I started the Master of Arts in Technology and Communication program at the UNC School of Journalism and Mass Communication back in late August, and I’ve managed to survive to the midway point of the first semester. “Survive” really is the apt term here; just ask the brain cells that didn’t make it through the past two weeks as I trudged through the literature review for a research project in one of my classes. I’ve spent probably about three hours a night on most nights doing class work since school started. I’ve even had a couple nights where I’ve written or read until I fell asleep in my chair. I’ve been so busy that I’ve hardly watched any TV in the past two months, which is actually one of the pluses so far. I find myself missing television less and less. Now if only I can just get the ESPN and science channels a la carte.

Even fall break isn’t a complete escape: One of my classes is off this week, but I do have assignments in the other class, though the professor has granted the class a partial reprieve by extending the due date on one of the assignments. Still, I’ll be spending the rest of this week plowing through 70 pages of readings about statistical analysis so I can lead a Blackboard discussion on it. The very thought of it makes what remains of my brain cells scream out in pain (and I was actually good at math back in my high school and undergrad days).

However, I already feel like the labor has not been in vain. One of my two classes this semester is a real hands-on course while the other is more conceptual. The hands-on class, Writing for Digital Media, covers mostly either things that I’ve done or have at least a passing familiarity with, so for me the course so far has been more about reinforcing and fine-tuning my existing knowledge and skills than picking up new ones. That doesn’t mean it’s dull, though. On the contrary, the VERY lively discussion boards for that class have been my favorite part of the MATC program thus far, as I’ve not only gotten to know my fellow classmates, but also have learned much from their respective expertise and experience. Also, I find that the course has given me a renewed commitment to, as George Orwell put it, defending the English language when I’m writing or editing.

The more conceptual course, Research Methods and Applications, definitely is the one that’s taking the heavier toll, not just on me, but probably on everyone else in the class as well. The difficulty has come in part from my total lack of familiarity with the subject matter and the methodical pace at which I read. There is a ton of reading for this class, and some of it can be quite dense and jargon-heavy (which makes it an interesting counter to the writing course, where the emphasis has been on simple and clear writing). It seems like each week I’m blitzed with an onslaught of new research-related terms and concepts, and there have been times when I’ve stared at the discussion prompts on Blackboard and thought to myself, “I’ve got zero insight to add to this conversation.”

Despite the difficulties, though, the research class has also been immensely rewarding because I feel like I’m learning so much that I never knew I never knew. For instance, I now know what makes research valid and how to evaluate its validity, so the next time I see anything that says, “a study shows …”, I’ll know the right questions to ask to judge how much stock to put into the findings. I’m learning how to design experiments. I’m learning how to use the library’s databases to find research papers (and one good thing about the literature review was that along the way I came across a bunch of articles relevant to my work).

What’s more, the class has given me a small taste of how researchers work, the processes they follow, the ways in which they see the world, and the principles and ethics that govern how they operate. To me, this has been as useful as anything else I’ve learned in the program, especially since I work with researchers. I’m hoping the new insights will help me communicate better with them.

So in short: A lot of work, but feeling like I’m getting a lot in return as well. Now, back to sampling distributions and Z-scores (I use those terms as if I remember what they mean).

About three weeks ago, I designed a newspaper sports front page for the first time in six years as I served as an emergency fill-in on the sports desk at my old newspaper, The Herald-Sun in Durham, N.C. Four days later, I found out that that would also be the last time I get to design a sports front at The Herald-Sun. The newspaper, following the lead of the News & Observer and a number of other papers across the country, is laying off its desk staff and moving all design and copy editing functions to Owensboro, Ky., site of a sister paper in the Paxton Media Group chain, which has owned The Herald-Sun since 2005. The last night for the desk staff is tomorrow.

The move toward consolidation of desk functions for multiple papers into a central hub is a trend across the entire newspaper industry. There are (a few) good and (many) bad things about it, and perhaps this move at The Herald-Sun was inevitable. The desk staff at The Herald-Sun — and the entire staff in general — has steadily dwindled to far below the size it was at when I worked there full-time as a sports designer and copy editor in the mid-2000s. The sports desk alone has shrunk from four full-timers and a couple part-timers at the peak of my time there to just one full-timer before this latest development, and that reduced staff was laying out the Sanford Herald’s paper in addition to their own.

I’m no grizzled newsroom veteran, and I don’t pretend to have ever lived in a golden age of journalism. The industry was already starting to fall into flux when I got out of school, even if we didn’t quite realize the magnitude of the changes that were coming. Also, I’ve now spent enough time away from the business and absorbed enough outsider perspectives to be able to step back and see the myriad of things we could’ve done better and the many ways in which journalism in this new age could be better than it had been before. However, it feels surreal that just five-and-a-half years after I left my full-time job there, the entire design and copy desk at the paper will be gone. The Herald-Sun sports desk is a place that has played a big role in my life and career (sometimes probably bigger than is healthy), and upon hearing the news of its imminent demise, I couldn’t help but reflect on my time there and the impact it had on me.

Getting Into the Game

I began working in The Herald-Sun sports department as a correspondent soon after graduating from high school in Durham in 1997. My high school journalism teacher heard the paper was looking for help covering prep sports and passed it along to me since I had been sports editor of the high school paper. So I sent an e-mail — from my AOL address, on a dial-up connection — expressing my interest. Neil Amato, then the preps editor at the paper, had to tell me during our first phone call to stop calling him Mr. Amato. “I only got out of college four years ago,” he said. My first story — an eight-inch lead to a roundup in which I totally focused on the wrong angle — is still framed and hanging on the wall of my old bedroom in my parents’ house. Within a year or so I started working part-time on the sports desk, too, putting together the page in the sports section with all the boxscores and statistics. Throughout my four years at UNC, I spent many a Friday night covering prep games and following that up with a desk shift on Saturday nights. In retrospect, I probably should’ve done a little more partying on those nights like normal college students do. But at the time, it was a sacrifice I made gladly. Even then, it wasn’t easy for journalism graduates to land jobs after college, so I figured every ounce of experience — especially in a professional newsroom — would help.

It was terrific experience, too. I did a little bit of everything: covering games on every level of competition, laying out pages, taking prep calls, driving a bunch of sports editors down to the Durham Bulls Athletic Park one summer when they held their annual meeting in Durham, placating a mentally challenged stutterer named Gary who called (and is still calling) every night asking for brackets for every conceivable and inconceivable tournament and would not hang up until he was satisfied that you were going to physically deliver said brackets to his house right away. I sat in a press box at East Chapel Hill High and gazed in amazement at the half-inch-thick layer of dead flies on the desk; shivered so hard in the chilly wind sweeping across the football field at Hillside High that I spilled half of the cup of hot chocolate I was holding; wilted in the heat on a track in Raleigh waiting to interview Marion Jones, only to have her make a quick exit without talking to reporters; nearly flipped my car off a particularly curvy on-ramp rushing back to the office from a game at Orange High; spent half a season having the same despondent postgame interview with the coach of a football team that went 0-11 and found a new heartbreaking way to lose each week; and watched a kid from Azerbaijan who had the use of only one arm do cross-over dribbles like you won’t believe.

The experiences from my first two-plus years at the paper helped me realize that while I enjoyed writing and sports, I wasn’t really suited to being a beat writer. I was a bit too shy, never feeling entirely comfortable about “bothering” people with my questions even though I did it when I had to. And I found out that I’d get bored quickly if I had to cover the same team or subject night in and night out, especially with game stories, which too often had a formulaic nature to them. At the same time, though, I also discovered a previously unrealized passion for design, in part from my experience putting together sports pages. I liked the idea of taking all the different raw material — stories, pictures, headlines, statistics, captions, graphics — and building something from them that, when done well, can be greater than the sum of its parts. That realization — and the shift in career path it effected — had an impact on my life that reverberates even to this day.

In 2001, the spring before my senior year, a design and copy-editing position opened up on the sports desk in a rather bizarre manner. The guy who had that job walked out of the newsroom one night without telling anyone that he wasn’t coming back. Oh, and it just happened to be the night that the Duke men’s basketball team was playing for the national championship, which, for a newspaper covering Durham, was akin to a presidential election in magnitude. After a couple hours of consternation on the sports desk while we tried to call that guy, wondering all the while if he was lying unconscious in a pool of blood somewhere (he wasn’t), we proceeded to bang out not only the regular sports section, but a special championship section as well. Soon thereafter, the sports editor offered me the position, which I wanted but was unsure about taking because I still had one more full semester of classes left. The paper was good enough to accommodate me, letting me work four nights a week — with benefits — during the fall semester before switching to a full-time schedule in the spring, by which time I only had a couple classes left to take. So while most of my journalism school classmates were fretting over what to do after graduation, I was already half a year into a permanent gig.

I learned a ton in the next three years. While The Herald-Sun has never been renowned for its design, I did have the benefit of editors who took a more or less laissez-faire approach toward design and the tutelage of a fellow sports designer who never hesitated to try something new. That combination created an environment where we felt free to try just about anything and everything, employing a kaleidoscope of cutouts, gradients, funky fonts, drop shadows, outer glows, and motion blurs along the way. We were both figuring it out as we went, and looking back on it, a lot of the stuff we did in those days were hideous, but we also stumbled into some good-looking stuff every now and then. The same kind of thinking that drove us to abuse artsy fonts also inspired us to design a pretty slick football special section cover featuring the starchild from “2001: A Space Odyssey.” Learning my craft in an environment that allowed such experimentation bred in me a mentality to not simply accept conventional notions of what a newspaper should look like. Headline-photo-story was always the fallback, the last option, and even though in my later years in the business I learned that sometimes that could be the best option, I never lost the zeal for looking to improve upon that builder-grade format.

Being a small to mid-sized paper (about 50,000 circulation in the early 2000s), we didn’t have the most resources or the biggest staff, yet even that aspect had a positive influence on me. To this day, I’d never accept not having the latest and greatest equipment as an excuse for not producing good work. The first work “laptop” on which I filed a story had a black and white “screen” that showed about five lines of text at a time. I was running a self-provided copy of Photoshop for half of my time at the paper. The pagination system the paper was still using when I first started in 1997 dared to ask the question, “What is this WYSIWYG of which you speak?” And I still remember the shocked look on the faces of my colleagues at an ad agency years later when I told them that I was laying out pages on Quark 3.something as recently as 2003. These limitations, however annoying, made me more inventive and more proactive in taking the initiative to find a solution. They were hurdles to be overcome, walked around, or tunneled under, not excuses to take the path of least resistance. And even though we often yearned for more time, in the end, I found that when we busted our ass, we generally were able to put together some nice work, especially for non-deadline stuff, even if it meant staying a couple hours longer. Moreover, being on a smaller staff meant we all had to do a little bit of everything, and from that grew my versatility, which I still consider my greatest strength.

In fall 2003, I felt like I had learned enough to shoulder a bigger load, so I volunteered to design our annual ACC football preview section, one of the few plum design assignments each year. It was the biggest project I had tackled up to that point, and it became my baby, conceived four months earlier when I discovered a Photoshop technique that gives photos a hand-drawn, comic-book-esque quality — the kind of discovery you make when you’re operating in an environment where you’re free to experiment without having to first ask for permission. I spent countless hours on the section, at work and at home, and turned out something that I’m still pretty proud of to this day. A couple weeks after the section was published, I went into work one evening and found an envelope sitting on my desk, containing a thank-you note and a four-figure check, compliments of the executive editor.

Little (or not so little) things like that were among the reasons that newsroom really appealed to me in those days. The paper was still family-owned at the time, and I think that definitely influenced the atmosphere. I couldn’t complain about the leadership since I always felt they treated me well (though I understand this point can differ depending on what you do and whom you work with, like at any company). The newsroom had a nice mix of veterans and up-and-comers, and unlike many other papers that size, it was a place where one could be content building a long career, especially in sports, since the location of the paper put you right in the heart of college basketball heaven (getting to live in the Triangle is a nice plus, too). We were a smallish paper but we were covering some big-time sports programs, and while we didn’t have as many resources as the big boys did, we always tried to hold our own where it really mattered. To employ an industry cliché, I guess you could call us “scrappy.” We didn’t work for awards, but we did collect our share, which was all the more satisfying knowing we were typically on the lower end of the circulation class in which we competed.

As for my colleagues, I got along great with most of them. We worked well together and we generally had fun in the process despite the nightly rush. For news design and copy editing desks, election nights are the busiest and most hectic nights, but as another industry cliché goes, every night on the sports desk is like election night. However, a night on the sports desk also rarely felt like work as one would imagine work to be. No one quibbled with us over trivial things like dress codes or the salty language that was a necessary release valve for the pressures we faced on a nightly basis. We weren’t locked into eight-hour shifts and were free to work fewer hours on some nights because, as the paper correctly figured, it all evened out over the long run as we often stayed well after deadline working on special projects (imagine that: staying at work as long or as short as needed to get the work done). And after that night’s paper was done, a couple of us would stand in the parking lot for hours at a time, talking shop and shooting the bull about all manners of things, sometimes until near dawn as the delivery trucks were pulling out of the parking lot with the edition we had cranked out hours earlier.

I was in a city I liked, at a workplace I enjoyed, doing work I loved, with people I considered my friends, and for people who appreciated my work. So what did I do two months after receiving the nice thank-you gift for my efforts on the ACC football section? I left the paper.

Too Comfortable?

During my first couple years at The Herald-sun, I had received a few inquiries from other news organizations looking for young, cheap journalists fresh out of school — including one for a copy-editing job at ESPN.com — but I was too enamored with what I had in Durham, both at work and in terms of family. The farthest I went in entertaining such inquiries was a two-day interview with the Charlotte Observer sports department (it’s hard to say “no” to the biggest newspaper in the state without at least taking a look). On September 10, 2001, I rolled into Charlotte around midday for a whirlwind afternoon of interviews and meals with various people at the paper. The next morning, I went back to take an aptitude test in the HR office, during which I thought I heard someone outside say, “The World Trade Center towers, they aren’t there anymore.” In the absence of context or further details, I quickly pushed it to the back of my mind; I had, after all, more important things to tend to, like this interview.

After finishing my test, I made my way upstairs to the newsroom and walked into a frenetic scene of people huddling around TV sets, hurrying to and fro, and yelling across the room. One of the assistant sports editors told me what had just transpired and said, “I think the plans for the rest of your day are scrapped. Let’s reschedule.” As I drove out of downtown Charlotte while the cops were setting up barricades, I thought to myself, “Maybe this is a sign.”

In all seriousness, though, I didn’t feel like I was a good fit for the Charlotte Observer’s design style. Don’t get me wrong: That paper is clean and functional and nice looking in an understated sort of way, but for a designer just starting out and looking for opportunities to learn and experiment, it felt too restrained and confining. In a way, the freewheeling atmosphere at The Herald-Sun had already stamped its mark on me. I courteously withdrew my name from consideration, and that was the only time I had even half-seriously thought about leaving until 2003.

The ACC football section I designed in 2003 had put me on the radar of some newspapers looking for young designers to mold in their image (and my obviously Chinese last name probably didn’t hurt either since newsrooms are constantly looking to add “diversity”). In October 2003, The State newspaper in Columbia, S.C., came calling. This time, I felt a greater urge to jump. The football section had whet my appetite for more large-scale design projects, and I knew that at The Herald-Sun, I would always run up against limitations in manpower, resources, and the number of opportunities to flex my design muscles. In addition, I was feeling the lure that most aspiring newspaper designers three years removed from college would probably feel to climb the newspaper ladder to some place bigger, more prominent, more widely read, to be able to point at a page gracing the eyeballs of hundreds of thousands of people and say, “Yeah, I did that.” Finally, I was feeling the fear of letting my career stagnate for no reason other than the fact that I was comfortable in Durham. I had, after all, already turned down a handful of opportunities, including ESPN.com and the biggest paper in this state. If I turned down the biggest paper in the neighboring state as well, how many more opportunities were going to keep coming my way?

So I decided it was time to push myself out of my comfort zone. I interviewed at The State — whose circulation was about two-and-half times that of The Herald-Sun’s — and came away impressed at the quality of its work and felt that its style of design was more in line with what I wanted to do. Those factors, along with the 23-percent pay raise The State had put on the table, convinced me to make the leap. I gave The Herald-Sun a one-month notice — I felt that was the least I could do for a paper that had done much for me at the outset of my career — and then made my way down to Columbia in one whirlwind November weekend.

Mover’s Remorse

On my first night at The State, I stepped outside the building during my dinner break, called a friend while pacing on the concrete steps by the side door, and confessed to her that for some reason I wasn’t feeling as excited as I should’ve been about starting a new job that was attractive enough to yank me out of my comfort zone. Of course, it might’ve had something to do with the fact that I sat down that night in front of a woefully underpowered computer that had less than 100 MBs of available disk space and was running Photoshop 3 — in 2003! The computer situation was remedied within a couple days, but the feeling I had that first night never truly improved. I started to miss the atmosphere and the people at The Herald-Sun almost immediately. I thought it would pass with time, but if anything, it only intensified in the ensuing months.

My new job certainly provided me with what I went there for — more opportunities and resources to do good design work. The sports desk was double the size of the one in Durham, which meant fewer pages per person and more time to spend on each page. I also never lacked for occasions to do special designs, as the sports department put out a giant feature package seemingly every week and was always doing special pages to commemorate this or preview that. I learned a lot during my time in Columbia, the most valuable of which was the benefit of advance planning. After constantly flying by the seat of my pants during my first three years in the business, I was now seeing how the bigger boys did it and how their less chaotic, more organized approach paid off. I received reinforcement on the importance of truly editing stories, not just proofreading. I saw what differentiated visual journalism from merely design, and I knew I wanted to do the former. I learned, I did some good work, and the people at The State liked my work.

