I’ve noticed a trend among newspapers starting to hire out their high-end tech work recently rather than keeping, training or hiring staff members with those skills. It’s interesting in this time of hyper backpack journalism, when staffers are already juggling written stories, videos, audio slideshows and more, highly-specialized staff members skilled deep in one area are becoming rare.

The most recent example I’ve seen is the LA Times Primary Tracker which was built by Bird Branch, a funky Flash design agency.

Times are lean for many papers and finding high-end talent is hard to do (especially at the rates newspapers tend to pay).

There are several high tech opportunities newspapers might consider freelancing out:

• Flash development – Mad skills cost buckets of money that newspapers don’t want to pay for a full time employee. Perhaps paying for 1/20^th of an employee, only when needed on special projects would suit the tight business model better?
• Data projects – Everyone and their freaking brother is trying to hire data programmer-producers now to copy Gannett’s Data Universe type sites.
• Design – There’s a billion web designers out there, perhaps its time to get some fresh ideas into newspaper design? Could it hurt?
• General functionality programming and development – Social media juggernaut Digg was originally created using Elance for $200.  What cool ideas could you fast track to reality before Google or a start up does?

Some of these high-end tech disciplines are thought by some to be the holy grail that will save the business. But that’s not necessarily true, there’s no one magic silver bullet yet and some of the zeal for these areas from non-tech people is rather pie-in-the-sky, as Mindy McAdams alluded to earlier in the week discussing Flash and how ga-ga people are about it. (I gotta give her a big high five for being honest and advocating a reasonable approach to using flash. She wrote the book on Flash journalism, so she could obviously benefit from fueling the Flash fire sale at newspapers.) As Mindy advocated and I’ve tried to preach to countless people that have approached me and asked them to teach them Flash in 15 minutes –Flash is a huge program and can take a long time to develop a skilled staffer from scratch that consistently does cutting edge work. It takes discipline, time and lots of experience to do very well.

So perhaps this new model of high tech freelancers filling the gaps could help catapult papers’ online storytelling into the new age, while balancing stock holders demands for high profit (as uncool as that may be to say or rationalize).

There’s a lot of opportunities and agencies popping up around the country doing awesome work and filling the niche of high end storytelling for media outlets: Brian Storm’s Mediastorm, Ken Harper’s Iron Clad Images,  Jayson Singe’s Neon Sky, Second Story, Terra Incognita, etc.

And for those of you interested in building your own agency, there are copious opportunities for freelancers to find tech gigs:

• eLance
• Sologig
• iFreelance
• 37signals Gigs
• Guru.com

I think this can be a symbiotic relationship for both parties – papers and freelancers/agencies. The freelancer/agencies get more work, more freedom, don’t have to work in the traditional newsroom and get to avoid the cubicle “Office Space” life. Newspapers can combat their brain drain, get to do cool projects quickly and perhaps get some fresh, non-traditional ideas about information and storytelling in their newsrooms.

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Nerd in Chief Note: This post is part of a new ‘blog carnival‘ thing I’m trying out. Read more about the celebration of journalism blogs and check out other members in this online magazine of sorts at CarnivalOfJournalism.com

Founding Members:

• Views on News Biz- Adrian Monck
• Andy Dickinson
• Common Sense Journalism – Doug Fisher
• Journalism Iconoclast – Patrick Thornton
• Journerdism – Will Sullivan
• Online Journalism Blog – Paul Bradshaw
• ScribbleSheet Blog – John Ndege

If a tree falls in the forest and no one hears it, does it make a sound?

If your newspaper website has an awesome blog / article / section / multimedia piece / feature / whatever and no one knows it exists except for the members of your web staff that posted it, does it really exist?

User navigation of news websites is perhaps the biggest problem for the publishing industry since Craig Newmark did what newspapers should have been doing for years.

Lately I’ve noticed four consistent newspaper navigation designs emerging among websites and one solution I really think is a step in the right direction.

