For this, the last blog of the quarter, we were asked to compare the site design of two hometown news outlets. I’ll be looking at my home paper, the Minneapolis Star Tribune and our local ABC affiliate, KSTP TV. Though neither site are true design “home runs” the Star Tribune’s layout is more professional and functional, though they lack serious multimedia integration. KSTP’s site attempts to integrate video (as they should, given that they’re a TV station), but falls flat in its implementation.

The Star Tribune has two excellent design features. The first is borrowed from its print edition: white space. The homepage and its feature story pages (check out “The pressure year” for an example of a great feature with a nicely integrated hed, readout, sidebar and body text) are well spaced. On paper, this spacing makes the paper seem more friendly, and is quite literally easier to read. This readability translates onto the Web. For example, compare the Star Tribune’s homepage with that of the award-winning WashingtonPost.com. With stories and headlines bunched together, it’s much more difficult to read. Furthermore, the similarities between the Star Tribune’s paper edition and Web site should help support its branding efforts. Wether you’re looking at a broadsheet or a printout, you know you’re reading a Star Tribune article. The second key design feature of the Star Tribune’s Web site is the prominent search bar. Search is quickly becoming (if it isn’t already) our culture’s standard interface to information and media. By placing the search bar at the top center of the page (within the F shape that people look at), it integrates with the primary navigation of the site.

There are two disappointing aspects of the Star Tribune’s Web site. First is that it does not freely resize horizontally, meaning it cannot take advantage of widescreen monitors, which are quickly becoming the standard. A secondary effect of the narrowness is that fewer stories are visible without scrolling that might be if the page was wider. A “liquid” design would have been a better approach. Second, the newspaper fails to take advantage of Flash to deliver compelling audio and video on the homepage. Just yesterday, the New York Times started using a Flash player on its homepage to play audio. The Star Tribune has a custom player, however they link off their homepage to display it — taking the viewer away from the news. Their use of video is more abysmal, as they are simply using KSTP content in a pop up window.

KSTP’s video, like the rest of their site, leaves much to be desired. Their video offerings are pathetic. Video is played using a Windows Media Active X control meaning you have to install software that is specific to KSTP.com to watch the video. This is simply unacceptable. When streaming video options including Flash, standard Windows Media, Quicktime, and Real do not require Active X, why choose a proprietary format? Moreover, using such a control leaves Firefox users out in the cold, as only Microsoft Internet Explorer can use a control. Second, their site’s visual design suffers from a lack of “wideness” in a more extreme way than the Star Tribune. Only two stories are visible upon loading the homepage. Third, KSTP’s visual design looks like it was plucked right out of the late 90s: it has no white space, no interactivity, and image-heavy. Where search was displayed prominently at the Star Tribune, it is a small box on the left side that’s well “below the fold” at KSTP. Also interesting are the typo’s in KSTP’s site template. The copyright date, for example, is listed as 106.

KSTP’s site is a sad experience, particularly because video on the Web is currently an exploding medium. For a comparison with what a TV site should be, look at CNET TV (just don’t search for my review of the mALX ;)). On CNET TV, video is done in Flash, the picture quality is great, you can email links to specific clips, and most importantly, you can search for video content that interests you.

Evan Cornog, in his Columbia Journalism Review piece “Let’s Blame the Readers” discusses how newspapers might combat the marked decline in readership currently in progress in the United States. He mentions two opposing solutions: changing what papers cover and reeducating the American public. Cornog’s prognostications are faulty in that they are not extreme enough. Blog networks are doing a better job than newspapers ever can of coverage on topics readership studies say younger readers care about most meaning the educational role of the newspaper must improve if papers are to survive.

