Future of Media Preview: A Q&A with OpenFile Editor Kathy Vey
How can a lean start-up survive in a busy media market? Kathy Vey, editor of community news site OpenFile, divulges her online recipe for journalistic success, days before she speaks on the topic at Digital Journal’s Future of Media event on April 6.
OpenFile is a collaborative news site, allowing members to suggest stories for trusted reporters to cover. It covers stories the legacy media might not pursue, but where does it fit in a crowded marketplace?
In a Q&A with Digital Journal, OpenFile editor Kathy Vey talks about the challenges her outlet faces and where she sees it fitting in the coming years.
Vey’s venture into online news is a broad step away from her print days. She worked at the Toronto Star as deputy city editor, news editor, assistant national editor, restaurant critic, among many positions. She’s also worked for the Ottawa Citizen, the Toronto Sun and wrote for Canadian Gardening magazine.
This Q&A is part of a 5-day series with media leaders who will be speaking at Digital Journal’s Future of Media event which takes place April 6 at the Drake Hotel Underground in Toronto. Check back each day for a Q&A with other media leaders from the BBC, National Post, CTV and GigaOM.
Digital Journal: Journalism via the mainstream media is still very much about one reporter telling a story. How can collaborative journalism change a story and how can media organizations incorporate collaboration into their businesses?
Kathy Vey: We’ve had success appealing directly to readers for story ideas and asking them about angles to pursue after we’ve done the initial reporting.
One example was the 204 Beech file, a story that was initially about a city councillor’s attempt to prevent a Toronto family from tearing down a 100-year-old cottage in order to build a wheelchair-accessible home. It drew an enormous number of comments and evolved into a lively debate about heritage issues, property rights, disability rights, social media campaigning, political meddling — all sorts of interesting angles.
The original file was opened by the homeowner’s business partner, and the people who took part in the ensuing discussion were usually upfront about their stake in the issue. Many chose to use a real name rather than a pseudonym. I had to kill only one abusive comment, which came from a lawyer who lived nearby. I offered him the opportunity to tone down his libellous remarks or to sign his real name to the comment. He declined.
I’d like to see more media outlets address the nasty free-for-all in their comment sections. Moderation is expensive and time-consuming but it’s valuable if you can create a reasonably civil forum that doesn’t make your eyes bleed. There’s no point trying to add something constructive to the conversation if it’s already a shouting match.
I can’t think of any local media outlets that encourage their journalists to respond to commenters — something that we insist on at OpenFile.
Some media organizations are already exploring ways to collaborate. CBC News, for instance, is asking for readers and viewers to weigh in with their federal election questions and they’re also signing up citizen bloggers to contribute to Your Take.
Digital Journal: You’ve worked for big media (Toronto Star), and for independent media/start-up (OpenFile). How have the experiences been different and what does one teach you that the other can’t?
Kathy Vey: I miss the luxury of resources that were available to me at a big, fat corporation — the library staffed with helpful researchers, the online databases, the automated payroll, the dental plan. Your calls typically get returned more quickly, too, when you’re phoning from the Toronto Star rather than from a small operation. I also learned that it’s much easier to be a bad, feared boss than one who’s respected and will be missed when he or she is gone.
I wish I could give my OpenFile editors, who are spread out in seven cities across the country, the experience of the camaraderie that exists in a newsroom, even the newsrooms that have been decimated by downsizing. Mentors seem to be a dying breed, too. We have to find other ways to support one another and strengthen our team, even if it just means having a chat window open in the corner of our computer screens and kibitzing online with our Twitter accounts.
The Toronto Star has an excellent program for summer students and year-long interns that pays them a full salary and provides training and seminars, rather than just dumping them in the biggest newsroom in the country to sink or swim. Competition is fierce, as anyone who has applied will tell you, but it’s a great model to emulate.
At OpenFile, we’ve started a series of what we hope will be monthly webinars that we offer to our editors and freelancers. Our first session was led by Ottawa editor Nick Taylor-Vaisey, who gave an introduction to making interactive maps using Google Fusion Tables.
