A Case Study of the Orlando Sentinel's Use of New

THE NEW NORM: A CASE STUDY OF THE ORLANDO SENTINEL’S USE OF NEW MEDIA TECHNOLOGIES DURING HIGH PROFILE TRIAL COVERAGE

GARY W. GREEN

A THESIS PRESENTED TO THE GRADUATE SCHOOL OF THE UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF MASTER OF ARTS IN MASS COMMUNICATION

UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA 2015

Dedicated to my patient and encouraging wife, Jeanette.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

First and foremost I want to thank my children, Sean and Jessica, my parents,

Dave and Linda, and my wife, Jeanette, for their unwavering support throughout my master’s program. To my parents: I am grateful to you for passing on the appreciation of higher education and love of life-long learning. To my children: I hope that I have shown you the value of setting rigorous personal goals and dedicating yourself to complete those goals. To my wife: I will forever be indebted to you for pushing me to step outside of my comfort zone and embrace the possibilities of the unknown.

Furthermore, I want to acknowledge my committee: Dr. Johanna Cleary, Dr.

Ronald Rodgers, and Dr. Lisa Duke, without whom this thesis would never have come to fruition. I am supremely fortunate to have worked with this all-star cast, particularly as two them complete this stage of their academic careers and step into retirement. Thank you for the mentoring, the innumerable edits, and the guidance into the world of academia.

Lastly, I want to thank my brother, Troy Green, who died from cancer in 2011. In his final months when I was considering returning to graduate school to work on my master’s degree, he advised me, no matter my decision, make certain I spend my time wisely, on endeavors of impact, because you never know how long you have.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

page

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ...... 4

LIST OF FIGURES ...... 7

ABSTRACT ...... 8

CHAPTER

1 INTRODUCTION ...... 10

2 LITERATURE REVIEW ...... 18

Traditional vs. new media ...... 19 Paradigm Shifts ...... 24 Creative destruction ...... 27 The price of entry ...... 29 Technological disruptors ...... 30 Avoiding extinction...... 31 Technology Changes Reporting Processes ...... 32 New Technologies in Old Mediums ...... 34 Audience Participation ...... 37 User-Generated Content ...... 38 Web 2.0...... 39 Editing user-generated content...... 41 Is Social Media Replacing Traditional Journalism? ...... 43 The value of social media...... 44 The true impact of journalism...... 45 Integrating traditional and social media...... 46 Theoretical Framework ...... 48 Gatekeeping ...... 50 Agenda-setting and framing through social media reporting...... 54

3 METHODOLOGY ...... 60

Case Studies ...... 60 Reflexivity ...... 63 IRB Approval ...... 65 Data Collection ...... 66 Transcription and Coding ...... 69 Participant Observation ...... 71

4 RESULTS ...... 73

Impact on Gatekeeping ...... 73

Gatekeeping in social media...... 75 Gatekeeping with photos ...... 78 Agenda-setting ...... 81 Audience Demand and Engagement ...... 84 The Role of Metrics ...... 86 The Role of Early Adopters ...... 94 Breaking news team...... 95 Social media...... 97 Twitter...... 98 Facebook...... 101 Alerts...... 101 Live chat...... 103 Online...... 106 SEO – landing page...... 106 Photos...... 108 Video...... 113 Cultural Resistance ...... 116 Mocking...... 119 Resentment...... 121 Lack of training...... 122 Stress...... 124 Fear of layoffs...... 125 Low morale...... 126 Lack of resources...... 127 Standards...... 128 Better off...... 129

5 DISCUSSION AND CONCLUSION ...... 131

A New Norm ...... 131 Pivotal Point ...... 132 Dissension ...... 137 Limitations and Future Research ...... 140

APPENDIX

A INFORMED CONSENT ...... 143

B INTERVIEW GUIDE...... 147

C INTERVIEW SUBJECTS ...... 149

D NEWSROOM FLOWCHART OF INTERVIEW SUBJECTS ...... 150

LIST OF REFERENCES ...... 151

BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH ...... 162

LIST OF FIGURES

Figure page

4-1 Orlando Sentinel Trayvon Martin Live Chat ...... 83

4-2 Orlando Sentinel Casey Anthony Twitter Account...... 99

4-3 Orlando Sentinel Trayvon Martin Twitter Account...... 102

4-4 Orlando Sentinel Casey Anthony Live Chat...... 104

4-5 Orlando Sentinel Trayon Martin/George Zimmerman Live Chat...... 105

Abstract of Thesis Presented to the Graduate School of the University of Florida in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Master of Arts in Mass Communication

THE NEW NORM: A CASE STUDY OF THE ORLANDO SENTINEL’S USE OF NEW MEDIA TECHNOLOGIES DURING HIGH PROFILE TRIAL COVERAGE

Gary W. Green

May 2015

Chair: Johanna Cleary Major: Mass Communication

As traditional news media struggle to adapt to a new journalism paradigm with the onslaught of a historic technological disruption in journalism, some institutions are altering decades-old newsgathering and dissemination routines by utilizing emerging media technologies to engage with a newly active audience through two-way asymmetric communication. Concurrently, these new journalism norms are challenging long-standing gatekeeping, agenda-setting, and framing media theories.

This comparison case study focuses on the Orlando Sentinel newspaper in

Central Florida and its groundbreaking coverage on two seminal court trials: State of

Florida v. Casey Marie Anthony and State of Florida v. George Zimmerman. Both of the trials garnered national and international media attention due to the controversial and sensational nature of the charges. Anthony was acquitted of first-degree murder in the death of her two-year-old daughter, Caylee. Zimmerman was acquitted on second- degree murder charges for the shooting death of unarmed teenager, Trayvon Martin.