Still, through it all I inwardly longed for the freedom and aggressiveness in experimenting with design that I had enjoyed at The Herald-Sun. The creative process at The State felt too formal, with too great a need to ask for permission rather than forgiveness for someone who was used to the exact opposite. I also missed the people I had worked with in Durham, in spite of (or because of) their respective eccentricities. My colleagues at The State were friendly folks, many of them were my age, and I got along fine with them and we hung out on occasion after work. But there were no hours-long bull sessions in the parking lot after work and nowhere near as many spontaneous belly laughs or four-letter words in the office. The place had a more buttoned-down, professional feel. Perhaps it was more conducive to getting good work done, but it also wasn’t as fun a place to work in (perhaps I just prefer being on a rag-tag ship of unruly buccaneers instead of a well-run galleon). There also seemed to be a lot of layers of decision makers, and every decision took longer and became more complicated than it needed to be, IMHO. That was difficult for someone who was used to making snap decisions on the fly because he never had much time to mull over every photo choice or every headline.

All those things, along with the fact that I missed my family and life in the Triangle, took their toll. After a few months, I e-mailed the sports editor at The Herald-Sun to tell him I was looking to move back to Durham if an opportunity arose. A couple months later, he called and told me a position had opened up on the sports desk. I jumped at it, even though it meant taking a sizable paycut from what I was making in Columbia, and a couple weeks later I was on my way back to Durham. The Charlotte Observer, The State’s sister paper, called while I was packing and offered me an opportunity to stay in the Knight Ridder chain (remember KR?). I really appreciated that gesture, but I stood firm, because I had figured out where I belonged.

Back Again

I first read this passage from a 1999 Sports Illustrated story on John Stockton when I was back in college:

If simple works, why change? If the Jazz franchise fits you like your favorite pair of khakis, why even think about playing anywhere else? Why even have an agent? Just figure out a salary you think is fair, tell the owner to do the same thing, and meet somewhere in the middle. If you’ve always worn your shorts a little snug and no longer than mid-thigh, why change just because everyone else is letting them billow down around the knees? If the hometown girl you began dating in college will give you a lifetime, no-cut contract, why go looking elsewhere? Marry her and settle down. If you’ve never been happier than you were in the neighborhood you grew up in, why not get yourself a house right next door to your parents’ and re-create your childhood for your five kids? “You don’t do anything just because other people do,” Stockton says. “My father taught me that.”

Obviously this approach to life and career isn’t for everyone, but it made sense to me. It took leaving The Herald-Sun for me to realize how much I enjoyed being there and that it was the right fit for me. My seven-month sojourn in Columbia had helped me figure out what really mattered to me in life and work, and those things were waiting for me back in Durham, not some other corner of the journalism world, even if that corner was offering more resources, more recognition, or more money. Thus, when I returned to The Herald-Sun, I knew in the back of my mind that this would most likely be the last newspaper I worked for, with the caveat that by then, I had also figured out that I would eventually want to leave journalism and explore other lines of design before possibly settling in one (possibly journalism). Nonetheless, I felt like there was still a lot left for me to do and try in journalism, and The Herald-Sun was where I wanted to do that. I was 25 when I started my second tour of duty there in June 2004, and I could easily see myself being there until I was 30, and possibly beyond.

Soon after returning to The Herald-Sun, I became the lead designer on the sports desk, and I threw myself into the role, adding the discipline and appreciation for planning that I had acquired in Columbia to the freedom and control I rediscovered in Durham. I was now the go-to guy for designing the special projects in the sports department, and I relished all those opportunities. That coming year, by coincidence, had more special projects than usual, and I also created some additional opportunities by applying some of what I learned in Columbia. I tried, and sometimes succeeded, in improving not only the design but also some aspects of how the sports department operated. I tried to make us plan in advance more, and some of those efforts paid off. I also played mentor to a couple younger designers who were in the shoes I once had been in.

I could see that I was affecting more than just the pages I worked on, a feeling I didn’t get in Columbia. At The State, the paper was big enough, with a culture and method of operation entrenched enough that one designer wasn’t going to make waves. In Durham, thanks to the smaller staff size and the more informal operation, it felt easier for one person to exert an influence on the paper, as long as he had the desire and didn’t mind putting in the hours. I was young, single, working a job I loved with a schedule that made it impossible for me to hang out with my friends who had normal jobs. So what else was I going to do but spend too many of my waking hours thinking about how to make the paper better? It was a time when I did a lot of my best work and a time when I did a lot of work, period. In retrospect, it would have been difficult for me to keep up that pace over the long haul, but at the time, I loved it. This was what I came back from Columbia to do. This was a virtually perfect fit for me, and I felt zero need to look around and wonder if there’s an even better fit out there somewhere.

Change of Plans

Several months into my return, things were going well. I was enjoying work and enjoying the fact that instead of four hours, I only had to drive four minutes to get a delicious meal at my parents’. By August 2004, two months after coming back to Durham, I had bought a house and was ready to settle in for the long haul.

But then late that year, we were rounded up in the newsroom one night for a surprise meeting. The top honchos announced that, after being family-owned for 115 years, the paper was being sold to a chain, the Paxton Media Group, which most of us hadn’t heard of. We were stunned, concerned, but still cautiously hopeful.

The cautiously hopeful part began to waver as we heard more and more whispers about our new masters, and it crashed and burned soon after the calendar flipped over to 2005. While spending an off day with my family just after New Year’s, I got a call from the sports editor informing me that the new ownership took control that day and, within half an hour of entering the building, had dismissed all the top management and said layoffs were on the way. The axe fell swiftly in the ensuing weeks. The first round claimed one of our four full-time sports desk guys and one of our veteran sportswriters, both solid, hard-working journalists. For someone who had never gone through a layoff before, it was a traumatic experience. The night I found out about those layoffs is still the only time in my career, at any job, that I found myself so unable to concentrate on the work that I had to take a stroll to focus my thoughts long enough to get the paper out. After the initial shock and anger subsided somewhat, I began to feel the inkling to start my exploration of other fields of design ahead of schedule. I still loved what I did, and if you pointed me in the direction of a newspaper page, I’d unquestionably attack it with the same vigor I always had, but were the new masters deserving of such efforts?

Still, I didn’t leave right away. The day the sports editor informed us about the two casualties in the sports department from the first big round of layoffs, he finished with, “I’d understand if you guys have other opportunities that you want to pursue.” I told him at the end of that meeting, however, that he could count on me not going anywhere at least through April. I felt an obligation to stay at least through the Final Four, the busiest time of the year for the sports desk. It’d only be fair to the people I worked with. Besides, the paper had been good enough to give me an opportunity to come back to Durham from the wilderness only a half year earlier; I felt I owed them at least that much. While that year was the most turbulent and difficult of my time at The Herald-Sun, that basketball season was also when I felt like we, the sports desk, did some really good work. As an added bonus, North Carolina, my alma mater, was on its way to claiming the national championship and I fulfilled one of my goals when I set out on my newspaper design career — to do a UNC championship special section.

April came and went. With the euphoria of UNC’s championship getting ever more distant in the rear-view mirror, I started looking around for other jobs but was always hoping that the new ownership would show me that they cared as much as the former owners did about quality journalism. “Just give me a couple signs, and I’ll stay,” I thought. The signs we got, however, indicated quite the opposite. From big things like more layoffs to smaller things like increasing penny-pinching in the day-to-day operation, it was clear that this was a new day and that the rules were now very different. As can be expected, the mood in the newsroom was souring rapidly, and there was a chasm between the new management and the surviving staff that could not be closed. All the way until the day I left, I never uttered more than the usual necessary pleasantries to the new, Paxton-imported top editor. In a way, I felt like here I was, enjoying my own little slice of Eden when the serpent not only slithered in, but also kicked down the gate and poisoned the flowers.

Despite the initial layoffs, we had enough momentum left over from the culture that existed in the newsroom before the ownership change to carry us through that college basketball season as we had in years past. However, I sensed that the negative changes I was seeing were only the beginning, not the end, and I didn’t want to stick around for things to deteriorate further. Being a longtime 49ers fan, I was also mindful of the pitfall of overstaying one’s usefulness in the eyes of the company, loyalty or skills be damned. After all, if Joe Montana, Roger Craig, Ronnie Lott, and Jerry Rice could all be considered expendable by an organization known for its willingness to spend money on good players, what was I to a company that, as word had it on industry message boards, was ruthless in its pursuit of a profit margin much higher than the industry norm? There’s an old Chinese saying that came to my mind more than once during that period: “When the nest is broken, how can any egg be safe?”

As the months wore on, I became more and more convinced that I did not want to stay long. I had several non-journalism job interviews during that time, and when nothing materialized, I started an application for the masters program at the College of Design at N.C. State, an idea that I had been toying with for a while. I did get some e-mails from other newspapers expressing interest, and I even talked to the News & Observer, which had been busy scooping up some of the layoff casualties from The Herald-Sun to beef up its operations and the new Durham edition it was launching (I’m sure the massive changes at The Herald-Sun looked like a giant “C’mon into our turf” sign to its competitor on the other side of the Triangle). Part of me was a little tempted, but never seriously so. The N&O seemed like it had the potential to be a less-than-optimal fit for me as a designer, as Columbia had been, and I knew I’d always feel a bit weird about working for the paper I had viewed as the competition for years. Most importantly, when I considered the landscape of the newspaper industry, I saw that it was only a matter of time before the same tsunami that had just made landfall at The Herald-Sun swept into newsrooms everywhere, and I knew I didn’t want to have to relive that experience again and again. During my meeting with the N&O folks, one of them told me, alluding to what had happened in Durham, “We don’t lay people off.” My immediate, unspoken thought was, “Yeah, not yet.”

I was done with newspapers, I decided. It didn’t happen quite the way I had envisioned, but The Herald-Sun will, as I had suspected when I went back there, be the last newspaper I work for.

How Can We Miss You If You Don’t Really Leave?!

In December 2005, as I was busy taking the GRE and chasing down recommendation letters for my graduate school application, a chance to be the graphic designer at a nonprofit program at UNC came my way, and it seemed like such a good opportunity that I scrapped my grad-school plans and took the job instead. I put in my notice at The Herald-Sun — my tenure would end a day before the calendar year did — and submitted a four-page letter as part of my exit interview. It wasn’t a bridge-burning rant, but a calm listing of the reasons that made me leave, ending with the expression of my hope that the paper would someday return to being a place that values quality journalism. I wasn’t naive enough to think it would make a difference, but I wrote it all the same so I could feel at ease that I had said and done all that’s within my power, and that what happened next would be up to the other party. The HR lady conducting my exit interview scanned through the letter and said something to the effect of, “Yeah, we’ve certainly seen similar sentiments from other people who have left.” We then exchanged a what-can-you-do look.

When I walked out of the office after deadline shortly after midnight on Dec. 31, 2005, I knew I would be back. I had already agreed to help do the sports agate page on Saturday nights. In a way, my career at The Herald-Sun was coming full circle since this was what I had done at the start of my time there. While I’ve never been wealthy enough to say I cared nothing about the extra $150 to $200 a month from that arrangement, the money was always by far a secondary concern. The main reason I agreed to do it — offered to do it, in fact — was to help out my friends in the sports department because I knew they would have a tougher job than ever. So, for the last five-plus years — like most of the nine years before that — I’ve spent most Saturday nights in The Herald-Sun office. It has been a pretty decent part-time gig — relatively undemanding in both time, energy, and brain power. I basically worked when I was able and/or willing, and the people at the paper were always grateful for the help. The arrangement gave me a chance to catch up with my newspaper friends who now existed on a schedule opposite from mine, a place where I could curse like a sailor in the office and no one would bat and eyelash, and a way for me to keep a toe in the journalism waters without getting wet.

I’d be lying if I said I didn’t miss the newspaper game for a good while after I left. As I told Neil Amato — the man who got me started in the business in the first place and who, like me, has since left it — over lunch a while back, no job you take from here on out will ever give you the same thrill. It was like a siren song, always trying to pull me back in. Almost six years later, however, I’ve finally moved on from that phase of my life. I’ve had three jobs since I left newspapers, and I feel more distant, more detached from the industry now, in a good way. Life after journalism has been pretty good to me, though I do still have a special place in my heart for that decade I spent in newspapers.

Perhaps it’s part of moving on, but in the time since my departure, even my attitude toward the Paxton management at the paper has become a little bit more mellowed, due in part to my gaining a wider perspective on what’s been going on all around the industry and in part to becoming a bit wiser about life and the world in general after having lived outside of the newspaper realm for a while and seeing the same or even worse ills out there. Or maybe it’s just a case of me no longer being at the paper to suffer from the new management’s decisions. But I came to see — and I wasn’t necessarily able to see this at the time — that even if a different chain had bought the paper or even if the original owners had never sold it, chances are good that it still would have suffered similar cutbacks in the past five years. The economic changes in journalism are far too powerful to be stopped by trivial things like whether a news organization is family-owned or part of a chain or which chain it belonged to. I would still never invite the Paxton-imported editor out for a drink, but a few years after I left my full-time job at The Herald-Sun, on the rare occasion that he and I crossed paths in the newsroom on one of my Saturday nights in the office, I would at least make eye contact and could sometimes even flash a bit of a smile as we exchanged greetings. Gradually, I stopped seeing Paxton as the serpent in the garden, but rather just a particularly virulent manifestation of the slash-and-burn approach that was sweeping across the entire industry.

Watching Death from the Periphery

One of the negative side effects of my continuing association with the paper, however, is that I’ve gotten an up-close look at its steady deterioration over the past six years. The Herald-Sun’s circulation has plummeted to half of what it was at the time of the ownership change, while staff size, ambitions, and quality of work have all waned drastically. A couple times each year, it seems, I would go into the office and be informed that we had more “churn” and so-and-so had been laid off. And as more of the familiar faces left on their own accord, fewer and fewer of their empty positions were being filled. The turnover rate has also increased. Of course people have always come and gone at newspapers, but this was different. For comparison’s sake, I’d estimate that about two-thirds (and definitely at least half) of the people who were in The Herald-Sun sports department when I started there in 1997 were still there when I returned from Columbia in 2005. Now, of the 10 people in the department when I left in 2006, the sports editor is the only one remaining. A sports department that was 12 strong at the time of the ownership change has been slashed to a current headcount of three, a 75-percent reduction in six years. No amount of innovation or “working smarter” can offset that level of loss. Add to it the fact that the desk has also been laying out the Sanford Herald’s pages, and it was inevitable that the quality of work would start to slip. Fewer and fewer events were being covered, with less and less depth. Time for editing, or even just proofreading, became ever more precious and virtually disappeared on some nights. Instead of visual journalism or even just design, the desk’s job quickly slipped toward mere production — fill the pages with stories and let them go. Instead of complaining about not getting enough space for a special section, the concern was now about getting an abundance of space because there aren’t enough people to work on it. Whereas we once busted ass so we could do great work, people were now having to bust ass just to get the paper out.

Outside the paper, the world has moved on. While the initial layoffs right after the ownership change had incited outrage from the community, each ensuing layoff made increasingly fewer ripples, until almost no one outside the paper noticed anymore, even in the journalism world, since such news had become commonplace. And in the current economic crisis,  one newspaper’s financial woes just blended into the tableaux of bad news everywhere. Inside the paper, however, the deterioration was hard to miss. The newsroom was hemorrhaging talent and experience and increasingly not replenishing either. The fat had long been trimmed, and most of what has been happening the last few years has been more akin to deciding that you don’t need one of your limbs anymore and cutting off that limb and carving out the part of your brain that controls it, and then doing it to another limb a few months later, and then another, until what you are left with is a limbless, near-brain-dead trunk. The newsroom, once alive with activity, became increasingly empty, especially at night. One cubicle after another became derelicts, serving as eerie monuments to the people who once inhabited them, a few still sporting their last occupants’ nameplates and belongings, untouched since the day they left, which, in some cases, was several years ago. On the night shift, the desk is now often cloaked in a silent solitude interrupted only by the drone of the air conditioning and the occasional ring of the phone echoing in a newsroom that had never seemed so cavernous. There’s no other way to put it: For someone who knew what that newsroom had been like just a few years earlier, this was a demoralizing scene to walk into, even if I only walked in once a week. It reminds me of “North Country Blues,” the Bob Dylan song about the death of an ore-mining town that includes this verse:

So the mining gates locked
And the red iron rotted
And the room smelled heavy from drinking
Where the sad, silent song
Made the hour twice as long
As I waited for the sun to go sinking

I understand that the journalism landscape is changing and that newspapers and their staffs — and staff sizes — have to change with it. However, that need for change touches on the other part of this tragedy. The changes at The Herald-Sun would be easier to stomach if the company was doing more than just shedding staff. I can live with reducing staff if it was part of a bigger plan to turn around the paper’s fortunes. I’d be ok with reducing ambitions if you’re altering your approach so you can focus your limited resources to specialize in a few areas. I’d be ok with reducing or even eliminating the desk if it was part of re-inventing your workflow, and the role copy editing and design within that workflow, for the digital publishing age. I’d be ok with the newspaper no longer being a place where someone can or want to build a long career if it took steps to transform itself into a place that consistently attracted young talent by offering them good opportunities to practice the new journalism skills they’re learning in school and hone their craft before moving on to bigger and better things. Unfortunately, with few exceptions, I saw none of that, a missed opportunity made even more frustrating by the fact that other newspapers facing similar pressures are trying to innovate and, in some cases, finding some success.