Digital Journal: The average person at home typically goes out and consumes media via traditional sources or via legacy brands. How can a start-up compete with those habits?
Kathy Vey: Well, I have to disagree with this premise. People are still consuming media produced by legacy brands but they’re increasingly getting it in ways that are anything but traditional. The State of the News Media survey released last month by the Project for Excellence in Journalism had some telling statistics.
In 2010, the percentage of Americans who got most of their news online surpassed the number who got it from newspapers. Most of the newspapers I see people reading on the streetcar are the free commuter tabloids, and I think Sudoku and celebrity photos have more to do with that than the calibre of the news coverage.
We also know that Canadians spend more time online than anyone else, and that people have embraced the idea of having internet access in their pocket or their purse. With a mobile device, you don’t have to wait for the six o’clock newscast to be informed — you can go to the TV stations’ or newspapers’ websites, or to your Twitter feed to catch up with the news whenever you want.
As smartphones become ubiquitous and electronic tablets such as iPads catch on, it makes sense to provide news content in a form that’s convenient for people to consume on the go. That’s a great opportunity for startups.
Digital Journal: Should media organizations take a more collaborative rather than competitive approach with start-ups in the media space? How and why/why not?
Kathy Vey: I’d love to see more collaboration. Our OpenFile Vancouver editor, Karen Pinchin, wrote a blog post last November about “co-opetition,” a word coined by David Beers, founding editor of The Tyee.
She said: “By creating opportunities for excellent journalism within our own organizations, by challenging our colleagues and our competitors to increase the quality, depth and breadth of reporting, and by constantly finding new ways to tell stories and connect with readers, then we’ll be helping the journalism industry citywide…It’s only when we invest in them, throw our weight behind new ones, and create a market where writers, photographers and broadcast freelancers are paid what they’re worth and are comfortable taking risks that we’ll see a real media revolution.”
Also, working with startups enables larger companies to test out new approaches without having to rejig their organization. It’s very tough for big media organizations to innovate and they should approach that challenge by working with smaller organizations that are focused on trying new things. It’s a good match.
Digital Journal: Outside of your own company, what start-ups do you think are making a big difference or impact in the world of media? How so?
Kathy Vey: Many people, including me, had high hopes for TBD.com, a local news project that launched last summer in Washington, D.C. It was an ambitious, expensive undertaking with some great people in charge — Jim Brady and Steve Buttry — and a genuine focus on community engagement, interactivity and mobile news.
But its owner, Allbritton Communications, pulled the plug on the experiment when it was only six months old, gutting the site and laying off most of this amazing team of young digital journalists who had been brought on board. Last I heard, it was going to become a niche arts and entertainment site.
So instead of being a shining example of a great new venture, TBD has become a dire warning about the dangers of getting into bed with the wrong partner.
Digital Journal: What do you think makes a good “digital-first” strategy for a media company, and should modern media businesses approach with a digital-first mindset?
Kathy Vey: Anything but a digital-first strategy right now would be madness. In a recent speech about the future of the newspaper industry, Lord Conrad Black referred to the “terrible albatrosses” of printing presses and delivery infrastructure. Remember, this is coming from a former press baron. There’s enormous value in newspaper brands and integrity, and in the talent of their staff, but trucking tonnes of newsprint around in the wee hours doesn’t make much sense any more.
Here in Canada, the Postmedia Network has been upfront about being digital-first and has gotten off to a good start by appointing an impressive digital advisory board, with people such as Jay Rosen, Jeff Jarvis and Judy Sims, some of the best thinkers and idea-sparkers in the digital journalism industry. I’m keen to see the effect they’ll have.
This Q&A is part of a 5-part series:
Advice column: Is citizen journalism a reaction to biased reporting and infotainment?
We’ve introduced a new advice column featuring questions and answers relating to journalism, new media, user-generated content, local news, and anything else we cover in our blog or get asked about. If you have a question for a future column, please contact us.
Question: Is journalism shifting back to the people (bloggers/Internet denizens)? It seems [to me] that people may be getting frustrated with how the news is being obviously spun or being sold as infotainment. Or is it just becoming more obvious?
