Michelle Cerulli, a second-year MA student, told me this story and I encouraged her to blog about it. The short version is this: While attending a session about article comments, she watched a mild-mannered man use Twitter to quietly excoriate one of the speakers. This man didn’t stand up and confront or question the speaker in person. Instead he used this virtual soapbox to disagree with her — in what Michelle described to me as incredibly rude terms — about the role of comments on online news articles.

What was his beef with NPR ombudsman Alicia Shepard? She was saying that online comments tended to be more vitriolic than you hear in “the real world.” His words on Twitter said that Shepard was wrong. But his behavior said that she was dead on. And, according to Michelle, he appeared to be oblivious to the irony.

And while this story so far might seem to some a perfect set-up for a conclusion in which I rail against online comments, that’s not where I’m heading. Online comments are important because it is there that our collective id gets revealed. Many of us reveal in anonymous or pseudonymous comments our fears and hopes n ways that most of us would deny if we were ever confronted with them. Online comments show how us — or at least some non-representative sample of us — experience the world in a way that we alienated from ourselves and the polite company around us.

And that unfiltered id — that alienated experience — is a happy hunting ground for a reporter who hopes to more clearly explain to his readers our increasingly complicated and interconnected world. The problem with comments is not that they are mean. The problem is that there are too few people mining them for hidden hopes and fears and too few people willing to patiently ask probing questions of the crowd.

More and more news organizations are hiring “social media producers.” I hope they’re given the challenge of not just distributing the news to the crowd, but also diving into it and finding individuals who are able to articulate why they’re much more scared, angry or jealous than they are willing to admit in a room full of their peers.

As a preamble, I’m re-running two blog posts (…hmm, I wonder if “the long tail” is going to make the word re-run go the way of the turntable…anyway…) that highlight the challenge and two potential answers:

• Open Letter to The Washington Post: Keep the Frontier Open (Jan. 9)
• Newsroom-Classroom Panel at ONA: A Bridge to Nowhere? (Sep. 13, 2008)

After the jump, I’m looking for where we might be most likely to find the fertile failures and experimentors that journalism needs.

Question 1: Who Drives the Vision?

A Free Market Competiton Between News Organizations: One argument is that news organizations themselves are in the best position to drive vision and are the most likely to take calculated risks. In an industry that has historically favored competition over collaboration, the argument is that companies will implement new storytelling and delivery techniques and seek new revenue streams based on their calculation of how they can gain advantage over their competitors. But the challenge of driving innovation in a mature industry has been well documented. As Phil Meyer says in The Vanishing Newspaper, it’s only logical for most news companies to continue harvesting the golden goose.

Startups: With much to gain and less to loose, perhaps small companies will be the most innovative and experimental. The only problem — the founders of startups often take as much personal risk to do a small-scale startup as a large scale. So they favor going big too quickly, before they’ve experimented and failed enough on a small scale. They seek big rewards to mitigate big risks. Entreprenuers meet the requirement of failing fast, but it doesn’t make sense for them to fail cheap.

The Community: A lot of the best things — such as WordPress and many of the plugins I use on this blog — are free, built by a community for the benefit of all. The motivations for this behavior are many and diverse. But the one thing that I find most open source projects lacking is neutral-party hypothesizing, testing and evaluation. In short, communities are innovative but not experimental.

Large Nonprofits: Large nonprofits — especially the Knight Foundation — has been seeking to foster innovation and mitigate risk for news innovation, especially innovation around the riskiest type of journalism — investigative and explanatory public affairs journalism. I have an idea I need to think about more carefully, but my hunch is that grants and awards tend to encourage applicants toward unbridled optimism rather than the more valuable skepticism. Skepticism is a pre-requisit for experimentation and fertile failure.

Industry Groups and Consulting Companies: Some of the most comprehensive and current research is coming from news industry trade groups and consulting firms. But their reports often focus on market predictions and ad sales. And, for the most part, their best stuff costs so much money that the research cannot be either publicly scrutinized or widely disseminated.

Research Universities: The best thing about the academic environment is also its greatest weakness — speed, or lack thereof. We’re slow. Now, that means we maintain standards in the face of fads and it means that our research is usually rock solid. The down side is that peer-reviewed research is often too incremental or too slow to be relevant. And while we watch the world carefully, we miss opportunities for leadership. Where we do get out on the cutting edge, our efforts are often funded by large foundation grants that (see above), I think, reward optimism over skepticism.

