_This was originally posted at Digital Journalism Portland.

After two and a half years, two conferences, eight social hour presentations, and almost a hundred job listings on the job board, it’s time for Digital Journalism Portland to come to an end. I want to deeply thank the hundreds of people who attended the events, who were a part of the online community and who helped make one of Portland’s first independent journalism organizations a reality.

The site will remain up as an archive for the conference resources (2009, 2011), but as of Jan. 1, Digital Journalism Portland is closing down.

Why Shut It Down?

Back in early 2009 we called ourselves “digital journalists” because we approached our work differently than the rest of the media world. I don’t think anyone sitting in the audience at the first Digital Journalism Camp would have guessed that two years later The Oregonian was going to partner with multiple local news blogs — the majority of which didn’t even exist at the time.

At the time there weren’t a lot of local resources for us and I wanted Digital Journalism Portland to fill that void. These days the name “digital journalist” still fits, but a lot has changed. Traditional news organizations no longer (for the most part) treat the online world as an anathema; bloggers who report on and break news are everywhere. In Portland and Vancouver we’ve seen multiple local media ventures launch, some successfully, others not so much.

Digital Journalism Portland is now one of many resources that exist both locally and online for digital journalists — a.k.a., pretty much all journalists.

Several months ago a handful of journalists began working to create a local chapter of the Online News Association. This last week they announced their first meetup: Jan. 18 at the U of O’s Turnbull Center.

I’m happy that I can contribute something to that effort. As of Jan. 4, the Portland ONA chapter will take over the @journopdx Twitter account. DJP and ONA share an almost identical mission: to be a resource for new media journalists. The conversation that ONA will have on Twitter is very similar to what Digital Journalism Portland did. If you disagree with this handover, please let me know.

Hacks/Hackers

Digital Journalism Portland was the beginning. ONA has now stepped up. But we also need a resource for those who work at the intersection of journalism and technology. Back in 2009, several journalists in New York and California founded a group called Hacks/Hackers. Their mission is to “create a network of journalists (“hacks”) and technologists (“hackers”) who rethink the future of news and information.”

Journalists sometimes call themselves “hacks,” a tongue-in-cheek term for someone who can churn out words in any situation. Hackers use the digital equivalent of duct tape to whip out code. Hacks/Hackers tries to bridge those two worlds. It’s for hackers exploring technologies to filter, visualize and distribute information, and for hacks who use technology to find and tell stories. Hacks/Hackers is a digital community of people who seek to inspire each other, share information (and code) and collaborate to invent the future of media and journalism.

There are now chapters of Hack/Hackers around the globe. If you’re interested in helping organize a local chapter, please get in touch. Multiple co-organizers are needed.

Thank You a Million Times Over

I can’t begin to thank the countless people who have been involved over the years. The social hours wouldn’t have happened without the initial co-host Libby Tucker, and wouldn’t have continued without the support — and prodding — of people like Betsy Richter, Michael Andersen and Cornelius Swart.

I owe a huge debt of gratitude to Al Stavitsky, the outgoing director of the University of Oregon’s Turnbull Center, and Tim Gleason, dean of the school’s journalism department. Al was one of the first potential sponsors I approached in 2009. Even though I had no experience organizing conferences he agreed to cater lunch for the event. That sponsorship was the critical cornerstone that allowed me to convince other sponsors to come on board — which then allowed the event to take place. If not for Al and Tim, DJP would likely have not have existed in its current form.

There are so many others to thank: the 40-plus conference panelists and presenters, the sponsors, the social hour presenters and regulars, and all of the people like Scott Nelson who were an advocate for DJP behind the scenes. I’m remarkably lucky to have a supportive and encouraging partner like Devon D’Ewart, who, among many other things, organized volunteers at both conferences. I wish there was a way to list everyone who helped along the way. Thank you all.

One Last Thing

Over the last two years people often offered suggestions for specific social hour topics or conference sessions. Starting at the beginning of 2011, the requests I got for training for social media and online tools increased dramatically. I’ve always been confused by that. There are a ton of places to find that kind of information online, but for some reason that connection is not happening for a lot of journalists.

