Award-winning writer: Journalism should be

a mission
by Omid Memarian, IJNet contributing writer

Author and journalist Deborah Campbell spoke recently to

IJNet about emerging trends in journalism, multimedia
journalism and the future of media. Campbell is the author of
This Heated Place, a narrative exploration of the Israeli-
Palestinian conflict, and an adjunct professor at the University
of British Columbia. She has written for The Economist, The
New Scientist, Ms._magazine, the _Guardian and Asia Times,
and recently reported for Harper's on the two months she
spent "embedded" with Iraqi refugees. Over the past seven
years, she has extensively chronicled the fault lines in the
Middle East from Iran to Palestine, immersing herself for
extended periods in the societies she writes about.

Excerpts from the interview follow:

IJNet: What are major emerging trends in journalism

today? How are these trends transforming journalism?

Deborah Campbell: Journalism right now is in a crisis. It -- if

we can call media an "it" -- doesn't know what the future holds
but it does know the old model is broken. A lot of this has to
do, quite simply, with money. Who wants to pay for
information if they can now get it for free through the Internet?
Where are the advertising dollars? So the corporate model of
journalism isn't working, but at the same time people are
consuming more news than ever -- just not paying for it.

At the same time the web has opened up new modes of

communication, as we know. And some bloggers are doing
fantastic journalism. On the Middle East, for instance,
academics like Juan Cole provide expert analysis that beats
most journalism. But there is really no substitute for sending a
journalist into the field to do actual reporting. I recently did a
long feature in which I interviewed a communications director
for the International Crisis Group. He was worried that without
field reporting, without actual journalists on the ground who
are trained and educated in the issues, we are not even
hearing about international conflicts such as small wars.
"Citizen journalism is like citizen dentistry," he said.

The feature I interviewed him for, "The Most Hated Name in

News," was about Al Jazeera-English and its ambitions to be
the biggest player in international TV journalism. Right now
they are taking over because everyone else is cutting back,
not sending out reporters, leaving a huge swath of the world
with no journalism being done at all.

Tony Burman, their managing director, told me: “The

mainstream American networks have cut their bureaus to the
bone. They’re basically only in London now. Even CNN has
pulled back. I remember in the ’80s when I covered these
events, there would be a truckload of American journalists
and crews and editors, and now Al Jazeera outnumbers them
all.” So here you have a totally different model with a rich
Middle Eastern state deciding to fund a news channel out of
its own pockets. But clearly that's not going to happen in
many other places.

IJNet: How about freelance journalism? Is there any hope

that big news organizations will pay for good stories?

DC: I met Seymour Hersh a couple of years ago. He is one of

the great freelance journalists -- he's still a freelancer in his
70s -- and when he broke the story of the My Lai massacre in
Vietnam, nobody would publish it. It was too hot to handle. So
he had a friend pose as a wire service and send it to all the
newspapers, so a bunch of them would publish it. You have to
be innovative, but yes you can still find places that pay well,
just fewer of them. And less space for investigative work. If
you have to spend months on a story, as Hersh did, you are
probably spending a lot of time you won't be paid for. I think
there is more future in books than in newspaper reporting if
you really want to do long-form investigative work.

IJNet: In journalism schools, students are learning to be

multimedia journalists. Is this changing the way
journalists work?

DC: I see the trend toward turning out journalists who are kind
of like one-stop shops. It probably favors a certain type of
reporter -- one who can do twelve things at once. It's great if
you can do it. Journalists should certainly try to be active in
more than one medium in order to find a wider audience. For
myself I like long-form narratives though I have also made
documentaries for radio and taken photographs to go with my
work. But I wouldn't want to introduce a video camera into
every situation I encounter, particularly since I explore other
cultures, often in conflict zones, and it would be highly unsafe
to do that. I worry that by doing too many technical things at
once, we end up with more superficial coverage of everything.

IJNet: How this would make stories superficial?