A Proposal

Each of the players mentioned above has a role to play in driving experimentation and fertile failure. Here’s a quick inventory of what we need from each:

1. Relevant questions and hypothesis — industry, community, entrepreneurs. But these questions can’t be limited to the transformation of content to revenue. They need to help us understand which, if any, innovations can help us hold powerful people accountable, shine light in dark places, give voice to the voiceless and explain an increasingly complex world. How do we get the right information to the right people at the right time so we can increase participation and improve individual decisions in a democracy and free market economy?
2. Experimental Design — universities. We don’t teach these grad school seminars for nothing. Academics are very good at making sure these big questions can actually be measured and tested in some way.
3. Data — industry organizations, consulting groups. Privacy and the competitive value of information I think has made it difficult for journalism programs to get their hands on the kind of massive data sets that can help separate variables and increase validity. If there’s going to be collusion in the news biz, it shouldn’t be over charging for content. It should be over finding a solution to these valid concerns about privacy and proprietary information.
4. Risk Mitigation — industry, government, foundations. Large companies will be in the best position to put experimental findings in to practice. They need to foot a big part of the bill. Good journalism — like public health and a basic education — is a public good. Government can fund research without getting in to the business of favoring solutions. Foundations are already playing the biggest role, but could use the failure form to begin encouraging skepticism rather than optimism from their grant applicants and award winners.

Epilogue: Leadership

None of this can happen without leadership from people who are in a position to influence each of these institutions. Perhaps the first thing to do is open the floor for nominations to be the first Czar of Fertile Failure.

You work on coming up with the names. I’ll work on designing the funny hat.

The audio of the talk is after the jump.

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In a lot of ways, magazines are better positioned than newspapers to make the transition to the Web:

• A site’s homepage has more in common with a magazine cover than a newspaper’s front page.
• Lists and numbers work well both in magazines and the Web
• The best magazines are niche publications that serve a loyal audience. Same for Web sites.
• Magazines have a (recently abandoned) tradition for great photography and visual journalism. Same for the Web.
• The best magazines have writers with distinct voices and perspectives. Same for the Web.

On the other hand, the Web tends to favor a few things that are absolutely the weakest elements of magazine journalism.

• Breaking news.
• Very short articles.

For magazines to make a successful transition to online, they need to play to their strengths and mitigate their weaknesses in the new medium. Here’s some thoughts on how to do that.

I think there are basically four simple tactics that can be used by most every magazine as they develop an online strategy:

1. Assign someone the task of gathering and publishing “breaking views” to the Web site. Most magazines have no advantage in trying to compete with wire services, newspapers and television about posting basic who-what-when-where stories. But they should be prepared to provide quick thoughts and perspective about the whys and the hows of events that are relevant to their audience — with the key word being relevant. The person who does this job is the site’s “anchor” — host a daily text-based conversation between readers and the newsroom about events of the day. The challenge: Finding someone who can do brief, quick, high quality explanatory journalism.
2. Create a way for readers to interact with each other. Whether you let readers interact with each other on their site or whether you leverage external social networking tools such as Facebook, YouTube and Twitter, magazine editors need to satisfy their readers’ desire to connect with each other. Many magazines are affinity publications that people read so they can keep up with — and become — a certain type of person. The best magazines online will define themselves as host of a big cocktail party and/or convention with their readers. The challenge: Make sure that one single person is responsible for cultivating this network of readers … and that the same person has the authority to make decisions about how best to do so.
3. Build tools that help readers get something done. Many magazines are read not as much for entertainment or affinity, but because readers want help getting something done — looking better, feeling better, spending money better, making more money. Magazines should have a running list of jobs they can help their readers do and should have someone on staff who can conceptualize those tools as well as talk to multimedia designers and developers to make the concept a reality. The challenge: Remembering that the audience and their tasks are more important than cool technology … and finding someone who knows how to manage a project.
4. Do excellent visual journalism. Photo galleries, videos, interactive graphics, animations…whatever. Give readers something with which they will want to spend time. This is the magazine’s antidote to the fast-past news snacking that happens online. The challenge: Getting writers to never abandon all anecdotal leads in favor of actually showing them. And training journalists to think about telling stories in multiple media.

Some of the stories the students brought in for me to discuss help illustrate some different techniques that magazine writers can use to adapt their storytelling to the Web.

This story about spring cleaning your dorm room was written for a print publication on campus, Kaleidoscope. It’s a good example of a piece that works almost as well in print as it does online. Here’s why:

• It makes extensive use of bullet points. The online audience doesn’t read, it scans. Typically people quickly scan down a Web page, their eyes fixed on the left side. Bullet points — as a well as subheads — give the reader’s eyes something to catch.
• It’s relatively short and on a narrow topic. In addition to writing for people who scan we also want to write for engines that search. Many people begin their news and information consumption online with a visit to a search engine such as Google. Search engines tend to favor pages that are densely packed with keywords. Keywords are the terms — typically nouns — that people enter in to a search engine. The higher the ratio of keywords to total text, the more likely a person is to come across your story.
• It’s evergreen. This piece is pegged to the idea of “spring cleaning” and it was publishing in 2009. But dorm rooms need organization in August and September and January and lots of other months as well. And they don’t need cleaning in 2009, but will likely still be a total mess in 2010 and 2020. That means that all those people who begin their reading with a visit to Google will continue to find this site. Unlike the content of newspapers, which often becomes stale within 24 hours, the content of magazines has the possibility to remain relevant long after the original news peg is gone. By writing with an evergreen angle, magazine writers can practice “sustainable journalism” and take advantage of “the long tail.”

