Fake news is as old as news itself, but at least in the West it was most clearly defined during World War I, when “the art of Propaganda was little more than born,” in the words of Charles Montague, formerly a leader writer and theatre critic of The Manchester Guardian and latterly an intelligence captain in the trenches of France. Montague saw up close the early probing efforts to plant what were then called ‘camouflage stories’ in the local press in the hope of misleading the enemy; one in an obscure science journal which recklessly overstated the Allies’ ability to eavesdrop on German telephone calls in the field.

Montague, as his intelligence bosses, saw the huge potential fake news offered for deception — which, after all, was the business he was in. “If we really went the whole serpent,” he wrote later, “the first day of any new war would see a wide, opaque veil of false news drawn over the whole face of our country.” (Rankin, Nicholas: A Genius for Deception: How Cunning Helped the British Win Two World Wars)

This didn’t happen but there was enough censorship and enough force-fed propaganda of the British and American press for there to be a backlash in the wake of the war, as told in the March 2018 edition of Science Magazine (‘The science of fake news’). The norms of objectivity and balance that most of us abide by or aspire to today are those century-old ones wrought of that conflict.

So it’s worth remembering that the serpent we’re fighting isn’t some newly created hydra born out of social media: it’s age-old the servant of governments, movements, forces who understand well how minds work. But that’s only part of the story.

One of the first problems that media face is that while we stood on our plinths of noble principles those plinths were for decades — nearly a century — built on powerful commercial interests. As the authors of the Science Magazine article put it: “Local and national oligopolies created by the dominant 20th century technologies of information distribution (print and broadcast) sustained these norms. The internet has reduced many of those constraints on news dissemination.”

It has, and very effectively. Not only that, it has helped change the language, format and tone, something we’ve been slow to pick up on. An academic study in 2012 by Regina Marchi of Rutgers University, based on interviews with 61 high school students, found “that teens gravitate toward fake news, ‘snarky’ talk radio, and opinionated current events shows more than official news, and do so not because they are disinterested in news, but because these kinds of sites often offer more substantive discussions of the news and its implications.” She quotes a 2005 study that such formats are “marked by a highly skeptical, alienated attitude to established politics and its representation that is actually the reverse of disinterest”.

Take note the ‘fake news’ reference predates the Trump era by a good three years. But the style, the content, the contempt for fact and sourcing was a trend already visible a decade before Trump and others rode its coat-tails to power.

I’ve been a nomad worker for some time. And I’m shocked at how few journalists seem to be prepared for mobile working. So I thought I’d offer a few tips.

If you can afford it, buy your own equipment.

I’ve been buying my own laptop for nearly 30 years, and while it brings pain to my pocket, I’d never dream of relying on my company’s equipment. In the old days it was because they were too slow and cumbersome, but nowadays it’s mainly because of compliance issues: restrictions on what software you can put on your laptop, as well as what the company is allowed to do and view on its hardware. I would rather retain control over how I organise my information and what apps I use.

Buy your own software.

I’m admittedly a bit of a software addict. (I think it’s probably a thing, I haven’t checked.) But there’s a reason for it: we spend most of our day at our computers, so it makes sense to find the software that best helps you. And with journalists, that’s a broad array of tasks: if you’re a freelance, you want to be measuring your word count and timing how long you’re spending on something. If you’re writing a lot then you want an app that looks aesthetically pleasing (I can’t stand Microsoft Word, and hate it when I see journalists writing stories in it, but that’s me). Then there’s how you collect and store information, be it from the net or from interviews. It needs to go somewhere and it needs to be easily retrievable when you want to write. More on this another time.

Get a decent mouse.

There’s a guy in my co-working space that still uses his Macbook touchpad, that rectangle near the keyboard, to move the mouse around. Very few people are adept at this, so it’s painful to watch guys like my co-worker waste hours a day scrambling around. Buy a mouse. Really. They’re cheap — you can even get a bluetooth one for less than $50 these days, so you don’t even need to take up a USB port. I guarantee it will save you an hour a day.

Save your own neck.

Mobile journalism can mean standing up, moving around, but most of the time it means bringing enough equipment with you to be able to work away from the office — a hotel room, a conference centre, or whatever. This is where I see far too many people hunched over a laptop, looking like Scrooge on Boxing Day. The problem with laptops is they weren’t designed for posture. But you can fix that, with a $20 stand. These are light, foldable, and lift the screen up to a height closer to eye level, which is where it should be. You’ll need to bring an external keyboard with you, but they’re cheap and light too, and your chiropractor will thank you.

While you’re at it get a second screen.

