No, I don’t mean those icky PDF-based “e-edition” replicas of print editions that are available online but aren’t interactive or updated. I mean, what’s the use when you can keep up with breaking stories AND get yesterday’s news on the full website?

No, I mean imagine a print edition that’s on paper … but it reacts to you like a touchscreen, and you can type on it, click on it, scroll it or swipe it.

The Japanese company Fujitsu has developed a way to make anything — a piece of paper, for instance — a touchscreen by using a special projector. So a newspaper can sell a onetime projection unit (once the costs drop down to realistic levels) to subscribers, and send a daily “newspaper” that can be projected on paper, or maybe on a wall (maybe the bathroom wall!).

Ah, technology. You gotta love it.

Journalists should all take note of the purchase, by Yahoo, of a 17-year-old Brit’s app for $30 million. The app, Summly surfs the Web for news content by keywords, then uses an algorithm to summarize those articles down to chunks that would be readable on small screens such as smartphones and tablets.

Nick D’Aloisio, who was born in 1996, two years after Yahoo was formed, launched the app in 2011 (he’s been creating iPhone apps since 2008) because he was frustrated having to read big articles on his small screen. Summly uses artificial intelligence and language processing programming to boil down text.

Once journalists get over their jealousy of a teenager getting the big bucks, they should think about what D’Aloisio has accomplished, and why.

For many news consumers, short, to-the-point communications is more useful on a day-to-day basis. They can sit back and enjoy the long enterprise stories on Sundays.
The foundational architecture of news writing – the “inverted pyramid” that puts the who, what, when, where and why at the top of an article is a model that’s still paramount. Busy readers can just scan the top of an article and “grok” what it’s about without diving deeper for details.

But in a world where people are increasingly connecting to the Web and getting their info on-the-go via smartphones and other mobile devices, we should all be more sensitive than ever to the elements of good writing and storytelling: the pacing of a narrative, the choice of words, the use of tools such as metaphors, similes and alliteration, and the rhythm of sentences that can be like music, ebbing and flowing melodically through the reader’s head, and the depth of a reporter’s knowledge and expertise in the subject all contribute to the quality of news. It’s how great writers separate themselves from mediocre ones.

And how journalism, which increasingly incorporates and relies on social media as another avenue for news content, separates itself from the clamor of social chatter.

In the end, not all news content needs to be in byte-sized chunks. There’s certainly a place for long narratives and 1,000, or 2,000 or even 6,000-word stories and more (last December’s fabulous New York Times “Snow Fall” multimedia package about a 2012 avalanche was 16,000 words, plus a lot of videos and interactive graphics).

Sure, the article’s going to be boiled down to “just the facts, ma’am” by Yahoo/Summly and probably a horde of other “summarizing engines” to come. But the original article, whether short or long, should be a pleasure to read in full.
That’s the value that journalism brings to society, which code and algorithms can’t.

Gil Asakawa is a journalist and blogger, and the Chair of the Society of Professional Journalists’ Digital Media Committee.

I came across an interesting post on PaidContent.org, “What would the perfect news application designed for Google Glass look like?” that got me to thinking more seriously about Google’s new project currently in beta, a pair of glasses that would connect you to the Internet and use augmented reality to overlay information on top of what you see through the glasses.

Some of the suggestions in the PaidContent article aren’t new — urging media organizations to offer not just news, but useful information, has been a mantra for some companies ever since the dawn of the Internet age, although few companies have actually accomplished this balance.

But I thought these bullet points were worth pondering (You should go to the original piece to read them in their entirety; these are my comments about the bullet points)

• Short excerpts

Anyone who is familiar with digital-era communications understand that short and sweet — 165 characters for text messages, 140 for tweets, scan-able chunks on home pages that explain the essence of a story — is the standard. If someone’s interested in the full monty, they’ll click on through to read it.

• Real-time updates

Twitter and other social media have killed the sad irony of newspapers (“Old news delivered every morning!” “Today’s news tomorrow!”) once and for all. If you don’t cover the news as it happens, you’re not covering the news. Sure, you have to be accurate while you’re rushing out the alert, and that’s a pain in our hurry-hurry reality. But that’s why you’re a journalist.

