Author: rcurley

This week, Washington D.C. is playing host to the Associated Collegiate Press/College Media Advisers annual conference.

I will be speaking at this conference on Thursday. This is, of course, the perfect time for a post about the state of journalism education.

But not today. I’ll try to post that blog later this week.

Today, I want to send out an invitation to any students who are going to be in DC for this conference and who would like to spend a couple of hours seeing the Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive offices and talk about journalism with a dork from Kansas.

If time permits, we also might head across the river to see The Washington Post newsroom, as well.

I’m guessing only about two or three people will take me up on this invitation, but just in case more do, we could probably only have about 10-15 folks visit us. I want it to be a small enough group that we can actually have some conversations.

Depending on how my schedule pans out for the rest of the week, we might be able to do this a couple of times. I am for sure going to meet with some folks from Appalachian State University on Friday morning, which is likely when this invite would be extended to others. I might also have some time on Wednesday afternoon.

If this sounds interesting, please send me an e-mail.

A few weeks ago, I did a phone interview with Northwestern University’s Media Management Center for a report that is planned to be released publicly a little later this week.

The report (which is now available for download as a PDF) is called “Running While the Earth Shakes: Creating an Innovation Strategy to Win in the Digital Age.” It’s kind of billed as a study on innovation in the news media.

It’s about 50 pages long and includes interviews with 36 executives from both old and new media companies, including several folks from The Washington Post Company, like my boss, Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive CEO Caroline Little.

I was told the audience for this report is essentially mainstream media executives.

I thought since I haven’t blogged in a while, I would post my quotes from the report, which were sent to me via e-mail after they were transcribed.

One of the quotes is from a section about the importance of company leaders keeping in close touch with folks who are trying to do new things. After being at The Washington Post for about a year now, I can tell you that Don Graham is the living embodiment of that.

Mr. Graham — which if he reads this, I’m going to be in trouble because he hates it when people call him that — rolls in much more impressive circles than I do. I mean, how many newspaper publishers can call Warren Buffett and Mark Zuckerberg friends and advisors?

And what’s really cool is that Don isn’t one of those people who might try to have friends like that for prestige’s sake. He really listens to these people. But you don’t have to be the “Oracle of Omaha” or the brains behind Facebook for Don to want to listen to you.

This is a guy who takes things in from almost everyone whom he finds to have a good point or fresh perspective. When I was in Lawrence, Dolph Simons had that exact same quality.

Anyway, that’s the point I was trying to make when I said:

+++

“Though I report to the CEO of Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive, I have this very cool relationship with Don Graham, our company’s chairman. He calls me a lot, he e-mails me a lot and we have lots of great conversations. He’s always very interested in what our team is working on and he’s even helped us cut through the bureaucracy on problems that seem a little beneath him, like getting information from a local school district.

“What’s been really fun is to see how many cool things we’ve worked on that actually begin with Don. The Washington Post was the first major media company to build a Facebook app this summer, and it was his idea. …

“But the coolest thing I ever saw Don do was have lunch with our team’s summer interns and write down three pages of notes from his discussions with them. The guy always wants to learn and isn’t above learning from the interns. You might have the leader of another company have lunch with interns, but how many are going to take notes?”

+++

Then there is this long, rambling quote from me that ends the report. I can’t believe I would have said all of this at once in the phone interview, so it must have been pieced together.

Of course, if it’s a morning where I’ve had a couple of Red Bulls and a Mountain Dew, I’m very capable of running off like this without a breath.
🙂

Here goes …

+++

“Our team works outside the typical boundaries of washingtonpost.com, and that has its good points and its bad points. In fact, unlike most of those who work at our offices, we’re not really washingtonpost.com employees. Technically, we are a new products team for all of Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive, which means we can be asked to build content, applications and sites for anything that our company owns, including Newsweek, Slate magazine, Budget Travel (and) even our company’s television stations around the country.

“Most of us (his team) have been together forever. Everyone else thinks of us as online journalists, but we think of ourselves as new media journalists, and to us that means we need to be thinking about a whole lot more than just how do we get our newspaper on the Internet — it means building things for mobile phones, mp3 players, widgets, Facebook, everything.

“What’s the next big thing? What’s around the corner? How does an information company present its content any place that people want it? I often joke that we would beam our content to people’s butts if we could figure out how to do it. …

“Our team has its own dedicated programmer; he’s been working with us for a long time so he knows how programming relates to journalism. This is a guy who practices his journalism with code instead of with sentences. We have a full-time dedicated senior designer who’s also a motion graphics animator and a Flash developer. Then we have two multimedia journalists — one in an editor’s role and one in a producer’s role, but both can do just about everything. They can write very well-written news stories, they can produce daily audio podcasts, they can shoot and edit video. You throw something at them and they can probably do it, or they’re going to figure out how to do it. They’re kind of jack-of-all-trades when it comes to storytelling.

“Then the fifth member of our team is this really smart guy who has the strangest role on our team. In fact, we had to make up a whole new title for him and that’s ‘Journalism Technology Specialist.’ He’s a weird guy because he’s a dang fine journalist; he can really write well and understands new media journalism really well, but he can also code a little bit, he can write CSS. Basically, this guy sits between the journalism and the technology. So once all the code has been written, all the sites have been designed, all the Flash animations have been built, all the stories have been written, all the virtual reality photos have been taken, he’s the guy who assembles all of that. And that makes him a pretty useful guy to have around.

(By contrast), “washingtonpost.com is massive — almost 300 people if you add up all of the different editorial, technical, advertising and marketing departments. I’ve never seen an online operation so dang big for a newspaper.

