Quartz’ Kevin Delaney and I at Columbia’s School of Journalism during his Hearst Digital Media Lecture Tuesday evening
It was delightful to meet Kevin Delaney at Columbia and shake the hand of the new Hearst Digital Media Professional in Residence, a title and honor that I shared last year.
Kevin assembled a panel of talented colleagues to discuss the provocative question: Can Digital Journalism Instincts be Taught?
Among the panelists: Joel Johnson, Editorial Director, Gawker Mitra Kalita, Ideas Editor, Quartz; Stacy-Marie Ishmael, Vice President, Communities, Financial Times.
I am not so sure that we emerged from this session with a definitive answer to the question of the night, but there were plenty of thoughtful insights that will make us think about our profession, about journalism education and the best way to handle the existing frictions in newsrooms everywhere when the subject of traditional versus digital journalism comes up.
The highlights
If I were to do a single takeaway tweet from the evening’s discussion, it would be: It’s all about those headlines and how they sell your story.
Amen! We have been saying that repeatedly, but every member of this panel emphasized the subject.
Here are some of those references:
Kevin:
Success is when someone clicks on your headline.
The positioning of a story is totally left to the headline.
Write the headline first, before you write the story.
Mitra Kalita, Ideas Editor, Quartz:
“Headlines make all the difference. Curiosity is at the core of it. It is amazing how New Yorker can take a New York Times story, reframe it, write a great headline for it, and sell it to a greater audience.
“And have a voice in your headline: for example, if you say children, it is so clinical, but say kids and it is conversational, it allows parents to relate to the story instantly.”
“Send flags in your headlines, key words that will appeal to a certain segment of the audience.”
Stacy-Marie Ishmael, Vice President, Communities, Financial Times:
“Used to be journalists were not at all worried about the distribution of the story. Reporters did not care much what the headlines said. Today, the headline is important. Journalists are now responsible for selling the story and getting an audience.
Teaching Digital Instincts
So, can those digital instincts be taught?
We emerged from the session with what I consider to be a good centerpiece for the discussion to be continued.
It was Joel Johnson, of Gawker, who expressed it best (and I had the opportunity to chat with him informally about this following the session):
“There is no difference between traditional and digital journalism. It is all about storytelling,” he said. He told me that he never calls himself a journalist. “I am a storyteller, a blogger, whatever, but I avoid the word journalist.”
“Nobody I know uses a different tool to write a digital story than he uses to write a print story, for example,” he said.
What has changed, Joel and the panel agreed, is how we speak to the audience.
I may also add that something else that has changed is that we have an obligation to know more about audiences we cater to.
Joel referred to the virtues of some traditional journalistic values that he embraces for his team at Gawker:
“It’s Ok to follow social media, but you lose your voice if all you do is become a slave to what you see there. You have to use those traditional journalistic tools of probing, asking, checking out the facts,” he said. “We desperately need people who can do traditional writing, but also performance writing. That’s the way we do it where I work.”
And to remind us of the notion that good headline writing and sound writing/editing are key, it was Mitra Kalita, of Quartz, who said:
“Tabloid journalism is great training for digital.”
So, perhaps, if journalism schools cannot teach digital instincts to students, the students might be wise to seek internships at one of those tabloids where editors have historically lived by the mandate that headlines have to seduce, that the words have to sell the story.
Almost every tabloid editor I have known globally always knew that packaging is part of journalism. Those tabloid editors would also agree with Kevin Delaney’s statement that the place to be is at the intersection of the important and interesting.
About Kevin Delaney
Kevin J. Delaney is editor in chief and co-founder of Quartz. He was a reporter at The Wall Street Journal for a decade, with that time split between hardship postings in Paris and San Francisco. While covering Internet companies such as Google, Twitter, and Facebook for the Journal, he became convinced that newspapers could do much more to ensure that good journalism thrives in the digital age. He returned to New York and became managing editor of WSJ.com, where he led efforts that helped greatly Body Textexpand the Journal’s online readership and championed innovative journalism projects that went on to win prizes. Early in his career, Kevin was a reporter for SmartMoney Magazine and a TV producer in Montreal.