The second story we discussed was a great example of the untapped possibilities of nonlinear writing as a technique for long-form journalism. The story was about three athletes — two at UNC and one at Duke — who had gone to the Olympics in Beijing. I find that students typically go through this process when writing stories like this:

1. Write anecdotal lead. Check.
2. Write a little twist or hook or reveal. Check.
3. Give the reader some essential facts that they need to put the rest of the story in context. Check.
4. Stare at computer screen for about 20 minutes, wondering what to do next.

This story is tough to write because it has three main characters. And it’s even tougher because none of the three characters are widely known to readers. The writer has to make introductions and make the reader care and then connect all the stories in some way.

This is where nonlinear writing comes in handy.

In linear writing — meaning that the reader has only one way to navigate the story, by starting at the top and working down through the end — writers have to come up with transitions that connect story lines and often have to move readers back and forth through time without jarring the reader too much. And when transitions don’t work, we often fall back on subheads.

In nonlinear writing, we can use HTML links in place of transitions. Links, well, link story elements together.

The process of constructing a nonlinear story I think is one that can help even writers who decide to tell the story by using the traditional linear technique. Here’s what we did for this story:

• Make a list of all the primary subjects of the story and draw them as circles on a piece of paper. We came up with six — each of the three athletes, Duke University, UNC and the Olympics.
• Determine whether and how each element is connected to each of the other elements. For this story, the Olympics were connected to the three athletes; the two UNC athletes were connected to UNC; the Duke athlete was connected to Duke University. But the athletes were not connected directly to each other — for example, they didn’t play the same sport — and the two universities weren’t connected — for example, they never played each other in the story.

At this point in linear story construction the writer would have to determine the order in which to present the connections. In nonlinear storytelling, readers will determine the order in which they explore the connections. So rather than writing one long story with transitions and subheads, you write six small stories that link to each other and provide perhaps some overlap with each other.

For some writers I can imagine this could be a liberating experience. For most, though, I suspect it will be difficult to leave behind their ownership of the story and humbly turn it over to their readers.

One last thing on this point — I really don’t have any good examples of professional writers putting this successfully in to practice. It remains a theory that I really have yet to prove. The only model I have is a nonlinear re-write I tried to do of an AP story about last year’s salmonella outbreak in peanut butter.

Another story brought in by the students was a good example of the need for writers to think about adding audio and visuals to their story. The story about a vintage clothing store started with a lead that was intended to help the reader visualize the scene inside the store. But I wanted to REALLY see the store. And hear the music. A multimedia story would have used video to show how the shoppers experienced the store’s physical space and would have let the readers hear the music and conversations there. The key word to this kind of journalism is “experience.” Storytellers need to always be thinking about the best way for their audience to experience and engage the story — even if they can’t work a video camera and even if they know nothing about codecs and digital editing.

Speaking of engaging the audience, the last student sample was a bit tougher to translate in to an online style but I think it was the story with the best opportunity to engage readers. It was essentially a news piece about new ticket distribution policies for concerts at UNC.

I wonder if — with encouragement and cultivation by the story’s reporter or editor — this could have been an opportunity to create a wiki in which readers could collaborate to create, debate and revise a ticket distribution policy of their own.

The wiki idea came to me only after I paused briefly on the idea of having readers comment on the article and discuss. But that would just quickly degenerate in to complaining and argument. I wonder if by giving readers an actual “deliverable” on which they could collaborate, the debate would be more positive and focused on finding a solution. Again… not sure.

And that leads nicely to the final message I had for students — don’t fear the unknown. The most successful future magazine editors will be the ones that fail fast and fail cheap. They won’t be the most facile with Web publishing tools, but they’ll be able to come up with audacious ideas and have enough technical vocabulary to collaborate with designers and programmers.

I think that’s pretty terrifying to graduating journalism students who can’t find a job. In an industry that is increasingly unstable, one bad idea can put you back on the streets. On the other hand, 1,000 bad ideas probably pave the path the executive editor’s office.

At the end, I raised this question: If government is already publishing a lot of raw data online, and if organizations like MDC are already put together in-depth, relatively objective analyses of public policy issues like this, then what does he — as a former journalist and the nonprofit’s communication director — think is the role for journalists? How do we fit in to his overall communication strategy for this report, I wondered.

That was a good question, Hart said. He noted that his primary focus now, after an initial and relatively small media hit, was convening small groups of influential and interested area leaders from various sectors to discuss how to implement some of MDC’s recommendations.

