A story by Grzegorz Piechota, head of social campaigns at Gazeta Wyborcza, the best read quality newspaper in Poland. Presented at the WAN-IFRA Newsroom Summit in London (9/9/2010):

Since September 29 to October 1 they will discuss the future of print, internet and mobile media as well as share their experience in how social, technological and market developments affect consumers and advertisers, and how to meet their expectations.

Among keynote speakers will be CEO of the publishing group Mecom David Montgomery (UK), publisher of the most-read newspaper in the world Dainik Jagran - Shailesh Gupta (India), vice-president of Gannett Digital Media Josh Resnik (USA), vice-president of Google for Southern & Eastern Europe, Middle East & Africa Carlo d’Asaro Biondo (USA), international content director of Microsoft Peter Bale (UK). Editor-in-chief of Gazeta Wyborcza, Adam Michnik will give opening remarks.

During this three-day meeting speeches will be given also by: representatives of The New York Times of the US, El Pais of Spain, Corriere della Sera of Italy, Segodnya of Ukraine, Aftonbladet of Sweden, L’Equipe of France, Independent of the South Africa, Montreal Gazette of Canada and news agency RIA Novosti of Russia.

Polish and Krakow media executives and reporters will attend as well. In addition to Adam Michnik their experience will share the editor of “Dziennik Polski” Piotr Legutko, vice-president of Polskapresse – publisher of “Polska Gazeta Krakowska” Grzegorz Haftarczyk, directors Artur Karda and Tomasz Krawczyk from Media Regionalne (the owner of mmkrakow.pl local news portal) and Jakub Krzych of Krakow, founder of an innovative internet ad network AdTaily.com, which is storming the UK market.

In total conference participants will present more than 100 different newspapers, websites, information services and media companies. They come from almost every country of Europe, as well as from Australia, South Africa, the United States, Canada, India and even Nepal.

Participating in the event will provide an opportunity to get to know Krakow, Malopolska region and Poland. Many of media executives will spend the weekend here after the conference.

Mayor of Krakow Jacek Majchrowski will host the welcome party at the Wielopolski Palace. Then participants will be able to visit the newest Krakow museum – built under the city’s mediaeval Market Square listed by UNESCO as the World Heritage Place.

Marek Nawara, Marshal of Malopolska region, will host the gala dinner in the Salt Mine of Wieliczka, the second oldest mine in the world and the second of the eight sites in Malopolska listed in the UNESCO registry.

Town Hall, the Marshal’s Office and Krakow media editors from „Dziennik Polski”, „Gazeta Krakowska”, „Gazeta Wyborcza Kraków”, Interia.pl and RMF FM jointly encouraged international media to arrive to Cracow and Malopolska. As a result INMA and OPA Europe for the first time organized its annual conference not in the West, but in the new European Union member state.

The cooperation with INMA brought international association as a partner of the recent museum’s conference in Cracow.

In order to create positive perception around the world during the conference breaks addtional information about the city and the region will be available at Town Hall and the Marshal’s Office’s stand at Park Inn Hotel. Companies like DTI, MatchWork, PaperView, Planeta Marketing will also present their technologies and merchandise.

Industry organizations – Polish Audit Bureau of Circulations (Zwi?zek Kontroli Dystrybucji Prasy) and Polish Readership Survey (Polskie Badania Czytelnictwa) – will present the Polish press. Along with Atex they are partners of the competition for innovative advertising campaigns in press. Winners will be announced during the conference.

Partner of the local media seminar – Media Regionalne – will establish multimedia newsroom, where journalists will cover the conference live in blogs, tweets and interviews on video.

U.S. Embassy in Warsaw also supports the conference.

Information about the organizers:

Newsmedia Marketing Association International – INMA was founded in 1930. This non-profit association promotes good practices and ideas among the news media publishers. World organization brings together over 5,000 members from over 80 countries. INMA headquarters located in Dallas (USA). The Association also has offices in Antwerp (Belgium) and New Delhi (India).

Online Publishers Association – OPA Europe was founded in 2003 and represents the interests of the leading web publishers across Europe. OPA’s headquarters is in Paris (France).