Here’s another tip: Laptop screens are too small to store more than what you’re writing on. If all your source mverkkorahaterial is also stored on your computer, then you’ll need a second screen. You likely have dual monitors in the office, so just because you’re on the road, why should you deny yourself that luxury? There are some good cheap monitors that don’t even require a power supply — plug them into your USB port and they’ll draw the power from there. For several years I had a AOC monitor, which was basic but did the job. I recently upgraded to an Asus monitor which is a beauty, and has made me much more productive and the envy of my co-workers — even the guy fiddling around with the touchpad.

A word of warning to Mac users: recent updates to their operating system have broken the drivers necessary to get the most out of these second screens, but there is a workaround that half fixes it. Email me if you need help.

Be safe.

Being mobile with cool equipment does leave you vulnerable to theft, either financially or politically motivated. Don’t take your main laptop with you to places like China. Have a cheap backup laptop with just the bare essentials on it. Always put your laptop in the room safe, and, if you want to be super clever, buy a small external USB drive to store any sensitive data on, and keep that in your pocket. Samsung do some nice, SSD (solid state, and hence smaller, faster) drives, the latest called T3. I attach mine to the laptop with velcro and then remove it and put it in my pocket when I’m heading off to dinner.

Stay connected.

Don’t trust other people’s wifi. Bring your own. I have a wifi modem, still 3G, which does me fine. Buy a local data SIM card and fire it up. Everyone in your team now has internet access — and the bad guys sniffing the free hotel or coffee shop wireless network will be frustrated.

Finally, stay cool.

By far the most popular thing in my mobile toolkit is a USB fan. Most conference venues are either too hot or too cold, and it’s amazing what a $2 fan can do.

This explains why in many countries, digital journalistic enterprises launched when social media was already mature rapidly run ahead of legacy newspapers, even those that made big cash injections into their digital operations. Of course, successful digital media must produce good journalism, but their true secret is creating a conversation around it.  They are open to their public and easily let them know who they are. In one example in Eastern Europe, despite the traditional formality of many East European media, a new digital outlet had no problem sending a video to their audience of the editor sitting in her kitchen apologising saying she was sorry for a boring newsletter they had sent. In Latin America, new digital outlets have also successfully broken with the formal, ceremonial tone so characteristic of serious media there. Reporters tell the stories behind their best stories; introduce themselves with slang, as if to friends; constantly correct their mistakes; and when they have a conflict of interest about an issue, are candid about it. They let their public know that the media is only human.

These journalists offer their audiences a new, more transparent, and freer horizontal culture. However, sometimes, even those passionate journalists forget it takes two to tango. They want to tell their readers a lot about themselves, but do not care to listen.  Recently I saw journalists from Central America and the Middle East marvel at how little they knew about their readers after taking an intensive “read your analytics” course.  They said that knowing their Google stats and monitoring their following on social media makes a big difference to knowing how their stories are received.

But they, along with other media, including the largest US newspapers, have been realizing that tracking graphs and trends is not the same as talking with your public. (“We can count the world’s best-informed and most influential people among our readers”, said the New York Time’s 2014 innovation report. “Yet we haven’t cracked the code for engaging with them in a way that makes our report richer”).

Media in digital era know now they should invite readers to discover the world with them: open doors so that their audience can check the public discourse with them (like many of the 100+ fact-checking outlets around the globe are doing today); know the experts among their readers so that they bring insight into their news; call upon those with a generous heart to help them go through the millions of documents they just got from a source and build a database; ask the furious and the bullies, who write insults under their articles, where does their anger come from and, listen; open a space to let readers decide which reportage they should do; invite first-hand witnesses to document a problem they are investigating… the list of how much they can enrich their journalism is endless.

For those journalists with blinders who believe that engagement with audience is the business of marketers, Monica Guzman in her great guide about audience engagement  published this year with the American Press Institute proves them wrong. It is not about delivering a product, it is about making sure your readers know you respect and value them, she says, “showing them that together, they have important things to teach each other.”

Around the world independent journalism becomes stronger on the shoulders of the communities they serve.  Eldiario in Spain and Mada Masr in Egypt define themselves as a culture, a way of being, a clique, an idea of the society they want to be. And they build this dream together with a community that feels invited to be part of their world, well-treated, partaker, equal, like in any really good conversation. The “talky” public is here to stay and those journalists who fail to see their luck in this new era are likely to fade away.

This story originally appeared in https://medium.com/@OSFJournalism of the Open Society Foundation’s Program on Independent Journalism and is reprinted with permission.

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“A significant portion of your newsroom is hiding from you. They’re not openly resisting the push toward ‘digital first,’ or even disagreeing with it. They simply don’t know how to proactively step out of their comfort zone.” What journalists need are newsroom leaders to engage them one-on-one to share the strategic vision of the company and explain how they fit in and can help deliver the changes that are needed.

Putting digital people in charge won’t bring about effective recruitment, put ongoing learning at the heart of the organisation or help staff embrace change. What will is appointing someone who is “devoted to managing human capital, specialized in journalism and the challenges journalists face today”.