• Designed for voice and touch

The future is mobile, and it’s already here. If you don’t have a version of your news product optimized for smartphones and tablets (meaning you need a touch-screen navigational scheme, and content produced specifically for those formats — no more “shovel=ware of content from one format to the other), you’re not meeting your audience’s needs today. For the future, products such as Google Glasses will be more and more voice-controlled. I already know plenty of people who rely on Siri on their iPhones more than I thought they would. Touch and voice — the future is already here. I know some journalists have finally come to accept websites as their digital-first avenue for media, but guess what — websites are already passe, and though they may stick around longer than dead-tree newspapers, they won’t be the default pipeline for news for much longer.

• Location aware

Anyone who uses their smartphone a lot has probably already come to rely on its GPS-enabled location-aware features. Click an app to find the Greek restaurant closest to your current location, or a supermarket, or a movie theater. Launch an weather app and it’ll automatically show the temperature and forecast for wherever you happen to be, whether it’s Boulder or Los Angeles. Marketers are busy dreaming up new and cooler ways to have special deals pop up on your phone as you approach a store or restaurant. Our devices will all be location-aware, to give us the news and information that’s most relevant to where we are.

• Prescriptive data

This one’s tricky for old-school journalists to get our heads around. This term is used for a feature that displays a whole bunch of information together, from your calendar agenda for the day and latest headlines to emails, social media updates and more. If you have a Windows 8 computer or device, you already see a version in the icon-filled launch screen. Google also has a feature called Google Now that is a harbinger of the prescriptive data possibilities to come.

I know this is a lot of crazy stuff to consider while we’re busy reporting the news, but I swear, it’ll be helpful to know what’s on the horizon, and it may even help you get and keep better jobs in the future.

After all, the future is now. It’s already here.

Courtesy FDNY

This article in the Valley Independent Sentinel is an example of how multimedia elements (and citizen journalism) helped take a simple local story and add context and emotion.

The Valley Independent Sentinel is an online-only hyper local news site in Connecticut. (Full disclosure: I helped launch the site in 2009.)

The news site has done a great job keeping ahead of the social media and multimedia trends in journalism — and forcing competitors in the area to get on board.

This week, editor Eugene Driscoll was faced with a fairly common story for local newspapers: A group of students collected donations for people affected by Hurricane Sandy in Rockaway, Queens.

It’s easy for local reporters to decide these stories are monotonous, and react by banging out some standard, boring 8-inch story about the donation drive.

But Eugene Driscoll took another approach, using Storify and citizen journalists to help add context to the story.

Driscoll created a Storify that detailed the damage in Rockaway, and the school’s efforts to get support via social media. One of the tweets is posted below.

I grew up in Rockaway, Queens and my parents are still there, they lost everything. Field trip to help, pay it forward? Anyone interested?

— Derby High School (@DerbyRedRaider) November 3, 2012

And he embedded a video produced by a friend of a Rockaway resident that shows exactly what was going on there after the storm. The creator of the video is not a journalist, but what he did here was a form of journalism.

He combined these aspects with the standard 8-inch story about the donation drive. The result was a much more compelling piece.

How have you used multimedia, social media and citizen contributions to bolster commonplace reporting? Share links to some examples in the comments section.

Jodie Mozdzer Gil is an assistant professor of multimedia journalism at Southern Connecticut State University. She previously reported for the Valley Independent Sentinel, the Hartford Courant and the Waterbury Republican American. You can follow her on Twitter @mozactly.

Steve Buttry, who has the impressive if murky title of “Digital Transformation Editor” for Digital First Media, the entity that now operates the combined newspaper and television properties of the Journal Register Company and MediaNews Group, spends a lot of his time speaking not only to working journalists but to journalism students. He preaches the gospel of digital media as not only the future, but the present reality of the news business.

