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When Your Newspaper Wishes You ‘Good Morning.’

I’ve been spending most of my time this week looking at the front pages of newspapers. It’s a strange thing, almost, to see so many dailies still printing. Two years ago, after the Rocky Mountain News closed, the prediction was that dozens of daily papers would be gone by now.

But they’re not.

Still, having now sorted through hundreds of front pages lately, I’ve seen an unusual thing happening out in a few small papers out in California, including the Lodi News-Sentinel. Here’s what their front page looked like yesterday.

But let’s zoom in a bit closer, to the bottom left corner of the page:

It’s quirky, yes. But why stop with a little blurb? Why not blow this out into a weekly feature: Readers’ Lives, with profiles of their businesses and families?

What I’m really saying is: Why does a news outlet have to limit itself to quirky stuff like this in order to cultivate the best stories from its community?

I’ve said it before: engage everywhere.

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An Open Letter to the PR Firm That Represents AT&T Regarding Potential Dunk Tank Promotional Opportunities.

Dear Fleishman-Hillard,

You’re the PR agency that represents AT&T. They’re one of your biggest clients. They’re also one of the largest companies on the planet, and for the last few years, I have been among the millions of AT&T customers who have come to decide that they are totally screwing me over.

I pay AT&T for both my cellular and Internet service, and I dislike both. Every time my phone loses service, and every time the wireless router at my apartment has a random, unexplained outage, I find myself quietly coveting Verizon, the AT&T competitor who may be just as evil.

I try not to take out my frustrations on AT&T’s customer care representatives. It’s tough to get mad at a kid in a call center on another continent. Sanjay, for anything I’ve said before: I didn’t mean it.

But I would like to vent to someone. And for you, the PR team behind AT&T: I think I’ve got a way for you to offer customer catharsis and win the Internet for a day.

Two words: dunk tank.

Go rent a park, say, the one next to the Golden Gate Bridge. Fly out 10 of your most dissatisfied customers. The ones who’ve said things to Sanjay that they cannot merely repent for on Yom Kippur. The ones who blame AT&T for running their business or their marriage or their lives. The ones who’d rather lick an oil-soaked pelican than say something nice about their iPhone service.

Find those guys. Fly them out to the park, and line them up in front of a dunk tank. Get the AT&T board of directors, and have them sit their turns in it. Let the angry customers finally get our collective revenge on someone within the AT&T family.

Consider the dunk tank a peace offering from AT&T to all of us who feel wronged. The rest of us will thank you for it.

And if you’re looking for someone to cast the first ball, let me know. I might have some dropped-call issues to work out.

Thanks,
Dan

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Where Everybody Knows Your Name.

Biloxi is not a town of comfort. It has its simple pleasures — the Waffle House, the Whataburger, the Five Guys — but when it comes to some brand names, head elsewhere. The nearest Bank of America is in New Orleans. So is the nearest Kinkos. When Target opened here, they held a celebration just a notch below Mardi Gras.

But what they lack in brand names, they make up for in service. I stopped by the local print shop today to ask about printing a few copies of this magazine I’ve been working up. I hadn’t been in there since early July, when they’d printed out my new business cards.

So I went in, reintroduced myself — hi, I’m a reporter, in town for a few months, yada yada — and asked if they could do this print job. They couldn’t, but they did suggest a competitor who could.

And as I was walking out, the owner of the store called out, “Good seeing you again, Dan.” The door closed behind me, and I swiveled around and went back inside. “Wait,” I said, stopping the owner before she headed back to her office. “How did you remember my name?”

She looked right back at me. “That’s just what we do,” she said.

So here’s to PDQ Printers in St. Martin, Miss. If you’re in town, stop by and let them know Dan sent you. They’ll know who you’re talking about.

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This Was My Favorite Story To Write Here in Biloxi. Please Stop Asking.

In my three months in Biloxi, the question that’s been my “Do you play basketball?” is, “What’s your favorite story from down here?” I’ve been told of miracles and horrors, and I’ve become intimately familiar with the inner workings of both local government and insurance contracts. But my favorite story to write down here didn’t have anything to do with rebuilding homes or fighting BP. It’s about — and my mother could have predicted this for you a few months ago, for the record — football.