DC: Maybe I am just trying to understand why so much

coverage is superficial -- is it because the person who gets
sent out is the techie rather than the journalist? Is it because
she's messing her equipment and her lighting and her sound
rather than focusing on what her subject is saying and the
actual content of the story? Maybe I am trying to understand
why we see so little actual journalism (as opposed to PR-
generated stories, celebrity sightings, or useless fear
mongering and fabricated controversies). At least in part it has
something to do with budgets and tight deadlines and the
attrition of qualified journalists who have been laid off because
they were expensive.

I know of young "journalists" who tell me they have to re-write

two or three press releases in a day, maybe doing a couple of
phone calls to add in original quotes. It's like Dickensian
factory labor. That's not journalism. It's cheap but it's not
journalism. It is allowing groups with interests, groups who
write the press releases and run the think tanks and the press
conferences, to essentially control the flow of information. The
studies I have seen on journalism in the UK, US and Canada
all found that about 80 to 90 percent of news stories originate
in public relations -- they came out of press conference or
press release. That leaves 10 or 20 percent that are coming
from the journalist going out there and finding a story -- and
how many of those are challenging stories that help us to
understand how to navigate he world?

IJNet: Imagine someone tells you that he/she is going to

apply for a journalism school. What would you say?

DC:I read a quote from Toby Young, the author of the book
How to Lose Friends and Alienate People (about his time
working for Vanity Fair magazine), and he said that anyone
who goes into journalism at this point is either a moron or a
romantic -- probably both. It's a funny quote, and hard to
dispute.

If you are going into this profession it needs to be a vocation -

- a mission -- it has to mean something to you personally, and
you will have to work very hard to do the work that matters to
you. I know it can be done, because others and I are doing it.
But you should have no expectations that it will be easy or
that you will find a nice staff job making a good living, at least
not for a while. You should also be sure you are doing the
work that is important to you, which is why the freelance
option is a good one -- perhaps the only one, given how many
staffers who are much older and more qualified are now
unemployed. The model is changing but you can be the
future. Try to live with your parents for as long as you can or
marry rich (again, only partly joking).

The great journalists I know are making it on their own. They

are going after the stories, often without assignments, often
moving to difficult countries if they want to do foreign
correspondence as I do, and then producing work people
want and need. They aren't waiting for someone to send
them.

IJNet: Should they go to law or business school and

forgo journalism?

DC:I think business school is looking about as promising as

journalism school right now. The future is very uncertain in
most industries, but your expectations should be realistic and
you should be prepared to make sacrifices. Unless your dad
owns a media conglomerate, you won't walk into a $70K a
year salary, and you may not have steady work for the first
few years. Unless you are very productive and very lucky, you
may have to have another job on the side in order to afford to
do the work you want to do and spend the time it takes to do it
well. But in my experience there is no other work that is more
rewarding. It's the best life I can imagine.
Editor: Journalists must offer insight, not just
facts
by Andy Shuai Liu

In a news world increasingly dominated by quick blog posts,

one startup website believes there is room for in-depth
analysis.

Atul Singh is the founder and editor-in-chief of Fair Observer,

an online community that provides high-quality, in-depth
analysis on global affairs by contributors from diverse
disciplines and perspectives. Envisioning a 360° view of the
world, Atul Singh shared with IJNet his thoughts on the future
of journalism in a phone interview.

Why was Fair Observer first started?

Atul Singh (AS): For a long time, I wanted to start up

something in the realm of media to tackle some existing
problems. The mainstream media provided much news, but
not enough analysis. Existing analysis was usually biased and
out of context due to contributors’ homogeneity in nationality,
background and ideology.

In 2010, my partners and I started Fair Observer to foster a

global dialogue...We found our niche in journalism by using
the power of the Internet, providing analysis with context and
providing a platform of global dialogue for people from
different disciplines and many parts of the world.
How can young journalists find a niche and stay
competitive?

AS: Above all, you have to realize that information is now

becoming increasingly accessible via the Internet.
Competition is and will be higher.