I happen to agree, and was glad to meet the man at an all-day Digital Media Workshop at the University of Colorado, sponsored by the Digital News Test Kitchen, a cutting-edge media think-tank. Buttry, who’s based in northern Virginia, spent the workshop sharing his views on the importance of embracing the evolving tools and technologies of news, and also giving hands-on tips that journalists can employ to tell stories for the new age.

He had lots of examples of newspapers doing innovative work and trying new ideas, like using a board on one Journal Register paper’s Pinterest page to show the local police’s Most Wanted mugshots (arrests increased). He also offered do’s and don’ts for other social media and digital tools.

In true digital-first fashion, there was a flurry of tweets during the workshop posted by attendees (lord knows when Buttry found the time to re-tweet some of them while he was still presenting), and Buttry posted on his blog about the workshop within a few hours. The post includes helpful links to all the examples of great multimedia and cutting-edge work that he used during his talk, and they’re worth checking out for anyone interested in the best that digital journalism has to offer.

His blog post includes a link to a Storify timeline, a compilation of tweets and photos uploaded live as the workshop progressed, curated by a journalism student, Rob Denton. Denton signed up for Storify when Buttry mentioned it, and created the timeline during the workshop. That’s how easy it can be to try out and learn some of the cool new tools that are available for journalists to use.

On his blog, Buttry also uses a service called Slideshare to upload all the slides from his presentation – a wealth of intelligence available for anyone to learn from. Slideshare is a social network to distribute PowerPoint presentations, and a perfect way to share expertise (assuming that your PowerPoint presentation isn’t a snoozer, and Buttry’s aren’t).

During the Q&A session, I asked if there was an epiphany in his career, which began in traditional newspapers that led him to embrace online media. “It’s really more a process than an epiphany,” he said.

He noted that he went into journalism in part because he knew he’d learn something new every day, and embracing new tools and platforms hasn’t been so different. He did remember that in 1984, he was in charge of a Des Moines Register initiative to raise community engagement by “crowdsourcing” news into a “Hometown” section. The idea didn’t fly with traditional journalists, but he was impressed with the power of the people who contributed.

He also remembered an early introduction to the Web as a research tool through a “Computer Assisted Reporting” (that’s what they used to call online, database-driven journalism stuff back in the day) project for the Omaha World Herald as the closest thing he had to an epiphany.

My epiphany was when I was entertainment editor at the Colorado Springs Gazette in 1994 (we were one of the first five American newspapers to have a website), and I got an email from a reader. He was thanking me for the paper’s arts coverage because he was a local scientist stuck in Antarctica for the winter, and our website allowed him to keep up with the rich local arts scene.

The knowledge that someone halfway around the globe could instantly read what I was publishing online changed my whole concept of news media. I realized that family and friends in Japan could now instantly follow what I was doing, and read my articles. Today that doesn’t seem too shocking, since we could Skype around the world for free and video-chat on Google Hangout, or read live tweets and watch live streamed video from anywhere in the world — or even outer space.

But back then, I have to admit, the idea blew my mind. That’s when I knew the Internet would be the future of news media, and that I had to find my place in it during the dawn of this evolution. I haven’t regretted the decision once.

If you had an epiphany about online media, send it along to gilasakawa@gmail.com — I’d love to hear your stories.

A version of this post was submitted for SPJ’s Quill magazine.

In my latest column in the Quill magazine about steps that college media can take to go digital first, I mentioned that you should use social media as an end in itself, not just the means to an end:

Social media drives lots of traffic to your website, no doubt. The CU Independent’s Facebook page is the source of half the page views to its website. But don’t treat social media as merely a marketing tool. That’s how newspapers thought of their websites in the early years, parking their online staff in their marketing departments or libraries. Since not everyone will click through to your website, be sure your social media presence has its own following.

I got an email today from Christine Jessel of WUOT, the U of Tennessee’s public radio station, asking for clarification about my point and what Facebook-only content I’d recommend posting. Here’s what I sent her in reply:

One way to make a Facebook page a destination in itself instead of just a pass-through (hopefully) for people to click on to your paper’s website, is to expand your “coverage” and include links to not only your site, but also to stories from your competitors.