That made me wonder: Should journalists be doing that? Presuming we think that the subject of high school dropouts is an issue that is relevant and important for our audience, how much effort should news organizations be putting in to creating conversation around content that is created elsewhere? Should journalists be conveners?

This really isn’t that new of a question. The civic journalism movement of the 1990s advocated the convening of reader panels. Much of online journalism’s emphasis on interactivity, distributed reporting and other user-generated content has its roots in the civic journalism movement. In fact, the Pew Center for Civic Journalism eventually became J-Lab: The Institute for Interactive Journalism .

But the civic journalism movement pre-dated the “We the Media” movement, in which the people formerly known as the audience and the people formerly known as the sources all began pushing content on to the Web and competing directly with each other for direct communication with each other. In a world of Facebook groups and Twitter followers, the idea of gathering a representative sample of your community and putting them in a windowless conference room for 90 minutes with all the Chex Mix they can eat seems rather lifeless.

That’s partly because even though these reader panels are conversational, they’re still relatively static when compared to the flow of conversation that happens online. Reader panels, like polls, can only take a snapshot. Online community literally gives life to an issue.

Online, journalists can use social media to promote ideas, engage the audience and facilitate new connections between audience members. The “panelists” of an online community can come and go as their interest in the conversation grows or wanes. And, as the audience reacts to the topic, the conversation changes.

In our class, we’ll be exploring this issue in depth. The state’s dropout rate is one of those stories that many newspaper readers — wealthy, civicly engaged — see as a story about “those people.” Can we use social media not only to surface voices of people who have first-hand experience with the dropout issue, but to connect them directly to people who do not have first-hand experience with it? Can we create a conversation aimed at finding solutions and a deeper and broader understanding of the effect that high school dropouts have on North Carolina’s civic and economic climate?

For example, I’d like to try to use YouTube to create a sort of hybrid between StoryCorps and the CNN/YouTube debates. I want to see and hear people who know each other and people who don’t know each other asking questions that help all of us better understand the issue. That is a lot to ask from an audience that is composed in large part of kids who don’t have technological access or aptitude. And it’s a lot to ask of an audience that — despite the ease of online publishing — remains remarkably passive.

(Don’t believe me that even the future news audience is made up mostly of people who want to consume news rather than produce it, then try this: Ask some college students which of the following they would chose if they could only have one– the ability to reader other people’s Facebook status updates or the ability to update their own status. My bet is that 90 percent would choose passive monitoring of others rather than active publication of their own voice.)

I do think journalists should be conveners. I think they should practice authentic conversational leadership. I think that part of every beat reporter’s annual review should be the size of his or her online social network, and how they work the network to uncover new facts and to better describe patterns and structures of influence.

In the ongoing conversation about whether the nonprofit business model can save public affairs journalism, let me suggest a three-pronged agenda — based on this very cursory case study of MDC’s Disconnected Youth report (PDF) — for those of you who care about the future of news:

1. Push government at all levels to become more transparent by publishing documents and data on the Web in structured formats that can be used to connect the government’s information with other data and publishing tools.
2. Use existing NGOs — partisan and nonpartisan alike — to produce in-depth analytical reports about information for which there isn’t a sufficient private market but that are critical to a functioning democracy. NGOs and their funders will be motivated by their desire to set the public agenda around topics of their concern. They are not interested primarily in the popularity of their ideas.
3. Private news organizations remain in the business of audience aggregation. Journalists will compete to make analytical reports relevant and accessible to a broader audience. Their interest in aggregating audiences to whom they can sell advertising aligns well with the goal of convening diverse perspectives around an issue of public importance. Shoot, private news organizations who create online communities that make it fun or profitable to join might even be able to charge for the privilege. In other words, private news organizations charge for the private experiences they provide around a public good.

This three-pronged approach creates appropriate roles for government, charities and private enterprise.

That’s my theory anyway. Stay tuned for the next few months and I’ll let you know how it works in our coverage of North Carolina’s dropout rate.

So, if you want to work online doing something other than breaking news you have to learn how to plan. In my experience, any online project — from an election returns database to a deadline explainer on the capture of Saddam Hussein — needs six things:

1. A product concept
2. A storyboard
3. Asset management
4. A clear workflow
5. A financial budget
6. A testing and quality assurance procedure

1. The Product Concept

“Oh, oh! What if we made, like, an AJAX page using Flash to create an interactive tag cloud of multimedia with a Twitter feed like they did that one time on The New York Times?”

If you’ve heard this sentence spoken by one of your online colleagues but have no idea what it means, don’t worry. Neither do I.

Unfortunately, this is the way that too many online projects are defined. And they get made because too many managers are afraid to sound stupid and ask questions. My advice to newsroom managers, which I learned from my former boss and mentor Mark Stencel, is this: “Manage like a reporter. Ask questions.”

