Five Steps to Foster Innovation in the Newsroom

Chris O’Brien
7:19 AM | bio | Comments: 11

Last month, Dan Pacheco asked for readers' ideas on How to Foster Innovation in Newspapers. He was speaking at an upcoming Knight conference and was looking for feedback to augment his presentation. I didn't have a chance to respond in time to help him, but it's a subject I've been thinking about a lot over the past year as part of The Next Newsroom Project. I'm sure there are plenty of doubters who think newspapers are a lost cause at this point when it comes to innovation. Fine. But it's important to understand that this question is one that any... continued...

Topics: Best Practices, Philosophy
Tagged: google, innovation, microsoft, nextnewsroom

Is Twitter the Newsroom of the Future?

Chris O’Brien
4:56 PM | bio | Comments: 12

I was sitting at my desk at the San Jose Mercury News on Tuesday when I first heard about the Los Angeles earthquake through an inter-office message from a colleague. My next instinct was to click over to my Twitter account to see what was going on. Like a lot of folks who have developed a cultish appreciation for the microblogging service, I've increasingly found that Twitter has become the place get breaking news before it hits online news sites or television. I follow Twitter through a desktop application called Twhirl. Since I only follow a limited number of folks... continued...

Topics: Best Practices, Participation, Technology
Tagged: citizen journalism, nextnewsroom, sjcobrien, twitter

The Next Newsroom in Second life

Chris O’Brien
11:30 PM | bio | Comments: 4

In April 2006, I was sitting in a Durham, N.C., sports bar with Gary Kebbel, who runs the Knight Foundation's News Challenge grant program. Gary was officially letting me know I would be getting a grant for The Next Newsroom Project. Our plan was to research and design the ideal newsroom for The Chronicle, the independent student newspaper at Duke University, which was considering building a new facility on campus. I was so giddy that something he said at the time flew right by me: "As part of the grant, we'd like you to build a version of the... continued...

Topics: Audio/Visual, Games & Virtual Worlds
Tagged: duke university, nextnewsroom, second life, the chronicle

CopyCamp: Community Unconference in the Newsroom

Chris O’Brien
12:42 AM | bio | Comments: 0

(photo by Rob Knight) As part of the Next Newsroom Project, I've been exploring several core questions about the structure of news organizations, both physical and operational. One of those central questions is this: What is the ideal relationship between a newsroom and its community? One of the exciting things about the era we're entering is that there are much wider range of options to consider when addressing this question. We're moving away from the traditional broadcast model where information flowed in one direction from the newsroom to the community. It's clear that the community should be placed at... continued...

Topics: Best Practices, Diversity, Participation
Tagged: community, copycamp, majorityofnone, next newsroom

It's Not Just a Newspaper Problem; It's a Media Problem

Chris O’Brien
11:41 AM | bio | Comments: 0

This past week, the National Association of Music Retailers landed in San Francisco to hold their 50th annual convention. Never heard of them? Neither had I, until I responded to a random email pitch and decided to attend for a few hours. Essentially, NARM is a trade group that includes every piece of the music ecosystem, from artists and songwriters to retailers to record labels. While the organization was unfamiliar to me, the main topic of conversation at the convention was all too familiar: How do we find a new business model in a digital world? The music world has... continued...

Topics: Best Practices, Financial, Philosophy
Tagged: business model, music, NARM

Finalists for the Knight News Challenge

Chris O’Brien
3:58 PM | bio | Comments: 2

The Knight Foundation today posted a list of the finalists for the next round of its News Challenge grant program. This list does not include the names of the 17 projects that were chosen for funding. Those winners will be announced on May 14, 2008, at the E&P Interactive Media Conference in Las Vegas. Knight says it posted this list of finalists because: "Many finalists had excellent proposals worthy of being considered by other foundations and funders." The 29 projects listed are all intriguing and worth checking out just to get a sense of where some of the sharpest minds... continued...

Topics: Best Practices
Tagged: knight foundation, news challenge

Life Inside the Non-Profit News Model

Chris O’Brien
2:31 PM | bio | Comments: 0

One of our group bloggers here, Geoff Dougherty, founder of the Chi-Town Daily News, is the focus of an extended profile that appears in Miller-McCune magazine. The profile was written by one of my former Mercury News colleagues, Ryan Blitstein, who uses Dougherty's story to explore some themes that have emerged on this blog: The possiblities of citizen journalism and the sustainability of the non-profit news model. An excerpt: "Civic entrepreneurs across the country are offering multiple visions of local journalism's future, from technology-heavy, amateur-dependent nonprofit sites to more traditional approaches to news that just happen to be tax-exempt... continued...

Topics: Best Practices, Financial
Tagged: chi-town daily news, nonprofit news

Where's the Innovation in Business Models?

Chris O’Brien
1:44 AM | bio | Comments: 13

I've been following closely a theme that has developed here in recent days. It began last week with David Sasaki's post about the legacy of the Knight family, continued with Dan Gillmor's call for more entrepreneurial thinking in journalism, and was amplified by J.D. Lasica's call for newspapers to innovate or die. All great thoughts, and worth reading to the word. But I have a particular interest here. As a business reporter at the San Jose Mercury News the past nine years, I've been living at the tragic center of the events being addressed to some degree by each of... continued...