Then, ask two questions:

What do I really, really, really love?

How can I communicate what I love to people in the most

simple, accessible way?

Every age needs a narrative. Journalists are the ones who

record stories and help shape the narrative. If you find your
passion and can communicate it extremely well, there is then
a real market for you to become a journalist who can shape
the narrative.

How can journalists communicate complicated issues so

that people from all backgrounds can understand?

First, be creative. Don’t just look at words. Think how to

convey your message through visual means such as charts
and images.

Second, focus on issues instead of events. There is no added

value if you only focus on individual events.

Third, gather feedback. Journalists now have more tools than

before to get feedback. Important questions to ask audiences
include: “How insightful or relevant is this the report?” and
“What else would you like to see?” Two-way dialogue is what
drives you forward and makes you relevant in the field of
journalism.
What's the most effective means of engagement?

Video is the most effective way to engage with your

audiences. The human brain is wired toward moving images
over static materials...Smartphones are making video
production easier and people will use them more often. It will
be the most effective way of engagement going forward.
Five dirty words journalists must learn to say
without blushing
by James Breiner

Journalism is the best job in the world, and working with

journalists is fun. They’re funny, irreverent, intelligent and
excellent storytellers.

Still, as a group we tend to be arrogant, self-righteous and

holier-than-thou (I include myself in this criticism). We tend to
view ourselves as high priests of an exclusive profession and
bearers of a special ethical standard that few others can live
up to. We see ourselves as purer, more objective, less
affected by the prejudices of the mere mortals we cover.

That is at least part of the reason we have trouble in the new

world of entrepreneurial journalism, where journalists start
and run their own news operations. If we want to go out on
our own, we have to recognize for the first time that journalism
is a business, that someone has to pay the bills and that there
is money involved. Money? This is a dirty word for journalists.
It makes us blush. We associate it with influence peddling,
lobbyists, bribery, corruption and other topics of our
investigative journalism.

Here are some other dirty words that entrepreneurial

journalists who launch their own media will have to learn how
to say without blushing:

1. Business. Journalism is a business. Yes, it’s a public

service, and it’s also a business. If it weren’t a business,
journalists would not be able to collect a paycheck. Now that
it’s not as great a business as it used to be, journalists are
waking up to the fact that there is money involved.
Start your own news business, do it online at low cost and
create something that serves your community.

2. Profit. Even in a non-profit news enterprise, you have to

spend less than you take in. Whether you call it excess
revenue or you call it profit, you have to have it. If you are not
covering your costs, you can’t pay the journalists or their
health insurance, and you can’t pay the printer or the web
host or the designer or the programmer or the marketing
director or the computer store. Without profit, you have no
resources to invest in improving your product or hiring more
staff. Without profit, you are out of business.

Entrepreneurial journalists have to learn how to make a profit

and how to track revenue and expenses in a disciplined way,
using something other than a checkbook balance. They have
to understand where their costs are and where their revenues
are coming from.

Profit is not a dirty word, despite the fact that many of our
investigative journalism projects center on people making
undeserved profits through chicanery or corruption. Profit is a
good thing, when it is justly earned. Profit is about taking care
of your employees so they can feed their families and
improving your product to serve your community better.
Nothing dirty about that.

Learn some basic accrual accounting. Even English majors

can do it.

3. Marketing. This is the discipline of identifying needs and

aspirations of a target audience, creating a product to serve
that audience and communicating compelling messages
about the product to that audience. Marketing helps us reach
and serve more people and serve them better. At its most
basic, this dirty word means knowing who your customers or
readers are and putting their interests ahead of your own.

For the last half-century or so, we journalists have lived in a

bubble, isolated from readers. Some of us assumed that the
public had a civic responsibility to read our stories, and we
gave too little attention to making our work readable and
relevant. Too often we wrote to impress each other or the
small world of our sources.

