I’ve been kicking around an idea after reading the book Outliers: The Story of Success. One of the major themes of the book is that success doesn’t come just from having raw talent or outworking the competition. Successful people usually have talent, work ethic, AND are able to put them to use to become experts in an area just before a major change takes place.

It isn’t hard to draw parallels to the accounts in the book and what we’re seeing with the newspaper industry. The people who are successful at the end of the upheaval will be those who’ve become experts at the new rules and new tools of the game.

If I had to name the top three aspects of journalism going forward, I’d say it would be wise to focus on these:

• Accurate
• Real Time
• Concise

Obviously, accuracy will always be a staple of journalism. Without accuracy we’re wandering into the realm of rumor and fiction. The market for accurate information isn’t changing. In fact, it’s probably growing due to the ease of sharing information real time and concisely. We don’t have to look far back in time to see why.

The idea of delivering accurate information real time and in a concise manner–that’s the real challenge. The new rules don’t have deadlines and editors cutting articles down to fit on pages. Instead, the new rules are throngs of first person accounts being broadcast in 140 characters or less as events are happening. The new rules are 140 character attention spans that spread inaccurate information as fast (or faster) than accurate information.

What are you doing today to put yourself in the position of being a trusted source of accurate and timely information served up in an individual sized package?

Image Credit

Here’s a pretty cool service being launched on YouTube to help citizen journalists with tips and videos. I can imagine there are lots of great ideas there for those with a journalism background as well!

I’m more of a reader than a video watcher myself, but this is a great potential way to catch up on technology really quickly and conveniently.

HT Tech Crunch.

I was watching an online conversation on Twitter yesterday about the NFL players whose boat capsized and the rescue attempt to find them.

XarkGirl made the comment that she had told her coworkers in the newsroom that she saw the story break on Twitter (which is were I saw it as well) and their response was quite typical. Not surprising but typical.

She wrote:

So i’m brgging in newsroom that twtr had NFL boat stry hour ago. Dude sez: some people work & don’t have time to Twittr. God in heaven.

Her tweet got me to thinking about how many times I’ve heard this comment as well. She went on to write that the person who said this was waiting for updates by watching the television in the newsroom.

Here is lies the problem as I see it. If journalists don’t even attempt to learn new technology, then where will they be in five years? One of the biggest mistakes I’ve seen in newsrooms and hearing from other journalists is the lack of commitment from coworkers and management to embrace new technology. The other downside is, and I’ve gone through this personally, when we do become technology evangelists, we basically are chastised for our eagerness.

This isn’t uncommon unfortunately.

Another journalist/editor from Jackson put a question up on his Facebook account yesterday asking if he should tell a teenage friend the realities of the journalism business. He wrote that his school-aged buddy was smitten with print journalism.

He wrote and I’ll paraphrase: Should I try to rescue her from this impulse?

He was serious.

All of us who responded said he should tell her the truth. One person responded that many new journalists find a 35mm camera romantic and nostalgic and those things needed to be taken into account which I thought was interesting, and very accurate.

I started out with a 35mm and we didn’t move to color until the mid-nineties. In less than 15 years, technology changed.

I see both of these online dilemmas from two dedicated journalists connected.

As things change, we have a choice. We learn and evolve with changing technology and online tools, or we don’t. I’m going with door number one.

And one last note in my observations this morning, journalism is not dead. The current business model for the industry is what is ailing like a fish out of water but journalism remains viable.

It’s important to remember the difference.

The Tennessean has an editorial on social media from Mark Silverman.

Most important, you’re now becoming your own editor. You can weigh the information our reporters develop, along with information provided by all of these other sources. You can mine the databases we post to dig deeply into issues. And, you can trade information and opinions with your neighbors.

Increasingly, people will see beyond narrow niches. Perhaps the new definition of mass media is a collection of niches woven together by social networking.

The good thing about this article, which you should read because it’s a good one, is that you are seeing more newspapers talking about social and online media.

Patrick Beeson tipped us to this two-part story at NPR about the impact of a city losing their daily newspaper.