If you want to do something to help journalism in Portland or elsewhere, find out why so many journalists don’t feel like they’re able to discover, utilize and adopt the many tools available online. Social hours are fun, conferences about big-picture ideas are edifying, but there is a real need for new media journalism training.

It’s been an amazing ride. I hope I see you at an ONA event or a Hacks/Hackers demo day or some other conference or workshop that someone is dreaming up right now.

Thank you all,
Abraham

Housekeeping:

1. As I mentioned, the new Portland chapter of ONA will take over the @journopdx Twitter account on Jan. 4. Email me with questions or comments.
2. After sending out a final announcement, the email addresses in the Digital Journalism Portland mailing list will be deleted.
3. All journopdx.com email addresses will be deleted on Jan. 1 along with the DJP Facebook page.
4. The website will remain online in its current state for the foreseeable future. I host the site and the bandwidth demands are very minimal. Barring some unforeseen issue, I will leave the site up indefinitely.

  

Last week The Globe and Mail interviewed Steven Berlin Johnson, author of the book Where Good Ideas Come From, and put together eight of his ideas that can “turn your workplace into an idea workshop.” Most of them are obvious: don’t be a know-it-all, don’t keep secrets, accept failure. But I think three are missing from a lot of newsrooms.

Become an omnivore

This isn’t a new idea. New York Times staffer Nate Silver gives the same advice to new journalists. But how can you possibly add more to the firehose of information you’re faced with every day? That’s not a problem with information overload, says Clay Shirky, “It’s filter failure.” Find your filters and you’ll be able expand your focus and discover trends and ideas developing outside of your sphere.

[Johnson said,] “Steve Jobs hired people not only trained in technology but in humanities and graphic design. And he let the folks who came in with other perspectives have as much say in product development meetings as the programmers and engineers. If there was poetry in things Apple produced, it was because they have actual poets in the company.”

Show And Tell

Brainstorm happens when we’re coming up with headline ideas, with story ideas. It happens when we’re planning how we’ll cover something. But it rarely happens when there’s not a specific goal. That’s a lost opportunity. There needs to be time for unstructured brainstorming, said Johnson, but only a few companies allow it to happen.

He’s a proponent of a concept used by design company Ideo Labs, in Palo Alto, Calif., which has developed a number of cutting-edge products, including the first mouse for Apple computers. Owners Tom and David Kelly bring their managers together for 20 minutes every Monday for what they call “show and tell.” The managers talk about things that grabbed their attention: “My seven-year-old just loves this crazy new toy” or “I saw an art installation that was amazing.”

The free-wheeling session clues in people to new ideas “and it’s been a great generator of innovation for the company,” Mr. Johnson said.

Promote pollination

Like a bee who brings the pollen around, a key role of a leader today is to be a pollinator, a person who talks to the engineering people and then talks with the marketing people and then the finance group. It’s important to not only know what everyone is doing but also to encourage people to link up. “The leader can say: Bob, it might be a good idea to talk to Bill because the two of you are facing similar challenges and what he’s finding might be relevant to what you’re doing.”

Or to take Maureen Dowd out of context: “As in Darwinian evolution, cross-pollination with diverse strains promotes species development.”

Photo by michelini

This week the Audit Bureau of Circulation, which audits the vast majority of US newspapers, released its data for the last six months. The numbers were, surprise surprise, down. Stocks for the major companies promptly took a hit. But there were glimmers of hope in those figures, too. Check out PaidContent’s post on the increase in digital editions and Jeff Bercovici’s look at how surprisingly dull that increase is.

In non-dull surprising news, one fifth of FT.com’s traffic comes from mobile devices. The Economist also grabs a spot on this week’s list with an insightful look at how tablets are no panacea, as does Frédéric Filloux, who asks why the hell there are so many crappy looking ads out there.

