From: Briana Duggan

Date: April 30, 2010

Topic: The Future of Public Affairs

MEMORANDUM

It is no surprise to say that the news industry is changing.  There has been an enormous shift has occurred in the way the public receives their news. Traditional print journalism is being out shined and outdone by online new media, which has the ability to tell a story using various techniques and mediums. Where journalists of the past were trained and experienced individuals, today anyone can publish their thoughts online – no printing press necessary. The titles of audience and journalist are now becoming foggy as online media allows people to cross traditional journalistic relationships. All this has created a news industry that is more open and democratic than ever, but one where its traditional entities are more unsure about their future than ever.

Across the country, newspapers have been the hardest hit. The Tribune chain of newspapers, which included the Los Angeles Times, the Chicago Tribune to Newsday, The Baltimore Sun, and the Orlando Sentinel went into bankruptcy. The effect has been felt in North Carolina, too. The News and Observer, centered in Raleigh, cut more than 100 jobs in 2008 and The Charlotte Observer cut more than 120 the same year. Many are consolidating content with newspapers across the state, and all are trying to figure out what the future of public affairs reporting will be like.

Below I discuss the characteristics that future public affairs reporting, followed by my recommendations as to how I would like to see future news organizations utilize this new structure.

Online media will be the main distributor of news.

Old habits die hard. Television, which has been a center of American life for the past 60 years, continues to be the country’s main source for news (54%). However, trends seem to be changing rapidly. In 2004, 92% of Americans received their news from offline sources of media; in 2008 the number had dropped to 86%. Six percent of the American population had switched to online news. Today is emerging as the medium of choice. About 18% of Americans regularly get their news online and it is especially popular within the 18-24 year old population.

In time, as the internet becomes more accessible and the youth ages and becomes the decision makers, news mediums will shift with preferences and the majority of public affairs reporting will take place online. North Carolina, like the rest of the country,

News sources that deliver media through traditional means will be forced to concentrate more heavily on their online media.

• While NC newspapers already have a strong online presence, they must continue in their attempts to engage the audience with their content in new ways. Several suggestions appear below.
• WUNC does not place heavy importance on its website but rather focuses on the quality of its radio broadcasts. Currently, this works with their demographic—women ages 55-64 (Alexa.com)—a group that, on average, utilizes traditional news sources. In order to compete with other news organizations, WUNC, along with other NC public radio stations, must recognize that maintaining websites is now as important as maintaining quality programming.

To compete with alternate forms of media, radio and newspapers must include on their websites

• Interactive content
• Up to date/live information
• Collaborate with other organizations to widen scope of project
  • University students – provide students experience while gaining free labor
  • Non-profits
  • Community Organizations
  • Public viewers

Content will be personalized to interests, on demand, interactive, and spread through networks.

The reason that social networking sites, RSS feeds, and blogs have become so popular is that people want programs to filter information based their interests. People trust the opinion of their friends – they like to read what their friends read. Visitors choose who to “follow” on Twitter or who to “friend” on Facebook, demonstrating that trusted people can be the best filters for information.

Personalized information means that news is divided by topic and often means that it is partisan or biased. The public is no longer as interested in objective reporting as before, but frequents sites like OrangePolitics.org.

We will see a rise in similar sits that combine the local, interactive, personalized, and community aspect to news that is impossible with traditional news. These sites will

• Be comprised of a network of individuals with a common interest – ie, Chapel Hill poltics
• Community membership will no longer be anonymous
• Members may contribute and direct discussion
• Journalism is free and self-motivated

As networks and trust become more in demand, individuals who have proven to be trustworthy by recommendation by a friend or consistent, quality work, will be preferred to giant news organizations whose name used to hold the trust.

• We see this today in the status of certain New York Times contributors have their own popular blogs, and personality, “beat” blogs have exploded (think Perez Hilton) while nameless, objective news organizations have been downsized.

