AUDIO: Interview with Mindy McAdams

Mindy McAdams is a professor at the University of Florida, where she teaches courses in online journalism. Her book “Flash Journalism: How to Create Multimedia News Packages” was published by Focal Press in April 2005.

She lived in Malaysia for eight months in 2004 and 2005, teaching and doing research as a Fulbright Scholar. In 2008 she taught two courses about online journalism for Vietnamese journalists in Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City.

Before moving to Florida, she was the Web strategist at the American Press Institute and lived in Washington, D.C. In 1994, she was the first content developer at Digital Ink, The Washington Post’s first online newspaper. Prior to that, she was a copy editor for 11 years. She worked on the Metro desk at The Washington Post and at Time magazine in New York.

She earned a bachelor’s degree in print journalism at Penn State and a master’s degree in media studies at The New School for Social Research in New York.

I spoke with her today about her views on online journalism: where it’s going, what’s happening now and advice she has for online journalism students who are starting out.

To listen to the interview, click here.

TRANSCRIPT:

Emily Kostic: So I was curious, what got you interested in online journalism?
Mindy McAdams: Well, let’s see. It’s kind of an odd answer because I was interested in what we would now call online journalism back in — I forget what year it was — in ‘87 or ’88. Because I was working at a business publication, a trade paper that covered the computer and telephone industry. So we covered IBM and companies like that. And he had computers in our newsroom. [inaudible] And we got the wires on the computer which of course is not strange now but again it’s not like everybody had that. And I was a copy editor for the most part so I would be waiting for the other reporters to finish their work, and while I was waiting I would check for different wires. I realized I wasn’t really interested in the newspaper the next day because I already knew most of what was going to be in it cause of the wires.

EK: Right.
MM: In other words I was sitting there in the mid- to late eighties using a computer to be up-to-date with the news and I was thinking, ‘Ya know, probably eventually everyone will be able to do this. It won’t just be those of us in newsrooms because people are getting personal computers now’ and they were and I did and things went on from there, but it just seemed to me at the time that because if everybody could get their news in this way, I thought, well why wouldn’t they?

EK: Right. Do you have blogs or Web sites that you read regularly?
MM: Uh yeah a lot! I don’t know let me open my Google Reader, probably a couple of hundred. I have no idea how many. I mean I don’t read all of them everyday. Anyway, a lot. Definitely more than 100 probably 200. I’m not as crazy as some people. So anyway, I can’t tell you what they are because there’s probably nothing I read every single day. You know, the reader just tells me what to do and I just read it in the order it comes in.

EK: Are there any blogs or Web sites you think are really overrated?
MM: Well probably most of the A-list because I’m just not — I just don’t find the A-list that interesting. Well, the biggest overrated one would be The Huffington Post.

EK: I could not agree with you more. I actually wrote a blog post about that.
MM: I mean it’s not that it’s bad or anything. It’s a lot like mainstream media, except with this added snarkiness sometimes, not always, but often. And it kind of reminds me of Salon and Slate, which I know a lot of journalists really like but they just don’t [speak to me]…Now and again, I’ll find an article…I’ll be searching and I’ll find an article on either Slate or Salon that I think is great and I think they have very good people writing for them but I mean overall it’s long, and I see a lot of these things that I don’t like about mainstream journalism and in The Huffington Post and in Slate and in Salon. So I mean…

EK: And what are those things that you don’t like?
MM: Ah…the sort of white, preppy view of the world.