Two articles – by the Independent’s Ian Burrell and by the Guardian’s Stephen Brook – give a summary of recent changes at the best read quality daily newspaper in the United Kingdom.

A group once seen as gentlemanly and old-fashioned is leading now the way into the digital era. While the latest circulation figures show a year-on-year decline of the daily title by 3% to 887,664 in August, unique users to Telegraph.co.uk have more than doubled to 18,746,025 over the past year. The reason is that the website attracted many users abroad.

Here is an interactive timeline of the changes since the Barclay brothers bought the Daily and Sunday Telegraph titles and the Spectator for £665m in June 2004 (spotted at the Guardian website):

Some quotes from Will Lewis:

On the revolution he started: “In essence, what we have done is put a group of highly talented journalists in a room and asked them to get on with it. We have provided the means for them to express themselves in paper, online, down a mobile phone and in distribution outlets that we haven’t yet announced. That is now working brilliantly. We are a united operation in a way that I haven’t experienced before in newspapers.”

Answering to complaints that the Telegraph is now one of the unhappiest newsrooms in Fleet Street: “I will concede it’s not Disneyland. It’s a tough place to work. Our people are very, very demanding of each other and they set very high standards. I will say this, if you can do it here, you can do it anywhere. This is probably the most demanding place to work in Fleet Street, I will admit that.”

Kevin will drive 6400 kilometres (4000 miles) to learn what is guiding American voters’ decisions, to explain their concerns and hopes to the Guardian’s readers and the rest of the world while also bringing voices from around the world to Americans.

His long journey proves that online journalism is not about sitting at the office and googling for facts. Kevin is going to do an old-fashioned reporting – meeting real people and talking to them – but he will use all the gadgets of the new media – Twitter, Flickr, Dopplr, Twibble, TwitPic, YouTube, Fire Eagle and others.

What is also unique – he thinks as much about a story he wants to report, as about the community of readers he wants to engage with this story. 

“I dream of bringing together people from around the world to have a conversation about the US elections, and in 2008, that’s possible with some very inexpensive technology. It all starts with the assumption that this is journalism, that bringing together people from around the world to discuss current events is a powerful new journalistic tool,” he explains in an interview with forum4editors.com’s Grzegorz Piechota. 

Kevin agreed to share  with us an exciting story of his past adventures and plans for the new one.

forum4editors.com: Tell me about your journey. What do you want to learn in the United States – as a journalist who plans to cover the elections and as a journalist who is so excited about new technologies?

Kevin Anderson: As a journalist, it’s valuable to get out and talk to real people. I’ve lived in capital cities for the last 10 years – Washington and now London. I’ve learned that people view politics very differently outside of capital cities. In capital cities, in the bubbles of Washington and Westminster, politics is the centre of everyone’s lives. Outside or capital cities, few people make their living in politics so it’s much more peripheral. Politicos in capital cities think that this means people aren’t engaged. That’s not true. Politics is people’s job security, the price they pay for petrol and whether their children have good, safe schools. It’s at once more concrete while also being more distant. I want to know what is guiding American voters’ decisions when they cast their vote. 

But my main role on this trip is to play the host in a global, networked conversation. This election, even more so than in 2000 or 2004, I can now connect not only with people I meet on the road, but I can also add the voices of people from all over the world. I can get an e-mail on my Blackberry or via Twitter on my mobile phone and put a question from half way around the world directly to an American voter. As an American who has been in London for all but a few months since the last election, I want to both explain the election to the rest of the world while also bringing voices from around the world to American voters. It’s a rare opportunity. 

I’ll be travelling with a Guardian Film team who will be producing several videos during the week and also longer pieces for television. Investigative reporter James Ridgeway and I will be doing rolling reports on a blog, via Twitter, Flickr and YouTube. But the main role of the blog is to host a conversation not only among American voters but people around the world who are curious about the US election.

In 2000, I travelled with a compact satellite dish and a mini-DV camera to webcast live from locations around the US, but we didn’t have the ability to take people’s questions as we were webcasting. We had to print them out. In 2004, I blogged, but the technology we used was relatively primitive, even when compared to real blogging technology  of the day. This time, I’ll be using high-speed wireless data technology, GPS and the latest mobile phone applications to constantly be in touch with people around the world as we tell stories using video, audio, text and pictures. We want to give our audience the sense of being on the trip with us and connect them with people across the United States. 

