Last week Robert Niles posted a story about the silliness of arguing about the merits of 'citizen' versus 'mainstream' journalism. Robert asks that we move towards a middle ground resulting in the best of both worlds. In his post Robert provides and example of how a recent LA Times article could benefit from a blend of 'mainstream' and 'citizen' journalism. He wonders why the LA Times reporter couldn't supplement/enhance the story with data from readers.

Collaboration between mainstream/citizen journalists and enhancing stories with user-content are great ideas, but working with newspapers over the past two years has shown me that we're still far away from this ideal. Why? Here are a few basic issues:

Thinking: The majority of reporters I've dealt with just don't think this way. It's not a bloggers-as-enemies thing, it's just that they are stuck in the traditional print publication mode, i.e. the print-edition comes first, the web second. As the next-generation of reporters fill newsrooms across the country this will slowly change. Schools today are doing a great job emphasizing that newspaper journalism is becoming a multi-media experience and involves the citizen/reader.

Bad Apples: Luckily this is only something I have seen on a few occasions, but as the common saying goes, a few bad apples ruin it for everyone. Some reporters don't respect their readers. This goes back to the 'who are these people and why should I care' mentality. Other reporters view anything beyond the basic assignment as more work than they're getting paid for. I remember a year ago many reporters would say, "You want me to write my normal column and a blog?" Don't treat them as different things or assignments, it's all content, it's all reporting.

Training: The majority of reporters don't have the training to 'enhance' their stories on the web. Asking a reporter to do some basic HTML mark-up is sometimes a big stretch. Asking them to add some sort of interactive functionality is an even bigger stretch. However, like the first issue, as newly trained reporters filter in this will change.

Workflow: Most of the time the reporters are merely content producers, i.e. they enter their story into the content management system and their job is done. It is usually the job of the technical producer or web monkey to enhance stories online. Often though, the technical folks are too busy just making everything work to take on a number of extra projects, especially those that don't mesh with the CMS (see next item)

CMS Inflexibility: All major newspaper are run on complex content management systems (CMS). While CMS's are great and allow for some amazing automation of publishing newspapers online they usually don't react well to "Can we do this?" queries. You usually can't go to the internal web team and say, "Hey, at the end of this story I want people to be able to submit data in tabular format along with a picture." More newspapers are adding comments and blogs, but many of those solutions are simple and out-of-the-box relatively speaking.

The larger paper groups have the biggest problems since they have invested millions into their current CMS solutions and if it doesn't do something they can't just scrap it. New functions have to be develop from scratch or they need to out someway to integrate it into the current system. Example: The search system of one major CMS couldn't index blog content on other servers. Corporate response? We'll look at that for next quarter. Smaller papers with a good development team can be more nimble in this respect.

The 1% Rule: The standard line: 100% of us are readers, while only 1% are contributors. The newspaper business is just that, a business, and when a newspaper spends time and money on a project they want to maximize the return on that investment. A user-generated-content project which draws input from that 1% doesn't always impress the bean counters. However, you need to think about the economics in terms of that 1% helping create content (at no cost) for that 100%.

So how can we fix all this?

As I have said, as the new breed of reporters begin to take over things will change, but that generational shift will take some time. Current reporters need to learn new tricks, so-to-speak. Reporters that do a better job of enhancing/supplementing their stories on the web should (in theory) be rewarded with higher traffic to their stories online. Give those reporters the best assignments.

Newspapers also need to beef up their web support staff, but they shouldn't just hire people to 'run' the paper web site. A great solution would be to assign a single technical producer to a small team of reporters. Let this producer follow stories as they are developing to provide suggestions on how citizen/reader input could benefit a story. Some papers do this now, but the ratio of technical producers to reporters is so low that very little can be done.

If papers can't integrate new tools within their current CMS's look for them to build/partner-with other platforms to handle specific types of content uses. I'm not talking micro-sites, but something like integrating Flickr-like tools for photos, etc.

Overall, we've come a long way in 2006 and it will be interesting to watch how newspapers continue to evolve in 2007. I welcome any thoughts/comments you might have.