What They Want

One of the great things about the Internet is that we can easily track which stories people are looking at, how long they're looking at them, what times of day they come to us, and even where they're coming from.

One of the disturbing things is that this also gives us a constant snapshot of what the public is interested in, and it's not always high-brow content. In fact, it's almost never high-brow content.

For example, the "Most viewed" stories on our Web site right now happen to be "Police Respond to MBTA Shooting," and "Man Charged with Stripping in Hair Salon," as well as "Ex-Sox Player's Drug-Infested Property Raided."

"Viewers Beach Photos" is the most viewed slideshow and "72 Year old fends off pickpocket" is the most viewed video.

If you were an alien from another planet, studying our civilization 2,000 years from now, what would this tell you about us? It's a bit frightening. Going on the theory that we "are what we eat," what does this tell you about us as a nation?

In one of my past lives editing a newspaper, we put together a little feature that looked back at newspaper articles from 100 or 150 years in the past. All the old articles had to do with topics such as U.S.-Spanish diplomatic relations during Cuba's fight for independence, or tax policy. Anything even remotely "sensational" such as man jumping off a bridge, was buried in the back pages and usually didn't merit more than just a few lines. It was as if in those more genteel times, such items were considered in "poor taste," as, indeed, they are.

But today it is nothing to see photos of young entertainers exposing panty-less crotches to paparazzi lenses. I'm not a prude, but ... this is journalism? In fact, it isn't. But so many people seem to want to see it and read about it and I haven't quite figured that part out yet. It's like all those people who slow down on the highway to see a car accident. It always makes me want to yell, "YOU'VE NEVER SEEN A CAR ACCIDENT BEFORE, FOR HEAVEN'S SAKE?" after waiting in the 3-mile backup on the highway and realizing that the slow down was caused primarily by gawkers.

What is it that makes humans so interested in grizzly details. The Fear Factor? The thing is, I don't think it serves our broader interests. The same people who'd rather read or see a story about some actor's drug addiction will be the first to cry foul when they find out they have to pay three times as much for car insurance next year, but they would not have been interested in a story about the debate over whether to raise those rates.

The notion that we have a right to a free press is founded on the principal that a free press is necessary to keep us informed so we can make the decisions needed to run an honest, efficient government. It's something we need to have in order to govern ourselves. If we're not using it for that purpose, why have free press at all?

Hamstrung

The problem with working in Internet news right now is that there aren't enough of us. Despite the fact that growth in Internet traffic has been exponentional ever since I started working for an Internet news company in 2000, the brass still seem skeptical about whether the business is going to "take off," -- whether they should make a significant investment in manpower.

Forget the phenomenal success of mega-sites such as MSNBC or CNN.com, there still seems to be reluctance to hire staffers in the same way that a magazine or TV news operation has traditionally staffed.

As a result, we're just not able to do more than keep our noses above water. Get the main stories of the day up, after a fashion, but no enterprise reporting, very little original content -- which is, of course, what viewers go to any particular site for.

I know things will change, I know they are changing, but not fast enough.

Pushing the Rock Uphill

As news days go, it was a slow one, but it seems that on most days I have very little time to dwell on the news.

As a manager, a big part of my job involves attending to problems, of which there is never any shortage. It's a bit like doing the dishes. You can do them really well, and put them all away, but the next day they're just going to be there again, some old ones and many new ones. I am a modern day Sisyphus, the sinner of ancient Greek mythology who was doomed to an eternity of rolling a boulder up a hill, only to see if roll back down again.

Today I posted all new stories and videos to the Web site in the morning, but then had to work with engineers who were trying to figure out how to install a second PC that will capture and digitize video. We are trying to get everything hooked up for the presidential debates in Manchester this weekend. The new PC has to be connected to a router that pulls in video feeds from around the state and the nation.

It's been a slow process that started more than a week ago and which has involved trying to coordinate a local computer tech and local engineers with an audio-video expert in Minnesota.

The indisputable truth I have learned in this job is that engineers just don't talk to each other much, not willingly anyway, which is why my communications skills have come in so handy. Basically, I often just translate for them.

In this Internet world, where we are spread out all over the country, I have done quite a bit of translating -- between local engineers and weather engineers in Alabama, or between local engineers, Hearst engineers in Charlotte and our own engineers in Minnesota. For awhile, the provider of our news aggregator tool was in Atlanta, so I've had quite a few conversations with them as well. To my mind, the only people who will never come up short in this global workplace are the people who own stock in Verizon or some other phone company.

