“Memos” Items

The ONA Digital Credibility Report

This is a PDF of the Online News Association study on digital credibility, co-authored by Howard Finberg and Martha Stone with assistance from Diane Lynch. Here’s what the goals of the project were:

ONA’s Web Credibility Study, for which it was awarded $225,000 from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation (www.knightfdn.org), is studying the impact of technology and the Internet on the gathering and dissemination of news.
The study will work to develop and promote principles and guidelines for online journalism focusing on proper relationships between editorial content, advertising and e-commerce; the development of ethical standards and avoidance of conflicts of interest; and appropriate use of hyperlinking in a journalistic environment.

Presentation of ONA Digital Credibility Report

Here’s a copy of the main online credibility presentation given at the ONA convention in 2001. The goal was to share the results of the ONA Credibility study conducted in 2000-2001. This PDF includes notes or a script for the presenters. It has the key elements the authors wanted to share with the audience. I conducted the survey work and wrote a large section of the report and was responsible for creating the presentation.

Letter page dated September 23, 2002 from Jim Naughton to the National Advisory Board, with three bulleted items and three small image thumbnails beneath.

“Yes, I’m Becoming a Convert to E-Learning”

I first came to Poynter as a visiting scholar, hired by the Institute’s president, Jim Naughton. This memo went to the National Advisory Board and Poynter staff ahead of its meeting, and it is Naughton making the case for distance learning.

He opens with the challenge of teaching “sequencing” to beat reporters and editors, admits he’d fudge it, then describes how Tom French did it in a seminar — an email from French’s 10-year-old son explaining a black eye (“nat + hockey stick + momentum + my eye + ow”), two clips from “Sling Blade,” and Monet’s paintings of the cathedral at Rouen. What stayed with Naughton was the size of the room:

I kept thinking how extraordinary such a performance would be if made available to thousands of aspiring writers who couldn’t or didn’t get to attend a Poynter seminar.

Yes, I’m becoming a convert to e-Learning.

The memo notes that Dean Karen Dunlap had briefed the Board of Trustees on the faculty’s exploration of distance learning — “less structured, more self-guided” than what API and others were doing — and recounts Naughton emailing Hodding Carter at the Knight Foundation about collaborating. Carter replied almost immediately that the suggestion “comes at a good time”:

Eric Newton of Knight followed, saying they had been “thinking about Poynter as perfect” to collaborate on what they called “News University.” Naughton’s aside: “News U. Has a certain ring to it.”

And then my name appears, which is why this document is in my files:

As a Poynter visiting scholar, Howard Finberg has guided a faculty task force in considering e-learning. He’s drafted a report outlining our next steps and providing a focus for our discussions with the Knight Foundation.

Naughton’s closing was cautious — “We’ll see where this palaver goes” — but he saw the potential in combining Knight resources and Poynter teaching.

Typed 1996 memo from Phoenix Newspapers reporting on a CCI Europe seminar about newsroom technology and reorganization

Technology and a New Newsroom: 1996 Memo

In October 1996 Phoenix Newspapers was invited to a CCI Europe seminar on how news organizations were changing and what technology they would need next. This memo is my report back to John Oppedahl, the senior editor of The Arizona Republic, with copies to Chip Weil, Mal Applegate and Pam Johnson.

The company in the room was good: senior executives from the Chicago Tribune, the Ft. Lauderdale Sun Sentinel, the Orlando Sentinel, De Telegraaf of the Netherlands, Ullstein Verlag of Germany, Politiken of Denmark and the Helsingin Sanomat of Finland, plus CCI’s management team led by managing director Carsten Christensen. Gunther Bottcher of IFRA facilitated. CCI wanted to use what it heard to plan its own direction for the next two to five years, and to shift from an engineer-driven company to one focused on customer needs. The newspaper people at the table liked that idea a great deal.

My summary came in two parts. The good news was that Phoenix Newspapers wasn’t out on a limb:

PNI’s vision of an integrated and fully connected system is a concept shared by all of the participants and being implemented at those newspapers today.

The not-so-good news was that getting there would take a great deal of work — and most of it wouldn’t be technical:

Not only technical or system work, but striving to address issues of how we organize, train, and deploy our workforce.

The workforce piece would be the toughest, with or without union considerations. We were fond of our journalistic traditions and our workflow, and the org chart was easy to manage. But business processes would have to change if the technology investment was going to pay off:

Flying a jet between two cities 50 miles apart is a waste of equipment.

Much of the memo is about the new newsroom. The seminar group predicted a shift toward “content teams” organized around products rather than coverage areas — closer to the way we had already built advertising sales teams. That meant more skills, more training, and an end to the unspoken single-task job description: I’m a copy editor, I don’t write; I’m a reporter, I don’t edit. With no expectation of hiring beyond existing staffing levels, the goal was multi-skilled specialists.

The day of the “designer only” is coming to an end.

The idea I still like best here is the difference between re-purposing and pre-purposing — deciding early that a story will be written for and published in multiple mediums, rather than pushing it through the production system for print and then reusing it. Which also means tracking and archiving every element. Hard enough for print, as I told Oppedahl. Add video, audio and other data types and it gets harder.

The section on communication tools holds up too. E-mail worked one-to-one, but broadcast a request on deadline and most people ignored it, assuming it wasn’t meant for them. What the newsroom needed was closer to shouting a question across the room:

This communication model is a “many-to-many” system that allows everyone to join the discussion.

I pointed to PNI’s Lotus Notes discussion databases as proof we already had the technical ability. What we lacked was the cultural shift. The memo closes with a short list of other issues — content management, production management, user interfaces, and system manageability, where I wondered whether the network computer might replace the personal computer.

Tabulations from the 1988 Society of Newspaper Design membership survey, prepared by The Arizona Republic's Market Research Department and dated August 9, 1988

SND’s First Membership Survey, 1988

In 1988, as SND Region 7 director — and an assistant managing editor at The Arizona Republic — I put the Society of Newspaper Design’s first-ever membership survey into the mail. The tabulations were prepared by the Republic’s Market Research Department and dated August 9, 1988.

The pitch to members was straightforward:

We need your help. Enclosed is the first ever SND membership survey. This survey will be used to evaluate current Society programs and publications, identify the areas that should be expanded and help in the development of new services.

The methodology section explains the mechanics: a six-page self-completion questionnaire mailed to 1,500 domestic and 200 foreign SND members on May 25, 1988, with the total membership serving as the sampling frame.

There were 775 usable questionnaires returned for a response rate of 46 percent.

A few numbers that still stand out. Ninety percent said their newsroom or art/graphics department had one or more personal computers — and among those, 92 percent were using Macintosh to create graphics or illustration. Asked what would become more important at their newspaper in the next five years, computers topped the list at 89 percent, followed by informational graphics at 83 percent, design principles at 79 percent and color at 76 percent.

Members were also generous about the Society itself: 82 percent thought dues were “about right,” 64 percent said they always read Design journal, and 93 percent liked its magazine format. The soft spots were attendance and awareness — only 41 percent had been to a workshop or convention in the previous two years, and the most common reasons given were “too far away” and “too costly.”