I have a particularly interesting (read: random) daily media appetite. It starts with a customized email of the headlines and summaries from NYTimes.com (usually read on my BlackBerry before I actually get out of bed). Then I make stops at Slashdot.org and TUAW, The Unofficial Apple Weblog. Later in the day, I might go back to the Times. I’ll definitely go back to Slashdot and TUAW. Often three or four more times. Blogs like these provide fanatical coverage on a subject that I’m fanatical about. For example, on Monday, November 20, TUAW posted 6 new stories on all things Apple related. Slashdot posted more than 20 pieces on “News for nerds. Stuff that matters.” But not everyone is interested in such news for nerds, and that’s where the newest of new media companies — blog networks — come in. The parent company of TUAW, Weblogs, Inc. owns blogs that cover: the advertising industry, cars, environmentally friendly cars, baby products/care, card games, movies, shareware, scuba diving, gadgets, HD TV, games, luxury goods, Tivo and other PVRs, food, fashion, health/fitness, Apple Computer, and TV shows. See anything interesting there? Yup, Weblogs owns properties that cover most of the “top items of interest for younger, so-called ‘light’ readers.” Weblogs’ competitor, Gawker Media, has another network of blogs that cover some of the same topics and additional, edgier ones that cover sex, Hollywood gossip, and the famous Wonkette D.C. gossip. Though experts are recommending that newspapers aim to remain relevant by covering these topics, they simply can’t in as much depth or as often. Moreover, younger media consumers such as myself are perfectly comfortable getting our news from such online sources with a laser-like focus on our interests. Essentially, newspapers shouldn’t even try to compete in a race to the bottom because they simply can’t win.

Where newspapers can win, however, is in the role of educator. The space between teaching and journalism is, as Cornog suggests, quite small. A journalist aims to teach people about something that happened yesterday or is happening today, whereas a traditional teacher is, most often, teaching about something that’s been discovered longer ago. That’s it. Each is engaged in the same core process: distilling the important facts and presenting them in an easily digestible manner. So what’s an editor-in-chief to do? Get her reporters to start teaching people about the subjects a newspaper can cover well. Write lucid articles about how our government actually works. Prepare compelling graphics that can relate complex processes at a glance. And most important of all: don’t take a story’s impact for granted. Be sure to tell readers exactly why they ought care about a governmental agencies most recent administrative ruling.

Declining readership is a severe problem for newspapers. A race to the bottom is, undoubtedly, the wrong way to win readers back.

In the wake of the September 11, 2001 attacks on New York and Washington, D.C., Americans interest in international news was reinvigorated. Journalism organizations that closed and consolidated bureaus around the world were jolted into action. And, according to the Pew Research Center for People and The Press’ study, the Internet is bringing that news to people, though admittedly fewer than in the past. Though interest in international news on the internet is up, people still care more about news that is inherently local and impactful such as the weather.

The Pew study found that interest in international news is low. In 1998, roughly 34 percent of people read international news “most of the time.” That interest skyrocketed and by 2004 a whopping 54 percent did. In 2006 at the time of the Pew study, interest has almost returned to its pre-Iraq war high levels of 39 percent. Where people go to get international news should be of particular interest to journalists. Once the province of network news and national newspapers, who could pay to send correspondents and cameras around the world, people are now getting more international news from the Internet. It’s the large national newspaper’s Web sites that are picking up these internationally minded readers; 77 percent of the readers at USAToday.com, NYTimes.com, and the WSJ.com follow international news most of the time. This is surprising because the Internet offers a leveled playing field for media organizations. People interested in International news could just as easily look at bloggers, foreign sources in the locality they are interested in, or wire copy. That they don’t suggests some value in the national paper’s brands. These papers ought capitalize on this, particularly in the declining media market.

Perhaps the most interesting statistic in this section of the Pew study, however, is the one news topic that people consistently follow most: the weather. Weather has two unique characteristics that explain why it is so closely followed and why the Internet might be able to better capture weather news consumers. Weather is newsworthy for the most important reason: it impacts your life all day, every day. Unlike almost any other news story, which readers depend on a news organization to tell them about in the first place, people will deal with the weather in their everyday lives. People seek out high quality, timely reporting on the weather can help them better prepare to interact with the world around them.The weather is also inherently hyper-local and individualized, making it the perfect story for the Internet. Unbridled by page or time limitations, and enhanced by interactivity, the Internet can tell hyper-local stories better than any other medium.

This seeming dichotomy, of enhancing international and hyper-local coverage at once, is the power of the Internet. It has the potential to make news coverage broader and deeper… if we take advantage of it.

The Pew Research Center for People and The Press’ study of the effects of the Internet on newspaper readership had two particularly interesting parts. First, users do not cite the medium’s multimedia capabilities as a reason for getting news online. Second is the importance of search for online news consumers.

Though the Web has tremendous multimedia capabilities, users don’t list it as “what sets internet news apart.” (26) In fact, only 2 percent listed it as a unique feature of the medium, though the answers were coded from open-ended, not prompted, responses. This is particularly interesting to the New Media journalist. Though there has recently been a major push to make multimedia journalism online better, perhaps some of that effort has been put in the wrong place. Readers instead reference other features of the web as more important, such as the ability to “‘read several opinions,’ compare different sources,’ and get a variety of perspectives’ online.” (26) Perhaps this indicates that some effort should be put into new projects like the New York Times’ MyTimes initiative, which helps collect the best information from around the Web, regardless of its source.