So, here in Boulder we have the metro daily papers in Denver and Boulder, as well as the irritating “youth-oriented” daily that’s published by the Boulder Daily Camera that people think of as the CU school paper, and of course the local TV stations. When news happens that of interest to students, not only about the campus but in the larger community, I think it’s an opportunity for us to tweet and Facebook about it and link to other sources, including competitors.

I think readers appreciate that you’re being generous and willing to become a hub of news and information that’s of interest to them, and will become trained to come back to your Facebook page to keep up with news. That’s an easy way to cover more stories than just what runs in the paper or website.

Like the last comment I made in my Quill column, this advice about linking to your competitors is advice I’ve given to newsrooms for a decade or more now, not just advice for college papers or radio stations. I realize it goes against the grain of newsroom staff, especially management, to acknowledge your competition and — gasp — even send traffic their way!

But you know what? It’s 2012, and your audience doesn’t just read your stuff. Your audience reads your news stories, or watches your station’s newscasts, and then does what we all do: Click to other sites to read more, to see what other sources are saying, to get a fuller picture of the news they care about.

If you think you have an exclusive relationship with your readers in this networked age, you’re dreaming. Dreaming of an earlier media era.

The truth is, if you link to your competitors, your readers will apprciate the step you’re saving them, and appreciate your open-mindedness. And like I said to Christine, they’ll soon come to your site (or Facebook page) first, and visit the other sites you direct them to, but click the “back” button and return to your site because you’re shown them you’re a onestop hub for the news that matters to them.

It’s amazing the things that we see people tweet about. Personal beliefs. Private conversations. Elicit behavior. Groundless criticism. Uneducated perspective.

Yes, I’m talking about journalists, too.

Sure, some genuine news seeps through to the Twitterverse — the brilliant coverage by Andy Carvin of last year’s “Arab Spring” foremost among the examples. (Remarkably, a year later, his work still sets the standard.) Otherwise, what remains on that social network largely amounts to boorishness and self-aggrandizement, impugning and assuming, snobbery and effrontery.

When I came up through the journalism ranks, any sort of spotlight-hogging was frowned upon as ethically dubious, if not forbidden by company policy. Today, a persistent and effusive social media presence is considered essential to one’s employment, if for no other reason than to continually trumpet a media “brand.”

This deep bow to branding waxes ominous, thanks largely to such popular social media measuring sticks as Klout assigning a manufactured importance to digital socialization — an importance weighted in favor of quantity instead of quality. If we agree to hold up these sticks as accurate, then news reporting via social media is bound not to be.

Why? Because there’s a certain assurance news consumers get from a journalist’s professional detachment, and we see that assurance petering out now as news providers strive to be heard above the loud partisan polemic drowning rational thought — a polemic they help stir up.

The solution, short of wiping social media off the map, is greater attentiveness toward distinguishing personal from professional content. Though there are claims that a personal touch demystifies media and as a result makes news more consumable, personalization also blurs the line separating judgment from fact. And when journalists apply it, they put their profession at risk of being marginalized by “citizen” journalists who insist they’re merely following the example.

So, then, make that example an admirable one:

Separate personal from professional tweets — If this means creating separate Twitter accounts, so be it. And try not to use the company logo or any derivative as a personal avatar.

Exercise care with criticism — Do you love “50 Shades of Grey”? Do you hate the movie remake of “Spider-Man”? That’s fine, but keep those opinions off all professional social media accounts, unless it has a discernible job relevance. Otherwise, inserting opinion only waters down what little objectivity a journalist can muster.

Keep company matters inside the company — There may be discord between management and staff, or personnel matters that prove irksome, but venting discontent via veiled insult on social media not only undermines others’ faith in you, it also could prove actionable in a court of law. In the same vein, honesty regarding one’s own reporting or editing errors may evoke pangs of guilt and frustration, but it  reinforces credibility and respectability as well.