First, the two old school models:

Vertical Navigation

There’s still a lot of newspaper sites that use vertical navigation, including all the Tribune-wide site redesigns. The NYTimes shook design trends (that were moving to horizontal nav.) with their redesign last year when they integrated vertical navigation on their homepage. Although their site changes to horizontal navigation whenever you click inside the site, so it’s kind of a mixed bag. The UK Telegraph’s recent redesign also integrates a hybrid horizontal and vertical navigation.

I’m still perplexed by vertical nav. (If you can explain it’s major benefits, please do so!) It may just be a legacy format, but so were animated gifs and we don’t use those anymore because better practices emerged. I just don’t really see the logic here putting a static object like navigation in the area with the hottest views–the F-Shape! And I really don’t understand why you’d want to bury some of your navigation ‘below the fold.’

Perhaps one benefit to vertical nav is there might be a slight SEO boost for having it buit static into the site, rather than as an item in a CSS list. And well, the flip side of the F-shape argument could hold water. (‘Put your static navigation where users are going to look for sure.’)

Overall, I’m a reader that digs big pictures. Big video. Wide views. And any static elements that cut that content well down aren’t cool in my book. It’s like advertising. I just gloss over it. (That is, if I actually had to look at ads and didn’t use Firefox and the greatest invention since the Internet — AdBlock Plus.)

More Vertical Navigation examples:

• Chicago Tribune
• Columbus Dispatch
• MSNBC
• San Diego Union-Tribune

Horizontal Roll Over Navigation

This decade, as CSS was widely adopted, many sites integrated the roll over navigation offering deep links into their content. This style still persists on many sites and definitely gets the job done.

Traditionally the options for this roll out vertically once the site viewer rolls over the link, but a new version with a second horizontal bar showcasing the second-tier options is making its way around the net.

More Horizontal Roll Over examples:

• Atlanta Journal-Constitution
• Denver Post
• Detroit Free Press
• Rocky Mountain News

Now, a new trend that has me puzzled:

Basic Horizontal Navigation

Normally, I’m all for simplicity. Newspaper sites need it. But having a horizontal navigation without roll over limits you to at about only 12 options for deep linking (including advertising’s four — Homes, Jobs, Autos and Classifieds).

Most* of Scripps Newspapers sites are big on this with their corporate template and while I appreciate the cleanliness, we need to offer deep utility. (* = The Rocky Mountain News uses roll overs and is a linked example above)

The logic behind static roll over confuses me less than vertical navigation, but it’s still perplexing that on a website with 10,000+* pages of content, why wouldn’t you want to at least give readers an option to go deep and find that content from the home page? ( * = This would include articles, bridge pages, blogs, section level pages, multimedia, etc. and vastly depends on your company’s content archiving policy, so it could easily flex to hundreds of thousands of pages if you don’t expire articles after 7 – 30 days, as most sites do.)

Or maybe the Simple Horizontal Navigation is really, really brilliant. Brilliant like MySpace’s page inflating site design, which makes people have to click multiple times to get deep into your site. Bean counters love it. Brilliant!

What about the audience though?

I just don’t buy that people are going to work that hard to find your content. I subscribe to Tim Harrower’s old school design belief that anything deeper than 3 clicks and you’ve lost most people (I’d wager my paycheck that by forcing them to click a fourth time you’ve lost 70 percent of the audience. And I’d bet two paychecks that you’ll lose 97 percent for those on slow dsl or dial-up). I’m talking about the casual, daily reader surfing around (not someone not looking for the article that mentions their son by name). They don’t have to wait and dig through your site when the entire Internet is easier, quicker, more entertaining and only click away.

More Basic Horizontal Navigation examples:

• Indy Star
• NY Post
• The Oregonian
• Courier Press

The newest solution I’m intrigued by:

Site Map Navigation

The newest newspaper website navigation trend is, what I’m calling (because I haven’t seen a industry term yet), Site Map Navigation.

It’s Horizontal Roll Over Navigation, on steroids.

Using a horizontal roll over navigation, some sites are blowing out that roll over box to really showcase all the content and related sections available deep within the site. This essentially provides sitemap above the fold, on the home page without calling it a “site map” or some other insane jargon word that my mom (or other casual users) wouldn’t understand.

