Talking a journalist off the ledge

"Talk me down off the ledge," pleaded the subject line of a recent email.

The ledge the writer emailed me from is crowded with journalists overwhelmed by digital demands, interactive inferiority complexes and a collapsing business model.

I write a quarterly critique of digital and print products for a media company and my last edition, my correspondent wrote, "made my head hurt. Literally. Here I am thinking we're somewhere near the digital cutting edge, and now you're exhorting us all to do things I've never even heard of."

I want to offer some encouragement to my correspondent, but first I should acknowledge some painful truths.

Jumping isn't such a bad idea for some journalists - not literally jumping off a ledge, of course, but jumping into a new career. The newspaper business is changing and whatever it becomes and however successful it might be in its next life, we're not going back. If we are going to succeed, we need people whose passion for our present and future is stronger than their nostalgia for our past. If that's not you, if your heart is not in the change, find a new career that excites you as much as this one used to. No hard feelings; I wish you the fulfillment you seek.

Another painful truth is that while journalists need to change, our change will not be enough. Our colleagues who own and run communication companies need to change at least as fast, developing new business models and new revenue streams to provide a healthy, profitable framework for the future. As my boss likes to say, the best guarantee of a free press is a profitable press.

Two close friends and too many other former colleagues have recently lost their jobs as short-sighted media companies downsized instead of using their talents to find new avenues to success. Jumping may be preferable to being pushed. If your company is not aggressively innovating at a pace that makes your head hurt, either by adopting the practices of API's Newspaper Next 2.0 model or by blazing its own innovative path, the declining revenues of the core newspaper business could make your head hurt in entirely different ways.

Now let's return to my correspondent's worried message:

Oh, you lament, if only these narrow-minded, old-school journalists could grasp the need to change. (Buttry note: I didn't say that, but I understand how he interpreted my advice this way.)

Well, I got the "need to change" part, Steve; our industry is at a crossroads. But I'm getting hung up on the technological know-how needed to do so. Liveblogging, video reporting, video editing, twittering, databasing, widgets, forums, and on and on - collectively you proffer these as adding value to our product, and that's true to some anecdotal degree. The hard part is convincing journalists there's value in developing these skill sets, other than the generic "JOURNALISM IS CHANGING AND YOU'D BETTER CHANGE TOO OR ELSE" sort of mantra that doesn't help people sell ads or write stories. You've demonstrated the need to change, perhaps, but middle managers like me need motivation not just for ourselves but also our staffs. Tell us again, please: What's the upside of twittering while Rome burns?"

Please help, starting with your Top 10 ideas for introducing print journalists, ever so gently, to the nuts-and-bolts of Web publishing and social networking, and why those skill sets are more useful than simply job security. It's getting drafty up here on the 22nd floor, so the favor of a prompt reply is requested.

I'll get to my top ideas shortly. But first some general encouragement in response to the anxiety he expressed.

Yes, this is a time of staggering change, when our confidence has been shaken as we tackle more and more new tasks and skills. But it's also an exciting time of learning and growth that can rejuvenate journalists who embrace it.

Fifteen years ago, I thought I knew it all where print journalism was concerned. I was in my late 30s with extensive experience and considerable success editing and reporting. I had survived a couple career setbacks and landed in a job that I enjoyed, where I knew I could excel (and did). I was so confident - and so clueless about what the future held.

When I look back on what I have learned since then, I am both pleased at this journalist's ability to change and excited about my professional growth. I know that narrow-minded old-school journalists can change, because I did. So when I look ahead at the daunting task of mastering those essential new skills I am just starting to learn - or planning to start learning soon - I have some confidence.

I suspect my correspondent would benefit from the same brief look backward to steel himself to press on. (Of course, the pace required is not exactly pressing on. More like sprinting, but I've already written about that.)

Also, you don't have to learn all the skills of the digital age. But learn some of them. I never learned how to do graphics and I did fine as their importance to newspapers grew. I learned the importance of graphics and worked well with colleagues whose artistic talents I respected. Similarly, we have teamwork and specialties in the digital age, so you don't have to be able to do it all. But learn to do a lot, some of it really well.

So here's some advice to get started. First, I suggest three steps that will change a reporter's or editor's outlook and output, but won't require lots of new work or new skills:

Reporters should liveblog events on their beats. This doesn't take notably extra time, because you're going to be sitting in the meeting, trial or game anyway and that's when you'll to the liveblogging. You were going to be taking notes anyway. The liveblog becomes your notebook. Liveblogging these events can actually help you focus your print-edition story. In fact, with some cutting and pasting from the blogs, you can quickly assemble the main pieces of your write-thru, giving you time to work on the perfect lead or to polish a daily narrative. I have long advocated writing as you report and I see liveblogging as a great extension of that. Take a look at this PalmBeachPost.com liveblog of a trial, liveblog of a city council meeting at TheDestinLog.com or the nytimes.com liveblog of the Roger Clemens hearing. Practicing on routine controlled daily news events like these will develop liveblogging skills that will help immeasurably when you need to liveblog the big breaking story, as rrstar.com did in its coverage of the Northern Illinois shootings. If you're an editor, encourage your reporters to liveblog the events on their beats. This may involve more work on your part, whether you're editing before they post or editing after a reporter has posted directly to the web. But much of the work will come at a slow time in the print cycle. And it will speed the work of the print cycle, which keeps too many editors in the newsroom too late in the evening.

