Only 1 out of 16 students said that it was UNethical to “download a photo from the Web server of a blogger, upload it to your server, using it on your site along with credit to the original creator.”

I’m dying to talk with them about this on Thursday to hear more about their rationale. Maybe it says something about how they see bloggers. Maybe it says something about the way they see ownership of content.

What do you think?

Standing in the outfield of a giant baseball stadium under the glow of more than 40 video walls and monitors, the lead singer of the rock group U2 aimed his remote up at the screens and flipped from station to station while tens of thousands of concert-goers screamed and cheered. It was the fall of 1992. CNN had just made history with the first live video coverage of a war, and somewhere in a computer lab at the University of Illinois – in a town that could have comfortably fit its entire population in the sports stadium – researchers were about six months away from launching the first graphical Web browser.

The hundreds of channels on cable TV were about to be dwarfed by millions of Web pages. The mass media that was able to send one message to an entire planet all at the same time and had defined a shared American experience for more than a half century was about to be replaced by communication technology that would blend the telephone with the television and the postal service and the printing press to form a decentralized network of news and information that would allow every – or everyone with a computer and Internet access – to talk to everyone else all at the same time.

The online news audience doesn’t spend an average of 35 minutes every day because they need another glowing box. News organizations that aren’t committed to giving their audience something fundamentally different should quit throwing money at their Web site and start re-investing in legacy media.

They didn’t come all the way out here to watch TV. Stop giving them a news product. Let them visit news experience. They’ll pay for that.

Online journalism is fundamentally different from other forms of media. The technology that forms its backbone is different. The time, manner and place that people use it is different. And its capabilities to make stories more relevant and more memorable to your audience are different.

Part of the power of the Internet is its ability to cheaply distribute text, audio and images to millions of people all at the same time. Relative to the cost of setting up your own television station, posting a video to the Internet is incredibly cheap — even when you take in to account the costs of the video camera, the editing software, the computer and the Internet access. And relative to the cost of printing all the newspapers you might need to make your story available to everyone in your town, the cost of reaching each additional reader online is almost nothing.

Those innovations alone give online journalism the potential to revolutionize the world, but they aren’t the most significant differences between the Internet and traditional media like television and newspapers.

As an online journalist, you can take advantage of three techniques that were impossible in older media. These three things make reporting, producing and distributing your stories via the Internet fundamentally different from all other forms of media:

1.    Multimedia. Journalists have more choices about how to combine different storytelling techniques to convey different elements of a single story.
2.    Interactivity. Sources, journalists and members of the audience all take part in the creation of a common story.
3.    On-Demand Delivery. The audience has unprecedented control over the time, place and subject matter of the news they consume.

These are the three pillars of online journalism.

The good news? Each pillar directly supports a traditional news value — prominence, impact, proximity, currency, magnitude, conflict, oddity, emotional impact — and each matches up with the five news elements — who, what, when, where, why and how.

Journalists have the task of picking the right technique for the story, and not using the Twitter or Facebook or Flash or blog hammer to smack every story like a box of undifferentiated nails.

Put together, these pillars create an experience, not just a good or a service. In their book, “The Experience Economy,” Joseph Pine and James Gilmore, write that an experience is engaging. It’s value is realized over time because it is memorable. And it personal — it changes and affects each visitor differently.

So, stop debating whether you should charge people to read your newspaper online. The only sensible thing to do is charge for it or stop putting it online. Then start thinking about how you can take your legacy news product and sell it as part of the news experience you create on the Web. And then you can charge for your Web site. Or not. Heck if I know…

The audio of the talk is after the jump.

[display_podcast]

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.

More here.

