Month: April 2007

Yesterday, I had to take the Metro from our Arlington offices to the newspaper’s main office in downtown D.C.

I almost always grab a copy of Express for the trip. For those who don’t know what Express is, it’s kind of The Washington Post’s answer to all of the free dailies that are popping up in large cities with well-used public transportation.

But yesterday, all of the Express racks were empty, so I grabbed a copy of City Paper instead.

The weekly paper had an interesting piece on the coverage of the Virginia Tech tragedy. As soon as I read it, I knew I had to blog about it because it really does a nice job of explaining how a tech-saavy reporter can do great journalism because of those skills — and even scoop those around him/her because of them.

The City Paper piece talks about how Washington Post reporters used the Internet for things like scouring blogs and contacting students via Facebook to get great leads and even exclusive interviews.

This clearly illustrates how a reporter who understands new technology (or basically how the world really works today, especially if you’re a college student) can use those skills to better serve his/her readers.

So, one example of a reporter using the Internet in the name of better journalism would be in the ways outlined in this City Paper story.

Another example of a reporter using new media to better serve his/her audience would be a journalist who uses this sort of technology to connect with readers on a daily basis.

An excellent example of this type of a new-media-saavy reporter would be Washington Post baseball reporter Barry Svrluga.

Barry does a great job of covering the ins-and-outs of the Washington Nationals on the pages of The Washington Post. And, yes, those stories also appear on washingtonpost.com. But that’s not what makes Barry — at least in my mind — one of the more interesting newspaper journalists to watch.

He’s a damn-fine multimedia journalist.

He has a popular blog that he usually updates at least a couple of times a day.

And, yes, his blog gets lots of comments from readers, and he frequently interacts with his audience in the comments section. It’s truly a dialogue, and a great local baseball blog.

He does a live online chat with readers about once a week or so.

He does a nightly post-game audio podcast that is very informative, and has lots of interviews with players and coaches.

He even appears on the new Washington Post Live sports television show that runs each day on Comcast here in the D.C. area.

The guy even writes books.

The team of folks that I get to work with here at Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive work with Barry each day. This is a journalist who is very serious about his role as someone who writes stories for The Washington Post.

But he’s not so close-minded as to think that’s only way to connect with readers.

I haven’t had a chance to meet Barry Svrluga yet, but when I do, I’m buying that guy a big-ass steak and as much beer as he can drink.

It’s not people in roles like mine who are showing folks what the future of local newspaper journalism might look like. It’s guys like Barry Svrluga.

In experimenting with online journalism for the last 10 years or so, the one thing that continually amazes me is how in nearly every market we’ve ever been in (including here in Washington D.C.), it’s nearly always a group of mid-career “traditional” reporters who end up doing the most interesting things with new media.

I think there is a misconception that if you really want to get things done at a newspaper website, you need a “couple of kids right out of college.” Not that things aren’t changing, but I’ve never really found that to be true.

As of right now, I’ll take the mid-career “traditional” journalist who still wants to kick some ass any old day.

UPDATE: We have filled all of the positions! Thanks for your interest!

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This summer, our “new products” team here at Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive is going to be working on a couple of really cool projects, and we would love some help.

In fact, we would love lots of help!

We’re looking for folks who want to build cool things, hang out with cool people, and work in one of the coolest offices you’ll see this side of Google. This is what most companies call an internship, and I guess that’s technically what it will be here, as well.

But you won’t be doing crappy intern things like fetching coffee, mowing our lawns, etc… You’ll be doing all of the same things that the rest of our team does.

We’re looking for folks who want to work with us through the summer, as well as for longer internships.

Because of competitive reasons, I can’t really go into any details right now as to what you’ll be working on with us here at WPNI other than to say that the projects are uber-cool and will likely get lots of attention inside and outside of the news/media industry.

We want solid journalists who can write their backsides off. We’re also looking for programmers with an understanding of Django. And if you’re a kick-ass designer with killer Flash or motion-graphics skills, we want you.