Still I kept going in and helping out about once a week, increasingly more out of loyalty to friends than anything else. There have been times when, upon being begged to pull an extra shift on a week night — something I typically loathe to do as it means a short night’s rest before work the next morning — I felt tempted to say no, to let management reap what it had sowed. But each time, I relented, because I knew the people who would suffer for it would be my friends and colleagues, who would be asked to work an extra day, to drive back from an assignment to squeeze in an extra desk shift, or to adjust their vacation plans to make up for the widening gap between workload and body count. So I kept saying yes, again and again, for the sake of loyalty. But as more and more of my friends have departed — and as the people who replaced them have departed — I’ve found myself wondering on more than one occasion, “How long am I going to keep doing this? Until the last of my friends have left?”

The parent company was good enough to alleviate me of that potential dilemma two weeks ago by announcing that it was moving all of The Herald-Sun’s desk functions out of state. That includes the work I’ve been doing on Saturday nights (the sports editor and I have discussed throwing some correspondent work my way when or if my schedule allows it, which is uncertain since I’m about to start grad school). Of course, I’ve never really considered what I’ve doing at The Herald-Sun the last five-plus years employment, but rather more as an arrangement among friends, and I’m fortunate enough that I can withstand the loss of that income without too much trouble. I had been considering cutting back on my work there anyway once my masters program starts. I’m sure this change will produce its share of negative consequences, given the loss of local knowledge and the tender loving care that only an in-house design staff can give a paper, but for the people who will be left after this round of layoffs, this change could actually be somewhat of a blessing since they will no longer have to worry about spending part of their time filling in on desk and can instead focus on just reporting. However, there’s no denying that the news hurts. I am, after all, watching something that I had once poured so much of myself into — and something that has had a big influence on my life and career — first wither away steadily and now finally die.

My experience at The Herald-Sun over the last 13 years is hardly unique in the journalism world. What has happened at The Herald-Sun is a microcosm of the cost inherent in any revolution, a reminder of the inevitable casualties that get thrown overboard as journalism plows full-speed ahead into a future it cannot fully comprehend and which no one can truly predict. It can be a gory, bloody mess that we don’t necessarily want to pay too much attention to. The notions of creation and new opportunities, after all, are a lot more appealing than the ideas of destruction and shipwrecked careers. It’s always easier to look away and tell yourself, “These changes are hard but necessary,” or “The laid-off people will find other jobs.” The future will arrive; it always does. I’m sure it’ll offer its share of goods and bads, and it will never stop changing and moving. But having had a front-row seat from which to witness the destruction involved in bringing that future into being is perhaps why I’m a half step slower to hail the coming of a golden age, even if I do find much to like about the new possibilities in journalism.

Perhaps one day we’ll look back on the times when each news organization had its own in-house copy-editing and design desk and wonder in amazement how they could’ve ever operated in such a manner. But for me, having lived through those times and having been shaped by one of those desks, seeing the copy and design desk at The Herald-Sun pass from the stage leaves me with an undeniable sense of loss. It has nothing to do with whether the new era of journalism is better or worse. Instead, it’s like seeing your childhood home get bulldozed. They may be putting up a new mansion in its place, shinier and better in every way, but you know it’ll never quite be the same, and part of you will always miss the old house that once stood there, leaks, cracks, and all.

Update (Aug. 14)

At 12:05 a.m. today, with no special fanfare, the last page for The Herald-Sun produced in Durham was sent off to composing. Here is what’s most likely the last newspaper page I’ll design.

As I got ready to leave the office, I discovered on one of the desks in the sports department a copy — my copy — of The Newspaper Designer’s Handbook by Tim Harrower, the textbook that helped lay the foundation for many a newspaper designer. I got this book when I was in college, and I brought it into the office years ago as a teaching aid in mentoring the younger designers on the sports desk. On this night, this book seemed to belong to a previous lifetime.

Also, former Herald-Sun colleague Ginny Skalski also shared her experience at the paper. Read it here.

For those of you not familiar with the industry lingo, “slot” can mean different things at different newspapers, but the general idea is that you’re in charge of the desk (the origin of the term is succinctly explained here). In this particular case, it meant figuring out what goes where in the sports section and designing and editing the sports front in addition to other pages in the section. It’s not exactly rocket science once you know how to do it, but it is much more involved than the work I’ve been doing for the paper for the past six years. I used to enjoy slotting when I worked fulltime in newspapers because it meant I had control over the whole section, and because I always did enjoy the challenges and opportunities that came with designing a section front. And after not doing it for six years, I was actually kind of looking forward to getting my hands dirty again this past weekend.

Here are the pages I ended up doing that night:

I really liked the track and field pictures on one of the inside pages. It makes your job as a designer so much easier when your photographers get you great shots. I just wish I had more space to make the hurdle picture bigger. I wasn’t planning to get fancy schmancy with the centerpiece package on the sports front, but when the photos we thought we’d get from the Associated Press didn’t materialize, I said what the heck and just went for it. It was kind of fun to get back in the process of working with the stories, coming up with a headline, doing some typographical treatment, doing a cutout in Photoshop (I can’t remember the last time I did that for work), tracking down information for an accompanying graphic, and pulling everything together to form (hopefully) a cohesive package. This was what I loved most about my old job and what I miss most about it now. And of course, what’s a night on slot without some kind of boneheaded mistake to beat yourself up over the next morning? See the extra E on the end of the winner’s name in the Senior British Open headline on the golf page (and I even caught it on the proof and could’ve sworn I fixed it on the page).

I found that a lot of the things associated with slotting came back to me pretty quickly. However, whether it’s due to rust or the ravages of age, I found slotting this past weekend to be a lot more mentally demanding than I remembered. A Sunday night in July is typically the deadest time of the year for sports, and Sunday nights are easy on the sports desk anyway because most events, when there are some, end relatively early. A six-page section on a Sunday night was typically a breeze. On this particular night, though, it felt like my brain was churning nonstop from the moment I sat down at my desk around 4:30 p.m. to when I walked out of the building at about 12:30 a.m. I was feeling the adrenaline rush, which I liked, but also the mental fatigue about midway through the night. By the time I was driving home through empty streets at 12:30 a.m., I was thinking that I was glad I got a chance to do this again, but also glad that I don’t do this every day anymore.

Bora Zivkovic, the blog editor at Scientific American, posted a piece few days ago about the rise of forms of storytelling other than “the kind of short, inverted-pyramid article many in the professional media think of as “The Story”. Instead, Zivkovic envisions this “middle” form fading away in favor of either very short (tweet-length) reports or much lengthier narratives:

My bold prediction is that the length of a typical article will go in two directions: super-short, just the gist of the news, like a tweet; or super-long, an in-depth, detailed explainer or narrative. Long articles are doing very well these days, are popular and are quite capable of fetching money from their readers who are paying for such quality content quite willingly.

I especially agree with Zivkovic’s push for storytellers to make much greater use of the wide array of new forms at a storyteller’s disposal, such as tweets, links, and visualizations. However, there are a couple points in his piece I want to address in greater detail.

First, as some commenters on his post have pointed out, it is a false caricature to think that “for journalists, a story is a filed, fact-checked, 400-word inverted pyramid with the punch line in the title followed by the most important stuff.” Sure, that form was taught in journalism school, but so was feature writing — where we definitely did not write 400-word inverted pyramid stories — and now so is multimedia storytelling. Journalists write everything from three-sentence briefs to features, explainers or investigative reports that are thousands and sometimes tens of thousands of words long, and all of these are referred to, in the the industry lingo, as “stories.”

Second — and this is the point I want to focus on — the length of the story and, to a degree, the style in which it was written (e.g.: inverted pyramid vs. narrative), are not really the appropriate criteria by which to judge the effectiveness or usefulness of stories.

The beauty of the Internet and the new forms of storytelling is not that they give us the freedom to turn every piece into a lengthy narrative or a video or a tweet, but rather that they give us the flexibility to make a story exactly as long as it needs to be to serve its purpose and lets us pick and choose the optimal style and format for that particular story. A story’s value to its audience lies not in whether it’s 140 characters, 400 words, or 30,000 words, but in what the storyteller does within that length. Used correctly and effectively, any story length can inform and satisfy. Used poorly, any of these formats can make the audience loses interest and focus, and the story in turn loses its audience.

Zivkovic presented the example of how he used to “filter” a newspaper by selecting certain sections that he’s interested in, then skimming headlines before picking a story that he might be interested in reading. He concludes:

The point of this exercise is to realize that for the most part inverted pyramid can be reduced to just the headline. The ultimate inverted pyramid article is a single tweet.

And for those who want to know more than just that one sentence, a short inverted-pyramid article is not sufficient, so one has to look for a longer narrative explainer.

There is not much utility for the short article in the age of the Web, where limits of the paper medium do not apply, thus no article needs to always try to be both a part of River Of News and a part of News In Context – it does neither perfectly. And in the age of the Web, the two can be separated, yet linked by hypertext.

I’ll offer up my own example of filtering here by describing how I read Zivkovic’s post. I found his post via a link on Twitter. The tweet interested me and so I clicked on the link to read the story. When I got there, the headline at the top of the story kept my interest, so I read on. But then, the first five paragraphs had nothing to do with the subject of the tweet or the headline, which was what brought me to the story in the first place. I skimmed the first two sentences and quickly realized this to be the case, so I skipped past the first 300-some words of the 5,400-plus-word post.

After the real intro of the story, which sets up the rest of the narrative, I got to the section titled “What is a story?” and the first sentence I saw under that subhead started with “According to Wikipedia …” and immediately my attention began to waver because of how overused the “The Merriam-Webster Dictionary defines X as …” device has become and how ineffective its usage tends to be in the first place. So I quickly skimmed through that paragraph and resumed actual reading with the paragraph below it. The ensuing section, “Narratives vs. Inverted Pyramid”, held my interest throughout.

And then I got to three consecutive sections that seemed to take a detour from the story up to that point — “Typology of science stories”, “Science in the story: hero or villain?”, and “Is a scientific paper a story?” While interesting, these three sections interrupted the train of thought and the line of argument that had been built in the previous parts of the post, and it wasn’t until almost 1,400 words later that we jumped back onto the narrative-vs.-inverted-pyramid train, with the section titled “How do readers know what to expect: inverted pyramid or narrative?” So for almost 1,400 words, I skimmed and my attention was starting to wane and I was beginning to wonder where this was all going because, after all, I have work to do and my job description doesn’t say anything about sitting here all day reading lengthy blog posts, as much as I wish it did (and yes, I do use Instapaper, but keep in mind there are also countless other stories out there vying for my attention and trying to keep me from coming back to this one).

The point of recounting how I read Zivkovic’s post isn’t to imply he’s a bad writer, to line-edit his post, or to suggest that all of his readers read the way I did. Instead, it’s meant to illustrate that filtering takes place not only while one chooses which story to read, but also on an ongoing basis while one is reading a story. The more someone has to skim and filter while reading a story, the harder one has to work to get to the central message of the story, the less effective and satisfying that story becomes, and the less likely the reader will continue reading. On the point of losing readers’ attention, Zivkovic wrote:

Unlike with Inverted Pyramid articles, in which the reader’s focus rapidly falls off after reading the headline, the narrative sustains focus (it may even rise as the reader progresses through the piece). The reader needs to concentrate better in order not to miss important clues and information. Thus, more information is retained. Thus, narrative form is more educational – readers can actually learn and retain new knowledge, not just get temporarily informed.

Here’s one place where I disagree with Zivkovic. Readers may need to concentrate more in order to not miss important clues and information in a narrative, but it doesn’t follow that they will. The latter only happens if the story, regardless of format, gives them a reason to stay engaged. What sustains focus isn’t so much style or length, but rather substance. A story loses readers not because it’s long or because it’s short, but because it runs out of interesting substance or becomes so much work to follow that it outweighs the quality of the substance being presented. A 400-word story that runs out of steam after the first three paragraphs is bound to lose readers, but so will a narrative that takes too long to get to the point or takes so many twists and turns that the readers give up after a while (ever hear someone tell a story in excruciating detail and think to yourself, “Get to the point already!”?). In fact, I’d argue that it’s more difficult to keep readers engaged throughout a narrative — especially in online reading — because by its very nature, a narrative takes longer to develop and covers more ground and more angles than an inverted-pyramid story, and thus has to contend with more potential distractions. It’s different when someone opens up a novel. That’s a situation where one not only expects the narrative form, but also a case where the narrative journey to the big reveal is as much a payoff as the reveal itself, if not more. In online reading, however, and especially in online news, where the overwhelming majority of pieces tend to be more informational, one is conditioned to expect a more direct path to the point of the piece — since the point of the piece often is the payoff — and generally has less time or tolerance for detours.

The Internet has removed the space constraints that previously prevented us from saying what needs to be said when more needs to be said. However, it cannot do anything about the pitfall at the other end of the spectrum — saying too much and getting in the way of what we are trying to say. A lengthy story where one ends up mentally filtering out big chunks of the story may not be as effective as a much shorter story that grips people’s attention throughout. The same idea applies no matter what length or style a story adopts. The 400-word inverted pyramid is definitely not the perfected universal form of storytelling, but neither is the 140-character tweet, the 5,000-word narrative, or the 90-second video. Each style serves a particular purpose better than others, and the ideal choice changes from story to story, depending on a myriad of factors, including the content, the intended audience, and the aim of the storyteller.

While the Internet has liberated storytellers to write as much as they want to, no less significant, especially in the realm of news, is the fact that it has also liberated them to write as little as they need to. I’ll be happy to see the extinction of the short stories where the writer strains to turn three sentences into 400 words because that’s the allotted space, but I will be just as happy to celebrate the continued existence of the short stories where someone writes 400 words because that is exactly what’s necessary to serve its purpose, no more, no less. I suspect Zivkovic and I probably agree on the idea of “the right length and style for the right story” (see the example of the runaway elephant story in his post). I think where we diverge is perhaps how often a short story is the appropriate choice. Whereas he seems to think the Web selects against short stories, I think people’s reading habits on the Web will help keep that format alive. After all, as Zivkovic points out in his post, reading a short, inverted-pyramid story is a less risky venture because it requires less investment of time and it’s easier to quit at any point (though I don’t think guilt has anything to do with it, as he suggests), whereas longer narratives require readers to be more selective in what they read because they are a much bigger investment.

Also, this is not necessarily an either-or scenario, since we’ve seen that people are segregating their reading into different times set aside for content of different lengths (think Instapaper). True, the short story does not do the “river of news” as effectively as tweets, nor does it do explainer as effectively as lengthy narratives (then again, neither of those two formats would effectively fill each other’s role either). However, those two are not the only important niches, and the short story can serve as an effective compromise of the two, balancing our need for more details than what’s conveyed in a headline and our need for pieces we can finish and get something out of without making a substantial time investment. Aside from being appropriate for the low-information stories that Zivkovic wrote about, the short story can also serve as the risk-free trial period for meatier subjects — a low-investment gateway to help you figure out if you are interested in a topic. In fact, Zivkovic entertained this possibility in the section of his post titled “A link is worth a thousand words” (and to serve as an effective gateway on the Web, a short story would indeed need to embrace linking as he describes). If you find you’re interested in the subject, you can move on to the linked narratives for total immersion. If not, you can quit without having lost too much time.

I think this gateway function will become an ever more important niche — important enough to keep the short, inverted-pyramid story a key part of people’s daily reading routine — because it helps people filter through the endless streams of available information vying for their eyeballs. In the age of the Web, it’s no longer the limits of the paper medium that we should worry about; it’s the limits of the human audience — their time, their interest, their attention span. With a little evolution, the short, inverted-pyramid story would still be an important and effective tool in that role.

Update (7/18)

See the discussion (below) I had with Zivkovic on Twitter after this post went up. He makes a good, and important, point that he was talking specifically about science stories, which often require much more context to truly make sense of and be useful to readers. After our discussion, it does seem that we pretty much agree on the key things and where we may disagree is only a matter of degrees. And also an important mea culpa: While writing my post, I had misread a sentence in Zivkovic’s post in a way that was definitely not a matter of degrees, as you’ll see in the Storify item below:

As hard as it is to believe at times, it’s been five-and-a-half years since I left the newspaper business. I still dip my toe in every now and then, however, by doing some desk work for the sports department at my old newspaper, The Herald-Sun in Durham, N.C. Most of the time, this just involves a couple hours on a Saturday night throwing together the sports agate page (a relic that I myself am surprised still has not gone away yet). However, every now and then, I’m called on to do a little more of what I used to do, loved to do, and got kind of good at: Design pages, edit copy, write headlines, maybe do some writing, and, most importantly, try to blend the text and design into one cohesive, informative, and useful product.

Such was the case this past Saturday, and when I walked out of the office after deadline that night, I thought to myself: “Hey, I still enjoy doing this.” It’s on such occasions that I feel like I could still get back in the game.

Fortunately for me, such happy thoughts are quickly dissipated by news like yesterday’s announcement that the News & Observer in Raleigh will no longer have its own copy editing and design desk come August. Instead, its sister paper in Charlotte will take on the responsibility of editing copy and designing pages for the N&O, as well as for the sister paper in Rock Hill, S.C. According to the report on the N&O’s website, approximately 25 positions will move from Raleigh to Charlotte, with the people currently occupying those spots being offered the opportunity to relocate.