Links Referenced in This Lecture:

• Slide 3
  • Little Green Footballs
  • Powerline Blog
• Slide 5
  • Sworn Statements by Abu Ghraib Detainees (washingtonpost.com)
  • The Fact Checker: Romney and Abortion (washingtonpost.com)
• Slide 7
  • Bluffton Today
  • Live Online With Bob Kaiser (washingtonpost.com)
  • Wiki Scanner (wired.com)
  • GasBuddy.com
  • #ch-snow (Twitter.com)
  • Ushahidi.com
  • Veep-O-Matic (washingtonpost.com)
  • Consumer Consequences (American Public Media)
• Slide 10
  • MarketWatch.com
  • War in Iraq (washingtonpost.com)
  • Times Topics (NYTimes.com)
• Slide 14
  • Breaking News Blog (L.A. Times)
  • iReport of Va. Tech Shooting (CNN)

Additional Resources

How to Report a News Story Online (Online Journalism Review)

A Guide to ‘Crowdsourcing’ (Knight Citizen News Network)

Multimedia Storytelling (Knight Digital Media Center)

MP3 Audio of the Lecture

Lecture: Reporting for online media

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 goal: Partner with N.C. news organizations to create a set of multimedia, interactive news reports about the state’s high school dropout rate. And since part of the class’s mission is to be a public service, I’ll be blogging from now until May 2 about the lessons we learn.

Here’s the syllabus and here’s how the first day went …

The class has 14 students, with room for four more. Only four have any newsroom experience. The rest have never even had an internship. Only two have online experience at all. But probably a third to a half said that someone in their family had not earned a high school diploma.

My hope is that what the students lack in the journalism experience that would help them survive this advanced reporting class they will make up for in curiosity , creativity and passion for the issue. They’re UNC students, so I have no doubt they will.

Their first assignment (I mean, other than reading Journalism 2.0 before they arrived in class this morning) is going to be to start creating a stream of links using Publish2. This week we’re going to walk through the basics of HTML and FTP as a a way of understanding just why online journalism is so cool — it’s all about the link…

Oh yeah, we’re working on Macs in the classroom we used today, but we’ll have PCs in the lab/newsroom that’s open from 2 – 5 p.m. on Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays.

More on Thursday after those lab classes. Also on Thursday, look for a report on my other new class, “Newsdesk,” in which we create an interactive, multimedia news organization from the ground up.

First, the Internet didn’t do anything to newspapers that the 1970s didn’t do more effectively.

Second, these aren’t the right questions to ask.

We shouldn’t be asking about the delivery mechanism people use to get their news, we should be asking about the source and substance of the content.

At its heart, the Internet is just a delivery mechanism — perhaps an incredibly democratic one, but not one that inherently changes information consumption. And this is not a battle of delivery mechanisms. It’s a battle of storytelling styles. Print has a certain style and certain news judgment. Broadcast has another distinct style and news judgment. The Internet can either merely inherit these styles or it may — if we choose — develop its own style — an interactive, multimedia and on-demand style unlike anything we’ve seen in previous media.

The problem with looking only at the medium through which people receive their news is that it doesn’t help us understand the content being delivered there. If I look at a newspaper story online rather than on paper am I any better or worse prepared to participate in democracy and a free market economy? If I watch a TV news segment online — or on my phone or iPod — do I retain or use the information any differently?

If we don’t start taking advantage of multimedia, interactive and on-demand benefits of online journalism, then it won’t matter whether the Internet “does” to television what it “did” to newspapers.

If we relocate these media without re-inventing them, what fun is that?

They say: “We plan to highlight innovation, chronicle setbacks and analyze the business side of college newspapers. We also plan to look at how college journalists are lending their voices to the big stories of the day.”

A good idea, methinks. Congrats, Sara and Andrew. You and your blog subjects are the Future of News.

And I’d be remiss if I didn’t also give a shout out to a great new multimedia site just launched by Tar Heel students. Andaman Rising is a collection of 15 student-produced multimedia stories about life in southern Thailand after the 2004 Asian tsunami. This kind of excellent multimedia documentary work is becoming so reliable here in Chapel Hill that I take it for granted. Congrats students. You, too, are the Future of News.