satisfy. To the extent they're not, you can shape their habits and tastes.

This applies to the news industry as much as any. Christopher Sopher, a University of North Carolina senior and author of the Younger Thinking blog, offers some insight.

News organizations need to learn from soda and snack producers and systematically infiltrate schools across the country with their products. There’s strong evidence that news-based, experiential, and interactive course design [pdf] — as well as the use of news in classrooms and the presence of strong student-produced publications — can both increase the likelihood that students will continue to seek news regularly in the future.

4. How the shift to mobile is revolutionising online news design

TheMediaBriefing, Oct. 10

Most of today's news sites aren't going to win any beauty contests, we blogged in August. Of course, this goes more than skin deep. Inefficient and cluttered design interferes with the communication itself.

Fortunately, the constraints of small screens are forcing cleaner, smarter designs, Guardian information architect Martin Belam writes.

Designing for mobile first means getting down to the real atoms of delivering news. And services like Instapaper, or Readability are reminding us that news stories are there to be read without clutter. By concentrating on the pure reading experience, and ditching the bells and whistles that make up so much online furniture, they encourage deeper and more engaged reading.

Image by ilco.

What would newspapers look like if they were invented today? Swedish media group Bonnier's News+ tablet concept is one answer.

As elegantly demonstrated in the video below, News+ iPad apps seek to create an intimate daily news narrative that "filter(s) out the din of the Web."

Users receive a new edition each morning that has a clear beginning and end. During the day they can follow updates on specific topics across devices, share reactions with friends and journalists and bookmark content for later. At night they can return to what they saved and browse selections recommended by their social network and the publisher.

I have to say, I don't think there's any piece of marketing that's done more to make we want a tablet, not even those snappy iPad spots. I'm special, of course: I'm a newspaper geek. Newspaper geeks, however, aren't a growth market. As one commenter on Bonnier's video put it, "It's interesting to also target people who love the newspaper. Who are those people?"

They might not describe themselves as such, but there are more newspaper geeks out there than you think. Even those who've never picked up a newspaper want to feel connected to and understand the world around them, two things newspapers, perhaps more than any other single medium, have long helped people do. The modern fragmentation of information sources, I'd offer, increases, not decreases, demand for context and belonging.

Even those who've never picked up a newspaper want to feel connected to and understand the world around them, two things newspapers, perhaps more than any other single medium, have long helped people do.

Another video commenter observed that News+ doesn't really do anything that isn't already being done. "Other than tablet-based formatting," he asked, "where is the Web 3.0 / semantic Web  innovation here?" I don't disagree, and toward that end, would like to see News+ or something like it be developed for the open Web. But, what's wrong with saying, "Let's get what we know and understand right, package it smartly, and iterate from there?"

Indeed, some of News+'s most brilliant features are about, now that we have the technology, righting longtime Web 1.0 and 2.0 wrongs. These are things publishers can and should be righting on all digital platforms, things like:

• Offering advertisements that are useful and add value to rather than distract from the experience. In the video, a user browses a map of real estate listings and books an appointment with an agent directly within an ad.

• Giving visual journalism "its rightful place as an important part of the news narrative." Honestly, if I were a photojournalist or videojournalist working in mainstream news, I would hate the current setup. Only in rare spaces does the presentation match these mediums' awesome storytelling power.

• Recognizing that less is more, that expert news judgment is best applied helping people sort through their seemingly infinite choices rather than piling on more.

What do you think of News+? If you were recreating the newspaper, what would you keep? What would you change?

On its face, it's just a list of restaurants. All it accomplished, however, is a list in itself.

My paper's 50 best restaurants list, unveiled in countdown fashion last week, introduced readers to our new dining critic, drew visitors to our website, sparked conversation on social media, let us play in emerging spaces, recruited text alert subscribers, showcased our (relatively) recently revived entertainment tabloid and reaffirmed the online and offline authority of our brand.  

Of course, it wouldn't have done any of this if it weren't engaging. One of the most revealing symptoms of that engagement was an unsolicited user contribution. A reader saw value in our list to the degree he felt compelled to add to that value — "Cognitive Surplus" and "Spreadable Media" economics in action.

Over lunch, the reader used free online tools, mostly Google Refine, to create a data-rich, mobile friendly remix. His presentation does not include any information ours does not, but it repackages the content nicely.

Granted, this isn't from just any reader — it's from EveryBlock co-founder Paul Smith. But its lessons apply broadly: Strong user-generated content doesn't have to be new content, and, often it is generated spontaneously, outside of traditional UGC channels.