This development underlines several of the main reasons I left newspapers and, if I can help it, will never go back full time:

• Newspapers have clearly decided that “boots in the office” don’t matter. Publishers and editors boast about keeping “boots on the ground” — namely, reporters — when they’re cutting jobs. Yet, boots in the office do matter as well, even if the public isn’t aware of their contribution to what they are seeing.
• Design’s time as a prominent part of storytelling in print at newspapers seems to have come and gone. At many news organization, visual journalism has been trumped by pagination. More on that later.
• While the situation at the N&O is a bit better than some others in that the people in those 25 positions are being offered the chance to relocate, the fact remains that they are being forced to choose between uprooting themselves and their families or going into unemployment in a crappy job market. One reason I left newspapers was the fact that it’s a business where you basically can’t change jobs without relocating, and I don’t want my job alone to be able to dictate where I live.

A life time ago, when I worked full-time as a sports designer and copy editor at The Herald-Sun, we saw the N&O as our main competitor (we were, after all, covering pretty much the same teams). At times we liked to make fun of the N&O for what we felt were “lazy” or “boring” designs and headline writing, some of which was justified, though in retrospect I have developed a much greater appreciation for some of what the N&O did (and I’m sure they had a good laugh over what those crazy kids in Durham did at times, too). However, we had to admit that the N&O produced pretty good journalism and, when it wanted to, did some really great design work. And truth be told, I liked it when the N&O put out great design work, because it always pushed us to up our game.

Those days of newspaper wars are long gone now. The Herald-Sun pretty much gave up on the idea of competing with the N&O when it came under new ownership and management in late 2004, and the drastic personnel cuts at my old paper over the past few years have left it pretty much unable to maintain any illusions of competition with its neighbor in Raleigh, which had always been the much bigger dog in the fight. Ironically, I never thought I would see the day when The Herald-Sun would have a bigger copy editing and design desk than the N&O, and that is sad, considering the N&O is the second largest paper in the state and covers the state capitol.

Of course, such centralization of design and copy-editing functions into regional hubs is nothing new, and there’s already talk that another newspaper chain is considering adopting the model. The Herald-Sun, in fact, has been doing the design and copy editing for the Sanford Herald for more than a year now. Being witness to the situation that the designers and copy editors at the paper find themselves in now, I’m very glad I got out when I did, because I would hate to work in those conditions. Basically, a staff a quarter of the size it was at five years ago is now doing twice the work, which, as you can imagine, doesn’t leave much time to actually do those things that I enjoyed so much about my job — really fine-tune a story, create graphics that inform and visuals that make you feel the story, and combine design and text to produce effective, cohesive communication.

In his memo to the N&O staff announcing the elimination of the copy and design desks, N&O publisher Orage Quarles III called it a “transition of production work,” a phrase echoed in the N&O’s own report on the move. On Twitter, Andy Bechtel, an N&O alum and a journalism professor at UNC, responded:

I can’t agree more. Calling copy editing and design “production work” ignores the journalistic contributions those functions can make for a news company. Certainly, copy editing can be downgraded to merely proofreading, and design can be watered down to merely pagination. However, when done right, copy editing and design not only improve the quality of the existing journalism, but also help create new, complementary journalism by adding to the stories and enhancing the message and information they are trying to deliver. Journalism, after all, is a form of communication, and communication is about the whole package — imagery, text, headlines, and, when applicable, sounds — and the messages and emotions that package conveys. Of course, you can’t create such packages if all you have time to do is make a few stories fit on a page and move on to the next. I’ve seen first hand what qualifies as journalism in the copy-editing and design realm and what is merely production work, and newspapers are increasingly choosing the latter.

For every function other than producing stories to fill pages in print and online, newspapers have always seemed to struggle with discerning the distinction between journalism and production work, especially where design is concerned. It took forever for design to claw its way into respectability in the newsroom, yet the bottom fell out financially for newspapers right around then, and they were forced to abandon their recently discovered appreciation for visual journalism and instead revert back to cataloging designers’ jobs as more production work than journalism, and then reshape or eliminate those positions accordingly.

I certainly understand the difficult position newspapers find themselves in and the tough choices they’ve had to make. Perhaps these choices are necessary, perhaps the journalism derived from good copy-editing and design has become a luxury newspapers can no longer afford, and perhaps I would make the exact same decisions were I placed in that situation. However, make no mistake about it: You’re not merely shipping out button-pushers or smart monkeys who know how to use InDesign and Photoshop. You are, without a doubt, shipping out journalists.

I missed a spirited debate on Twitter last night while I was off enjoying Spamalot. Bora Zikovic, science communicator and chief editor/community manager with Scientific American magazine, got things started with this tweet:

Nothing irks me more than when journos say “we are not here to educate”. What are you doing it for, then?

That spurred a flurry of tweets from others, and the discussion has been compiled into a Storify post. Zikovic has also followed it up with a post on his blog:

We had a great discussion this afternoon on Twitter, about the way journalists strenuously deny they have an educational role, while everyone else sees them as essential pieces of the educational ecosystem: sources of information and explanation missing from schools, or for information that is too new for older people to have seen in school when they were young. Also as sources of judgement in disputes over facts.

While journalists strongly deny their educational role, as part of their false objectivity and ‘savvy’, everyone else perceives them as educators – people who should know and then tell, what is true and what is false, who is lying and who is not. People rely, as they cannot be in school all their lives, on the media for continuing education, especially on topics that are new. And people are then disappointed when, as usually happens, journalists fail in that role by indulging in false balance, He-Said-She-Said reporting, passionately avoiding to assign the truth-value to any statement, or self-indulgent enjoyment of their own “skill with words” in place of explaining the facts.

Here’s where I agree with Zikovic:

• The practice of false balance and he-said-she-said is BAD, BAD, BAD. It goes against the basic tenets of journalism.

Here’s where I disagree with Zikovic:

• The assertion that “everyone else” perceives journalists as educators.
• The idea that journalists deny their educational role as a way to absolve themselves of the responsibility to be accurate.
• The notion that journalists must see themselves as “educators” so that they are bound by the responsibility to be accurate.

A Game of Definition

After reading the discussion, there were two questions that, for me, needed to be answered:

• What does Zikovic mean when he says “educate”?
• What do the journalists who say “I’m not here to educate” mean when they say “educate”?

Zikovic told us what he means by “educate” in some of his tweets during the discussion:

@mcshanahan @alicebell ‘education’ = helping people understand the world as it really is.

@alicebell telling people what is a lie and what isn’t is education.

@ktraphagen @alicebell @ejwillingham @caseyrentz @mcshanahan I do not think of education as http://bit.ly/jMxXHZ to be lecturing+testing.

What we do not know, however, is what the journalists mean by “educate.” Are they using the same definition as Zikovic? This is where the discussion runs into problems. Zikovic can go on and on about what he thinks “education” is and dismiss suggestions that maybe the journalists take it to mean something else by mocking them for thinking so, but his is far from a universally agreed-upon definition. Say “tree” to anyone and they immediately know what you are referring to, and if they say “tree” to you, you know exactly what object they are talking about. “Education”, however, is a different beast — a concept rather than an object — and as such means different things to different people, and sometimes even different things to the same person under different circumstances. My problem with Zikovic’s argument is that he is using a self-imposed definition of “educate” and assuming that’s what others who use the term mean, when there is no grounds to make that assumption.

No Dodging Responsibility

If you were to ask journalists the following two questions:

• Do you consider yourself an educator?
• Do you consider yourself someone whose job is to help people understand the world as it really is?

I suspect many more would answer “Yes” to the latter than to the former, because the latter is much more specific and clear, while the former concerns a murky label whose meaning shifts from person to person and whose connotation is strongly linked with a profession. That’s why I disagree with Zikovic’s opinion that saying they are not here to educate is the journalists’ way of absolving themselves of the responsibility to be accurate.

Fortunately, just because a journalist may not think of him or herself as an “educator”, by whatever definition they or someone else may apply to that term, it does not relieve him or her of the responsibility to accuracy and truth, because for journalists, that responsibility was never tied to “educate” in the first place. As someone who, you know, actually did the journalism school thing, I found Zikovic’s assertion that the avoidance of the responsibility to be accurate is “hammer in j-schools” to be utter horsesh*t. If anything was hammered into my brain during J-school, it was the responsibility to accuracy and truth. We may not necessarily have heard “educate” much in J-school, but you can bet “truth” and “accuracy” were constant companions. One of the few things I still remember from J-school was when my reporting professor told us, “If Senator X says Senator Y is a communist, you don’t just report ‘Senator X said Senator Y is a communist’ just because it’s something that happened. You verify Senator X’s claim.”

This is why this discussion over whether journalists “educate” or are “educators” is ultimately unnecessary for addressing Zikovic’s issues with bad journalism. We don’t need journalists to label what they do as “education” in order to hold them to a commitment to truth and accuracy. We don’t need journalists to say, “We’re here to educate,” as opposed to “We’re here to inform” or “We’re here to [fill in the blank]” in order to get them to call a lie a lie, to not set up false balance, and to not turn the concept of objectivity into its degenerate bastard child — he-said-she-said reporting. We simply need them to live up to the principles that form the bedrock of the identity and profession to which they all agree they belong. We simply need them to say, “We are here to practice journalism.”

On our recent trip to Washington, D.C., we visited the Newseum, the shrine to all things journalism. Despite having been a journalist, I wasn’t particularly eager to go, in part because I had this idea in my head that it was going to be a shrine to how great the news business used to be, which would just be down right depressing. That, and the fact that $22 a ticket seemed awfully pricey considering many of the best museums in D.C. are free.

With a little prodding from Courtney, though, we decided to go, and it turned out to be a terrific experience that was well worth the price of admission. Even if you don’t care about the subject matter at all, this is one of the better designed museums I’ve seen. The building is beautiful, with a modern, all-glass design. The exhibits are very well done, and you can easily lose yourself in the museum for five or six hours if you take the time to read everything. It was a good thing that the tickets were good for consecutive days, because we hadn’t planned on spending too much time at the Newseum but ended up going back the next day.

Some observations:

• First of all, how the heck does a museum about a profession filled with people making slave wages afford such prime real estate? The Newseum has a nice spot on Pennsylvania Avenue, a great view of the street and Capitol Hill from its terrace, and the honor of being next to the Canadian embassy to bout. There are some posh apartments in the building and a Wolfgang Puck restaurant next door, too.
• The gallery of Pulitzer-winning photos and the stories behind them was stunning and moving. Some of those stories really underline the difficulty and emotional toll of covering the news without becoming a part of it. The picture that stuck with me most was the one of a vulture standing in wait while an emaciated Sudanese toddler stops to rest as she struggles toward a feeding center. It’s a difficult photo to look at, but just as difficult was the accompanying text on how the picture came about, in which the photographer, Kevin Carter, discussed why he didn’t help the child (he said they had been told not to touch the Sudanese children because of risk of disease). That struggle for a balance between covering the story and becoming involved in the story was an undercurrent found in a number of the photos on display, as well as other exhibits, such as one section of the Katrina exhibit about how two journalists decided en route to covering the hurricane damage that if they came across someone in need of help, they would help first and worry about getting the story later.
• One of the exhibits included a video about newsreels, those conveyors of news to the movie-going masses in the early half of the 20th century and the fodder of many a hilarious Mystery Science Theater 3000 segments at the tail end of the 20th century. As I watched the part about how the emergence of television made newsreels obsolete and eventually extinct, I couldn’t help but wonder whether we will be seeing a similar exhibit about the printed newspapers in 10 or 20 years.
• The unintentionally hilarious headlines and corrections built into the restroom walls are great. I found myself going to the restroom even when I didn’t have to, just so I could check those out.
• The museum has a small but apparently growing wing about social media, and I was impressed that there’s already a panel there about the role of social media in the Middle East uprisings. That’s some fast work.
• The exhibit of old newspaper pages is a terrific time sink if you are looking for a way to while away a few hours. Many of those pages reminded me of the “Our Dumb Century” book by The Onion, which, by the way, was on sale at the museum gift shop.
• There are a lot of video exhibits at the Museum, and many are long, perhaps too long ((some are 10-12 minutes). I wonder how many people make it all the way through one of these clips.
• One of the most beautiful exhibits was the Journalist Memorial, a curved glass wall bearing the names of journalists who died in the line of duty.
• A perhaps unintentionally symbolic exhibit: There was a couple displays about the decline of newspaper circulation, and one of them was a survey about whether you read a newspaper in print or online, and you are supposed to answer by depositing a penny into two tubes, one for print and one for online. When we were there, there was only a small handful of pennies at the bottom of each tube. It may not be the intent of the exhibit, but it really did kind of sum up the financial quandary facing journalism, and more specifically newspapers, today.

Pennies in print, and pennies in online. Kinda says it all for newspapers, doesn’t it?

You would think a top-notch news organization like NPR would know the difference between journalism and non-journalism. That wasn’t the case, however, in this NPR story titled ” ‘Robot Journalist’ Out-Writes Human Sports Reporter”.

The story really caught on on Twitter, where the original NPR tweet has been widely disseminated (just search for “robot journalist” on Twitter). Here’s a sampling:

The only problem is that the person out-written by the software program is not, and doesn’t even claim to be, a journalist. Instead, the human-produced piece in this case is a press release on the official George Washington athletics website — in other words, a PR piece.

Having read countless sports press releases during my career as a sports journalist, I know these things are kind of hit-or-miss. Some schools have very well written releases that tend to be fair, while other schools produce horrible homerish material. I’ve even seen a number of examples of releases burying great performances by opposing teams, though not quite to this degree. In this case, even as a PR piece for the team that came out on the wrong end of the perfect game, the writer made a bad decision in burying the rare feat. If a journalist reported about this game, however, that mistake in judgement would never have been made because this is as easy a judgement call as it gets for a journalist. There’s no way you’d bury the perfect game. The way the NPR story distorted the facts to call the sports information writer a journalist is a slap to the face for journalists everywhere.

But it gets even better. In case you missed it, Poynter addressed that bad gwsports.com piece a good three weeks before the NPR story (and here’s a bunch of sports journalists discussing it). The money quote from the Poynter piece (emphasis added by me):

“This is the George Washington website,” GWU sports information director Dave Lubeski tells Romenesko. “We’re in the business to promote our athletes and our team. We’re not claiming to be journalists.” What some call “the buried lead” was discussed after the story was posted, says Lubeski, and it was mentioned that the perfect game could have been noted in the sub-hed. But “we’re not in the newspaper business,” notes the SID.

So despite the quote above from the sports information director saying, “WE’RE NOT JOURNALISTS,” whoever wrote NPR’s “robot journalist” story decided to call the person who wrote the piece on gwsports.com a journalist anyway. It’s hard to imagine that anyone could mistake a school’s official athletics site for a journalism site, and I would certainly expect someone working at one of the top journalism companies in the country to know the difference. The question, then, is what’s the motivation for distorting the facts? Is it just because “robot out-writes journalist” makes for a better story than “robot out-writes PR piece trying to hide home team’s embarrassment”? If so, then whoever wrote that NPR piece has no business calling him or herself a journalist. Or if the NPR writer really couldn’t tell the difference between gwsports.com and a journalism site, then he/she should be replaced by a computer program.

Update 1 (4/18)

I should add that I’ve known about Narrative Science’s sportswriting software for a while and I’ve checked out some of its work from the Big Ten Network’s website. For the most part, the stories are actually not bad and definitely usable. If I was putting together a non-rev sports roundup from press releases, I would definitely take these computer-generated stories over some of the ones I’ve gotten in the past because they are a lot easier to extract useful information from. However, there are signs in the computer-generated stories that are relatively easy to pick up that would lead you to wonder if they were written by software, such as the odd placement of a particular factoid.

Update 2 (4/18)

If you were going to ask me which of all the posts I’ve written that’s going to shatter the single-day record for visitors to this blog, I would not have guessed this one, but this story apparently grew legs as it has been picked up by a few other sites and retweeted a number of times (I know, a few hundred views really aren’t much, but considering this blog probably averages around 100 views a day, it’s a big number for me). I’ve had traffic spikes before, but nothing quite like this:

Of course, much more important to me than my traffic numbers is the notion of correcting bad information that’s been widely disseminated. So, thanks to everyone who took the time to check out this post and pass it on. Also on that front, thanks in part to King Kaufman and the folks at the news bug-catching service mediabugs.org, NPR has changed the headline on the story. You can read more about this at mediabugs.org, where Kaufman reported the error and the service contacted NPR about it. Like Mark Follman said in the discussion there, I think NPR does need to post a more prominent correction than just a note in the comment thread on the story.

Update (4/20)

I saw this last night but didn’t have time to update the post until now. NPR has indeed gone back and added a correction at the beginning of the story, as well as on its corrections page.

To be honest, part of me never thought I would go to graduate school for journalism. In fact, part of me was kind of dead set against it for the longest time. I was fortunate enough to land a newspaper job before I graduated from college, and after graduation, it seemed that practical work experience would mean much more to my career in journalism than an advance degree (which was my stock reply to my parents whenever they asked if I had any plans on going to graduate school).