“They’re all working their backsides off, but with a site this dang big, sometimes you need that many people just to keep the trains running on time. But, man, is it big to a kid from Kansas. … All the different divisions of washingtonpost.com are on different floors or in different areas of our building so if they want to build something new or different, they have to ask for programming and engineering to come up from the 9th floor, they’ve got to ask for the design team to come over here; they may have to ask for the multimedia team to come over, and they’ve got to have the journalists and editors come over. So every time they do anything, they have to coordinate with several departments. Meetings are a huge part of life at washingtonpost.com.

“That’s what makes our team so unique at Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive. We’re small and nimble. Our team doesn’t have to coordinate like that in order to get a project off the ground. We’re pretty much a self-contained unit; we have all of those skillsets right there and all together. As soon as we get the go-ahead to do something, we can start working on it immediately. We don’t do a lot of meetings.

“I would say 80 to 90% of our ideas are internal … well, kind of. It’s all very informal — no spec sheets, no white papers, no research or user-group testing. In a lot of ways, we just like to build things that we’d like to have ourselves. I guess it kind of drives some people in our organization a little nuts, but it works great for us and I wouldn’t want to change a thing.

“Besides, if you ask a group of readers what they want, they’ll tell you based upon what they know. They won’t tell you about what they’ve always wished they could have but had no idea they would love having until you finally give it to them. That’s what we try to build — things people never knew they wanted.

“I get asked all of the time how our team comes up with the ideas behind the things we build. I’d love to tell you we have found the secret sauce, but it’s not like that at all. We might go out to lunch as a whole group, once or twice a month. We just talk about things we’ve seen, things we like. A lot of ideas come from those lunches, but that’s not how it works on a daily basis. A lot of our things happen more like this: I’ll get an e-mail from someone on our team at three in the morning saying, ‘Have you seen this on this site? Wouldn’t it be cool if we borrowed this idea and made it work like this for what we’re trying to build?’

“Nearly all of those ideas are from non-newspaper sites. They’re from other websites that had a kernel of an idea that they had used on their website that this person on our team recognized as being something that, if modified and used in the news industry, might work really well.

“So these people (the members of his team) are of the Internet. It is in their DNA. That’s what makes a lot of these newspaper sites completely suck is because so many of them are run by people who don’t have the Internet in their DNA.”

+++

Why do I get the feeling that last paragraph is going to land me in the principal’s office?

I know I’m a little late to this party, but there have been quite a few links going around to the Bivings Report’s list of that group’s views of the Top 10 newspaper sites in the United States.

I really have to applaud some of the choices on that list.

It may not be obvious in a sea of large market and national newspaper brands, but the Knoxville News Sentinel has quietly put together one of the best local news sites in the nation. The Bivings Report talks about the site’s clean design (which is *very* nice), but it’s the site’s mixture of great content that is constantly updated that really stars in my mind.

Knoxnews.com is a killer site with incredible vision. I would go as far as to call the current version of the Knoxville site the industry standard that all other newspaper sites whose names don’t rhyme with Boo Bork Bimes and Squashington Roast should aim for.
😉

Some of the other sites on the Bivings list have me a little perplexed, and that’s more than OK because we all have different opinions about what makes something good. (And there’s more jargon on that list than what you’ll hear at an NAA conference in Orlando. And I am in no way passing judgement or making fun of that … just pointing it out.)

The newspaper sites I’d like to focus on are the ones that aren’t on the Bivings Top 10 — especially since the Bivings list only looked at the 100 biggest newspapers based upon circulation.

And the one thing I’ve learned over the last 10 years in this industry is that innovation has absolutely nothing to do with circulation. Trust me on this one.

So, not that it matters, but my personal favorite local newspaper sites are Roanoke.com, Bakersfield.com and Bakotopia.com, Knoxnews.com, lawrence.com and KUsports.com — and, no, you can’t call me a “homer” for those last two sites because there are a lot of other sites from my past that aren’t on that list.

And, though this is a little off topic, my current favorite local multimedia effort that not enough people seem to be talking about is the “Soul of Athens” project. Awesome. Just awesome.

I’m sure I’ve forgotten a few other local news sites that I like, and I reserve the right to add to this list at anytime.
🙂

Another interesting ranking of newspaper sites happened over at Howard Owens’ personal site. I gotta tell you that I like Howard’s list a lot.

One thing these lists reminded me of was just how much I love lists. I really love ’em. I know, I know … too much VH1 for me.

Well, I’m heading to bed. My wife has warned me about blogging while I’m medicated.

Over my last several month’s worth of presentations, I’ve been telling a lot of journalists they should join (or at least try to understand) Facebook.

This week’s cover story in Newsweek is a great overview of Facebook by Steven Levy. If you still haven’t joined Facebook, at least read this story.

Right now.

Newspapers should be concerned with how the people in their communities communicate and stay informed. That’s just one of the reasons why I think newspaper folks should try to understand and appreciate Facebook.

I would bet that in nearly every city in the United States, the fastest growing “local” site is Facebook. And, trust me, Facebook is as local as it gets. It may not always be “news” but it’s local.
🙂

Here are a couple of short excerpts from Levy’s story:

“… the Facebook experience is built around people you know, and the center of the page is a News Feed where the stories largely consist of the activities, brief status reports, photo and video postings, and comments from those you have earmarked as friends.”

…

“But even more extraordinary was the way people used it. Facebook, as it became after a name change, was permeating every aspect of campus social life. Students even came to use its messaging function instead of e-mail.”

I see the points being made in these paragraphs all of the time. More importantly, I know I personally read a lot of the links/stories/blogs that my friends post on Facebook. I’m typically interested in the things my friends are interested in.

And, as lazy as this might sound, I love that everyday when I log on to Facebook, I see if any of my friends are having birthdays. Then I send them a quick e-mail to wish them well.

I know this is simple stuff. But it’s informative and I like it. I like knowing when a friend of mine has done something cool over the weekend and posts photos of it.