This method also helps combat the challenge of having immense levels of content and only one home page to showcase it on (which must be updated and changed constantly). AND it if done right, it can organize related content together so readers can understand what else is out on your site.0

My favorite live example so far is TampaBay.com and SacBee.com, who both not only get a lot of deep links in there but organize the content in logical chunks under each site sections so readers can logically see how things are organized and how deep it goes. Ohio.com also employs this method and the Sydney Morning Herald’s recent redesign integrated a “show site sections” button that is kind of a half-navigation, half-site map hyrbid.

Site Map Navigation examples:

• Sacromento Bee
• Tampa Bay
• Ohio.com
• Sydney Morning Herald

Conclusion

In conclusion, San Dimas High School football rules!

And…

The Site Map Navigation may not be the ultimate solution, but we need to integrate better logic and utlity into our newspaper site navigation because they’re a jumbled mess. We need to find a way to balance simplicity while also showcasing our vast expanses. This isn’t an ultimate fix by a long shot but it’s a step towards organizing our content — and perhaps more importantly — easily communicating to readers how the site is organized so they can connect with related content and what they want, when they want, as quickly as they want.

Goodbye to the music industry
“So, why do I say goodbye to the music industry? Because how do kids find out about new music? On the Internet. Where on the Internet? Radio stations. Well, when they aren’t stealing music or borrowing their friends iPods that is.” More info. Given this disappointing news about internet radio, now check out this article on libraries:

If Public Libraries Didn’t Exist, Could You Start One Today?
“I am guessing there would be a huge pushback from book publishers. Given the current state of debate about intellectual property, can you imagine modern publishers being willing to sell one copy of a book and then have the owner let an unlimited number of strangers borrow it? I don’t think so. Perhaps they’d come up with a licensing agreement: the book costs $20 to own, with an additional $2 per year for every year beyond Year 1 it’s in circulation. I’m sure there would be a lot of other potential arrangements.”

Audio: Ted Stevens Wants To Switch Between Phones “As I Ride My Motorcycle”
I’m not sure if this is very funny or very sad. Perhaps both.

FCC Auction Should Allow for Open Wireless Network, Say Lawmakers
Finally, some positive news in telecom regulation! “This issue of open access lies at the center of the debate about rules that will govern the spectrum auction, which are expected to be released this month. FCC Chairman Kevin J. Martin has proposed setting aside one-third of the spectrum for an open network that would work with any cellphone.”

Study: Most US Teens, Young Adults Don’t Follow The News Closely
“Harvard University has released a study that concludes that 60 percent of American teenagers pay little attention to daily news, Reuters reports.”

’10 That Do It Right’ No. 3: ‘The Onion’
“…the success of the Onion, the weekly mix of outright fake news, commentary, and real arts-and-entertainment coverage, is far from a joke. Promoting itself as “America’s Finest News Source,” the witty chronicle has grown from a small student publication at the University of Wisconsin to a major circulation and advertising powerhouse, equipped with a formidable, user-friendly Web site with all of the modern online offerings of any 21st- century newspaper.” The ‘Noke is on the ’10 That Do It Right’ list too!

Zillow expands into hyperlocal news
Oh-oh.

Suggestions for “scared” TV news sites
“I remember my days in the newsroom. Unless a viewer wrote a letter to management, most complaints went in one ear and out the other. Viewers were good for only two things: ratings and story ideas. The latter only if we wanted to listen.” Dude, TV people really are like that? I thought it was just an urban legend. Anyway, Angela has good stuff here for TV (or) newspaper sites to build audiences.

Using the Internet to Find Stories
“In a digital age, let’s expand upon that theory – let’s create Digital Listening Posts.” Great tips for reporters to get wired sources.

The Original (and Future?) Facebook
“The basic lesson is one I’ve said before, but probably is worth repeating: we collect a ton of information and only think about how it will help shape a smallish blob of text in tomorrow’s paper. And then we forget about it and move on. Now here’s the ironic bit. If you think about it, newspaper wedding announcements and obituaries (in particular) are the original social networking application: people volunteer or even pay to have these announcements printed, they hand over personal information that could be quite interesting or relevant in other situations and they really, really like to see those announcements in the paper.”

