Tagged with journalism 2.0 …

Mar 10 2013
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Journalism, Journalism 2.0

James Harrison pushes sports journalism one inch closer to obsolescence

The Pittsburgh Steelers released former Defensive Player of the Year Jerome Harrison on Saturday, which, since some called him one of the best players the team has ever had, was big news in Pittsburgh. But what’s notable is just how Steelers fans first heard of the news:

Not from the Post-Gazette. Not from the Tribune-Review. Not from WPXI, KDKA, or WTAE. In a town with five local media outlets, the news of one of the most popular players on the team leaving came from none other than the player himself.

Welcome to the world of covering sports today.

This is not a new development, of course. James Harrison isn’t the first player to head to his Twitter feed rather than calling up the local beat reporter. Rather, the Harrison example is just another reminder that increasingly, news organizations are finding themselves competing not with each other, but with those whom used to be sources.

Writing in the Washington Post, Paul Farhi pointed to the challenge of teams themselves circumventing the local media:

For sports journalists these days, the playing field isn’t always level. As the Iowa incident suggests, teams and leagues can break their own news, over and around the independent news media that cover them. Professional and big-time college teams aren’t just news sources now; they’re in the news business, too, with their own radio, TV and Internet operations. …
In an earlier age, teams welcomed coverage as free publicity. Now, in an age when technology permits almost anyone to broadcast text, photos and videos instantly, some are far more wary of reporters, viewing them as info-competitors.

But as Harrison demonstrated, it’s not just the teams that news orgs have to worry about. And this can have major ramifications for a symbiotic business model that has existed for generations, according to Jason Fry at Poynter:

All of these developments point to another buzzword from the Web’s early days: disintermediation, or eliminating the middleman. When teams are publishers, and athletes can speak directly to fans, the cost-benefit analysis of opening locker rooms to journalists changes. Like all middlemen in the digital world, they’re endangered.

Maybe this won’t matter. The last decade has seen an explosion in sports news, analysis and chatter, and dedicated fans continue to devour as much as they can get. But at the very least, sports journalists will face powerful new competitors with unbeatable access.

And, in case you weren’t already feeling sorry for your local sports beat guy, it’s only going to get worse, Fry posits:

Now, throw in athletes who are taking to Twitter to connect directly with fans, and using it to break their own news. Most professional athletes on Twitter are still digital immigrants – they started tweeting after they were famous. But very soon, star rookies will arrive who have used social media throughout their teens. For them, communicating via social media will be far more familiar than confronting a scrum of reporters.

It’s worth noting that Fry doesn’t just sound the alarm, he offers some actual advice to trying to stem the approaching apocolypse:

Rather than risk being caught flat-footed then, sports departments should plan now for the era of teams as publishers and competitors.

First, think about what news teams will hold back to break themselves, and get out of the business of competing with them for it.

Next, discuss which stories are me-too fare that readers can get anywhere, and that waste reporters’ valuable time.

Having done that, think about what niches teams can’t fill. Fortunately, there are lots of these — statistical analysis, investigative reporting, scouting upcoming opponents, minor-league reports and historical perspective, to name just a few. Think about if any of those approaches make sense for your news organization, and brainstorm how middlemen can use their status to add value. (For instance, become a great curator, using news judgment to collect the must-reads for a team’s fans whether things are good, bad or ugly.)

Fry was talking to current reporters, of course, but he also laid out a pretty cut-and-dry game plan for journalism educators to use to revamp how they teach the coverage of sports.

What do you think? Are sports journalists futures more in danger than “run-of-the-mill” reporters? And if so, what does that mean for those just entering (or soon to enter) the field?

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Mar 06 2013
2 Comments
Journalism, Journalism 2.0, Journalism Job Hunt

Sonderman: Is freelancing dead?

Jeff Sonderman, a voice a respect a great deal (and whom I cite often in my research), offered a few musings on The Atlantic Write-For-Free-Gate. Sonderman buried his interesting contribution at the end of his post, where he asks a pretty provocative question: Is freelancing dead?

Will there ever be a secure living in freelancing full-time, in an age when so many other writers are happy to publish for free? Or do writers need to accept that their skill must be leveraged into other income opportunities like book deals, speaking fees, etc.?

As someone who has done a good bit of freelancing — but never made it my full-time source of income — I’m not sure how to take Sonderman’s question. I can’t say I fault his logic.

The Web has killed many things that used to be staples — I’m looking at you, Travel Agent — is the freelancer on the path to a similar fate?