Here are some of the reasons why:

Shrinking newsrooms – as newsroom numbers fall, management need to be able to manage poor performers up or out, while also ensuring that top performers don’t jump ship.

Career counselling – “The best way to bring newsroom staff out of hiding is to engage them in a very personal dialogue about how your organization’s needs and priorities mesh with their own performance and career path.”

Constant change – However much change you’ve led your organisation through, you can be sure there’s more to come. Newsrooms need leaders who can identify and hire the right people and enforce change on staff who are struggling to adapt.
Read more:  Newsrooms need HR specialists, not just technologists, in top leadership

Strategy, structure and culture form an interdependent triangle for change. “Any attempt to change culture without developing a strategy and structure is doomed to failure. And any attempt to implement a new strategy without working on structure and culture is also unlikely to succeed.”

Strategic change drivers: Faced with disruptive competitors such as search engines and social media, print businesses have to develop new strategies and products. Websites, mobile sites, apps, social media channels – the pace of product changes and modifications has increased tremendously. Publishers are in danger of being left behind.

Structural change drivers: Breaking the focus on daily deadlines for the printed paper is important in supporting the strategic shift to digital. So are agile product development and an adoption of improvements in technology, platforms and collaboration.

Cultural change drivers: Sometimes cultural changes demand structural change and even strategic change. For example, news types of employees: “young graduates (Generation Y or Millennials) are bringing different value sets and expectations to the workplace… And organisations must adapt to this trend.”

Dr Knoll says you should always “sweep a staircase from the top”. Trying to change culture from the bottom up will not work. “The simple fact is if managers — whether they’re in editorial or commercial areas — do not believe in a common change in vision and goal, it will not work.”

In times such as these, “transformational leaders are needed to share an engaging vision and navigate people through unsteady waters. But, first, we need managers who really understand the changes taking place.”

Read more: Sustainable culture change for media companies must start at the top

Most see journalism going in “wrong direction.” Six in 10 journalists (59.7 percent) say that journalism in the United States is going in the wrong direction.

Newsrooms are shrinking. Six in 10 journalists (62.6 percent) say their workforces have shrunk during the past year, while only about a quarter (24.2 percent) said their staff numbers remained the same, and even fewer reported some growth (13.2 percent).

Journalists are getting older. The median age of full-time U.S. journalists increased by six years to 47 from 2002. This trend applies to journalists at daily and weekly newspapers, radio and television stations, magazines, wire services and online news sites.

More women in journalism. The number of women in journalism increased by 4.5 percent. However, women still represent only slightly more than one-third of all full-time journalists working for the U.S. news media, as has been true since the early 1980s. This trend persists despite the fact that more women than ever are graduating from journalism schools.

Journalists are more likely to have at least a bachelor’s degree. About 92 percent of all full-time U.S. journalists have at least a bachelor’s degree, but slightly fewer proportionately are journalism majors (37.4 percent).

Gender pay gap persists. Median income has climbed to about $50,000 in 2012, up 12.9 percent since 2002. This increase was less than half of the combined inflation rate of 29.5 percent during this decade (2001-12). Women’s salaries still trail those of men overall, but not among journalists with less than five years’ experience.

More journalists say they are independents. In 2013, about half of all journalists (50.2 percent) said they were political independents, up about 18 percentage points from 2002.

Job satisfaction drops further. Job satisfaction dropped from 33.3 percent of journalists who said they were “very satisfied” with their job in 2002, to 23.3 percent who said so in 2013. This trend continues the decline in job satisfaction that was observed between 1971 and 1992 but was interrupted with a positive bounce in 2002.

Source: Indiana University Press Release

Read more:
Report: Journalists Are Miserable, Liberal, Over-Educated, Under-Paid, Middle-Aged Men
Indiana University survey: journalists grow more negative about their work
Three charts that explain how U.S. journalists use social media

Building the right kind of sensibility means building the right kind of brand that resonates. In a crowded media sector these days, the white space to create anything unique is non-existent, or at best narrow, which is why content-based startups take a longer time to gestate and build up.

Hiring and building a team present peculiar challenges for a media startup compared to any other kind of software or consumer product startup. Cultural fit becomes the driving criteria above almost any other criteria, particularly at the early stage.

Having been a student of media and media startups all my life — and now a year into building my second — I’ve learned a bunch of lessons along the way on building the right kind of teams in lean content-driven environments.

Different stages in a company require different strategies, and for this article I am focusing on the early stage, where the focus is on building editorial, product and distribution. Call it my year-one guide to hiring in a media startup.