Then a funny thing happened in 2005, about six years into my journalism career: I didn’t want to work in journalism anymore. At that time, the newspaper I worked at and loved had just undergone an ownership change for the worse and laid off a big chunk of its staff. After the initial tremor subsided, it was clear that the work environment, while still tolerable, had started to deteriorate and would likely continue to do so. I started looking around for other jobs. There were some potential opportunities at other newspapers, including some pretty reputable ones, but when I looked out on the media landscape, it was clear that what had just happened at my newspaper was already happening at other media organizations and it would only be a matter of time before it swept across the entire industry, and I didn’t want to put myself in a situation where I would have to experience again and again what I had just endured. As I started looking around for a way out, graduate school was an obvious option, one that was serious enough that I even took the GRE in December 2005 (I wrote about Bob Dylan in the essay portion of the test).

However, I didn’t want to go back for a graduate degree in journalism. While there are pros and cons to journalism graduate school — some of which are laid out in the HuffPo piece I linked to above – for me my resistance ultimately came down to a couple things:

1. Alternative sources of learning: For many of the skills that I would be interested in learning through a graduate program — such as programming, Web design, multimedia, and photography — there are numerous online sources for learning them on my own, for free. As for the conceptual side of a graduate curriculum, anyone following the online discussion about journalism realizes that there’s no shortage of theories and ideas floating around out there these days.
2. Benefits vs. cost: This was really the overriding factor. It’s obviously a significant investment to take a two-year break from my career to go back to school, not to mention adding a five-figure expenditure during those same two years. Given the state of the journalism job market, and the fact that the market will almost certainly continue to contract in the foreseeable future, it seemed the cost-benefit ratio is too far out of whack for me to take that plunge.

Also, I was ready to leave professional journalism, the only work I had known up to that point. I had always wanted to explore other fields of graphic design, but when I was 25, I could still see myself happily working in journalism until I was 30 before trying my hand at other lines of design and eventually picking one to settle into — possibly back in journalism. A little more than a year later, however, not only did I feel like I needed a break from journalism, I increasingly suspected that when I do leave it, it won’t be a temporary detour. It would be for good. The instability in the industry was part of the cause for this change of heart, but just as influential was the daily toll. Even in good times, journalism is a demanding mistress, which is fine when you are young and your friends are equally young and unoccupied with old-folks concerns like family and can hang out with you despite your oddball schedule. When you start to get a bit older, however, you start seeing less of your friends as they get married and have kids, and you feel more isolated and start to wonder, “When the heck am I going to do that?”

So if not journalism, what would I go back to graduate school for? I was working as a newspaper designer then, so going back to school for a design degree seemed like a natural option, and I even started an application to the College of Design at N.C. State right around the time I took the GRE. However, before I finished the application, I got an offer for a non-newspaper design job that seemed to be a great fit for me,  and in the end I chose getting design experience over getting a design degree because I felt that the point of my pursuing a design degree was so that I could land jobs where I could gain non-newspaper design experience, and here was one of those jobs, there for the taking.

In retrospect, I’m glad I made that choice. That job, and the one that followed, not only gave me some valuable experience and portfolio stuffers, but also helped me realize one thing: As much as I love design, I’m not enthralled with the agency setting in which most commercial non-editorial design is being done. Also, in the past few years, I’ve realized that what I am at heart, ultimately, is not so much a designer, a writer, or a programmer, but a storyteller, and that my interest for each of those other crafts stems from the desire to use them to help me tell a story. So the reason I learned Photoshop, the reason I am picking up photography, and the reason I’m trying to hack my way through a PHP book, is not so much that I want to be a pixel jockey, a professional photographer, or a code ninja, but that I want to use all of those skills to weave together rich, in-depth, multifaceted stories about people and things in this world. From that standpoint, I’m glad I didn’t invest tens of thousands of dollars and two years of my life for a masters degree in graphic design before realizing that I probably won’t be happy designing ads in an agency the rest of my life.

Still, in the past few years, I’ve been feeling the on-and-off urge to go back to school for a graduate degree. Among the reasons:

• The devaluation of a bachelor’s degree: A basic college education costs a whole lot more than it used to but isn’t worth what it used to be. Plus, with the recession, there have been more people going back to school or staying in school longer to try to wait out this mess, which means when the jobs do return, I’d be competing with more people with advance degrees in the job market.
• While I can learn skills and concepts on my own that might exceed what one might expect from someone with a bachelor’s degree, it’s more difficult to convey that on a résume sent to an HR department reviewing hundreds of résumes looking for reasons to quickly eliminate all but a handful of them. One thing I like about journalism is that it’s a very inclusive field as far as educational backgrounds go, as you don’t need a particular degree for most jobs in the industry and your portfolio means much more than your résume (at least from my experience). However, in making my career leap away from journalism, I discovered that’s not necessarily the case in other professions, where I’m seeing a greater emphasis on job applicants’ educational background and stricter adherence to requirements on that front. A number of communications-related job postings I’ve seen either require or prefer people with an advance degree, even though that hardly seems necessary from the job description.

However, I had trouble figuring out what program I would want to go back to school for that would be worth the investment. I knew I didn’t want a PhD because of the time and financial commitment involved and because aside from teaching, I wasn’t exactly in love with other aspects of a career in academia. Besides, my wife, upon successfully defending her dissertation, had declared that that’d be the last time anyone in this family goes after a PhD :-). I had already ruled out a degree in graphic design because I couldn’t see myself enjoying the agency setting long-term. I’ve always had a keen interest in science, but not enough to want to do that for a living. For the briefest moment, I toyed with the idea of getting an MBA, but then quickly asked myself, “What the heck are  you going to do with an MBA that you would want to do?” and couldn’t come up with a good answer (nothing against MBAs. It’s just not for me).

Then last fall, I heard that the UNC J-school was going to start offering an online masters program geared toward mid-career professionals, and all of a sudden, the cost-benefit equation changed — the cost side just went down significantly. The curriculum was designed to allow people to keep working while completing the degree, so I won’t be bringing in zero income for two years. Also, since I work at UNC (and hopefully will still be during the coming two years, steep state budget cuts notwithstanding), the program’s total cost after tuition breaks for university employees would come in around $10,000, a great bargain for a masters degree from a J-school with a strong national reputation at a great university. After doing the math, it felt like I would have to come up with an excuse to not take advantage of this opportunity. This was, in many ways, the kind of program format I had been looking for — one that recognized that while many communication professionals would like to go back to school to freshen up their knowledge and skill set, many cannot afford to take a couple years off mid-career to do so. Personally, I think we need more educational programs structured like this, especially when technology has made it much easier to pull off than ever before.

Of course, cost was far from the only motivating factor in my decision to apply to this particular program. For one thing, the curriculum focuses on emerging aspects of communication (not just journalism) that I’m very interested in and will need to understand for the rest of what I hope will be a long career in this field, regardless of whether I work in journalism or other communication-related professions. Also, the lines between journalism and other types of communication are blurring, and there are increasing crossovers in the skill sets needed for various communication professions, so I felt that this curriculum would be beneficial to me no matter which of those professions I end up pursuing. Besides, I’m a big believer in lifelong learning anyway, so this program would fit right into that. While it’s true that I can learn skills and soak up concepts on my own — and have been doing so ever since I left college — I know from experience that a more structured environment will definitely help accelerate my learning, and having a support system and experts and classmates with whom I can discuss ideas and questions was certainly a big selling point as well.

So come August, I’ll be one busy man, juggling family, work, and the journalism graduate program that at one point I figured I would never pursue. In chatting with Rhonda Gibson, the faculty member directing the program, she emphasized that this is not going to be a walk-in-the-park, diploma-mill-type program. I think her approximately exact words were, “We designed this program so you can do it while working 40 hours a week, but you’re not going to be able to do that and much else.” That did sound a bit scary at first, but after giving it some thought, I decided I would be able to make that commitment. Besides, if these next two years go by as fast as the last few have, I’ll be done before I know it.

And what will I do with that masters degree after I get it? I haven’t decided yet, but I’m looking at this as more of a career-booster than a career-changer. I’ve always remained passionate about journalism, but I can’t see myself returning to it fulltime, at least definitely not to the world of journalism I was in before (if that world even exists at all in a few years). There might be things I want to do that are journalism-related, but right now, I still feel that this is a great time to be in journalism as long as you’re not making the bulk of your living from practicing journalism. I don’t know if I’m built for a career in PR, though the last few years have certainly changed a number of misconceptions I had about the field. As I said, I’m a storyteller at heart, so whatever I do in the future will likely revolve around that.

You know, I like a lot of the terrific journalism work that Shane Ryan is doing at Reesenews.org, but I just can’t stomach this diatribe of his at his Seth Curry Saves Duke blog (and not because it’s a pro-Duke blog). He starts off by telling the story of his experience at last week’s ACC Tournament and how he sat next to a radio guy who gave him a hard time about being a Duke alum and then lectured him about not cheering on press row when he showed just a teensy flinch of emotion about a great play by Nolan Smith. From there, Ryan proceeds to lambaste basically the whole group of sportswriters at the tournament. An example:

You can’t cheer on press row. You can look at your computer, and back at the court, and back at your computer. You can share tired jokes in an attempt to sound gruff. You can hammer out your two-bit tale in the moments after, trying like hell to beat a deadline. You can gobble up the free food they give you at every venue, augmenting your complacence. You can slowly grow bitter and tired of the thing that brought you here in the first place. You can focus on baskets and touchdowns and home runs and forget why you came. You can forget the people, and the inner human drama that these games actually represent.

…

But the sneaky, waddling, frantic lackeys I witnessed this weekend are not the heart, the soul, or the brain. They’re the fleshy tire around the midsection, weighing the body down. They’re dead weight, and they need to be shed.

Here’s my point: I don’t want to march in lockstep with the drones of inadequacy. I can already tell it’ll swallow me whole. My place is with the fans in the crowd. Failing that, it’s in front of a television. And I don’t have $150 to spend on a scalped ticket, so I’m not going.

I actually agree with one of Ryan’s chief complaints — the absurdity of some of the questions in the postgame press conferences. It’s always been a pet peeve of mine, as the whole postgame press conference is like some absurd stage act where the coaches and players know exactly what the media will ask them and the media knows exactly what the coaches and players will say, with very few exceptions. Some of the questions, in effect, are just another way of saying, “Give me a quote, coach.”

Now comes the part where I start poking holes in the rest of Ryan’s attack on the sportswriters at the tournament.

1. Ryan holds up Dan Wiederer as an exception to the “drones of inadequacy” he’s raging against and points to a three-part series Wiederer wrote about Mike Krzyzewski as example of his excellence and observes:

Interestingly enough, in all the postgame press conferences we attended, I never once saw Dan Wiederer ask a question. Maybe it’s coincidence. Or maybe his narratives are organic creations that don’t have the taint of prefabrication.

But here’s the problem with Ryan’s reasoning. The three-part series he points to is a big feature that was done under completely different circumstances than at the ACC Tournament. The deadline for that feature, I’m sure, wasn’t two hours after the game ended, and I doubt the interviews that went into that series were done in postgame press conferences. So what did Wiederer write from the ACC Tournament? Some examples:

• http://fayobserver.com/articles/2011/03/13/1078213
• http://fayobserver.com/articles/2011/03/12/1078075
• http://fayobserver.com/articles/2011/03/13/1078102
• http://fayobserver.com/articles/2011/03/12/1077965

To be absolutely clear, I’m not offering these examples to say that Dan Wiederer is not a good writer. This post is not about him, and I haven’t read enough of his stuff to form an opinion one way or another. Instead, I offer these links to show that it’s comparing apples and oranges to pit his Coach K feature against stories coming out of the ACC Tournament. Note that his stories from the tournament contain many of the same quotes and cover the same storylines that appear in many of the other stories written by those “drones of inadequacy” at the same event under the same circumstances. Oh yeah, and some of these are the quotes that came from the “dumb, leading, and boring questions” that Ryan is lambasting. The point is, you can’t compare live-event reporting to features. Many of the other sportswriters at the ACC Tournament have written excellent features when they’re not laboring under a tight deadline.

Also, consider how little sense Ryan’s reasoning makes in suggesting that perhaps not asking questions at the postgame press conference is a sign that a writer’s story doesn’t have the “taint of prefabrication.” If the questions being asked are indeed signs of prefabrication, then won’t a key part of getting to the “real” story be asking good questions, rather than no questions at all? If the questions being asked are not getting the real story, and you don’t ask the questions that do, then how is what you write going to be anything but prefabricated? Again, I’m not saying that as a slam to Wiederer, just to show that it makes little sense to say that because someone didn’t ask a question, it could be a sign he’s not going into his story with a prefabricated script (By the way, I didn’t ask a single question in those press conferences either, so by Ryan’s logic, I should be feeling pretty good about myself).

2. Ryan also writes:

But the old world is dying while the old order persists. Except for pieces of local interest, sports sections of newspapers go unread. Especially by young people. I honestly can’t think of one friend who starts his or her mornings by opening a newspaper to read the latest Duke or UNC story.

The problem with that argument is that most of the people covering the tournament were there to cover teams of local interest. In many cases, when the team in a particular newspaper’s coverage area got eliminated, the reporters from that paper went home because there’s no longer any local interest there. That is why there were more and more empty seats on press row as the tournament progressed. Also, while I, too, cannot think of a young person who starts his or her day by reading the latest Duke or UNC story in a newspaper, I sure as heck know plenty who read that same story online at the newspaper’s website.

3. Ryan says sportswriters live for the negative because it makes them relevant and because they only wield power when something bad happens, and that’s why coaches and players try to be bland in interviews. All I can say to that is that in the decade-plus that I’ve worked with sportswriters, I’ve never known one to “live for the negative”. In fact, some of them hate it when a team they’re covering is struggling because it becomes more and more difficult to cover the team without coming off as too negative. I’m simultaneously amused and angered by such attempts to paint sports reporters (and those who work in the media in general) as evil trolls wishing ill on those they cover for the sake of personal gain. I’ve seen journalists who are egotistical, and I’ve seen ones who are incompetent, but in no greater proportion than in any other field. Sportswriters, for the most part, are ordinary folks. They have a job to do, they do it — some better than others — and then they want to tend to other parts of their lives. They aren’t some subspecies of the human race with a particular genetic disposition toward villainy.

4. Ryan writes about his dislike of the “no cheering on press row” rule:

You can’t cheer on press row. But it’s also hard to love the game.

As I wrote in my previous post, I was at that same tournament, sitting on the same press row, and in a similar situation — it was the first time I had been to the ACC Tournament and I’m not a regular member of the sports media at games. I can relate to the feeling that Ryan describes. On press row, you are in the middle of all this emotion and fanfare, and yet you are not a part of it. However, as I wrote in that last post, I don’t find it hard to rein in my emotions or my love for UNC — which I’d pit against Ryan’s love for Duke any day — when I’m sitting on press row.

The way I see it, experiencing a game as a fan and as a reporter are different things and require different approaches. When I’m on press row, I’m there to do a job — to observe the game and then to explain to people what happened. To do that doesn’t require me to live and die with every Harrison Barnes 3-pointer or Nolan Smith drive; instead, it requires that I take a more analytical approach. As some of the commenters on Ryan’s post said, you can have all the emotions you want, just buy a ticket and sit in the stands. Complaining about the lack of cheering on press row is like complaining that the staff at a beach resort isn’t enjoying the fun in the sun as much as the guests are. The people on press row are there to do a job, and I know most of them are plenty passionate and knowledgeable about the game. Don’t mistake the lack of cheering for a lack of love for the game.

In his post, Ryan takes some pretty vicious swipes at the sportswriters at the tournament. Yet, strip away the fluff, and this is what I hear: “I sat next to a prick at the tournament who gave me crap about showing a little bit of emotion on press row, and I found that I don’t like watching my team play without being able to cheer, so not only am I not going to do that again, I’m going to flame everyone who does.”

Is the radio guy in Ryan’s story a jerk? Maybe (certainly from the way he tells it, though a commenter on his blog who was also on press row offered a different take). You don’t like watching your team play without being able to cheer like a fan? No problem. I totally understand, and if you ask me to pick, I’d want to watch as a fan rather than as a reporter. But if you’re going to flame an entire group of people, you better have something substantial on which to base your criticism. In Ryan’s post, aside from the complaint about bad questions — one that I share — I saw little else of substance to back up the rest of the diatribe. I know, I know. Letting words like “facts” get in the way of a good rant is another one of those stupid passé journalism rules like “no cheering on press row.”

Update (3/15)

To his credit, after receiving some not-so-positive feedback on his piece, Ryan has posted a mea culpa apologizing for speaking “too broadly, and too extremely.” It seems like a classy, sincere apology, and thus I’m appeased. (See update below)

Update (3/17)

So after doing right and offering what seemed like a sincere apology, Ryan then wrote in his next post:

*Apology for any Sportswriter I Might Have Offended

Please forgive my swear words and general attitude of rebellion and disrespect. If you were about to give me a job at a high level or even low level organization or were just going to let me cover junior high volleyball for free, please direct me as to which parts of the post I should delete. Better yet, I’ll just give you my login information and you can write this yourself. If I’ve upset any of you fine folks, I sincerely apologize and hope you’ll drop me an e-mail telling me where you’d like me to make confession. Oh wait, I already know; I’ll see you at the Church of the Divine Silence, the Holiest Incarnation of the Blessed Grimace, i.e. press row.

(Grabs crotch defiantly, skateboards off into the distance while a pair of black un-belted pants slowly fall down.

In the context of the post, I can’t decide if he’s just kind of kidding around a bit with this or if he’s serious and has suffered another bout of ass-clownery.

I got the opportunity to not only go to the ACC Tournament in Greensboro this past weekend, but also get an up-close look at the action. The newspaper I used to work for got me a press pass for the tournament — partly as a thank-you for years of meritorious service – and I went to help out a bit with the paper’s coverage of the event. In exchange, I got to take in the action from press row, a mere few feet away from the court.