All good online news projects start with a good question. What do I mean by “good” question? A question that the audience wouldn’t think about asking, but one to which it would want to know the answer. You can’t do this if you don’t know your audience. I encourage all journalists to get to know your audience demographic and information consumption behaviors as well as you possibly can — not because we care what kind of information is popular, but because we want to know how we can serve their unmet information needs better than anyone else.

This is what the Newspaper Next report — borrowing an idea from The Innovator’s Solution – calls the concept of “jobs to be done.” The idea is that people don’t really buy products, they hire them to do a job. When you’re conceptualizing a project, think about what job the audience needs to get done and how your solution is going be hired over all the other job candidates.

(Of course, real innovation happens when companies create solutions for problems the consumers don’t yet know they have. Nobody knew they needed a fax machine until about 150 years after it was invented. Nobody knew they needed to know who was behind the burglary of the Democratic National headquarters in the Watergate. Nobody knew they needed to keep track of every human being they’ve ever met since high school. Nobody knew they needed to broadcast 140 character text messages.)

In 1957, Anthony Downs outlined four basic types of jobs that news consumers are trying to get done. The four types of information needs are: producer, consumer, voter and entertainment.

• Producer information helps you make money.
• Consumer information helps you spend money wisely.
• Voter information helps you choose between Candidate A and Candidate B.
• Entertainment information isn’t for anything. It’s just things that make you go hmmm.

But going back to the idea that good project managers are good reporters, I like to go with a who, what, when, where, how and why approach to conceptualizing the right story or news tool for the right audience.

• Who is the audience? Be very specific.
• What type of job are they trying to get done?
• When will they consume the information? Day? Time?
• Where will they be when they consume it? At work? At home? In the car? In the subway?
• How will they use it? On a desktop computer? Mobile phone? Television?
• Why will choose your solution over all the other similar choices?

I literally try to picture a person using the project. If there are several types of audiences, I try to draw out the use cases.

By now, I’ve probably lost or revolted many of the best “newspapermen” out there. I’ve made gumshoe reporting, hard-hitting interviews and beautiful prose in to just another widget to be marketed like a rotten little Twinkie. Fair enough, but at least I have put the audience in its proper place.

Now we can ask the next set of questions that any good public affairs reporting piece should ask. You have to be able to answer at least one of the following questions.

• How will this piece hold powerful people accountable?
• How will it explain an increasingly complex world?
• How will it shine light in a dark place?
• How will it give voice to the voiceless?

If I know my audience, and I do the kind of reporting that helps them hold powerful people accountable, then I know I’ve got a good project on my hand.

But, wait, Ryan. Didn’t you mention something up there in the headline about “online?” When are we going to talk about that?

How about now?

You’ve identified the audience. You’ve clarified how your piece will make the world a better place. Now, why not just write some nice paragraphs and be done with it? Well, that’s exactly what you should do if you can’t answer at least one (and preferably all) of these questions:

• What audio or visual elements would be appropriate for this story?
• What opportunities does this story give you to interact with the audience?
• How can the content, format or delivery of this story be customized to an individual user?

By now, we’ve asked questions about the audience, the impact and the execution of the piece. But most journalists don’t have time to read through all of this each time they plan a story. For the students in my classes, I’ve boiled this all down to a one page “pitch sheet” that is designed to help them do more planning at the front end and less salvaging at the back end.

2. Storyboarding

Just like writing a newspaper article is a process, so is producing an online news project. And just like all good writers start with an outline, all good online journalists start with a storyboard.

The purpose of a storyboard can simply be to plan out the orderly flow from one visual “scene” to the next in an animated graphic. But it’s real power lies in its ability to get you thinking about non-linear storytelling — stories through which each consumer can choose his or her own path.

The Knight Digital Media Center has a nice description and case study of storyboarding for online news production. The real gem of advice there is to avoid thinking about the “first part, second part, third part” of your story and think about “this part, that part.” In other words, you present the information and your audience members will choose the order in which they consume it.

If you prefer a more traditional journalistic way of storyboarding, you can think of each news element — the whos, whats, whens, wheres, whys and hows of your story — as each being the start of their own inverted pyramids. After you map an inverted pyramid for each news element, draw connections between the points at which two (or more) pyramids have common facts. I need to show you a picture of this, don’t I…?

As you are storyboarding, you’ll also want to note the medium you’ll use to tell that part of the story. Text? What kind? Video? Animation? Charts and graphs? Photos? Photo galleries? With or without sound? A database? A map? A discussion board?

The biggest advantage that storyboarding has over inverted pyramiding (?) is that you can begin to doodle the actual layout of various screens to show how the multiple media fit together. Again, for an example of this, please see the Knight Digital Media Center.