General culture and companywide skills:

• Bringing negative energy into the company is not worth any kind of talent. This is true for co-founders, employees and even investors. Because in a daily ideas driven startup, the flow of energy back and forth matters a lot more, any negative people in the company suck up all available energy in the company. This may sound esoteric and hard to quantify, but if you’ve done this long enough, you know this matters.
• The product in a media startup changes every day, unlike any other product startup. The front entrance of your flagship product changes many times a day, and the people you hire need to understand the manic-ness that goes into doing this day in, day out.
• Product thinking: Typically media startups have been stuck in “post thinking,” as in a blog post, a story post, etc. In a multi-platform environment, product-led thinking that continually tweaks to keep the brand fresh in digital becomes the driving force. Iterate, test and build; a thinking in mainstream consumer startups, has to come to media startups as well. Hire people who get it.
• Visual and multi-platform thinking: Anyone you hire — from editor to developer to social media manager to sales to business development — has to understand the visual nature of media these days, especially in a social media-driven, multi-platform world. This is easier said than done, but people with varied and non-traditional career paths tend to get this the most.
• Living in a Google Analytics stream: Or in other words, data thinking. These days, data skills for anyone you hire across any function in the company — from editorial intern to social media manager to founders — is not an optional skill. That’s true for any startup, but for media startups that live and die in Google Analytics (and most use that at early stage, because it is free), it means making sure everyone in the company understands it, uses it, and makes decisions that are informed from it. Baking it in at the hiring stage will ensure you make it pervasive across the company as it scales.

Editorial team:

• The 4 S’s of Content: be Smart, Sharp,Surgical and Strategic. With a small team in the beginning, can the editorial talent you hire be nimble enough to understand this, and execute against it?
• Because part of the talent you will hire will likely have come from existing old-school media companies, one of the things you are looking for is how much can they unlearn what they’ve learned before. Especially if the editorial product and the voice you are trying to create is something the industry has not seen before.
• This is my personal favourite: No journalism circle jerk or moralising media people. Get the basics of reporting right, keep the future of journalism prognosticators out.
• Related to above: Avoid scenesters, above all else. Media tends to attract a lot of those because it comes with the high profile of a byline and public presence. These days with the amplification of social, people love the idea of working in high profile places and would do anything to flatter you. It will take some trial and error, but you’ll learn the necessary skill of avoiding these people.
• Curation thinking: This is another critical hiring and company culture parameter. No media startup can survive doing just original content, it has to be a mix, of original, of curated or aggregated, of licensed if that is an option. It means hiring people who have the ability to mix content types, and not be moral about it. You’ll be surprised at how many journalists look down upon curation. In a small team, curation thinking also means learning to do a lot more with lot less.

Developers:

• This is hard in the best of times, and for media startups that may not seemingly be solving rocket science tech problems, your options of how and what to attract developers with are lower. In most cases media startups are about execution, and that requires a slightly different kind of developer than a software or product company would need.
• Look to the pool of journalists turned developers, or dual majors in journalism and computer science, of which there is an increasing pool. They generally tend to get ignored by other high-profile consumer startups, and present an attractive pool to target for hiring.
• This is especially true if you are trying to create media-derived data products, and there are a lot of cross-dependencies that somebody with the media background would understand better than a regular developer.
• Developers with media background tend to understand presentation of data and information in right formats.

Cross functional agile product manager:

• Agile development, a methodology that came out of the software world, is increasingly being implemented across other parts of companies as well, especially as a buzzword by marketers. For a media startup, agile would translate into building quick, fast and dirty, with few resources, whether it is edit, business, sales, and of course tech development. That means a cross-functional product manager who is almost a junior COO, working with founders to keep everything running and launching on time, amidst the requisite amount of chaos.

Content marketing & partnerships:

• The social media editor is dead, the engagement manager has arrived. Call it whatever you want, beyond the buzzwords it means marketing your content is a full time function, and is multivariate, multi-service and multi-platform. The skills required then becomes a lot more complex than just someone who tweets and “engages” with community. It is a mix of being natively good at social, ability to focus on various social networks in different ways that those platforms require, in different formats of media. It means seeding various sites, forums and platforms beyond social; it also means part traditional business development functions of maintaining and seeding existing content partnerships.

Sales:

• The first sales hire at any media startup is a crucial and scary step. Hiring someone who can just sell banner and boxes, even if lots of them, won’t cut it. The first sales hire has to be strategic enough to think big picture, understand what the nascent brand stands for, and be on top of emerging trends in content market, native advertising and digital branding. And as digital has enabled the rise of early adopters, fanboys and prosumers across various industries, a sales hire should typically have both B2B and B2C experience to understand how companies market to various constituencies in different ways.

Caveat:

This is an early stage template. Beyond year two and beyond seed stage, the hiring guidelines and skill sets needed will evolve as product, business and strategy evolves — even if philosophies and operating principles stay rooted in founders vision.

(I have used the words “news”, “media” and “content” interchangeably here, to cast a wider net. Don’t get tripped up in the semantics of the words, larger lessons apply to any kind of content-driven startup.)

