Tag Archives: Steve Smith

Covering media job cuts – staff facing redundancy speak online

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Having set up a timeline dedicated to reporting on the sweeping job cuts affecting both senior and junior journalists alike, a trend is emerging for laid-off staff to use blogs, Twitter and other online sites and tools to capture their redundancy.

Reports such as Martin Gee’s set of Flickr images from his last day at the San Jose Mercury give a highly individual picture of how these cuts are being felt on a personal level beyond the redundancy figures and prediction stats.

In the summer, the Columbia Journalism Review started its ‘Parting Thoughts’ series, posting responses from journalists leaving the industry or facing redundancy.

At the Gannett Blog, former Gannett editor Jim Hopkins crowdsourced a blogpost of lay-offs by the publisher, listed by newspaper area – at time of writing redundancies at 72 of Gannett’s 85 US titles affected by the company’s latest round of job cuts were accounted for in Hopkins’ post.

In an open blog post last week, Ryan Carson, co-founder of web application design and events agency Carsonified, used the company’s blog to share his thoughts about staff cuts and give the reasons for making them.

Carson went on to give tips for companies looking to recession-proof their business (points that some commenters on the post argue are common sense no matter what the economic situation).

The Spokesman-Review has used its Daily Briefing blog to cover staff leaving in an equally personal and open way. News of senior staff exiting the paper, such as editor Steve Smith and assistant managing editor Carla Savalli, was broken on the blog and posts have also been penned by outgoing journalists, including Thuy Dzuong:

“Folks, it’s been fun but The layoff list for non-managers has been finalized, and I’m on it.”

Last week Silicon Alley Insider built a ‘real time’-style page to cover lay-offs at parent company Yahoo, updating it as new info came in.

(UPDATE – The Rocky Mountain News has launched iwantmyrocky.com to canvas support for the newspaper)

Despite the sad circumstances, the way in which journalists and media workers are facing redundancy in these examples shows a real engagement with online tools. A personal picture of what is happening to the industry is being documented for future reference by these staff members expressing themselves so openly (and perhaps significantly being ‘allowed’ to express themselves by their past/present employers).

What is more, while they may not hold the answers to the problems currently faced by the media industry, they shed light on how these issues are perceived and felt on the frontline. Something which employers should read and learn from.

Ode to a newspaperman, by Steven A. Smith

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Steve Smith, editor of The Spokesman-Review, has posted a eulogy for the newspaperman – “the bison of the information age. The wooly mammoth and, bless us, the dodo.”

“The old newspapermen have died or are dying. One of my great mentors, Dan Wyant, passed away just a week or two ago. The younger, my generation, are fading, too, facing a future in which journalists serve products and platforms not communities and their newspapers. The young turks have become the old farts. We pray at the old altars. We worship the old gods. The new media moguls have their shiny new religion. And our passing is seen by them as both timely and just,” writes Smith.

“But there is more to be lost than warm, rosy recollections. It’s not all about nostalgia.

“No instrument will ever serve the public interest so relentlessly as the daily newspaper. New media will successfully distribute data and information. “Communities of interest” will develop around niche products. And while print newspapers will survive to serve a small, elite audience, they never again will serve the larger geographic communities that gave them life and purpose. Democracy will have to find a new public square.”

He admits to indulging in nostalgia, but what makes this post so interesting is that Smith shows he’s not stuck in that past. He knows the industry is changing (for better and for worse) and manages to capture that shift on a personal level and one that will strike a chord with many contemporaries. Most refreshingly it’s not preaching to the next generation of journalists nor is it dismissing the printed past.

Online Journalism Scandinavia: Norway’s Aftenposten to webcast editorial meetings

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Norway’s newspaper of record, the Schibsted-owned Aftenposten, is to start webcasting parts of its editorial meetings.

Following of a newspaper debate on media transparency where American regional newspaper Spokesman-Review, which has webcast its editorial meetings since June 2006, was upheld as an ideal in terms of editorial transparency, the paper’s editor-in-chief Hans Erik Matre told attendees it was time to open up more of the editorial process to public view.

“We are considering webcasting our editorial meetings, starting this autumn. However, instances were we broadcast these live online, in full, will probably be limited,” he later told Journalism.co.uk.

“What we have concrete plans for, is publishing parts of our editorial meetings online to get feedback. This could either be to get reader perspectives on the evaluation of our stories, in retrospect, or to involve readers more upfront in the planning stage of big stories – say on healthcare.”