These trials were selected in part because the researcher was employed by the Orlando

Sentinel at the time of the trials and study, and therefore had privileged knowledge and

direct access to the inner-workings of the newspaper and the employees who covered the trials.

Employing qualitative case study methodologies, this research involved a series of in-depth interviews with reporters, photographers, web and social media producers, and editors who were directly involved with covering the trials. Through these interviews, the researcher investigated the changes the Orlando Sentinel made to its traditional newsgathering and dissemination processes in response to audience demand, and how those new processes directed readers to the newspaper’s multiple resources in print, online, and on mobile platforms for obtaining information about the trials.

The study demonstrated how these emerging newsgathering and dissemination techniques challenged existing gatekeeping, agenda-setting, and framing media theories, whereby information is no longer passing through one specific gatekeeper and the audience is now actively engaged in setting the agenda and framing the context of the story. Findings show that audience demands for live and continuous information throughout the development of the Casey Anthony and George Zimmerman stories and resulting court proceedings were a driving force in changing outdated journalism paradigms that led to the adaptation of a new norm by the Orlando Sentinel newsroom and journalists.

CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION

Traditional journalism is at a crossroads as news organizations are struggling with changing and broken business models, fleeing advertisers, and readers who expect the free delivery of information across multiple publishing platforms. At the same time, readers are using new media technologies to assist in setting the news agenda through two-way interaction with news organizations (Berkheimer, 2012; Sasseen,

Olmstead, & Mitchell, 2013). In response to these changing journalism paradigms, news organizations have had to evolve their newsgathering and dissemination processes, especially during breaking news and high profile trials, to provide a steady stream of content across multiple platforms using new media technologies such as

Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter (Cloud, 2011; Goehler, Dias and Bralow, 2010; Jobb,

2010; Lozare, 2011; Pew Research Center for Excellence, 2012). Through this evolution, individual journalists are also challenging traditional gatekeeping functions by publishing news and information in real-time on these emerging platforms in response to the audience, who Shoemaker and Vos (2009) propose have an active role in a secondary gatekeeping function in which readers redistribute content around their own personal interests. And while this paradigmatic shift in newsroom functionality is vital for legacy news organizations hoping to survive the historic Schumpeterian (1942/2008) creative destruction, cultural resistance from long-standing and successful journalism methods by veteran newsworkers can disrupt the critical transformation to the new journalism paradigm (Killebrew, 2003; Lawson-Borders, 2003; Quinn, 2005; Singer,

2004; Tameling and Broersma, 2013).

Through a comparative case study drawing from a series of in-depth interviews, this research explores how the Orlando Sentinel, a 152,923 daily circulation newspaper in Central Florida as of January 2015, the third largest in the state (Audit Bureau of

Circulations, 2014), covered the Casey Anthony and George Zimmerman trials, and how the coverage of those trials changed their traditional newsgathering and reporting processes as they adapted to keep up with new readership habits. Both of the trials garnered national and international media attention due to the controversial and sensational nature of the charges. Anthony was acquitted of first-degree murder in the death of her two-year-old daughter, Caylee. Zimmerman was also acquitted, but on second-degree murder charges for the shooting death of unarmed teenager, Trayvon

Martin. The researcher, who was employed by the Orlando Sentinel at the time of the study, selected these two court cases to highlight and study due to the privileged knowledge and direct access to the inner-workings of the newspaper and the employees who covered the trials.

Other newspapers have also used social media to report on high-profile trials

(Jobb, D, 2010; Lozare, 2011) however, having two trials of such magnitude occur within the same media market just two years apart was unusual and significant. And, with audiences throughout the world monitoring and responding to the development of these trials through mainstream and social media alike, the Orlando Sentinel had a pivotal moment in which to react to changing journalism paradigms. These paradigms are the core of what McChesney and Nichols (2010) describe as a critical juncture in the history of journalism. This critical juncture is the point at which journalism must fundamentally adapt to give rise to a greater system of informing the public in the name

of democracy, or face the dire consequences of failing to do so (McChesney & Nichols,

2010).

Using the Orlando Sentinel’s coverage of the trials as a case study into changing newsroom processes, this research aims to highlight significant and necessary adaptations in newsgathering and dissemination procedures that challenge and expand existing media theory including gatekeeping, agenda-setting, and framing theories.

Previous research on new media technologies and legacy news organizations has primarily focused on the effects of Twitter, user-generated content, or Facebook.

Tribune Company’s Orlando Sentinel utilized a wide array of digital delivery methods during their coverage of the Casey Anthony trial including live video streaming, social media, automatic uploads of photos from the courtroom, specialized mobile collections and SMS (short message service) campaigns, live chat rooms, and SEO (search engine optimization) techniques for stories posted online (J. Cutter, personal communication,

September 24, 2011). By the conclusion of the second trial, their experiences suggested some fundamentally important changes for the field.

Moments after the not-guilty verdict was announced, the terms “Caylee Anthony” were the third most searched terms in the world on Google (Pacheco, 2011, July 6). On the afternoon of the verdict, Twitter locked up from the heavy response during which the keyword “caseyanthony” was used 34,000 times and “not guilty” appeared 20,000 times an hour (Pacheco, 2011, July 6). Additionally, 75,510 people signed up to receive a text message alert of the verdict. On that one day, orlandosentinel.com received more page views than all of the other Tribune Company publishing and television websites combined (J. Cutter, personal communication, September 24, 2011).

