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Transcript for
2005 Batten Symposium
and
Awards for Innovations in Journalism
Sept.
12, 2005
National
Press Club, Washington, D.C.
John Robinson
Editor, News & Record, Greensboro, N.C.
I really need a picture of myself in front of
the Batten Awards sign to take back with me to my office because we
at Greensboro don’t
consider ourselves innovators at all, we consider ourselves survivors.
We’re trying to find new readers wherever we can, and this is one
of the ways we’re doing it and having a little fun too.
Our
mission with this, which we started about eight months ago and called
Town Square, is really to transform
our 115-year-old, ink-on-paper
newspaper. It’s filled with people who believe very strongly and
cherish the ideals of journalism, and you know who I’m talking
about with the arrogant, obnoxious and pushy reporters and grouchy editors.
We want to transform this group into the 21st century where we’re
not constrained by our daily deadlines or by the schedules that the carriers
have. We want to show them that we can have a different kind of conversation
with readership and that we can explain what we do and how we do it,
that we can ask readers what we should do, that we can create video and
create audio and compete with radio and television in ways that we never
thought possible. We really want to tap into conversations that the community
is having without us and help enable those and participate in those.
We did this by calling it the Town Square.
There’s nothing particularly distinctive and unique about what
we’re doing at the News & Record, with the possible exception
that we’ve done it all pretty much in public with this transparency
that is unnerving at times and creepy at times and, when we make mistakes,
embarrassing at times. Essentially we asked readers online what we should
do on our Web site, published a report about it online and said we were
going to do it and we’re starting on it. But
I’m getting a little ahead of myself.
Our
efforts essentially have taken two tracks. The first stage that we’re
in right now is us outward – taking the newspaper model and transforming
it into online. We started with blogging, and we now have 15 or 16
blogs, all done by our staff.
We have news related blogs where our reporters take a whole different
tone and produce more information
from their beats and from their meetings and put it online. This is
pretty much all stuff that does not get into the newspaper.
We
have one on education where we’re able
to link to school board agendas, to maps for redistricting, to school
redistricting projects and
to cost analysis done for the projects. It gives readers a
different look, much more in-depth than what we can do in the newspaper.
This blog in particular is very feisty – as you’ll see we’ve
got 69 comments on SAT scores dropping. These are parents arguing about
the value of the school system and, in many cases, the competence of
the school board and school superintendent.
We also do the same kind of thing with some other
news blogs. We have one on local government that we call “Inside Scoop.” In this
case it’s just about the City Council talking about buying some
property and it’s got some news about a candidate for the city
manager’s office. Also, we now link online to the campaign finance
reports of all the City Council candidates, so you can read more about
that.
There are just more things that we are able to do online than we are
able to do in the newspaper.
We have other news blogs: One out of Raleigh, the state capital, and
one on religion.
We have a couple sports blogs. Sports is the first
one we started, thinking that we’re in the middle of ACC country where we could put a lot
of information online about Carolina and Duke and Wake Forest and State.
Our sports guys really had to be dragged into this, and it was a great
learning for me not to drag people into it because they wouldn’t
do it very well. They write about a whole lot of stuff but very little
about local sports and the things that people would come to our site
for. Like here’s one about a Major League Baseball player, and
there’s not a Major League team within miles of us. So we’re
still working on it. It’s our first one, and it’s like your
first child...
We do have one on NASCAR as well – which is big there and now
big a lot of other places – that’s done by our assistant
sports editor who is very much a gear head, and it’s very popular.
As
you’ll see, the tone is very different on these, as they are
on all blogs. One of our interests with all the blogs was, foremost,
we wanted to learn. We really needed to get in and learn by doing this
whole different medium, so that’s what we tried to do. We wanted
to interact with readers in a different way, to talk to them differently
and to listen to them differently, and we wanted to expand the sort of
journalism that we do.
The neat thing that we’re trying to do now is take the much more
casual tone of the blogs and bring them into the newspaper proper where
it’s much more accessible and easier for the readers to get through.
We have a couple of editorial blogs done by our
editorial folks that are just an extension of what they do. There’s the editorial page
editor who puts his column online, but also throughout the week does
little mini editorials about issues before the community that sometimes
spark a little bit of controversy. Here’s one just on the train
station. You wouldn’t think that would be a big deal, but it’s
got nine comments as people go back and forth on how the city does with
its mass transit.
We
have features-related blogs. One of our online editors in the news
department highlights a bargain where he has done some research and
found
good places to shop for, in this case, photos, magazines, boneless chicken
breasts and that kind of thing.
We also have one on music, we have one on cooking – which is our
newest blog that’s a lot of fun and is so new I have no idea of
it’s page views so I don’t know how popular it is – and
then of course we’ve got the best one, which just happens to be
mine where I talk about the newspaper, issues of journalism, how we cover
things, and I apologize for stupid things that we do and that kind of
thing.
Actually the most popular blog that we have – which is a good
thing and a bad thing – is our letters to the editor. We have enabled
comments to the letters that we publish in the newspaper so people can
come and comment on the letter writer’s opinion. This was a hit
right off, to the point that it forced us to consider a great deal of
registration issues because we had a whole bunch of “trolls” on
the site who would take the conversation down into the gutter so quickly
your head would spin.
As
you can see, all of these letters have comments. I saw one this morning
that had 50-some comments. Usually the ones
about the war get the most replies. I used
to be an editorial page editor and anytime anyone would write a letter
with the words, “wake up America,” in it, you knew it was
a good one, and here’s “Mr. Bush, wake up,” where
we’ve got all these comments from people talking about politics.
And just for fun you can go there and read them and it will make your
world feel a lot better since you’re not one of them.
Jan
Schaffer:
John, talk about your motivation for doing
this.