In cities around the country, such as Atlanta and San Francisco, the major newspaper in town is losing money. Financial analysts say they expect some big dailies to fold, perhaps as soon as this year.

But what would it mean for a city if its newspaper were to disappear?

I talk about learning new technology, and my utter failings at it sometimes, because of the state of emergency that is going on at many papers which are on financially perilous ground at the moment. Box sales are down, ad revenues are down as well as subscriptions and everyone is looking at new efforts to monetize news delivery.

With that said, I love soy ink on the tips of my fingers. I love the jump to finish the story and letters to the editor (especially crazy ones.) There is something satisfying about grimacing at the editorial page or reading the latest sports story.

For the reporters that work for me, I evangelize that news won’t stop but the delivery is going to be different in the coming months and years. That we need to step it up a notch to remain relevant. People want news. That’s not going to change, campers.

However, no one can predict what our readers will do next and where they will find their news. Will the need for a tangible page of newsprint remain valuable to the audience or will the immediacy of a free product on the web win out?

These are questions a lot of folks are asking.

The Wired Blog Network says it’s more tired than wired.

What say you?

As I’m the NewsZilla portion of this blog, I’ll let you guys (and Sadcox) take this one.

Wait! This happened to me as well as countless others.

Millions of cubicle dwellers across the country helped set records for Internet traffic on Tuesday as they watched online video of the inauguration ceremonies — or at least tried to. The overwhelming demand meant that some Web sites and data networks had trouble keeping up, forcing many people to turn to less cutting-edge forms of media.

“It was really frustrating to have this great technology and still not be able to watch the speech,” said Dan Robinson, who runs the box office at the Julliard School in New York. “I had to use this TV from the early ’80s and some rabbit ears to watch it.”

The product has to be stable and in my neck of the woods, it wasn’t.

Apparently I wasn’t the only one.

I have tried to be as transparent as possible in regards to my lack, and blinding fear, of online technology. I think I’m better than the average bear in some respects and completely incompetent in others.

I believe that some of us, and it doesn’t matter if you are a journalist or not, let the little tech problems we run into completely gobsmack us. When I look on my FriendFeed account and see everyone from Robert Scoble to Louis Gray talking about new tech, video implementations, computer plug-ins or CSS coding, I glaze over. I made the mistake about four years ago of buying some books on CSS/HTML coding that completely and positively confused me.

Enter Sadcox.

I have a humble blog that I post silly things about zombies, my obsession with working at Weekly World News, items about myself that I call Annoying Autobiographical Pauses (a term I got from Stephen King’s Danse Macabre), politics, running my dog Mabel for president and other inane things that amuse me.

And thus the idea for NewsTechZilla came from that it was those small, and not so small things on our blogs, that confounded me to the point of me pulling my teeth out with a rope.

Sadcox wrote last night of an ongoing issue I’ve had on my blog regarding comments. I’ll let him tell you the whole thing, but because I wasn’t sure what I was doing, I became extremely frustrated. I want my silly Flickr pictures on my sidebar. I’ve tried to FTP the plug-in a dozen times. I’m not making it work.

These things go from small to huge obstacles for those of us who are learning technology as we go.

Do you see where I’m going with this? Sometimes for those of us who are novices regarding technology become completely overwhelmed by the little stuff that we won’t tackle the larger items that could send our blogs/websites to the next level.

What are some of the things some of you have had issues with that have set you back?

Let’s ask Sadcox!

Ok, this is the kind of stuff I absolutely love. A reader asks a question about a project he’s doing with some students, and we’re able to use that to show professional journalists how to cover a story in real time on a blog with a mobile phone.

Reader Dan writes:

A small group of seniors from my local rural Kansas high school are attending the presidential inauguration and I want to create an online experience for local friends, family, community members to follow this event, through the eyes and thoughts of the students. I’m thinking the students can text their thoughts to Twitter and I can use a hashtag to allow others to follow them there. Then I want them to post cell phone photos and Flip camera video to a Flickr group, so people can watch what the students are seeing too.

I then want this all to feed to my Wordpress blog (backroadsnewsroom.com) I’ve been experimenting with this, but am still having a bit of trouble getting it all to flow well. Do you have any input for me?