What if anything, one might ask, does any of this have to do with journalism? I will tell you: I do not know. Had you told me back in my college days that I would one day be conversant about things like file transfer protocols or XML code, I would have been extremely skeptical. The human brain, however, is an amazing thing. I've learned so much it seems second-nature to me now, even though when I started this job they said we would primarily be journalists, and other people would worry about the hardware. That, it turns out, has never been the case. We are married to our computers, whether we like it or not.

I do worry that we spend so much time figuring out how to get information where it's supposed to go that we don't really have time to gather the information itself. That is a daily frustration. It was there in the newspaper business and, before that, when I was working as a television reporter. If we couldn't get a signal in, we couldn't do the story. Period. For some reason, however, I have constantly found myself in a position where I have to figure out how to get the story ON. On the air, on the Internet, in the paper.

I spend so much time on the mechanics of getting the story out that it actually makes it a joy when I have nothing more to do than immerse myself in the production of the actual piece. It makes getting the information, organizing and writing it into a coherent piece of journalism seem like a walk in the park. I've been doing that part of it so long I could do it in my sleep. The perfect order for a story will unfold in my head so fast sometimes that it's a race to get it down on paper (or computer screen.)

In my very first television job I would go to work, make assignments, then go out with another reporter, the two of us shooting each other's stories. We'd go back to the station, write our stories, edit them, and then assemble the newscast and go into the control room and produce it. All in a day's work. I think I probably made about $2 a day. It feels a little like that again.

At The Beginning

The term "Internet journalism" may be an oxymoron, especially for many journalists still primarily employed by "traditional" media organizations -- newspapers, radio, television, magazines -- and yet, it is what many of us are practicing even now, and will be practicing, for years to come.

We are here in significant numbers, some not entirely by design, working (as I sometimes like to think) at the beginning of all things. Or, rather, at the beginning of another great thing. We're on the cutting edge of a new news medium, more far-reaching than all that have come before. One that truly creates a global news village. It has already happened. Yet, by far, many of us are unknown, unrecognized, undocumented, providing news and information to millions around the world. We inform and influence thousands, but few know who we are or how we do what we do.

Who are we? What are we doing? What are we trying to do? Why are we doing it? What are we encountering along the way?

These are the questions framing this blog, which I hope will draw the comments, experiences and expertise of Internet journalists around the globe. I also see it as a way to provide a Web history of what we are going through as we build this new medium, this new journalism "discipline." In college, I learned about what Edward R. Murrow did as he shaped what came to be known as television journalism. A few years ago, I read a biography of William Randolph Hearst, who helped shape newspaper journalism. Now it's our turn to write the book on the beginnings of Internet journalism, using our medium, the Internet.

In a way, it doesn't feel unusual to be working in a new news medium. As one of my bosses at Internet Broadcasting said a few years ago, "If you're looking for a guidebook on how to do what we do, don't. We're writing it every day." It's not the first time I've been on the cutting edge of a journalism job.

More than 25 years ago, I got my start as a journalist working at a television station in Austin, Texas. We were still using manual typewriters then, (small type) and ripping wire off huge machines that spewed out reams of copy 24 hours a day, seven days a week. We would tear copy and organize it by category -- sports, news, entertainment -- slapping it on to nails on the wall designated for each. The engineers were excited when we first tried transmitting "live" from a remote location. This being Texas, they sent me to do a live shot from the rodeo. They had a remote van that looked like an ice cream truck and it seemed like they were using twine and bubble gum to get the job done, but somehow it worked. They were elated when they were able to beam a picture back, and I felt a little like a human guinea pig.

A few years later, I was working for a television station in Tampa, Fla., WTVT, and it was one of the first local stations (if not the first) in the country to own and operate its own satellite truck. At that time, only the networks were operating satellite trucks. My assignment desk sent me down to Naples, Fla., to do a story on some beached whales, and my managers decided that, since we were out of microwave range, it was a good time to test our new satellite capabilities. The only problem was, we still didn't have a communications package entirely established. I didn't have IFB, the little ear piece that fits in a broadcast reporter's ear connecting them to the directors, producers and control room back at their stations.