This article originally appeared on LinkedIn, and it has been republished here with the kind permission of the author. 

There were quite a few themes covered in this year’s GEN News Summit, but if there was an overall theme, it really would be their unofficial slogan: Hack the Newsroom. ‘Hack’ in this case doesn’t mean breaking into computers or denial-of-service attacks, but rather to try and try again to solve difficult questions, and then to try some more.

The conference looked not only at new developments in digital news but also about how to achieve organisational transformation.

Drone journalism: Potential and practicalities

The session that left me with a proper sense of future shock looked at the rise of drone journalism. Using small, inexpensive and flexible remote-control flying machines like the Parrot AR, journalists and news organisations are able to do aerial camerawork that would have once required helicopters. Drones like the Parrot can be controlled easily using a smartphone or tablet. The kind of footage possible with these flying machines is illustrated by a self-described drone journalist who recorded protesters in Istanbul’s Taksim Square and posted the results on YouTube.

The story didn’t end so well for the Taksim drone itself, however, as police eventually shot it out of the sky.

In the US, universities are already exploring how drones can be used for journalism. The University of Nebraska used a $25,000 drone and other remote-controlled aerial vehicles to cover the extreme drought last year. In this video, you can see not only the footage from the drones but also how they operate.

A recent report by Robert Picard and the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s Mark Corcoran for the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism said that while $25,000 might seem a lot, the cost of a drone is much less than a helicopter or a fixed-wing aircraft. Costs vary widely, however, from “a few hundred pounds to a few hundred thousand pounds”.

The cost of some drones and the risk of police shooting them down are just two of the issues surrounding the remote-control aircraft. Their use for journalism also raises questions of legality and privacy, as they can be highly intrusive. While there isn’t a cloud of drones chasing Justin Bieber – at least not yet – the report looked at some of the legal and ethical issues of drone usage.

In many countries, drone use will require regulatory permission. This means that governments that want to prevent coverage of protests will find it relatively easy to ground them. Privacy laws, which are already being used to block traditional journalistic coverage, will almost certainly be used to curtail their use as well.

BBC Live Editor Guy Pelham and Nick Pinks, a BBC R&D engineer, noted that media organisations’ lawyers should already be studying aviation law in addition to privacy law to be ready for the questions that drones will inevitably raise.

John Paton’s clarion call for digital transformation

For me, the best talk at GEN – both in terms of its informational value as well as its well-argued message – was from John Paton, the CEO of Digital First Media. The US company manages the MediaNews Group and the Journal Register company. Paton argued that the past success of media companies does not ensure a successful future. He said that $1 of profit in a traditional media company today will become 56 cents of loss in five years. He even says that his company will need to do more in terms of growing digital revenue, managing digital costs while investing in digital products, sales and infrastructure and making cuts to the legacy, meaning print, business. He said:

Over the next three years if our digital revenue goes up again around 87% and digital costs go up again about 73% – mobile, video, digital sales and content don’t come free – then profit will be down 37%. Not up but down.
We can no longer treat digital as a bolt-on to our strategy and protect the legacy business.

He wants to motivate his employees to change. He said:

There can be no risk without reward. Smart, risk-taking legacy news organizations will successfully transform. Wealth will be created. And that wealth has to be shared for the employees who are taking those risks with the Company. To that end, Digital First Media will roll out in the coming weeks the details of a profit-sharing plan for all employees. It will include non-union and union employees alike but not senior executives. They’re well paid and it’s enough already.

The entire text of Paton’s talk is available here.

Hackathons: Rapid innovation

To help organisations innovate, GEN has held a series of ‘hackathons’ in various cities worldwide over the past year. A hackathon is a competition in which small teams attempt to solve a specific problem by creating a product in a limited amount of time, with the most complete product usually winning. The GEN News Summit therefore represented the World Cup of news hackathons, with 11 teams worldwide invited to Paris, where they were given the following challenge: rethink your homepage in the context of user engagement.

The winning team was the Netherlands’ De Volksraant, which created a new front page that provided summaries as well as entire articles, and provided visual clues as to what a reader’s friends were sharing.

GEN 2013 trends

It’s always fun to go to a news industry conference and play ‘buzzword bingo’, a game where you have a bingo card filled with new media buzzwords and cover them during the presentations. Of the new media themes, one of the most frequently used buzzwords at GEN 2013 was ‘engagement’, with numerous speakers discussing methods and measurement of audience involvement in the news. ‘Committing acts of journalism’ was another phrase that stuck in my mind – and my notebook – as another way of referring to citizen journalism or user-generated content.

Another buzzword was ‘responsive’, as in design. It refers to new design methods and technology that allow digital content to automatically respond, or resize, to the screen size of the device. Responsive design allows news content creators to design a page once rather than having separate designs for desktop, mobile and tablet audiences. While it makes perfect sense, there still aren’t many organisations executing responsive design well, which design guru Oliver Reichenstein of Information Architects pointed out in his talk.

