Recovering Journalist

Twitter and Breaking News

Twitter can be maddening in many ways, a cacophony of voices with a lousy signal-to-noise ratio—does anybody really care what somebody else had for breakfast?

But one thing that Twitter excels in is breaking news. Its broadcast, real-time, 140-character headline nature makes it a perfect vehicle for the latest news, whether it's being generated by on-the-spot observers (or participants) and retweeted far and wide, or whether it's being used by news organizations to blast out their latest headlines.

The latter seems a slamdunk use of Twitter by news organizations—it's just a great headline distribution medium. You'd think that news media outlets would be taking advantage of this functionality to increase their reach and influence. But that's not necessarily the case.

Sure, just about every news organization has a Twitter feed or two. But not all of them promote them well (or tend them well). As a result, a list of breaking news feeds on Twitter shows a large disparity in the number of followers for the various sources. This list isn't meant to be comprehensive, though it includes most of the major news brands. But it is representative:

Source	Followers
New York Times	1,993,474
Time	1,670,519
NPR Politics	1,585,066
Breaking News Online	1,325,832
CBS News	1,286,393
Newsweek	925,910
ABCNews	787,833
CNN	547,785
HuffingtonPost	247,841
ESPN	180,473
NPR News	130,433
Fox News	107,818
Wall Street Journal	99,291
Reuters	43,886
MSNBC Breaking	36,228
WashingtonPost	34,556
Google News	24,576
Politico	22,089
YahooNews	4,004
AP	1,552

As you can see, there are some well-known news brands at the top—and some equally well-know news brands at the bottom. The New York Times, Time, NPR and CBS are reaching vast new audiences via Twitter; The Washington Post, Yahoo News and the AP (which should be a natural for a breaking-news headline product), not so much. Some big Web-only names like HuffingtonPost are doing well; others, like Google News, Politico and Yahoo News (the #1 Web news site), are also-rans.

But one of the big names on the list is not like the others: Breaking News Online, the upstart Twitter-only news headline service that has muscled its way near the top of this list, with more than 1.3 million followers. Run by a 19-year-old Dutch entrepreneur, Michael van Poppel, BNO has become an invaluable neutral source for news headlines as soon as they happen. Van Poppel and his small team scan major media sites (and do some of their own reporting) to produce BNO's breaking news feed, pumping out bite-sized news breaks in a manner that will bring a smile to any wire-service or news-radio junkie. They seem to have pitch-perfect news sense, which is essential for any good headline service.

The result: A startup news company with an audience that rivals those of the big traditional news sites on Twitter. Not too shabby. You have to wonder what also-rans like The Washington Post and MSNBC are thinking when they see a teenager beating them qualitatively and quantitatively in distributing breaking news to Twitter's news-junkie-heavy audience. As PaidContent recently wrote, "Hey Media Company. Buy BNO News. Now. Really."

Is there a business model for breaking news on Twitter? At first blush, you'd think not, since there doesn't seem to be any sort of business model for Twitter at the moment. But van Poppel may be a step ahead here, too. BNO now has an iPhone app that sells for $1.99—plus a 99-cent-per-month subscription fee. That might be a decent model to convince breaking news buffs to pay, gasp, a subscription fee for news on their phones (a natural mobile app). It will be interesting to see if BNO can make its subscription model work. At least it's trying.

In the meantime, Breaking News Online is another example of mainstream media being outflanked by an aggressive online startup. You'd think, given the popularity of Twitter among news types, that every major media outlet would have a mega-popular Twitter news operation. But only some do—and the rest are taking a backseat to a clever 19-year-old kid. Tweet that.

Addendum: Some Twitterati argue that inclusion on Twitter's Suggested User list—which new Twitter members see after signing up—skews the popularity of certain sites. Sure, the list—which has hundreds of suggestions, in random order—is probably one factor in driving popularity. But there are many others, and a big news organization that can only garner a few thousand Twitter followers is clearly just not taking advantage of the medium or marketing its feeds well (including lobbying Twitter for inclusion on the suggested list!). And now it appears Twitter is considering eliminating the Suggested Users list. That would level the playing field.