I like seeing what Don Graham is reading this week.

And, obviously, a ton of other people enjoy Facebook for the same reasons.

As Levy points also out in his article, “1 million people a week are flocking to Facebook.” The article says the site grows at a rate of 3 percent a week.

Those are insane numbers. Massively huge.

Early on in the article, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg says the site “is not a social-networking site but a ‘utility,’ a tool to facilitate the information flow between users and their compatriots, family members and professional connections.”

I love that very-rehearsed sounding answer. And as a fairly regular Facebook user, I would agree with him.

There are a ton of reasons journalists should understand Facebook that have nothing to do with knowing if one of your friends is feeling well today.

Back in April, I blogged about how the Washington City Paper documented how Washington Post journalists used Facebook to find sources during the horrible Virginia Tech shootings. Here is a link to the City Paper story.

Look, if you’re a journalist and you’re really serious about the future of our industry, you at least need to be informed about how people get their information.

Read Steven Levy’s primer on Facebook and you’ll get a glimpse of how a lot of people now stay connected and informed … the things many people used to turn to newspapers to do.

+++

UPDATE: Last night, I got an e-mail from Phil Cauthon — who is the editor at lawrence.com — about Newsweek’s article on Facebook.

Phil is a really thoughtful and perceptive guy, and I loved working with him both in Lawrence and in Topeka. He’s sharp and a damn-fine editor, so even when we disagree on things I always respect where Phil is coming from because I know that he’s thought a lot about it.

Phil said he had tried to post a reponse to the story on Newsweek’s site, but that it hadn’t shown up yet. I asked him if I could post it on here, and he said that was fine.

It definitely gives a different point of view on the Newsweek article, but also on Facebook.

+++

>
Is this Journalism or an advertorial? Aside from the article’s tone—which reads more like boosterism than a critical look at the Facebook phenomenon—it not-so-deftly brushes aside perhaps the most fundamental concern of any social networking site in the third to last graf: Privacy.

A red herring (having more to do with usability than privacy) is offered in place of, say, a critical look at what is done (or expressly not done) with all this data stored in Facebook’s databases: all the demographic info, personal info, deepest secrets, private photos and videos, etc. etc.—all of which is likely posted with only the users’ friends and family in mind, not in this spirit:

“We may share your information with third parties, including responsible companies with which we have a relationship.” (from Facebook’s “privacy” policy)

Instead of practicing Journalism, Newsweek has published a feel-good fluff piece that Facebook ownership couldn’t have paid enough for were it presented as it should have been: Advertising.

Fact is, social networking is a savvy means of identifying and selling data on consumers. No doubt Zuckerberg did not enter this venture for that reason, but that does not change the reality of why (to a significant degree, at least) his creation is worth billions to investors. Zuckerberg may well rigidly adhere to the highest code of responsibility to the internet community his work fostered, but inevitably, some day, all the data Facebook has collected will be owned by a Murdoch—and all the people who use this site with the same spirit that this article cheerleads will likewise be owned. The direct marketing fallout is potentially just a mere annoyance compared to much more grave implications (Patriot Act anyone?).

One has to wonder: Is Newsweek primarily concerned with riding the coattails of the next big trend or going beyond the hype to inform its readers about the potential pitfalls of jumping in head-first? This article suggests the former …

Phil Cauthon, editor
lawrence.com
desk: 785-832-7270
645 New Hampshire
Lawrence, KS 66044

I’m always surprised at how the questions and phone calls I get kind of come in waves of specific topics.

The topic that it seems I’m getting asked the most about right now is “will I share our job descriptions?”

That’s a hard one for me because if you ask those who have worked with me, we really don’t have set job descriptions and I’m not sure I’ve ever really told someone what exactly his or her job is.

But when I came to Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive, all of the positions that were going to be on our new products team had to be posted, so some sort of job descriptions had to be written for the job postings. I wanted these job postings to have a certain attitude, and our HR director at WPNI also wanted to make sure the postings had the correct tone for our company.

There was a fair amount of compromise on both sides (and all you have to do is read this post for our summer interns to see why), but I’m still fairly happy with what we came up with.

I’m not going to post all of the job descriptions and postings we put together. Instead, I thought I would post the job descriptions for our team’s main editor/producer and the posting for our team’s programmer.

BTW — these jobs have long been filled. I’m only posting them here so that others can see what we were looking for.

I also think it’s interesting to compare the more formal job description of the editor’s position that you see below with the blog posting that I wrote about what our online managing editor’s duties were when we were in Naples, Lawrence and Topeka.

Anyway, here goes …

+++

Multiplatform Editor/Producer

Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive is looking for a Multiplatform Editor/Producer to join our new team aimed at the rapid development of online content, tools and strategies. This Editor will work with a small collaborative team built lean and nimble.

This is a senior level position accountable for conceiving, producing and readying multimedia features, including text, audio, video and still images, either within online sites or for emerging technologies such as wireless media and downloadable audio, video or audio-visual broadcasts.

The ideal candidate will have an extensive and solid new media journalism background. You will be presenting multimedia in a variety of formats, helping manage day-to-day project activities from an editorial standpoint, and working quickly and effectively on multiple projects from beginning to completion.

You must be at ease working both as part of a team and independently. You must have impeccable attention to detail, so that we can trust you to produce excellent work without close supervision.

The Multiplatform Editor/Producer will be focused on creating and overseeing the creation of content on any and all of WPNI’s publications (washingtonpost.com, slate.com, budgettravelonline.com, and newsweek.com), both at the production and management levels. You will be able to help generate ideas for projects, make sure other members of the team are staying on task and help to make sure deadlines are met.

