#ona13

Two Minute Takeaway: Raising Your Hand to Opportunities (by Online News Association)

Callie Schweitzer, Director of Digital Innovation at TIME, offers advice for getting ahead at work: always be willing to help out.

Eleven startups have been selected by the NewU Startup Competition this year to compete for seed funding. Voting is open, so you can help determine who wins the two $20,000 seed grants. 

Hi, my name is Julie Whitaker, I'm the social media editor at WNYC. I also went to the Online News Association conference in Atlanta, and wanted to share something I heard that is still kicking around in my brain a few weeks later. 

In a session on new story formats that looked at story streams, topic pages, and live blogs, Zach Seward from Quartz took the conversation a slightly different direction with his discussion on what he called "things."

He started with three provocative assertions: 

There's no demand for landing pages.

There's no demand for packages.

There's no demand for articles.

"I might even go as far as to say there's no demand for news," he said as the crowd, full of journalists, laughed and somebody yelled, "Shut it down, let's go home!"

The new news habit is no habit at all.

As you can see from this Pew study on news habits, people are increasingly not looking for news during a set period of the day—reading the paper over breakfast, checking npr.org at lunch—so much as news is coming at them from all directions throughout the day.

And separately, what you have instead of a loyalty to a specific news organization—even a specific organization’s coverage of one topic—is people getting their news from a variety of sources.

When people are looking for news just from your organization, there’s more room for packages and landing pages. But when it's being pushed at them all day, there’s a tendency to prefer the atomization of content, the distilling of news into “things.”

What is a "thing"?

"Things are the grist of the social web. They are the stuff people pass around, saying: 'Here, look at this thing.'”

The most literal interpretation of "things" can be seen in headlines that start "Here are..." or "Look at..." or "This is..." These articles are framed as something that can be passed around, even if the one thing being shared is just part of the broader coverage the publication is doing on a given subject. 

You can see this in the list of the New York Times stories shared most frequently on Facebook in 2011. Many can't be described as articles, they are before/after photos, a list, a statement, an opinion. The New York Times also wrote articles about the issues related to these "things," but what was shared was the raw statement, the list, the photos.

The example Seward gave that has stuck with the most is this one.

An article about hackers that gained entry into Gawker Media's database had 5,000 page views. But a list of the top 50 passwords revealed in the course of hack got ONE MILLION page views.

At WNYC we're already playing around with this idea, trying to report and frame our newsroom pieces in ways that make them easier to share. Of course it won't work for everything, but we're already seeing more social shares than usual for stories like These Are the Six Questions on Your NY Ballot Tuesday and This is What $1 Million in Marathon Security Looks Like.

Listen to the full audio from the ONA 2013 session "An Exploration Of New Story Formats." Seward comes in at 30:00 and shares many more examples than I did here. Check out his slides and follow him on Twitter.

I attended the Online News Association conference in Atlanta last week and thought I would write up some of the tools and projects I learned about, as well as my takeaways from the conference:

If You Want to Inform and Engage, Use Comedy: WHYY used a local comedian to explain what a charter school is. It’s smart, funny, engaging, and short.

Short Isn’t Bad: There are many tools journalists can use -- instead of an article -- to explain tough concepts. Want to explain the debt ceiling? You can make a 3-D pop-up book. Want to showcase something chronologically? Use a timeline. There are tools to mashup audio and video, which can be used to highlight parts of a story (which independent radio producer Todd Melby used very effectively in his look at the oil industry in North Dakota.) You can create your own visualizations to enhance or tell a story.

Long Isn’t Bad: Scrollkit and Shorthand are customizable platforms to create multimedia stories. Other publishing tools mentioned include Newhive, ThingLink, and Creatavist -- which WBUR used for a long-form story on Whitey Bulger.

Try New Formats: Technical.ly Philly sent a comic book artist to cover a startup weekend. The result? A comic as news article.

Other Interesting Projects and Thoughts:

Localore -- Public radio stories blending on-air, in print, and multimedia.

#MyMadisonDay -- A tiny newspaper in Madison asked the community to show what happened over the course of their day and curated the results into a site, which gave them more ideas for stories in the future.

Andy Carvin’s session on Slow News -- Thinking about how to better report breaking news

Amy Webb’s session on Top Tech Trends for Journalists -- I was most taken with the idea of personalized videos and newsrooms thinking about MOOCs, or online learning. (How can we package our content in a way that educates people?)

Thanks to Christopher Wink, Tiffany Shackleford, Adam Schweigert, and Jessica Plautz for leading the sessions I attended. You can listen to the audio for their talks here:

Building Open Source Templates for Longform

Here's what I shared with my community on ONA, following up on this promise.

It's (some of) my notes on the New Management Skills session, and it really does apply for most careers:

Fast forward video to about 1:24