Cynthia McCune's List: JACC

• There is no mass audience.
• There is no barrier to publication.
• The cost of operating legacy organizations increases indefinitely as profit decreases indefinitely.
• There is nothing cyclical about this change.

Six months ago, Hill says, he wouldn't have even considered approaching the story this way. "I think I would have thought about the story visually, but I would not have incorporated it into my work. Nor would I have thought that I would have had the license to do that here," he says.

That changed in the spring, when NPR put Hill through an intense, seven-week training course in multimedia journalism that encouraged him to expand his repertoire of reporting and storytelling skills.

This year and next, NPR is tackling an ambitious and comprehensive plan to transform itself into a multimedia force: The organization is asking all of its journalists to rethink their storytelling and audience interaction the way Hill has. Most news organizations are at least paying lip service to this multiplatform goal, but NPR is putting its money (and the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation's) where its mouth is: The foundation gave NPR $1.5 million to train its 450 editorial employees in digital storytelling skills and to pay for substitutes to fill in for them while they learn. NPR is putting an additional $1 million into the training.

What's more, NPR News has nearly doubled its digital staffers to 30 in the past year. The hires include two videographers. NPR aims to overhaul its Web site by early next year; it is expanding the offerings on its year-old mobile site; and in the last three months, it launched a suite of social media tools and an open application programming interface that allows independent Web publishers to use NPR content on their own sites.

Says NPR Vice President for News Ellen Weiss, "We're going to get our stories and our storytelling and our journalism out to people wherever they are and in whatever form they want to experience it."

To put NPR's journalism in front of its audience - whether they're listening to the radio or a podcast, surfing the Web or scanning the screen of a mobile phone - requires not just new training but also a fundamental cultural shift, says Dick Meyer, NPR Digital Media's editorial director.

"What we really want to do first is to build a culture that is respectful of the modern news consumer, knowing that the modern news consumer wants news on demand, wants it to be timely, wants it to be authentic and wants it to be noncommercial from us," Meyer says.

NPR's mobile site, launched last year, is growing quickly, and included partnerships with 44 stations as of August. Each local site offers a blend of local news from member stations and national content from NPR.

About half of NPR's mobile visitors (about 700,000 to 800,000 per month) use iPhones, the major driver of the site's growth. The presentation on many other handsets is "clunky, text-heavy, so you're encouraged not to present lots of good stuff or much content. In the iPhone experience, there's a whole lot more you can do,"

They're distributing their content in another ambitious way: This summer, NPR launched an open application program interface (API), a set of programming tools that lets Web sites more easily interact and share content. The API will also let member stations choose NPR content focused on their regions and display it alongside their own local reporting. In the future, stations will be able to make their own content available to other sites using the API.

Web developers have already used the API to create widgets that showcase NPR content, including an NPR podcast player on Facebook
and an interactive world map that links to NPR stories.

Tips on How to become facilitators of conversation and not just ghostwriters for execs:



• Monitor key blogs/forums. Send execs 3-5 relevant posts a week (think briefing sheets!). When you send these posts over, send 2-3 posts on which they can comment
• Coach them on comments, particularly focusing on the how–formatting, tone, disclosure.  If you need to, draft a rough outline or template but let them add the meat and personalize it
• Shove a camera in their face and ask them one question.  Great way to do a fast video blog post or a video comment on blogs that have that capability
• Brainstorm a list of ideas for blog posts.  Do this monthly and create an Editorial Calendar so they don’t forget!
• Monitor Twitter and FriendFeed for Tweets or FF Posts that need responses. Again, coach them on best responses

I think the new building block of journalism needs to be the topic. I don’t mean that in the context of news site topic pages, which are just catalogues of links built to kiss up to Google SEO. Those are merely collections of articles, and articles are inadequate.

Instead, I want a page, a site, a thing that is created, curated, edited, and discussed. It’s a blog that treats a topic as an ongoing and cumulative process of learning, digging, correcting, asking, answering. It’s also a wiki that keeps a snapshot of the latest knowledge and background. It’s an aggregator that provides annotated links to experts, coverage, opinion, perspective, source material. It’s a discussion that doesn’t just blather but that tries to accomplish something (an extension of an article like this one that asks what options there are to bailout a bailout). It’s collaborative and distributed and open but organized.

After 1990, of course, the effects of the Internet kicked in. When writing "The Vanishing Newspaper," I underestimated the velocity of the Internet effect. It is now clear that it is as disruptive to today's newspapers as Gutenberg's invention of movable type was to the town criers, the journalists of the 15th century.

The town crier's audience was limited to the number of people who could be assembled within the range of an unamplified human voice. Printing changed everything. It made the size of the audience theoretically limitless and, by the creation of multiple records, enabled more reliable preservation of knowledge.

The Internet wrecks the old newspaper business model in two ways. It moves information with zero variable cost, which means it has no barriers to growth, unlike a newspaper, which has to pay for paper, ink and transportation in direct proportion to the number of copies produced.

And the Internet's entry costs are low. Anyone with a computer can become a publisher, as Matt Drudge demonstrated when he broke the Monica Lewinsky story in 1998 and countless bloggers have shown in the decade since. These cost advantages make it feasible to make a business out of highly specialized information, a trend that was under way well before the Internet.

But the time for launching this strategy is growing short if it has not already passed. The most powerful feature of the Internet is that it encourages low-cost innovation, and anyone can play. I am ashamed to admit that "The Vanishing Newspaper" contains no mention of Craig Newmark. The significance of craigslist is not just that it uses the Internet but that it empowers public-spirited motivation. Newmark is what business school people call a "bad competitor" because he appears more interested in serving society than making money.

He does make money by charging certain kinds of users, but the bulk of his service is free. He is like Henry Ford who, after introducing the Model T, lowered prices, increased wages and concentrated on market share rather than maximizing profit. When challenged by shareholders unhappy that their dividends weren't higher, he replied that they should view his company as "an instrument of service rather than as a machine for making money."

What service supplied by newspapers is the least vulnerable?

I still believe that a newspaper's most important product, the product least vulnerable to substitution, is community influence. It gains this influence by being the trusted source for locally produced news, analysis and investigative reporting about public affairs.