And That's The Way It Is

With the passing of Walter Cronkite, it will be interesting to see if there's a media frenzy that's anything like the over-the-top orgy of coverage and tributes the accompanied Tim Russert's death last summer. Cronkite was 10 times the journalist and historic figure that Russert was. But I suspect he won't get one-tenth the coverage. How sad. I hope I'm wrong.

R.I.P. Walter.

PS: Sitcom writer/sportscaster Ken Levine has a terrific and appropriately terse appreciation of Cronkite.

Doodlebuzz

 

And now for something completely different: I'm a sucker for interesting ways to visualize news and typography. So I'm a sucker for a new site called Doodlebuzz, which lets you pick a topic, draw a little doodle, and then plots headlines about that topic along the lines of the doodle. "Huh." you say? Go try it for yourself. It's fairly useless, but still great, cool fun with technology.

(Hat tip to 10,000 Words for this one.)

This Just In: Michael Jackson, Still Dead

There's been a nagging suspicion in many enlightened journalistic quarters that the Michael Jackson story has been massively overplayed in the media, especially by TV news (even NBC Nightly News led with the story most nights last week, which was ridiculous). 

It was quite apparent that Baby Boomer media managers—out of touch with popular culture and audience interest, but obsessed with a performer from their youth who hasn't been relevant for years—were staying with the Jackson story even though they didn't understand that people really were over it. Indeed, Jeff Jarvis supplied some great data last week that showed that, measured by hard data on Internet searches and blog conversations, interest in all things Jackson had dropped precipitously after the first couple of days.

But the TV talking heads and cameras and helicopters droned on, providing unrelenting coverage on most of the major networks of a story that basically was over once the coroner declared the singer dead. This culminated with live coverage by most networks today of Jackson's funeral, in LA, replete with breathless predictions that hundreds of thousands of mourners would pack the streets around the Staples Center for his memorial service.

Um, not so much. The AP reports:

The traffic snarls and logistical nightmares that had been feared by police and city officials had not materialized. The thousands of fans with tickets began filing in early and encountered few problems, and traffic was actually considered by police to be lighter than normal.

"I think people got the message to stay home," said California Highway Patrol Officer Miguel Luevano. "When you have people staying home, it clears up those freeways."

Deputy Police Chief Sergio Diaz, operations chief for the event, said authorities had expected a crowd of 250,000. Besides reporters and those with tickets to the memorial service, the crowd around the Staples Center perimeter numbered only about 1,000, he said.

Only 1,000 people? When 250,000 were expected? That's some lousy predicting, but it was doubtless fed by media hype. We haven't seen the ratings yet on today's wall-to-wall coverage, but I suspect they're going to be similarly paltry (there's some indications of heavy Web traffic to streaming video of the memorial service, but that may reflect a curiosity factor that's going on while people are at work). Jackson's death was a big story, but it was over in a day or two. By sticking with it and flogging it, big media showed, once again, that it's out of step with its audience.

Update: Turns out the Jackson memorial service was boffo on the Internet. Go figure. But I suspect that had a lot to do with it happening while people were at work, and streaming the video on their office PCs. (Hell, I watched it, out of morbid curiosity.) As Dan Woog notes in the comments, Facebook saw a bunch of MJ-related activity, too, though nothing close to the Obama inauguration. But I think the lack of crowds in LA was very telling. And I hope that the story will just go away now. At least until the toxicology report is in!

A Couple of Good Reads

It's hard to keep up with everything worth reading about the state of the journalism business, but here are a couple of good ones I found today. 

First, veteran Washington Post reporter Walter Pincus, writing in CJR, surfaces some unpleasant truths about what's wrong with journalism today (he gets fuzzier when he talks about the Web and the future of news, but his basic diagnosis is very good).

Second, Ryan Tate on Gawker eviscerates journalist-turned-Hollywood-auteur David Simon's ridiculous testimony before the Senate's grandstanding hearing yesterday on the future of newspapers. Splendid stuff.

Google Makes News (Better). Again

While everybody's patting themselves on the back today over the Pulitzers' look at journalism's past, news industry "scourge" Google is once again inventing journalism's future. Take a gander at the newest toy out of Google Labs, the Google News Timeline:

What this nifty little gadget does is pull together the top stories of the past few days (or weeks or months—it's configurable, natch) and displays them in, yes, a timeline. It's a nice at-a-glance way to catch up on what's been going on in the world (because most readers aren't up-to-the-minute news junkies like journos are). Very cool—and a clever example of news packaging.