About our redesign — South Florida Sun-Sentinel.com
The Sun-Sentinel joins the Orlando Sentinel in rolling out Tribune Corporate’s new “Gen3″ cms and layout template.

MySpace – Still The King (for now)
“I can imagine that all the Facebook hype is a little annoying to MySpace – which is still the largest site on the Internet. That may be some of the motivation behind the press release going out Thursday morning saying, effectively, that they are still the King of Social Networking.”

Sigbritt, 75, has world’s fastest broadband
“A 75 year old woman from Karlstad in central Sweden has been thrust into the IT history books – with the world’s fastest internet connection.” (via Digg) Hm… 40 gb, eh? I wonder if there’s a ‘Mr.’ Löthberg.

News-Gazette Launches Harry Potter Niche Site
I’m sorry, I don’t ‘get’ Harry Potter but I’m sure there are people who don’t ‘get’ Star Wars. I applaud this niche site effort.

What j-students need
“… You’re absolutely out of your mind.” These are awesome.

House Passes College Cost Reduction
“House Passes Single Largest Effort to Help Students Pay for College since GI Bill Bill Would Boost Scholarships and Reduce Student Loan Costs at No New Taxpayer Expense WASHINGTON, D.C. – By an overwhelming vote of 273 to 149…”

OMG — My Boss Wants To Be My ‘Friend’ Online
“But when his boss, in his 30s, invited Mr. Dyer, 24 years old, to be friends on the social-networking sites MySpace and Facebook, dodging wasn’t so easy. On the one hand, accepting a person’s request to be friends online grants them access to the kind of intimacy never meant for office consumption, such as recent photos of keggers and jibes from friends. (‘Still wearing that lampshade?’)” Note to self: Remove last weekend’s streaking photos from MySpace.

Medill – Great Storytelling in Visual Formats at Robb Montgomery
“Next month we’ll be gathering along Lake Michigan for a presentation and coaching in visual journalism at the annual meeting Alternative Journalism Workshop of Association of Alternative Newsweeklies.” All you Chicago readers should get to this.

YouTube – Michael Moore vs. Sonjay Gupta
My question is answered: The broadcast media does make corrections!

23-Year-Old Mark Zuckerberg Has Google Sweating
“Owen Van Natta, Facebook’s chief operating officer, said a visit to Amazon.com will uncover all the product recommendations one might want but the value can be limited in the anonymity of the people posting the reviews. On the other hand, if you take your online activities and put them through the filter of the people you know well, those actions take on greater meaning.”

What If Moses Had Had Google?
“When asked about Google’s future, he talks about the targeted personalization of search results: ‘The goal is to enable Google users to be able to ask questions such as ‘What shall I do tomorrow?’ and ‘What job shall I take?’”

Wikipedia ranks first for online news
“According to Nielsen//NetRatings, the encyclopedia site Wikipedia is the top news and information destination on the Internet, gaining 20 million unique monthly users in the past year.”

This will become the trend: news sites to require real names on comments
“The wild-web 2.0 has advantages, and normally I advocate be as much like the unfettered web as possible, and even though it contradicts my ‘stop thinking like big media’ advocacy, there are some journalistic standards worth maintaining. One of them is truthfulness and transparancy. People should stand behind their opinons and assertions with their real identity.”

MySpace News worth using
“After about an hour using the beta version of MySpace News, I’m pretty sure it’s going to be worth your time. … If for no other reason, check it out to learn how you can rate your content up the list and drive traffic to your own site.”

Metromix Los Angeles Launches
Whoa, Tribune’s Metromix gets shiny. I dig, except Orlando/Baltimore versions have lots more nice image teases. And the Chicago version has lots more scannable info visible and deeplinked. If these three iterations could have a menage a trois and produce a baby, it would be really bodacious. (Via Squared) Word on the street is the Trib will be rolling out a lot of redesigns this summer.