Even though new and sometimes experimental newsgathering and dissemination processes were initially developed and routinized by the newspaper during the course of the first trial, only two years elapsed before another landmark case challenged those new procedures. As the newspaper prepared to cover the George Zimmerman trial, newsroom employees had to build upon those emerging routines, once again redefining their roles as news producers and publishers through social media and other new media technologies.

Robert Picard (2009) describes a newsroom mantra in the Nieman Reports in which he suggests that news organizations need to provide information to their readers at any time, at any place, and on any platform. This mantra is a deviation from the traditional norm, in which news organizations have historically reported to passive audiences through one-way symmetric communication on legacy platforms (Hermida,

2010b; Miller, 2008; Pavlik, 2008).

With the advent of Web 2.0, conceived by Tim O’Reilly (O’Bannon, 2008), audiences are no longer passive recipients of media, news, and information; they are creators, facilitators, distributors, and readers alike (Lee & Ma, 2012; Lâzâroiu, 2012;

Miller, 2008; Pavlik, 2000). When the audience is able to contribute to the process, they become part of a community, which builds loyalty, and ultimately brings them back to the original site (Miller, 2008).

Web 2.0 technology not only provides the audience with the opportunity to participate in the creation and dissemination of content, but it also provides a ubiquity of information, freely and readily available at any time and any place for the next generation of news consumers. More than one media scholar has noted that if news

organizations are to maintain readership in the evolving media landscape, they must find new ways to engage their audience (Sasseen, Olmstead, & Mitchell, 2013).

Michael Skoler (2009) suggests that trust is the key to maintaining loyal readership.

Legacy journalism organizations have been slow to adapt to new reader’s habits, consequently, they have lost the trust of their audience (Skoler, 2009). As active participants, audience members expect to share information throughout their network of established people using a variety of credible sources such as Twitter feeds, blogs, videos, and online news articles (Skoler, 2009). In many cases, audience members are serving as citizen journalists themselves, often covering topics that fall through the gaps of mainstream journalism (Cleary & Bloom, 2011; DeRienzo, 2011; De Keyser &

Raeymaeckers, 2012; Pew Research Center for People, 2012). Skoler (2009) suggests that news organizations “need to listen, ask questions, and be genuinely open to what our readers, listeners, and watchers tell us is important everyday” (p. 39).

The tools of social media and Web 2.0 provide news organizations with an opportunity to engage and connect with their audience, to share in the experiences, knowledge, and voices of others (Skoler, 2009). But in doing so, journalists risk further alienating their readers by not listening and only using social media technology to distribute and market their content, rather than truly connecting and building conversations and relationships with others (Armstrong & Gao, 2010; Himelboim &

McCreery, 2012; Skoler, 2009).

Barb Palser (2009) highlights that one of the early adaptations of Twitter as a news tool was by the Los Angeles Times and KPBS, a San Diego public radio station, that used the micro-blogging site to disseminate breaking news alerts during the

Southern California wildfires in 2007. Another prime example was the emergency landing of a US Airways flight on the Hudson River, when Janis Krums, tweeted a photo of the plane in the river (Krums, 2009). Palser (2009) points out that most Twitter users access the site from their mobile devices, upon which they have the ability to monitor

Tweets and update information while simultaneously responding to it. And not surprisingly, more of the coveted 18 to 34-year-old audience access news and information from their smartphones than traditional print publications, which presents legacy media a valuable opportunity to engage with potential readers through these developing platforms and interfaces (Newspaper Association of America, 2013). As newsrooms adapt to these changing readership habits, they have had to reallocate resources and dismantle outdated reporting, editing, and delivery methods to keep up with the demand of the audience and the never-ending news cycle.

This study takes an in-depth look into the processes and procedures of the

Orlando Sentinel’s coverage of the trial of Casey Anthony, who was acquitted of murdering her two-year-old daughter, Caylee, in July, 2011, in Orlando, Florida. Two years later, the newspaper focused its coverage on another controversial trial, State of

Florida v. George Zimmerman (2013), in which George Zimmerman, a neighborhood watchman, was on trial for the murder of Trayvon Martin, a young man whom

Zimmerman claimed he shot in self-defense. As the newspaper prepared to cover the

George Zimmerman trial in Sanford, FL, the reporters, photographers, editors, and web producers built upon the routines they developed during the Casey Anthony trial to engage with readers across the social media sphere as well as the Orlando Sentinel’s varied platforms. While many of the new procedures developed during the Casey

Anthony trial became standard during the two-year gap between the trials, several new approaches were employed to attract and maintain readership throughout the

Zimmerman trial. Social media and new media technologies played an integral role in the newspaper’s coverage of the trials and how it engaged in different variations of one- way and two-way communication with the audience, while growing and maintaining existing readership.

The goal of this case study is to show how new reporting processes used and developed by Orlando Sentinel journalists (See Appendix C) throughout each trial changed and adapted many long-standing newsroom norms, by which news and information from the field was traditionally edited in the newsroom and disseminated through one existing channel to a broad audience (Breed, 1955; Singer, 2005; White,

1950). Similarly, as these new norms evolved, the traditional gatekeeping, agenda- setting, and framing functions of the newsroom were challenged as individual journalists and the audiences whom they served were working collectively to set the news agenda, and ultimately deciding which information passed through their own specific gates.