Specifically, an ex-football coach I interviewed during my first week in Biloxi. Here’s one of those stories that, in any other journalism job, I don’t find. It’s almost wholly unrelated to the rebuilding efforts in Biloxi, at least at surface level, and its central character isn’t intimately connected to any of the subjects I’ve covered down here[1. e.g.: The insurance industry, BP, business development, gaming, tourism, mental health, egregious lawsuits, et al.]. No rational boss says, Sure, Dan, spend an hour on a Thursday afternoon talking to a guy who doesn’t have any leads for you.

But here’s a story that I got by 1.) Not being in a rush, and 2.) Being okay with wasting a few minutes and listening. The result: the story that I had the most fun writing.

You can go back to asking me how the weather is up here, Biloxi.

(N.B. The photo above is from a D’Iberville HS football game last month. It has no connection to anything I’ve written above other than that it involves a football.)

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Report: Newsworthy Event Happens During Protest Against Newsworthiness.

The story is meant to be a laugh, right there next to “Fla. Man Punches Shark in the Face, Snaps Photo” and the slightly more straightforward “Playboy Model Detained After Allegedly Trying to Open Plane Door Mid-Flight.”

This one starts, “A Norwegian radio journalist quit on the air after complaining about her job and saying she wouldn’t read the day’s news because ‘nothing important has happened anyway,'” and the rest of it writes itself.

So it’s a laugh. It’s a woman quitting her job in the craziest way possible — a newsman denying the existence of news — and maybe she’s worthy of being sandwiched between shark-punchers and gravity-unaware Playboy models. But any journalist worth his/her reporter’s notebook knows what she’s getting at. We’re coming to a point in our society where we need to ask a question that we should have asked a long time ago:

What is news?

I read a news feed each day — on Facebook. Is that news? I see a ticker of headlines on the bottom of CNN. Is that news? I have headlines and links arriving onto my desktop via my Twitter feed. Is that news? I check the front page of washingtonpost.com each morning. Is the stuff on there news?

What’s happened is, in the last 100 years — better yet, in the last 20! The last 5! — we’ve gone from a finite number of media outlets to an infinite number. On the web, we’ve got infinite space for news. We’ve got 24-hour news networks, and they need something to fill that time. We’ve got websites that need a constant F5-Refresh. The authoritative read on the matter is Neil Postman’s “Amusing Ourselves to Death,” but the short version is: when we created daily news outlets, we gave consumers a promise: we would deliver them the day’s news. But that means that every day, some form of news has to happen that’s worth delivering. So we’re filling it with what the Norwegian radio reporter probably considers “news”: news of incident, accident or occasion.

On the day she quit, the Norwegian reporter probably looked at the stories she’d been asked to read on air — Man punches shark! Playboy model attempts to open door mid-flight! — and asked, What the hell is this? Is this news?

But what I really wish she’d done is gone on air is asked, What is news anymore? What matters to you?

And if we’re not giving it to you, then why are you still listening?

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The Ultimate Closing Thought.

Since April, I’ve been working on an experiment for my Twitter feed: I start each day with a bit of #AMinspiration, and I close each day with a #closingthought. A few weeks back, I expanded the latter, and started running #closingthought weeks. I had one inspired by Beatles songs. Another one featured overly-existential 90s pop lyrics.

But yesterday, I took a visit to Biloxi National Cemetery, on the grounds of Keesler Air Force Base, and I realized that I’d been ignoring the most obvious closing thought of all: the ones engraved into tombstones. What could be more final than the words printed on one’s grave?

So this week, I’ll be featuring Biloxi tombstones as my #closingthought. There were dozens and dozens to choose from; selecting picking the final five was an impossible task. One, in particular, is getting left out, but it deserves to be seen.

So below, this is the closing thought that every male journalist wants printed on his tombstone:

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Five Things to Rethink the Newsroom: Partner and Grow.

This is the shortest of these posts, if only because it’s more of a pep talk than anything, and because it deserves to be brief.

Your newsroom is shrinking. Your newsroom cannot deliver all the news it wants to deliver.

