NYT's Bill Keller: Yes, J-Schools Matter

Some fascinating quotes from the conference, “Crisis in News: Symposium on Investigative Reporting,” at UC Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism, for all of you who read "J-school Ate My Brain" and became depressed:

"We’ve come to take journalism schools more seriously. [audience laughs] No, we used to hire people according to clips and the academic background isn’t as important. I didn’t go to journalism school, there used to be a grizzled editor who would help young reporters figure it out, but those grizzled editors are gone now so the schools are more important." -- Bill Keller, executive editor, New York Times (emphasis added)

So the times are indeed changing -- and maybe all of that advice about how "you don't need j-school" isn't applicable to the 21st century. Keller's word isn't the final word, of course, but it's an especially prominent and accomplished one. If Keller's feeling the effects from on high, who knows what the situation really is.

On more interesting quote on that note:

"There used to be more beginning positions at newspapers and smaller magazines have scaled down their staff jobs. All these places that feed the Pulitzer winners at bigger papers — those sources are drying up, and I find that worrisome." -- Clara Jeffery, Mother Jones

The "intelligence flow" or "talent flow" of journalism outlets is changing, it seems.

Reinventing The Newsroom: Is It Necessary?

The New Yorker's architecture critic Paul Goldberger says the New York Times' new newsroom feels enormous and corporate-cool -- with an interior that "fails to emulate either the unusual quality of the building's exterior or the amiable rambunctiousness of an old-style newsroom," adding that "if the Times newsroom is an unadventurous space hidden within an architecturally important building, Bloomberg is the opposite: a dazzling work environment tucked inside a refined but conventional skyscraper." Goldberger goes on to set these new incarnations within the frame of the traditional newsroom:

The tradition of having reporters and editors in one big space, called a newsroom or city room, arose largely because it was the easiest way to put out a newspaper on deadline. The fastest communication was face to face, and in a newsroom everybody could watch the same clocks, use the same news tickers, and keep an eye on one another. Everything depended on the flow of paper; in the old Times building, the Linotype machines were right above the newsroom, so that copyboys would only have to run up a single flight of stairs to deliver copy to the typesetters. Stories moved through the building in physical form, from paper to type to print, like an assembly line. Now, of course, stories are electronic blips, and page images are transferred in an instant to printing plants around the country. Almost none of the conditions that led to the creation of newsrooms still prevail.

"The workers are in much closer quarters than those at the Times, and you might expect the atmosphere to be one of a sweatshop, but sweatshops don’t usually have rotating displays of contemporary sculpture."

All of this, of course, begs the question -- what is the newsroom of the 21st century supposed to look like? A glam'd-out glitzfest of technological prowess or something totally different?

But allow me to ask this: Does it really need to change?

Must a new newsroom format follow new technology, in the form of computers and instant communication?

The old newsroom, documented by thousands of photographs by bored photographers in newsrooms nationwide, show reporters lined up side-by-side, in parallel rows, at typewriters and phones. As Goldberger writes above, it was all about efficiency, like an assembly line.

But has all this really changed? Does the IM or the e-mail really take a shorter time than making a phone call? Surely reporters could have used the telephone to call each other, but they don't. It's human nature -- it's just easier to give a shout when your intended target is in eyesight.

So in a world where citizens can create journalism from their basements, has the true trade and process of journalism really changed on the ground level? Does plugging in really make a difference? After thinking about it, I really don't think so.

Which leads me to ask: Must the newsroom be changed at all?

Goldberger puts it into context:

The interior was designed by the architectural firm Gensler, and it fails to emulate either the unusual quality of the building’s exterior or the amiable rambunctiousness of an old-style newsroom. With its sea of cubicles partitioned by wood-veneer cabinets, it is vastly more sophisticated than any workplace the Times has ever had, but sleekness has brought a certain chill (though the effect will be pleasanter when the birch trees go into the still unfinished courtyard). You also don’t get much sense that anyone has really rethought the idea of the newsroom in the electronic age. Ultimately, it’s hard not to sense that the Times, so determined to have a building that makes a mark on the sky line, had a failure of nerve when it came to the interior.

So is the newsroom of the 21st century a failure? If success is measured by change, probably. But if success is measured by function, I'm not so sure.

Sure, I don't like the uniform feel of each individual desk -- something my former colleagues in another new Manhattan glass tower complained about -- and I am uneasy, in principle, about executive editor Bill Keller's decision to use frosted glass inside his office. But when it comes to the newsroom, there's no measure of technology that can trump a good shout.

How Bill Keller's Reading Habits Indicate That Regional Newspapers Dropped The Ball

I Want Media has posted a great interview with Bill Keller, the New York Times' managing editor, on all things Times-related: New building, new organization, new journalistic frontiers. A great piece for sure, but one of the most interesting things in the interview is to see Keller's mind thinking.

Though only an e-mail interview -- those tend to come out guarded and overthought, as any reporter in 2007 knows -- we can still see through the defenses a bit and see that journalism in the digital age keeps Keller up at night just as much as today's front page story on the Middle East. He elaborates on a May comment that we "can't let our reverence for quality become a straitjacket in new media":

The Times is respected not because every story is perfect, but because we have excellent people making their best effort...the Web environment is different in several respects... [readers] bring different expectations to the Web than they bring to print...that does NOT mean the Web is a lawless frontier, or that you cannot aspire to high-quality journalism on the Web. It just means you cannot apply the same formal editorial bureaucracy to the Web that works in print. Because the deadline is constant, more stories will be posted on deadline -- and necessarily be less polished -- but they will be improved more quickly, too.

