Digital first

One of the enchanting things about Princeton is how little its campus changes. Students of a century are connected by the walk from Nassau Hall to Blair Arch, or the carousing in the turret rooms of Witherspoon. Even our academics are slow-moving; since the introduction of the precept at the beginning of the last century, instruction in the humanities has seen no reason to significantly change form or content.

Unfortunately, this is too true of our campus journalism groups. Though The Daily Princetonian’s website has seen a few redesigns and now sports has a Twitter account, the ‘Prince’ is still an entirely traditional and print-focused organization. Improving web presence can’t be a side project — the ‘Prince’ needs to see itself as a news organization rather than a newspaper one. When The Guardian saw its subscription revenues declining and bankruptcy a few years away, it decided to go “digital first” by focusing on producing content for the web and publishing it in a physical paper as an afterthought. It is now a wildly successful brand online and on track to meet its goal of doubling digital revenues by 2016.

I remember coming to McCosh 50 for my ‘Prince’ training workshop at the beginning of last year. Former editor-in-chief Jack Ackerman explained to a packed room of freshmen how to write a good lede and nutgraf — because you cannot be sure how much a reader knows about the story, you begin with the most recent or important facts and focus increasingly on past or background information. This way an informed reader can just stop after the first paragraph.

Yet outside the Orange Bubble, these topics are being debated and disrupted. Over the summer, Jeff Jarvis, director of New Media at the City University of New York’s Graduate School of Journalism, wrote a controversial article claiming that the article, as a tool of journalism, was an unnecessary luxury. Instead of a traditionally-formatted article, digital media allows breaking news to be reported by tweet as it is discovered and then compiled and analyzed in long form after the fact. When the New York Times was reporting on the marriage equality bill in the New York state senate, its reporter simply tweeted updates which were compiled into a constantly updated article on the New York Times website. A series of articles for print would have been repetitive and inflexible — tweets are better at bringing readers up to speed than ledes and nutgrafs.

But digitalization shouldn’t just be putting your print content online. When ProPublica — an investigative journalism startup with two Pulitzers under its belt — wanted to report on doctors taking gifts from drug companies, they didn’t write an article; they made a searchable database that allowed readers to find the disclosures of their own doctors.

The New York Times research and development wing should be an example to every staffer. Dubbed by New York magazine as “the only happy story in journalism,” the group of journalists and hackers produce interactive online content integrated so seamlessly with the Times’ traditional content that it has simply become part of its brand. The group is responsible for many famous online experiments such as Casualties of War, a data visualization and search engine for every U.S. service member who died during the war in Iraq. No article could report the 4,000th death in Iraq better than seeing the faces of every fallen soldier.

These examples illustrate digitalization done well — not just uploading print content but fundamentally reorienting your strategy to fit a new form. The ‘Prince’s video and blog content is a step in the right direction, but to call them a digital strategy betrays a print mindset of static one-size-fits-all linear content. The Computer Science majors on the ‘Prince’ staff could use the skills they learn from their classes or their independent work to develop new tools and forms of content to inform the campus community. Though the ‘Prince’ has several COS majors on staff, they are primarily used in business and managerial roles in print. The tangential treatment of digital strategy goes a long way toward explaining why the ‘Prince’ isn’t even on the radar of COS students considering independent work.

The Prince's instruction in traditional journalism skills are not enough — a news writer today could spend four years at the Prince without significant exposure to the technologies that will define news for the next decade.I don’t think the ‘Prince’ can develop a coherent web strategy off on the side without at least considering changes to its five-day publication schedule, their focus on print content, and their role as ‘the newspaper of record.’ There would have to be tradeoffs, because staff members kept busy covering every campus event are staff members not experimenting with new digital platforms. As long as the most central staff and writers of the ‘Prince’ think that the purpose of the organization is to publish a daily newspaper, its digital efforts will continue to be shunted. The ‘Prince’ is using blogs and the occasional tweet to plug holes in an organization stuck in a print mindset, and it falls to every staffer to end this complacency and fight for the future of the ‘Prince.’