Rein in the urge to be defensive — By its nature, journalism invites criticism, warranted or not. Certainly, some of that criticism can be mean-spirited and vindictive, instead of constructive. Avoid driving a conversation further down the same dark road. As humorist Mark Twain once said, “Never argue with stupid people; they will drag you down to their level and beat you with experience.”

Resist posting vacation and food photos — It’s always good to get away from it all when possible; it’s bad to drag readers and viewers along. That beach picture with Diamond Head in the background, while pretty, smacks of braggadocio, and may even suggest to others a laxity at work — especially if the picture puts you in one place while the calendar says you should be somewhere else. Food photos, on the other hand, pose a different problem, one rooted in esthetics. Put simply, food never looks as good in social media as it does in person.

Avoid posting sales pitches — Ensure personal brand integrity by not promoting other brands in tweets through sales pitches or links to special deals. Leave that up to the sales people who are supposed to market those products.

David Sheets is a content editor at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and STLtoday.com, a candidate for Region 7 director, and past-president of SPJ’s St. Louis Pro chapter. Reach him by e-mail at dsheets@post-dispatch.com, on Twitter at @DKSheets, or on Facebook and LinkedIn.

Came across this post, “Banjo CEO: Location Is Key for Social Apps” from Street Fight today, one of my daily must-read sites that covers the hyperlocal news and media space.

I’m interested in the growth (and coming explosion) of what’s already being called “SoLoMo” — the technology-driven intersection of Social, Local and Mobile media. That could include news or advertising, or innovative ways to get daily deals (your mobile buzzes with a text message when you approach a pizza place that is putting slices on sale for $.25 each!) to easy ways to find the closest hardware store when you’re in a neighborhood you don’t know very well.

SoLoMo is all about content and interactions that are keyed to your location, via the GPS in your mobile phone or device. At its most basic, SoLoMo is when you check in to a restaurant on Foursquare or Facebook.

Why is it important for journalists to know about SoLoMo?

Because it’ll be a big part of the future of media, including news media. The Street Fight interview with the founder and CEO of Banjo, one of the hottest new location-based mobile social apps (I guess that would be LoMoSo…), asks the question of how Banjo and SoLoMo applies to journalism:

The news is already starting to use Banjo. A couple of weekends ago I had CNN on, on a Saturday, and one of the reporters was using Banjo to report on the Trayvon Martin case in Florida. He said with Banjo he could go there and he could actually search by the keyword “Trayvon” and he knew every person that was showing up, whether it was Twitter or Instagram or whatever the case may be, was talking about Trayvon and was actually in Sanford, Florida, and was therefore highly relevant.

Another news channel was using it to report on the weather where there were tornados. They couldn’t get to the affected area right away, but they could go there with Banjo.

Download Banjo on your phone and check it out, willya? It’s available for iPhone and Android. Try it, and if you don’t find a use for it, delete it. At least you know about it and how it works, and won’t be out of the loop as it becomes more and more popular.

It’ll be increasingly important as we embrace the digital-first imperative that some companies are espousing, to stay on top of new developments and cool new apps and tools that can help us be better journalists. Even if you choose not to use some of these new tools, it’ll help your career to be familiar with them.

The SPJ’s Digital Media Committee will help you keep up with the ever-evolving media technology, both here on the Net Worked blog and in the Quill column.

Stay tuned…

Steve Buttry is the Director of Community Engagement and Social Media at Digital First Media, the company that operates both MediaNews Group and Journal Register chains of newspapers (full disclosure: I used to work for The Denver Post, MNG’s flagship paper, and MediaNews Group’s corporate interactive group). He’s giving four workshops at Northern Kentucky University and here’s one of them, about what it means to be a “digital first” journalist of today. He shared it online via Slideshare –thinking very digital first, I’d say. You can check out his other presentations at Slideshare as well.

I’d like to hear Buttry go through this deck sometime, because he’s making great points that apply not only to students, but mid-career journalists. I’ve forwarded this to my students at the CU Independent, because they need to embrace this way of thinking, and this information will help them get jobs and aim their careers for the future of media.