The objective of this research is to demonstrate that with the adaptation of new media technologies, David Manning White’s (1950) gatekeeping theory is alive and well, but the lengthy channel by which information previously traveled has been significantly condensed. Furthermore, the role of “the most important gatekeeper of all” (White, 1950, p. 384) has in many cases been transferred back to the original reporter, who often serves as the one and only gate through which information is distributed. Similar to

William P. Cassidy’s (2006) study, the purpose here is to discover which forces are at play when journalists covering high profile court cases choose to update their live

stories onto the web, or send a particular Tweet or photograph over another from their laptops or mobile devices in court.

Additionally, this case study was designed to explore how Shaw and McCombs’s

(1972) original agenda-setting theory is challenged in the face of new media technologies and their implementation into mainstream media newsrooms. Shaw and

McCombs’s initial research asserts the core propositions of traditional agenda-setting and attribute agenda-setting, or framing, are that the news media tell us “what to think about,” and “how to think about it”. The purpose here is to examine whether these underlying agenda-setting functions have transferred to a newly active and participatory audience, or if these core concepts have dissipated altogether into fragmented and highly personalized agendas of a diverse audience spread out across multiple platforms and social media streams as suggested by McCombs (2005).

CHAPTER 2 LITERATURE REVIEW

Legacy news organizations steeped in traditional methodologies of one-way symmetrical communication with passive audiences that matriculated over the course of the past two centuries are facing a historic technological disruption that is irrevocably changing the manner in which newspapers cover news and report information to a fractured but active audience with agency through developing technologies. This new two-way asymmetric communication with the audience signifies a momentous shift toward a new journalism paradigm, which is equally influenced by the development and implementation of Web 2.0 technologies, as well as the broken business models of heritage news operations. As journalists work to transform their traditional work routines and dissemination practices, audience members are entering the conversation via new media technologies to a degree that is fundamentally changing how journalists’ and their sources interact (Nee, 2013; Phillips, Singer, Vlad, & Becker, 2009; Pavlik, 2000;

Pavlik, 2008). In this new model, all parties are contributing forces to the message, in which no one person or voice dominates the conversation (Boczkowski, 2005; Nee,

2013; Pavlik, 2000; Shoemaker & Vos, 2009). As a result, audience members are shifting away from their role as passive recipients into active content producers and disseminators (Bowman & Willis, 2005; Harrison, 2010; Phillips, Singer, Vlad, & Becker,

2009). As news institutions use more social media to gather and disseminate information within a new media ecosystem, the value and impact of that journalism is brought into question as it pertains to the democratic process and society at large

(Garber, 2011; Ludtke, 2009; Pilhofer, 2012; Stray, 2012; Zuckerman, 2011).

Furthermore, these new media technologies are challenging decades-old media

theories in new and different ways. Much of the traditional agenda-setting, framing, and gatekeeping functions that historically resided within the newsroom and the principal players of the establishment are now migrating back into the field with the individual journalists, as well as the audience who are entering the conversation through what

Shoemaker and Vos (2009) describe as a third channel of information dissemination.

Traditional vs. new media

John Nerone and Kevin G. Barnhurst (2003) describe six major periods of traditional newspaper journalism beginning with the printer’s paper in the 1700s when the printer not only physically produced the printed pages, but also the content that was printed on the pages. The authors point out that during this initial period, the majority of the work was considered mechanical, leaving little room for editorializing or reporting.

Most of the content came from letters or texts through the mail that served specific political or business interests (Nerone & Barnhurst, 2003). Over the course of the next two centuries, the modern concept of the professional journalist evolved from that of reporter and correspondent, whose task is now to gather facts and present them with political and personal neutrality (Nerone & Barnhurst, 2003). The authors argue that the idea of the modern newsroom only came into existence once the editorial work was completely separated from the mechanical work of printing the paper at the turn of the

19th century, when reporters began working on individual typewriters. Until that point, newsmen wrote their stories alongside the linotype machines, or composed their prose while typesetting (Nerone & Barnhurst, 2003).

As the industrial period of newspapers took hold during the late 1800s, newsrooms consisted of long banks of typewriters, upon which newsworkers produced copy side-by-side under direct supervision of the city editor and the subeditors, in what

could have been compared to a news factory (Nerone and Barnhurst, 2003). As advertising and business interests grew, so too did the roles of editor and publisher, which created a top-down hierarchical labor force that served as the infrastructure for what is referred to by scholars as the traditional newsroom (Nerone & Barnhurts, 2003,

Robinson, 2011). Hanno Hardt and Bonnie Brennen (1999) note that by this time, the telephone had moved reporters into the streets, from which they could call in their stories to a line editor or “re-write man” (as cited in Nerone & Barnhurst, 2003, p. 440;

Tuchman, 1973). Eventually all copy made its way through a series of editors and finally the slot editor, who transferred the approved information to the press foreman for page design and printing (Nerone & Barnhurts, 2003).

The division of newsroom labor continued to separate the mechanical, business, and editorial operations of the newspaper throughout the latter part of the 20th century, which ushered in what Nerone and Barnhurts (2003) describe as the high modern period. In this high modern newsroom, much of the physical orientation of the newsroom changed. Reporters then sat in cubicles positioned around the newsroom according to beats or topics, while managers and editors worked from glass offices, communicating with their subordinates during group or individual meetings (Nerone &

Barnhurts, 2003; Robinson, 2011).