You will play a substantial role in the journalism aspects of these projects, gathering information and writing stories. It is therefore essential that you be able to write clean copy without much need for editing. The ideal candidate will have strong knowledge of Associated Press style and the ability to write well for different platforms.

You also must have the experience, knowledge and ability to work within the standard operating procedures of a traditional newsroom in a way that helps support all of the companies’ media strategies. It is imperative that you be able to handle pressure and stress with grace and diplomacy.

Necessary skills include, but are not limited to:
— HTML;
— General multimedia editing (Photoshop, iMovie/Final Cut,Audacity/Audition/SoundEdit);
— General computing (text editors, spreadsheets, FTP, etc.); and
— The ability to write clean copy.

Typically, the Multiplatform Editor/Producer also will have five or more years experience, strong leadership skills and strong subject matter and technical expertise.

We embrace a highly creative, non-traditional work environment. We love to work fast and have fun, with the time between having a great idea and that idea being added to one of our sites being measured in days, if not hours. So, if you learn things quickly, want to spend time with talented and imaginative people and build amazing Web content, then this is the place for you.

+++

Lead Programmer

Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive is looking for a Lead Programmer to join our new team aimed at the rapid development of online content, tools and strategies. This Lead Programmer will work with a small collaborative team built lean and nimble.

We will build Web sites that embrace relational databases in ways they’ve rarely been used, coupled with broadband-centric multimedia content that all works together in a platform-independent manner. Think Internet-based applications that cross from computers to mobile phones to iPods to Sony PSPs, and you’re beginning to get the picture. And that’s really just scratching the surface of possibilities.

We’re big believers in and contributors to the open-source community. Our primary development platform is Python (mod_python) and PostgreSQL, with a particular emphasis on using the Django Web framework. Our Lead Programmer should be fluent in these technologies, but experience with the complete Web stack — (X)HTML, CSS, JavaScript, Apache, etc… — is expected. The ideal candidate will also share our vision to build sites and applications that have an impact on real users at both the local and national level.

You must be at ease working both as part of a team and independently. You must have impeccable attention to detail, so that we can trust you to produce excellent work without close supervision.

This is a very senior level software engineer that may, as required, lead projects. The ideal candidate will have high-level abilities in software design and architecture and a strong grasp of software and system interrelationships.

Our Lead Programmer must be able to set the technical “vision” and design specifications of assigned projects and serves as lead engineer in implementation. This person will be relied upon to solve highly complex problems and to develop programs and systems that have little to no precedent.

Typically, the Lead Programmer will have five or more years experience.

We embrace a highly creative, non-traditional work environment. We love to work fast and have fun, with the time between having a great idea and that idea being added to one of our sites being measured in days, if not hours. So, if you learn things quickly, want to spend time with talented and imaginative people and build amazing Web content, then this is the place for you.

Back in May, our special-projects team here at Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive built washingtonpost.com’s new Facebook app — The Compass.

I wrote a pretty dang long post about it at that time.

I still probably get at least one or two e-mails and/or phone calls about it each week. And I’m surprised how much it still gets blogged about.

One of the questions I often get via e-mail is “would we do it again?”

Absolutely.

We’d do it differently, but we’d definitely do it again. And probably not for the reasons people think.

I think more and more traditional media companies ought to do more experimenting and reaching out to sites like Facebook. The experiences and discussions we went through as an organization were hugely valuable.

I feel our industry tends to be isolated from a lot of what’s happening with new media. Working with the “pure dot-coms” (as one of my old bosses used to call them), as well as with other technology companies, really helps us understand how things on the Internet work outside of a newsroom.

And that can only help us if we’re really serious in our mission to reach our audiences however they want to get our content.

Getting out of your comfort zone can only be a good thing when you do it for the right reasons — especially if you work for a newspaper company.

So, what’s been the impact of our Facebook app?

Nominal, if you’re measuring the impact by looking for a direct increase in page views or revenue.

We never once believed that of Facebook.com‘s roughly 40 billion pageviews a month, we were going to start to get a bunch of those at washingtonpost.com because of The Compass. Our expectations were pretty much in check in that regard.

We did this because we thought we should be in front of Facebook’s huge audience. In many ways, we thought of this as more of a marketing opportunity for the washingtonpost.com brand.

Still, the numbers for our Facebook app are very respectable. For the first several weeks, The Compass was one of the Top 10 most-downloaded apps on Facebook, and even cracked the Top 5 a couple of times.

As of today, The Compass has about 300,000 Facebook users who have it on their profile page, which still puts it in the Top 50 most-downloaded Facebook apps.

So, what would we do differently?

In our description of the app on Facebook, the first sentence begins: “All in fun …” but some people took the app very seriously.

Armed with that knowledge, we would now give the app’s users at least two options for the political quiz, and possibly even three. This still wouldn’t fix some of the criticisms of the app, but we would feel a lot better about it.
🙂

When you install The Compass Facebook app, you get asked 10 questions that are basically the hot-button issues surrounding conservative and liberal views in the United States. We opted for a short quiz with 10 questions because we thought readers wouldn’t want to spend a ton of time answering questions.

If we can find some time to tweak this app, it will likely have at least two quizzes in the updated version — a shorter quiz like it currently has, and a much longer quiz that gets into more detail. A possible third survey option might be tied to current events and prompt those who pick that option to retake the quiz each time it is updated.

We really like the idea of having a constantly updated quiz that could then track your thoughts throughout the year on various current issues.

Another thing we would do if we update the app would be to ask each person how he or she would classify themselves, and then have The Compass compare the self-evaluation with the answers to their questions.

But probably the biggest change we would likely make to the app would be how it appears on the Facebook profile pages.

The way the app works now, after you answer the survey, it places a graphic of a compass on your page that shows where you fall between liberal and conservative.

As I mentioned earlier in this post, an updated version would also show where you thought you should be on the compass based on the self-evaluation question we would ask when you first installed the app.

