Hybrid Roles in the Newsroom

This week, Simon Holt, the managing editor of Brisbane Times, spoke to us about the fluidity of modern newsrooms and the fact that there are no longer strict boundaries placed on journalists. Instead, journalists are expected to have hybrid newsroom roles.

For example, print and online journalists are no longer expected to work purely in their specialized media. Instead, they are expected to be both print and online journalists, and probably have working knowledge of radio and TV. News organisations do not operate solely in one media (except for specialist, new, online media outlets like Brisbane Times). The ABC for example, operates across TV, radio and online, while papers like The Australian also have an online presence.

Journalists in these organisations have to not only be able to work with journalists in other media sectors, but also have to be able to write an article for print and then write it's online sister. No longer are print journalists writing one copy and sending it to online journalists to write an online version. Instead, they have to do both jobs.

Therefore, physical newsrooms are no longer separated into print and online. While different sectors may be evident as some journalists are required to remain in one section (such as managing directors, editors or producers), regular reporters have the ability to move fluidly around a newsroom. The following picture demonstrates a more modern newsroom structure.

Source: Fernando Samaniego - 25 Tips for a Modern Newsroom

An example of a newsroom embracing the need for a multi-media structure is The Seattle Times. According to Knight Digital Media Centre, The Seattle Times' newsroom previously had very separate print and online managing directors, each working independently of one another. Now, however, there are three branches of the newsroom: creation (news-gathering staff), curation (production staff) and community (staff who engage with the community, including local bloggers).

Executive Editor David Boardman says that the old newsroom where everything was separate was unworkable. "We were in the same newsroom physically, but it was a situation where the online operation was just a processing operation and the website was just the newspaper online with a few updates throughout the day. There was a little bit of dabbling with multi-media, blogging, but not much," he said.

However this new hybrid newsroom which focuses on the stages of producing news and not on the type of media being used to distribute news, plays to the strengths of each media. It allows reporters to focus on reporting, regardless of what media they are using.

For students, this means a few things. It means that we must be proficient in all types of journalism, and not have a specialty. We have to be able to prove to employers that we can write for online (by including pictures, videos, slideshows), write for print (formal written style, no reliance on graphics) and write for TV (over-reliance on images, casual style of talking). We also have to prove that we can tell one story over a variety of platforms without being too repetitive. It also means that we need to know our stories inside out; we are now responsible for telling this one story over every type of media and must bear the full responsibility for quotes, facts and sources.

In a way, it means that students graduating into the current workplace have an advantage. We have grown up using a variety of media and have been trained to use new media, including blogs and social media. We have an advantage over older journalists, who while have experience, may not have our knowledge of how to tell a story over a variety of platforms.

The best way to show how much value news organisations place on multi-platform journalism is to show you the following advertisement for The Guardian. Most people have probably already seen the ad. We were shown it in the lecture on Monday but my Mum showed it to me a while ago when it was first released. This ad is still considered one of the best advertisements for a news organisations because it shows how diverse and modern The Guardian is, and how this type of journalism is what all modern news organisations are striving to achieve.

Using Social Media to Market Yourself and Engage Audiences

In this week's lecture, breakfast radio host Spencer Howson talked about how to use social media to engage with your audience. I thought the subject was absolutely fascinating and Spencer did a fantastic job as lecturer. I wanted to learn more about social media and so I stumbled across this Youtube video (which you may have seen before):



As the video notes, consumers are more likely to trust peer reviews than actual advertisements. With 53% of people recommending products on Twitter, this means businesses are no longer advertising their product; people are. Social media has developed a 'word-of-mouth' approach to business. Producers can no longer rely on traditional marketing through online, tv and magazine ads. Instead, they need to interact with consumers through social media to help spread word of their product.

Particularly, at 2:59, the video says that society is no longer searching for products and services and that products and services will find us. I believe this to be true. As many other women in Australia can probably attest, there is a particular brand/product called Ashy Bines Clean Eating Diet Plan, or something similar. Daily, my Facebook newsfeed is infiltrated with photos of people who have lost weight through the plan or advertisements of the plan or simply people (who I don't know) talking about the plan. Ever since Facebook introduced the fact that you can now see pages your friends have liked on Facebook (whether they liked the page that day or not), Ashy Bines has been taking over my newsfeed.

Regardless of whether or not my Facebook thinks I need to lose weight, the fact that I know the name of the product and what it does says something about the fact that social media has significantly helped the Ashy Bines product.

I believe social media is just as helpful to journalists, particularly online ones, in this way.

Journalists have the ability to harness the same social media power. If journalists consider themselves a brand, or at least the organisation they work for, they can use the same marketing techniques as products.

Firstly, journalists have to find their audience on social media. This means not simply tweeting to your followers, but following back journalists, journalism students, PR companies, media relations officers, and many more. Secondly, and on a related note, journalists have to engage with their audience. They need to reply to questions, thank people for their comments or concerns, and start conversations around interesting topics. This will help the audience to feel like they have a personal connection with you, the journalist, which will undoubtedly help to create a stronger audience.