Here’s an idea for an exercise that also came from the Knight Digital Media Center via a learning module it made for NewsU.org: Take a in-depth feature or investigative story from the newspaper and create a storyboard for it. What are the elements it has? What are the audio and visual possibilities? What are the interactive elements? How could it be crafted as a non-linear story?

3. Manage Assets

One of the biggest challenges with managing an online news project is keeping track of the all the pieces once they start moving. Projects often have multiple elements, each of those elements have sub-elements and different people may be working on each of those sub-elements at different times. How do you keep people from stepping on each other’s toes? How do you make sure folks aren’t accidentally overwriting previous work?

Asset management and storyboarding come together when the team members begin to talk about the nuts and bolts of reporting the project. Who will the subjects be? When, where and how will interviews take place? How will we get the data needed for that animation? Does our software support that kind of online discussion?

In newspapers, asset management is done with the daily budget. In television, it is done with the show rundown.

The four tricks for online news asset management are to have a standard file naming convention, implement some sort of version control, and create a stylesheet that can be used across elements. Elizabeth Osder, Erik Ulken and others do a nice job of demonstrating the value of asset management in the case study they did for the Online News Association and NewsU.org.

File Naming Conventions

File naming conventions are not new to traditional journalists. These are the slugs of your story, often a one-word description of the piece. Filenames can also include other information such as the media type, the creator’s name or the date — depending on which is relevant.

For example, a project on the high school dropout rate might have file naming conventions such as:

• teachers-thornburg-main.html
• teachers-thornburg-photo1.jpg
• teachers-thornburg-photo2.jpg
• teachers-thornburg-audio.wav
• teachers-thornburg-data.xml

This naming convention would indicate that the story is about teachers, it is being done by Ryan Thornburg and that it has one main story, two photos an audio file and a data file related to it.

Of course, there are almost infinite ways to do file naming conventions. The important thing is that anyone working on your project can tell at a glance what the file contains and how it relates to other files.

Content Management Systems

Along with file name convention, comes asset organization. Your project team should have an agreement about the common location that files will be stored. Whenever possible, it is a good idea to get files loaded in to a content management system as soon as possible. A content management system, or CMS, is essentially a database that stores your content, meta-data about the content (the author, creation date, file type, etc.) and the relationships it has with other data. Some examples of content management systems are Workbench, Ellington, Drupal, WordPress, and Saxotech. You can read even more about content management systems at CMSwatch.com .

But content management systems aren’t always appropriate for projects that are still early in the development and production stage. Early in the process, the best solution is to give team members access to a shared file server where they can save files. And on these file servers, you will want to have folders that reflect both the project workflow as well as its organization. But one of those organizational aspects must take priority.

For example, you might have final versions and draft versions of the teacher story mentioned above. You could either have a directory structure that looks like this:

• drafts/teacher/
• final/teacher/

or one that looks like this

• teacher/drafts
• teacher/final

but what you don’t want to have is two sibling folders that confuse the workflow, like this

• teacherdrafts
• finalteacherfiles

I prefer a file system that prioritizes workflow over content because it makes it easier to simply move entire folders from draft to editing to testing and publication status.

Stylesheets

One of the hallmarks of online publishing is that it separates format from content. This means that you can have the same content (a headline, for example) displayed in several different colors and fonts in several different media. That means that styles are also something you need to standardize across an entire project early in the planning phase.

I’ve never used a stylesheet like Elisabeth Osder did in the University of Southern California example, but I think she has a good idea. Here is her example of what a stylesheet – not to be confused with a Cascading Style Sheet — should look like.

4. Workflow

Assets are just one of the things you will have to manage in an online news project. You also need to manage the people. And it’s especially important to manage how and when each of those various people touch each of the pieces of content. This is called the workflow.

There’s a lot of software out there than can help you manage a workflow. Basecamp, Microsoft Project and OmniPlan are just three examples. If you have a Mac, I think OmniPlan does the best job balancing features, price and ease of use.

Of course, a simple Excel or Google spreadsheet will often do just fine. That’s basically what they used in the USC case study.

However you organize it, a good workflow should have the following elements:

People: Who are they? For what deliverables are they responsible? What decisions do they have the authority to make.

Tasks: A list of everything that needs to get done. These should be as specific and granular as possible. If more than two people touch a task, think about dividing it in to two tasks.

Deadlines: Giving meaning to the lives of journalists everywhere. Be specific about date and time, even if it seems silly. Journalists like to work around the clock. The end of the day comes at different times for different people.

Also, be hard-nosed and conservative about the amount of time it will take to complete each task. Remember that you will make tradeoffs as deadlines approach — you can make something quickly and cheaply and well. You can get two of those, but never all three. Deadlines will help you determine which one you want to sacrifice when the inevitable snafu arises.

Dependencies: This is where the rubber meets the road in workflows. For every task, what other tasks have to be done first. You can’t edit a video until you shoot the video. You can’t map the data until you acquire the data.