Another thing that readers do cite as key for the medium is search. “Nearly three quarters of all internet users (74%) say they have used a search engine,” (17) to find news that is of personal interest to them. Moreover, about the same number (76%) say they “bump into” news stories online when doing searches for information, even if not explicitly looking for news. The centrality of search also presents serious questions for multimedia journalists. Current search technology is wholly text based. If people are coming to news content increasingly via search, they are missing out on many excellent multimedia packages. Optimizing multimedia content for search is not an easy task, but must be done. Perhaps one methodology would be to include a full transcript of a voiceover in the metadata of any page with a flash movie in it.

Essentially, the tendency of users to rely on search to bring them the specific content they’re interested in presents fundamental questions about the value of multimedia journalism. Obviously, people do care about rich Web sites – if offered a plain text one and one filled with color and flash video, I’d guess many would choose the latter – but they use Internet news for something more than multimedia. Publishers ought consider the current value they are generated from multimedia journalism and should consider methodologies to optimize multimedia content for search.

As Professor Rich Gordon highlights, Convergence is a tricky thing to define. Gordon latches on to Ithiel de Sola Pool’s explanation:

“The current convergence between historically separated modes of communication lies in the habitability of digital electronics. Conversation, theater, news and text are all increasingly delivered electronically … [E]lectronic technology is bringing all modes of communications into one grand system.”

Not only is this exciting, but it is already happening for me in a real, concrete way. There are two obvious examples of how converged media directly benefit me as a student here at Northwestern. First is something almost everyone here can relate to: NUTV. Second is the Byzantine-yet-powerful Voice-over-IP telephony system I rely on.

Every Northwestern student has benefited from the convergence of IP and coaxial cable networks. In response to persistent student complaints about not being able to access TV in their rooms – either because reception was poor in the university’s old, plaster-and-chicken-wire-walled dorms or because students wanted to watch cable channels – the university IT department introduced NUTV. Though relatively advanced multicasting technology is required to stream 24 channels across a 10Base/T network, to students it’s totally transparent. With the NUTV back end, students can turn their computers into televisions with a simple Java application. The key here is that rather than support a new kind of network like installing broadcast signal boosters or wiring every room for cable, the university digitized TV signals and sent them out over its pre-existing IP network. Not only was this cheaper, but it also allows the university to be much more nimble in the future; when (OK – if) the FCC finally makes digital broadcasting standard, modifying NUTV will simply require a new backend. The network itself can remain untouched.

Though NUTV is an obvious and pervasive example of the power of convergence, it does not actually improve the television experience beyond pushing it to new locales in a less expensive manner. My experience with VoIP telephony, however, not only brought landline style phone service to me more cheaply, but it also drastically improved the phone’s functionality. After moving into my fraternity last year it became painfully clear that my cell phone simply would not work in my room unless I was willing to stick my head out the window every time I wanted to make or receive a call. I also had a roommate, so I couldn’t send private calls to my room phone. So, an internet-based phone line seemed like the optimal solution.

My VoIP line operates transparently; so transparently, in fact, that I don’t even know the phone number for it. When someone calls my cell phone and I don’t answer for any reason – be it that I don’t have reception or that I simply rejected the call – rather than call forwarding to my carrier’s voice mail system, I’ve set it to forward to my VoIP number. If I’m in my room, I can answer the phone. If not, it goes to the VoIP voicemail. When someone leaves a message, the VoIP system records it as a WAV file, attaches it to an email and sends it to a GMail account. From here a GMail rule determines that it is a voicemail, automatically archives the message, and sends a copy of it directly to my cell phone. In this way I still get instant voicemail notification, even though my voicemail system is totally separated from my cellular carrier. The benefits of this system are threefold. First, of course, I effectively created cell phone service in an area where there was none before. Second, I unified my messaging. All asynchronous communication is stored in a single, date and time stamped, searchable archive. Third, I can move my self-created cell phone service anywhere where I have access to the Internet. Not only is this extremely helpful for a standard college student (who is inherently mobile) but for myself in particular. Next quarter when I am abroad on TM, friends and family in the US can call my cell phone and speak to me, regardless of where I actually am.