Thirdly, journalists must also market themselves. They need to be able to promote their stories, their colleagues stories and their organisation. Facebook has introduced a new 'promote' button for specialised pages. What journalists should do is create a page about themselves. For exmaple, I have created a 'Rebecca Gillies' page for my food blog, which people 'like' but are not 'friends' with. This means whenever I post under that account, I can promote my posts, which means my personal account's friends and those who have liked the professional page will see the post at the top of their newsfeed (which is when people pay the most attention to posts).

As for Twitter, journalists need to ensure their tweets about their stories are being retweeted or favourited or in some way, being passed on to others. One way of doing this is to write a tweet that says something similar to this: 'Retweet if you agree with the latest election polls, covered in detail on www.myblog.com'.

Finally, and this is only something online journalists can do, but remember to always link back to your organisation's site or your story or your blog. This ensures that readers are always being reminded of who wrote the story and it is helping to build up your brand.

These are just some ideas I have had as to how journalists can market themselves as a brand. These days, everything is a brand, including individuals. Journalists need to embrace this and learn how to use social media to ruthlessly target their audience into reading what they have to say. I am in no way an expert on how to use social media, but my blog (Half Baked) has a small but dedicated following and I am happy with how I have created a small, personal brand around a simple food blog. I think professional journalists can do the same things I did with much bigger and better results.

Fact Checking for Online Journalists

It is common knowledge that in the digital age journalists must be both quick and accurate when writing stories. There is a stronger-than-ever need to be the first to post a breaking story online. Conversely, the internet brought about an age where readers can fact check stories for accuracy so there is also a very strong need for journalists to get the facts right the first time they write a story.

Now Full Fact, a UK-based fact checking website has launched an online Finder to help people find information and facts quickly. The finder covers information about five topics: economy, crime and law, education, health and immigration.

The website used to just produce documents and stories with facts, discussing whether the media or politicians were correct in their statements. Now, however, this new Finder tool helps the public to do their own searching.

For journalists, this means two things.

The first is that they can use the tool themselves. They can use it to check their own facts and to check facts of other media organisations. The Finder tool will help make finding and checking facts easy.

However, it also means journalists are more accountable then ever before. The public can search to see if what a journalist has written is correct. They can also read articles on the website which detail particular fact findings.

For example, the image above is a copy of the website's homepage today. As you can see, the second link on the page is to a topic that analyses a claim made by the Daily Mail. Clicking on the link will lead you to an article where Full Fact either proves or disproves the claim by looking at facts. For a journalist, this means your inability to fact check will be known by those who check the website and read articles, or simply by those curious enough to check out your claims.

At the moment Full Fact and the Finder are fundamentally focused on the UK. However that is not to say that the organisation could expand in to other countries or that other countries could develop similar websites dealing with facts in the media.

The idea for this piece came from www.journalism.co.uk.

Social Media as a News Source

In this week's lecture, Trina McLellan of Reporting 4 Work discussed how journalism is an industry in transition. Particularly she looked at the rise of the internet and how it is changing the nature of journalism. What was most interesting to me was the use of social media for news distribution and dissemination.

According to ACMA's Digital Australians Online Survey in 2011, a large percentage of Australians are accessing news through social media. Trina discussed this in her lecture: 36% of those aged 18 - 29 access news through social media, yet the number of Australians using social media for news decreased as their ages increased.

While this says a lot about the generational changes in society, it also indicates that as the internet infiltrates society, it is becoming a news distribution tool. Children born in the past few years will never know a time without widespread internet, which means they will grow up knowing how to use social media and the internet. My six-year-old cousin, for example, is better with an i-Pad then me, and often plays games on the internet for her school homework.

What this means is that the use of social media to receive news will increase with each generation. The following graph, taken from Trina's excellent lecture, demonstrates this. This graph shows that social media is a significant source of news and one that is increasing, while the more traditional forms of news such as television, radio and print are decreasing in use.

So what does this mean for news organisations?

It means that they have to actively work on engaging audiences through social media. It is no longer possible for journalists and their organisations to simply occasionally tweet about an interesting story or expect people to follow boring links on Facebook to their news websites.

I think there are several things organisations can do to engage with audiences through social media.
1. Ask them their opinion - social media is an outlet through which people love to express themselves. Allow them to do it.
2. Satisfy their curiosity - give them most, or all, of the main facts on social media. No one will click on a link to a website if they can't tell from the tweet of status update what the point of the story is.
3. However, provide more coverage on their website - give a lot of detail on the website so that those who really care about the story can find out more.