Some observations from my weekend at the tournament:

The Good

Let’s get the obvious out of the way: Sitting courtside for the ACC Tournament rocks. It was the best seat I’ve ever had at a big-time sporting event. On Friday, my first day at the tournament, this was the view I had:

When the players were inbounding the ball from the sideline, they were literally right in front of me. Things definitely look a little different when you’re this close:

• At first, while I was watching the action, I thought, “These guys don’t look so tall.” And then I realized that the seat I was sitting in is elevated about a foot off the floor, so yeah, these guys are tall, and big.
• From my vantage point, I was a little surprised at how small the court’s dimensions seemed. It just didn’t seem that far from one end to the other or from one sideline to the other. Of course, that probably had something to do with the next point …
• When you’re sitting just a few feet away from the players on the court, you gain a whole new appreciation for how fast the action moves.

Other good things:

• Hey, free food! Ok, so who doesn’t like free food (and sports reporters especially)? The ACC put on a pretty nice spread each day for the media, but the best parts were the candy baskets and the mini-fridge stocked with Häagen-Dazs bars. Oh, there were healthier snack alternatives, but for some reason the fruit basket always stayed pretty full :-)
• The atmosphere was awesome. I’ve covered some college games before, and I’ve been to the Greensboro Coliseum once before for a women’s ACC Tournament game, but the atmosphere this past weekend was unlike any I had experienced. When UNC was making its comebacks in the quarter- and semifinals, the arena was literally deafening, and being down on the floor, the cheers from the stands felt like raucous walls closing in on me. It’s only now that I have a true idea of how big a home-court advantage it can be for the Tar Heels and, to a less extent, Duke to have the ACC Tournament in Greensboro. I took an unscientific measurement of the decibel level in the arena during the games with an app on my iPod, and the meter was fluctuating between about 97 and 100 during those UNC rallies (for context, the same app shows the sound level in my office to be in the 60s). According to the information on the app, that’s roughly the equivalent of noise from a heavy road transport vehicle, a motorcycle, or a circular saw. Of course, the app maxes out at 100 decibels without an external mic attached, so I suspect the actual decibel level was probably above that.
• The Maryland mascot. The terrapin is the only mascot I’ve seen that actually takes part in forming a human pyramid with the team’s cheerleaders, and the tortoise isn’t on the bottom either. No, he gets hoisted up into the air with the cheerleaders. Pretty impressive considering how unwieldy that costume must be.

The Not As Good

• The obnoxious confetti cannons that went off at opposite corners of the court after Duke won the title game. Ok, I’ll admit that if UNC had won, I would probably be more tolerant of the confetti, but regardless, confetti is less fun when you’re sitting a mere few feet away from where they’re getting blown out.
• NO MORE “LIVING ON A PRAYER” … PLEASE!!! Sitting through all or parts of five games, I got to hear the Bon Jovi classic covered relentlessly by seemingly every school band at the tournament. Not that their performances were bad or anything, it’s just that … well … you can only listen to a song so many times in a day, and I think the tournament maxed out my limit for “Living on a Prayer.”

The Flat-Out Horrible

• Duke winning it all. Enough said.
• UNC’s play in the first halves of every game. During a restroom break during halftime at the tournament final, I overheard someone remark that it’s like being in the movie Groundhog Day, and I can’t say I disagree. It’s kind of befuddling to get this sense of déjà vu over and over and over.

Working vs. Watching

Being at the tournament was a fantastic experience, but being at the event as part of the working media was a bit of a strange feeling, especially having watched sports events the past few years as a fan rather than as a journalist. While it was definitely a treat to get to see the action up close and experience the tremendous atmosphere, there was also a feeling of detachedness while sitting on press row. When I watch UNC games at home, I’m the type that yells at the TV and jumps up and down throughout the game. When I set foot on press row, however, it was as if a switch had been flipped. The great surges of emotion that usually accompany my watching a UNC game were replaced with a cool, analytical mindset. Keep in mind that even when I’m watching at home, that analytical mindset is always there, but it seems that when I’m watching at home, the emotions of the experience are amplified, whereas when I was watching from press row, that aspect was minimized while the analytical aspect took centerstage.

I’ve already mentioned that the atmosphere in the stands was tremendous during the UNC comebacks, but I didn’t feel like a part of that atmosphere from press row. I know that if I was watching, say, the Miami-UNC game at home, I would’ve been yelling at the top of my lungs and ricocheting between emotional poles with every play and feeling my heart pounding at the back of my throat. Yet, when I watched from press row Kendall Marshall deliver a perfect pass to Tyler Zeller for the winning basket a mere millisecond before time expired, all I could muster was to mouth a quick “Oh my god.” And the thing is, this restraint required no effort. I didn’t need to try to force myself to stay in my seat. I didn’t even feel the inclination to do so much as a fistpump in celebration while the players, coaches, and people in the stands around me were going nuts. I was right in the middle of something — totally enveloped by it, you could even say — yet I was not a part of it.

The other thing about being at the tournament as part of the working press is that you ARE working as opposed to just there to watch the games. Most of the people on press row were busy keeping play-by-play or taking some kind of notes throughout the games, and it’s a bit of a scramble after a game ends. There’s the dash to the locker rooms and the postgame press conference, then a good solid hour or two of pounding away at the keyboard. And I had it obscenely easy compared to most of the other journalists there. All I was doing was staking out the postgame press conferences, transcribing those quotes, and then typing up a short item or two for a notebook. And even that usually took up so much time that I would end up missing most of the game that followed.

Also, covering a four-day event like the ACC Tournament is a bit of a grind. Making the hour-long drive to and from Greensboro each day and then spending a good eight to eleven hours there adds up after a while, especially when you’re sitting in one position, either on press row or hunched over your laptop in the media room, for much of that time. And again, I had a pretty light workload at the tournament, and even I was feeling a bit drained toward the end, so imagine what the other people who were there doing the actual heavy lifting must’ve been feeling. Sure, as far as jobs go, covering sports is a pretty sweet gig (as most sportswriters would tell you), but make no mistake: It IS a job. All things considered, I think I would probably prefer watching the games as a spectator, even if it meant having to sit a few rows back (ok, more like a few dozen rows back). Nonetheless, it’s good to get a taste of the action every now and then, just to scratch that old journalist itch again, and I couldn’t ask for a better venue in which to do that than the ACC Tournament.

Update

Someone else who was also on press row at the ACC Tournament for the first time had a different takeaway from the experience than I did. Here’s his take, and my response to it.

Journalism blogger and former newspaper CEO Alan Mutter wrote on his blog today about the need for America’s newspapers to ditch their text-heavy looks and become more like their international counterparts:

Though it may not be fair to judge the problems of American newspaper publishers strictly by their covers, you can’t help but wonder how much their weary- and retro-looking products are contributing to their faltering readership and advertiser support.

…

While those fortunate enough to still have jobs in America’s down-sized newsrooms may argue that they don’t have the time it takes to dream up glitzy graphics and layouts, I would argue that the industry can’t afford to stick to the predominantly gray and text-heavy formats that characterize most newspapers.

The look of most American newspapers harks back to the limitations associated with setting hot type one letter at a time from the 1500s to the mid-1900s. But that era ended a good 50 years ago. Today, the increasingly mobile Internet makes it a snap to acquire text, data and images in real time, while powerful computers and software make it easy to create and fine-tune layouts in full WYSIWYG Technicolor. Sorry, folks: No excuses.

As a former newspaper designer, I agree with Mutter that American newspapers do need a facelift. I think one of the many tragedies in the decline of the American newspaper industry has been the fact that after spending decades fighting to get the newsroom to recognize the importance of design in communicating information, newspaper designers were just starting to turn the corner and getting a bigger role in the journalistic process when the financial bottom fell out of their industry and forced their companies to trim away just about everything deemed even remotely peripheral to the core act of gathering and reporting news. Design desks have taken a huge hit during these cuts, in part because it is easier to cut positions that the public never sees while telling your readers that you’re still committed to keeping “boots on the ground.” Also, a key part of designers’ role at newspapers is pagination, and unlike design, pagination can be relatively easily streamlined and automated, and so it has been. Design desks have been merged, more pages have been templatized, and workload has increased. At one of my former employers, whereas the designers used to bust ass so they can do great stuff, they have been reduced to busting ass just to get their paper — plus another paper in the chain — out, much less really think about design, and of course they are hardly alone in that predicament.

However, as much as I think American newspapers need a drastic redesign, I don’t think it would do much good unless it is first preceded by a drastic re-imagination of what the print product of a news company should be. Looking back, I’d say that far too often during the past decade or so, a newspaper redesign was, when considered against the backdrop of all the dramatic shifts that were going on in the revolution of news, little more than changing the shade of the lipstick on a pig. A new way to color-code your sections or presenting your international news pages as short nuggets rather than full-length stories doesn’t change the fact that the print product you’re delivering to someone’s doorstep every morning is, on the whole, chocked full of yesterday’s news. Yes, there have been more efforts at some papers to produce stories that look forward rather than back, but overall, the general tendency is still to recap what happened yesterday, which immediately relegates the print product to irrelevance for a large chunk of news consumers.

Another problem for the newspaper is redundancy. Many news companies have been saying for a while now that they are looking at their websites as the primary vehicle for breaking news and their print product for more in-depth reporting. That’s all well and good, but when you actually look at it, after they break the news online, most newspapers still end up putting most of what they posted to their website into their print products the next day, maybe with just a little extra information thrown in. That’s partly dictated by resources — you only have so many reporters, and they are not going to be able to keep posting breaking developments on a news story on your website throughout the day and then still have enough time or material left over for a substantial analysis for the print product that’s not going to rehash a significant chunk of what they’ve already posted online. Oh, and also, even on the occasions when you do have a substantial analysis piece in the next day’s newspaper, what is the incentive for me to look in your print product for it when I know it’s also going to be on your website, where I go to read your breaking news anyway?

In the face of these and other issues, a splashy redesign isn’t going to do much. Newspapers first need to drastically redefine what their print product should be, which I think should include an examination of:

• User group: It’s futile to keep pretending that the people who frequent your website are the same people who are reading your news in print. So don’t try to chase both. Make that break, tailor your online and print products, and keep slicing away demographic groups until you arrive at a group of core users for a print product.
• Utility: Once you know whom you’re catering to with your print product, you have to think about how that group is going to actually use a print news product and what you want that product to mean to them. Are these people who still sit down and peruse the morning paper over breakfast to catch up on news? Are they big-city commuters just looking for something to read while they are without Internet access on the subway? Are they corporate executives who want information to guide them in their next big decision? What kind of product should they perceive this as? Something they pick up for five minutes and then throw away? Or as a high-end information product (hey, if Pabst can reinvent itself as a beer you sip out of champagne glasses, any kind of rebranding is possible)? Understanding these things about your print product’s intended user group will help you determine the next couple factors …
• Frequency: If you’re targeting a narrower demographic and a narrower set of needs, does it still make sense to publish a print news product every day? I think the answer is going to increasingly be “no”. Besides, I think removing the need to fill a news hole every day is going to be a key for newspapers in adjusting the way they do journalism in the digital age.
• Form and feel: So let’s say the target user group for your print product is the morning commuters on the subway or buses. How crowded are your city’s subway trains and buses during morning rush hour? Are people generally packed in like sardines in a tin? If so, how much sense does it make to give them a broadsheet or even a tabloid-sized newspaper that they have to flip with two hands when they can’t even lift their hands up past their waists without bumping into their neighbors and they have to use one hand to hang on to the rail at all times? In those situations, I would prefer a stack of stapled index cards to anything bigger than a letter-sized sheet of paper. This concept also covers the material of your product. If you’re presenting your print product as a high-end item, then make it that way. Stop printing it on birdcage liner. Make it a heavier stock, make it glossy, make it convey its intended utility in the way it feels.
• Content: Now that you know how big your print product is going to be, what are you going to fill it with? Again, this goes back to knowing your user group. Are they likely to have already read a lot about the big news story from yesterday by the time they see your print product the next day? Are they people who still look at the newspaper for the weekly TV schedule (yes, there are apparently still some out there who do, I kid you not)? If you are already tailoring the physical format of your print product for a specific audience, then it only makes sense to do the same for the type and format of content in that product. It’s not just picking certain types of stories from the same pool of stories or editing them down in a certain way, it’s more akin to a whole separate production routine. Just as it would be a failure to simply port your print product over to online or mobile, it’d be an equally big failure to try to shoehorn your online or mobile content into a print product.
• And finally, design: Yes, design comes in after you have nailed down all those other factors, and just like those, it should be tailored specifically for the target users. For instance, if you are targeting seniors, then maybe the best design for your print product has nothing to do with how many beautiful graphics there are. Maybe the best design in that case would be just running gray text in plain large type to make it easy on their eyes. As with most designers, of course I always feel the itch to do a huge splashy graphic or photo illustration, but that itch must take a backseat to the understanding that the best design is the one that works for its intended users.

I guess what I’m basically saying is that a general, all-purpose print product no longer works. It has to become much more niche for it to regain usefulness and relevance. Perhaps instead of one morning paper, news companies should splinter their print product into multiple niche publications targeting different users, printing in different formats and on different schedules, and let each sink or swim on its own. This is a new life for print news products — a life as a secondary, rather than the primary, product of a news company.

A couple days ago, in the aftermath of the Huffington Post’s sale to AOL, Felix Salmon of Reuters wrote a piece with the link-bait title “Why the NYT will lose to HuffPo“, in which he compares the design of a news story page on each site and concludes that

… the NYT page is like walking into a library, while the HuffPo page is like walking through Times Square. The HuffPo page is full of links to interesting stories elsewhere on the site — about Egypt, or the kid in the Superbowl Darth Vader ad, or the stories my Facebook friends are reading. And there are lot of links to media stories, too; each one has a photo attached.

The NYT page, by contrast, feels like it’s at a site-map dead end. It’s part of the Media Decoder blog, and almost every NYT story linked to on the page is also part of that blog. There are almost no photos; there is almost no color.

Most importantly, the HuffPo page is genuinely, compellingly, interactive — it’s almost impossible to visit it without finding something you want to click on. Like! Comment! Tweet! Go here! Try this! Visit that! There’s site navigation, yes, but that’s just one layer of a very rich and complex page architecture. At the NYT page, by contrast, to get out of the Media Decoder blog you either have to click on a generic navigation button like “Sports,” or else you’ll just leave the page and the site completely.

Around the same time I saw Salmon’s  piece, I also came across this Q&A with Mike McCue, the chief executive of Flipboard, the iPad app that’s trying to revamp the way we read digital news. In it, McCue says

The problem with journalism on the Web today is that it’s being contaminated by the Web form factor. What I mean is, journalists are being pushed to do things like slide shows — stuff meant to attract page views. Articles themselves are condensed to narrow columns of text across 5, 6, 7 pages, and ads that are really distracting for the reader, so it’s not a pleasant experience to ‘curl up’ with a good website.

Journalism is being pushed into a space where I don’t think it should ever go, where it’s trying to support the monetization model of the Web by driving page views. So what you have is a drop-off of long-form journalism, because long-form pieces are harder to monetize. And it’s also hard to present that longer stuff to the reader because no one wants to wait four seconds for every page to load.

Judging from the Q&A, I would imagine that McCue would think even the NYT layout has too much clutter, and god knows what he would say about the Huffington Post’s page. These two stories offer up two contrasting views on what is effective presentation of digital news. I think Salmon is evaluating the page design’s effectiveness from the standpoint of whether it generates page views — the very goal that McCue, who’s looking at this from a user’s perspective, says journalism should not be pursuing.

For me, from the perspective of a user who’s on the page to read the story, there’s no contest between the NYT page and its HuffPo counterpart — the NYT layout wins hands down. I don’t know how Salmon can say that the HuffPo design makes navigation effortless. He has a point in the critique that every sidebar link on the NYT page goes to something in that section of the site rather than to other parts of the site, but that’s an issue of content, not design. When it comes to design, the HuffPo page, with ads and various other elements interrupting the flow of the story, not the mention the screaming sidebar of links in the right column, is an assault on the senses and I have to struggle to focus on the story. The NYT design, on the other hand, actually allows you to breathe and take your time digesting the story.

Salmon says “the HuffPo page is genuinely, compellingly, interactive — it’s almost impossible to visit it without finding something you want to click on.” I’d counter that a more accurate description would be “it’s almost impossible to visit without having something telling you to click it.” On an NYT page, the design focuses your attention on the story you’re reading, whereas on a HuffPo page, the design pushes your attention to everything around the story you’re reading. It’s funny that what Salmon sees as a big advantage for the HuffPo experience over the NYT’s, McCue would probably see as the very embodiment of what’s broken about reading on the web and the reason for Flipboard’s existence.

In this sense, I think Salmon’s analogy of the NYT to a library and the HuffPo to Times Square is actually kind of apt, though perhaps not in the way he intended it. When you want a quiet place to read, you go to the library, and when you want to people-watch and be wrapped up in the hustle and bustle, you go to Times Square. Yes, when I’m done with one book in the library and want to find another, it takes a little more effort to find it, but at least when I’m actually reading the book, I don’t have people constantly coming up to me to bug me to do something else.