– Trent Wilkie in Edmonton, Alberta
Answer: Thanks for the question Trent, and you certainly picked a topic that could easily be debated for hours.
We think it’s important to note balance, or how news is presented, varies widely from city to city, outlet to outlet, country to country. While there are certainly a number of people who feel their news is biased or lacking in substance, we want to be sure to distinguish there are a number of differences depending who you read for news or even what you consider to be news in the first place. Not all news media are going the route of pushing celebrity gossip or political spin so we wouldn’t apply that blanket statement to all media.
With that caveat intro, it’s also difficult to say definitely if journalism is returning to The People. It’s really not a new trend.
Citizen journalism
Citizen journalists and bloggers have long been reporting the news from their communities, even before CNN’s iReport or OhMyNews in South Korea began.
In the 1960s especially, people reported on government strong-arm tactics via underground newspapers and magazines, often unsupported by mainstream media. Furthermore, people wrote accounts on bulletin boards before they could get their own blogs. In this sense, citizen journalism is not new.
You’re correct in assuming the trend toward user-generated content in news is becoming more obvious (Disclosure: our sister site, Digital Journal, is a user-generated media network). Many news outlets are looking at ways to complement their coverage with reports from their audience. How many times have we seen our local broadcast ask us to submit photos and stories from this or that event/crisis? In the past, those user-generated reports were slapped with an “amateur footage” label, but we see that less often as media organizations attempt to fold their audience into their newsroom to varying degrees.
We’re now in the age of the “audience formerly known as the people,” as media critic Jay Rosen once put it.
We always advise media outlets to not just talk to their fans, but engage them in the media process. The result is a large pool of sources, more content and a highly engaged readership that has a reason to regularly return to their specific media outlet. Also, we’ve seen how bloggers and citizen journalists are winning credit for digging up stories that fall through the cracks, no matter where they post the news.
Bias, infotainment and spin
Regarding your point on “infotainment,” we definitely do hear a lot from people who are frustrated with the trend. We heard heard many people they are no longer following their favourite media outlet simply because of this cheapening of news.
That said, it also depends on what medium we’re talking about. On the Web, readers can pick and choose what they want to consume; in print they can thumb through a magazine or newspaper to skip over content that isn’t of interest (even though Justin Bieber might dominate the front page instead of an important story from the Middle East); but on television and radio the listener/viewer must follow along with the format chosen by line-up editors and producers. Infotainment plays a different role in different mediums, but live-broadcast mediums could arguably be a more frustrating user experience in this case because the news consumer has no choice but to sit through and watch or listen even if the content is not of interest.
In our experience talking with news consumers, we find more people are turning to the Web to get their daily digest of news because they can filter content (infotainment or otherwise) very quickly. In fact, these days more people get their news from the Web than traditional printed sources.
When it comes to “spin” in news, we also think this really depends who you watch and where you live. Anecdotally speaking, we hear about spin and bias in reporting most often from Americans who say politicization and polarization has trickled into news lineups.
The topic of bias in journalism is as old as the craft itself, but we think the trend of including more opinionated news as part of a daily news offering is emerging because people do actually want to consume news that falls in-line with their interests or political beliefs. The Web is helping people find those specialized news outlets, too.
If you look at American programs and personalities such as Bill O’Reilly, Glenn Beck, Keith Olbermann or Bill Maher (to name just a few), their opinionated voices have been added to the daily news lineup to offer audiences something other than hard news reporting. These shows have been given more exposure through networks because people do in fact tune-in and watch. Just because they’re on the air, however, doesn’t mean news is becoming more biased or politicized. They’re just shows that are part of the line-up and viewers know what to expect when they tune in. If they want hard news journalism, news organizations have countless other programs that cover that.
Today, no matter what type of news is being delivered (hard news, opinion, infotainment, bias or one-sided political Op-Eds), the simple fact is that there are a lot of choices for consumers and they can go anywhere to consume news or information that matters to them. When news junkies get frustrated by the production by their once-favourite news outlet, they turn elsewhere. It’s that simple.
