Share your thoughts about how the newsroom of the future should be different .

[Chris O'Brien]

If you answered this question on your profile, please copy your answer here (or even expand on it).

[Scott McCartney]

I think what is most important is a comfortable space in a central, well-traveled campus location. Staffers need to see the Chronicle office as their own, a special place with lots of history and character where they feel like they are stewards of something big. Because they are. They need to sprawl out on couches and crowd in for edit council and create their own memories of how great it is to work at that paper. It should be a place where they want to hang out, where they can make friends as well as make phone calls, where they can work together and play together until 5 a.m... I worry that a fancy, sterile newsroom could kill the culture of the paper.

I don't think equipment and physical layout is as important--the equipment changes rapidly, the technology negates many office needs. What's most important is having a flexible space that can adapt to different staffs as well as different technology.

In terms of location, it needs to be central enough so that editors can pop in for a quick check on a story or photo. And the location needs to reflect the paper's importance to the Duke community. The Chronicle -- a strong daily newspaper with a long history of excellence that has produced many journalists at a school lacking a journalism school -- is an institution Duke should be proud of, and should highlight to prospective students and alumni. To maintain its voice on campus, it shouldn't be shunted off into a remote corner. The Chronicle is every bit as important to Duke as basketball and the Chapel. (Well, maybe not quite as important as basketball....)

Hope that helps. Good luck with the project, and let me know if I can help.

--Scott

[CE]

You might check out the new facility just opened for the College Heights Herald, the student newspaper at Western Kentucky University. The 6,500 square foot facility cost $1.6 million and was built largely through donations from alumni of WKU's student publications. The freestanding building houses both the Herald and the Talisman, the campus yearbook, both of which are among the best in the nation. The Herald and Talisman count more than 25 Pulitzer Prize winners among their alumni. The Adams-Whitaker Student Publications Center is set up to be fully multimedia, with television facilities, a sound booth for podcasting and other sound recording, etc. Information on the building and the campaign to raise money for it can be found at www.heraldalumni.com. I am attaching a picture of the exterior.

[John Cass]

It used to be that the leading news analysts in the country were the top traditional media outlets, that is no longer the case because anyone can publish content and analyze an industry with the web. However, companies because of their drive for market research data and now blogger engagement buzz reports have a better pulse on what is happening within a particular community than many traditional media outlets. I think for a publication to be competitive in tomorrow's world, many publications will have to adopt some of the technology tools that companies are now using in this area. For example there are tools available that analyze text across the web, discover individual posts, rate by sentiment and authority to provide company managers with tools for market research and blogger engagement. Publications in the future, which adopt these tools, will have a competitive advantage.

[Chris O'Brien]

Very interesting. As a journalist, I sometimes worry that we're not doing a good job of taking advantage of all the data that's out there about how readers engage with our work. And therefore, we aren't being aggressive enough in pursuing some of the opportunities to re-imagine how we connect with readers.

[John Cass]

Hi Chris,

Though engaging readers is certainly part of the point I was making with my posting, as the new tools that are available now also deal with customer engagement, or I suppose reader engagement in this case. I was making a wider point about newsgathering activities, what news should be reported by the newsroom. I'd suggest that these new tools could help a newsroom to find, and evaluate news. I don't think that means people are taken out of the loop, far from removing people, these tools need people to interpret what is important and what is not. I am not a journalist or a PR person, but a marketer, so you will forgive me if I don't quite understand how today's newsroom works, I do however, understand how social media campaigns are being managed in corporate America, and I think those tactics can we used in the newsroom of the future for monitoring and engagement.

[bAbelr0cks]

Shows text, photos and graphics and plays video and audio while engages the audience in a way that makes them excited about news and what they are taking in.

bAbel.

[Xurxo Martínez]

The future newsroom will be different because the world is changing. The product is different, and so the profile of the journalists. There will be people with the deep journalist know-how and people with abilities to connect with user's (not readers) needs and interests. Also, we need to integrate both designers and programmers in our daily work. They are not a service or secondary in any information web.

The newsroom of the future not only needs to be a reflection of its times and how the information is shared. It also needs to answer lots of questions: should the journalist create great content or identify great content already created? Should they be in the street or the 'digital street' is enough? Should they work together or each member can work from wherever and just a little hub-team will put it together? Should the users be part of this newsroom? How should we work with designers, developers and marketing people? Are they part of the newsroom or just part of the media business?