First of all, this is such a cool project and experience for the kids. Secondly, this is a perfect example of how journalism is changing. A huge event in history is going to be covered through the perspective of some young people from a small town for their local community, but their coverage is going to be available worldwide. Unbelievably cool!

So what does Dan need to do this project? He already has a WordPress blog ($0)…he just needs a way to pull stuff from Twitter ($0) and Flickr ($0) into it. He wants to create his own “mashup”. Assuming the Flickr group has been created and all the kids have Twitter accounts, all that’s left to complete this project is a Yahoo! account ($0).

Oh yeah, this how-to….$0

Yahoo! has a really cool service called Yahoo! Pipes that lets you create your own mashups from just about anything. A couple of design considerations for Dan’s mashup are that he wants the kids to use hashtags, which is a Twitter convention to categorize tweets, and he only wants his students’ tweets (he said it was a small group) to show up in the mashup. This will keep people other than his students from showing up on the site.

This is very easy to do in Yahoo! Pipes. In fact, I’ve created a Pipe (it’s right here) that does exactly this, and it’s output is displayed further down this page .

My Pipe pulls the feed from my Twitter account and Newscoma’s Twitter account and filters only tweets that contain links to websites, which are indicated by an “http”. You can find the RSS feed for a Twitter account up at the top right.

I’m also pulling the feed from this Flickr group for Maui, Hawaii. The feed for this group is located at the bottom of the group page.

The “union” function merges all these feeds together,

and the “sort” function sorts these posts by their publish date.

How does this solve Dan’s problem? Mostly because he doesn’t even have to do everything I just did. He (and you) can use this Pipe any time you’d like.

All Dan has to do is:

1. Clone the Pipe I made to his account–Yahoo! makes this easy…just click the button!
2. Use the students’ Twitter feeds instead of ours–add as many as you’d like
3. Change the filter from “http” to “#inauguration” or whatever hashtag he decides to use
4. Change the Flickr group to the one he sets up for the students.

Viola–a live feed of what the students are experiencing at the Inauguration in chronological order.

Now all that’s left is to display the output of the Pipe on his site. Yahoo! makes this easy too:

1. Click on the “Get as a badge” link for the Pipe
2. (optional) Choose the “Customize the size, type and settings of your Badge” so you can set the height and width to 100%.
3. Paste the code into your site. Yahoo! generates a JavaScript that you can copy and paste directly into your post or page (make sure you’re editing using “html”–not “visual”).

The JavaScript for the one I’ve created looks like this:

<script src=”http://pipes.yahoo.com/js/listbadge.js”>
{“pipe_id”:”BH23SUzZ3RGILudirbQIDg”,”_btype”:”list”,”width”:”100%”,”height”:”100%”}</script>

Seriously, that’s the only code you have to deal with. Now you have a feed that’s constantly being updated by a several people (or just you) and displayed on your site.

Note: If you edit your post later and your Pipe all of a sudden isn’t working, it’s probably because your editor commented out the attributes. You can either remove the comments or just repost the Pipe.

Here’s what the Pipe I created looks like (if you’re reading through our RSS feed you’ll have to come to the site to see the Pipe)–again, it is constantly being updated. As soon as one of us adds a link in a tweet or something is added to the Flickr group, this will change.

You can stop reading here if you’d like…the rest is automatically generated by Yahoo! Pipes. But feel free to include your own examples in the comments!

I admit it.I’m not very confident when it comes to doing things online. It’s doesn’t always jive with my comfort zone.

I’ve killed a template more than once, I still can’t figure out how to put my flickr pictures on my personal blog in the sidebar (it worked before I started hosting my domain) and I’m literally terrified of upgrading.

I’m afraid I’ll break it. Other things I’m fine with such as writing and communicating. I’m the kind of person that is not afraid of speaking in public, I’ve trained at conferences all over the United States and I’m not afraid of a little controversy although I don’t necessarily seek it out.

The question for Sadcox today might be how does on get over the fear of “breaking” a blog or a website?

Confidence is different for different people. How do old school news hacks jump through the open window in learning new technology?