The other fallacy I see in Salmon’s analysis is that he’s kind of comparing apples and oranges since the NYT and the HuffPo occupy very different niches in the media sphere and naturally would have different business strategies. Even Salmon himself admits, in passing, that the NYT probably has a much higher ad rate than HuffPo does, yet he then proceeds to focus on pretty much only page views as the barometer for success. The second half of his piece transitions to discussing the repercussions of the coming NYT paywall — that it will cause the site to lose a significant amount of page views — but that’s a separate issue from the design of the site. If the HuffPo threw up a paywall tomorrow, it, too, would lose a significant portion of its page views, design notwithstanding.

By this I mean that critics must strive to write stylishly, to concentrate on the excellent sentence. There is so much noise and screen clutter, there are so many Amazon reviewers and bloggers clamoring for attention, so many opinions and bitter misspelled rages, so much fawning ungrammatical love spewed into the ether, that the role of the true critic is actually quite simple: to write on a different level, to pay attention to the elements of style.

As someone who writes and edits for a living, I would naturally applaud any piece calling for people to write better, but the thing about Roiphe’s piece that does not sit well with me is the way in which she tries to defend the value of the critic in a marketplace overflowing with free opinions. She resorts to setting up a bogus “paid critic vs. anonymous amateur reviewer/blogger who can’t write a complete sentence” juxtaposition. Aside from the passage above, she also writes:

Of course, it is not considered nice or polite or democratic to take the side of the paid critic (though, to be fair, she is paid very little) over the enterprising amateur who would like to shout anonymously on the Internet, but that’s precisely what is called for — unless, of course, the enterprising amateur writes better than the paid critic. The answer to the angry Amazon reviewer who mangles sentences in an effort to berate or praise an author is the perfectly constructed old-fashioned essay that holds within its well-formed sentences and graceful rhetoric the values it protects and projects.

Basically, this is little more than a slight variation on the “we have standards, amateurs don’t” argument that some professional journalists have used (and have been rebuked for using) to explain why what they do is more valuable than what amateurs do. Of course, like the original, this variation has the same fatal flaw: The professional’s competition isn’t the free crap that’s out there; it’s the free goods that are out there. From a user’s perspective, a professional critic’s prose doesn’t compete with product reviews on Amazon or a poorly written tirade on a blog. Those things occupy different niches, offer different utilities, and are viewed in different lights. The professional critics are instead competing with people who can and do write insightful, stylish, and grammatically correct critiques for free.

Roiphe’s piece has other issues, including the following passage (emphasis added by me):

To those who doubt the beleaguered but well-spoken critic’s influence, his ability to provoke or sway, I would submit a tiny piece of anecdotal evidence from the classroom. I have seen students rush out to buy “Anna Karenina” because an essay by James Wood made them feel that Tolstoy was essential. If it’s even just these couple of students, alone on planet Earth, who have read that essay and rushed out, those couple of students are to me sufficient proof of the robustness and purpose of the eloquent critic, of his power to awake and enlighten, of his absolutely crucial place in our world.

Really? Even if it’s just two students buying a book because of that essay, that’s enough evidence of the critic’s value? Imagine if a journalist said, “Even if just two people bought our newspaper for the story I wrote today, that’s enough evidence for me of the value of that story.” Or if a city government said, “Even if just two people used the new parking lot we just built, that’s enough evidence of the need for more parking.” If you yourself just admitted that this evidence is just anecdotal, then why do you follow that admission with a conclusion that you know this piece of evidence alone is not strong enough to support?

Another issue with the piece is the “cultural desert” notion that Roiphe first debunks, then uses to build her main argument, and then debunks again at the end. In the first part of the essay, Roiphe points out that critics have a tendency to paint a romantic image of themselves standing “in the vast desert of our cultural landscape” and concludes that:

So at this juncture we can take with a grain of salt our definite sense and encroaching fear that our audience of educated readers is shrinking. The world, as we can now inform Arnold, stubbornly resists going entirely to the philistines; the world is not finished with its Janet Malcolms and James Woods, its Harold Blooms and Michael Woods.

Yet, just one paragraph later, in launching into the crux of her argument, Roiphe uses the very notion she had just more or less dismissed:

Now, maybe more than ever, in a cultural desert characterized by the vast, glimmering territory of the Internet, it is important for the critic to write gracefully.

Toward the end of the essay, after laying out her argument that the critic’s value will come from writing really well because the amateurs in this desert of a cultural landscape don’t, Roiphe backtracks:

But let’s go back to the seductive and dramatic despair we in the business of writing and thinking about books continue to feel. Is the entire rich and textured English language really on the verge of being reduced to text messages? Can an 18-year-old really not understand why a sentence of Hemingway or Wharton is more charismatic than a tweet? I am not entirely convinced.

Umm … so which is it? Are we or are we not in a cultural desert? I’ve gotta hand it to Roiphe. Not everyone can build an argument based on a notion that they themselves debunked … twice … in the same article. Maybe that’s what separates professionals from amateurs.

However, there’s one part of ProPublica’s package where I think the organization fell short. After publishing its initial story, ProPublica got a hold of the PR action plan that an advocacy and lobbying group for dialysis providers was drafting in response to the series. ProPublica published the plan on its Web site under the headline “Read the Leaked P.R. Plan to Spin Our Dialysis Investigation”.

After reading the plan, I came to the same conclusion as a number of people who commented on that piece did: It’s perfectly reasonable for the group being depicted as the bad guys in a news story to prepare a response to tell its side, and as far as PR plans go, this seems pretty reasonable, professional, and well thought out. Furthermore, the plan’s talking points more or less don’t directly address the issues raised by ProPublica’s piece and instead point to other angles that the group felt would be neglected. There’s also nothing in there suggesting deception or lying. It seems rather irresponsible journalistically for ProPublica to label this as “spin” without pointing out why. “Spin”, after all, carries a very negative connotation and immediately villanizes the group, and if you’re going to do that, as a journalist you need to at least give your reasons (and simply disagreeing with you on an issue is not sufficient reason). ProPublica did not.

Going beyond that, however, I feel that ProPublica also failed to take advantage of an opportunity to add context to their readers’ understanding of the subject. The talking points in the PR plan throw a number of additional facts and figures into the picture. As someone who knew basically nothing at all about the subject dialysis, here’s the problem I face after reading the ProPublica story and the PR plan: How do all the things raised in the two pieces fit together? Which ones are more significant than others? Are the things in the PR response even true? If so, do they make some of the things in the ProPublica story false or at least out of context? And I’m pretty sure I’m not alone in wondering about such things. For instance, take this comment on the PR plan from ProPublica’s Web site:

I’m a communications professional, so I’m interested in the inside-baseball aspects of this. My questions include: Is the story balanced or is the industry just afraid it won’t be? Or have the industry’s executives been drinking their own Kool-Aid to the point that they can’t recognize a balanced story, and think that anything short of effusive praise is a hit piece?

Those are questions that any reasonable human being would ask when presented with conflicting sides of a story. Answering those kinds of questions is exactly what good journalism needs to do in an era where everyone on every side of the story has the means to disseminate their perspectives in more or less the same arena, resulting in a collision of facts and figures, all telling a different tale. By putting the PR response out there without comment, verification, or context, ProPublica basically leaves its readers with a “he said she said” (or in this case, “we said they said”) situation.

Here’s a more fruitful way in which ProPublica could have used the PR plan: Dissect it point-by-point, post it with contextual information accompanying each talking point and every fact or figure, and correlate the points in the PR response with the data cited in ProPublica’s own story to elucidate the connections between them. Which talking points are lies? Which statements are exaggerations? Which figures are true but are less significant when considered in the context of the overall picture? Why did we not address this angle in our story? This would help me, as a reader, to make much better sense of the situation and, assuming ProPublica did its homework on the investigation, strengthen the credibility of its work.

I watched the Rally to Restore Sanity in its entirety Saturday. It was fairly entertaining, as I expected it to be. The take-home message that Jon Stewart delivered at the end of the event, however, struck me as unmistakably hypocritical in one respect.

Basically, Stewart’s message was: “We can have animus and not be enemies.” We can work together to solve problems. We DO work together to solve problems. The reason we don’t think we can is because the media hypes up everything. “If we amplify everything, we hear nothing.”

It’s funny that while spending the better part of three hours to painstakingly hammer home the after-school-special message of “You can’t judge a whole group by the actions of a few” and showing how that applies to everyone from Muslims to robots, Stewart doesn’t hesitate for a second to bash “the media” as if it were some singular monolithic entity. Not all Muslims are bad. Not all robots are bad. But “the media” (except Jon Stewart, of course) is bad. Nice.

In one segment of the rally, Stewart shows a shot of cars in a traffic jam and speculates on who’s in a particular car to show that despite our differences, we all learn to work together, such as working out who has the right of way. Look, here’s a mother of two who’s in the NRA. Oh, there’s a Mexican plumber. Oh, here’s a fundamentalist insurance salesman. Oh, occasionally we have an asshole who cuts in, but that asshole is scorned upon, not hired as an analyst. In other words, occasionally we have an asshole, and that asshole is … “the media.” Nice.

So am I defending “the media?” Absolutely not, and I don’t want to paint “the media” as victims. I AM, however, defending the individual journalist from being lumped into some stereotypical monolithic creature or evil empire, a false notion and a stereotype that Stewart basically did his best to reinforce at the rally. Why does that matter? Well, because this “the media” BS helps poison our discourse about anything that’s reported. Any attempt by journalists at any level to defend their work against criticism, regardless of the topic, easily triggers responses that degenerate into “the media are all biased”, or “well, the media failed us on Iraq and the economy, so …”, even though that particular journalist probably has never written word one about national politics or finance. It’s a disservice to the innumerable journalists in the profession who do try to do their job the right way when they are judged not by their work, but by the poor journalistic practices of some the most visible members of their profession.

Maybe this is just my own pet peeve and something that doesn’t matter at all to anyone who’s not or has not been a journalist, but then again, how often do those doing the unjust demonizing understand why those being demonized might feel wronged? While Stewart is preaching to the crowd to not judge Muslims or robots by the actions of a few, I wonder if it ever crossed his mind to tell them the same regarding “the press” or “the media”. If you want to restore sanity to our discourse, maybe you should consider that part of that is restoring some sanity to this “blame the media” game. But no, Stewart basically does none of that at the rally, save for one passing remark that “the media didn’t create our problems”, which was sandwiched in between two-plus hours of mocking “the media” and a 20-minute rally-concluding speech on why, despite what he had just said, “the media” is to blame.

A few other observations:

• Was the rally political? I don’t think it was overtly so, though I don’t doubt some would dissect every statement to find evidence that it is, for whatever good may come from proving that claim. However, consider the non-politicalness in the context of the argument I’ve been putting forth in this post. If the rally demonizes people who hold certain views or the politicians who, you know, actually bog down the government, then it can’t avoid being labeled political. So let’s demonize people that we can all agree is ok to stereotype and discuss without sanity — “the media.” Who would be sympathetic toward those guys, after all? The rally paints “the media” as the ultimate villain, more so than the politicians (who got basically one snide remark in three hours), and more so than the actual people who hold on to and spew irrational fears because, according to the gist of the rally, those people aren’t bad like you might think; they’re just misled by … “the media”. And if there is one thing that unites people of all races, cultures, religions, and political views in this country, it’s the consensus that the media is bad. So let’s just fan that insane flame a little more. Am I framing this unfairly? Well, consider the fact that two of the three “Fear Awards” they handed out at the rally went to members of the media. Yes, I’m sure NPR and other media organizations that barred their staff from attending the rally have done far, far more to fan the flames of fear than anyone else. Certainly more than, gasp, politicians or zealots, whom we are not going to criticize at this rally lest this rally be labeled “political”.
• The main idea advocated by the rally is one of pragmatism, a theme embodied by the song that Kid Rock performed at the rally (which Stewart said he asked the musician to play). The song included the line, “Screaming on the left, yelling on the right, I’m in the middle …” Sounds perfectly reasonable, right? Well, that is unless you’re a member of “the media” and you try to make that claim, in which case you get accused of this. So, to recap: Pragmatism preached by everyone else, including popular comedian/pundit, great! Pragmatism preached by “the media”, LIES!! DAMN LIES!!! Got it?
• Stewart may mock “the media” for the games they play, but he’s certainly not above playing that game to his advantage. At the beginning of the rally, he tells the crowd something to the effect of, “Of course it doesn’t matter what actually happens here. What matters is what will be reported about what happens here.” Later, as he prepares to launch into his rally-ending speech, he prefaces it with something like, “Maybe there are lines that I, a comedian/pundit can’t cross. I’m sure I’ll find out about that tomorrow.” The crowd roars in approval both times. Of course, with those two simple remarks, Stewart also effectively placed himself in an advantageous position. Now, if anybody in “the media” dares to criticize any part of the rally, then it just provides proof for the “big bad media spinning lies” notion that Stewart was pushing, and he, or more likely, his supporters, can just point to those remarks and say, “See, told you so.” In effect, Stewart delivered a preemptive strike in the “spin the message” game, a strike so well-executed that you would think he’s a member of … gasp … “the media”.

So, my takeaway from the Rally to Restore Sanity? Try this: “The best way to unite a fractured people is to give them a common enemy.” Of course, history has often shown common hatred to be much more powerful than “love thy neighbor,” so maybe Stewart is right after all to tell the people of America to stop hating their neighbors and start hating their neighbors who work in “the media.”

Disclaimer: Most of this was written in the immediate aftermath of watching the rally. I may (and probably will) come to regret parts of this upon further introspection. If I do, I’ll update the post with those regrets. Hey, maybe that’ll earn me a Medal for Reasonableness. Oh wait, nevermind. “The media” is barred from receiving such awards since they are all lying bastards who do everything they can to perpetuate their fellow Americans’ fears.

In the past several weeks, two daily newspapers in the Triangle area have changed their policies regarding user comments on their Web sites, and the difference in their new policies are a good microcosm of a couple of the different views in the industry on how to manage online comment sections that can all-too-easily degenerate into an ugly war of insults.

First, the News & Observer in Raleigh announced in late August a three-strikes-and-you’re-out policy toward trolls:

… When we block a comment because of a serious violation, we will send an e-mail warning to the commenter. If that person commits two more serious violations, his or her account will be blocked.

Remember: We do not block comments because of the ideas expressed; opinions from all points on the spectrum are not only tolerated; they are precisely what we want. What we do not want: personal abuse, profanity (open or disguised), hate speech or threats. In other words, don’t say things you wouldn’t say in the living room of someone you just met. …

Then, a little more than a week ago, The Herald-Sun in Durham posted this announcement regarding a change in its comments policy:

The Herald-Sun has suspended the comments feature on our site.

Users who would prefer to discuss ideas or the content of the news are being drowned out by a few participants who lob insults at their fellow users. The discourse in our comments section is devolving and it’s time to pull the plug.

We welcome ideas as we try to figure out a better approach that we hope will actually add reader voices to the marketplace of ideas.

In the meantime, we encourage readers to participate in debate and dialogue through our editorial page letters (you can submit letters by clicking on the “letters” option in the left-hand navigation bar).

Personally, I prefer the N&O’s new policy, as it rightly punishes the trolls and not everyone else who actually use the comments section in a respectful manner. The Herald-Sun’s decision to suspend its comments feature seems like an overkill. I understand moderating comment sections requires time and manpower, and I’d be the first to say that the staff at The Herald-Sun is short on both, but cutting off discussions on the site just strikes me as a step in the wrong direction for newspapers. I hope The Herald-Sun will bring back its comment section with an improved solution down the road.

Some good reading on dealing with comments on news sites:

• Newspaper comments: Forget anonymity! The problem is management
• New Tricks: Rules of engagement: How journalists can – and should – respond to comments
• Why comments suck (& ideas on un-sucking them)
• If you’re not doing comments right, you shouldn’t do them at all
• Comments, content creation and creating real value

Image on loan from Spot.Us

There’s an interesting article by Sameer Bhuchar at PBS’s MediaShift Idea Lab about a survey of users of the community-funded journalism organization Spot.Us on what they think about the importance of objectivity in journalism. There are several charts accompanying the piece showing the results, which speak for themselves.

The most striking thing about the study for me was the fact that it gave us a glimpse of just how wide a range of definitions people have for “objectivity.” A sample of those definitions are included in the Community Views section of Bhuchar’s post. To me, that seems to indicate a need for more precise questions in future studies about objectivity. If you ask, “How important is objectivity?” and everyone responds with a different definition in mind, the data will be pretty misleading. For instance, do those who say objectivity is important think he-said-she-said journalism is ok? Or do they merely define objectivity as something that does not include the practice of creating a false balance? Also consider that “objectivity” — and “transparency” for that matter — has become a pretty loaded word in this debate, and its use likely would trigger some sort of strong reaction one way or another.

My suggestion would be that instead of asking about “objectivity” or “transparency”, a future survey should ask about the various practices and approaches associated with those concepts. For instance, you can ask people to rate, on a numerical scale, the importance of each of the following in journalism:

• Giving all sides of a debate an equal chance to make their case to the reporter.
• Giving all sides equal space in the story to make their case.
• Constructing the story to give each sides’ arguments equal weight.
• Presenting a counter-argument for every argument put forth in a story.
• Limiting the story to only information that is factually verifiable.
• The reporter maintaining a detached position from the players in the story.
• Drawing a conclusion for or against a particular argument based on the information presented in the story.
• Disclosing the reporter’s biases that are directly related to the story’s core issue.
• Disclosing anything in the reporter’s background that may be indirectly linked to the story’s core issue and thus could color the reporter’s views.
• Posting transcripts of the complete interviews with each person mentioned in the story.