Most importantly, it's quite simple, and something similar probably could have been developed by any smart news organization. That it came from Google, instead, says volumes about the smarts of news organizations these days.

PS: More in the same vein from Mathew Ingram at the Nieman Journalism Lab.

Hey AP: Story Embargoes are SO Last Century

Just saw this in my Yahoo Entertainment AP RSS feed, timestamped 9:48 pm EDT:

AP - Advisory: The NASA Colbert story is embargoed until 11:10 p.m. EDT and will be resent at that time.

Oops. Because this appeared in my Yahoo Entertainment AP RSS feed at 8:11 pm EDT:

NEW YORK – One small step for NASA, one giant running leap for Stephen Colbert.

NASA announced Tuesday that it won't name a room in the international space station after the comedian. Instead, it has named a treadmill after him.

Um, hello, AP? In the modern world, you can't take back a broken embargo quite that easily. Once you've released a story onto the Internets, it's out there for everybody to see. You know, like a mistaken e-mail. (And if you weren't so busy feuding with The Google, maybe they could help you with that type of error.) 

In the old days, AP would make embargo slips like this occasionally, but since its wires appeared only in newsrooms, it was easy to take it back: You just sent out an advisory to newspaper members asking them not to use the story. You know, kind of like the advisory shown above. Alas, that doesn't really work, anymore. Got that?

And sheesh, the AP embargoed a story about naming a treadmill after a comedian?? No wonder they tried to withdraw it!

Laid Off? 10 Tips For Suddenly Unemployed Journalists

According to the excellent (if depressing) PaperCuts newspaper layoffs tracker, more than 20,000 jobs have been cut from American newspapers since the beginning of 2008—more than 3,500 in the past two months. That quickening trend is going to continue as the industry's spiral worsens and more newsrooms are cut back and/or papers close.

The newspaper crisis really hits home, of course, when it's your job that's cut. There are waves of guilt, shame, anger, depression and fear that come fast and furious. Questions abound. What do I tell my family? How will I pay my bills? How will I find a new job in this economy? Was it something that I did, or didn't do? You'll go through all of this and more when you're laid off.

I've been laid off and I've had to lay people off, and it's an understatement to say that it's not easy for anyone. But there are some things you can and should do to get a grip on the situation and position yourself to move on to the next phase of your life. 

Here are 10 tips for suddenly unemployed journalists. Nothing can immediately take away the pain and anxiety that you're feeling, but hopefully these will help you understand that your situation is not unique and that you'll be able to get through this. And maybe it will get you thinking about next steps.

