7-year-old advice about online journalism, surprisingly still true

The iPhone debuted in 2007. Oh, if only I’d predicted the changes that would bring. (Photo by Niall Kennedy via Flickr)

Back when I was an editor in a business section, December and January brought the annual ritual of predictions from economic experts. I tried to make sure that each of our stories also went back and looked at the experts’ year-old forecasts. Turnabout is fair play. So here’s an article I wrote in 2006 for the Donald W. Reynolds National Center for Business Journalism, urging other business journalists to adapt to this weird concept called online news.

A public relations man, business editor, an online editor and an ex-performance artist walk into a seminar. No joke. The PR man and I were there to talk about adjusting to online communications. The online editor presumably was there to gloat about how she’s been there and done that.

Control, and the loss of it, was a key theme. The PR man, a former journalist named Chris Thompson, said any news release must now compete with the spin put on it by bloggers. I said journalists have to understand that users are taking more and more control over how they receive their news. That means we have to learn new lessons:

Deadline is always a minute ago

We’re used to waiting until we nail down every fact and consult every analyst before shipping the story. But if I go to your site at 2:36 p.m., I want news that’s fresh, not from the day before, not even what you’ve posted for some artificial online deadline like a noon update. If you don’t post it, I’ll find a site that will.

Grab every news release immediately, do a quick rewrite and post it. Now! Find ways to expand information as fast as possible — for example, quote chunks of previous stories rather than writing a wad of background. Substitute dynamic content for static — even if that’s as basic as using a link to your site’s stock-tracking tool rather than putting a quickly outdated stock price into a post.

Update: I would be nostalgic about the era when editors had to remind reporters that news sites require constant updating … I would be, except I know that editors still have to do that today.

A commenter on the original post wrote, “After participating in this process for a quarter of a century I can report that many otherwise excellent journalists just are not equipped to do this. Does this mean every business desk with an online responsibility has to have a specialist capable of doing this well on the staff? Is this an extra person, or does this position mean one less reporter out there covering a beat on a given staff?” I was pleased to see that my reply said newsrooms should focus not on creating separate online-focused jobs, but on training reporters to meet different needs.

The Internet is for Montessori journalism

The Montessori method of education says, in part, that effective education must be tailored to the individual’s needs. Montessori journalism should say that we allow the users to decide which way they want the news delivered.

Offer an e-mail newsletter for those who don’t want to have to go to your site every day (and no, you don’t necessarily need to wait until the market closes. Send it now!). Got a long narrative story? Also offer the full content in audio. Profiling a public company? Add a Flash graphic that allows the user to scroll through 30 or 40 years of stock price and earnings fever lines, and scroll over to call up headlines that put the spikes in context.

Different people absorb information in different ways, and online gives us more tools and more space than we’ve ever had to provide tailor-made information.

Update: Oh, old me, if only you’d dreamed a little bigger and thought of readers who want the news on smartphones and tablets, you could have looked like a prophet. Still, you had the right idea.

We are not alone

I can call up nytimes.com as easily as Insert-Name-of-Hometown-Paper-Here.com. Why write a local version of the same daily market story everyone else is doing? If you can’t do it better than what I can find elsewhere online, concede that turf.

Find other ways to attract users. When you post about a company moving its headquarters to town, or leaving, add links to reports from the media in the rival city or to blog comment. Get your users to believe that your site is the place to start their search; get used to knowing they may not end it there.

Update: The word you were looking for, old me, was “aggregation.”

The users decide how long is too long

In print, we choose the story length — too short to be thorough, or so long that no one will wade through it.

Online, let the users decide how thoroughly they want to explore a story.

You think that earnings reports is worth a brief, but the user may want to see pro forma numbers and the pre-tax, after-special charges, sometime-during-lunch adjustments. Link to the news release.

You cut the transcript of that interview down to the three questions that got intelligible answers. Post the complete audio for users who find business jargon fascinating.

Don’t use this as an excuse to post flabby writing. Do use it as a way to boost your credibility. Add links to SEC documents or PDFs of corporate memos. Like your algebra teacher told you: Show your work.

Update: Still good advice. But if I were writing this now, I’d put one of those sentences in boldface, underlined and bright red: “Don’t use this as an excuse to post flabby writing.”

Get used to losing control — but not too used to it

Denise Polverine, the Cleveland.com editor on our seminar panel, says mainstream news sites are increasingly emphasizing user-generated content, whether that’s restaurant reviews or blogs or even contributions to news stories. These are odd concepts to the average print business journalist — and frightening, too.

Don’t worry; the future isn’t a complete rejection of the past. Thomas Mulready, the former performance artist on the panel, said he’d written a few years ago about the end of information gatekeepers — no more middlemen, just raw information going out to consumers. Now, he said, he’s revised that opinion: There’s so much information that people crave gatekeepers to filter it. His new role? Running CoolCleveland.com, an electronic newsletter about local entertainment. In other words: He’s a gatekeeper.

Update: Seven years ago seems like an eon in internet time, but I was happy to see that all of the basic advice in this article held up. Indeed, much of it could have been taken from the most recent training sessions I held. You could say that shows the lessons haven’t sunk in. But I think it reminds us that the core qualities of online journalism have been clear from the start.