But as we suspected when we were building the app — and as the last few months have kind of proven to us — the most interesting part of The Compass isn’t so much where you fall on the political spectrum but where the friends in your social network fall.

You see, one of the options for The Compass is to see this info for your friends who have taken the quiz, which is much more interesting on a ton of levels.

As I noted in my initial post about this app, the ability to integrate something like this on Facebook in a way that leverages the social network is what makes it cool. That, to me, was the genius of the Facebook Platform app, and it was what we thought was the most interesting part about trying to build something for Facebook.

The map is the coolest part of the app, and we should have made an option that would allow the folks who installed The Compass to choose what they wanted on their profile page — the graphic of where they stand politically or the map of where there friends stand.

+++

But not all of the questions we get regarding our washingtonpost.com Facebook app center around the philosophies behind it.

Many are much more practical … as in, “so just how did you actually build this thing.”

And I now have a much easier answer for those questions.

Go read a couple of recent blog posts by our team’s brilliant programmer, Deryck Hodge.

In these posts on his personal site, Deryck gets into a lot of the technical details of how The Compass app was built.

Deryck’s first post about our development on the Facebook Platform came shortly after we launched The Compass, and was titled: Washington Post and Facebook Platform Development.

His most recent (and detailed) post came back in June, simply called: Washington Post and Facebook, Part Two.

He ends that post by saying he will try write a little more about this subject when he gets the time. But with the launch of our new site, LoudounExtra.com, it looks like he hasn’t had a lot of extra time to write for his blog.

None of us have had much time for anything other than Loudoun.
🙂

Anyway, I hope this helps. And I can tell you that I become a bigger and bigger Facebook fan everyday. I really like the site and all of the thought that has gone into it.

Our team will definitely be doing much more with Facebook in the coming months, I assure you.

Today on washingtonpost.com, I was a part of a live online discussion with Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive CEO and Publisher Caroline Little.

We (well, mostly Caroline) answered questions about The Post’s new/first hyper-local site, LoudounExtra.com.

Here is a link to chat’s transcript on the washingtonpost.com site.

In all of my years of helping to set up live chats on our sites, I’m not sure I’ve ever actually participated in one, so this was a little different for me.

🙂

Our team’s first “hyper-local” site for washingtonpost.com launched this morning — LoudounExtra.com.

Because — as far as we can tell — no one knows what in the heck “hyper-local” really means, we decided we’d try to take a stab at what we thought it means with this site. More importantly, we didn’t think it meant a site that was essentially just community publishing.

I *love* community publishing. One of my core beliefs is that newspaper web sites need to be much more of a dialogue. But building a site with essentially just community-publishing tools and calling it “hyper-local” seems a little lazy/crazy to us.

It’s like having a nice big cup and going to your readers and saying, “we really don’t have time to fill this bad boy up for you all, but maybe you can do it for us.” We wanted our first local site at The Washington Post to be like a cup that was already pretty dang full, and the readers could then top it off to give it the personalized flavor that they want.

To us, the key is that the site should be a real local destination even without the content from the readers.

The irony here (or would that be goofiness?) is that even though community publishing is going to be a huge part of LoudounExtra.com, we actually launched the site this morning without any of those tools.

That’s a long story that I don’t want to get into right now. Not because it’s bad. Just because it’s long, and I’m already pretty dang tired as I write this post.

But once you see how we’re doing community publishing on LoudounExtra.com (which shouldn’t be too long), it will definitely make sense why it’s taking us a little longer to get rolling. We think it will really be worth the wait.

And that’s not all that’s missing. In some ways, the site is currently just the Ellington publishing system filled to the gills. And I mean filled to the gills.

But that’s not what it’s going to be by late August or so.

We have done more custom development for this site than we have for any other project we’ve ever worked on. The majority of that work just isn’t quite ready yet.

We’re thinking all of those new features will likely roll out in two phases: the end of August and the end of September. Knock on virtual wood.

So, how did we define hyper-local?

Well, I’ll try to list what our core strategies for LoudounExtra.com are (though not all of these features/strategies were ready for this morning’s launch):

* Constantly updated “Big J” and “little j” journalism from Loudoun County.

In trying to achieve this goal, the buy-in we’ve received from editors at all levels of The Washington Post and at the newspaper’s Loudoun bureau has been phenomenal.

The basic premise from the bureau will be that it will continue to write the bigger stories out of Loudoun County that work well for The Post’s entire print readership (and that will also go on the site), as well as the smaller stories that run in the newspaper’s twice-weekly Loudoun Extra zoned tabloid that’s inserted into The Post.

The bureau’s journalists also will work with LoudounExtra.com’s editor to produce daily stories that only appear on the site.

The site’s editorial team here at Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive also will create daily web-only stories. These stories will include smaller police blotter-type stuff that we’ll work hard to get posted by 8:30 or 9 in the morning. Along with these police reports, we’ll also have weather reports, community news, newsworthy press releases, etc…

Though it could change once we see how things really work, our hope is to have between three and six updates a day to the site.

The local news on the site doesn’t stop there.

There also is a daily blog dedicated to checking out what others are posting. The Linked Up In Loudoun blog is a continuously updated look at interesting items published on other sites by newspapers, news organizations, local home owners associations, area volunteer fire departments, other bloggers in the region, and any other sites that mention noteworthy happenings in Loudoun.

* Exclusive databases filled with things that people want to know.

+ A searchable local calendar that has every school event, every community organization get-together, every local government meeting, every county fair, every bar band appearance, every local art exhibit, every Bible-study group, etc …

Like other sites built on the Ellington publishing platform, the site’s calendar will soon be able to send event reminders to your e-mail account or call your cell phone.