Dependencies will tell you if anyone is creating a bottleneck at any point in the project, and it also helps to prevent all the content from landing on the final editor’s desk too late to make changes.

That gets at another point about the design workflow — be sure to have multiple sign-offs during the process. It is often more difficult to make last minute changes on the Web than it is to make similar changes in print. The design sign-offs should come in the following steps”

1. Storyboard and wireframes
2. Black & white comps
3. Color comps
4. Functional test site

5. Financial Budget

When I was an editor, I’d often have staffers ask me, “Do you think we should build …?” My answer was always the same: “Depends on what it’s going to cost me.”

Even if you don’t have to worry about the financial costs of building something, it’s important to keep a constant eye on the opportunity costs.

But on the money side, here’s what I want to know:

• What will be the travel costs?
• Are you going to have to buy new hardware?
• Are we going to have to buy new software?
• Are we going to have to pay for any content — like logos or music?
• Are we going to have to pay for stringers to cover your daily work while you’re working on this?
• How much time will we need from other departments, especially IT?

6. Testing/QA

If any job in journalism remains secure, it’s the job of the copyeditor. As readers of this blog can attest, journalist’s can’t spell and often use poor grammar. But the job of the copyreditor is going to change some, too. Copyeditors are going to need to manage workflow across media and in large sets of data, and they will need to be comfortable with letting some style and grammar errors go live before they get fixed (while also demanding that they ALL get fixed ASAP).

Working Across Media

Text for all pieces of a project should be edited as early in the project plan as possible. This includes CHA in animated graphics and titles in videos.

If getting copyeditors the text early in the process isn’t going to work for you, then your multimedia editors are going to have to take responsibility for and understand that they may be re-rendering video the night before launch.

Working With Data

How do you copyedit the election results of every candidate for federal office? That’s the problem we had in 2000 and 2004 at washingtonpost.com. Luckily, we had Tammy Kennon to answer that question for us.

The problem is this…how to check the spelling of more than a thousand candidate names, as well as the party affiliation, as well as making sure that the computer programmers told the Web page to display “1 p.m.” instead of “1 PM” or “1:00 p.m.” or “01:00 p.m.” or “13:00:00″ or “JD 2451853.04167.”

The solution we developed was to test a few instances of each possible thing a user could see (“But what if a candidate dies and her name is taken off the ballot?” or “What if the winner of the popular vote doesn’t win the electoral vote?” or “What if Nebraska splits its electoral votes?” or “What if the polls in a state are in two different time zones?” or “What if Nader’s votes all of a sudden end up determining the outcome of the election?” I mean, seriously, you would not believe all the weird things that could happen on election night.

Fixing Errors After They Go Live

Let me be clear, in an ideal world every piece of content would be vetted for fact, spelling, grammar, punctuation and AP style adherence by at least six fact-checkers, line editors, copyeditors and layout chiefs. But the world has never been ideal and we’ve always had to live with some degree of risk that we would accidentally print things that look goofy.

The biggest difference in QA between print and online is that print can’t be fixed once it’s published. Online can be fixed. That means that while I’m no less willing to publish a fact error online, I am willing to tolerate more misplaced commas.

The key thing about this final step in online project planning is that everything must be tested before it goes live. Every link should be clicked on. Every page should be tested in both IE and Firefox browsers, and on both Windows and Macs. The pages should be tested on at least two different screen resolutions — 800×600 and 1024×768.

If you’re dealing with anything other than static HTML, the entire project should be uploaded to a testing server that mimics exactly the live server. It needs to have the same version of PHP, the same load-balancing specifications, the same file structures, etc.

And, getting back to deadlines, the testing needs to be done in time to allow for the inevitable fixing.

ADDITIONAL READING

Site Planning

• Planning a Web Site (J-Learning.org)

Storyboarding

• Multimedia Storytelling (Knight Digital Media Center)
• Storyboarding Basics … (PBS Media Shift)
• Elements of Digital Storytelling (Nora Paul and Christina Fiebich)

Case Studies

• Online Project Development: Part 1 (NewsU.org)
• USC Multimedia Reporting Seminar: Making It in L.A. (NewsU.org)

The bad news is that I didn’t get a chance to have MDC’s Richard Hart host a discussion about the N.C. dropout rate. The good news is that I had a chance to run two good live experiments in online journalism.

The first, and probably most interesting, was the use of amateur reports to track the snow. Last night on Twitter I asked my followers whether there was a common location where people would be storing photos and other reports on today’s road conditions. One of my students, Sara Gregory, suggested that we set up a tag, “#CH-Snow” for people to post their accounts. And it turned out to provide some very localized views of the storm — stuff that I wasn’t getting from the local radio station’s interview with the town manager or county sheriff. Although, I also got a lot of good information from WRAL and WCHL that I would not have received elsewhere. For an example of how Twitter can be used to create an instant and ad-hoc reader news network, go here. Today also provided a much larger example of how Twitter can be used for breaking news coverage via an ad hoc network of amateurs and professionals. See #inaug09 for that example.