This way, you avoid getting mired in a debate about the grand notions of “objectivity” and “transparency,” which can be pretty fruitless when everyone has a different idea of what exactly those terms mean and what results they lead to. Instead, you get at the real issue: Which parts of current journalism practices are not working and should be eliminated, which parts are working and should be preserved, and which new practices should be incorporated more. The resulting set of practices may not be pure objectivity or transparency per any one person’s definition, but it probably will be better than anything you can get by continuing to deal with the issue at the level of those vague, ill-defined terms.

For the Sake of Transparency

The opinions from the Community Views section of Bhuchar’s post that I agree the most with are these two:

” ‘Transparency is the new objectivity’ is a fun riff, and it’s close, but I think we (in the media business) grossly overstate the public’s interest in our affiliations and conflicts.” — Ryan Sholin

“No one is truly unbiased or objective but that doesn’t mean that a good reporter doesn’t look for the truth behind everyone’s agenda. Objectivity means not sitting on a story that would make someone look bad just because you’re invested in their success. I almost said “Transparency is the new objectivity” only because it is the latest and most fabulous word to throw around. Transparency only helps identify lapses in objectivity, it doesn’t replace it. As for transparency, it certainly helps identify lapses in objectivity, but it doesn’t replace it.” — Amanda Hickman

I bolded that sentence in the second response because it closely aligns with my thoughts on the subject. Transparency and objectivity do not occupy the same niche and are therefore not in direct competition with each other. Thus it would be folly to posit that the adoption of one necessitates the abandonment of the other. I wrote more about this thought in an earlier post.

I’ve always seen the rising emphasis on transparency as a greater benefit for the audience than for journalists. For the audience, transparency provides more information on which they can base their decision of whether or not to trust the report. For journalists, however, it remains to be seen whether that transparency earns more trust in their work — the ultimate motivation for journalists practicing transparency — or whether it simply increases the likelihood of trust and distrust equally. Transparency is a clear plus for the audience, but I’m not sure if it’s a clear plus for journalists or if it’s one of those “you can’t afford not to” things where the best you can hope for is breaking even because it beats a minus. In any case, the answer to that question doesn’t change the fact that increased transparency is here to stay. However, that fact also doesn’t necessarily dictate that we must do away with objectivity … at least the way I define “objectivity.”

Side Notes

The survey data, which the post itself admits are not scientific, raised a few other questions for me:

• In order to see whether this data represents a shift in opinions about the importance of objectivity in journalism, we need to have something to compare it to.
• The sample included both journalists and non-journalists. I’d be interested to see how the answers to the questions concerning objectivity break down within each of those of segments. Also, how does that breakdown within each segment compare with previous surveys about journalists’ and non-journalists’ opinions on objectivity?
• The answer options for some of these questions are not really mutually exclusive. For instance, on the question “Is objectivity even possible?”, the answers “Yes, that’s what journalism is” and “Possible but difficult. It separates wheat from chaff” can co-exist. The fact that I pick one doesn’t mean I’d reject the other. In fact, can you not legitimately say, “Objectivity is possible but difficult. It separates good journalism from bad. Therefore, that’s what journalism is”?
• I also question some of Bhuchar’s interpretations of what some of the responses mean. For instance, he says

A staggering 44.6 percent (199) people agreed with the answer, “Objectivity is possible but difficult. It separates wheat from chaff.” In essence the answer implies that objectivity should be seen more as a quest for honest, factual reporting.

To me at least, it’s difficult to draw a real connection between the answer and the interpretation. It seems a bit of a leap to reach that conclusion based on that answer alone. The same holds for his interpretation of the next answer option:

Of the respondents, 27.6 percent (123 people) chose the answer “transparency is the new objectivity,” implying that it is the reporting of truth that is most important, rather than a detached account of a scene.

So how does “objectivity” come to mean “a detached account of the scene” in the second answer option, but “honest, factual reporting” in the first?

Bill Gates’ recent prediction about the Internet becoming the best single source of education in five years and that the university education will be five times less important touched on something I’ve been thinking about: How technology will and will not change higher education in the near future.

I started thinking about this because of my experience in journalism and seeing how technology has affected newspapers. What struck me as kind of interesting is that if you take away the difference in the two industry’s financial situation, higher education resembles newspapers in many ways. For instance, like newspapers, higher ed

• Is a big industry.
• Has a reputation for not providing satisfactory service to a significant portion of its users (just think about how often someone says that they learned more on the job than they ever did in college, or that they never use most of what they learn).
• Is often out of touch with the people it serves (students).
• Lags behind in terms of truly embracing new technology to connect with its users.
• Is hesitant to embrace social media.
• Uses information systems that are big, cumbersome, out of date almost as soon as they go live, and difficult to upgrade.
• Has small pockets of innovation surrounded by widespread intransigence and resistance to change.
• Recognizes the need to change, yet cannot do so quickly.
• Is hampered by its own outdated performance-evaluation systems that stymie change by giving little incentive and often outright discouragement for employees to experiment with new ways of doing things.

If you think about it, in some ways the only major thing differentiating higher ed from newspapers is that newspapers’ model of scarcity — their hold on the distribution of information — has been shattered while higher ed’s model of scarcity — the universities’ status as the generally accepted and preferred accreditation bodies — remains intact. That is why I think that while technology will undoubtedly affect higher ed in some significant fashion in the near future, I don’t know if I agree with Gates’ assessment that a university education will be five times less important in five years (believe me, if it comes true, I won’t be sorry to be wrong).

Already, a vast amount of information is available online for anyone with the desire to learn, and that’s only going to grow. However, that increase in freely available information isn’t a threat to the financial stability of higher-education institutions as long as they remain the only ones who can give you a piece of paper that employers would accept as evidence that you possess enough basic knowledge and skills to be employable. That’s why universities can afford to put their lectures online for all the world to see.

Let’s say MIT puts all of its lectures and other course material online. Without enrolling at MIT, I can watch every lecture, do every assignments, and even take every test. After four years of going through the exact same curriculum as someone who is actually enrolled at MIT, am I going to be able to walk into a job interview and convince a potential employer that I am just as qualified as an MIT graduate? Most likely not. Right now, if you want an education in the truest sense of the word, you have many options. But if you want to get a certification of your education, there is really only one widely accepted source — colleges and universities. That’s why universities can keep charging — and people will keep paying — tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars in tuition. The thing that keeps students and tuition dollars rolling in is no longer necessarily the knowledge that higher ed institutions offer or even the faculty who impart that knowledge, but rather the fact that these institutions are the only ones who can hand out certifications that enable their students to get jobs. The significant time and money that people invest in higher education are aimed at — above all else — obtaining that piece of certification.

I personally think that’s a bit of an absurdity, but I also think that model probably isn’t likely to dramatically change in the near future, much less five years. Universities have little incentive for making such drastic fundamental changes unless their model of scarcity is broken or at least seriously threatened. For that to happen, employers must generally reach the conclusion that a diploma from a university is no longer a stamp of employability, or at least no longer the sole stamp. Yet, what incentives do employers have to change that mentality? They still need an efficient and cost-effective way to gauge which among the hundreds of applicants for a job opening are equipped with the knowledge needed for the position. If nothing else, a university degree at least tells you that someone took a number of courses specializing in whatever field they majored in. In essence, the universities are conducting educational background checks and weeding out unqualified candidates for employers, at no cost to the employers. The universities are making oodles of money from this, and employers are saving oodles of money and time from not having to do such background checks on their own. I see few incentives for either to change their mindset any time soon.

To break that model of scarcity, we need to first have sufficient information on the Internet, available for free or relatively low cost, to substitute for the amount of knowledge you will acquire through a college degree program. I think we already have that, and much more, for many fields and I have no doubt the amount of publicly available knowledge for the taking will only increase. However, what we then need — and this is more important — is for someone to organize that gigantic pool of knowledge into curricula focusing on various fields and then devise an effective, less expensive, and more efficient way to certify that someone has digested the contents of a particular curriculum. There are many possibilities for how this could be accomplished (another post for another day), but the bottom line is that whatever solution they come up with has to be at least as cost-effective and efficient for employers as the current do-you-have-a-college-diploma system. If we can pull that off, then we’ll see a sea change in higher education. This involves more than just change in a few sectors or professions. It requires a fundamental rethinking of how a major component of society should function. That, I think, will take significantly more than five years.

I’ve spent the last few years working at a pharmacy school, and my experience there has me thinking that professional journalism desperately needs to develop a culture of continuing education the way the health-care professions and some other fields have. Professional pharmacists, for instance, are required to earn a certain number of continuing-education credits each year to retain their licenses, and pharmacy schools, among other entities, help provide such opportunities by offering CE programs. In addition to attending these programs, pharmacists can also earn credits through self-study — reading certain courses or articles on their own and then completing related exercises. The programs and self-study projects are approved and assigned a number of credit hours by an accreditation body. The system helps ensure that practicing professionals are up to speed on the latest developments and research in their field.

One of the biggest problems in journalism right now is that many of its practitioners are not all that familiar with the latest relevant trends and technology. Yes, journalism schools are retooling their programs to adapt and provide a more up-to-date education for their students, but that doesn’t help the journalists who are already out of school. Given the rapid pace with which communication technology is evolving, it doesn’t take that long for skills and knowledge to become dated. Yet, there is no formal professional-development system to ensure that journalism practitioners are continually updating their knowledge and repertoire. That task is left up to the individual, and in the high-stress, high-workload, modest-compensation world of professional journalism, it is far too easy, even for motivated self-learners, to let things like attending workshops or reading about the latest journalism research fall out of sight and out of mind.

Journalism Organizations’ Responsibility

I think a big part of the problem is that unlike the health-care fields, one doesn’t need to be licensed to become a journalist (and rightfully so). The lack of a profession-wide licensure mechanism makes it difficult to implement a profession-wide continuing-education system. However, I think you can build a culture of continuing education without tying it to licensure. For example, professional journalism organizations can independently require their employees to fulfill a certain number of hours of professional-development activities each year as part of the terms of their employment.

With that, of course, comes the obligation on the part of the companies to make sure their employees have the time to fulfill those requirements. That means setting aside a certain number of hours for each employee to pursue CE activities and creating an environment that encourages employees to seek out such opportunities.

There are several benefits to the news organization in this. First of all, it would ensure its journalists are up on the latest practices in the field, which can only help the organization’s work. Secondly, it could be leveraged as a recruiting tool — “Come work for us and we’ll give you time to help yourself add new skills.” That second point would obviously also be a motivation for journalists to pursue continuing education, and it’d become even more so if more and more news organizations begin adopting this approach. You may not need to be in a continuing-education program to be hired for a job at a news organization, but if that organization is taking steps to make sure its employees have the latest skills, then chances are you’d have a better shot at a job there if you have the latest skills as well.

Journalism Schools’ Responsibility

It is not enough to merely have news organizations impose CE requirements for their journalists. There needs to be a rich variety of CE programs available for those journalists. This is where journalism schools come in. I did a quick search to see how many journalism schools offer continuing education for professional journalists and was rather disappointed. Of the 56 schools on this list, only seven mentioned a CE or professional-development program on their Web site:

• Ball State
• CUNY
• Columbia University
• UNC-Chapel Hill
• NYU-SCPS
• University of Oregon
• University of South Carolina

Note: The list I linked to is obviously not comprehensive, but I think it is large enough to be a representative sample size. I went to each school’s Web site and looked for links to the effect of “continuing education” or “professional development.” On sites with a search box, I searched for “continuing education” and “professional education.” It is possible that some of the other schools do offer CE programs for journalists, but if you can’t find it through the navigation or easily through a site search …

Many of the schools offer graduate programs and fellowships that provide further training in journalism. However, such programs require the journalists to give up their current jobs for at least a year for a fellowship and more than that for a graduate program. Family obligations, financial burdens, and the prospects of having to find another job in a tight job market make these programs an unfeasible option for many working journalists.

In addition to the relatively few CE opportunities being offered by J-schools, a number of the ones I did find were simply not very accommodating for the working journalist. A weeklong immersion program is no doubt useful, but how many journalists can take off from work for a whole week and plop down a couple thousand dollars plus travel and hotel expenses to attend such programs? Worse yet are the programs that are spread out over several weeks. If attending for a whole week is difficult for many journalists, attending for one or two days a week for four or five weeks in a row would likely be impossible unless you happened to work within driving distance of the program site and have a very accommodating employer. Basically, such programs are occasional indulgences — something that a relatively few get to do once every few years if their schedules and budgets allow — rather than an ongoing process of continual learning for the masses.

Frankly, I think journalism schools are doing a disservice to their alumni by not having more comprehensive CE offerings. Think about it: You graduate from a J-school with (you hope) the latest skills. Five years later, a chunk of those skills are probably in need of an update, but journalism schools offer few opportunities for you to do that without quitting your job and incurring major expenses to enter a graduate degree program. Meanwhile, the schools have updated their degree programs’ curricula and are producing new graduates whose skills are more up to date than yours, thus making it more difficult for you to compete with them for that next job.

Aside from doing right by their alumni, J-schools also might benefit from CE programs in several ways. For one thing, it’d foster stronger ties between faculty at the schools and journalists in the field, spurring more opportunities for academia-industry collaboration. Secondly, the CE programs could be an additional source of revenue, especially if they’re designed in such a way that they can be offered to a large number of people at the same time. Third, it helps the schools be more connected to their alumni and helps those alumni be more competitive in the job market, which probably doesn’t hurt when it’s time to ask those alumni to send in their donation checks.

If we’re to build a culture of continuing education in journalism, then the nature of the CE programs being offered must change. Comprehensive weeklong or multi-week programs have their place, but we need a much greater number of shorter, less expensive programs. Also, these programs should be designed with the idea of being accessible to journalists regardless of where they are. In an era where you can produce a livestream with just a laptop and a webcam, surely a school of journalism can whip up something to deliver good online sessions to off-site participants. Delivering programs online would also eliminate physical limits on how many people can attend and probably cut down on the cost of holding these programs, making them affordable to more journalists.

How It Might Work

Here’s a scenario of how a CE system for journalism could work:

A journalism organization hires journalists based on the usual criteria — skills, experience, potential, etc. All employees of the company are required to fulfill, say, 15 hours of continuing education each year. The company sets aside a number of each employee’s annual work hours (let’s just say 40 hours — a mere five days per year) specifically for such activities, covering the duration of the programs, travel time, and time for the employees to devise ways to apply the new skills and knowledge to their jobs. That last part is important, because what good is going to a seminar if you have no time afterward to digest what you learned there and think about how to put it to use? If the budget allows, the company might also set aside some money to cover a portion of the employees’ CE expenses, though I’m not counting on this last part, at least not in the current environment.

The CE programs can come from several sources. The easiest thing to do would be for the company to organize internal sessions, led by employees in various departments. A photographer can teach reporters the basics of taking a decent photo, for instance, since reporters are increasingly being asked to do that for some of the events they cover. The company can also partner with several journalism schools and, where it makes sense, other entities to create CE programs that are designed to appeal to various types of journalists. For instance, there would be a selection of programs for reporters, a selection for copy editors, a selection for programmers, a selection for ad salespeople, etc. In addition, each focus would have courses targeted at people with different levels of expertise so that an experienced programmer can opt for a more advanced programming session while a beat reporter who’s interested in learning about programming can take an introductory workshop or something specifically geared toward how reporters can use programming in their work.

These CE sessions would vary in length and cost, but most would be relatively short (an hour to a day) and at a reasonable price ($50 to a few hundred dollars). Also, as much as possible, these sessions would be delivered online as well as in person (you’d pay more for in-person). That way, instead of having to leave their jobs for a whole week and spend a couple thousand dollars for an intensive immersion program, journalists would spread it out, spending $50 for an hour-long online seminar here, two or three hundred dollars for a four-hour, hands-on program there. What the schools might lose in offering less expensive programs can be made up by having many more attendees than before.

The journalists would be able to earn CE credits by:

• Attending the aforementioned CE programs offered internally and by partner schools.
• Leading internal sessions (which encourages people to share their expertise across departments).
• Attending other relevant conferences or workshops.
• Learning how to use new software programs through online learning sites such as Lynda.com, documenting that learning experience, AND using those programs in their work.
• Reading pieces about relevant trends and new practices, logging and sharing what they read, AND coming up with ways to put into practice the ideas from those pieces.
• Other activities as approved on a case-by-case basis.

With that system in place, the company would then make CE part of its employee-evaluation formula and tie in various incentives to reward employees for putting what they’ve learned from the CE activities into practice. The hope is that under this setup, journalists would not only be required to keep their skills current, but would also have incentive to actively seek out new skills, in part to fulfill their CE requirements and in part because there’s a carrot dangling in front of them.

Each journalist would fulfill the requirement through a combination of the above activities according to their own scheduling and budget limitations. So if you can’t afford to go to several sessions at a partner J-school, you can make up for it by doing more reading and online self-learning. And by requiring the journalists to not only read or learn new software programs, but to also come up with ways to put that knowledge to use in order to get CE credit for it, it would help spur experimentation and innovation from the bottom up, which is desperately needed at many traditional news organizations.

If a couple journalism organizations can do this and show tangible, positive results, others would follow, and with luck and time, it could become a common practice in the industry. However, it would not prevent outsiders from breaking into the business the way a licensure system would, since 1). you don’t need to work for a journalism company to be a professional journalist, and 2). even if you do want to work for a journalism organization, your lack of prior CE experience would not hurt you as long as you have up-to-date skills, regardless of how you obtained them.

So what do you think? Too crazy? Will never happen? Already being done somewhere and I just don’t know about it?