1. Fas-Fax: Major Newspapers’ Total Digital Editions Rise 63 Percent – paidContent
   
2. More Proof That Paywalls Work From…Newsday?
3. Your digital paper, sir: The struggle to make money out of news on tablets
4. Fifth of FT.com traffic coming from mobile devices
5. News website design is plagued by too many ads: The rise of the mobile web could mean better-looking sites – smaller screens can attract fewer, higher-value ads – Frédéric Filloux

Photo by sh0dan

This month’s Carnival of Journalism host is Andrew Pergam, who asks “What is the role of online video in the newsroom of the future?”

The future of online news video hit me for the first time in mid 2009 when I was talking to the editor of a small daily in Northern California. He was telling me how the paper had bought high-end video cameras, trained photographers to use editing software and put together beautiful video packages.

But that’s not what visitors seemed to care about. What did they click on the most? The raw, unedited footage from car accidents and local events that reporters shot and uploaded to the Web while in the field.

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Not much has changed since then for a lot of small and mid-size newspapers. The future of online news video looks like it was shot on a camera phone.

That’s obviously not true for the big guys, The New York Times, et al. And if you don’t have NYT-style resources there are apps and tools that make creating OK-looking video easy and cheap. And I should add that low-quality production doesn’t mean the content is without value.

But the drift towards low-quality video is an inarguable and inescapable trend, one that stems from the basic principle of supply and demand.

In an old post on (the sadly defunct) Rebuilding Media, Vin Crosbie writes that an overabundance of news sources leads to competition that actually lowers the bar on the definition of “quality” video.

When there were few suppliers, they used higher quality content (i.e., ‘high production values’) as a competitive weapon against each other. But now that there is an overabundance of suppliers, their competition levers towards being the first to produce content that is at least of acceptable quality. Millions of videos are viewed billions of times each month on sites such as YouTube.com (+3 billion per month) not because of high production values, but because the videos are at least ‘good enough’ to watch.

So What Role Does Video Play? Advertorials, Really?

From a financial perspective, cost-intensive video production faces a big hurdle. The rate that advertisers will pay for video views is relatively low. Let’s look a non-news-media example: Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia.

Earlier this month paidContent reported that Marthastewart.com’s July traffic was up 7% to 2.6 million uniques but video views dropped 14% to 382,000. Like the rest of the media world, MSLO’s advertisers aren’t paying much for those views. So Martha ditched the editorially driven video strategy and teamed up with Frigidiare for some good old advertorial content.

Halfway through the paidContent story is a pretty depressing sentence:

As media companies look to refine their video strategies, it might make more sense to go with the custom video as MSLO is doing and wait until CPMs, along with marketer and viewer interest in supporting original, non-advertorial content emerges.

What this really means for small print news orgs is that there is no immediate future in investing in quality news video. That includes small online-only news orgs like the one I work for. If editorially independent news video can’t support itself, either through advertising or other revenue models, then it can’t be done.

There’s hope on the horizon. According to eMarketer, by 2015 US online video advertising will double in size to $2.16 billion.

Get ready for four more years of camera phone video clips.

Flickr CC-licensed photo by JcOlivera.com

TweetThis year news apps were either horrible villains or lifesaving heroes depending on your perspective. But what about apps for journalists — for reporters who need information and tools on the go? I’m not talking about podcasting or video editing apps. I’m talking about mobile and cloud-based tools that the average journalist will use on a regular or even day-to-day basis. Here are my top eight choices that either launched or received significant upgrades in 2010.

1: Rapportive

Mac, PC, Firefox, Safari, Mailplane, Fluid and Chrome; free

This is my favorite tool of 2010. As my co-worker Marshall wrote last March: “Stop what you are doing and install this plugin.” He wasn’t kidding. Rapportive replaces the ads in your Gmail account with publicly available information about the person who sent you the email: links to their social networking accounts, their photo and biographical info, even a live feed of their tweets. Not only that, if you mouse over other email addresses included in the email, those people’s info shows up, too. At right is what the right half of an email from my boss looks like.