But journalists have to understand that in order to make such a tool work when needed they have to have already made these kinds of connections with the community. If a journalist doesn’t build a network of followers in a time of calm, he or she won’t be able to activate that network in a time of crisis.

The second innovation was the online discussion I hosted on my class Blackboard site instead of hosting live class. I gave the class a reading assignment, and they are begging to use Publish2 to extend the conversation. We are the N.C. Diploma Dilemma newsgroup on that site, if you are interested in keeping track and adding your comments as well.

Of course, online discussions are just a simple demonstration of the way that the Internet creates an on-demand information tool that transcends space and time. Of course, books do that, too. But book readers can’t backsass the author. No “Gutenberg, your drawings are LAME!” And don’t you think that’s something the Renaissance was completely lacking?

This is not a lecture about how I wish the online news audience behaved. It is a lecture based on years of watching actual site usage at national news sites, watching focus groups, and reading industry surveys — primarily those done by Pew and collected in the annual State of the News Media reports.

This isn’t a lecture about how to change audience habits. It’s a lecture about riding a wave that is SO much bigger than journalism.

A version of the lecture is available here as an audio-only MP3 or in a Slidecast version that includes the visual presentation below.

If you have a question about the presentation — especially if you have an experience that contradicts any of the information I present here, please contact me.

If you are a blogger, publisher or editor and are interested in having me work with your site, also please contact me.

[display_podcast]

1. All journalists should accurately identify themselves.

2. Conflicts of interest should also be disclosed, if not avoided altogether.

3. News and opinion should be clearly differentiated.

4. Photography and video should not be doctored or misleadingly used, unless it is obvious it has been altered only to entertain or express opinion.

5. Journalism should serve the public interest rather than the personal whim of bloggers or special interests of any kind.

Finally, he says, “Too much concentration on the philosophical questions about journalism in the digital world runs the risk of ignoring the most important question before us. Who will pay for the news?”

Those seem pretty straightforward and not too onerous. I have a quibble with his third and fifth points because I’m not sure these can be accomplished in a way that convinces and builds trust with the audience, even when done by the most well-intentioned journalists. Some people know the difference between opinion and fact, and for them labels are meaningless. Other people don’t know the difference between opinion and fact even when it’s labeled, and for them labels are also meaningless. “The public interest” I think is also a bit elusive and is phrase that has been so widely used by policy advocates on all sides that I’m not sure it has much ability to build or sustain credibility. Instead, I’d replace those two points with one — that journalism should be “evidence-based” and respect the scientific method.

I would like to thank the Tampa Tribune for helping demonstrate the importance of knowing how newsrooms are organized — what skills, duties and concepts are held at different staff positions, and how those positions relate to each other.

The Tribune’s reorganization memo was posted to Romenesko yesterday. Thanks to Paul Jones for the tip.

Now, I’ve written more than my fair share of reorganization memos. All have been aimed at breaking down silos. Some have worked. Some haven’t. But all eventually create new silos. That’s because newsrooms, like nature, abhor a power vacuum. And someone always fills it.

In restructurings, there are always three important people:

• The person who has budgetary discretion.
• The person who makes the schedule.
• The person who has the power to hire and fire.

Sometimes those are three different people. Sometimes they’re the same person. But those folks have inherent tools that can make things happen — or not happen — in a newsroom. These people have what I call economic power — they control the important resources of time and money.

But that isn’t the only source of influence in a newsroom, especially an online newsroom. Perhaps the most influential people in an online newsroom over time are the people who can work laterally to collaborate with their peers. And this ability is largely a result of who has certain skills, and how many of those people have that skill. For example, if I’m the only Flash developer in my newsroom I’m calling the shots no matter how low I am in the org chart.

Well, at least in the short term. Over time, the person who has the ability to fire me can separate a skilled developer from his or her daily power, but that usually only comes after long conversations with other staff who are disgruntled that the developer isn’t working on his or her project. And only if the manager can determine whether the developer is sandbagging or whether he or she is really being asked to do more than is humanly possibly. But usually by that time, the developer — who has more career options than probably anyone in journalism — has decided to move on to another shop for more money or more (promised) autonomy.

That, my friends, is the power of the bottleneck in the online newsroom. And that’s just one of the reasons it’s important to survey folks about their skills, duties and responsibilities. The people who sit in positions of Bottleneck Power have the ability to move innovation quickly forward or to thwart even the best intentioned manager.

From the memo, I can’t tell where the position of Bottleneck Power resides within the Tampa newsroom, but I guarantee there is one.

My best wishes to my colleagues in Tampa on their reorganization. I look forward to watching how it will change the journalism they produce.