The Evolving Newsroom

I had the pleasure last night of speaking at a convivial gathering of journalists and communications professionals about where journalism fits into new media ecosystems. It was great fun and my thanks go to @ericalloyd at Network PR for the invite.

What follows below, more or less, is what I said. There’s coverage on TV3 including video of fellow speaker Stephen Collins, a social-media-in-business-consultant better known on Twitter as @trib, and me.

A little while ago a UK politician stood up and said ‘we must save our newspapers’. In the US a senator has called a series of hearings into the state of newspapers in that country.

Why? Because newspapers are in trouble in a few places – specifically in developed economies where circulation has been in decline for years.

Newspapers are in trouble because we don’t buy them so much anymore. For lots of reasons, some of them lifestyle.

We’re busier, we drive more, we work longer hours and we have the internet. It’s not 1975, Merv Smith doesn’t rule the airwaves and we don’t put stuff in the paper on Saturday morning when we want to sell it.

Young people aren’t growing into newspapers, as previous generations did. And we’re all spending an awful lot of time online.

So some newspapers are in trouble.

This worries people because we tend to conflate the future of newspapers with the future of news and the future of journalism and the future of democracy.

I don’t think we should.

If you stand back, and unpack this, what you find at the heart of news is… information.

What we the readers need is accurate, timely and relevant information about the world around us.

We need it to run our businesses, to keep our politicians honest, to protect our families, to know what kind of world our children are growing up in so we can prepare them.

We need information when we travel, when bridges fail, when volcanoes blow – accurate, timely information about the world around us.

For a long time journalists have played a major role in bringing us that information.

They’ve gone out and talked to people and attended council meetings and read agendas and sat in on select committees and so on. Then they settled on what seemed most relevant to the most readers, and wrote up as much of it as they had space for.

They’ve delivered this information in newspapers, and in radio and TV bulletins.

Now they’re delivering it on websites and mobile phones and Twitter and Facebook as well – and this is part of the new face of journalism.

Some journalists are reporting live from court via Twitter, they’re live blogging events and conferences via their blogs or Twitter or similar applications.

There’s also newsgathering done online now, through these social networks and, of course, search engines and web-based databases.

Some journalists are taking it further by using blogs to talk to readers about stories before they write them – to get story ideas, develop story ideas, get contacts.

Some go further still and set up networks where their contacts, perhaps a scientist, an academic or a tax specialist, write guest posts or blog alongside the journalist and respond directly to readers’ questions.

Others go further still. Much further. And this is where it gets interesting.

In the US there’s a website called everyblock.com where you type in your postcode and drill down to your neighbourhood or street.

You can see how many houses are for sale in your neighbourhood and what they’re listed for.

You can see which restaurants failed health and safety inspections and reviews of local businesses.

You can see planned public works, new books arrived at the library,  crimes committed on your street and neighbours’ blogs and pictures.

You can see council data, government data, emergency callouts and lost and found notices.

So this is information, accurate and timely information that couldn’t be any more relevant – it’s about the very street that you live in.

And it’s delivered by a journalist. The site is the brainchild of Adrian Holovaty, a journalist and computer programmer who has a particular interest in information and how it can be gathered, packaged and distributed online.

Adrian won funding from the Knight Foundation and with his team went to public organisations across Chicago – health inspectors, councils, government, libraries, you name it and asked them to make this information available to his team electronically.

This information is all public information, although not necessarily previously published information.

Their success – the site now covers a number of US cities – showcases a cost-efficient way of delivering useful information to readers direct from the source. After all, the sources of this information are the very sources that journalists traditionally go to.

One attractive scenario that comes to mind here is to use this cost-effective means to deliver nuts and bolts reporting, freeing resources to support more considered and analytical reporting to run alongside.

This is just one example of thinking about journalism differently in a digital world. It may not be the only way to think about journalism in the future, or the best way, and it may not work on its own, but it’s an interesting take and I think inspirational.

If nothing else it shows that journalism can evolve in new and interesting formats. In other words, newspapers are not the last word in journalism. Information is.

Footnote: For the record, I love newspapers and wish them no ill. I also think they have a good way to run yet. But journalism needs to evolve and now’s exactly the right time to be thinking and talking about interesting and workable alternatives.