seattlepi.com: Go Web-Native, Please

And so the  Seattle Post-Intelligencer, the former No. 2 newspaper in a 2-paper town, has dropped its pulp-and-petrol format. Its paymasters at Hearst Corp. have decided to keep it going as a news-and-local-information operation, but to publish only online.

Bully, I say. I’ve long been agitating for this outcome. Congrats to the suits at Hearst for making a brave decision to experiment during a time when every dime counts.

It’s vital for legacy news operations to explore online-only publishing. And not just to see if  they can make money this way, although that’s certainly the most important question.

But this will also provide a good chance to see how–and, more to the point, whether–journalists who carry the ink virus in their blood can figure out how reporting, writing, editing and publishing are different when done for online-only readers.

Many  journalists, including very good ones, do not understand this. I say this with firsthand knowledge.

I recently was a judge in the “online” category for a national journalism contest. Some great work was entered–important, richly-reported stories that serve the public interest. Some were produced by online-only, publicly funded journalism organizations, others by multimedia organizations, others by legacy newsrooms.

But I was surprised to see how few of the entries, even in the online category–even those produced by purely digital operations!–seemed to embrace, or even acknowledge, the medium for which they were created. With the exception of two inspired blogs, the other significant entries were essentially long-form–really, really long-form–traditional feature or investigative stories.

[Aside: As required by the rules of the contest, which were set up mainly for print journalism, the entries came to us judges printed out on paper. "Just send the urls," said I. Um, no, said they. The whole lot of them showed up one morning on my doorstep, as heavy as a cinder block.]

Some of the entries contained interactive elements as decor–a photo gallery here, an audio clip of an interview with the author there. Links to sources riding in the sidebar like Google ads, but smaller. But I didn’t see one that truly embraced the digital medium.

Not to belabor the entries to that contest. My point is that web-native journalism is not print journalism distributed on a screen.

Journalism created for the web needs to accommodate the behavior of web users and exploit the tools of reporting and analysis that only an interactive digital, social platform can provide. For instance:

Interactive maps that show what happened where, ideally presented with a timeline that shows when it happened. Ideally with items linked to content that explains the item and takes you to the reporting about it.

Links to high-value content such as public documents, full interview files, video with reporting value [i.e. security camera shots]–and to reports off-site, including those done by other journalists, to provide context and diversity. [Journalists fight that last one to the death. "Why send people away from our site?" they cry. That's a subject for another day, but go to this blog entry by Scott Karp for a seminal document on link journalism.]

Datavisualizations that interpret and present data interactively in a way that words or print-style graphics cannot.

Automated data sources that continue to update long after the story publishes to keep it current and allow users to follow the story after it’s “done.”

Tight, fact-rich copy, delivered in screen-sized chunks and optimized for online consumption–not the malingering, flaccid narratives produced by journalists who realize they are working in a format with no space limitations.

Anecdotes and personal stories presented as sidebars, via appropriate multimedia, such as video, in which people tell their own stories rather than have them filtered through the brain of a reporter.

It’s far too early to pass judgment on seattlepi.com, which is just a few weeks into its only-only adventure. It is being led by Michelle Nicolosi, whose record as a reporter [Pulitzer, investigative reporting, fertility fraud], veteran online editor, digital business operator and university instructor of online journalism makes her extremely well qualified for this job.

So far the site includes local print-style news reports, a bunch of blogs, aggregated wire service and Hearst Corp. content, and opportunities for Seattleans to provide content. We should assume this the “before,” not the “after” online-only seattlepi.com

My hope: That the 20-person team doesn’t behave like print journalists doing business-as-usual reporting, playing local-news scoop against the Seattle Times.

A news operation unburdened by a print product can do things the printists cannot. Users will choose the news source that serves local news and online users the best.

It would be a shame if this opportunity to explore online news creation were squandered not because it didn’t produce good print-style journalism–but because it did.