The other major change in the last four years is just what’s possible with free or low cost web services. It makes the journalism so much easier, while also freeing our content from our site, allowing us to sprinkle it all over the web to reach a much wider audience. We’ll be using YouTube to help augment our own video publishing platform because we need to take our content to where our audience is. We’ll be using Twitter for its ease of use and also again to involve people in a broader network. We’ll be using GPS to geo-tag almost every piece of contact we create. We’ll be publishing photos on Flickr and mapping them on Google Maps so that people get a sense of where we’re at.  Hopefully, our trip will become the centre of a networked conversation happening all over the world about the US elections and the critical issues involved. 

Where do you go and when? What is the plan for the trip? 

We’re still putting the final touches on the itinerary, and we’ve got to leave a little flexibility in terms of trying to catch up with the candidates occassionally along the way. But the journey will take us more than 6400 kilometres (4000 miles) and at least 14 states across the US. The trip kicks off 5 October in Los Angeles. We travel across California to Las Vegas Nevada, then down into John McCain’s home state of Arizona, across New Mexico and up to Colorado. We’ll then travel across Kansas, Missouri before heading north to Chicago, Illinois, the home town of Barack Obama. We’ll drop down through Indiana before hitting the crucial battle ground state of Ohio. We’ll stop in Pennsylvania and West Virginia before ending our trip in Washington DC where we’ll make trips to neighbouring states Virginia and Maryland. 

We’ll see a huge range of the United States, but the fact that we’ll only see 14 states reinforces how large the US is.  We’ll travel from the west coast through the desert Southwest up the Front Range of Rockies before travelling across Kansas in the Great Plains. We’ll see the corn fields of the Midwest (where I’m from) and cross the Appalachian Mountains. We’ll start the trip looking west over the Pacific and end up in the east looking out over the Chesapeake Bay that opens up into the Atlantic Ocean. 

How do you prepare yourself for this journey? I know from your blog that you are testing a new mobile etc., but could you tell me from A to Z what you really do?

The Guardian Films team have been working for months on the logistical details for the filming, and we’ve all been jointly working on the editorial details. For months, as part of my work with the Guardian’s US news blog, Deadline USA, and as part of that, I’ve been reading voraciously from a wide range of news sites and blogs as well as following politically oriented Twitter and YouTube users. I’ve been adding the stories and blog posts I read to the Guardian America del.icio.us account as both a feature of our site and a resource for myself and other staff members. 

I’ve also been testing equipment and web services for the trip so that there are as few surprises as possible on the road. I also know that we’ll be juggling hours of driving each day and also the the job of journalism. One thing that we’re doing on this trip is focusing on geo-tagging all of the content. To the greatest extent possible, we’ll add location data for every video, every picture, every blog post and every Twitter message. People following the trip will be able to see where we are at in near real time.

I’ve been testing a Nokia N82 with built-in GPS to automatically geo-tag my photos. I will in some instances upload the images directly and immediately from the phone. I will also be using a GisTeq PhotoTracker and a Nikon D70 to add geo-data to high quality images. The PhotoTracker comes with software that adds the geo-data to the image files and will upload them to Flickr or create Google Maps picture galleries.I’ve been testing Twibble, a great location aware Twitter client. I can also upload pictures directly to TwitPic to allow our Twitter followers to keep track of the trip. The trip has spurred internal development work that will allow us to add geo-data to content in the Guardian content management system. 

I’ll be using Twitter, Google Maps, Flickr and YouTube. I might also try to use Dopplr, a travel-based social network, and Fire Eagle, a Yahoo location-based service that should make it easier to update my location along the way. 

I think geographical information is important to this story. It will give people another way to navigate the story.  If will give people a sense of where the posts come from in the real world. You’ll see pictures from across the United States showing the varied people and landscape.

What troubles do you consider that make you hard to fall asleep? 

I assume that the technology will not always work as advertised. That’s the nature of technology. 