+ A huge restaurant guide with a detailed look at the more than 300 restaurants in Loudoun County. Wanna know where you can get a steak at midnight in Loudoun? Now you can find out.

+ An in-depth look at the more than 150 churches in Loudoun.

+ A massive school guide that details the roughly 80-90 schools in the county.

We talked to every school principal in the county — both public and private — and took photos and steerable 360-degree virtual reality images inside each school. The site’s school guide can tell you which schools have full-time nurses, if foreign languages are taught, how many special-education teachers are on staff, etc …

So, who did all of this work?

Well, no surprise if you’ve been reading my blog for a while: new-media editor extraordinaire Tim Richardson and multimedia content producer Cara McCoy did a ton of it.

They also got a lot of help from Emmy Crawford, our killer intern from George Mason University.

The work ethic of these three people always blows me away.

Tim estimates that it took a little over two months to get all of this information collected, with him and Cara working about 30 hours a week on the project during that period.

* Databases of public records.

Like the community-publishing tools, we haven’t quite finished these for the public version of the site, but we’re hoping to have them up some time in August. We are building searchable databases of building permits, homes sales, and many other publicly available records.

* A commitment to local multimedia journalism.

Using photo galleries, video, audio and other multimedia tools, we are committed to using LoudounExtra.com to tell the stories of our community in new and innovative ways. For a great example of this, just check out Bill Snead’s story on First Baptist Church-Watson.

(We were very lucky to have Bill work with us throughout the development of the site, as he focused on local storytelling for us. The guy is the best multimedia journalist I’ve ever met.)

* Alternate delivery/platform independent.

Though some of our alternate-delivery features are already working, more are coming. We’re hoping that by the end of August, LoudounExtra.com’s features will work on just about any device or web tool you can dream up.

* In-depth coverage of local high schools.

If you’ve seen what we’ve built in the past, this shouldn’t be a huge surprise. High school football season begins on Sept. 7 and we’ll be ready!

* Evergreen content.

Despite the new subdivisions and businesses popping up on every corner, long-time residents know that Loudoun County is steeped in history. From its central role in the Civil War to its more recent emergence as a tech hotspot and booming population center, LoudounExtra.com’s local history primer and gallery of historic photos really show the rich history of the county.

We also built an evergreen section related to moving to Loudoun County that’s filled with lots of practical information.

* Community publishing that works the way the Internet really works.

We’ve put a lot of thought into the community-publishing section of the site, and we all can’t wait to get it implemented on the LoudounExtra.com site.

Along with this content, we’re also doing a lot with local blogs, and have two staff-written blogs on the site — the one I mentioned earlier and another written by washingtonpost.com staffer (and longtime Loudoun resident) Tammi Marcoullier.

We’ll also be implementing lots of other Loudoun blogs on the site very soon.

+++

Let me tell you what I believe in my heart is the key to success for LoudounExtra.com. It’s not the crazy-deep databases. Or the cool multimedia. Or the ability to read a story on your iPod.

Those things are all important for lots of different reasons, but they aren’t the most important things.

The most important things we have to do on LoudounExtra.com are the daily news and breaking news. Databases are cool, but if there’s a big fire, you gotta have the latest information about it on your site or readers will just think you stink.

We’ve got to do a great job with the latest news in Loudoun County for this site to be a success. Period.

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Well, that’s a look at the ideas behind the new LoudounExtra.com site and how we defined what hyper-local meant to us.

We’ve got a ton of work/hours in the site, and we’ve still got a ton more to do. As I mentioned earlier, we have done more custom development for this site than we have for any other project we’ve ever worked on.

And it won’t be that long before these new custom apps we’ve built begin to appear on the site.

Well, I say “we” but it wasn’t really “we.” It was mostly lead programmer Deryck Hodge, along with some help from our summer programming interns — Sean Stoops and Chris McMichael (both from my alma mater, Emporia State University).

I can’t wait until you see some of the tricks that Deryck has up his sleeves for this site. Really cool stuff that I’ve never seen before.

If you’re wondering who made LoudounExtra.com look so dang cool, it was our team’s senior designer, Jesse Foltz. Yep, the same guy who designed the “onBeing” project.

Jesse kicks some serious backside.

All of the front-end coding of the site was done by Levi Chronister. Levi’s a hard-working sucker who was the editor of KUsports.com when we were both still in Lawrence. Man, do I love that guy and feel blessed to be working with him.

Before our team arrived in October of 2006, the hyper-local mantle at Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive was being carried by Jonathan Krim. In fact, it was Krim who picked Loudoun County as the first market washingtonpost.com should try this strategy in.

Throughout the development of this site and the other upcoming washingtonpost.com hyper-local sites, several of Krim’s ideas will likely find their way as key components that prove their popularity and importance.

It’s never easy being the first guy with a new job that represents a new direction, and that’s what Krim did for a long time. He paved the way for LoudounExtra.com to happen.

+++

I guess the big question now is will The Washington Post’s hyper-local strategy work?

We just don’t know. But we also weren’t about to wait around and do nothing.

If doesn’t work, maybe I can still get hired to throw newspapers back in Lawrence.
🙂

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Here’s a link to the the note I posted on the new LoudounExtra.com site that kind of walks through all of its features, if you’d like to read it.

I’m back in San Francisco, this time for the California Newspaper Publishers Association conference.

On Friday, I give the morning keynote for the group’s summer conference.

A couple of months ago, the organization asked me to answer ten questions, which I think ran in the group’s monthly or quarterly magazine.

Here is how I answered those questions:

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No. 1 — Why did you decide to work for a newspaper? What interests you in journalism?

I’ve wanted to be a journalist since I was in third grade. It’s all I can ever remember wanting to do.

I was editor of my high school paper back in Osage City, Kan., worked sporadically for my university paper at Emporia State, and was a stringer for a ton of newspapers all throughout my time in college.