Another major shift in newsroom production occurred during the 1980s, when computer assisted pagination programs gave editors the ability to electronically place photos, text, graphics, and headlines onto the news pages, transferring much of the physical production of cutting and pasting back into the newsroom (Russial, 1994). In this new pagination system, copyeditors, or paginators, would layout the news page on

the computer, while transferring stories, headlines, and photo captions back and forth between a series of editors, until the slot editor set it to type and sent the page to the back production room for paste up (Russial, 1994).

Tuchman (1973) demonstrated how journalists routinized much of the work of the traditional newsroom in order to accommodate for daily, unexpected news events by separating the flow of information and type of events into distinct typifications of hard news, soft news, developing news, continuing news, and spot news. The majority of the traditional news work referenced in Tuchman’s study was conducted from approximately 8:00 a.m. to midnight, which is in stark contrast to the 24-7 virtual newsroom of the digital age (Tuchman, 1973; Robinson, 2011; Singer, 2004).

Correspondingly, good writing is considered a necessity in the traditional journalism world, in comparison to the online journalism world, in which speed and aggregation of content is the lifeblood of the operation (Singer, 2004; Tameling & Broersma, 2013).

Technological disruptions (Christensen, 2011) such as the telegraph and telephone helped shape traditional journalism in much the same way the Internet and new media technologies are shaping the future of journalism (Nerone & Barnhurts,

2003; Phillips, Singer, Vlad & Becker, 2009). While traditional reporters may have relied upon “shoe-leather reporting” (Pavlik, 2000, p. 229) to canvas neighborhoods and call in the story to the line editor or craft their story back at the paper, digital journalists are armed with an arsenal of mobile storytelling tools such as a laptop, audio recorder, cell phone, and digital camera that keep them connected and engaged with their audiences through blogs, videos, online chats, e-mails, and social media platforms (Nerone &

Barnhurts, 2003; Phillips, Singer, Vlad & Becker, 2009; Robinson, 2011; Tameling &

Broersma, 2013; Tuchman, 1973). Additionally, traditional print journalists were more accustomed to meeting one daily deadline, for which they had the entire day to gather information and write their stories. The online digital journalist works under a swarm of ongoing deadlines that he must meet throughout the day in order to post timely stories to the website and other multimedia platforms (Singer, 2004; Tameling & Broersma,

2013).

These new media technologies have been effective in creating a 24-7 “virtual newsroom” (Robinson, 2011, p. 1130). However, their implementation has created new tensions within the labor force of newsrooms in which the personal and professional lives of journalists have blended. Consequently, those with technological skills have moved up in the newsroom hierarchy, pushing older, less technically inclined journalists into retirement or layoffs. As these new media technologies challenged traditional work routines, they also systematically changed newsroom flow charts with technology specialists moving into the center of the newsroom, and the “successfully transitioned”

(Robinson, 2011, p. 1135) journalists now wielding a much larger role with significantly more power in the existing hierarchy. Phillips, Singer, Vlad, and Becker (2009) suggest there is even momentum to eliminate copy editors from the newsroom altogether to facilitate the faster posting of content directly from the journalists into the digital space.

While reporters are continually having to adapt to new work routines in the field by incorporating video, audio, blogs, and social media into their existing workflows, traditional newsroom editors must also adapt by re-inventing themselves as new media content editors (Phillips, Singer, Vlad & Becker, 2009).

Whereas many news organizations are working to integrate new media technologies into their daily work routines, critics of convergence suggest the speed of the new routines threaten traditional journalism standards and the credibility of the respective news organizations (Klinenberg, 2005; Nerone & Barnhurts, 2003; Pew

Project for Excellence, 2009; Phillips, Singer, Vlad & Becker, 2009; Robinson, 2011;

Singer, 2004; Tameling & Broersma, 2013). Tameling and Broersma (2013) focused their research on the de-convergence of the Dutch newspaper de Volkskrant, whose digital convergence efforts were hampered by cultural resistance, and therefore never established a successful digital business model. By dividing their digital and print operations, de Volkskrant allowed for its print journalists to focus on traditional reporting, while the multimedia journalists focused on the digital initiatives (Tameling & Broersma,

2013). After initially reorganizing the converged newsroom to integrate the digital and print operations with editors of each sitting side-by-side, upon de-convergence, online reporters and editors were removed to a separate newsroom, or “content factory”

(Tameling & Broersma, 2013, p.25) 50 miles away, where online journalists could focus on producing as many digital stories as possible, as quickly as possible, without the burden of threatening the traditional print operation. Despite efforts of many to converge digital and print operations, the routines and workflows of each are fundamentally different, with digital news work primarily focused on the efficient delivery of aggregated content, and print more narrowly concentrated on the slow and methodical delivery of specialized and accurate information (Tameling & Broersma, 2013). If new media technologies are to effectively work in a converged newsroom, seasoned journalists must relinquish traditional work routines and adapt a multimedia mindset (Kolodzy,

2006; Singer, 2004). However, Tameling and Broersma (2013) argue that even though digital and print media may be operating under the same vertical brand, they do so with widely different work routines and standards, producing entirely different products.

Paradigm Shifts

Pan and Chan (2003) describe journalism paradigms as the tenets of practice upon which the accepted norms and ideas of society, its working practitioners, and governing bodies are based. These professional beliefs, values, and techniques were developed over time through the routinzation of news work as illustrated by Tuchman

(1973). Paradigms, as referenced in this study, refer to the normalized and traditional newsgathering and dissemination procedures, and the changing mechanisms within those methods as they relate to new media technologies.