Robinson:
Our
motivation was that Greensboro has a very healthy blogging community.
I stumbled
upon it a year or so ago and found that
they were talking about the newspaper a lot and most of the things they
said were misguided, I thought. Once I started reading more and saw
that there was a real community there talking to each other – very
civically engaged people – it was clear that we needed to get involved
in that and learn about that. As a result we had one of our more technically
based journalists do a study and come up with what we should do online
to expand our journalism, because for us it’s really about expanding
our journalism. He asked readers online, wrote this report called “The
Town Square” that we put online, and we really just took off from
there.
We’ve
gone into several other areas. I’ve only dealt with
the blogs, but we’ve gone into other areas of journalism and multimedia
where we have video. Our version of what Newsday did on a very small
scale is that we had a woman in Iraq who is a print journalist – she’s
just a reporter – who sent back stories from Iraq where she was
there looking for people from our area. She also took a video camera
with her and sent video of marines talking to their loved ones at home,
marines talking about the experience, and an evangelist Christian marine
who put on a dance show for everyone that was very entertaining. She
also did audio, we interviewed her over the phone and she talked
about her work, and she did still photography, all of which we put online
for people to see.
Mostly for us it was just learning. It was learning
how to do this, to see how easy it was. We’re a small paper in
North Carolina and we have a small staff, and we wanted to see how
to do it.
We
currently solicit citizen journalism, but it’s not all that
good. I think everyone’s discovered that there are varying degrees
of it. We have something called “Your News.” I say it’s
not all that good not because the articles aren’t especially good,
but because we haven’t really developed it and solicited it. We’re
still trying to figure out what we want to do with it. Before the end
of the year we’re going to have three communities of geography,
which are towns around Greensboro that we don’t really cover except
when there are major crimes there. We’ve found citizens who will
be bloggers for us and who will contribute articles about things going
on around the town, and we’re going to create a site around that.
We hope to expand to all the communities around us, and later on to neighborhoods
inside Greensboro.
Oddly
enough, this little story about this lemonade stand was somehow picked
up by the Chicago Tribune and featured in an article about small
efforts around the country that people were doing to raise money for
Hurricane Katrina victims. I know Lori Wilson and I know that she did
not send
the Tribune her news
release
about their lemonade stand, so all I can guess is that they found it
on our citizen journalism site.
But
the site's not very well developed. Six months from now it’ll
be much more developed.
We also have forums where we’re going to enable comments on stories
so citizens can come in and talk with us about the stories by the end
of the year. We really want to transfer our organization into as much
of a Web-to-print organization as now it’s a print-to-Web organization.
Audience
Question:
What’s
been the reaction in the journalism community?
Robinson:
It’s
actually been very positive. I think the people who resisted don’t
understand it, and those who come and look and mess around and see
things they like appreciate it.
Audience
Question:
What kind of business models
do you have around these things?
Robinson:
The
most famous thing I’ve
ever been quoted on is me saying, “We don’t need no stinking
business model.”
I’m
a former reporter, so I’m very proud of the fact that
I don’t have to be responsible for the business side of this. This
is done with very few extra resources, I’ve just created it out
of my news compliment and these reporters aren’t getting paid any
extra to do this. This is part of their job.
There is an interactive group that’s responsible for monetizing
this, and actually the person who does one of the music podcasts got
a music store to sponsor that, but we aren’t making money on this.
It’s easy for me to say because it’s really to extend the
journalism. That’s what’s important to me, and I’ll
leave the money making to the business side.
Audience
Question:
How do you preserve the freshness
of all this and still keep it clean enough to meet some kind of journalistic
standard?
Robinson:
We
don’t
edit the blog entries, for the very reason that we want readers to
have a much more accessible, casual tone
and we want to be fresh. We know that if we send it through editors it
would take a long time and they would beat the tone out of it.
The expectation on the blogger is that it be grammatically
correct and that the spelling is correct, and most of the time it is.
What I’ve
told reporters is to find someone else to read it if you’re in
doubt or if you’re a chronic misspeller, which newsrooms seem to
have a lot of. But don’t wait on an editor, and don’t get
us in trouble or get us sued – and they haven’t.
Readers
will tell us when they make a mistake on the blog and we’ll
correct it. The whole culture is different on the Web and there’s
a sense of forgiveness on grammar, and if you go other places you will
see that there are spelling and grammar mistakes, but it’s an
issue out there.
Audience
Question:
What kind of conversations have you had about the legal
concerns and liability with unedited things?
Robinson:
Our
concern is more about comments from readers than the bloggers themselves.
All
of the people who we have blogging have
a clue about what libel is and they don’t do it. And the sorts
of things that we write about on the blogs are not the traditional things
that would get you into trouble with libel issues. We don’t do
a whole lot of investigative reporting on the blogs and we don’t
have a crime blog, which tend to be places where you’d get in trouble.
Our lawyers tell us that the latest court ruling
is that if you don’t
edit the comments, you’re not responsible for the content of the
comments, so we don’t edit the comments. Also, we will remove comments
if they become particularly offensive and we have done that in a few
cases.
There will be some court cases that will clarify
the law. I just hope that we’re not the pioneers there.
Audience
Question:
How are you re-conceiving your audience?
Robinson:
I
think we see our audience as a whole bunch of niches. You may be interested
in football
and cooking, and not interested in
Washington politics and basketball. We know that you can find very deep
information on the Web on all those topics and ignore all the others,
and our hope is that you could come to our site and find very deep information
about all the things that you’re interested in, and if you live
in Greensboro, find information about your neighborhood or your community
of geography. Also, we want you to be able to find conversations about
the subject matter that interests you.
So it really is trying to produce a whole bunch of areas that you can
go in and out of at your leisure.
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