But what we really want are self-motivated bad-asses who have at least one of the skills I listed above.

So, if you’d like to hang out with the bad-asses that I’m lucky enough work with each day, learn cool stuff, and basically ensure your future marketability in the field of journalism for a long time, then contact me ASAP.
🙂

No, we won’t be expecting you to starve for the summer in order to take these internships. You aren’t going to get rich. But you’ll definitely be able to get by.

And another thing … if you are what some call “one of the Top Kids” who has already accepted an internship with some other newspaper or media outlet, go ahead and call them to tell them that you’re sorry that you can’t make it, but that something has unexpectedly come up. Then come hang out with us this summer at washingtonpost.com.

Your career will thank you later.

And trust me, you’re going to have a whole lot more fun here in the D.C. area with us than you were going to have at that other internship anyway.
🙂

(UPDATED: I’m joking. Please don’t quit another internship to come hang with us. Unless you really, really want to.)

E-mail me for more info.

This upcoming weekend, I will be going back to Kansas to see my parents, as well as to visit my alma mater, Emporia State University.

On Friday, April 6, I will have a full day of speaking events on the ESU campus.

From 9 a.m. to 11 a.m., I will be talking about the business of online newspapers. More specifically, I will be explaining how newspapers make money on the Internet and through other new-media opportunities.

What makes this interesting is that there are some sort of universal ways in which newspapers make money on the Internet — such as classifieds — and then there are very different ways of making money on the web that are totally dependent upon a newspaper’s size and the amount of traffic that its site gets.

When you’re washingtonpost.com, having a substantial portion of your revenue tied to CPM works. When you’re ottawaherald.com in Ottawa, Kan., having your revenue tied to CPM isn’t going to pay the bills.

There’s no real guidebook on how newspapers make money on the Internet.

Some newspapers are very creative and aggressive with their new-media strategies. And some just suck at it. (Well, maybe a lot of them.)

The one thing I’ve noticed is that if the top person at a newspaper really cares about success on the Internet, and places a high priority on it, then the website does just fine on both the revenue side and the content side.

But what’s going to make this presentation at ESU fun for me is that I’m going to focus on what I think all of this means for newspapers in Kansas.

I know I’m biased, but I love Kansas newspapers — and I know that my views on things like hyper-local journalism were formed by reading Kansas newspapers as I was growing up.

From the influence of William Allen White and The Emporia Gazette on American journalism in the early-to-mid 1900s to today’s influence of the Lawrence Journal-World on the current evolution of the newspaper industry, journalism in Kansas matters.

So, when I speak with the students at Emporia State on Friday, I won’t be talking about how I think you make money on the Internet if you’re The Washington Post or The New York Times — it will be about how I think this works if you’re the El Dorado Times or the Prairie Post.

The newspaper industry in Kansas is fascinating to me. Here is a state that is definitely in the lower-half of the nation when it comes to population (a little over 2.5 million, I think — or about half what the DC metro is), yet it has 40 daily newspapers. And there are more than a handful of newspapers in Kansas with less than 2,500 daily circulation.

I love that!

I also will be giving two other shorter presentations that day at Emporia State.

From 1 p.m. to 2 p.m., I will be focusing more on the technical/software aspects of being a newspaper on the Internet.

Then from 2:30 p.m. to 3:30 p.m., I will be talking about the social and community applications of being a newspaper on the web.

My guess is there will be some overlap in all three of the sessions.
🙂

I’m told that all of these presentations at ESU will be free and open to the public.

If you’re going to come to one of them, drop me a line so we can chat either before or afterwards.

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And because I don’t get back home as much as I would like, I have to figure out how to balance spending time with my family, eating at the restaurants that I miss, and then whether I take my kids to Worlds of Fun or to a Royals baseball game.

I have to note that with yesterday’s 7-1 Opening Day butt-kicking of the Boston Red Sox, my beloved Kansas City Royals are currently tied for first place.

I needed to go ahead and write that sentence right now because I might not be able to write it anymore this season. Or even this decade.