In North Carolina, reporters and contributors will become better known for their specialty and much more central to a business’s functioning. Reporters already have their own twitter accounts and blogs, and I see the larger corporations being a group names and individuals rather than the organization being the trusted force

Journalists will continue to hold an important role in news production.

While there has been a lot of talk about journalism being a dead field of work, I don’t see it becoming extinct any time soon. There is a lot of citizen reporting going on, but even the best citizen reporter does not have the time or the skills required to do many aspects of a journalist’s job. Journalists will be needed for

• Investigative reporting
• Exhaustive analytical systems – campaign finance
• Complicated website design and programming (on a large scale, this feature on the Washington Post’s website
• Costly, time consuming reporting

RECOMMENDATIONS

Utilize free labor – turn the viewer into an actor.

As Arianna Huffington once said, “People ask, why would someone tweet or write for no money, but no one’s asking why they are watching seven hours of bad T.V. a day for no money.” We must provide anyone with a desire to contribute and add free labor an outlet to do so. Future North Carolina web visitors should not only be able to comment on the journalistic process, but they should be able to do the traditional tasks of a journalist

• Discuss events and opinions
• Produce video, photos, and audio
• Record events geographically
• Propose news stories
• Analyze finance reports (ex. The Guardian)
• Enter system information
• Interviews

In order to make free labor utilized more by North Carolina’s news organizations, we must ensure that the information be filtered and siphoned through community organizations with common interests. News organizations can take advantage of the structure, drive, and purpose behind structured organizations to flame their same projects.

Ex: A church member would be more likely to study campaign finance reports when he knew that the politician in question was considering building a shopping center beside his church.

Hybrid, non-profit, local news organizations will develop to fill in the cracks where traditional reporting used to hold.

News—quality, accurate, and up to date information is necessary for the functioning of a democracy and therefore deserving of non-profit status.

I recommend that universities, non-profits, community groups, and weakening news organizations combine to create hybrid forms of local news reporting entities. North Carolina has a tremendous base of resources. It houses hundreds of top notch universities with students that desire real-world experience, community groups that desire a place to share their voice, non-profits to provide guidance, and wealthy people to invest in the project.

Such organizations have sprouted up across the country and I would like to see the same come to North Carolina. A quality, local news source is of paramount importance. While international news takes most of the popular interest, it is local events and politics that most directly affect the average person’s daily life. The average person can also make the most impact locally, a step that will influence the global, rather than vice versa.

Non profit news entities would tell the consumer that the organization was supporting quality, intelligent news rather than maximization of profits. Non profits also hold special status that would make them a more sustainable model. This status allows them to

• “To receive tax-deductible donations, along with foundation grants, advertising revenue, and other income, including revenue from for-profit subsidiaries (Downie & Schudson)”

I would like to see specialized, non-profit news reporting that follows the aforementioned structure. Collaborations, which would follow a “beat”, could be housed within the structure of a weakening local newspaper, but be comprised of outside entities.

Example of a collaborator idea:

NC Food News: As a highly agricultural state, food production and distribution has incredible social and political impacts on state policy & organization. Housed in the non-profit, North Carolina Farm Stewards Association, local farmers & farmers markets, university students, food activists, restaurant owners, chefs, farm labor organizers, and nutritionists could intellectually discuss their passions, suiting their own community’s aim, while filling a journalistic need. Possibility of ad revenue from restaurants, cookware stores, etc.

Similar pages could be created for any subcategory of a newspaper – politics, sports, health & science, education, etc.

How it will be accomplished:

• The site would require funding. I would recommend the contributors be paid, both to insure quality reporting and fund non-profit organizations.
• The site would hold specialized content with a specific goal. The overarching entity (a weakened newspaper), would have to make sure that they wanted to support the goal of the collaboration (say, organic farming vs. conventional methods). However, as previously stated, specialized content is the direction online journalism is moving.

Realize that there is tremendous opportunity in change.