There's an app for that. And that. And that. But should there be? Or will there be? Platform-specific mobile applications might seem like the next big thing, but there are indications that they could be a passing fad, like Flash splash pages.

That's the comparison offered in a MobileBeat article this week, one of a few recent readings that make a case against native apps and in favor of standardized solutions like HTML5. The two other pieces, from mobile notification and purchase vendor Urban Airship and tutorial site Nettuts+, respectively, address developers' and businesses' mutual interest in creating consistent user experiences, which native apps complicate, and cover ways HTML5 can already be used in app development.

Like Flash splash pages, Peter Yared writes at Mobile Beat, native apps are expensive to develop and cumbersome to update. And, for all the resources they require, each serves only a fraction of the market.

On top of that, Yared goes on, apps easily get lost in app stores (especially on Android), forcing publishers to hawk them on their sites anyway. In the case of iOS, it's worth adding, apps are subject to a sometimes lengthy approval process that enforces restrictions on publishers' content and how they monetize it.

In part because publishers are going to be developing websites and mobile websites with HTML5 anyway, HTML5 apps are an attractive alternative. This synergy, the comparatively greater pool of HTML developers versus platform-specific programmers, the removal of any app store restrictions, and the ability to serve all platforms with a single app, would expectedly reduce the cost and hassle of building and maintaining apps.

HTML5 apps can't, at least not easily, achieve quite all of the functionality that native apps can — like accessing devices' cameras and local files systems. And this is something one would expect mobile companies to try to maintain through the design of their software and hardware. Still, the Nettuts+ article notes, HTML5 can accomplish most if not all of what the average publishers' requires.

At this point, there are merits to both approaches, but, publishers, especially smaller ones, should carefully weigh what they are gaining and what they are giving up by packaging content in a native app versus an HTML5 app — or even just incorporating it into a robust mobile website.

Storytelling is changing, so says the headline in a Journalistics post by Bethany Bengtson. Yes, of course she’s right, but I like her point. Some journalists have spent too much time lamenting new forms of publishing technology, like the web, blogging and social media, but storytelling will continue to evolve at a blistering pace. Get used to it, my friends.

Oh, and Bethany advises you also embrace shorter form content, keeping those blog posts under 500 words. Man, I hope she doesn’t take offense to this long post or this one.

Speaking of change, Jim Brady is no longer at TBD. We’ve followed TBD from the beginning, and you could count us as fans of their work. TBD Publisher Robert Allbritton said he and Brady had some “stylistic differences,” and it would seem Allbritton wants to focus more on original content. Under Brady, TBD was/is all about aggregation and technology.

While I doubt the talented staff there will lose sight of what’s over the horizon, the article surfaced a few questions for me. 1. Can news orgs afford to focus on just one of these – content, aggregation or technology? 2. If newsroom leaders must focus on more than one, how do they balance the attention each important aspect receives?

What are your thoughts?

Image by statianzo.

The previous three election cycles, blogs, Web video and social media emerged as mainstream tools for covering and influencing the political process. This time around, it's the mobile Web and location-based services that are making inroads. If you've only just caught up with the first three, don't panic. With these free, easy-to-implement resources, virtually anyone can have a place in this newest space.

Google Election Center

Google Election Center offers an embed code for a customizable map widget your readers can use to find their local polling place, ballot information and contact details for election offices. If information for your area is incomplete, you may add to Google's database. (Mobile publishers can point their audiences to this version of the map.)

Foursquare I Voted data visualization

Foursquare is also offering an embeddable map. Available starting election day morning, it will aggregate real-time check-in data for more than 100,000 polling locations.

Twitter Fast Follow

If, on election day or any other busy news day, you ever need to create a text alert service on the fly, Twitter Fast Follow is a way to do it. In fact, every Twitter account already doubles as a text alert system. All you have to do is promote the fact that anyone with a mobile phone — whether they're on Twitter or not — can receive your tweets via SMS by texting “follow NameOfYourTwitterAccount” to 40404.

It's remarkable how much newspapers look like their parents. And grandparents. And great grandparents. With their medium in its second generation, a similar thing is happening now with news Web pages.

Why this is, and what it means for publishing's next iteration, is the thesis of a short, stimulating piece published this week on TheMediaBriefing.

Products of their times

Newspapers and news Web pages look the way they do, Guardian information architect Martin Belam writes, because of the technological envrionments in which they were created.

In the days of physical type, "interchangeable blocks of text with common widths" were a good way to accommodate late-breaking revisions. In the early days of the Web, "chunks of articles of broadly similar length" served a similar function on larger-monitor, consumption-oriented desktop computers.