The lessons from BackFence.com
Great stuff here: “Hyper-local is about utility and networks of people, not citizen journalism” And… “The only thing that makes it easier is being able to do it in ‘gulps” as in ‘Here’s the local phone number for this service’ or ‘here’s where you sign up for this’. That’s it. Most people can’t do much more and those that could don’t have the time. Microblogging and Facebook status updates are literally a gift from heaven in this scenario.”

A New Branded Journalism
Medill is retooling the way it teaches the trade, to the dismay of faculty and students. More on the rapid changes and controversy (Full disclosure: If you didn’t know from the about page, I’m a Medill MSJ grad.)

Open-Source Journalism: It’s a Lot Tougher Than You Think
“But fundamentally, crowdsourced journalism’s promise must be realized by the crowd; if a project doesn’t suit the ‘users,’ it won’t fly. So hearing from — and listening to — these users is key.”

Dayton Daily News Acts Like a Start-Up with Pets Sites
“A group at the Dayton Daily News decided to act like a tech start-up and launch a niche Web site in just nine days that centered on this growth area. … In addition to social networking among pet lovers, the site offers photo uploads, photo galleries, helpful information and polls.”

New rituals for new media pt 2
“The big problem is site stickiness. Far too many web site visitors are ‘one click and out.’ They dive bomb into the site, check the weather and are gone. They come to the home page, scan the top headlines, and give up very few clicks.”

A neutral ‘Net needs up to twice the bandwidth of a tiered network
“Recent research suggests the obvious: that building an undifferentiated network requires far more capacity than one in which traffic is prioritized, throttled, and controlled. But when AT&T researchers are involved in writing the paper in question, the results seem a bit more sinister. Is the research just another attempt by a major backbone Internet operator to justify a non-neutral Internet?” Be careful kids, there’s so much evil out there!

Cutting the ties that bind
“Off with the yoke. Damn the tie.” (Via Hartnett … Although he as been known to wear his republican red power tie around the office on occasion.)

‘Chicago Sun-Times’ Looks to Redefine Itself as ‘Liberal, Working-Class’ Paper
Interesting move. “Under marching orders from Publisher John Cruickshank and Editor in Chief Michael Cooke, new Editorial Page Editor Cheryl L. Reed introduced a new Commentary section Tuesday with a promise to turn the tabloid back into the liberal-leaning paper it was for decades before the Reagan administration.”

Revamp: Del.icio.us preps next version — and gives us a peek
I am so excited about this. I hope they 1-increase the character count for link notes 2-build a cooler system for organizing/combining tags you already have. 3-streamline the lag time on the search/tagging process — I’ve found once you get beyond 6,000-7,000 links, the site slows immensely… especially when using the Firefox tag plugin (which is also a key to accumulating that many links).

Korean company GPNC has put together a 70 inch all-in-one PC, making it the world’s largest.
“Although the manufacturer didn’t even bother taking a product shot without an XP error message in it, so who knows what kind of effort they’re putting into this thing. If you open up the monitor it’s probably just filled with styrofoam peanuts instead of actual electronics.” I laughed at this for half of Monday.

Silly live shot turns into web phenom
Following up the clip of Jonathon and his professed love of turtles that I mentioned a couple weeks ago. Bonus clip: Bill O’Reilly interviews the “I Like Turtles” Kid.

New York Bike Share Project
This is awesome! Like in Denmark! Too bad it’s just for a week as a “summer charrette” … (Could that name be any more pretentious?) (Via Khoi Vinh)

MTV Labs: Short Circuitz
MTV can’t seem to find a successful vehicle for Nick Cannon. So now he’s doing a show on submitted remixed videos.

The Beard Team USA Blog: Chicks dig beards!
Beard nerds, rock it. Also, beardists, it’s time to book your Aug. 4 flight to St. Louis.

Mediastorm: Black Market by Patrick Brown
Great use of chapters and tight editing. I can’t believe I’m saying this, but they’re almost too short.