- Future of Media editorial team
[Photo credit: Quinn Dombrowski]
Debate: The gap between what reporters write and what readers consume
By Chris Hogg
For those interested in the gap between what reporters cover and what readers consume, this video from MIT/NiemanLabs may be of interest.
Pablo Boczkowski is a Northwestern professor who studies news production and how it is changing in a digital environment. In the video embedded below, Boczkowski makes a presentation on the kind of journalism news organizations produce and how it compares to what people actually consume. Boczkowski gathers data from a wide variety of sources that span different geographies and time periods.
After his presentation, Joshua Benton from Nieman Journalism Lab weighs in with a few interesting points to encourage discussion and debate on the subject.
You can read a transcript here, and for those who want to skip ahead: Boczkowski’s talk starts at 7:50; Benton’s response starts at 37:10; and a Q&A session starts at 57:45.
Pablo Boczkowski and Joshua Benton at MIT Communications Forum from Nieman Journalism Lab on Vimeo.
The future of news? Media trends suggest social media, partisan reporting and brevity
The following is a guest post by Chad Garrison, a journalist with the Riverfront Times. It originally appeared in Garrison’s Riverfront Times blog and has been reprinted with permission. You can follow him on Twitter @chadgarrison.
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By Chad Garrison,
Amy Mitchell, deputy director of the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism was in town yesterday to speak at a luncheon for PR professionals. Her topic, “The New News Consumer and the Future of News: Trends for 2011 and Beyond,” also drew a fair number of reporters and editors. Yep, flacks and hacks brought together to try to read the ol’ proverbial tea leaves.
And the bottom line? These are uncertain times. But you already knew that. Here, then, are a few of the statistics Mitchell shared with the audience that may offer some guidance on the future of journalism:
- Contrary to popular opinion, the average American actually spends more time consuming news than he/she did a decade ago. They tend to spend the same 57 minutes per day getting news through traditional outlets (radio, TV, print) today as they did in 2000. But they now also spend another 13 minutes per day consuming news online for a total of 70 minutes spent each day following current events.
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People tend to be “news grazers” getting their information from a variety of sources with just 33 percent of Internet users saying they have a favorite site for their news gathering.
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Moreover, the average time per visit to news sites continues to drop. In 2009 it was three minutes and six seconds. Last year it dropped to just two-and-a-half minutes.
- Sixty-two percent of Internet users participate in some kind of social media.
- Seventy-seven percent of social-media users say they get their news from social media.
- Facebook is now the third biggest referral site for news articles, following only Google and the main new site from which an article is linked (ex. a New York Times article that’s linked from the main page of the NYT.)
- In 2010 online news readership grew 8.5 percent. News consumption for all the following fell: local TV (-1.1%); network TV (-3.4%); print newspapers (-5%); cable TV (-11.4%); magazines (-12%).
- Newspapers have lost an estimated $1.6 billion from their newsrooms budgets since 2000, and that money isn’t coming back with online ads selling for a fraction of what similar print and classified ads sold for.
- Of the three cable news networks, Fox and MSNBC far outpaced CNN in revenue in 2010.
Lessons? Obviously social media is key. Getting people to share stories on Facebook, Twitter, etc. can bring in new readers. But is a more wholesale change needed?
Based on the success of Fox News and MSNBC, I asked Mitchell if she thought the key these days was for news outlets to become more partisan as a way to increase traffic.
Mitchell didn’t really answer my question, but she ended her talk by noting that the public today has a lot more freedom to choose where and from whom they consume their news. With that freedom comes that old journalism mantra: Always consider the source.
As for news agencies, the challenge is to make the news available in platform-specific consumption across all new media — phones, tablets, social media, etc. The news, concluded Mitchell, can no longer be seen as a product. It must be considered a service.
That said, I’m struggling to think of any business — be it a manufacturer or a service industry — that gives away its work for free, as has been the case over the past decade with newspapers and the Internet. Mitchell suggested that that may change as papers find a way to finally charge for news downloaded to tablet computers.