In chapter 3 of “We the Media,” Gillmor highlights one way that the Internet has already made journalism better; bloggers and other citizens can act as the watchdogs of the watchdogs of democracy. To summarize (later in the book) Gillmor quotes early blogger Ken Layne: “We can Fact Check your ass,” (187).

Let me juxtapose two bits of journalistic introspection to show how the Internet can act as a better check on journalists than more traditional methods like Ombudsmen. The first is the recent tiff at the speech their Supreme Court reporter Linda Greenhouse gave upon receiving the 2006 Radcliffe Institute Medal. Months after the speech, NPR picked up on a few choice tidbits including: “Greenhouse went on to charge that since then, the U.S. government had ‘turned its energy and attention away from upholding the rule of law and toward creating law-free zones at Guantanamo Bay, Abu Ghraib, Haditha and other places around the world — [such as] the U.S. Congress.’” and “She also observed a ’sustained assault on women’s reproductive freedom and the hijacking of public policy by religious fundamentalism. To say that these last few years have been dispiriting is an understatement.’” After the NPR piece, the Times’ Public Editor Byron E. Calame wrote a piece that suggested Greenhouse “stepped across that line” between holding personal opinions and expressing them publicly. Four months after her speech, Greenhouse got a slap on the wrist for a breach of the Times’ code of ethics.

On September 8, 2004, at 8 p.m. PST, Dan Rather aired a story questioning the veracity of President Bush’s National Guard Service claims. Just 59 minutes and 43 seconds later, a citizen-poster (non-professional journalist) on Freerepublic.com – a conservative blog – known only as “Buckhead” asserted that the memos Rather based his story on were fakes. He said: “In 1972 people used typewriters for this sort of thing, and typewriters used monospaced fonts. The use of proportionally spaced fonts did not come into common use for office memos until the introduction of laser printers, word processing software, and personal computers. I am saying that these documents are forgeries, run through a copier for 15 generations to make them look old. This should be pursued aggressively.” Bloggers, including those at Rathergate.com did just that. By September 13th, a New York Times column ran under the headline: “Those Discredited Memos.” Rather resigned in disgrace.

Granted, Greenhouse’s misdeeds were much less egregious than basing a story on forgeries, however the lag time on the New York Times’ feedback loop was extraordinarily long. When massive numbers of people get involved in a news story, which the Internet can facilitate, journalists can be “scrutinized the way [they] scrutinize others,” (62). This type of scrutiny can only help make our reporting more accurate.

In Chapter 2 of “We the Media,” Dan Gillmor gives a brief overview of the technologies that make citizen journalism possible. Though already outdated (note how his discussion of the expense of delivering video on the Web is no longer valid thanks to services like Google Video, YouTube and clones), the most important argument he makes is for RSS feeds. RSS is important not because it can deliver headlines to your desk, but because it is a precursor to the Web service future; RSS is an early mechanism designed to atomize content and free it from any particular display device.

Using RSS for its intended purpose is undoubtedly powerful. The ability to access and aggregate news headlines as an individual sees fit drastically changes the power structure of news organizations. It, in fact, destroys editorial power as we know it. In addition to removing an editor’s agency in story placement by limiting presentation to a chronological-only format, it also allows news consumers to override any editorial vetoes – if one news organization does not deliver a story chances are good the user will still be notified by another feed. An excellent example of how wresting power from editors and media organizations is an application I built called bbfeed (here is the Python code). bbfeed gathers news from sources that I care about and publishes it all on a simple page that’s easily accessible via my BlackBerry.

What’s more important about RSS, however, is the philosophy of content it represents. This summer I spent a lot of time covering Web 2.0 for CNET and News.com and I saw that Web services and atomized content are currently driving almost all Internet innovation today. Rather than building monolithic applications, Web developers are increasingly making use of Web services to “mash up” lots of different features into a single useful application. One of my favorite mash ups is Gmaps Pedometer, which lets you place pushpins on a Google map to calculate the elevation and distance of a run. Another example is the badge that Facebook now lets you place on any Web site that is automatically updated with your most current information. These mash ups are taking on an increasingly application-like feel thanks to the introduction of advanced APIs and AJAX-based applications.

Essentially, atomizing content frees users to work creatively to solve both large- and small-scale problems. Hundreds of thousands of people use Gmaps Pedometer to track how far they’ve run and improve their training. And, as far as I know, I’m the only one who uses bbfeed to get a news page tailored to my interests on my BlackBerry.