I'm not an expert in any way on social media, and the ideas above are very simple. But they are highly effective. If you look at the most successful news organisations on social media, they are the ones who are following these guidelines. The Sydney Morning Herald, ABC news sites, The Age, and news.com.au "own nearly 60% of all Australian news links being shared by Twitter users". This means that these four organisations are connecting so well with audiences over Twitter that their audience is re-tweeting and sharing information from these news websites. For more information on news organisations on Twitter, see the Australian Twitter News Index (ATNIX), a study conducted by QUT's own Dr Axel Bruns.

Their success could be shared by other news organisations, if they simply accepted that social media and news dissemination is the way of the future, and if they begin to engage with their audiences now, they will build a strong social media following which will improve their brand.

Paying for News: Should Readers Pay for Online Journalism?

When I was interning at The Courier Mail, around two months ago, on my very first day, they introduced news+. News+ is an attempt to get readers to pay for digital journalism. The Courier Mail was merely following in the footsteps of many other news organisations who charge for news by using paywalls, subscription based services and apps. In Australia alone, The Australian, The Daily Telegraph and The Herald Sun (also under the news+ brand) all charge for news. Sometimes, they also add 'premium content' to entice readers into paying the small fees. Yesterday it was announced that The Sun would be joining The Times as another British newspaper to charge for content. For more detail about which newspapers charge for content, see Darren Davidson's recent article in The Australian.

Obviously, these payment systems are not foolproof and there are often ways around the subscription services. But regardless of how easy or difficult it is to trick the services into thinking you have paid, one question remains: should we, society, have to pay for online news?

When I asked my roommate this question, she said no. When I asked her why, she said that while she understood all of the reasons why we should pay for news, she doesn't believe you should have to pay for news. She said that people benefit when they read news and if they stop because of costs or because they are lazy, it is not benefiting society. She believes that you should not have to pay to find out what is going on in the world.

While that is a good point, I have a few counter-arguments.

Firstly, there would not be news without journalists. There would not be the concept of news without people to spread it around. We all know what is considered the oldest profession in the world, but I would venture that journalism is a close second. Think about it: if there was no one, not a reporter on tv, not a person on Twitter, not someone in the streets, to tell you what is happening, there is no such ideal of 'news'. We only understand what 'news' is (current, interesting, new information) because a journalist has decided it is worthy of people to know. Without them, there would just be information.  And loads of it.

Secondly, working on the notion that journalism is an old profession, I can almost guarantee that something is not given away for nothing. In other words, even when 'news' was not known as such, people would only spread relevant information if they got something in return. Journalists work hard to create news - they have to collate loads of information, determine what is relevant to society and source it. You cannot expect something for nothing, and therefore you should not get any news, be it on tv, in a newspaper or on the internet, without paying.

Finally, I disagree with the idea that you should not have to pay to find out what is going on in the world. Sure, in a perfect world we would all tell each other everything that is important to our lives. But we also wouldn't maim and murder, keep secrets from out families, or illegally download Game of Thrones. But we don't live in a perfect world.

On the topic of illegal downloads I find my point. We have, in the words of Reuters Institute, a "legacy of free online news provision". News organisations are dealing with generations of people who grew up with the idea that the internet was free, all its content was free, and the internet was in fact useful to help you get other (usually paid) services for free (such as Game of Thrones). I am not going to discuss the morality of using the internet to get free tv or music, because we all do it, but I am going to discuss the fact that when people go on to the internet, they expect content for free.

Which I believe is what my roommate was trying to say: the internet is free and should remain so. So here I must quote Alec Liu, who wrote about how The New York Times encourages citizens to pay for news.

"We were trained to expect all of this stuff [online news] to be free, but it's really not. It's totally unsustainable. Now we have to be trained back, but we're already hooked on a bad habit, junkies for online content we never had to pay for that's propped up by ads no one looks at."

He is right - what needs to change is the idea that everything on the internet is free. If we had started by paying for news content, we would not know the difference and we would not expect free content. Reuters Institute backs this up in their annual Digital News Report, by noting that people are more willing to pay for news online in countries where there is no legacy of free news provision.

Furthermore, as others have said, how can you feasibly start charging people for news when it is something they can get for free? Even if, by some miracle, every news organisation in the world decided to have paid-only online content, how can you make people pay for news when they can still get their news from television and social media?

I don't know the answers to these questions and I don't know how to change people's minds about paid content on the internet. Maybe eventually people will come round to the idea and everyone will just pay for online news. As Mona Zhang noted in her article on tablet users and paying for news, it happened with television - thousands of people each year happily pay for cable, when there are plenty of television shows on free-to-air.

Anyway, it's not all bad news. New figures released by The New York Times show their digital subscriptions have increased by 35 per cent from last year. Perhaps all of these arguments about whether or not we should pay for online news is irrelevant - one day, after the plausible demise of newspapers, all online news organisations may require payment and we will simply accept it. Furthermore, our children will not know any better, and their legacy will not be one of free content, but of paid content.