The business side operated almost independently and

produced fantastic profit margins of 30 to 40 percent even
when we wrote boring, irrelevant, badly researched stories.
There was little competition in one-newspaper towns. For
advertisers, the daily newspaper was a great vehicle for
reaching the majority of households. The newspaper was
above all a vehicle for distribution of advertising messages
(70 percent of the content typically) and, by the way, it also
had some news stories.

We journalists didn’t have to care much what the public

thought. We wrote columns of 750 words and news stories of
1,500 to fill spaces and had almost no way to measure
whether anyone read us or not. We could brush off readers
who disagreed with us by telling them to write a letter to the
editor.

Now the playing field has shifted, and everyone has a voice
on WordPress, Facebook and Twitter, and we are discovering
that "the people formerly known as the audience" (Jay Rosen)
have interesting things to say, and often have better, more
accurate information than professional journalists. The public
has exposed the faults of our work in ways that we are not
used to.
This dirty word -- marketing -- means to listen to the readers,
to understand their needs and aspirations, to treat them with
respect and to find ways to serve them.

There is a science to it. Study the traffic of your website. Use

Google Analytics or some other tool. Learn how to measure
reader loyalty. Find out which communities your readers live
in, how much time various audiences spend per visit on your
website, which content they are attracted to, which web
browsers they are using and more. You don’t have to pander
to your audience, but you do have to know them to serve
them well. Analyzing their web behavior will surprise and help
you.

4. Customer (reader, user, subscriber). This is the person

who presumably benefits from the journalism you produce.
The customer uses your information to make informed
decisions about business, health, politicians, the environment,
education, entertainment, travel, housing, computer games --
the possibilities are endless in the online world of niche
publications.

Journalists have tended to talk about readers in the abstract,

but now, with the rise of social networks, we have tools to
interact with our reader-customers and find out what really
matters to them.

Get to know your readers and users, and get down off the
pulpit to have a conversation with them in social networks.

5. Client (sponsor, advertiser, contributor, member, fan).

These are the people who generate revenue for the news
enterprise. The best clients are the ones who understand the
rules of the game, namely that buying a sponsorship, an
advertisement or a membership does not give them a voice in
the editorial product.

My advice is to put those words into the contract and to

discuss them with the potential client -- "because our
product’s value to readers and sponsors depends on its
credibility, we will not allow any client to compromise that
credibility by having an undeserved or undue influence on the
editorial product." At the same time, a news organization will
have to be more transparent than in the past and be more
open with the public about editorial processes and how
editorial decisions are made.

Editorial types like myself may have trouble dealing with the
client-advertiser because we typically never had to have a
conversation with one. The business side of a newspaper
handled all that. However, I think editors can be the best
salespeople for a news outlet -- they can describe the value of
the product better than anyone.

Meet with some potential sponsors and advertisers and

explain to them how they are served by your product’s
editorial integrity, how their own brand is enhanced by a
credible editorial environment. If you are an editorial type who
still blushes when talking about money, make sure you have a
sales and marketing person on your team from the very
beginning. Have that person come with you on a call to close
the sale.
Good journalism is good business

However, if you start your own news enterprise, you

eventually will have to tell an advertiser-sponsor, No.

When I was editor of Business First of Columbus, our paper

did an investigative story about a bank’s behind-the-scenes
manipulations to get the state to take over a failed office
project. The stories scuttled the deal and caused the bank,
our biggest advertiser, to cancel its contract.

The reaction of Publisher Carole Williams to the canceled

contract set an example for me and gave me words to live by.
The lost revenue would hurt us, she said, but would not result
in cutbacks at the paper. We had other advertisers.
Investigative stories strengthened our credibility and made
advertisers want to be associated with us, she said. In other
words, good journalism was good business. In turn,
profitability safeguarded our editorial independence.