Reporters should hyperlink web sites they visited in their reporting. Many reporters visit other news sites, special-interest blogs, statistical databases and public-agency web sites in the course of their reporting. As I wrote recently, outbound links add value to your stories and mark your site as a place to come for all the answers. I would advocate spending a few minutes when you can to look for appropriate links for a story if you didn't do any or much web reporting. But at the very least, share the links you already have. If you can't hyperlink them yourself, put a note at the top of your copy with the links and suggestions on where they should go. If your editors object to sending visitors away from your site, send them to my blog link above or to this Scott Karp blog and educate them about the value of outbound links. This is a quick step to get extra value from work you're already doing (and to get you started thinking differently about digital reporting and writing). Editors should ask reporters for their links (and encourage them to do more web reporting if they're just regurgitating what an official or two told them).

Twitter. Yeah, you should blog, but a good blog does take some time and twittering doesn't take much. You can twitter from your phone. You can twitter when you're battling writer's block on your daily story. A single tweet can take less than a minute. But doing it regularly, even just a few tweets a day, will teach you about writing for the web and about connecting socially online. And you need to learn both of those things. Follow me on twitter if you want. You'll see that some days I just tweet once or twice, if that. But sometimes I use twitter as my liveblog, as I did last Saturday when I was listening to Dan Gillmor at the New York Press Association.

These next two steps will take a little time, but not a lot and you'll find it helpful:

Join Wired Journalists. I'm presuming (and hoping) you already spend some time online learning what's happening in our business. Spend some of that time at Wired Journalists, learning from others about our changing business. (For instance, this discussion helped me see the potential of Twitter for journalism.)

Start using another social network or social bookmarking tool. Whether it's Facebook, MySpace, Flickr, LinkedIn, YouTube, Delicious, Digg, Reddit, StumbleUpon or whatever, you need to start learning how social networking works if you haven't already. I haven't mastered all those sites, but I'm working on several of them. Social networking is already important in reporting, in spreading the word we gather and in generating revenue. We need to figure out how to use it and how to provide community networking platforms.

And here are two suggestions of big things you can do to make your learning efforts more useful:

Focus your learning. Identify two big skills to master in the coming year - blogging, databases, video, Flash, whatever. Choose something you've never done or haven't done much or well and make it a goal for the coming year to become at least competent and somewhat confident. You might ask why you can't focus just on one skill. Wouldn't that help you master that skill better than you could two? Yes, but we need speed and intensity in our innovation efforts and that means we have to move beyond the comfort zone of concentrating on just one thing. Besides, you'll be amazed at how the two things that you select, whatever they are, turn out to be related. This approach won't exclude you from learning all the other skills entirely. But setting priorities will focus your improvement and make the digital demands feel more manageable. Discuss your priorities with your editor, so you and your colleagues are mastering different skills and upgrading the skills of your whole team faster.

Read Newspaper Next 2.0. Ask your publisher and advertising manager if they have read it. If not, give it to them, tell them to watch the webcast and tell them that this report has some actionable tools that will help them maximize the digital revenue potential of your community. After you've read the Casebook section, which includes 31 studies of innovative projects and organizational transformation efforts, decide what you can do to lead innovation at your organization. Maybe you can improve on one of the products described in the Casebook. Maybe you can apply the lessons of the Casebook to your organization's efforts to undertake the mega-jobs described earlier in the N2 2.0 report. I'm not saying journalists need to sell ads and we certainly shouldn't compromise our integrity for advertisers. But journalists can and should work with colleagues in other departments to develop new products that will generate new revenue streams that will secure our future.

My friend asked for a Top 10 list and I've only given seven things to do and this has already grown too long. Rather than come up with three more, I'll refer him to Howard Owens' 2008 goals for the wired journalist, which is a top-10 list. If it overlaps some with my suggestions, that's because I'm pursuing those goals myself. And for good measure, here's some advice from Yoni Greenbaum (I found this following him on twitter).

I haven't mastered all the skills my correspondent is worried about learning. But if I wait till then to start teaching and encouraging others to learn, I never will. Because I know once I master those, new needs will arise.

Come down off the ledge. We have a lot to learn and it's going to be fun.