Often it takes a complete shock, a complete change in environment, to produce a new and better creation.

I recommend that we relax, stay creative, open to possibility, and use the changing media systems to get more out of community and democracy.

The work with WUNC was a very interesting experience, especially because it was my first time producing and editing content for the web. I learned about the basics of news writing, the speed and work involved in radio broadcasting, and how to find my way around WUNC’s content management system. I also enjoyed communicating with the reporters and seeing the development of their stories. My group, Katy, Jeremiah, Alesia and myself comfortably fit into our roles which allowed us to create the quality content you see.

The main thing we lacked in our partnership was time. Working under the fast-paced and deadline driven environment meant that we often did not have sufficient time to produce more complex and interactive features that larger sites produce (see last post). Nonetheless, the partnership allowed me to further explore the complex issues concerning energy consumption, environmental regulation and the public’s role in all of it.

Ushahidi is a crowdsourcing site where users can send information via text message, email, and twitter to create a “crisis map“. Help can then be sent and resources allocated based on user feedback.

Such high quality, complicated and seemingly costly technology was actually developed in Kenya during the 2007 political violence as a way for people to locate events geographically in real time. What I like most about the program is that it is free and widely accessible to anyone with a cell phone or a computer. Even those who don’t have the resources to own this technology will most likely know someone who does. The only real drawback I see is simply people not  being familiar with the program and process.

With recent success, however, Ushahidi is becoming increasingly well-known and will hopefully rise to a point where it is a widely recognized idea and concept.

Ushahidi was effectively used after the earthquake in Haiti, to monitor the elections in Sudan, the crime in Atlanta, the snow in Washington D.C., and now is used in the cleanup after the earthquake in Chile.

Could we have used something like this in our work with WUNC? Perhaps if we had the resources we could have had people geographically note where sustainable environmentally features existed in the Triangle. Alternatively, they could have pointed out where they knew of any environmental pollution problems or any factories or plants they believed were dirty and needed cleaning up.

Like much of life, it is just a question of time & resources.

(A girl can dream, can’t she?)

Working with WUNC’s: Tomorrow’s Energy series inspired me to check out what other news sources are doing to inform their audience on climate and energy issues. I found a really, really incredible interactive feature on The Washington Post’s website that works to explain worldwide carbon relations. Just in time for Earth Day (happy Earth Day, by the way), the Post created this center for information on “The Climate Agenda” which contains “tools for policy, science & the search for solutions”.

Now, as a sustainability minor, this site really was the cat’s meow, the compost to my bin, the organic soy milk to my flax-seed flakes…

But talk about complicated! The effort that must have gone into this make this site is really impressive and commendable. The feature has an interactive map of carbon emissions across time and country. You can even see emissions per capita! Once you have learned what you want about relative carbon emissions, you can see what the big shots have to say, as the Post has created links explaining those who are in charge, even linking to their twitter accounts.

This kind of in-depth feature is costly. I would have loved to have created this feature for WUNC, but neither we, nor the staff at the station have the time required for programming, data collection, and analysis. Going off of our discussion in class today, this kind of feature would only be able to be created in a large news group like The Washington Post. If media were to move in the direction of the local, as it has in recent years, this means less possibility for such pricey productions as this.

So, as much as I support local, participatory news outlets, I do believe we do need a space for larger news outlets that can provide us with detailed analysis of complex global issues like climate change. I sincerely hope that these features will not require future viewers to pay. The poor as well as the rich need to understand basic global issues.

An interesting article in the New York Times focused on user-generated comments, saying that the times of anonymous online comments appears to be coming to a close. And I personally, could not be happier. After years of reading unfounded opinions, impassioned remarks and hateful speech on comment boards, huge media organizations are hoping to clean them up by requiring those who wish to comment to register first.

News organizations like The Huffington Post and The Washington Post are currently creating systems to improve the quality of discussion which their articles ignite. They believe that by requiring users to provide a name and email address and thus be responsbile for their comments will make a huge difference.