Right now, good journalism is not always good business

because the profession and the industry (they seem to be less
related these days) are struggling to redefine themselves.
However, I am confident that journalists can add some new
words to their vocabulary and not feel squeamish about using
them. These entrepreneurial journalists who learn how to
make a business out of producing news and information will
be the ones who redefine the profession and the industry. And
it won’t make them blush to make a profit.
How to be in the right place at the right time
by Joe Grimm

We often hear that someone landed an opportunity by being

in the right place at the right time. They weren’t there just by
chance.

Smart people put themselves in the right places all the time in
hopes of finding opportunity. They do that because, while it
may be hard to know when the time is right, we can make
educated guesses about which places are right.

Once, when the American Society of News Editors was

holding its annual convention in Washington, D.C., I decided
to visit my son there for a few evenings and to spend my days
at the hotel where the convention was.

I am not a member of the group and likely would not have

been approved for membership because I was not a top editor
at my newspaper. But I knew people in the group and figured
something good would come of being at the convention hotel.

One of my bosses encountered me there and gave me a

surprised greeting. I told him not to worry, that I was there on
my own time and expense. Still, it seemed to startle him that I
was among so many of his colleagues and seemed to know
some of them.

And sure enough, a couple of editors who were at the

convention suggested I work on small projects with them. I
had no idea about the timing, but I was in the right place when
they were looking for help.

Sometimes, being in the right place at the right time is more

figurative than literal. A certain job candidate used to write to
me frequently and always seemed to have a note or a letter
on my desktop. Sure enough, when someone at another
newsroom called looking for just this sort of candidate, I
spotted one of his letters and passed his name along. His
letter was in the right place — where it could be seen on a
desk and not hidden in a file — and the time turned right.

If you want to be in the right place at the right time, visit the
right places frequently and don’t be worried about the timing.
Sooner or later, that will be right, too.
Nine challenges facing the future of
journalism
by Maryanne Reed

With more and more people consuming news digitally, the

future of journalism has never been brighter. But journalists of
the future will face a number of challenges, according to Raju
Narisetti, senior vice president and deputy head of strategy at
the new News Corporation.

Narisetti recently shared his predictions about the future of

media with students at the West Virginia University P.I. Reed
School of Journalism, (where I am dean) as part of our Future
of Media - Now series.

In a nod to the “listicle” format, popularized by BuzzFeed,

Narisetti provided his top nine reasons why the road ahead for
journalism will be tricky to navigate.

Print isn't going away.

Despite downsizing and cutbacks at the nation’s top

newspapers, print journalism continues to offers advertisers
the most effective way to reach audiences in many markets.

For example, The Washington Post (where Narisetti served

as a managing editor) still captures about 40 percent of the
local market, providing a necessary revenue stream for the
paper.

“If it’s 50, 60, 70 percent of our revenue and profit is coming
from print, we will always have to have kind of large staffs
focused on print,” Narisetti said. Comparing print journalism to
the declining auto industry, he said, “It’s like Detroit. Fewer
people will make it [journalism], but you will always need
somebody making it.”

Digital advertising isn't the savior.

While more readers are moving to digital, the revenues from

digital haven’t kept pace — because the audience has
become increasingly fragmented, giving advertisers the upper
hand.

“If you’re an advertiser, the choices you have where you can
run your ads continue to explode,” Narisetti said. “And as a
result you [news media] can make a fair amount of money on
digital, but it’s nowhere close to what the revenue is for print.”

Narisetti says it’s essential that newsrooms build new revenue

models into new digital products and applications. He
described The New York Times’ Pulitzer Prize-winning
Snowfall project as an “amazing” experience that fell short
because it had no revenue model attached to it. “At the end of
the day, the Snowfall page views are really empty calories
because they really haven’t generated any incremental
revenue.”

Paywalls are here to stay and struggle.

The number of newspapers with paywalls will continue to

grow but with varying degree of success because it’s hard to
attract digital subscribers willing to pay for content. Narisetti
says that the most a news organization can expect to attract
from either a paywall or a metered model is about 5 percent of
its unique digital audience.
“If it’s seen as an extra source of revenue, I think it will
succeed, but if paywalls are seen as solving the problem [of
funding journalism], then most of them will fail,” said Narisetti.