Well, we're in the early days of mobile and tablets now. And it's getting later by the second. To paraphrase Mel Brooks' "Spaceballs," then will be now soon.

Tiny screens, many models

In "How the shift to mobile is revolutionising online news design," Belam previews what then will look like. Once again, form will follow function. The influential factors this time will be mobile screens' small size and the diversity of device types.

Design implications

There simply isn't room for 15 related story links, a most read panel, and 100 ways to share an article on the screen of a smartphone or small tablet - not to mention advertising. This forces a concentration on what the user is most likely to want to do next after consuming a story. ... It also means thinking about what are the real interactions you are hoping to encourage from the reader - to share the story, to comment on the story, or to dive deeper into a specific topic?

Development implications

In order to serve a wide range of devices, with differing screensizes and aspect ratios, rather than starting from scratch with a unique app and codebase each time, publishers will most likely ultimately have to develop "one-size-adapts-to-all" systems, relying on open standards like HTML5 and CSS3 to deliver content.

For newspapers and other legacy media organizations this is the best possible news. It's a back to basics approach that rewards their core values of editorial efficiency, consistency and quality.

Until now.

Last week during game 6 of the ALCS on TBS, I caught the tail end of a segment extolling the Texas Rangers' smallball prowess. The announcers were carrying on about a list of 17 run production virtues (which I can't find online for the life of me) the team posts in its dugout. You know, the little things — moving runners over, taking the extra base — that, when strung together, can lead to big things.

That got me thinking: What would a smallball list for interactive news look like? What are small, fundamental things that virtually anyone can do that, if embraced widely and consistently, can make your news team a digital winner?

The meandering list below — containing 17 best practices, like the Rangers' — probably isn't refined enough to post in your dugout, or, er, cubicle. But it should get you thinking. The best part is these are specific tasks (except for, well, the first two) that almost anyone can do, not just multimedia vets or Web development power hitters.

But first…

Two overarching rules

These are kind of like "There's no crying in baseball."

1. Let the story determine the platform, not vice versa.

2. The process is becoming the product. The less you fight this and the more ways you find to work with it, the easier life will be.

Now, on to the nittier, grittier suggestions, organized by subject area.

News gathering

3. Make a note of PDFs and other electronic documents — or even websites or online videos — consulted for a story; users might like to consult them, too.
 
4. Encourage every smart phone owner in your newsroom to install basic live publishing apps like Qik and Ustream for video and Plixi and Instagram for pictures. If they find news or news finds them, these might come in handy, even if it's just to share information with colleagues.

SEO

5. Include alt text, description meta tags, keyword-rich titles.

6. Link to related content. (Good for context, too.)

7. Retain the same story URL for the duration of a breaking news story, writing through it, or, probably better, updating it in a serial, blog-like fashion. (Also good for context.)

Mobile

8. Include thumbnails with lead stories.
 
9. On social media, link to mobile-friendly versions of breaking news stories.

10. When applicable, append mobile articles with addresses of places mentioned in or related to the story. Most mobile browsers automatically pull up a map when users tap locational text.

Social Media

11. Respond to social media mentions.

12. On Facebook, post articles with photos; on Twitter, RT, @ reply/mention, use hashtags; on Foursquare, leave tips.

13. Include reporters' Twitter handles at the end of their articles.

14. Reserve your brand name on the "next" platform/service/network, even if you don't plan to use it now.

UGC

15. When soliciting content, link to previous contributions users can emulate. This also shows people their stuff isn't going into some cyberspace black hole.

16. If a submission is exemplary, or just every now and then, personally thank your contributors.

17. Pretend you're a user and you see news breaking. Pretend you have a photo/video/tip and want to share it. Pretend you don't know how. How many clicks/taps on your Web/mobile site until you do know? If you're unhappy with your answer, make this information easier to find.

Creative Commons photo by Flickr user Nero.Lives
Modified Creative Commons photo by Flickr user erik jaeger

These days, it’s almost sacrilege for news sites not to have a mobile presence.

According to the Pew Internet and American Life Project, 40 percent of adults use the internet, email or instant messaging on a mobile phone (up from the 32% of Americans who did this in 2009). But what’s a small news operation to do?

Some smaller organizations may not have the budget for developing a mobile site or app. While that excuse may not be valid for long, there’s one thing you can do if your organization lacks a mobile-specific site.

