Texas Center For Community Journalism

One of our functions here at the Center is to be “surrogate readers” for Texas community journalists. Keeping up with the fast-changing world of community journalism has never been harder, especially since pretty much everyone now wants in on the act: Even The New York Times is doing community journalism, the number of Internet-only startups is growing by the day, and community journalism is now the “hot” area in mass communications.

But you have a paper to put out, and a Website to maintain. A few of you may even have a life.

So we’ll help you keep up with what folk around the nation are saying about our field — about community journalism specifically and the wider world of newspapers and news Websites in general.

Let’s get started.

Adweek reports that the Atlanta Journal-Constitution has rolled out a new “Unplug. It’s Sunday” campaign to promote the traditional Sunday newspaper as a refuge from the constant buzzing and beeping of smart phones, instant messages and e-mail that marks the modern workweek.

AJC‘s campaign, which runs until the end of the year and will cost more than $1 million, coincides with a recent redesign of the paper.

The marketing guru who designed the campaign put it this way: “It’s about how to reposition the newspaper. We came up with the idea as a counterpoint to the digital cacophony that exists in everyone’s lives. Sunday is the day to relax and do something different than you do the rest of the week.”

Two TV spots show the hectic whirl of the digital workweek, complete with ringing cell phones, instant messenger notifications, conference calls and TV screens filled with digital crawls. The ads then show a couple relaxing on their sofa and reading the paper. A voiceover says, “Unplug. It’s Sunday. Discover the new, totally redesigned AJC Sunday.”

The paper’s weekday and Saturday print circulation has dropped nearly 20 percent in the past year, according to the Audit Bureau of Circulations. The Sunday edition did better, falling about 7 percent to 462,000. Six weeks ago, the paper cut 30 percent of its news staff.

The new marketing effort reflects the dilemma so many newspapers face. There is a shift in reading patterns, away from print editions toward Websites. But newspapers make far less from their Web readers — at least at this point — than from their print editions.

If you’d like to see the commercials for the new campaign, go here.

It sounds fascinating. Sort of like the beer commercials that aren’t selling the brew, but the good times you can have with friends when you drink it. Or the car company that isn’t selling a car, but the image you will project when you drive it. The AJC is not selling a newspaper, but a throwback to simpler times.

Major metro to debut “citizen journalism”

You have probably been using people in your community for some time as writers — people who don’t work for you, people who haven’t been trained a journalists.

So guess what? Major metros have now discovered that folk not on the regular payroll can add significantly to their news coverage. They even have a name for it: citizen journalism. I did a Google search on “citizen journalism” this morning; it yielded 4.17 million hits.

One of the latest players in this game is The Washington Times. Their citizen journalism project will debut next week. It will feature one full print page every day of news stories written by average citizens in local communities surrounding Washington, D.C.

The Times‘ citizen journalism efforts will focus on six communities within the larger Washington area: academia on Monday, the Maryland and Virginia suburbs on Tuesday, the District on Wednesday, local military bases on Thursday, faith communities on Friday and the charitable and the public service community on Sunday.

The citizen journalists’ work will be showcased in the A-section as an additional page of metro coverage and will provide a natural complement to the work of the newspaper’s reporters and editors.

Each citizen journalist is provided a set of rules for their reporting and newswriting, as well as copies of The Times‘ policies governing ethics, anonymous sources and other journalistic standards.

If you’re interested in further developing citizen journalism in your paper, you should read Steve Outing’s article, “The 11 Layers of Citizen Journalism,” in Poynter Online. Outing’s article prominently mentions Bluffton Today, the South Carolina newspaper whose staff the Center brought in for one of our Web workshops last year.

If you read Outing and you want to know more, get Jack Driscoll’s book Couch Potatoes Sprout: The Rise of Online Community Journalism. This is no philosophical examination of media trends – it shows how real groups of people, including senior citizens, all without a background in journalism, have put together their own successful online newspapers. Don’t let this trend sneak up on you – it may well be a significant part of all our futures.

WSJ editor offers advice on paid content

Zachary Seward wrote a piece for the Nieman Lab at Harvard where he passed along some tips for charging for online content. The ideas were those of Alan Murray, executive editor of the Wall Street Journal Online. Some of those ideas are worth repeating:

1. The best model is a mix of paid and free content. Don’t just assume your only options are all paid content vs. no paid content.
2. You can’t charge for exclusives that will just be repeated elsewhere. Murray explained, “If it’s a big news story, if we report a takeover and — we could hold that behind the pay wall, but if we do, Business Week or someone else will simply write a story saying ‘The Wall Street Journal is reporting x,’ and they’ll get all the traffic. Why would we do that?” So they drop the pay wall, “and take the traffic ourselves, thank you very much,” Murray said.
3. Don’t charge for the most popular content on your site. Items with broad appeal are better used to build traffic that can be turned into advertising revenue.
4. Content behind a pay wall should appeal to niches. For example, a local newspaper could consider charging for coverage of high school sports. “To the people who want to read it,” he said, “they really want to read it because maybe their kids are involved. Maybe they’re willing to pay for that or maybe there’s a photography service that’s connected to that where you can download pictures of your kids or of the game. But only if you’re a subscriber.”

