Author: Kathryn Jones Malone

Nothing is more important to today’s Texas consumers — and therefore to journalists — than being able to access energy at reasonable costs.   The energy issues faced by the state today are huge, and the dollar amounts involved are staggering.  And to make it all worse, navigating the sometimes-arcane world of energy policy can make your head spin.  Education reporters and cop reporters at least understand the basic terminology – energy reporting deals with a host of terms from the world of science and regulation, and it can be a confusing maze of jargon for reporters.

California energy reporter Elizabeth McCarthy put it this way in a Nieman Reports article:  “My first weeks on the [energy] beat were painful. I was overwhelmed by the words I was hearing—megawatts, BTU’s, capacity charges, and dedicated rate component. I didn’t have a clue what these words meant. But when I began to get a grip on the beat’s terminology and its culture, I entered another world.”

The Center will host a workshop on Thursday, Feb. 17, in Austin to help Texas journalists make sense of the energy beat.  Give us about six hours and you’ll come away understanding much more about energy sources and energy regulation, plus you’ll have ideas and resources for lots of energy-related stories.  We’re doing this with the generous support of Oncor, who is partnering with the Center to sponsor the workshop.

Because of Oncor’s support, we are making the workshop available free to Texas reporters.  Tuition is free, parking is free, and even your lunch is free. This workshop will be held in Austin at the headquarters of the Independent Bankers Association of Texas, which is located at 1700 Rio Grande St., Suite 100. Check-in begins at 10 a.m. on Feb. 17 and the workshop will be over by 3:30 p.m.

The one-day workshop, “Reporting on Electrical Energy Issues:  Energy Trends, Energy Science, and Energy Regulation for Today’s Texas Readers,” will look at how reporters can find and pursue ideas for energy-related stories about the issues most important to readers.

And additional benefit will be that you’ll have the opportunity to ask questions of some of the state’s top energy experts.

We want reporters to go back to their papers and Internet news sites with an increased understanding of the complex choices Texas is now facing. Stories about energy regulation, sources of green energy, and the trends we’re seeing in energy exploration and delivery are really important to all Texans, and we want to help reporters get a handle on how they can make these issues come alive for their readers.

 Oncor funded the workshop but left the selection of speakers and the agenda up to the Center. 

Speakers for the workshop include BruceHight, former energy reporter for the Austin American-Statesman and now senior advisor at Public Strategies, Inc.; Terry Hadley, former TV reporter, now director of communications for the Texas Public Utilities Commission; Kate Galbraith, former energy reporter for The New York Times, now with the Texas Tribune; Catherine Cuellar, senior communications specialist at Oncor; and Andrew Chavez and me from the Center.

To register or to get more information on the workshop, go to the application page at /forms/workshop-application

When you think of AOL, your image is probably that of an Internet pioneer, now a major e-mail provider.  And the phrase you probably associate with AOL is the signature greeting, “You’ve got mail.”

So imagine the same voice, but this time he’s saying “You’ve got competition.”

AOL is now more than an Internet portal – now it’s also a content provider following the launch in 2009 of Patch, a network of news sites.  Currently there are more than 450 in 19 states throughout the nation, with 500 planned for the near future.  Each covers a community of between 20,000 and 50,000.

Patch was the biggest hirer of journalists in the United States in 2010 – each site has a full-time local editor, supplemented by freelancers.  Each site features free access, supported by local advertising.  And AOL’s pockets are deep enough to sustain losses while they wait for Patch to take hold.

Patch features a back-to-the-basics approach.  They have hyperlocal content – people news, local government, schools, crime, sports and the like.

I recently talked with Patch representatives about Texas – and the news there is that while there are no Patch sites in the Texas, we’re definitely on their radar.  And indeed, I notice that Patch is advertising to make a hire right now in Dallas.

Patch has claimed that it can come into a community and operate at 4.1 percent of your operating costs – remember, they don’t buy newsprint or pay for real estate.  The “office” of a Patch editor is his or her briefcase or backpack.  One Patch editor told a reporter for the Chicago Reader:  "Part of my job is being visible and accessible. It means I'm working in coffee shops all over my coverage area. I have a big Patch sticker on the back of my laptop, so when I'm working people can recognize me. Since my site is so young it's a mix of curiosity—'What is Patch?'—and 'Oh, you're the Patch girl. You look much younger.' I didn't explode on the scene, but I've found that as people discover my site they like it. And they come back."