News will have to go to readers; they don't have to come

to us.

With Facebook and other social media providing new

pathways to journalism, the modern audience doesn’t expect
to work hard to “find” the news. Today’s digital journalists
must be able to write, report and market their stories. At the
very minimum, reporters need to know how to use SEO to
their advantage.

“In the print world, there is a position called circulation

marketer, whose job is to figure out how to make money. That
doesn’t exist in the digital world,” said Narisetti. “In 2013 the
definition of a journalist must include ‘I will do everything I can
to bring more people to my journalism.’”

Web video offers a possible way out.

Web video offers a significant monetization opportunity

because (a) audiences want it and (b) the pre-roll advertising
can be embedded into the content.

“Video is the first form of journalism where we have figured

out that when somebody watches it – no matter where they
watch it – the business model travels with it,” Narisetti said.

For that reason, The Wall Street Journal — a former print-only

publication — is now producing about 1,600 videos or 120
hours of video a month, making it the largest producer of
video in the world outside of a television newsroom.
Mobile might be a threat or opportunity, but it is a
journalism reality.

With an increasing number of people accessing news through

mobile devices, news organizations must adopt a “mobile-
first” model — or risk becoming irrelevant.

This means packaging content in a way that is easy to digest

on a small “window.” For example, long narrative print leads
could be replaced with shorter, snappier leads that can be
read on the first screen.

It also means devoting significantly more resources to mobile,

which is a long way in coming. Narisetti says that even at The
Wall Street Journal — which 36 percent of its audience reads
only on mobile — just a handful of people serve on its mobile
team.

Great journalism matters, but how readers experience

that journalism will matter even more.

Today’s news consumers are “promiscuous” — going from

source to source and device to device, giving news
organizations a limited amount of time to capture their
attention.

“The advantage we had with great journalism or great

storytelling exclusives used to be a day when we were
primarily in the print world,” said Narisetti. “It then shrunk to a
few hours when the websites had to catch up. If you’re lucky,
now it has shrunk to two minutes.”

Narisetti says that “amazing” content is no longer enough.

The only way to catch and keep an audience is to create
compelling experiences that keep them coming back, such as
The Wall Street Journal’s graphic that tracked Mark
Zuckerberg’s wealth in real-time when Facebook went public
or The New York Times’ interactive Academy Awards ballot
on Facebook.

Good and bad experiences all come at the same

intersection: content and technology.

To produce impactful digital journalism, reporters, developers

and designers all have to work together to create quality
content that also will engage an audience.

But working as a team can be challenging for professionals

who don’t always understand and appreciate what the “other”
is doing.

“When you go into newsrooms, you don’t have to code, but

what you have to be able to do as a journalist is to speak the
language of developers,” said Narisetti. “If you make the
conversation about what is the experience we’re trying to give
to our audience, the developers get it and understand what
you’re trying to do.”

Newsrooms now face a new competitor: our advertisers.

Many companies that advertised in traditional media are now

going directly to their consumers to promote their brands. The
rise of “sponsored content” and “native advertising” has
created a major threat to newsrooms.

Companies have also become skilled content producers,

vying for “the single non-renewable resource my readers
have, which is their time,” said Narisetti. For example,
General Electric is trying to position itself as a leader in
innovation through videos and social media campaigns such
as #6secondsciencefair.

“We have to start thinking, how do we engage with these

brands, how do we help them do this,” he said. If news
organizations don’t play in that space, they “are not going to
have the opportunity to make any significant revenue in
digital.”

Ultimately, the key to thriving and not just surviving in the

ever-evolving digital environment is to continue to adapt,
experiment and anticipate what’s coming next.

“The good thing about talking about the future is that it’s in the
future,” he said. “But the bad thing is, it doesn’t have a sign
post saying it’s coming. You just wake up one day and realize
it kind of hit you, and if you’re not prepared, you’re left
behind.”