Developing a troubleshooting system that can be the basis for all software emergencies is crucial.

It is fundamentally a set of trial and error steps that eliminates problems one by one. Be as creative with those steps as you are with your designs. The more you eliminate, the closer you are to finding a solution.

10 Tips for creating your own software troubleshooting system

1. Write down your operating system (Windows XP, Mac Leopard, etc.), the version of software you are using (CS2, CS3, etc.) and the exact nature of your problem. It helps to see this in type and it gives you a great reference point later when you are searching for help on the Web or talking with someone about the problem.
2. Turn the machine off, then on.
3. Close the program and launch it again. I know steps two and three sound way too simple, but at times, simple works!
4. Reset or delete preferences for the program.
5. Try to work with the file on another machine. Certain problems travel with the file, others prefer to take up residence on the machine.
6. Confirm what the software program still does correctly. In the above case, I would see what other formats I could save it in. It might help identify a particular pattern, i.e. vector images work, raster images do not; color works, black and white will not.
7. Eliminate elements. Will the process work with type only? With images only? Again, you are trying to find clues.
8. If there is a font problem, try changing to a different font. If it will work with a different font you might end up reinstalling fonts and/or deleting corrupt packages.
9. Search for help on the Web. Don’t get disappointed and give up if you don’t find the answer to your problem immediately. Look for similar problems, key words, etc. that create a trail to your solution.
   For example, to confirm my suspicions on an Illustrator problem I started with the search: “Adobe Illustrator will not save .ai , unknown error” and found several forum and discussion threads on Adobe forums and tech sites.
   As I read and searched further, I found I needed more info and added terms i.e. Mac, Windows, preferences, etc. This is where the reference information I wrote down in step one helped speed my searches along.
10. Post a help request with a discussion group or thread. You can often register with a forum or help group for free and post your question. Be specific and give as much information as possible. On some sites, help can arrive in less than an hour. On other sites, it might take days for someone to volunteer information.

If all else fails, call a friend, a colleague or a stranger.

It might surprise you to find out that they have faced the same problem and are more than happy to help you through the crisis.

What might be even more surprising: One day these folks may call you back for assistance with their software problems.

Helpful links

• Troubleshooting Graphics Software
  http://graphicssoft.about.com/cs/faq/a/troubleshooting.htm
• Adobe Forums
  http://forums.adobe.com/index.jspa;jsessionid=878197957E6A5FFCD38C1A4D5CE274BF.node0
• Adobe Help Resource Center
  http://www.adobe.com/support/documentation/

It’s a question as old as the newspaper industry.

Why should we give away our content?

As community newspapers face a new age of competition from the Internet, the question has become more relevant. For many of us, we have effectively been “giving it away” for years as local radio and television stations get their cues from our newspapers and crib the stories for their own use.

My argument for an active website is not “giving away” the content, but shifting the cost to the advertiser instead of the subscriber. Look that this question: “Which would I rater do, sell you a subscription for $35 a year, or sell an advertiser a daily ad on my Web site for $35 a week?” The math is simple: $35 a year from the subscriber or $1,820 a year from the advertiser.

I am convinced that once your webset “catches on” with the community, you can easily sell more than one ad for your daily news update. The site will be especially attractive during political season when local candidates want their names and pictures before the public every day — not just once or twice a week in your newspaper. And that is all cash business — a tremendous boost to your cash flow. Ask your advertising sales staff to work up “combination” packages for your print and Internet additions and it will result in “plus revenue” for your newspaper.

Why don’t you try it sometime? An election is a good opportunity. For the May 9 local city council and school board elections, put a house ad in your newspaper saying that you will have “live, up to the minute” election returns on your Web site. Ask an influential business leader — the local Ford dealer, a community bank, your hospital or the Dairy Queen — to be the “sponsor” of the live coverage. Make the price attractive, say $100.

After all, you won’t have those results in your weekly paper for four or five days. Even though you have shared the results with your readers on the Internet, your newspaper coverage can be fresh with interviews with the winners and losers as well as great photo coverage of the “courthouse stand-arounds” in the county clerk’s office on election night.