Well there's a lot there for sure, but the good news is that someone's starting to realize that the web isn't the same beast. All these thoughts seem to be a pastiche of company policy and his own thinking, and it's interesting to watch it being fleshed out on the page. In fact, Keller even admits to reading blogs:

I have a couple of dozen non-Times blogs bookmarked -- media blogs, political blogs, music blogs, food blogs, etc. The lineup changes, and includes a pretty wide spectrum of opinion. (Why read only things that confirm what you already think?)

I visit them less frequently than I did a year ago. In part that is because, surrounded as I am by journalists, I usually hear about anything interesting without having to spend my time browsing. Also, some blogs I used to enjoy seem to have said everything they had to say.

A few interesting points. Sadly, Keller doesn't go into detail as to which blogs he reads. (That's what I want to know -- is he reading the digitalized voice of an established MSM journalist or is he reading some fine citizen journalism or opinion? Sure, it changes often and it's a personal matter, but I feel that Keller's habits may reflect how "with it" he really is when it comes to the "Web environment.")

But you know what? This whole interview isn't about the Times at all. What this is about is every other paper in the nation, and how they've dropped the web-ified ball for their readers.

I know what Keller thinks. The web is a different beast, but we need to close the gap so that readers experience it the same way they read the paper. I can see the fruits of his company's thought on their website. But I continue to see terrible choices -- or worse, a lack of any at all -- regarding existing regional newspapers and the web.

As a part of my day, I regularly bounce from site to site reading our nation's best regional papers. The Dallas Morning News. The Indianapolis Star. The Chicago Tribune. The Philadelphia Inquirer. The Boston Globe. The Miami Herald.

The list goes forever on.

And almost every website I visit looks the same. A bunch of text in an unidentifiable font, a bunch of thumbnail pictures and nary a signature flourish of the printed paper in sight. Hell, half of these papers don't even have their mastheads in the font that they are printed in everyday.

That's like sending the Yankees on the ballfield without the "NY" and pinstripes. Could you imagine watching a ballgame game like that?

My point is, while Keller's dreaming up the finer points of journalism on the web, the rest of the nation hasn't even me any semblance of their paper on the web. Sure, the stories are there, but the packaging isn't. And it's a frustrating read.

I myself can attest that I spend very little time on the Philadelphia Inquirer's website because it's so damn frustrating. I've complained about their city-friendly portal before -- and still don't understand why they don't have their own standalone website that syndicates its stories to the "city" site -- but seeing "Philadelphia Inquirer" in small type trumped by a bigger "Philly.com" on the top isn't helping that paper at all be the national force it used to be.

Philly's not the only one, either: The Miami Herald is missing a real masthead, and has some space management issues. The Dallas Morning News gives its ads more important space than its own content, and is missing a masthead as well. Even with good organization, the San Francisco Chronicle can't even reconcile the fact that it's website operates as a separate entity from the newspaper altogether (SFGate? Ridiculous). The New Haven Register needs to ditch its Web 1.0 look and manage its space better (oh, and put the name of the paper in a size that is at least equal to the smallest ad). Et cetera.

It may sound like I'm whining over details, but many readers only go to the website. For any paper who's trying to extend reach without breaking the bank, all they need to do is find a web format that looks like a newspaper -- and not like a Yahoo! News compilation.

Makes the whole complaining about web-syndicated stories thing seem moot, doesn't it? They're worried about content and meanwhile, the paper's website, the front door and front page of the newspaper, looks like a 12-year-old designed it in Microsoft Frontpage.

I know that budgets are tight. But the nation's pillars of journalism need to look, well, like pillars, and not like driftwood in a sea of many websites.

If I can't differentiate a newspaper's site from a news-aggregate site, how will I trust (and buy) the real thing?

Pride In The Name of News

If you care about getting the news in a timely fashion, there is no reason to read a newspaper.

Spot news, it seems, is disappearing from the pages and moving to the screens.

A recent New York Times newsroom memo from Bill Keller announced that the Internet will be key to 2008 political coverage:

For this Presidential election cycle we are organizing our coverage in a new (for us) way: for the first time, a central political desk will supervise coverage for the newspaper and the web. This new desk will include not only newspaper editors, but also people with experience in web production, database reporting and software development. Newspaper and online journalism will get equal emphasis — we are well past the day when we can think of ourselves as a newspaper with a Web site on the side — for an audience that now expects its political news to arrive in full multimedia, interactive glory.

The goal is to develop a seamless operation that can feed our blog and home page with breaking news all day long, produce innovative and value-added multimedia and database reports -- and then deliver the smartest, freshest possible stories to our newsprint readers the next morning.

Basically, Keller and Co. have reorganized the way instant-news is produced at The Times. He's placed equality between the paper and the website, and as far as political stories go, he values the benefit of clickable electoral maps, live-voting feeds and comparison charts that aren't truncated to fit a peice of paper.

As I've mentioned before, this change at The Times is indicative of a new way to do the news: Internet first, paper second. And it's more profitable than critics think.

Web journalism has finally found its reporters. And it seems they're more inclined than ever to be versed in web production, multimedia and traditional reporting savvy.

The future is clearer than we think: spot news will reside online, and adventurous, well-rounded journalists will helm the ship.

Conversely, expect to see a change in the very basic format of writing a news story: half-reported stories will rarely make it to the page, and analysis will become a critical component of a basic news story - the real reason people will keep reading a publication.

The "news" in "newspaper" is now a relative term: it's news to anyone who hasn't read the website.

Will newspapers save the big, muckraking stories for the printed page? Maybe, if they think no one else has the story. But if a newspaper smells competition, don't expect to see any "exclusives" on the printed page.

For newspapers who pride themselves on getting a story first (and being cited as so), posting it online with a timestamp is the new proof of bleeding-edge legitimacy.

After all, aren't newspapers sick of citing blogs as the first sources for stories?