We shall see.
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The following is a guest post by Chad Garrison, a journalist with the Riverfront Times. It originally appeared in Garrison’s Riverfront Times blog and has been reprinted with permission. You can follow him on Twitter @chadgarrison. This blog post is part of the Future of Media‘s ongoing coverage and examination of what’s happening in the media around the world. If you have a story idea, please contact us.
An interview with Nieman Lab founder Joshua Benton on the future of journalism
By David Silverberg
A crowdsourced copy editing project. An equation to track a news site’s user engagement. How “public-interest news can be more valuable to publishers than traffic bait.” These are some of the issues analyzed by Nieman Journalism Lab (NJL), born out of Harvard University’s Nieman Foundation. Just over two years old, the website tracks news in the evolving journalism industry, offering stories on how old media adapt to the digital era and what new projects are emerging from tech trailblazers and start-ups. What makes the Lab tick and what new ideas are exciting media observers?
We spoke to NJL director Joshua Benton, who says the Lab has expanded immensely since he joined as the sole writer after nabbing a 2007 Nieman Fellowship. Now staffed with four full-time writers, NJL has welcomed more than 80 writers to contribute content to the site, some steadily and some freelance.
A former reporter for the Dallas Morning News, Benton says NJL stories are designed to look at how journalism is maturing in today’s digital era. “In this journalism revolution, lots of people are doing lots of interesting things,” he said in a phone interview. “Some are happening deep within news organizations and others in one-person start-ups or within tech companies. We’re the common point of conversation for all those people.”
NJL tends to investigate stories you won’t find in your local daily or magazine. For instance, writer Justin Ellis profiled MuckRock, a site which aims to make FOIA requests effortless; an interview with a computer science professor looked at digital forensics and photojournalism; and Benton wrote an insightful post on the economics behind news site paywalls. NJL also features sections with news from around the Web relating to media and journalism trends.
Benton says the stories on NJL should help journalists and editors “inform their judgment” on the volatile media space. NJL’s purpose is altruistic, Benton notes. “Our goal is to do our part to help journalism evolve and succeed.”
NJL doesn’t track what a media site such as Poynter’s Romenesko would follow, such as layoffs and paper closures. Instead, their writers analyze how new startups or media projects will help journalists adjust to the new realities presented by social and digital media.
“Traditional news organization want to increase the size and loyalty of their online audience,” Benton says. “When you look at news outlets with substantial online audiences, the numbers aren’t analogous to the loyalty of having a daily newspaper delivered to your house every day. ”
Benton says editors have to rethink how they value online relationships with their readers.
What trends excite him and NJL? Benton said the burgeoning mobile space is positioned for major growth and he believes there’s great potential in news apps which create a “walled garden around content compared to the Web, where the competition is just one click away.”
Benton also says he supports user-generated media, which he views as part of the news ecosystem. That said, he believes large news organizations will still produce the lion’s share of journalism in 20 years. Also, Benton believes “amplification” is the biggest obstacle for citizen journalism and user-generated content. ”If someone writes something journalistic he needs to find a way for that work to reach an audience,” he says.
When asked about printed media’s role in the future of journalism, Benton says printing a paper is still a money-maker for many outlets but he’s not sure what newspapers will look like in 10 or 20 years.
“People who are 50 today aren’t going to give up their newspapers anytime soon, but in the future it won’t be the ideal tool for mass media distribution,” he says.
Benton would like to see a balance between the players in the tech world who believe they will learn nothing from old-school media, and newspaper executives who think the Net is one big crowd of “know-nothings.”
“Both those point-of-views are equally wrong,” he says.
Looking at the future of Benton’s own workplace, he hints the Nieman Journalism Lab will soon be getting into hosting conferences and may also look at creating “centralized resources or databases” but he was mum on details. And as NJL’s site programmer, Benton also points out there may be a redesign or a few tweaks coming in the near future.
For more information on the Nieman Journalism Lab visit their website or join the 33,000+ people who are now following Nieman Lab on Twitter.