What keeps me up at night is building the community, the conversation around the trip. I’m already reaching out to people using my personal blog and through Twitter and Flickr. We’ll launch the blog on the Guardian site after the Republican Convention ends, but we’re not waiting for people to come to us. I’ve been reaching out to bloggers, vloggers and other people using social and citizen media for weeks now. In 2004, we still thought about creating a site or a blog, but four years later, you can’t expect people to come to your site. You have to go where they are and involve them. This is the only way to make the conversation as broad as possible. 

And when you finally get asleep, what are you dreaming about? What kind of story would you love to tell during your Odyssey?

I’m dreaming that I will be able to pull together this distributed conversation. This is the third US election that I’ve done a project like this, and I’ve learned that you have to start reaching out to people early.

I dream of bringing together people from around the world to have a conversation about the US elections, and in 2008, that’s possible with some very inexpensive technology. It all starts with the assumption that this is journalism, that bringing together people from around the world to discuss current events is a powerful new journalistic tool. 

I also dream of getting people involved in talking about the issues not just the ‘horse race’ of which candidate is ahead. I’ve seen how people do want to talk about issues, about the economy, healthcare, immigration and foreign policy. We have the possibility to show people the United States in an entirely new way as we travel and involve them in this trip. That’s exciting. We also have the possibility to help people around the world interact with average Americans. The kind of story that I want to tell is to help Americans tell their stories and let them explain their election and their choices to the rest of the world, while the rest of the world can talk to Americans about the impact of their election to the rest of the world. 

Tell me, please, about your past journeys. Where did you go and when? What did you do there?

This is really an extension of what I did in 2000 and 2004 for the BBC. In 2000, we called it the Election Challenge, and was it challenging!

BBC TV correspondent Tom Carver and I took an M4 portable satellite dish, a webcasting unit and a mini-DV camera to five locations across the United States in five days. From Monday through the following Saturday, we travelled 10,460 km (6500 miles). We asked the web site visitors what they wanted to know about the US elections. They were curious about voter apathy, especially among young voters, so we talked to university students in Miami. We had to balance the satellite dish off the balcony of a bar to get a signal. We then travelled to Austin to talk to people who had served in state government with George W Bush to get a sense of the then relatively unknown candidate. 

The webcasting gear developed a fault en route to Texas so I had to call an engineer in London and perform ’surgery’ on it in a car park outside of Austin. I finally brought it back to life with some coaching. I had the kit in pieces across the roof of the hire car and the dish on the boot of the car sending the video back to London from a DIY store car park. One of the store workers asked me what I was doing, and I said, “We’re feeding video to London.” The amazed worker said: “No shit?!” He was very helpful in keeping people from walking in front of the dish and interrupting the transmission. 

We missed a flight to San Francisco and then got delayed by the famous Bay area fog. We finally made it and drove across the bay to talk to an electronic voting expert. Little did we know the voting problems that would happen in that election. The next morning we interviewed supporters of the Green Party because visitors to the website wanted to know about so-called ‘third parties’ in US politics. Then we rushed to the airport to catch a flight to Chicago. We interviewed suburban ’soccer moms’, a key demographic in that election. 

In 2004, the road trip built on what we did in 2000. We didn’t focus on video. Webcasting seemed so 2000. Now it was blogging.

Again, all along the trip, we took questions from people. In 2000, mobile phone technology made it difficult for us to check our email on the road, but by this time, it was much easier.  The BBC didn’t actually have a blogging platform at the time so we just used our own content management system. Producers in London managed the comments and flagged up interesting questions from readers. I kept a running tally of miles and cups of coffee. I’ll probably do the same this time around.

We travelled to Detroit to talk about the economy and health care. We travelled to Colorado to meet with social conservative voters in Colorado Springs and liberal voters in Boulder, often called the People’s Republic of Boulder by locals who view it as radically left of most of the US. We returned to Texas talking not only to Republican supporters of George W Bush but also to Latino voters in San Antonio, a rising power in American politics. We stopped in Nashville Tennessee to talk to Iraq War veterans who had fallen through the cracks on their return home and become homeless. One final stop in Florida to cross that battleground state and try to tell which way it might go. Blogging is a natural way to cover these kinds of trips. 