These rules look familiar

Follow the rules of building any solid website. As Stefan Nagey, a managing director at Qorvis, says: “When you’ve done things right, people won’t be sure if you’ve done anything at all.” Nagey presented “The Mobile Web is Dead” at a MeetUp event, hosted by the Web Content Mavens group in Washington, D.C. He also emphasized the importance of leaning toward developing an app rather than a mobile site since apps tend to be a richer, more popular experience for consumers.

Bur if you lack the funds for programming a mobile app, he relayed some good advice for creating any site, like:

• making sure your interface priorities match your business priorities.
• writing clean, semantically correct markup.
• creating SEO friendly content.
• designing a clean, simple user interface.

Use what he called a “light touch,” and your website will function well, even though it’s not officially mobile-ready.

What do you think? Should news orgs definitely be mobile ready?

Photo by sgback.

Every field has its buzzwords. You know, words that are used so often to mean so many different things that their meaning starts to erode. At Journalism Lives, we've made restoring their meaning part of our mission. We blogged previously on "digital first" and "interactivity." Today we examine "crowdsourcing."

So, what is crowdsourcing? We'll let participants from the Oct. 6 #wjchat both show and tell you.

@henrymlopez: Commenting is crowd sourcing, if for nothing more than a diversity of opinion. So are scientific polls. #wjchat

@zachbehrens: Q1. Crowdsourcing is using the people as a news wire (you should still fact check, though). #wjchat

@ryanjz crowdsourcing is essentially putting a concept out there and soliciting data from the world at-large i.e. open-source journalism. #wjchat

@kimbui Q1: Crowdsourcing, using the wisdom of the crowd to enhance your reporting and your story presentation. #wjchat

@jeffsondermanCH: “Crowdsourcing” is used to describe many different things. From asking an open question to gathering scientific samples #wjchat

No definition is necessarily right or wrong or even better or worse. Some speak to specific applications while others try to be all-encompassing. Below I seek to organize the varying applications into what I'm calling crowdsourcing archetypes. But first, the broader definition.

Targeted, functional

Like some of the chat participants said, crowdsourcing can be very simple and traditional. @henrymlopez's observation that comments and polls are crowdsourcing, if only to obtain a diversity of opinion, is an insightful point.

At its heart, though, and what differentiates crowdsourcing from user-generated content at large, is its utility. It is targeted enough and involves enough people that it can solve important problems that would be impossible or prohibitively difficult for one person or group to solve on its own.

A recent Slate piece, mentioned in the #wjchat,  on crowdsourcing medical advice, says Wired editors invented the term in 2006 to mean just that. "Seeking a problem's solution from a wide community," was how they put it.

Now, on to the types of problems crowdsourcing can solve and news and non-news examples for each.

Needle in a haystack

The more eyes looking at something, the less likely patterns or outliers will slip through the cracks.

News use: The Texas Tribune is a leader in promoting data content and making it accessible. Its efforts attract loads of page views as well as industry praise. The ability of all those eyeballs to uncover story leads was part of the reason the online-only publication made its most popular feature (data or otherwise), a state government payroll app, more user friendly.

Common use: Citizen scientists are fulfilling this archetype when they flag shapes or irregularities in thousands of telescope photos to help astronomers identify and classify galaxies.

Microtasks

The assembly line for the digital revolution. Split up large, tedious or complex projects into simple microtasks anyone can complete.

News use: On its citizen reporting network blog, ProPublica recently explained how it uses Amazon's Mechanical Turk to collect, reformat and de-duplicate data.

Common use: You're applying this function every time you fill out a reCAPTCHA, which in addition to fighting spam, digitizes books.

Wisdom of the crowd

Take advantage of people's collective knowledge and experiences to get more, more creative ideas more quickly or to hone in on the most popular ones. 

News use: Tracking election day snafus with Crowdmap, like TBD did.

Common use: David Pogue's Twitter APB for hiccup cures is a fun example.

Network of networks

Study or enlist crowds to discover relationships. Good old fashioned networking but mapped out for you by the social graph.

News use: Everyday social media sourcing. Let the organizing power of online communities steer you to the person or piece of information you're looking for: Purusing Twitter lists to find like-minded people, for example, or identifying Foursquare mayors to find people who know a place or area well.

Common use: Every time you search for or stumble upon contacts on Facebook you're using crowdsourcing this way.

Crowdsourcing also is…

Before ending this post, and opening things up to the wisdom of the crowd, it's worth noting that crowdsourcing doesn't have to involve humans, doesn't have to involve computers and can involve internal audiences like coworkers as well as users. 

With that said, wise crowd, what would you add to or change about this list?

Creative Commons photo by Flickr user victoriapeckham