But they are going a step further. In a style similar to that of Amazon.com, organizations would allow other commenters to rank others on the quality of their writing and validity of their point, etc.. Visitors will be able to establish a trust in the other commentators on a discussion board.

This has several upsides. People (like myself) are more likely to participate and offer legitamite and intelligent comments in places where the conversation is civil, rather than a place where “tomatoes are being thrown”.

Registered user comments are just going to become part of navigating the internet in the future. As Arianna Huffington, the founder of The Huffington Post said, “I feel like it is an education process…the rules of the road are changing”.

While looking for inspiration, I chose to explore how other sites are explaining complicated issues using perhaps one of the most confusing current topics as my keyword: the new US health care reform.

There is the everyone’s FAQ page like the one created by the White House. Pages are headed by questions created by the journalist and then answered below in a  linear fashion. It’s a logical setup, easy to understand, but provides little opportunity for interactivity.

Then there is the improved method used by sites like Slate and CNN which embed links so that visitors can learn more about the issues that surround a topic. This is an important way to not only create a more knowledgeable audience, but it increases site traffic by directing  the number of pageviews per visit.

Times Topics created a page that provides a broad and extensive information on the US health care reform. I found their design particularly effective in its ability to pull in so many resources at its viewer’s disposal. Looking at the right column, you can see that The New York Times makes available sites to books, official documents, blogs, advocacy groups, speeches, and video that are related to the reform. We could add similar features to our pages and provide links to the resources related to the specific issue. For example, if we were designing a page for nuclear energy, we could link to the nuclear energy providers in North Carolina, the official documents related to regulation in NC, and any sort of advocacy group that works nuclear energy in North Carolina. For the FAQ page in the energy series, I think it would be effective to create categories for information much like The New York Times and provide information that is outside the range of the questions posed by the journalist. Let’s allow the viewers the opportunity to both answer and ask more detailed questions.

My teammates and I decided to split up and work in pairs for the assignments (as it is always a nightmare to find a meeting time for four college students!). Katy and I will be creating a page for Frequently Asked Questions and a Who’s Who page to introduce listeners to the important players in the state’s energy use.

I’ve started looking for inspiration for cool ways to both display the information and make it as understandable as possible.

As always, I started at nytimes.com, as they always have displays and interactive features that are both easy to follow and visually appealing. Within the New York/Regional section there is an impressive feature following the past residents of an elite black neighborhood in Harlem. While Katy and I do not have the time to produce such a complicated feature, it nonetheless has elements that we could add to our project.

The most effective trait of the site is how it clearly positions the audience geographically. To the left is a set map of the neighborhood within the greater New York metropolitan area, but then below there is a map of the neighborhood and its individual houses. When the visitor scrolls over a person, their home lights up below. Our team had been discussing the importance of creating a map to visually display where we are speaking of; the series, after all, is highlighting the state of North Carolina. The other half of the WUNC team, Jeremiah and Alesia, will be creating a map to show where the major energy providers and players are located within the state. After seeing this New York Times feature, I think it would be very effective to combine the two features. We could have a bar of photos of the state’s energy players which lights up the company and geographic position of the related company as the reader scrolls over the photo. The feature would enable visitors to clearly position the important people and players in relation to themselves.

Goosegrade.com puts the job of the editor and fact-checker in the hands of the audience. Viewers copyedit blogs and websites for grammar and factual errors. While blogs have traditionally been a more relaxed and personal online source, they are now becoming more widely read, a more central place to find information, and thus more in need of fact checking.

In a 2008 speech, NYU’s professor Clay Shirky emphasizes the incredible creative power the crowds possess, calling it ”the cognitive surplus”. He believes that much of the time the develop world used to spend watching television will be spent more and more on online, collaborative projects. The information on a site like Wikipedia, for example, is completely user created and in his estimations cost about 100 million hours in human thought.