So find a partner. Make it an exclusive deal or use the Publish2 newswire to bring someone else’s free content in. Decide what kind of content you’re lacking and find someone else who’s delivering it. And then get that content into your users’ hands.

This is an opportunity for you to define what it is you do and then deliver exclusively that. To focus in on that one thing. And to be great again.

Get going.

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Five Things to Rethink the Newsroom: Prove It.

When I was in elementary school, I spent a lot of time watching infomercials. This wasn’t by choice; my family had yet to subscribe to cable, and Saturday morning cartoons always came on after infomercials.

So I’ve been well-schooled in the nature of the TV pitch: the Total Gym, the Ronco Rotisserie, the Unbreakable Auto-Lock. All of them were variations on a single theme: whatever it is we’re selling, you need.

Why can’t news organizations buy into this type of pitch?

I’m tired of ads that dance around the point. The sell for news organizations is simple: There are just some things you can’t live without. News is one of them.

You cannot live without water, or light bulbs, or a decent roll of toilet paper. These are the essentials. And a newspaper, a radio station, a TV news show: these are just as essential.

Or: a free press is an essential part of a healthy democracy. Believe in the democratic process? Then you have to watch/listen/read.

Here’s a personal favorite, from London’s The Sun:

News isn’t a product that sells itself. Good stories require time and thought to digest, and consumers don’t give those things up easily. It’s up to news organizations to launch campaigns to remind consumers why news is essential.

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Five Things to Rethink the Newsroom: Engage Now.

There’s this funny little joke going around right now that there’s such a thing as a social media expert. These are people who boast advanced skills in the way of Twitter. They’ll teach you how to DM and build a fan page with the best of them.

But what’s so funny is that technically, there’s no such thing as social media.

So we’re in agreement here: there’s such a thing as media, which I’ll define as any platform through which you can distribute information. A newspaper, a TV station and a Facebook profile all fit this description. So does a chalkboard out in the open. So does a TED talk.

But social media? Any platform in which you engage the public could be social media.

So let’s get rid of the title now and get to the heart of the idea: if you’re rethinking your news organization, you need to be thinking about how you work with and talk with your readers, viewers and listeners.

And you can start by considering a few options.

Online

-Commenting forums: Allowing consumers from around the globe to chime in on an issue is a wonderful thing. It brings additional perspectives and ideas to a story. It can also bring unpleasantries; modern commenting forums have taken over where early Internet message boards started. So now’s a good time to ask: are these forums working?

Here’s something to consider: what is it you’d like to get out of commenting forums? Are you really looking to give readers a chance to debate? Because if you are, you’ll first have to set the rules of debate for readers. Or are you looking for reader tips on other similar stories in the community? Because there might be other, more user-friendly forums for readers to suggest story ideas.

My personal favorite use of commenting forums: as a place for reporters to answer additional questions or comments about a story. Sometimes, reporters do this in a live chat that happens after the story is published. But why not put it all in one place, where readers can find it for posterity?

Or, better yet: why not just make consumer engagement part of the reporting process in the first place?

-Twitter and Facebook: Use them. Respond. Reply. Be active. Before/during/after the reporting of a story. It’s okay if your readers help you be the assignment editor. It’s even okay if you open up a forum to actually allow readers to do so.  It could actually open your newsroom up to new ideas.

Offline

The next step is to actually get back into the community and be engaged offline. I’d recommend one of two methods:

-Weekly chats in the community: In the form of MeetUps/TweetUps/FacebookUps[1. F-Ups?] to discuss issues or stories being discussed in the news. Instead of having readers merely email in their thoughts, invite them to regular forums in which they can discuss and debate their ideas.

-Lecture Series: Make it a monthly event. Pick a lecture hall. Pick a topic. Publish a few stories leading up to the lecture about that topic, and then invite experts or interesting thinkers to discuss it. [2. And while you’re at it, make it a package deal: subscribe to our news outlet and you’ll get first pick/discounts on tickets for our lecture series.]

Either way, it’s essential that you offer some sort of in-person experience with your readers. It’s a great way to get feedback on stories, make new contacts and – best yet – to remind readers of the actual humans they’re supporting when they buy your news.

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