Answers for innovation skeptics

Wrightsville Beach, N.C. - The first time I developed a newspaper feature based on user-generated content, I had never heard of that term.

The World Wide Web was still about a decade in the future, so I wasn't seeking e-mail contributions or digital photographs. I was developing a new regional section of the Des Moines Register called Hometown and I proposed "Your Page," which would invite readers to submit essays, photographs and recipes.

Hometown was short-lived (for reasons that had nothing to do with Your Page) but I remember some colleagues questioning the journalistic value of Your Page. I have thought about those colleagues as I have wondered about some of the features of an innovation effort tried by The Star, a newspaper with 15,000 circulation in Shelby, N.C.

The Star introduced a new format March 26 and I examined four editions of the new paper as part of a quarterly newsletter I do for Freedom Community Newspapers, called eTuner, which praises outstanding work and suggests ways to improve. I had more praise for the new Shelby effort, but some suggestions as well.

I got another look at the Star's new product over the weekend at the North Carolina Press Association's summer meeting. The Star is fusing its print product with its web edition more creatively than most papers. It's aggressively using alternate story forms. It's featuring user-generated content in several ways.

Publisher Jennie Lambert and Editor Skip Foster explained their innovation effort to their North Carolina colleagues July 15 with a mix of pride, humility, humor and just a touch of defensiveness. I admired the pride, humility and humor. The defensiveness bothered me. Because it's the same sort of defensiveness I felt over my innovative effort more than two decades earlier. And because it's traditional, ink-stained journalists like me who make Skip a little defensive. And who too often stand in the way of innovation or find fault.

The traditionalist in me has to say I don't like it when newspapers publish anonymous opinions from readers. The views tend to be trite, petty, and inarticulate. They are more mean-spirited and silly than many of the same people would be if they had to stand up for what they wrote. They don't make for thoughtful or interesting reading.

But isn't that kind of naysaying the way that traditionalists greet any sort of innovation? The new Star has some features that I love, including community photos contributed by readers. It's easy for me to love that one, since it's the electronic version of what I tried in Hometown in 1985 and later at the Minot Daily News in a reincarnation of Your Page.

I was less enthusiastic about Talk Back, an opinion-page column that publishes anonymous comments readers make on the Star's web site. In telling his fellow editors and publishers about the feature, Skip said it generated a half-hour discussion at a recent Freedom editors' meeting. While I wasn't part of that discussion, I had weighed in on the subject of publishing anonymous opinions in an earlier eTuner, commenting on another newspaper. Judging from Skip's remark, some of his colleagues agreed with me.

Skip made the case for Talk Back quite effectively, if defensively: Readers want that kind of forum and the newspaper needs to be the place they gather for that kind of discussion. The opinion page provides responsible commentary elsewhere. As long as Talk Back isn't labeled as journalism, Skip said, "I'm very comfortable with this and I don't want to give it up to someone else."

I'm not comfortable with it, not a bit. But a newspaper wouldn't be innovative if everything felt comfortable to a guy who used to get up at 4 a.m. in the 1960s to read the newspaper before delivering it on his route. The newspaper I carried back in the '60s is no longer in print. Neither is the first newspaper I wrote for in the early 1970s. However much I loved those old papers, I can see that newspapers have to innovate to have the healthy future I want for them.

Maybe sometimes innovation means providing a forum for anonymous sniping by the same readers who distrust us when we write stories citing anonymous sources. So I'll join Skip in not wanting to give up the community forum role, even for anonymous nitwits, to someone else.

I'm more enthusiastic about some other aspects of the new Star. As a guy who has written and edited countless paragraphs through the years, including some mighty fine paragraphs, I cringed a bit at Skip's PowerPoint slide that proclaimed, "Ding, dong, the paragraph is dead!"

He showed an entire lifestyle page that didn't have a single story in the traditional style of a string of connected paragraphs. Calendars and some news and feature stories are presented in "who-what-when-where" fashion (now, that certainly has its roots in traditional journalism), with a boldface W followed by the appropriate answer.

"There are stories that need to be written and there is information that needs to be conveyed," Skip told the North Carolina audience. When a certain event or issue is more information than story, he said, this just-the-facts presentation is more appealing and more effective than the traditional paragraph approach. (Hmmm, now that you mention it, I've also written and edited some mighty boring paragraphs over the years, too.)

The most popular feature told in who-what-when-where fashion is a page-one feature called "Know-it-all." The Star finds a different expert in the community each day to share his or her expertise on a topic. Some of the topics are newsy, making Know-it-all a news story in disguise. Some of the topics deal with technology and lifestyle, bringing a welcome variety to the front page and some faces that aren't usually found there.

"People want to know about themselves and their friends and family in the paper, not just when they climb the highest mountain," Jennie said.

Skip and his colleagues have not forgotten those stories that need to be written. The new Star carried a 13-day serial narrative mystery story, "Who killed Brenda Sue?" about an unsolved murder that gripped the town 40 years ago. It had some masterful storytelling (in paragraph fashion) by reporter Megan Ward. And, as the Star does with its stories today, it included a powerful video element. As old photographs of Brenda Sue and her sisters scroll by on the screen, a younger sister of Brenda Sue, in a trembling voice, recalls the morning Brenda Sue walked her to school, just before she disappeared. The video has been downloaded 10,000 times.

So how has the Star trained its staff in the use of video? It's armed them with cameras. Skip's not quite my age - I was delivering papers when he was born. But I identified when he said if you give someone his age a new device, we want someone to show us how to use it. But you give his kids a new device, he said, gesturing with the remote control for his computer, and they'll try to figure out what this thing will do. Some of his younger staff members responded that way to video cameras. And they've shown their colleagues how to use them.

Enthusiasm is an important part of the Star's innovation effort. Jennie told how excited a staff member got when Al Tompkins of the Poynter Institute was demonstrating how an Archos portable video recorder worked. "Her eyes got as big as saucers," Jennie said. The publisher decided she was going to find the money (about $300) to get that staff member an Archos. "That was just the magic of one staff member getting it."

It's too early to say conclusively how the Shelby innovation project is working but initial response is encouraging. Print circulation is holding steady (only 20 stops were tied clearly to the redesign). The series about Brenda Sue boosted single-copy sales, demonstrating again the reader appeal of narrative writing. Web traffic has taken off. Unique visits are up 110 percent year over year.

How that will translate economically remains to be seen. The Star is selling sponsorships for videos, a brief mention at the start of a video. In addition, political candidates (who often avoid spending their money on print advertising) are using the web for video advertisements.

A particular police chase that ended quickly and uneventfully might have been little more than a brief, if that, in the old print edition. But stringer Lem Lynch caught the chase on video. As police led the suspect away, he was apologizing to his mother and children, saying he hoped the experience would make him a "better man." The video attracted 7,000 downloads.

After Skip showed his North Carolina colleagues that video and some others - a bar's surveillance video of a robbery, an intern's video of a community Gospelfest - a colleague asked how the Star decides whether to shoot still photos for the paper or video for the web. The Star's journalists are doing both consistently, he answered.

"We're in an 'and' world right now and we've got to figure out how to get that done or someone else will."

That's a pretty good answer for the skeptics - including the skeptic within you - who greet any sort of innovation: We have to figure out how to get it done or someone else will.