The Evolving Newsroom

For the past few months I’ve been working to make the National Diploma in Journalism, a New Zealand industry standard qualification, available for online study through Wintec. It’s a big project which has demanded a lot of work by a core group of people and which has also involved a lot of imagining – how the course will work, how long exercises will take to do, how students will interact with the material, with us, with each other. Just as with building a website, until you have users – in our case, students – you can’t really know how it’s going to work.

We’ve read about online instruction and community building, we’ve picked people’s brains about their experience of teaching and learning online, we’ve inherited some material from the people who first ran this course, at WITT in the Taranaki, and we’ve done our best to take classroom activities and transform them for the online experience and to conceive new teaching and learning materials that we think will make sense for and engage someone who is sitting alone at a computer at their home or work.

In a couple of weeks our real, rather than imagined, students will be starting the course and letting us know directly what is working for them and what isn’t. I can’t wait. I’m realling looking forward to meeting them. Between this project and launching All About The Story, I’ve become a huge fan of constructive feedback and ceaselessly interested in learning what users need.

The National Diploma is taught in a number of polytechs and universities in New Zealand, including Wintec, and is usually covered in a full-time one-year course or incorporated into the third year of a degree programme. We are offering the online, or distance learning, version of the course over two years and students can expect to spend up to 15 hours a week on study – quite a commitment. That said, we think we’ve built a rich and interesting course and are looking forward to developing a useful online community with our students, and exploring crossover with our face to face students.

Enrolments are done and dusted and the course starts with an orientation week on Monday February 8, but we may be able to squeak one or two more people in – so if you know of anyone who wants a journalism qualification but wants to study from home while they continue to work, give them this link or my email: julie.starr@wintec.ac.nz.

The start of the course will coincide with the end of my stint as Editor in Residence at Wintec, a position I’ve held and enjoyed for the past two years. It’s time now for someone else to bring their industry experience and perspective to our students, fresh speakers to our Media Bites lunch functions, and to manage the production of the Fieldays Exhibitor, a newspaper produced daily by students during the Fieldays event each year.

I will be continuing on at Wintec, overseeing the online National Diploma in Journalism programme, doing a little teaching and spending time with students as and when. The rest of the time I’ll be developing All About The Story and, maybe, doing a bit more writing. We’ll see.

Here’s to a great year.

I wrote a few weeks ago to say that I was launching an online marketplace for news features and other stories. It’s called All About The Story, it’s in beta and it’s off to a great start.

I said I’d write more about why we’re doing it and the people behind it. I can’t fit all my thoughts in a single post so here’s one driving idea for me, a starter for ten.

Why am I doing it?

I’m a lapsed journalist who wants to keep some skin in the game. I don’t want to be a salaried full-time journalist or a full-time freelance. I don’t want to earn a living from journalism, I  want to supplement my living with journalism. I am learning new skills and diversifying. Who wouldn’t in this climate?

Jobs are being lost from newsrooms of all kinds here and around the world, salaried specialists are fewer and farther between and if newspapers here follow the trajectory of newspapers overseas, those newsrooms will shrink further and some may close their doors.

Journalists have to look to the future. What can they do? Here are a few ideas:

• retrain so you can be a multimedia storyteller and web publisher and increase your employability long term.
• build a specialist writing portfolio and client base.
• develop a specialty and start a niche blog.
• pitch in with some other entrepreneurial journalists and start a niche news business.
• diversify by doing some teaching, report writing, media training.
• jump ship and finally get that well-paid job in PR or work for a worthy cause.
• buy that B&B you’ve always wanted in Nelson and enjoy the change of lifestyle.
• any of the above AND sell stories on All About The Story.

The niche blog, or the ‘branded journalist’, is a popular concept and one I like in the long term for some journalists. But blogs require a lot of work and it takes time to build to the point where you can earn advertising dosh. (I don’t know anyone in New Zealand earning a living from their blog alone, for example, but I’m very happy to be corrected.)

For many of us, a niche blog isn’t going to get much past a part-time job.

And even if I have a niche blog, say one about media, what do I do if I want to write a story about an environment court hearing that I think’s important but few news outlets are able to cover?

What if I also want to write a story about the mullet boats my Dad and his pals used to sail out of Cox’s Creek and race up to Leigh. Or about the way the organic store in Raglan has grown and now delivers weekly grocery boxes into Hamilton and is now on the market. Or about the mad bureaucracy in teaching, or Webstock 2010, or CloudCamp Sydney 2010, or Publish Asia 2010, or the growing open data movement, or the way institutions lock down the internet so much it’s hard to know how anyone gets any work done.