Xx

[Xurxo Martínez]

Regarding all the thoughts about somehow integrating the readers/users into the newsroom, the idea can be correct, but you need to know exactly how involved your readers/users (your community) want to be in the making of it. The problem is when you put too pressure on them and ask that people to do what they can't or don't have time to do.

[Chris O'Brien]

Xurxo: That's a great observation about the role of community. The community falls along a spectrum, from folks who want to actively participate to those who want to remain passive consumers of news and information. For me, this points to the need to have someone in the newsroom who is helping to identify different categories of participation, and helping to build those relationships.

[Michael J]

I want to strongly Scott's first reply. The newsroom should be first and foremost a physical place for people to get together, brainstorm, form a common culture. It's a bit like the coffee shops in England, out of which grew some of the most vibrant social networks and published products in history. My own favorite is that the next newsroom could be seen as Publishing Centers. (Maybe set it up in a local Starbucks that is about to close?)

As for "engaging readers", I'm not sure that is the most useful way to think about it. First, most people who come to a website are more like TV viewers than readers. It's just they way it is. Reading takes time and energy. In my opinion, the web is mostly for viewers. One part -Youtube and Hulu- are quickly moving to interactive TV with search. The social networking stuff adds great conversation. Sometimes great conversation leads to real bonds in the real world. You can learn alot about people and refine a half baked idea in great conversations.

Talking and viewing are good life affirming activities, but they are not "reading." From my point of view, Print is for reading. Most people are much too busy with their day to day lives to find the time to read. But since TV was invented, everybody seems to find the time to view. In fact, the number of readers has always been pretty small. Books as entertainment had a much larger audience. But the competition from TV and the web is going to keep eating into that.

So . . .it would probably help if people clearly understood if people in the next newsroom decided if they were in the viewing business or the reading business. There's been lots of great thoughts and conversation about the viewing business. As for the reading business, my take is that it would be neat if journalists thought about print products that people, not advertisers, would buy. For example, a 4 to 6 part series of investigations on some complex local issue that was offered to viewers in the form of a $5 paperback. Given the advances in print technology, this is pretty easy to do.

First post each part of the story on the web, then have a conversation about the issues with experts involved, once a buzz has been created, sell the viewers a print version that they could read. Then only produce books based on the demand. Every once in a great while, one of the books will strike a nerve and be a significant success.

[John Cass]

Michael,

I agree in part with your characterization that many media websites are viewed rather than a two way conversation between readers and authors. That's got more to do with how people view their media sites than whether real engagement is happening. The most successful engagement efforts on the web currently are being conducted by companies that are actively monitoring and responding to customers on their sites. Dell and Comcast come to mind here. Comcast does not even have a blog yet, and the company is resolving customer service issues on customer blogs and sites. Many media sites don't have an engagement strategy, there is no follow up from the authors of the publication to the readers and people who comment. I'd argue there is more to be gained from developing an active engagement policy on the part of media companies. This case study from Adweek and Adrants from 2 years ago illustrates my point about engagement.

http://www.scoutblogging.com/success_study/blogger_interviews/adwee...

Cathy Taylor one of the founders of the Adweek blog Adfreaks suggests that Adrants has a competitive advantage because the blog spends more time on engagement that their Adweek blog does.

I'd suggest that technology tools like TruCast and Radian6 can enable newsrooms to monitor and respond to readers, but also monitor for stories and good interview leads at a faster pace than non media industry bloggers might be able to do.

[Michael J]

John,
I think we agree. You said "I agree in part with your characterization that many media websites are viewed rather than a two way conversation between readers and authors"

To try to clarify my position. The web (interactive TV plus search) is viewed. "Web 2.0" is the natural evolution of the original killer app- email. The web is the perfect media for those two purposes and a third functionality, buying stuff or a service. Your remarks about how to use the conversational aspect of the web are right on point.

Your point about gathering information and understanding the mindset of your audience is spot on.
"I'd suggest that technology tools like TruCast and Radian6 can enable newsrooms to monitor and respond to readers, but also monitor for stories and good interview leads at a faster pace than non media industry bloggers might be able to do."

But my focus is on which platform you are going to use to publish. Viewing/conversing is not reading. Just as a story on TV is not a story on a website or in a printed book. A verbal culture and a written culture both have their advantages and disadvantages. Gathering the story and publishing the story are two different things. Stories meant for scanning and viewing are different from stories meant for reading.

The other problem is that the zeitgeist is "read for free and pay for print." To get the advertising model to work on the web needs a gezillion hits or ultra local adverts. Too hard. Printed books, on the other hand, are easier to sell, as long as you find the people who want to read them.