1. Don't freak out–This is hard to hear. "I just lost my job, for chrissakes!" Yes, you did. But don't beat yourself up about it. Given the state of the news business these days, a layoff is hardly your fault–it's a failure by your ex-employer. Don't succumb to depression or go into a funk. Get to work immediately getting your act together and finding a new job. And you're going to quickly find out that you're hardly alone—and I don't just mean those 20,000 other newspaper jobs lost since the beginning of last year. Many friends will come forward to tell you that they've been laid off or fired during their careers. They've just never told you until now. It's an unfortunate part of life, and they went through it and survived. So have millions of others. So will you. 
2. Get your finances in order—Hopefully, you saw the industry faltering and began putting money away for this rainy day. Even if you didn't, look hard at ways to conserve money and get by with less. Sorry, you might have to give up that daily Starbucks for a while, and cut way down on going out. And it's time to finally learn Quicken and how it can help you manage your finances. Take care of yourself, too: Spend some time at the gym.
3. Apply for unemployment—Your employer paid into the unemployment pool, and now it's time for you to take advantage of it. It's no shame, it's not welfare–it's there precisely for this reason. Start collecting it–it's a small but essential flow of cash that can run for several months.
4. Network like crazy—Get in touch with everybody you know who might be able to help you. Ask them to refer you to others they know. Then do it again, and again. If you're a good reporter, you know the drill–it's very similar to working a beat—persistence and repetition pay off. You've got to regularly let people know that you're available. Out of sight, out of mind is a real problem when you're in the job market, and you never know when you'll contact somebody who just happened to be looking for somebody with your skills. If you don't do it, it won't happen for you. Plus, it's an excuse to get out of the house for to get together with other people.
5. Get on Facebook and LinkedIn—These are the modern forms of networking. If you're not already on these essential social networks, register for accounts (it takes seconds), start "friending" people and learn how to use them to connect with others. Again, that old colleague you hadn't thought about in years until you reconnected on Facebook could have a job lead for you. In addition, familiarity with Facebook is a good way to start understanding some of the leading edge principles in new media. It also can be lots of fun.
6. Expand your new media horizons—And not just Facebook. Spend some time getting to know and using things like Twitter, Flickr and all those other strange names you've heard about but never really paid attention to. Getting up to speed on these will greatly enhance your knowledge of new media, and that's going to be essential to keeping your journalism career going. Your print skills will only take you so far. You can no longer pay lip service to new media–dive in. And no, you don't need to learn HTML or any computer languages. Really. It's not that scary. But it doesn't hurt to take some classes at a local community college or even the Apple Store to learn about things like Photoshop, video production or, yes, HTML. Don't be intimidated. Getting comfortable with those things—and it's easier than you think—will enhance your skills and make you much more marketable. (Gina Chen's blog is a good resource for helping journalists understand the new media world.)
7. Start a blog—If you're not blogging already, start, immediately. Again, it's really easy and gets you into the new media milieu. If nothing else, it's a good way to keep your writing chops sharp. You can blog about just about anything, but here's a thought: Why not be really entrepreneurial and start a blog about your old beat, or about some niche topic that you think is undercovered. Keep at it, and over time, you may find your blog becoming a key to your next job.
8. Look beyond journalism for your next job—Journalists have investigative, organization, storytelling, writing and editing skills that are taken for granted in newsrooms but are seen as rare and valuable in other fields. Broaden your range of possibilities by thinking about a new career outside of journalism. I wrote about that at length a while back in a post called Life After Journalism. Check that out for ideas.
9. Don't be afraid to ask for help—Misplaced pride can hurt you. Please don't be embarrassed by what happened to you. Don't let your self-confidence crumble (though it's easy to understand why it would be shaken). People want to help; reach out whenever you can and ask them for help. It's not a sign of weakness. And by the way: These are the times when you really find out who your friends are. You'll treasure them forever for what they do for you.  
10. Take a deep breath—Again, don't freak out. You're going to get through this. If you can hack it financially, take some time for yourself before plunging into finding a new job. You've been through one of life's most traumatic experiences (no doubt on the stressful heels of months or years of uncertainty and fear in your newsroom). It's going to take you some time to emotionally recover, in ways you won't grasp for years. If you can get away and take some time off to decompress, do it. It will really help your mental health and ability to move forward. And you may never get a chance again to take a mid-career break like this, for yourself or to spend time with your family.

Good luck. 

R.I.P. Jim Bellows

I never knew or had the privilege of working for Jim Bellows, but I was fortunate to be a regular reader of his mid-'70s Washington Star and became a total fan. He was the kind of newspaper editor they just don't make anymore, a bold, creative, aggressive leader who wasn't afraid to tweak anybody in print. In fact, he seemed to revel in such tweaking, and in playing the underdog to more powerful competitors. His newspapers had real personalities and attitude, something you just don't see these days—and probably a reason why newspapers are losing readers.

As editor of The Star, Bellows ran scrappy opposition to the bigger, more powerful Washington Post, fanning a newspaper war that was endlessly entertaining (I still have an "I Followed Doonesbury to The Washington Star" bumper sticker pinned up over my desk, in fact, a souvenir of a key battle in this war). Underfunded and understaffed, the Star delighted in hassling the Post every way it possibly could, making both papers better in the process.

These days, when we barely have one-newspaper towns, it's hard to remember how competitive (and wonderful) great two-newspaper towns could be, and Bellows was a master of the game, never letting up on his crosstown rival as editor at the Star, the New York Herald Tribune and Los Angeles Herald Examiner. No wonder his autobiography was titled "The Last Editor: How I Saved The New York Times, The Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times from Dullness and Complacency." He didn't (directly!) edit those three papers–but he kept them on their toes through relentless, creative and resourceful competition.