No problem. They decided to go with the shot anyway, since they could see and hear me. They would have the photographer I was working with talk via walkie-talkie to another photog in a small motel down the road, who would in turn be communicating via telephone with the control room in Tampa. I stood there gamely until my photographer hissed "go" and simply began talking. Voila. On the air was our first satellite feed from Naples to Tampa in which I never heard a cue and didn't even have a monitor to look at to see what I was doing. Looking back, not having the benefit of "direction" from a producer was sometimes the greatest blessing the universe could bestow upon a reporter, but at the time it felt like flying blind. Again, I felt a little like a human guinea pig.

Years later I went "retro." I had a child and decided to leave journalism and paid work entirely. I wanted to focus a bit on raising another human being. I was never able to stay away from a keyboard for long, however, and eventually decided to try my hand at print journalism, which had always been my first love. I spent the next six years learning the newspaper business from the ground up. I even learned, quite literally, how to cut and paste. After assigning stories to reporters, spending hours editing their copy and then laying out each page of the paper, I would go out to the printing plant to oversee "paste up," sometimes going so far as to take the small Exacto-style knives in my own hand to cut tiny lines of newsprint from an article or headline to make it "fit" into its alloted space.

It was a "back to the future" experience, because it gave me the newspaper experience I lacked, having started my career in broadcasting. It also gave me some of the most fulfilling years of my professional life because of the great latitude we had in "enterprising" news stories. Noticing a trend toward the construction of larger "McMansions," we could write a story that we'd see a month later in the big daily newspapers and, later, in national magazines. There was tremendous satisfaction in rooting out stories and trends, not merely "reporting" events that had already occurred or were occurring, as I had done for so many years as a television reporter.

For my money, being able to enterprise a story is about as good as it gets for a journalist. It's what puts the "new" in the "news." Everything else is just "repurposing," which is what many journalists do on a daily basis, not really realizing it. They see a story someone else has done and they modify it for their medium and run with it. But to be the reporter who first spots a trend or informs about a topic, issue or event which has never been published before --that, to me, is the Holy Grail of journalism.

So here I am, again at the "cutting edge" of a new news medium, and much of what we are still doing on the Internet is "repurposing," just as in the early days of radio announcers would simply read stories that were printed in newspapers to fill air time (until the newspapers put a stop to it) and just as television reporters have been reporting stories out of the newspapers for decades.

We won't, however, be doing this for very long. Even now, when news breaks, Internet journalists are racing to get a few bits of information populated to their sites, long before a story is on the wire, printed in the paper or read over the air. We know the world sits poised at desktops everywhere, waiting for whatever details we can provide. My first experience of this was when I was still working at the newspaper as the Columbine High massacres were broadcast live on national television. We immediately turned to the Web sites of Denver newspapers for any shred of detail that could place the unfolding tragedy into some kind of context. Today it is passe' for news consumers everywhere to come to go to the Internet first.

We, however, are struggling as we work within a still-evolving new news infrastructure. It is so new, and there are still so few of us, that having an opportunity to enterprise a story is still an almost unheard of luxury. News managers are racing to create and implement guidelines that will be relevant to the developing news environment in which we operate. We adhere to traditional print style guidelines and conventions, and yet we know that the Internet requires, and offers, through multiple media options, a different approach to presentation . Additionally, the roles of journalists who work within the new medium are changing as well. Newspaper journalists are shooting pictures and videos to include in their Internet reports. Soon, broadcast reporters will be asked to produce print-worthy copy that can live on the Internet.

How will it all end? That's what we're finding out. We do know some "traditional" journalists are worried and threatened by the Internet as a news medium, but that train has left the station. What they should embrace is the potential if they want to continue doing what they love. We are all looked upon now not so much as "journalists" but as "content providers" for multiple information "platforms." Those platforms are always going to need content. People who know how to gather information and communicate it to the public, regardless of the medium, will still have a place to work -- their work may now just reach a wider audience on more "platforms."

How we go about the work of Internet journalism on day-to-day basis is what this blog will be all about. I see myself, again, as a bit of a pioneer or "guinea pig" working on the cutting edge of a new news medium. I think it's important that we have a record of what we're building, the obstacles we encounter, and a dialogue about what works and why. So, in this forum, I'll talk as often as I can about the day's work and the issues we confront. It often seems it's never easy, but sometimes it can be fun ... and it's always enlightening.