It was clunky and difficult last time. I had to e-mail my posts back to London to be posted by a producer there. This time not only will I be able to update the blog myself but I’ll also be able to easily post status updates via Twitter and pictures via Twitter with a DSL-class mobile wireless card. That will be a game changer. 

Tell me about a person who inspired you to these journeys?

Nic Newman, who now helps build technology to support journalism at the BBC, had the idea for the road trip in 2000, and Steve Herrmann, who is now editor of the BBC News website, asked me to blog initially for the US political conventions four years ago. 

The BBC had been doing its Talking Point programme for years where it allowed people around the world to email, text or call in their questions to major world figures. Our trip in 2000 asked BBCNews.com visitors around the world to set the agenda. What did they want to know about the US elections? We then put their questions to the people we interviewed. 

Was it hard to convince you to go?

It was easy. I was excited to try something new, and I really believe in the basic premise of the trip that it’s important to involve the audience. 

What were your concerns at that time?

The first trip was just a mad dash across the US. We spent a lot of time in airports, and we were lucky only to miss one flight. The webcasting equipment was temperamental. Four years ago, it was a much slower pace. We had more time to work, but we had to rely on producers in London for a lot of the work. I’m glad that we can do so much in the field this time. 

What did you learn about America during all those journeys? 

I was reminded just how big the US is. It’s a huge place.

And there is this famous quote in American politics by former speaker of the House of Representatives ‘Tip’ O’Neill: “All politics is local”. 

It’s so true in the US. People think about very local issues when they are voting, and even in 2004, the war in Iraq might have been the foremost issue for our international audience, but it wasn’t for most American voters.

And what did you learn as a journalist and as a person? What turned to be the most difficult? And what was much easier than you thought before you had departed?

I am often reminded on these trips just how big the US is. Seriously, the biggest challenge for the first trip was the pace and the logistics. I bought my first Palm Pilot after that trip because it forced me to be better organised. It helped me manage my contacts and my calendar. It was a lesson that really improved my journalism, and it made me generally much more efficient. 

However, I still feel that travelling 10,640 in six days was too much. I felt like we saw more of American airports and than of the American people. We managed to cram a lot in those six days, but I felt like we were able to do more journalism in the 17 days we took the last time. 

The first trip the technology was also a much bigger challenge. Without much time to find a good position, we had to find a place where the satellite dish had a clear view of the sky. Fixing the webcasting kit in a car park wasn’t something that I had planned on. 

The last time it was easier than I had expected to get people engaged. I think part of that was because I was blogging in the summer at the conventions and had an opportunity to connect with people before the trip started. That’s one of the reasons why we’re starting the blog this time a month before we start the trip. It will take time and a lot of outreach to build a community around the trip. 

Could you please share some tips for people who would like to take a challenge like yours? What should they avoid? What should they remember?

Don’t try to do too many things, not in terms of journalism, but in terms of new technology. Most of what I’ll be doing, I either do on a daily basis or have tested quite a bit before I leave. Also, make sure that you spend as much time doing journalism as you do travelling.

Thank you very much and good luck.

Reporters hate – because editors sit the whole days at the office and do nothing but ask stupid questions to hard-working people on the beat.

Readers hate editors – because everybody can be a journalist now, but it is still harder to be an editor with a top-down authority!

Advertising sales-reps hate – as those bastards in the newsroom oppose all good deals the newspaper could make.

Promotions people hate – as editors never share their enthusiasm to the new give-away, or a contest, or a PR event and grumble about journalism and values.

Research people hate editors – as their drawers are full of readership surveys that have never been used.

Designers hate – as editors seem to have no artistic taste and prefer to publish just words, words, words…

Internet geeks hate print editors – as they don’t embrace the internet revolution as quickly and as much as they should: they underestimate bloggers, neglect user-generated-content and play Canute, trying to turn back the waves by opposing the web-first policy in publishing stories.

And last but not least publishers hate editors – as they oppose any cost cutting at newsrooms, are reluctant to any innovation in the paper (they call it ”gate-keeping”) and – of course – know nothing about their readers’ needs!

Is there anybody who loves those devils? Do we really need them?