One of the reasons conferences are great is that it allows you to get an idea of the state of the art. While one cannot easily achieve all of the best practices presented, they provide food for thought. At GEN, it seemed that the state of the art is to be digital-first, drone-ready, responsive, ethical and ready for a hackathon. All in a day’s work, right?

The hacktivist group, the Syrian Electronic Army, has been on a roll recently, tricking journalists at some of the most well-known news organisations, including the Associated Press, Thomson-Reuters, the BBC and the Financial Times into giving up their usernames and passwords. The hacktivists have then used the Twitter and WordPress accounts of these news outlets to damage their credibility and spread pro-Assad government messages.

These incidents have been embarrassing, and the natural response is to play them down. However, two news groups – the American satirical news site, The Onion, and the Financial Times – have resisted the urge to sweep the attacks under the carpet and have instead detailed them.

Not only does this caryy the best tradition of journalism into the digital age with the news organisations practicing the transparency that journalists so often call on others to embrace, it also provides a valuable public service to other news businesses on how to spot these sophisticated attacks and prevent themselves from also becoming victims.

Attacks rely on trusted sources

The popular image of a hacker is one of a technical savant so steeped in the ways of computers and network security that no lock is strong enough to keep them out. While this does describe a small elite, most hackers do not rely on complex technical attacks, instead relying on tricking you out of your usernames and passwords, a process known as social engineering in the hacking community.

One of the key elements of these attacks is that they rely on networks of trust – either in colleagues or in trusted sources. Most of these attacks begin with phishing and spear phishing attacks. At The Onion, staff began receiving emails from “strange, outside addresses”. But that’s not all. The example The Onion gives in its write up of the attack is a faked email from Elizabeth Mpyisi from a UNHCR address. Many journalists would be familiar with UNHCR, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, and a quick search turns up a skeletal LinkedIn profile for an Elizabeth Mpyisi. The attackers are counting on the fact that journalists would be familiar with UNHCR and would trust it as a source of information. As for the social media profiles connected to Elizabeth Mpyisi, do not take this as evidence that the email is legitimate. Hoaxers and hackers have been known to set up fake social media accounts to support their attacks.

However, journalists and editors must immediately ask why anyone from UNHCR would be contacting them with this brief and slightly cryptic email. Also, Mpyisi is listed as a community services officer, and her LinkedIn account is listed as being registered in Uganda. Why would a Ugandan employee of UNHCR be contacting employees of The Onion? Journalists are professional sceptics, and in this age of frequent digital attacks, it is worth employing this scepticism to keep yourself from being the next victim.

In the case of the FT attack, the Syrian Electronic Army had first targeted the personal email accounts of FT journalists, according to FT lab co-founder and director Andrew Betts.

In the emails to both The Onion and the FT, they contained links that appeared to be to news stories in the Washington Post or CNN. However, the links actually redirected to a hacked WordPress site, “rather a high profile one but we thought it rude to name them, and they’ve since fixed it”, Betts said. The staff at The Onion were then redirected to a fake Google Apps login. In the case of the FT, the hackers faked the newspaper’s corporate email login page. Once logged in, the FT employee was redirected to their corporate Gmail inbox and “were none the wiser”, Betts said.

Copying these webmail pages is all too easy. Some news organisations’ corporate webmail login pages can be found using a simple search, and with the increasing use of Gmail for corporate email, it isn’t that difficult to guess the address.

These types of tricks are the common way that most of these attacks now start. The tricks that hackers use are always changing and constantly growing more sophisticated, but the tactics have remained largely the same for much of the past decade.

How the attack escalates

Once the hackers had access to an internal email address, then the attack intensified. Betts said:

By targeting those FT staff that advertise their email address publicly, the hackers eventually managed to secure access to an FT.com corporate email account. With this, they also had access to our global address list and with it the email addresses of every member of FT staff. They began sending the same email to a much larger number of FT.com users, this time from legitimate FT.com email accounts.

In both instances, the attackers use your own email systems against you. Back at The Onion:

After discovering that at least one account had been compromised, we sent a company-wide email to change email passwords immediately. The attacker used their access to a different, undiscovered compromised account to send a duplicate email which included a link to the phishing page disguised as a password-reset link. This dupe email was not sent to any member of the tech or IT teams, so it went undetected. This third and final phishing attack compromised at least 2 more accounts. One of these accounts was used to continue owning our Twitter account.

The FT was able to work with Google to blacklist the site that was being used to compromise the accounts, which meant that any email containing the link would not be delivered, and The Onion forced a company-wide reset of their Google Apps accounts.