33 Names of Things You Never Knew had Names
Word, word nerds.

And finally, here’s some widely-discussed news you’ve probably read elsewhere, but just in case:

Breaking News: All Online Data Lost After Internet Crash
“I feel like ctrl-alt-deleting myself”

New NetRatings Metrics: A Work in Progress
“While NetRatings’ average time per person and average number of sessions metrics typically reflect what the average user does, the total minutes and total sessions measurements provide information from ‘a ranking perspective’…” Howard Owens rightfully questions this as a final solution

Michael Moore Rips Wolf Blitzer on CNN: “Why Don’t You Tell the American People the Truth” [VIDEO]
I don’t mean to jump on the broadcast haterz train here but have you ever actually seen a broadcast TV news retraction/correction? Wolf says they’ll issue one if there’s incorrect information but I’ve never, ever seen one.

Google, Yahoo Both Working On Next Generation Social Networks
“It’s a busy Sunday evening – first the news on Yahoo Mosh, and now news that Google is working on its own next generation social networking service called Socialstream, possibly to take the spotlight away from the ailing Orkut.”

RIP: Registration, and its database of lies
“It’s about time the industry faced reality: Registration doesn’t work. The information gathered is largely a database of lies. Why would anyone enter their real name, age or anything? Most users fill out crap so they can arrive at the story they wanted to read as quickly as possible. Newspaper executives expected to use registration data as a replacement to professional market research, though few will admit it.” Right on!

’40,000 citizen journalist working to report one story for your paper? It’s possible, we did it’
“The citizen journalism project, he claims, has spun off into message boards with millions of posts, 200,000 uploaded photos and regular supplements in local editions.”

Social media site Backfence Says Goodbye to Evanston
“We are sorry to announce that Backfence Evanston will be ceasing operations within the next few days.We have been honored to have been members of this vibrant local community over the past several months. Your postings and discussions on Backfence have been been a reflection of the strength and interests of the members of the community. We hope we have provided you with a valuable local forum. Unfortunately, business issues are forcing us to close our doors and shut down the site.”

SPECIAL REPORT: Inside Gannett’s ‘Information Centers’
Definite must read.

Google: You ain’t seen nothin’ yet
“Search engine giant Google Inc. has been putting together a massive cable network to provide customers around the world with telecommunications services ranging from broadband Internet to home and mobile phones.”

How Mass Media Passes Off Crap as News…
“There were certain things that respectable journalists wouldn’t write about in the 50s. For example, JFK managed to keep his affairs under wraps even though most of the white house press corps knew about it. They refused to write stories on it because it wasn’t respectable. Not that it’s a great ideas to have affairs or anything, but at least there were standards. Those are being slowly whittled away. When Saddam was hung, illicit camera phone footage ran on every major network for three days. We’ve crossed the snuff film barrier; all we have left is hardcore pornography as a limit to what media won’t portray.”

How Apple Will Use The iPhone To Take Over The Wireless Industry
“Steve Jobs isn’t stupid. He knows that AT&T Wireless sucks. So why lock the revolutionary iPhone into a crappy network? Because Jobs knows that everyone will buy an iPhone anyway, even if they hate the network. And that, as Umair points out, shifts all the power to Apple.”

How ‘Citizen Stringers’ Can Help You Hyper-Localize
“From a practical standpoint, probably not. It’s not worth assigning a reporter from your thinned ranks to spend a day watching a bike race that’s not a national championship. But from the standpoint of serving your community, definitely. You should figure out how to cover it without taking reporters off more significant assignments.

Finding yourselves in journalism: Finding yourselves in journalism
“We are seeing more people who are leaving the business altogether than I can ever recall. Some are peering into the future and seeking a different, perhaps more secure road.”

MyBlackBook lets you track sexual history
Social media sex history?

The greatest newspaper giveaway… EVER!
Free Prince album with a newspaper!

Rupert and Me
“The people responsible for lowering the quality of journalism is not us. It’s the people with the ad budgets, still investing all that money into dead trees, in a medium that hardly anyone reads, instead of hiring decent online ad agencies to produce good online advertisement. And paying the money it’s worth.”