Now, he says, imagine if just a portion of the 200 billion hours Americans spend watching television were spent on similar postive and enlightening collaborative online projects. Who knows what could be created?

A lot.

But what does that mean for us? Isn’t there some place for a poor ol’ journalist in this big, scary world?

Tom Rosenstiel, the director of the Project for excellence in Journalism reccomends 4 ways in which journalists can mold themselves around this new structure. He sees a need for journalists as

The field of online journalism is unquestionably changing – and I believe for the better. Techniques such as crowdsourcing make information gathering easier, promotes interaction and makes for more interesting news, but there is still much behind the scenes organization and analysis that needs to be done. This is where the journalist comes in.

MEMORANDUM 2

To: WUNC

From: Briana Duggan

Date: March 18, 2010

Subject: Audience Assessment

According to Alexa.com, 18% of WUNC.org visitors access the site through search engines. We can therefore assume that much of the traffic generated to our site is through loyal visitors or through people who are already familiar with WUNC. We can assume, therefore, that we do not need to spend our time in search engine optimization or publicizing our name out as much as we need to turn people to WUNC.org as a place for news and keep them there.

Alexa.com found that most of the visitors to WUNC.org are college educated women ages 55-64 that browse the site from work. This demographic data is in line with sites that have a similar goal and budget as that of WUNC including the public radio stations in  Maryland (WYPR) and Virginia (WVTF) whose visitors are mainly older women. While we must continue to produce content of interest to our strongest demographic, we are obligated as a public service to serve all sectors of the population. We must therefore increase web traffic in the areas in which we are weak:  males and youth.

Looking at news delivery, Digg.com is one of the most popular sites among males ages 18-24 [alexa.com] and can therefore offer clues as to how to appeal to this demographic. The site is built around user-recommended stories, promoting information as interesting and legitimate, which then spawns conversation. To promote these qualities we will

• Allow viewers to recommend articles/stories through many various social networking sites
  • Currently, articles that link to the NPR website allow for viewers to share news through Facebook, Twitter, Stumbleupon, Yahoo Buzz, Reddit, Digg, but no WUNC-generated local stories have this feature. We are missing a great opportunity because the local is where our stories can have the most impact.

• Allow readers to rate articles
  • We should create a system similar to a “dig” where viewers mark those articles that they think other WUNC.org visitors should read. The 5 articles with the most votes will appear on the home page. A story will be discontinued after 10 days to allow the promotion of more recent stories. This feature can be seen on the front page of major news outlets like nytimes.com & NPR.org.

• Create discussion through reader-suggestions
  • Below each story we will also provide a place viewers may pose questions to the reporter, the interviewees or the general public that they believe deserves discussion. Web managers will sort through suggestions and create discussion a discussion board for the most interesting/feasible.

Providing such features will allow us not only to broaden our reach into underrepresented demographics, but will also increase overall web traffic to the site.

Our goal will be to have all 3 new features running within 3 months. We will aim to offer recommendations through all the stated social networking sites, to continue to increase rating numbers every month, and to have two discussion boards running at a time.

Increase audience time on site

Like WUNC.org, NPR.org focuses on providing news and information through mainly audio stories. The average NPR viewer spends about 2.6 minutes on the site, with about 2 page views. WUNC’s viewer spends considerably less time on the site: a steadily decreasing 1.6 minutes on the site, with about 1.8 page views. This works out to about the length of one short newscast. To encourage visitors to spend more time on the site we must provide news & information suggestions, with a special emphasis on the home page. I recommend that

• The “latest WUNC” newscast should open up a new window where the newscast can play, along with a sidebar with other recent stories. This provides the viewer with a new page to explore, rather than leaving them to return to the same page.

Because WUNC’s format is focused on audio stories, our viewers do not spend as much time on our site as sites focused in print journalism. However, we will aim to maintain 1.6 minutes, and eventually increase average viewing time to about 2 minutes once our newly formatted pages are open.