The FT shared how they managed to wrest control back of their accounts. One thing stands out, they worked closely with both Google and Twitter. If you use third party services such as these, you will want to make sure that you have good contacts with the companies, and if you are working with major US or European internet companies, try to get a local contact so that you’re not waiting for hours before the US wakes up and comes online.

Lessons from the attacks

The FT and The Onion have done a valuable public service by detailing the attacks, however embarrassing they might be. They also have added several suggestions on how news organisations can defend themselves against such attacks. Here are some of the lessons they have learned.

Widespread services make big targets – In the end, only several Twitter accounts and two out of 60 WordPress blogs were compromised at the Financial Times. As Betts point out, these are some of the most widely used third party services and platforms used by news organisations. “This problem will likely get worse over time as more organisations adopt the same online tools – if a vulnerability is found against one, it can be used against all – increasing the motivation for the hackers to find holes,” Betts said.

Hackers share tips on how to exploit, and they often cooperate. Betts says that there was evidence that the attack against the FT came not only from Syria but also from Russia.

However, it’s not just hackers who share information on how to break into sites, there are several popular guides on how to improve the security of the services you use, including WordPress.

How many people really need high-level access? One step the FT took after the attack was to re-examine its security procedures and limit high-level access to only those staff who require it. Does everyone need access to your corporate Twitter account? WordPress has the ability to limit access based on roles. For instance, you can set up accounts that allow contributors to submit content but not publish that content live to the site. You will need to strike a balance between allowing access so no process relies on a single technical staff member or editor, but you also don’t want to give everyone access to make major changes to your site.

Make two-factor authentication mandatory – As these attacks have become more widespread, more internet companies have added two-factor authentication. Often this is implemented so that in addition to your username and password, you also need a code that will be sent to your mobile phone to access your account. Google, Facebook and recently Twitter have all added two-factor authentication. Google will also provide you with a set of single use codes you can use if you don’t have mobile phone access. The FT has now made two-factor authentication mandatory. If an internet service provides you with a way to be more secure, use it, without exception.

The Onion’s tech team also recommends using an app such as HootSuite to manage your social media accounts. “Restricting password-based access to your accounts prevents a hacker from taking total ownership, which takes much longer to rectify,” they said. They also suggest using an email to register with Twitter “isolated from your organization’s normal email”.

Educate staff – This is key. Both of these attacks were only possible because members of staff were tricked into surrendering their usernames and passwords. Security training is no longer a luxury. It is essential. Often these attacks are carried out by patriotic hackers, people not employed by the government but sympathetic to it. Out of a sense of national pride, they will attack international and domestic critics of their government.

Digital security is a cat-and-mouse game, with hackers constantly coming up with new ways to trick users into sacrificing their own security, but also with security professionals and staff learning new ways to defend against these attacks. Fortunately, these two news organisations have shared valuable lessons on how to stay safe. Take advantage of their honesty and openness and make sure you’re not the next victim.

Go to almost any online journalism conference and you’ll hear CMS war stories. Several years ago, Martin Stabe, an interactive producer at the Financial Times, wrote about some of these CMS horror stories, saying:

Gripes about the clunkiness of content management systems are almost universal among online journalists. At one conference I attended a few months ago, several editors compared how long it took to post just one simple story to their websites. One had counted 62 clicks to complete this most basic publishing process.

It’s important that your CMS is flexible both for technical staff and editorial staff – and you’ll definitely want to make sure that it doesn’t take 62 clicks of the mouse just to publish content online.

Here are some tips of what to do and what to avoid collected from news organisations that have lived through it.

Journalists have to be involved in the process

A CMS is a critical element to your future digital success. Dave Lee, a technology reporter for the BBC, looked at the issues surrounding CMS development a few years ago, and he wrote:

A bad CMS hurts. It means people cut corners. It means more time is given to fart-arsing about with HTML code than writing good editorial. It means time that should be spent refining headlines, opening pars and article structure is instead spent wrestling with ‘quirks’ that slowly sap away at a reporter’s motivation to do the job right.

When you’re doing any technical project, one key element is requirements’ gathering. For a CMS, you’ll have to think about what you want to deliver to your audiences and how you will deliver it. One key element in that process is how your journalists and editors will use the system.

It might seem odd to journalists and editors to want to be involved in developing the digital production method because, in the past, journalism and the production process were largely separate. Journalists wrote stories and handed them off to sub-editors and page designers. At broadcasters, the production system was focused on writing scripts and producing radio and TV stories.

However, in digital news production, journalism and production processes become more tightly integrated, and the workflow and process has to work for journalists and other editorial staff. This is true regardless of what stage you are at in the digital transition. In the early phase of the digital transition, newsrooms often have a single journalist transferring text from print stories or broadcast scripts into an online CMS. With a single journalist, you want the process to be as efficient as possible.