I thought I wanted to be a high school journalism teacher, but telling stories was just too much fun, and I couldn’t imagine giving it up. For me, seeing my byline each morning was better than Christmas.

I love journalism and all that it stands for — both Big “J” journalism and little “j” journalism.

No. 2 — What is your biggest praise of the newspaper industry during this transitional time?

For the last decade or so, there have been a handful of newspapers that have worked incredibly hard to make sure that they continue — and even grow — their relationship with their readers. Their work, investment and creativity have been amazing.

But they are the exception, not the rule.

When I read and hear things from some publishers in the U.S., I definitely get worried about the newspaper industry.

Then you meet newspaper leaders like Dolph Simons (Lawrence Journal-World) and Don Graham (The Washington Post), and you realize some of these great news institutions are going to be around regardless of the disruption that surrounds us.

Dolph Simons always used to say that we had to be “driving with our brights on,” and he was.

I think this might be the most exciting time in American journalism. I love all the change.

No. 3 — Your biggest criticism?

Uhh … see above.

No. 4 — What can small/community newspapers learn from big/metro newspapers and vice versa?

I think it’s just the opposite: What can big metro newspapers learn from small dailies?

When I look at the most innovative news sites in the U.S., I think of Roanoke (Roanoke.com), Bakersfield (Bakersfield.com), Bluffton (BlufftonToday.com) and Lawrence (lawrence.com), as well as a couple of other papers that aren’t in Top 25 markets.

The Washington Post and The New York Times are doing some really cool things with new media, but if I were back at a smaller paper, I wouldn’t be looking at the big-market sites for inspiration.

I’d be looking at the smaller newspaper sites I listed above.

Look at the community dialogue being created in Bluffton, look at the willingness to experiment in Roanoke and Bakersfield, and look at dang near anything you want on lawrence.com or KUsports.com.

My gut tells me that smaller papers are going to learn more from other smaller companies, and they’ll probably relate better to the lessons learned. Plus, I think there is a hotbed of innovation in some of these smaller markets.

No. 5 — What is one of the biggest challenges of working in the newsroom today from your personal experience?

In years past, it was really hard getting buy-in from the newsroom in some markets. But it doesn’t seem that way anymore. Most of the “traditional” reporters I work with now are very open.

It definitely feels like the mindset has definitely changed in the last year or so.

What I’ve found is that once the reporters and editors understand that you just want to create kick-ass journalism, then they’re pretty dang helpful.

No. 6 — What does a degree in Integrated Studies entail?

I basically just took the classes that interested me. I had a lot of hours and none that added up to a more traditional degree. Luckily, (the school) eventually came up with a degree for people in my situation.

I went back to college several years after I had left Emporia State to finish my degree once “Integrated Studies” became an option.

No. 7 — Where are some places where you look for inspiration for innovation?

I watch my family and learn from them all of the time. I spend a lot of time on non-newspaper sites. Heck, we got the idea on how we should use cell-phone text messaging for KUsports.com from a bank in Sweden back in probably 2001.

No. 8 — What is the best advice anyone has ever given you on working in the newspaper industry?

Bill Snead (Lawrence Journal-World senior editor) taught me it’s about the content, not how the audience gets your content. The technology means nothing if your content sucks.

Focus on doing things that delight and inform your audience. Connect with them.

No. 9 — Where do you get your news every day?

I check my e-mail on my cell phone first thing when I wake up, and I get my first news of the day from a couple of different e-mail editions that I subscribe to.

Then before I head to work, I usually spend about 15-20 minutes going through The Washington Post print edition while eating a bowl of cereal. I spend most of my “print newspaper time” with the sports section, then probably the business and metro sections.

On my drive into work, I have a couple of different podcasts that I listen to each morning – both from fairly traditional media companies.

I listen to the PTI podcast (which is a daily television show on ESPN featuring a couple of Washington Post columnists that I think works really well as an audio podcast), and I listen to the NBC Nightly News podcast, which can be really good as a podcast when it stays newsy.

From there on out, I mostly use the RSS feeds on my iGoogle page, which I probably check 5-10 times a day.

I go to a lot niche sites that relate to things I’m interested in — some from traditional companies, but most of them are independent.

I read a lot of blogs. I like to see what topics are the most blogged about each day on technorati.com.

No. 10 — Regular Mountain Dew? Or Code Red?

Do I have to choose?

They’re both so good!

+++

When I checked into my hotel room this evening, the CNPA had a six pack of Mountain Dew waiting for me. I already love these guys.
🙂

My recent trip to meet with several newspaper folks in Scandinavia was great. Every single time I go to Europe for something like this, I get so much out of it.

I kept asking the folks who had brought me there why they had asked me to come talk with their newspaper staffs because they all were doing so many great new-media things really well. They didn’t need any help or suggestions from me!

And these aren’t huge newspapers. Most were right around the 50,000-circ level or lower.

The common theme of these newspapers is that they all are partners in something called Citygate, which is a newspaper-owned technology group that helps all of these newspapers with new-media strategy and enterprise software.

Let me go over some of the highlights:

+++

On my first day in Sweden, I got to visit with the folks from Östgöta Correspondenten, in Linköping.

One thing that I found very interesting is that all of the newspapers I visited have full names, and shorter names that everyone really calls them. No one called this newspaper Östgöta Correspondenten. Everyone just called it Corren.

This shouldn’t be a huge surprise to anyone, but one of my favorite projects at Corren was the newspaper’s amazing coverage of its schools’ local proms.

They had formal photos of every single person who attended the proms, but my favorite thing they did was shoot the dances.

Now these aren’t dances like you would see at proms in the United States. These were very formal dances that had been rehearsed every Saturday during the school year. It looked like incredibly choreographed ballroom dances.

