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The information sherpa: role for journalists on the web

February 1, 2012 in General Media, ideas

(Image by Flickr user Sistak, used under Creative Commons license)

Following up on my post yesterday about information overload, I wanted to expand a little bit on a term I used: information sherpa. I first used a similar term “video sherpa” in a post for a Carnival of Journalism about the future of online video. I wrote:

Perhaps a new form of journalistic curator will arise – the video sherpa, a journalist who guides others through the mazes of videos on various platforms like YouTube andVimeo to find the nuggets of related content that are worthwhile, a la Andy Carvin‘sNPR tweets about the Middle East.

I should specify that I’m using the term “sherpa” in a specific sense. Wikipedia captures that essence here:

Sherpas were immeasurably valuable to early explorers of the Himalayan region, serving as guides at the extreme altitudes of the peaks and passes in the region. Today, the term is used casually to refer to almost any guide or porter hired for mountaineering expeditions in the Himalayas. Sherpas are renowned in the international climbing and mountaineering community for their hardiness, expertise, and experience at high altitudes.

Another way of looking at our age instead of as “information overload” is to look at it as a mountain of information. News consumers who want to be informed, to stay on top of events that are important to them, need to find a way to scale that mountain. And they don’t always have the tools or experience to do so. That’s where a modern journalist can carve out an important role. The journalist as sherpa guides the info-mountaineer through the dizzying peaks and passes of the mountain of information, finding and presenting just the right information to help reach and stay on top of the mountain.

But I want to be clear about some things that are happening that are not what I mean by an information sherpa. The sherpa is not the mountaineer. The sherpa is not the mountain. The sherpa is not the treacherous weather that attacks the mountain suddenly. I’ll explain what I mean:

The sherpa is not the mountain: As I mentioned yesterday, there are too many sites on the internet that aren’t really providing high quality information. They’re posting intriguing photos and blurbs, or they’re posting barely disguised press releases, or hastily re-written information provided by quality news sources to juice page clicks. Those people are part of the mountain of information. They keep piling up the heights before the information consumer.

The sherpa is not the mountaineer: This is not the first time the sherpa has climbed the mountain. The sherpa knows a path through the mountain of B.S. masquerading as information, and is guiding the person who’s trying to make it up the mountain. More than ever, a journalist can’t be a generalist. Generalists get taken in by misinformation, slant, faux controversies and technical jargon meant to obscure rather than illuminate. A journalist needs to do everything possible to become fluent in whatever topic she is covering, learning who’s got an agenda, and when that agenda is shading the information she’s receiving. A sherpa doesn’t take the easiest path, but the best path.

The sherpa is not the weather: One of the most dangerous aspects of the ascent of Mt. Everest is the extreme and quickly changing weather, which can include high winds and sudden storms. In climbing a mountain of information, an info-mountaineer can experience frequent wild swings of information that can knock one off the path – useless information, sudden Twitter storms and Facebook outrages, breathless reporting about silly products and gossip about famous people. A true sherpa isn’t the weather. A journalist worth his salt doesn’t traffic in such chasing the weather. A sherpa stays the course, is aware of the weather, and knows to avoid its traps.

Many others have focused on the analogy of journalist as curator. But I think I prefer this analogy more. I would love to know what others think. I also think this new paradigm should influence how we train college journalists for the future.

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Redesigns 2011: WVU Daily Athenaeum

November 15, 2011 in Redesigns

The Daily Athenaeum at West Virginia University just updated the design of their web site, run on College Publisher. Here’s a screenshot of the new design.

And here’s a screenshot from Archive.org from February:

The most dramatic change appears to be the header, which is larger and uses more white space. They also seem to have made the choice to emphasize the web address as opposed to the newspaper name. Notice as well that they cut down the number of items in the nav bar from 10 to eight – features and blogs being eliminated.

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Redesigns 2011: UC News-Record

November 9, 2011 in Redesigns

The News-Record at the University of Cincinnati relaunched their website recently.

The new site runs on the Griphon system from Detroit SoftWorks:

The old site, from archive.org:

The new site has more color in the (thinner) nav bar and a bolder nameplate. It’s hard to judge the columns on the new site, since the dominant art focuses on an important election story. The interior pages do show a greater variety of stories and look more like traditional newspaper section fronts.

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Abandoning print at a community college: an adviser’s progress report

November 2, 2011 in College Media, management, Websites

Editor’s note: Mark Plenke wrote a message on the College Media Adviser’s Listserv about the transition to an online-only publication at Normandale CC. I invited him to revise and expand his comments and share them with readers who don’t have access to the listserv. This is the result. – Bryan

By Mark Plenke
Adviser, The Lions’ Roar Online

Editors at the Lions’ Roar, the student paper at Normandale Community College in Bloomington, Minn., decided last spring to drop their print edition and go totally online. The decision was difficult because the paper had published continuously since the school opened in the late ‘60s and had a good reputation and a loyal audience among faculty and staff.

The editors had noticed, though, that there just weren’t enough reporters, editors and photographers to do a consistently good job of putting out both a print newspaper and a website. They’d also noticed that the number of newspapers they were recycling was getting bigger despite a dynamic redesign and stepped up efforts at social-media marketing.

So they pulled the plug.