As your digital business grows, the process gets more integrated. Instead of a single journalist, many newsrooms eventually move to a system in which journalists directly write their stories for digital and print or broadcast platforms. Making sure that journalists are able to do their jobs most efficiently is crucial.

The industry is full of horror stories of journalists being left out of the process.

Stabe flagged up a fascinating collection of academic research, Making News Online, edited by Chris Paterson and David Domingo.

Domingo researched four online newsrooms in Catalonia in Spain. Martin highlighted the struggles journalists had with their CMS.

Reporters usually did not have the chance to participate in technological decisions and one of the strongest internal social conflicts in the newsrooms arose because of the frustrations with the technical features of the tools they used … CMS design did not always fit the needs of journalists, and discouraged them from routines that would have sufficed in other material conditions.

In other cases, they complained that technical routines were too cumbersome and time consuming, working against their wish for immediacy. This led to a relationship of distrust between the journalists and the CMS staff.

And Martin fears that this is feeding resistance from print staff to embracing digital media. He wrote:

I suspect badly-designed CMS backends engender resistance to the online medium among print journalists by leading them to assume that all this digital stuff must be frightfully complicated.

The key thing is to make sure that your CMS and the tools that your editors and journalists use on a daily basis meet their needs. To do that, editorial staff have to be involved.

Journalists must engage with the process

However, bad CMSs are often not a simple issue of journalists being left out of the process. Senior management need to make sure that journalists and technical staff or contractors work together effectively. This may take some effort, and to be honest, very few editorial organisations work effectively across editorial and technical departments. The handful that do have achieved this over years of effort.

Dave Lee looked at the frustrations and  problems surrounding CMSs, and he flagged up a number of issues including communication and collaboration, or lack thereof. Lee quotes a developer, John, who said they had invited the more than 200 users of their CMS to test new features. John said:

Almost nobody bothered – and when we thought it’s fine (because of no requests to fix something) and turned the old version off there was this shitstorm about some minor things not working properly (which could have been fixed in couple of days).

Small improvements could make journalists’ life much easier but if they don’t want to participate they shouldn’t expect much either.

This is a key management issue in the digital transition, and senior management need to make sure that editorial and technical staff communicate effectively and work together well. This is not something that happens without close attention and effort on the part of management, editorial and technical staff.

CMS solutions are increasingly modular

Content-management systems do not need to do everything, and often if you try to make them do too much, that is when the project becomes a mess including going over budget, not working as well as you’d like and leading to a complicated process that journalists hate. At the most basic level, web services can add services without having to modify your core CMS, such as social media curation service Storify or liveblogging tool Scribblelive.

However other services can also deliver key elements of your digital content strategy such as search. Newscoop is an open-source CMS focused on news organisations, and they have added support for the Solr open-source search. [Sourcefabric was spun out of the Centre for Advanced Media – Prague, a project of the Media Development Investment Fund. Knowledge Bridge is a project of MDIF.] The Solr search platform is used by major organisations including Nasa, the White House and The Guardian. Search is a key element in helping your audience find the content they want, and by integrating proven technology such as Solr, Newscoop is supporting organisations like Georgian independent news organisation Netgazeti to deliver a better search experience that will grow as Netgazeti grows, according to Sourcefabric’s Adam Thomas. [Netgazeti is one of the online components of Georgian newspaper Batumelebi, an MDIF client.]

Adopt existing systems rather create new ones

When news organisations look at their requirements for a CMS, frequently they come to believe that their requirements are so unique that they need a bespoke system. This is rarely a good solution especially for small, independent news organisations with small technical development budgets. More news organisations are taking existing systems and adapting them to their needs.

The School of Journalism and Media Studies and the Computer Science Department at Rhodes University in Grahamstown, South Africa, created NiKA by extending the Drupal open-source CMS to make it easier for journalists to publish their own material as well as allowing members of the public to easily send in eyewitness information and tips via SMS and IM.

Harry Dugmore, a professor at the School of Journalism and Media Studies, told PBS MediaShift:

NiKa sorts SMSs and incorporates them directly into the newspaper’s system, automating what had previously been a manual process. The SMS pages let local citizens share their opinions, and see their words in print.

However, even relying on an existing CMS didn’t eliminate all of the technical complexity of the project. In another article about the NiKA project on PBS MediaShift, Dugmore said, “ the software, although open source and free, does need good tech skills to install.” And Michael Salzwedel, the online editor of the NiKA media partner the Grocott Mail, said that the goal was to simplify the requirements in setting up the system so that publishers could easily publish to print, the web and mobile.

This kind of integration is a difficult task, but as more news organisations bring together their digital and print or broadcast workflow, there will be new lessons both about the technology, workflow and organisation that will help you.

What are the lessons you have learned as you chose your CMS to publish to the web and mobile? What worked? What didn’t? What will you do differently the next time you have to change your CMS? Let us know in the comments.