Information technologies including the Internet and social media sites such as, but not limited to, Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube, provide multiple new avenues for legacy news organizations to reach and distribute content to their respective audiences.

As a result, audiences, specifically the coveted 18-34 demographic, are receiving up to one-third of their news on social media networks (Sonderman, 2012). Media companies target these younger readers who make up a quarter of the U.S. population as they are more easily influenced by new consumer products that are introduced by supporting advertisers (Flint, 2013; “The Digital World of Millennials,” 2011, May 11). Furthermore,

94% of them are expected to be online by 2015 (“The Digital World of Millennials,”

2011, May 11). Additionally, 47 percent of U.S. adults are receiving their local news, weather, entertainment, and business information via mobile phones and tablet computers (Kaufman, 2011). Of the 164 million U.S. adults who consumed newspaper media content online, in print, or on mobile devices in a given month, the median age of

those who accessed newspaper content exclusively on mobile devices was 33, compared to 54 for the print readership (Newspaper Association of America, 2013).

Furthermore, the mobile exclusive newspaper audience grew by 83% in 2012, compared to the year before (Newspaper Association of America, 2013). In comparison, the median age for those who used Twitter in the past month is 32

(Newspaper Association of America, 2013). The Scarborough report typifies a trend that shows how readers are moving away from the long-standing, rigid, and habitual daily news consumption to a more varied process with more choices and more platforms from which to gather and share stories within a trusted network of people. The

Poynter Institute’s Andrew Beaujon (2013) underscores an alarming trend for legacy media in which approximately half of print readers and television viewers will be over the age of 50 by 2015 (Flint, 2013, June 19; Pew Research, 2012, September 27). In light of that data, Buzzfeed’s President Jon Steinberg suggests that there are no new newspaper readers or television viewers being born today (Beaujon, 2013). If media companies hope to attract the attention of those who grew up in a wired world, they will have to go online, where Generation Y is spending a vast majority of their time (“The

Digital World of Millennials,” 2011, May 11).

There are two paradigm shifts at play here: one mechanical and one theoretical.

Mechanically, the process by which information is collected and reported has changed with the advent of technology. With the aid of Wi-Fi and cellular networks, reporters are now able to collect and transmit data directly from the scene of breaking news.

Previously, journalists would have needed to return to the newsroom to write up their stories, process their film, and edit their video before the news was distributed to the

public through traditional methods in print or on mainstream websites. The second significant shift in the process is theoretical, one in which the reporters in the field have adopted the role of gatekeeper and much of the agenda-setting function has shifted to the audience. Previously, these functions were primarily embedded into the structure and culture of the newsroom as demonstrated in David Manning White’s (1950) original gatekeeping study and Shaw and McCombs’s (1972) primary research on agenda- setting. White illustrated how news and information traveled through a singular line editor who ultimately decided what was and was not news based upon parameters such as time constraints and personal opinion. McCombs and Shaw demonstrated how the news media shape public opinion by emphasizing certain aspects of a story and how those aspects are “framed” or emphasized within a specific context. However, despite the transference of these functions from editor to reporter and newsroom to audience, many of the underlying values and norms that form the decisions by which news is collected and disseminated are still securely in place as demonstrated by Warren

Breed’s (1955) theory on social control in the newsroom. Breed’s (1955) seminal body of work elucidated how the publisher’s policy is adhered to by means of socio-cultural dynamics and status rewards between veteran “newsmen” (p. 327) and new “staffers”

(p. 328). However, Breed’s theory is not applicable to the newly anointed agenda- setters, the audience, who maintain widely divisive opinions and ideological viewpoints as to which agendas the media and participating audience members should be advancing and how those fractured agendas are framed according to individual viewpoints and idiosyncrasies (McCombs, 2005).

Creative destruction

Business Insider’s Henry Blodgett (2013) suggests the journalism industry is entering a new golden age. Blodgett concedes that newspapers in particular are experiencing painful loss and disruption, but that journalism as a whole is better off than ever before. He even postulates that once the emerging news start-ups have fully matured and newspapers complete their transformation to digital first news operations, that journalism will not just be good, but great (Blodgett, 2013).

ProPublica founder and executive chairman Paul Steiger (2014) agrees that the

“train” that is the print world “has left the station” (para. 44). However, Steiger (2014) argues that in order for journalism to reach the next golden age, one that continues to make the world a better place, the proper resources must be allocated. Christensen

(2011) concurs, stating that access to abundant and high-quality resources such as people, technology, brands, capital, information, and customers, to name a few, is absolutely necessary in order to successfully mitigate change. After serving three decades as foreign correspondent, executive editor and most recently, columnist, New

York Times’ Bill Keller announced his departure from the legacy newspaper to join the

Marshall Project, a non-profit news start-up focused on the American criminal justice system (Somaiya, 2014).

During an interview with NPR’s Renee Montagne (2014), Keller explained his thoughts on newspapers’ adaptation to the changing journalism landscape.

You know, people prefer [sic] to what's going on in journalism as creative destruction. And to people at foundering newspapers, it feels more like destruction, but it's also an incredible amount of the creative part of that. My hunch is that there will be newspapers that adapt successfully to the new audiences and the new technology and there will also be startups and things that haven't been entirely invented yet. You know, everybody's experimenting and it's kind of fun to be in on the experimentation.