Steve Smith, the editor-in-chief of Spokesman-Review, visited Oslo recently. He told Journalism.co.uk webcasting editorial meetings was a minor programme in the scheme of things for the newspaper, which also use reader polls and journalist-written blogs actively.

“Our webcasts have 40-50 viewers in the morning, 20-25 in the afternoon. It’s mostly our competitors or people who have, or think they might have, a stake in what is being said. We attract few viewers simply because these are boring meetings. It’s symbolic: the fact that it is there, that it is an option, is important. We also break out pieces of the webcast and put them on blogs when we are dealing with controversial issues,” he explained.

He added: “The whole transparency costs next to nothing. The challenge is time: I would much rather spend all my time blogging than being an editor.”

In May, Liverpool Daily Post (LDP) became the first British newspaper to webcast an editorial meeting. Mark Comerford talks to LDP’s editor Mark Thomas about their “transparency” experiments here.

Social Media Journalist: “Our future isn’t traditional online but in mobile media platforms,” Steve Smith, Spokesman-Review

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Journalism.co.uk talks to reporters across the globe working at the collision of journalism and social media about how they see it changing their industry. This week, Steve Smith from The Spokesman-Review, USA.

Steve Smith, editor of the Spokesman-Review

1. Who are you and what do you do?
I am the editor of The Spokesman-Review, a 90,000 circulation daily serving several counties in eastern Washington state and north Idaho.

As editor, I supervise all news and editorial operations, including our website, our other digital platforms and our radio operations.

I have a staff of 124 full-time employees in the newsroom and an annual budget of about $9 million. I have been here since July 2002.

Before coming here, I worked in a variety of roles at seven other newspapers in six different cities.

2. Which web or mobile-based social media tools do you use on a daily basis and why?
I use YouTube daily because we post all of our multimedia on the site and also are capable of embedding YouTube videos on our blogs, including my blog, “News is a Conversation”.

I use MySpace and Facebook when hiring. We check the profiles/pages of prospective employees and actually have rejected applicants because of questionable behavior observed on their pages.

I also go into MySpace frequently to check on the pages devoted to our entertainment magazine, “7”.

In addition, I check several industry blogs daily. Several times a day, I check Romenesko, the must-read industry blog on the Poynter Institute for Media Studies site.

I do very little of this on my mobile, though I do use it for blog work, reading and posting.

I’m still somewhat of a troglodyte (no MySpace page of my own) so I don’t use the mobile to access video or social networking sites.

The Spokesman-Review is the pioneer newspaper (in the United States at least) for transparency. Our transparent newsroom initiative is built around interaction with people in our communities. Blogging and the various blogging tools are critical to us.

We also webcast news meetings and provide as much two-way interaction as possible via chats and other real-time opportunities. Increasingly, we’re developing transparency systems that work on mobile devices.

3. Of the thousands of social media tools available, could you single one out as having the most potential for news either as a publishing or a news gathering tool?
Blogging from the field has the most potential for us at the moment. We’re in the process of developing ideas for 7 that would have real non-media people posting live reports from concerts, nightclubs and other events.

We’re also involved in some beta proposals for training citizen journalists and giving them publishing platforms.

I have no idea where all of this will lead. We’re experimenting with some developing Google applications such as Google Maps and Google Street View to see how they might enhance our blogs.

4. And the most overrated in your opinion?
Tough question. I am willing to try anything with any tool. Until something proves to be useless, I won’t dismiss it.

I do believe our future isn’t in traditional online but in mobile media platforms, the potential of which is yet to be understood. That may drive us to networking tools that enhance the mobile experience.

To reference one single overrated tool, as it were, I’d have to mention Wikipedia. There is an enormous amount of information there. I go to the site often for informal searches. But journalists beware. It is a bottomless quicksand pool that will easily send reporters and editors off in the wrong direction, at best wasting time and, at worst, producing factually inaccurate, even humiliating journalism.

Journalism.co.uk: Spokesman-Review uses interactive map to help readers in weather emergency

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A US newspaper has added a new element to the coverage of local weather emergencies by developing a interactive map to assist affected readers.

The Spokesman-Review, in Washington State, developed the Help Your Neighbors scheme to match readers’ offers of help with those needing assistance by plotting their locations on an interactive map.

The project was conceived as a quick response to sudden snow fall and effectively turned the paper into an extra emergency service, editor Steve Smith told Journalism.co.uk.

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