I can’t run ten blogs. I don’t know the editors and section editors of all of the newspapers and magazines and websites that might be interested in these stories. I’m not gifted at pitches or cold calling and I don’t have time to send my ideas out one email at a time to one editor a time and wait for a response that may never come. (No offence, but editors aren’t renowned for assiduously replying to emails in a timely way, they’re simply too busy).

In short, the barrier to entry for me to continue doing journalism is too high.

Which is a shame. I really like writing stories. I miss it. I’m not alone. There are thousands upon thousands of people like me  – in New Zealand alone – tentatively knocking on news industry doors and drifting away when they don’t open easily.

There are journalism students and graduates who want to get started, there are journalists sitting in front of computers playing round with data visualisations and audio slide shows who want a way to sell them. There are talented non-journalists with specialist knowledge and a knack for writing who want to participate too.

There are people who could cover tribunal hearings and council meetings and certain kinds of court cases. People who can write features and cover sporting events and conferences and specialise in fly fishing or lifestyle farming or kelp exports or R&D or biotech developments.

Which is interesting, given that news organisations are stretched too thin these days to cover courts and hearings and council meetings and conferences and academia and science and technology and R&D and events like they used to. These same news organisations need affordable content streams from multiple niches to fill their pages and help them build ‘monetisable verticals’ on their hungry, hungry websites.

Seems to me like there’s some mutual need there.

How do I know there are thousands upon thousands of people like me who are no longer full-time journalists but still want to write?

Because I hear people talking about it.

And because I see them writing for mass-content outfits like DemandMedia for US$3.50 a story, or for Triond where you get a teeny share of advertising revenue, or pitching for web writing work at low prices or slowly building up skin on listing sites to write web content – because those are the only easy-entry options available online.

It’s not the stuff we went to journalism school for, though.

So I’ve built a marketplace where people like me can write the stories we’re passionate about and easily post them for sale, tagged with keywords to make them findable. It’s a place where editors can find stories to plug gaps in pages, browse for inspiration and spot new talent. Over time, we aim to build a diverse and deep multimedia content stream with wide appeal. Think of it as TradeMe or eBay for news.

It’s not the traditional way of selling stories and I know I won’t sell all the stories I list on All About The Story. But if I sell  three stories, well, that’s three more than I would have done by leaving them on my hard drive or posting them on this blog.

The world is changing and I need to change with it. I want a way to participate that fits with my lifestyle.

Are we there yet?

No, we’re just starting out. Will it work with just a handful of users? Not at as well as it will work with an army of users. Will it work just within New Zealand? It will work best if we operate overseas too, and we’ll work towards that. Can we pull it off? I believe so. We have 75+ members after just a few weeks with barely any advertising. We know we will build that membership significantly in the new year.

We have a lot of work to do, functionality we want to add, and we need feedback:

• is a 20% transaction fee too steep for authors, if so what’s the right number?
• do our copyright licences work in this new, everything-is-online environment?
• what price range is right?
• what about word counts?
• how can we best let writers know what publishers want?
• should we add video first, or commissioning or the ability to make an offer on stories?
• are buyers in Australia and Asia and beyond happy to pay in NZ dollars for now?

All feedback gratefully received.

Who’s ‘we’?

I have the good fortune to be working with a group of really smart people. This is who they are in a nutshell:

• Michael Koziarski: Michael “Koz” Koziarski is a software consultant who specialises in Ruby on Rails, database architecture, web businesses and object oriented design. He’s been a contributor to Rails since 2004 and a Rails core team member since 2005. Koz has created and maintains several open source projects.
• Lance Wiggs: Lance is an independent consultant providing management, strategy, growth and valuation consulting to media and internet based businesses. He writes at Lancewiggs.com.
• Natalie Ferguson: Natalie designs simple, usable, websites and web applications that make work and life easier and more fun. Find her at simpleandloveable.com.
• Joshua Vial: Joshua is a web developer with a passion for business, technology and social change. He has been building websites for The Media Suite since 2004 and has recently been spending his time on several start up ventures. Joshua is a trustee for 350 Aotearoa and Intersect and blogs about sustainable development at www.joshuavial.com.

Finally…

A big thanks to those who’ve already signed up with All About The Story as buyers or sellers and who recognise the potential of having another outlet for content. We have a couple of dozen stories for sale already and are delighted that cartoonist Malcolm Evans is adding cartoons for sale every day.

So, editors, drop in over the silly season and see if there’s something you can buy that will meet your needs. And writers, pull together a few stories over the summer break and post them for sale. Let’s start something.