Topics: Best Practices, Financial
Tagged: advertising, business models, mercurynews, minnpost, newspapernext

The Washington Post vs. washpost.com

Chris O’Brien
8:27 PM | bio | Comments: 0

The Washington City Paper this week published an extensive profile of the online strategy used by The Washington Post. Called, "One Mission, Two Newsrooms," the piece details how the Post has built an entirely separate newsroom for the online staff across the river in Arlington, Va. While the online team has flourished, and developed a number of innovations, the profile notes that this arrangement has led to tension between the old newsroom in the city and the dot-com operation. The story kicks off with an extended anecdote about how Dana Priest and Anne Hull kept their big investigative series on... continued...

Topics: Best Practices, Philosophy
Tagged: innovation, integration, nextnewsroom, washington post

Will There Be a Newsroom in the Future?

Chris O’Brien
12:38 PM | bio | Comments: 1

The nature of our project at Duke University, the Next Newsroom Project, is to try to design the "newsroom of the future." But the other day on our project site, Leonard Witt of Kennesaw State University, started a discussion around the first, most obvious question we confronted: "Does the newsroom of the future really need to be a brick and mortar newsroom?" You can view the various responses, and some relevant links that got posted there. I wanted to withhold my reply until folks had their say. Naturally, it's not the first time I've heard that question since our work... continued...

Topics: Best Practices, Education, Philosophy
Tagged: future, newspapers, newsrooms, next newsroom

Guiding Principles for the Next Newsroom

Chris O’Brien
6:36 AM | bio | Comments: 0

The Next Newsroom Project began last summer with a question: If you could build the ideal newsroom from scratch, what would it look like? We were asking that question on behalf of The Chronicle, the independent student newspaper at Duke University. Since receiving our News Challenge grant from the Knight Foundation, we've interviewed journalists, digital media experts, architects, campus media advisers, academics, and innovation specialists. We profiled professional and campus newsrooms (and some organizations that had no newsroom). And we looked for ideas outside journalism from folks like innovation consultants Jump Associates . And we studied buildings like the Stata... continued...

Topics: Best Practices, Education, Technology
Tagged: chronicle, duke, nextnewsroom

A Crisis in College Media?

Chris O’Brien
3:27 PM | bio | Comments: 0

Anyone interested in the challenges facing college media, especially independent college media, should check out a series that ran this week in The Daily Bruin, UCLA's independent student newspaper. There are three stories posted so far, including one that features The Chronicle Duke University, and its editor David Graham: "We were seeing all of the dire predictions about the future: We have to go online, do multimedia, blog, do video," said The Chronicle's Editor-in-Chief David Graham. "Those who are interested in journalism as a career realized we had to be pragmatic and be aware of this." But: But until the... continued...

Topics: Education, Philosophy
Tagged: college media, multimedia, next newsroom

Wanted: A Marshall Plan for Campus Media

Chris O’Brien
6:37 AM | bio | Comments: 0

Over the past few months, I've had a chance to visit various campus media groups as part of our research project on newsrooms. And as I've noted before, I'm continually surprised at how dramatically behind the times many of these groups are. Rather than closing the gap, it seems to me that these student groups are falling even further behind. There are a variety of reasons why this is happening, some of which are general, and some of which might be specific to certain organizations. But I see this is a big deal. These groups play a role that's at... continued...

Topics: Best Practices, Education, Philosophy
Tagged: campus media, college media, journalism schools, journalism studies

Surprise! Students Resistant to New Media

Chris O’Brien
5:18 PM | bio | Comments: 0

I'm currently attending the College Media Conference in Washington, D.C. And what I've been hearing from college media advisers this week confirms something that I've been seeing anecdotally while working on the Next Newsroom project at Duke. Advisers from colleges and universities of all shapes and sizes are frustrated at how resistant their students are to embrace new digital media tools and to collaborate with other media organizations on campus. At an otherwise jovial keynote on Thursday, Rob Curley, the Washington Post's digital and community guru, (see J.D. Lasica's previous post on Rob here) actually admonished the room full of... continued...

Topics: Best Practices, Education, Philosophy
Tagged: college media conference, college students, Hastings College, HCWorldnews, rob curley

Community and the Next Newsroom

Chris O’Brien
12:23 PM | bio | Comments: 1

In a world increasingly obsessed with the virtual, I'm leading a project focused on the physical. Our aim is to imagine the ideal physical space that will serve the needs of journalism for the next 50 years. There's no shortage of folks who will immediately say, "In the future, there will be no newsrooms." Perhaps. And there are some news organizations that operate that way now. Check out the New Haven Independent which operates virtually except for an occasional staff meeting in a local coffee shop. But I'm not convinced that's the model for most groups. There's still something intangible... continued...

Topics: Best Practices, Participation, Philosophy
Tagged: duke university, newsrooms

A Fresh Start

Chris O’Brien
11:27 PM | bio | Comments: 0

I could begin by reciting in mind-numbing detail my experience running The Next Newsroom Project. There have frustrations (many); there have been moments of despair (a few); there has been progress (some); there have been unexpected discoveries (lots). But this blog is just getting started, and there will be plenty of time for those stories. For the moment, you can visit our project site for the skinny. Instead, I'd like my first post here to sound a note that's far more hopeful, if not exactly profound: I feel optimistic about the future. And that, more than anything, is the most... continued...

Topics: Philosophy
Tagged: journalism, newspapers, newsrooms, print media