EK: Yeah.
MM: To be really blunt about it. It’s like the world is not white and preppy, and in the world of white, preppies there’s not really [inaudible] that much. There’s a lot of sort of self-centered, young, talented journalists [inaudible] real journalism. I have just never been there, probably because I’m not a preppy and I’m not a guy.
EK: So you’ve written a book on flash journalism, you obviously must think that flash is really important. What would you say to people who aren’t catching on? What would you say to people who don’t want to learn the skill or something like that?
MM: Well, I would disagree. I don’t know that flash is actually needed anywhere, and a lot of sites and a lot of people who that flash is what they need, they should probably examine why they think that is what they need. And I’m saying that because — I could give you a good, concrete example is I was at a day-long workshop called “Naming the News,” thinks that help people understand the news, using kind of a game interface so to help journalists tell a story. And if you are going to make a game, it was really clear from that daylong, you know 9-6 or something. It was very clear that if you want to make a game that’s online that’s easy to play and so forth and tell stories, you would want to use flash. There isn’t [inaudible] out there that would do what you’re trying to do, but that’s coming from the position of knowing that you want to make a game, and there are some great examples out there. There’s a budget game from the Public Radio or something like that. Anyway, there are some of these games which are really an interesting way to convey the information, and flash right now in the foreseeable future is the best tool to build that kind of thing, but for a lot of other things and stories and interactive packaging, flash may not be what you need, and it might not help you, do what you really need to do. So an example of that is, sometimes what people need to be putting together is something driven by a text-base. They’re going to collect a really huge amount of information and they’re going to allow users to look up on their own and explore what they want or something like that. You don’t need any flash at all for any of that.

EK: Right.
MM: And you could even do fantastic animated graphics driven out of a text-base, using other methods. So if you didn’t have anyone who knew any flash, that wouldn’t prevent you from building that package, but a lot of people in news don’t know that. They think everything that’s graphics that lives on the web — they think everything is flash, because they just don’t know.

EK: What are your thoughts on open-source investigative journalism?
MM: Like what kind? Like give me an example, like which kind?

EK: Well like the one that Paul Bradshaw is starting up now.
MM: Well, I don’t know that much. [inaudible] Yeah, I know he’s doing that but…What I like is the idea of crowd-sourcing and the idea that there are certain stories — there’s a good example of, I think in England, that I think Andy Dickinson pointed out, not Paul but Andy where there is this site that invites everyone to take a picture, upload it and get exact [inaudible] coordinates for things like potholes and broken windows and trash in the neighborhood.

EK: Right.
MM: And um while they’re not telling a story they’re just reporting some situations. I see that kind being really helpful for [inaudible]. There are things going on that are not getting addressed. It’s a way to get their local governments accountable, like look there’s a car that’s sitting at the end of my lot for three weeks and here’s my picture and I called to have someone remove that car, the first week, the second week, and the third week and here’s our picture from the forth week and it’s still sitting there It’s a way to empower the people to make sure that stuff gets done that’s important to them, but does it eventually become a story? That’s sort of another question. Does a journalist eventually put it together and weave it into a story. Maybe that’s no necessary but maybe it is. On that kind of reporting with a lot of facts in the end you have the ability to write a really good story that otherwise you couldn’t have written. Now the open source part, I just realized I didn’t answer that. There’s this cultural thin that journalists have about always beating each other and scooping and beating and scooping and beating and obviously I don’t think that that’s so fabulous because of my snarky tone of voice, but it can be real but it’s often sort of manufactured and there’s this worry expressed by these guys for years like “Oh if we put it on the Web site the t.v. station will steal it from us and so they don’t want to go web first because that darn t.v. news thing that’s in their town will steal it” and it’s like “nobody cares.” And I find this rather ridiculous, because it’s like nobody cares. Your audience is either going to be watching tv anyway and see what’s in your newspaper or they’ll find it in your newspaper or find it on your Web site. There’s people who don’t look at your Web site…it’s not like the general public walks around and says “Oh. TV 20 had that first before the Sun had it. That TV 20 they’re really good!” Nobody does that! No normal person does that! Only journalists do that!