Joseph Schumpeter’s (1942/2008) original work on creative destruction is widely cited as the process by which innovative entrepreneurs threaten and impact existing monopolies through a necessary component of successful capitalism (Anthony, 2012;

Caballero, 2006; Christensen, 2011; Christensen, Skok & Allworth, 2012; Compaine &

Hoag, 2012; Nee, 2013). The premise behind Schumpeter’s theory, according to

Anthony (2012), is that sometimes in order to innovate, you must first destroy. MIT economics professor and scholar Ricardo J. Caballero (n.d.) characterizes creative destruction as an “incessant product and process innovation mechanism by which new production units replace outdated ones” (para. 2). University of Michigan economics professor Mark J. Perry (2014) calls the decline in newspaper ad revenues “one of the most significant Schumpeterian gales of creative destruction in the last decade.”

Christensen et al., (2012) argue the seminal problem for traditional mainstream media is they are not able or willing to destroy their current business model in order to develop a new one for tomorrow. Christensen (2011) describes this paradoxical phenomenon in the Innovator’s Dilemma. The dilemma for industry leaders is that while they are focusing their efforts on serving their best customers and concentrating their investments on innovations that yield the highest returns, they are actually digging their own grave, to a point of possible extinction (Christensen, 2011; Gershon, 2013).

Nieman Fellow David Skok (2012) asserts that legacy journalism institutions have failed to foster a culture of innovation in which younger, forward thinking, risk taking journalists are rewarded for presenting and utilizing adaptive measures to the rapidly changing new media environment. These audacious and fledgling reporters are what Everett M.

Rogers (2003) describes as early-adopters, individuals who “adopt” or employ

innovations, or new media technologies for purposes of this case study, at an earlier rate than others within the same social system. The problem for news executives is none of them want to take the giant leap into the unknown for fear of risking whatever stability remains in their legacy models (Christensen, et al., 2012). In the meantime, emerging news start-ups are coming onto the scene stealing audiences and revenues by entering the market at a lower end with lower expected profit margins, only to move up the value chain as they gain strength and permanence through developing resources

(Christensen, 2011; Christensen, et al., 2012). Organizations such as the Huffington

Post, ProPublica, The Marshall Project, and Buzzfeed are what Christensen and his colleagues call “classic disruptors” (p. 6).

The price of entry

Compaine and Hoag (2012) cite A.J. Liebling’s famous quote that “Freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one,” (p. 27) to draw comparisons to an emerging media market in which start-up publishers no longer need access to the kinds of capital that was required for legacy print and broadcast news organizations.

Newsonomics author Ken Doctor (2014) wrote that without the need for printing presses or broadcast facilities, the price of entry for a news start-up is less than $25 million, a pittance in comparison. Steiger (2014) argues that the barriers to entry have shrunk so dramatically that new publishers need only to purchase a laptop computer and accompanying website to get started. However, Steiger (2014) differentiates between millions of bloggers on their laptops and meaningful journalism. In order to reach the next golden age, start-ups will need a team of talented journalists, editors, and a lawyer.

Without the extensive overhead expenses of their “old-world” (Christensen et al., 2012,

p. 6) legacy brethren, new media start-ups are able to deliver a more personalized product in a more efficient manner to new audiences in a newly created market.

Technological disruptors

Following suit with Christensen’s (2011) theory on technological disruptors,

Doctor (2014) highlights how new publishers are finding niche sectors of the media sphere in which to build small but growing audiences, who in turn allow them to steal talent from legacy brands and build up their staffs. While traditional news organizations kept their focus on sustaining their legacy business models for fear of “cannibalizing”

(Christensen, 2011, p. 23) their core customer and product base, the new media disruptors such as Google, Facebook, and Huffington Post began to intersect the incumbents’ business trajectory with year over year growth (Christensen et al., 2012).

The tech giants have now paved the way for more news start-ups to repeat the cycle by entering the market in a lower value network with lower profit expectations, and begin the climb towards eventually competing with and possibly displacing long-standing journalism market leaders.

Robert G. Picard (2010) suggests that the problem for newspapers is not technology, nor is it a lack of interest, but a lack of value. With ever-shrinking resources and depleted newsrooms, newspapers are unable to provide useful and vital information and services for the growing media audience. For instance, the Orlando Sentinel only reaches 15% of the Central Florida market (J. Anderson, personal communication,

February 13, 2014). In essence, the newspaper is not valuable enough for 85% of their possible customer base to invest their time, or in Christensen terms, hire them to do a job (Christensen et al., 2012). As a result, the Sentinel launched the citizen blogging platform, hypeorlando, in efforts to boost market penetration by bringing in a wider

variety of voices and content into the conversation (J. Anderson, personal communication, February 13, 2014).

Avoiding extinction

Christensen (2011) wrote, “It is not until the disruption is in its final stages that it truly erodes the position of the incumbents” (p. 8). The Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism (2013) highlights this phenomenon reporting that newsroom cutbacks in 2012 put the industry down 30% since the apex in 2000. As newsrooms continue to cut their valuable resources, the audience is left with shallow, trite, topical reporting by strained legacy operations that are no longer able to produce quality journalism (Berkheimer, 2012; Picard, 2010). As a result, nearly one-third of respondents to a public opinion survey have abandoned their previously preferred news outlet, including both print and broadcast operations (Pew, 2013). Conversely, digital and mobile audiences continue to soar with 62% of smartphone owners using their device to consume news each week (Pew, 2013). Similarly, 64% of tablet owners receive their news on the device each week, with 37% doing so daily (Pew, 2013).

