Notes for a speech: at Cal Poly Pomona

I'm the reader engagement editor for the Los Angeles Times.

What is that?

It's a position created to help the newspaper and website improve something we have struggled with over the years: be more responsive to readers.

  • We aim to be more available and respond more quickly.
  • Increasing our online chats
  • Explaining more how we got a story
  • Share our work more actively on social media networks

By doing this we hope to:

  • improve our journalism
  • learn from our audience
  • harness the wisdom of the crowd.
  • And by doing all of that we hope to make our journalism more relevant to more people and....

.....  buy time for our business people to figure out a way to make our new delivery methods as profitable as print.

 

  • Because, maybe you've heard: printed newspapers are in trouble? This week an official with the very successful London newspaper Financial Times the end of their print edition above the sunset of print in 5 years. 

Let's do a quick, non scientific poll.

By show of hands:

Who reads a print newspaper daily?

Who reads one once a week?

Who reads one a couple times a month?

Never?

Who checks Facebook daily? Twitter, Digg, Stumbleupon, Reddit, Technorati, Tumblr, Posterous, AOL, Yahoo, Ning .... Everyday a new service or two pops up...

Play woof: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ytc9-wGCHW0

Scary time for the business:

  • Will we survive?
  • If we survive who will remain to do the work
  • What will that work be like.

I don't know the answer to any of those questions. I don't think anyone does. Things are changing so quickly that we really have no idea what's coming next. But there's plenty of room for speculation. Here's one guess. It's five years old and I appologize if you've seen it before but i think it's still a great illustration of the media landscape.

Play: Epic 2015

So what do you think? It that a plausible future? There probably won't be a marriage of Google and Amazon and the NYT probably will be the last major newspaper standing.

  • I don't know.
  • But I do believe that it's a great time to be in the business and a student of journalism and communications.

Never has there been more information available about the craft of journalism. Text books used to have a near monopoly on journalistic how-to material. You used to have to wait months for trade journals like Columbia Journalism Review to weigh in on the ethics and craft of journalism.

Now there are probably hundreds of blogs, and twitters, entering the fray every day. You can consume a PHDs worth of J-school information and never leave your desk. 

My current favorite is based at Harvard: Nieman Journalism Lab: http://www.niemanlab.org/

Another good one is Sreetips, from a professor at Columbia Journalism School. http://www.sreetips.com/

Really useful resources. Amazing advances in access to curriculum compared to when I was finishing my official journalism education. 

Also amazing changes in tech.

Impossible to overstate how much has changed in the business in my 20 years; brought a couple props to drive home the point.

When I started writing Sports for the Times, this was the state of the art: trs-80.

  • cost a bit more than 1,000
  • full size keyboard
  • most importantly 20 hours of battery life (from 4 AA batteries!)
  • file from anywhere view couplers and a payphone.
  • So good that I know reporters who clung to these up until forced to give them up in 2000.

Back then, however, these devices were a one way street. Reporters talked to sources at the scene, composed their stories and sent them over the wires in time for the once a day deadline.

  • Now we have a rolling 24 hour minute by minute deadline.
  • And we have tools that have evolved; tools that we now use to help transmit the story and the many in the audience are using to read or view our stories.

And despite all the changes one thing remains: there will always be a demand for people who can help people make sense of events happening in the community, city, state and world.

Questions?

 

Resources:

Epic 2015 explained: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EPIC_2014

Epic 2015: http://epic.makingithappen.co.uk/new-masterfs1.html

If necessary social media revolution: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sIFYPQjYhv8