Here’s what happened and what we’ve learned:

  • There were complaints, both during the informal public-comment period last spring when they made the decision and this fall when the news racks stayed empty as school started. But we didn’t hear from a single student; a few faculty said they missed the print paper.
  • The students and I did a good job of letting people know what was happening, including a campaign that used the empty racks (Can’t find a paper?–look online!) to promote the switch.
  • Readership went WAY up. The number of unique visitors to the site is triple what it was last May. The comparison I like the most: Lions’ Roar used to print 2,000 papers and close to half were recycled. In the first full month of school this fall, the website had 2,893 unique visitors and comparable numbers for October (2,821).
  • The key to success was giving up the student fee money that would have been used for printing (about $7,500 a year) to secure a promise of weekly access to the database of student email accounts. The webmaster now sends a weekly update of what’s on the website to every student email box, and we publish the same hyperlinked mini-home page to an employee portal so staff has one-click access to the site.
  • The biggest growing pain was getting students to understand that they weren’t putting out a paper every three weeks anymore, that news had to be covered, reported and posted in a hurry (still working on that one, but it’s gotten a lot better lately).
  • Many more slideshows and video stories are being produced now. It’s no longer a medium for feature stories only.
  • Writers are using more web-friendly forms, especially lists.
  • Blogs have replaced columnists, a really good change in terms of the writing. It’s much tighter and brighter.
  • Students are thinking more visually because it’s the best way to get a story promoted on the home page.
  • Happily, a few advertisers (but none of the national agencies, unfortunately) have decided to go online with the paper.
  • The one minus has been the loss of social time when layout night disappeared, but we’ve started scheduling staff events (a pizza-and-pop party in the office this week, for example) to help replace it.

I’m biased, but I think it’s fair to say the change was a big success. The site has three times as many visitors as it did last spring and at least a thousand more readers than the print paper had each month. I also think the staff is being served well because they’ve learned to report news when it’s still news and they’re broadening the professional skills they’ll need to find a job when they’re done with school.

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Redesigns 2011: The Argonaut

October 25, 2011 in Redesigns

The Argonaut at the University of Idaho redesigned their website this semester.

Here’s the new design:

And here’s the old design:

The new design abandons the light blue and rainbow color palette for a more staid black and white look. Web exclusives are promoted prominently, while the social media buttons are de-emphasized.

Via Madison McCord.

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Redesigns 2011: Golden Gate Xpress

October 24, 2011 in Redesigns

The Golden Gate Xpress at San Francisco State University updated their web site this semester.

Here’s the new site:

And here’s the old layout for comparison:

The old design was basically similar to what it had been since 2007. The new design gets rid of the left nav bar and adds white space to the top of the page. They’ve also updated the nameplate. Also note the prominent placement of links to their social media channels.

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Redesigns 2011: Blot (University of Idaho)

October 20, 2011 in Redesigns

The University of Idaho’s Blot student magazine has redesigned for 2011. Here’s the new design:

Here’s the redesign from 2010, from our post:

Via Madison McCord

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Occupy coverage in college media: Round Two (updated)

October 13, 2011 in showcase

The corner of Wall Street and Broadway, showin...

Image via Wikipedia

I’m starting a second round of college media coverage of the various Occupy protests around the nation. I’m particularly hoping to find some coverage that features use of online/multimedia components, as the example above from the Temple News.

I’m also going to keep this post “sticky” at the top of the blog for the next couple of weeks. If you’ve seen student media coverage of the protests, e-mail me: scmurley -at- gmail.com and I’ll add a link below.
Read the rest of this entry →

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Redesigns 2011: Daily Eastern News

October 10, 2011 in Redesigns, Websites

The Daily Eastern News, where I am the adviser to the online staff, has updated its web design this semester. Here’s the new site:



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And here’s what it looked like previously:

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In addition to the redesign, we’ve also changed the URL. Readers of the newspaper are directed to dailyeasternnews.com in promos and articles. The old URL, dennews.com, still works, but pedants (like me) always grated at the use of the extra “n” in dennews.com.

We also changed content management system hosts from College Publisher to TownNews.

The previous design has served the paper well, but it was long in the tooth (designed originally in 2007 by Matt Wills).

If your college news organization has redesigned their website, send me an e-mail (see the left-side rail for the address) or comment on one of these posts, which are archived under the category Redesigns.

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Facebook’s changes and college media: appification on the way?

September 23, 2011 in College Media, industry news, social media

Some of the biggest news in social media the past two days has been the announcement by Facebook of a whole passel of new features, changes to their interface, and ways for news media to interact with the Facebook mob of users (now around 700 million).

There’s more coverage in the tech blogging/press universe than I could possibly link to, although I’m including some links at the bottom of this post if you’re interested.

photo via GigaOm

The big change for users will be the Timeline. But for media operations, the big change is in the application space. Several large media outlets – Washington Post and the Guardian UK among them – debuted new “social reading” applications. These applications allow you to read articles within the Facebook interface and then notify your Facebook acquaintances as to what you’ve been reading.

Now why do I think this is going to be important for college media? Perhaps an illustration is in order. I’ll pick on a large media outlet like The State News at Michigan State.

Let’s say they develop a Facebook app like the ones listed above. Facebook users can then allow that app to hop into their newsfeed (or whatever they’re calling it this week at Facebook). When one of The State News’ readers reads an article in Facebook, a link to that article will be shared with that user’s friends, which may push more readers into The State News app, and bring in a wider connection to the paper’s online content.

From what I’ve read, the media outlets are able to sell advertising in the app outside Facebook’s advertising platform (from the Guardian story above), so there’s added value for online advertisers.

And as much as I talk about developing web sites, it’s pretty obvious that a huge number of college students spend a lot of time in Facebook. And getting content in front of college students’ eyes (especially online) is always a challenge when college newspaper readership remains committed to the print edition.

Will college media outlets do this? It’s too early to tell. I’m aware of some outlets that have been using Facebook pages for a social media presence. This is a slightly different paradigm, and totally new on the radar. But I’ve already seen information on my FB page about what articles people are reading on the Washington Post Social Reader. It’s worth experimenting with, at least, as a way to expand the reach of your digital footprint.

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