And Corren shot the dances with multiple cameras, and then edited them very, very well.

Of course, all of this was posted on the newspaper’s website, but the paper also released all of this coverage in DVD format, which has already sold more than 700 copies.

It’s really, really great coverage that was incredibly well done. And Jörgen Bengtsson, the leader of the web department at Corren, told me the traffic to the coverage has been really strong — that nearly all of the dance videos had been viewed about as many times as what a big local breaking story might get on the site.

(I don’t have a link to this project right now, but I will try to get one soon.)

+++

On the next day, I visited Vestmanlands Läns Tidning in Västeras. Again, no one calls the newspaper Vestmanlands Läns Tidning. It’s simply called VLT.

Again, I saw a lot of really great things at this newspaper, and the buy-in for new-media coverage at VLT from its editor-in-chief — Elisabeth Back — was really impressive. It reminded of the buy-in we had at the Naples Daily News from Executive Editor Phil Lewis.

I learned in Naples that the easiest way to new-media success was to have great buy-in from the top editor, and we had that in Naples. They also have that at VLT.

The VLT newspaper building was amazing.

One of the ideas of the newspaper is that it “reflects” the community, so when they built their new building, they made the building actually reflect the community. It was one of the best and most interesting newspaper buildings I’ve ever seen.

Now that’s taking a mission statement and really taking it into the real world!

This week, VLT built a huge section with lots of multimedia coverage of something called a Power Meet. From what I could gather, the Power Meet is essentially a massively huge car show.

But one of my favorite things at VLT was how the newspaper used cell phone text messaging to get content (which I think is way more common in Sweden than in the United States).

You see this all over the VLT site, as well as in the print edition.

But my favorite reference to this strategy is right on the front of the newspaper’s building, where there is a huge sign with the number on it.

I love that!
🙂

After sitting in a meeting with members of the VLT staff, I’m convinced this is a local news site that our industry is going to want to pay attention to over the next year or so.

+++

The final newspaper that I visited in Sweden was Nerikes Allehanda in Örebro.

Yep, you’ve probably already guessed it by now. No one calls the newspaper Nerikes Allehanda. They just call it NA.

Before I talk about this newspaper, I’ve got to show you its building:

I remember the first time I saw the Chicago Tribune building and thinking how traditional and cool that it felt. Well, the NA newspaper building takes that “traditional feeling” and really amps it up a notch.

There actually is a real, honest-to-goodness castle right across the water from the NA building.

I can’t even imagine how cool it would be to walk past those sorts of things as you walked to work each day!

Just like at VLT, the editor-in-chief at NA has amazing buy-in for new media. His name is Ulf Johansson, and he’s a real go-getter who moves quickly. I loved the guy!

In fact, he just re-designed the entire news desks so that all of the main print and new-media editors would be together.

So imagine walking into this very historic-looking building and then seeing a newsroom that looks like it’s out of Star Trek.

It was awesome!

Yes, it’s very reminiscent of the Tampa Tribune newsdesk or the newsdesk at the Lawrence Journal-World. But when you put that sort of newsroom in a building that looks like the NA building does, well then you’re doing something a little different!

+++

My favorite project that I saw while I was on this trip wasn’t from a newspaper. In fact, it wasn’t even from a traditional news organization.

And to me, there is a *huge* lesson to be learned from this project.

There is a magazine in Copenhagen, Denmark, that is published by one of the labor unions there. The leader of the magazine there is an extremely talented guy named Jesper Berg.

Jesper calls himself a “media conductor,” which might be the most appropriate (not to mention, coolest) title ever.

The union’s magazine was producing a story about how a worker cleaning lights/windows at the top of the building was severely injured when he fell. To tell the story, the magazine staff put together one of the most interesting examples of multimedia storytelling I’ve ever seen.

The link to it is here.

Jesper admits he loved the design of a recent project at LJWorld.com so much that the look of this project is very similar to that. This project has all of the standard new-media tools, such as video, photo slideshows and steerable 360-degree panoramic photos.

But the most impressive part of the coverage is an animated re-creation of the accident.

Not even the most eloquent writer could have explained what happened as well as that animation does. It’s very powerful and very well done.

The lesson here is simple: If newspapers don’t get off their butts and start embracing this sort of storytelling, then the very folks we normally cover will just do it themselves.

If you don’t believe me, spend about 15 minutes on the MLB.com site for your closest Major League Baseball team, and then tell me if the hometown newspaper for that team covers the team as well or as deep.

I’ve always been impressed with these official sites, and I’ve been bugging the Newspaper Association of America for several years to put together a panel at one if its conferences with the folks behind MLB.com, NBA.com and NFL.com, but to no avail.

I think it would shock the heck out of most editors at not only how good these sites are, but how large the traffic to them is.

This past winter, I was amazed at how good the blog by Washington Wizards star Gilbert Arenas was on the team’s official site. (Though it’s much more of an online diary than a blog. Readers can’t post comments.)

The NHL’s Washington Capitals are owned by a big-wig from AOL, so you know that team’s site kicks some serious backside.

And then there’s this union in Denmark doing something like this.

As I said before, I learned a ton on this trip, and I’m positive I got more out of it than any group I spoke with got out of my little spiel.

Scandinavian news organizations are doing lots of things right when it comes to new-media storytelling, and I’m convinced we ought to be paying more attention to what the newspaper industry outside of the United States is doing.

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And if you’re really bored …

Here is another link to photos taken on my camera phone from the second half of our trip (Stockholm and Paris). Yes, I fully expect to be made fun of because of how much time we spent at Disneyland Paris while we were in France.

We can’t help it! Our family loves Disney.
🙂

And if you missed it from my previous blog, here is link to photos from the first half of the trip (Copenhagen, Denmark).