So how seriously should Texas community newspapers look at Patch?  The jury’s still out on that until we see what Patch ends up doing in the state.  But the real issue here is not Patch – it’s the whole idea of online news operations that can provide competition while operating at a fraction of our costs. 

And that is a topic of concern for every print-first operation in Texas.

At the Center , we study community journalism and answer questions on community journalism and provide workshops on community journalism.  But as of last fall, we’re actually doing community journalism.

And what community are we covering in this city of three-quarters of a million people?  We’re covering a ZIP Code, 76109, which surrounds the TCU campus, where the Center is housed. This “community” has about 23,000 inhabitants and covers about eight square miles.

The whole project came about only last summer, when we were looking for opportunities to get our student journalists off campus to cover the city.  We adopted a community that didn’t exist — it consisted of lines on a Postal Service map.  And  if you asked someone from this area of south central Fort Worth where he or she was from, that person would never have said, “I’m from 76109.”

That’s changing.  We named our hyperlocal website The 109, from the last three numbers of the ZIP.   Our goal is to cover the people and events and trends of this area like no one else.  The old Atlanta Journal boasted that it covered Dixie like the dew – and we’re not exactly sure if there’s anything comparable that covers the 109, but you get the idea.

This ZIP is part of a large city, but our coverage area is only the 109.  Our reporters attend school board meetings, but we talk about the implications of votes taken for the 109.  We cover City Hall, but only those actions that relate to the 109.  Fort Worth had a big budget shortfall this year, for instance, but our focus was on service cuts and other implications for the 109.

During the November elections, we had reporters at polling places, doing stories on the 109’s precincts. We filed traditional stories and video pieces, news , features and a slideshow with lots of names and faces and opinions.

We even coined a word – at first, we called the people who lived here “residents of the 109.” Now?  They’re 109ers. Cheesy, but it has caught on.

We are using entirely open-source software and have built the entire site using Drupal, a free content management system available to website developers. We hope to learn a great deal about website deployment that we can apply to Texas community newspapers.

So please check out The 109. Friend us on Facebook to follow what we’re doing in our own venture into community journalism.  And let us know what you think.

We journalists have always recognized the tendency to kill the messenger – because people often take out their frustrations on those who tell them what they don’t want to hear.

The messenger is not the cause of the bad tidings, but it’s easier to blame that messenger than to change the event he or she is reporting.

John Paton, CEO of the Journal Register group of newspapers, delivered a message last week that many Texas community newspapers might not want to hear – but it’s an important message we should all pay attention to.

Paton, in a speech to the Transformation of News Summit in Cambridge, Mass., put on by the International Newsmedia Marketing Association, said newspapers need to be “digital first” in everything they do.

Paton is no ivory-tower news philosopher. The Journal Register group has been living by that principle for the past year. The result: a company that was virtually bankrupt a year ago will have profit margins of about 15 percent this year.

The Journal Register has no papers in Texas – it publishes about 170 daily and weekly papers in Pennsylvania, Michigan, Connecticut, New York and New Jersey. And its total online audience is bigger than its print audience. Paton’s approach has been to outsource everything he can to other companies who can do it cheaper or better and to put the digital editions at the heart of his business.

The staff of the Center urges Texas publishers and other journalists to read what Paton has to say. Admittedly, he is talking about a newspaper group with some unique circumstances half a nation away. We’re certainly not urging most Texas publishers to adopt the Journal Register business model. But based on all the evidence we see, that model is the future.

Not today’s future, or tomorrow’s, or maybe even the next few years – but the inevitable future for what we now know as newspapers.

Even the Journal Register company still publishes ink-on-paper editions, but the core of their enterprise is now digital.

So take a few minutes to read Paton’s explanation of what his company has done. This explanation goes into the background of their decision to go digital-first and how they pulled it off.

And while the core of the enterprise for most of us is still print and will be for the foreseeable future, we must pay attention to ventures like this and give some thought to the digital transformation we will all eventually undergo.