Three more examples of Bellows' distinctive style that I remember offhand:

• When he suspected that The Washington Post was lifting a syndicated item from the Star (long story!), he tinkered with the first letters of the first few paragraphs to that they spelled out something like "Hello Ben," to tweak rival Ben Bradlee—who was thus caught redhanded when the Post reproduced the altered copy verbatim. Gotcha!
• The Washington Star's gloriously irreverent Ear gossip column, written by Diana McLellan, which seemed to be mostly about the Post (aka "O.P." or "the Other Paper"), Bradlee and Sally Quinn (aka "The Fun Couple"). It was endlessly entertaining, a daily soap opera of high life in Washington. (Come to think of it, I think Bellows' Star also ran a daily soap opera feature that was mostly a thinly veiled insider version of life at the Post. Great stuff.) When the Star died in 1981 (post-Bellows), the Ear—and Doonesbury—moved to the Post, but it was never the same.
• What may have been Bellows' greatest moment, which happened when he was editing the Los Angeles Herald Examiner: In 1979, President Jimmy Carter was allegedly attacked by a crazed rabbit while out on a solo fishing trip. Not surprisingly, the story was a little hard to believe, especially when the White House was unable to produce a photo of said rabid rabbit. Bellows had the solution: He ran a large blank rectangle on the front page of the Herald Examiner, above the fold, with a tiny caption that said something like, "This space reserved for photo of rabbit when it is released by the White House." Absolutely hilarious—the best use of white space on a newspaper front page ever. I still have a copy somewhere.

It wasn't all gags–Bellows papers were also damn good, doing more with less than any of his larger competitors. After leaving newspapers, Bellows went on to help turn Entertainment Weekly into a TV juggernaut, and he even brought smarts and personality to proto-Internet companies Prodigy and Excite as an executive and editor. 

Bellows died today, at age 86, in Los Angeles, and the dwindling list of great living editors (still headed by Bradlee) is reduced by one. Alas, in today's constricted, corporate, cash-strapped newsrooms, we won't be seeing his likes again. But some of his scrappiness and pizzazz will live on in blogs and other new media. I sure hope so.

"They Hate Us Out There"

A Congressman–a Democratic Congressman, at that–has given public voice to something a lot of journalists don't want to know about or talk about: A large number of people are actively rooting for newspapers and other media to die horrible deaths.

Rep. Jared Polis (D.-Colo.) said this about the closing of the Rocky Mountain News at a political meeting this week: "I have to say, that when we say, 'Who killed the Rocky Mountain News,' we're all part of it, for better or worse, and I argue it's mostly for the better. ... The media is dead, and long live the new media, which is all of us."

Polis' remarks made Romenesko, and drew an angry retort from Atlantic magazine's Jeff Goldberg, who titled his post, "Go to Hell, Jared Polis." But about the only thing remarkable about Polis' inflammatory comments were that they came from a Democrat. 

Over on the other side of the political aisle, there's a whole cadre of people passionately rooting for the death of media outlets they see as liberally biased. And the kinds of things they say make Polis look positively temperate.

Want a taste? Jump into any of the discussions here, at FreeRepublic.com, one of the leading right-wing Web sites. A regular feature called "Dinosaur Media Death Watch" chronicles every development in the decline of the journalism business in detail that surpasses even Romenesko–except that these dispatches are accompanied by unalloyed glee. The standard comment about newspaper layoffs or closings is something along the lines of "good riddance." You'll see similar sentiments expressed at other conservative sites. It's nasty stuff.

In the FreeRepublic view of the media world, newspapers are dying–and should die–because they're inaccurate, too liberal and too arrogant. These folks believe, in fact, that those alleged failings are driving readers and advertisers away, causing newspaper problems that go far beyond the real factors like Internet competition, the decline of classifieds and the economy. Like Polis, they revel in how alternative formats like blogs are causing problems for traditional media. 

To journalists, this is sort of bizarro world. But it's virulent in certain quarters, and Polis' unfortunate remarks are just one facet of it. While some of us think the existing newspaper business model is fatally flawed, we love journalism and we're working hard along with a lot of other good people to transition the media business to something more sustainable. But there are probably just as many–or more–people rooting heartily for papers and journalism to fail, for political reasons.

Twenty-five years ago, a smart professor and editor of mine named Charles "Puff" Puffenbarger told me something about news audiences that I'll always remember: "They hate us out there." It appears that's true more now than ever.