Suddenly, the sources you exchange email with have a face, and even better, their background info is at your fingertips.

It’s not omniscient. Rapportive displays data based on the specific email address that the sender is using. If they use a different email to log in to social networks, then those accounts won’t show up. One fun bonus is that it finds some hilariously old accounts. You’ll be surprised how many people have long-forgotten Friendster profiles.

2: Simplenote

Mac, PC, iPhone, iPad, Android, Web; free/paid (no ads)

This is my second most-used tool of 2010. By itself, Simplenote, is, well, pretty simple. It’s a note-taking app that syncs what you write — whether you’re using a mobile device or a computer — live to the Web. It’s been around for two years but got a very significant update (tags, versioning, word count, sharing) in August. Its real power lies in its ability to work with a host of other desktop and mobile apps and browser extensions. Once you link to one of those tools, you no longer have to pay attention to Simplenote. It stays in the background, instantly syncing what you write to the cloud.

For instance, I use an app called Notational Velocity for pretty much everything I write. I like it because it stores what I write within the app; I don’t have any folders full of old documents. When I started using Notational Velocity I linked it to Simplenote and then forgot about Simplenote completely. But no matter where I go, no matter what computer or smartphone I use, I have access to everything I am working on or have written in the past.

True, there are plenty of other cloud-connected note-taking apps out there (Notespark, Evernote, etc.), but none have the simplicity and versatility of Simplenote.

3: Photoshop mobile app

iPhone, iPad, Android; free

Like note-taking apps, there are tons of image-editing tools out there. The Photoshop mobile app is a simple powerhouse that outperforms everything else. It meets my criteria for an on-the-go reporting tool: it’s stable, powerful and easy to use.

If you want hip filters and splashy effects, this isn’t for you. But if you need to quickly and easily color correct or make cropping/rotating changes to an image before you send it back to your newsroom or post it on your blog, this is your best bet. Over the course of 2010 it got several updates: new tools, Facebook and Flickr connection, and more.

4: Police and fire radio scanners

iPhone: 5-0 Radio; free/paid (extra feeds). Android: Scanner Radio; free/paid (no adds, more controls)

Even thought I work for a tech news site and don’t need an app like this, I love it. I wish I had something like it back when I was a daily reporter.

Scanner Radio for Android launched this year with more than 2,300 live police and fire scanners and weather radios from around the world. One interesting feature is that it will let you know when a specific feed has a lot of listeners. According to the developer, “You could have the app alert you when any scanner in the directory has more than 500 listeners, or, you could have it alert you when scanners you choose (such as those in your area) have more than, say, 50 listeners.”

I use 5-0 Radio, which launched in 2009. It claims to have “the largest collection of live police, firefighters, aircraft, railroad, marine, emergency, and ham radio” feeds.

5: USA.gov mobile app

iPhone, mobile Web; free

This may seem a little elementary, but the USA.gov app is unmatched as a portal for searching all federal, state, local, territorial, and tribal government websites, including in some cases vital birth, marriage and death records. It also does image searches and government recall searches.

Out in the field covering a fire and need some background? Punch your city name and “fire code” into the app. What about reporting about an accident at a job site? Searching for your city name plus “OSHA fatality” will bring up the agency’s website that lists accident reports.

6: Mobile document scanners

iPhone: JotNot Pro; $0.99. ScannerPro ($6.99), Document Scanner ($4.99), Scanner & Fax ($7.99)

These kinds of apps sometimes get mixed reviews (and I’m kind of cheating since some of then came out before 2010). They’re essentially camera apps that are really good at enhancing text in the images they take. Can you do the same thing by taking a photo and messing with the contrast and sharpness? Yes, in some cases. But often you can’t: the paper is wrinkled; the paper isn’t on a flat surface; you have multiple pages that need to be a single document; you need the resulting image to be a PDF.