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Mar 05 2013
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Journalism, Journalism 2.0

Social media, Nancy Grace making life miserable for news orgs in Steubenville

Jackalyn Kovac, a producer at WTOV9 in Steubenville, recently spoke to journalism students at Waynesburg University at an event hosted by the campus SPJ chapter.  Kovac and her coworkers at the WTOV9 newsroom have been trying to navigate the ongoing Steubenville rape ease imbroglio, which, from my perspective, serves as a near-perfect case study for the challenges that today’s social media world presents to journalists trying to do their job the right way.

The Steubenville story — if you’re not familiar, here’s a primer —  has led to accusations that the town (or the sheriff or the football coach or the county) is covering up for the accused boys. And in a case as emotionally loaded as this one, the battle lines have been drawn among the community and WTOV9 has been left in the crossfire.

What makes this case notable from a journalistic perspective is that because WTOV is keeping with its internal policy to not name minors until they’ve been found guilty, the station (and its staff) have been accused of aiding in the “coverup” and refusing to report the “truth.”

Kovac alluded to  this problem when she discussed with students how misinformation had spread online and made their jobs more difficult:

“We had a lot of issues with how viewers perceived what was going on and it caused a lot of work to try and debunk those misconceptions,” she said. “It’s something we can’t ignore.”

Now, any journalist (or any j-student who’s had an intro class) knows that it’s not up to the media to determine guilt — that’s why the judicial system exists. And we know that we treat suspects as innocent until proven guilty (unless you’re on cable news, and then you make a career off of deciding for yourself who’s guilty and who’s not). Of course, regular citizens have no such qualms about waiting for pesky things like a jury verdict before determining guilt — and they’ve taken to social media to decry why WTOV has not done the same.

Now, it’s worth noting that I have no idea if the boys are guilty (the trial doesn’t even start until next week), but this story encapsulates the challenge for media organizations in the social media age: namely how they handle a world where every viewer or reader has their own platform to air grievances about real or perceived faults in the coverage — and possibly sway others’ perception of the same.

From my understanding of journalism ethics, WTOV9 is handling the case the right way. But since viewers who have assumed the boys’ guilt have an expectation to see them treated as guilty by the media, will the station’s credibility suffer in the eyes of viewers who think not naming the students is an abdication of responsibility? In the pre-social world, these arm-chair critiques would’ve gone no further than watercoolers or dinner tables, but thanks to participatory media, it’s spreading like wildfire and feeding and growing.

Now that social media has empowered audiences in a way not seen before, this is a situation that more and more newsrooms will be confronted with: an audience reared on Nancy Grace and mobilized by social media who think waiting for facts and not jumping to conclusion is a vice rather than a virtue.

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Mar 05 2013
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Journalism, Journalism 2.0, Journalism Education

‘Social media information is a tip, not a source, and it needs to be researched intensively’

Waynesburg University alumna and WTOV-9 producer Jackalyn Kovac spoke Monday to Waynesburg’s SPJ students and members of my journalism classes and offered advice for avoiding getting caught up in the spread of rumor and misinformation on Twitter and Facebook:

“Social media information is a tip, not a source, and it needs to be researched intensively,” she said.

It’s a common-sense tip that several major media outlets have apparently forgotten in recent months as they’ve passed on hoaxes and bad information culled from the Web.

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Mar 05 2013
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Journalism, Journalism 2.0

Comments Empower Trolls to Hijack The News

A new study finds that comments on news articles can have a dramatic effect on the reaction of subsequent readers. Researchers gave two groups fake tech stories with comments. One had “civil” comments; the other got the “nasty” batch. The results could have major ramifications on our participatory model of online journalism:

“Those exposed to rude comments … ended up with a much more polarized understanding … Simply including an ad hominem attack in a reader comment was enough to make study participants think the downside of the reported technology was greater than they’d previously thought.”

Mary Elizabeth Williams, a staff writer for Salon who has also moderated Salon’s online community Table Talk, worries that this brings to light the power of trolls to hijack our digital environs:

What’s new about this study, however, is that it offers validation of what for many of us has been a gnawing fear: that the trolls really do hold tremendous power of persuasion. Why try to craft a well-reasoned argument, using facts and grammar, when the real way to influence how a person feels is a well-aimed “Kill it before it lays eggs,” or the classic “Your stupid”? Even if the effect is divisive, at least it’s substantial — to the point that it can strongly affect how one feels about the original piece itself.

Eesearchers have long looked at the ability for media outlets to “frame” news in a way that impacts the recipient. Does the Web’s obsession with comments bestow this power on everyone?

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