A hypothetical newsroom by Jeff Jarvis

”Are not they a luxury that we could do without in the digital age?,” asks Jeff Jarvis, a former editor and internet evangelist, in his column at the UK Guardian?

”I took a hypothetical newsroom staff of 100 as a round number, then cut by 30% – not draconian by today’s precedents – and asked what the priorities should be when the cutbacks come. In my hypothetical newsroom, reporting is the highest priority. The more original journalism that is done, the higher the value of the paper and its web service, the better the opportunity to stand out in links and search. Breaking news is worthwhile, but I come down heavily on the side of beat reporting: journalists who are devoted to watchdogging an area.

When these reporters blog their beats – involving the community in suggesting and requesting stories, sometimes even in reporting, and certainly in correcting mistakes – then the community acts as the assignment desk, and the idea of editing every comma seems futile. My blog readers are my editors.”

Editor as a ”digital curator”?

However, Mr. Jarvis still sees the role for editors:

”There is a need to add context and fill holes in understanding – by using links. As we move from an economy of scarcity in media to one of abundance, there is a need to curate: to find the best and brightest from an infinite supply of witnesses, commentators, photographers and experts. As news becomes collaborative, editors will need to assemble networks from among staff and the public; that makes them community organisers. I also believe editors should play educator, helping to improve the work of the network.”

This thesis is not new. For example Valeria Maltoni, a blogger and a marketeer, has seen editors as ”digital curators” that offer ”intelligent guidance and selection” on the news websites.

Suw Charman-Anderson, a social software consultant and a writer, wrote in 2006:

We don’t need gatekeepers anymore. We don’t need people who stand between us and our stuff, deciding what to tell us about and what to ignore. We don’t need arbiters of taste. There are so many blogs out there reviewing software and web apps and films and books and every other sort of creativity that we don’t need to rely on the media’s old gatekeepers telling us what we should like.

We do, however, still need help. There’s just too much stuff around for us to know what’s out there, to keep up with what’s good, what works for us, what is worth investigation. What we need are curators. And we need them badly.

Meanwhile, some commentators of the BuzzMachine blog by Mr. Jarvis add some other roles:

• Tom B. says: ”This next generation of editors should not only synthesize, but expand on bodies of work. They should translate it into other forms long and short, video and audio, so it reaches a broader audience. The community, theoretically, will have natural ‘editors’ among them.”
• Dan Kennedy cannot imagine a major investigative series coming together without deep involvement on the part of skilled editors. ”I’m talking about leadership, the ability to find holes in stories and suggest ways to fill them, being ahead of the curve on what ought to be covered — all that good stuff. And, yes, inspire the troops.”

Our own experiences with multi-media, crowd-sourced and interactive journalism

Humane Birth: In 2006 we engaged Gazeta Wyborcza’s readers to review all the maternity wards in 413 Polish hospitals. Thanks to the internet we received 40 thousand reviews from young mothers who gave a birth there. We needed 170 people – editors, researchers, volunteers – to edit these reviews to make a reliable guide on hospitals!

Watch my presentation at the 2007 World Association of Newspapers Editors’ Forum about this project:

Save Rospuda: In 2007 we called people to save the wild river in North-Eastern Poland whose flora and fauna could be destroyed by a new highway. The year-long nation-wide campaign was led by our reporter. More than five editors were working on this project as ”media producers” similar to those in TV channels – planning features in print and online, running interactions, organising live events etc.

Here is my presentation about at this year’s WAN Young Readers Roundtable:

Seven choices of Lech Walesa: this July we told the biography of a legendary Solidarity movement leader Lech Walesa in a series of multi-media features about his seven most dramatic choices from 1970 to today. We were also collecting readers’ memories to produce an interactive biography. This editorial project involved a team of 26 people from Gazeta and hundreds of readers. We needed 6 editors in total to develop and run it under a 5-day-deadline’s pressure.

Read more about this project here.

So could we go without editors? I don’t think so.

Multi-media production, network building, community management needs in fact more editorial planning and leadership than ever before.

Some other links on the topic

Read posts written by Allan Mutter, a self-declared newsosaur, John Robinson, an US editor, Del Marbrook, an editor and mentor.

Join the debate

What is the role of editors at your newsroom? How has it changed recently? How do you see its future?