It’s an experiment worth trying — I think you’ll be very pleased with the results.

Move over, Voodoo priestess. The ancient Chinese had it right. The most effective curse is this one: “May you live in interesting times.”

We in community journalism certainly live in the most interesting of times. There have only been a few generations who have been fortunate (?) enough to live in the days when a new medium is being introduced and therefore redefining the old media.

It happened when Gutenberg invented the printing press, which took over dominance from the manuscript culture. Didn’t happen again until the 1920s, when newspapers were threatened by the new medium of radio. And radio had the shortest Golden Age of all, because when it was at its height, TV was invented and began claiming living rooms for itself in the early 1950s.

As each new medium came along, the old media had to redefine themselves and find new roles. When the Internet was invented, we saw email revolutionize personal communication and then search engines redefine how we got information. And now, we realize that one impact of the Net is to make a publisher out of everyone with a computer.

Even 10 years ago, we thought the newspaper — especially in smaller communities — had the market cornered on news and information. To be sure, someone could always start a rival publication, but costs were typically prohibitive.

No more.

Anyone with a computer is now potentially your competition. And if they don’t know how to start a newspaper, or what to put in one, or how to lay out the pages, or where to find news — no worry. There are Websites all over whose entire goal is to show anyone, anywhere how to start a newspaper on the Web.

Some start as blogs, some are primarily opinion journals. Many come and go overnight. But other people discover that with practically no overhead — no reporters, no rent or utilities, no presses — that they can get local names and photos and news and information on the Web and update it daily, and find an audience. And that audience may be your readers.

As they build audience and get more eyeballs onto their pages, they inevitably attract advertisers.

These Internet start-ups are more prevalent on the coasts, but it’s inevitable that we will see more and more in Texas. I asked Texas newspapers about their local Web-only competition recently and here’s a sampling only of what I found. Take a minute to scroll through the list to follow; you will find all kinds of new Texas Webmedia here, but these new publications represent a real threat to printed newspapers in Texas. The level of sophistication varies, from just blogs to legitimate online newspapers, but all represent alternatives to newspapers — and they frequently have more news, more photos, and more local opinion than papers do. Click on as many as you can, and you’ll get a feel for what may be the wave of the future.

Here they are:

• www.sanmarcosmercury.com
• www.newstreamz.com
• www.bastrop-news.com
• www.bastropia.com
• www.fortbendnow.com
• www.InstantNewsWestU.com
• www.forneypost.net
• www.twentypeacefulminutes.com
• www.supportcrandall.com
• www.takebackcombine.blogspot.com
• www.highplainsobserver.com
• www.shelbycountytoday.com
• www.polkcountytoday.com
• www.instantnewskaty.com

And if you’re thinking that even starting a Web paper may be a daunting task for some potential competitors, what if they could just open a franchise operation, complete with all the support they needed? Check out www.hometowntimes.com. As the organization’s Website says: “We’ll show you and support you as you build an audience and support the growth of the local community through innovative, proven advertising packages designed to build your town’s business success, make your neighbors aware of the issues and events of importance to them, deliver local news that concerns your lifestyle, and more features to keep your visitors coming back again and again.”

How serious is this company? HometownTimes launched 513 local online newspapers across the United States in January. It was recently ranked No. 10 in a listing of Atlanta’s Top 25 Franchises.

Have you heard…

• An analysis of circulation figures published in the 2004 Editor & Publisher Year Book showed that of the 9,321 U.S. newspapers listed, 9,104 (97.7 percent) had circulations below 50,000, a common benchmark used to distinguish “big” from “small” newspapers.
  Those 9,104 “small” newspapers reported circulations totaling 108.9 million, compared to a combined circulation of 38.2 million for the 213 “big” newspapers.
  The majority of all newspapers are weeklies, with an average circulation of slightly less than 7,500.
  Among the 1,456 dailies, 1,239, or 85 percent, are small newspapers, and reach about 44 percent of all daily newspaper readers.
• Social media have now overtaken pornography as the No. 1 use of the Internet, according to research by the Institute for Public Relations.
• Ottaway Newspapers has launched electronic editions of its newspapers aimed at cell phone and smart phone users. “Seekers of news and information in our markets should be able to access our content on the platform that either they are most comfortable using, or that is most useful to them at the moment they need to be informed,” said Sean Polay, Ottaway’s product manager for distributed media. Ottaway is using internally developed software to support the initiative. The Cape Cod Times in Hyannis, Mass., was the first Ottaway paper to launch the service.