EK: Right.
MM: So this idea that if you open source your investigation, some competitor is going to steal your idea. I think that’s really ridiculous. Now the thing that can happen is if too much information is revealed too early, you might spoil your chances of getting more information or surprising some source that you’re working on hitting them with a pile of stuff, but I think there’s a normal way to deal with that. You wouldn’t open source the very sensitive stuff, but you’d have to have perspective. You have to not act like the people I described a minute ago and thinking that every stupid thing you have is a scoop because it’s not. So people would have to get a sense of reality for a change and realize that a lot of the stuff they are collecting is not the [inaudible], is not special. Anybody could look it up, if they just looked it up.

EK: So what do you think is next for online journalism? Like what trends are you noticing that you think are just waiting to catch on?
MM: You know that’s really hard to say with the current news environment because right now we don’t even know how many newspapers are going to survive.

EK: Right,
MM: And with the economy as it is, online advertising is not going to grow the way it needs to grow. So umm…what was I going to say? I do think the idea that Beckett wrote about in his book “Super Media” is kind of the way of the future that I think is necessary. I don’t know if it will ever happen, but I think that more and more of a partnership between journalists and the public and that’s not as simple as saying, “Oh they should be citizen journalists.” That’s not what Beckett says. Beckett describes [inaudible] a fuller picture of what Jeff Jarvis has talked about on his blog, BuzzMachine and he calls it network journalism. By that what he means is, kind of like a social network the journalists and the public kind of have continually communicated in two directions: back and forth, back and forth, back and forth. Through that constant communication, stories arised and the importance of stories that need to be told come [inaudible] come out in a way they haven’t in the past. Journalists have become more separated from the public as journalism has become more of a professional career. And as the newspapers have become bigger and stuff — like the media monopolies have grown, [inaudible] newspapers in one town. All this combines to essentially cut off the journalist from the public that they ostensibly serve and as a result there’s very little communication back and forth and in any newsroom where they’re allowing comments on articles you can hear the act of the journalist how this effects the way they report. They – they journalists often speak to the public as if the public is a bunch of idiots, the public is a bunch of oh, stupid people, uneducated, ignorant people. And when journalists talk about their audience that way, it shows very clearly why they’re not telling stories that are relevant to their audience because they have a very low opinion of their audience. So I don’t know who they’re making their stories for. You know either they’re on packages, their written stuff— who do they think…? They think they’re writing for each other. They’re not dealing with the real public because they, not all of them, but number of journalists, a large number of journalists have a very low opinion of their actual audience and I think you can attribute a lot of what has happened to leadership of that very opinion. Why would I want to buy a product from people who think I’m stupid? What could that bunch of people possibly be providing me that I would find interesting cause they think I’m stupid, cause they’re giving this story for stupid people and I’m not finding those stories very relevant. So I know that’s kind of a long-winded way of saying but network journalism does not have to be online.

EK: Right.
MM: Although online tools make it easier to happen. What it really means is a more direct communication back and forth between the public and the journalists.

EK: And last but not least, what is your biggest tip or biggest piece of advice that you give to your students that you want to pass on here?
MM: In general, I try to…I urge them to learn as much as they can about as many different things as they can. As you go forward in your career or your professional life you never know at the beginning what is going to turn out to be really helpful or really valuable and you don’t even really know what you’re going to find, because you haven’t been exposed to everything yet and in terms of jobs and work styles and work places and bosses and things like that, you know what you think would be your dream job right now, you might actually get that job and find out that the job is actually not that interesting. [inaudible] So the more you keep a really wide perspective and try new things like, try to learn flash. You don’t have to but you might find out you like it. Learn about photography. Study the great photojournalists because it will make you more observant and a better writer, if you’re just a writer. If you’re a journalist, you should read the great journalists, because reading how they describe things will make you look for something different the next time you go out with your camera. So I guess my biggest advice is that you should be an omnivore. You shouldn’t [inaudible] from yourself, especially when you’re still young because anything might turn out to be valuable to you and useful to you. So you should reach out and explore different things, not just of technology but writing styles, production styles, and you should explore them with an open mind like as if you might find something you like there. And not be close-minded about things that you think are not for you. You should investigate them.