I use JotNot Pro (right) mainly because it’s cheap. If I forked out $4.99 for something like Document Scanner I would also be able to do things like OCR (a process where images of words are turned into actual text). Each of the apps I listed have varying features that may or may not fit what you need from a tool like this.

7: DocumentCloud

Private beta

DocumentCloud made big headlines when it launched earlier this year. If you don’t remember, it’s “an index of primary source documents and a tool for annotating, organizing and publishing them on the web.” Since then, dozens of small and large news orgs have used it to annotate and augment public documents that they’ve published. As of August, there were close to 500 users and 100 newsrooms participating in the beta trial.

I don’t know when the service will go public (the development team has been rolling out updates for beta testers throughout the year), but when it does, it’s going to be an invaluable tool for newsrooms, regardless of their size.

8: The Onion mobile app

iPhone, Android; free

The Android app came out this year (the iPhone version launched in 2009), and it is, as The Onion says, the “last bastion of unbiased, reliable, and definitive news in a world dominated by superficiality, mediocrity, and non-Onion news outlets.” You need it.

Did I miss any of your favorites? What will you be using in 2011? Let me know about it in the comments.

[This post originally ran in September, 2008. I'm reposting it following the death of an Army journalist in Afghanistan last month.]

When the Iraq War began, I was sitting in a small steakhouse in rural Central California, and as the television screens lit up with grainy, phosphorescent splashes of color, the people around me began clapping. We all knew it was coming; the build up to the war had been years in the making. But I was the one stunned into silence, amazed by the satisfaction and appreciation on the faces of the people around me.


Yusafiyah, Iraq, 9/7/07. Photo by Senior Master Sgt. Brian L. Boone, U.S. Air Force.

The next day, the Department of Defense released its first press photo (stock photos shot by the DoD for media outlets to use) of the war — an image of Donald Rumsfeld in a press conference. Since then, the agency’s collection of media photos has grown into the hundreds. They’re fairly uniform: Soldiers run to helicopters that are blowing up walls of dust. Soldiers with guns search homes. They stand in streets having pleasant conversations with Iraqis and they peer around brick walls with their guns at the ready. There are never any dead bodies; the smiling Iraq children are always hugging smiling soldiers — the photos are propaganda at its most transparent and banal.

And the photos are, at times, beautiful. They were shot by people with an aesthetic eye for the moment, an eye for the dramatic and powerful. The truly artistic photos are rare — only a few each year. And they’re limited in their scope: dramatic composition and lighting is the best most photographers can pull off. But the images are striking and memorable all the same. Flipping through the last four years, I find myself pulled into the DoD’s narrative of the war.


Sather Air Base, Iraq, 3/12/08. Photo by Tech. Sgt. Jeffrey Allen, U.S. Air Force.


Camp Ar Ramadi, Iraq, 9/3/06. Photo by Tech. Sgt. Jeremy T. Lock, U.S. Air Force.

When I write that sentence I hear the echo of four-year-old applause in my words. I know the steak house diners were clapping for something different. Me appreciating a propaganda photo from the DoD is not the same as their Pavlovian response to foreigners dying along the axis of some fabricated argument for war. But it’s disingenuous to pretend the photos are independent from the government that created them. It’s like my relationship with the U.S. Army, which I despise for its role in the war, and the individual soldier, whom I respect for her service. Each one is an intrinsic part of the other, just like a photo and the events it depicts.

To like the photos does not mean I have to be an apologist of the war. But to like them brings me into a closer relationship with the powers that created this war than I would ever want. And so I try and balance on that line. I see the art. I hear my own clapping. And I remain coldly aware of what birthed these beautiful images.


Fair al Jair, Iraq, 12/16/07. Photo by Tech. Sgt. Adrian Cadiz, U.S. Air Force.


Wounded soldiers from Iraq being offloaded in Southwest Asia, 1/17/07. Photo by Staff Sgt.
Edward D. Holzapfel, U.S. Air Force.

Top photo: Near the Iraq/Syria border, 3/6/06. Photo by Staff Sgt. Aaron Allmon, U.S. Air Force.