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Storytelling that makes you hungry for more

As each of us struggles with the real enemy of journalism -- apathy -- we should think about how and why people become interested. Jay Rosen's exploration of the great NPR audio story, "The Giant Pool of Money," zeroes in on how great storytelling that focuses on context can create demand for news:

"I noticed something in the weeks after I first listened to 'The Giant Pool of Money.' I became a customer for ongoing news about the mortgage mess and the credit crisis that developed from it. Previously I had skipped over such reports because I just didn't understand the story. Now I did. 'Twas was a successful act of explanation that put me in the market for information."

But this doesn't only apply to big, complicated, difficult stories like the mortgage crisis.

News stories tend to fall into two categories. One is "painfully incremental" and the other is "out of the blue." If you pick up the average local newspaper and randomly start reading about an incremental development in a continuing story, your brain is going to translate it as "bark bark bark" and move on. And the "out of the blue" stories may seem similarly opaque.

We tend to forget that most people aren't paying a hell of a lot of attention in the first place.

The news is a continuing story, and all techniques that engage readers/listeners/users pay off twice. First they convey the immediate story. Then they create an appetite for the next development by creating the context that helps people recognize important and interesting information. Demand for news is not a constant.

The changing newsroom

In a lengthy report, the Project for Excellence in Journalism profiles the shift that's taking place in newspaper newsrooms (or, if you prefer, multimedia information centers) across the country:

"The newsroom staff producing the paper is also smaller, younger, more tech-savvy, and more oriented to serving the demands of both print and the web. The staff also is under greater pressure, has less institutional memory, less knowledge of the community, of how to gather news and the history of individual beats. There are fewer editors to catch mistakes.

"Despite an image of decline, more people today in more places read the content produced in the newsrooms of American daily newspapers than at any time in years. But revenues are tumbling. The editors expect the financial picture only to worsen, and they have little confidence that they know what their papers will look like in five years. "

The report is based on in-person interviews at 15 daily newspapers and a survey of 259 senior news executives across the country.

Understanding social networking

Just shut up and watch.

The self-indulgence of oppositional defiance

Jeff Jarvis zeroes in on how to handle curmudgeons -- "get us past the growling as soon as possible and onto a substantive discussion:"

"You can always find reasons not to do things. Then fine, don’t do them. Far more interesting and useful is to explore what might happen if you do them. ...

"Well, the hour is far too late and the state of the industry far, far too desperate to waste time with these sideshows. They had their time and the objections needed to be addressed in that time. But I haven’t heard fresh objections in a few years. What I want to hear instead is fresh ideas; we must have more of those."

Of course, simply moving on works better in the public debate than it does in the organization.

Debate that moves us forward is good, but destructive sniping, complaining, and passive-aggressive undermining is not. The unpleasant cure in the workplace may be to show the curmudgeons the door. We just don't have the time.

Especially irksome is curmudgeonly behavior that shows up as submarine attacks.

What's a submarine attack? You've seen it. Curmudgeon goes to all the meetings with folded arms. When pressed, curmudgeon says the right words. Then curmudgeon sinks the program with a series of silent, hidden maneuvers.

You might have gotten away with that in the old days. Every curmudgeon was hired at one time for discernable strengths. When things are going well, a newspaper can simply move curmudgeons to positions where they can do little damage.

But every editor in America right now knows that at any moment the publisher could respond to yet another horrible revenue month by asking for more cuts. How badly do you want to be on that list?

Newsroom curmudgeons would do themselves -- and their families -- a favor by abandoning the self-indulgence of oppositional defiance.

Figure out a way to help your coworkers and help yourself. You can't control the Internet, or the boss, or market forces, or Sam Zell, or whatever other ogre you want to blame, but you can control your own attitude and behavior. Or move on.

What drives away young, talented journalists

We have an acute need to adapt journalism -- and especially newspapers -- to the societal changes brought by new technology, and to do that, we need the energy, optimism and willingness to try something new that comes with being young.

But Northwestern University's Vickey Williams observes:

"My work on changing culture in newsrooms shows that young journalists intend to leave because the pace of change is too slow. (Report here). They are turned off by the tendency of veteran journalists to argue down new ideas, cling to old ways, and avoid risks. As Readership Institute research has shown, those are outcomes of newspaper people's tendencies to be oppositional, perfectionist and conventional."

Yes, we've seen a lot of that lately.

Wanted: Drupal support engineer

One of the things we're building at Acquia is a Drupal technincal support center where customers can call for help with Drupal questions. We're busy setting up a phone system, a bug tracker, a customer tracking application, a knowledge base and more. We already have some great technical support people on board, but we're looking for more Drupal talent to staff our support center.

Specifically, we're looking for people that have the rare combination of mad Drupal skills (both Drupal configuration and Drupal development), a diagnostic mind, and what we call, the support DNA. Do you have what it takes and do you want to learn how to build a support center from scratch? Apply here.

Or be the first to refer someone who makes the cut, and we'll gladly mail you a check for $1,000 USD to $2,500 USD depending on the situation. See our our technical support job page for details on our bounty program.

FooCamp

Last week was crazy. Six airplanes, three time zones, four different hotels, two rental cars, an Acquia Board meeting, two nights in a tent and ultimately, my mind blown at FooCamp.

Off to a meeting in a tiny little airplane. In line behind the big guys. Taken with my iPhone.

FooCamp is the annual invitation-only conference organized by Tim O'Reilly. It is the mother of BarCamp, if you will. The people you get to meet at FooCamp are impressive, and the format (including the nightly campfires) really sets people up to talk, brainstorm and geek out. The result? A fire hose of new ideas and a lot of new friends. Thanks Tim!

Joi Ito took this picture of me so I had to take one of him. Joi is CEO of Creative Commons, and is (or was) on the board of Technorati, ICANN, Mozilla Foundation, the Open Source Initiative (OSI) and much more. He is also an early stage investor in Six Apart, Technorati, Flickr, SocialText, Dopplr, Last.fm, and other internet companies.

Just like last year, I was pleasantly surprised by how many of the Foos are using Drupal, planning to use Drupal, or even evangelizing Drupal. More good stuff comin'!

More photos in my FooCamp gallery.

Drupal download statistics

Each year around this time, I share the download statistics for Drupal core (see also: 2006 statistics and 2007 statistics). In other words, time for this year's update.

The last 12 months, from July 2007 to June 2008, Drupal core was downloaded more than 1.4 million times. The year before, from July 2006 to June 2007, Drupal core was downloaded 620,000 times. The number of downloads doubled in one year's time! And while Drupal 5 continues to be popular, the Drupal 6 core download is already a lot more popular.

These numbers do no include betas, release candidates or CVS checkouts. Also, we can't track downloads from mirrors, such as various Linux distributions, nor can we track installations through control panel software for hosting like cPanel or Plesk. Contributed themes or modules are not included in these numbers: we only looked at Drupal core.

Mollom for Joomla

Right on the heals of the Wordpress plugin for Mollom, Markus Bopp got his Joomla extension for Mollom accepted into the official Joomla Extension Directory. It is great to see Mollom being adopted by more and more platforms. Thanks Markus!

Mollom volume segmentation

When people sign up to protect their website against spam with Mollom, they are asked to categorize each of their sites. So far, almost 2,000 Drupal sites have been categorized. The available categories are: a company website (22%), a site built for a customer (7%), a non-profit website (27%) or a personal website (44%).

Based on a sample of roughly 2,000 Drupal sites that use Mollom.

It is only one data point and a relatively small sample so I don't know if it is safe to generalize, but I figured it was an interesting nugget that could help us understand Drupal's install base.