Much of this digital audience growth can be explained through Christensen et al.’s

(2012) “jobs-to-be-done” theory (p. 8), in which the authors suggest people are not necessarily looking for a product to buy, but more inclined to hire products and services to solve arising problems. Media companies, whether old or new, have an opportunity to sell their services of news and information to customers looking to fulfill a “job-to-be- done” (Christensen et al., p.8) on a variety of platforms. Smartphones and tablets present legacy news organizations a “strategic inflection point” (Gershon, 2013, p. 41) to redevelop their traditional practices of news dissemination. Failure to adapt to these emerging and disruptive technologies, or to re-identify their value proposition, could

signal the extinction of the former market leaders of news and information (Christensen,

2011; Gershon, 2013; Picard, 2010). However, if news organizations can create and curate content for which their audiences are willing to pay, capitalize on other areas of their value network by creating events, consulting and printing services, and long-tail repurposing of content, and lastly, redefine their culture, processes, and priorities while creating space for innovation, they can build a new framework for successful innovation to replace the traditional news business model that has dominated the media landscape throughout the last century (Christensen et al., 2012). The Orlando Sentinel is already implementing many of these new revenue models including their community blogging platform, hypeorlando, and sponsored community outreach events such as Florida

Forward and Bark & Brew, in addition to new commercial printing contracts and possible statewide or regional acquisitions (H. Greenberg, personal communication, January 15,

2014). Whether the Sentinel missed the strategic inflection point or can innovate quickly enough to adapt for the emerging value network remains to be seen.

Technology Changes Reporting Processes

Scholars contend that technological advancements are changing the way journalists do their job, the nature of news content, the structure and organization of the newsroom, and the nature of the relationships between news organizations, the journalists who work for those news organizations, and their subsequent interaction with the audience (Nee, 2013; Pavlik, 2008; Phillips, Singer, Vlad, & Becker, 2009). Similar to the transformation brought on by the introduction of the telephone, which brought journalists in from the field, limiting what Pavlik (2000) described as “shoe-leather” (p.

229) reporting, new media technologies such as the Internet, World Wide Web and digital video are redefining the process of reporting and dissemination (Hermida, 2010b;

Nee, 2013; Pavlik, 2013; Phillips, Singer, Vlad, & Becker, 2009). As more and more journalists go online to research, report, and reach sources for stories, reporters can continue updating their stories right up to deadline, while the ability for breaking news to travel the globe in a matter of seconds, as witnessed during the Arab spring (Lotan et al., 2011;“The People”, 2011, July 7), Boston marathon bombing (Mnookin & Qu, 2013), and Hurricane Sandy (Pavlik, 2013; Stelter & Preston, 2012), has irrevocably transformed the industry. However, many scholars question whether this change produces better journalism (Harrison, 2010; Hayes, Singer, & Ceppos, 2007; Hermida &

Thurman, 2008; Pavlik, 2013; Phillips, Singer, Vlad & Becker, 2009). In 2000, Pavlik inquired whether audiences would prefer to wait until the next day to read about breaking news, knowing that the news organization spent ample time vetting their sources and fact-checking their information, or, would they prefer to receive their news instantaneously, knowing there may be inaccuracies? Fifteen years later news organizations are now leading their breaking news coverage through online platforms and social media (Lotan et al., 2011; Mnookin & Qu, 2013; Pavlik, 2013; Stelter &

Preston, 2012; "The People", 2011, July 7). Nic Newman (as quoted in "The People,

2011, July 7), formerly of the BBC, says "News organizations are already abandoning attempts to be first to break news, focusing instead on being the best at verifying and curating it” (“The view,” para. 8). The implementation of online pay walls could certainly affect the distribution of priority information, but many of the most important facts are already circulating the Internet through social media tools such as Twitter. In some cases such as Hurricane Sandy, social media and online news were the only avenues for citizens to send and receive information during the storm when power was out and

the local print media was unable to print or deliver the traditional newspaper (Pavlik,

2013; Stelter & Preston, 2012). This continues to bring into question whether news organizations are cannibalizing their own operations by distributing preferred content over social media that could be held for paying subscribers behind online pay walls or saved for the printed editions the next day as Pavlik (2000) originally suggested over a decade ago.

New Technologies in Old Mediums

In their 2010 study of how news organizations use Twitter, Armstrong and Gao found that although news organizations have implemented the use of the micro- blogging site as a dissemination tool, many of them are ignoring the technological advantages of Twitter by forcing new technology into old ways of doing business. For many of the major news organizations including The New York Times and USA Today, at least at the time of their study, the newspapers’ Tweets were merely the same as their headlines (Armstrong & Gao, 2010). Additionally, their study suggested that newspapers, in comparison to broadcast media, tended to lag well behind in developing multiplatform and multimedia news content. While their research suggests news agencies are in fact using Twitter, they are doing so in limited ways, lacking innovation or adaptation to the new technology, which would allow them to reach their readers instantaneously — something newspapers desperately need to do, according to

Armstrong and Gao (2010). Too many news organizations are adhering to traditional one-way communication through the social sphere, forgoing an opportunity to engage in open dialogue and two-way communication as the technology would allow (Bloom et al.,2013; Himelboim & McCreery, 2012; Lasorsa et al., 2011).

In contrast, Lozare (2011) writes that tweeting from the courtroom is the new norm for court reporters. For high profile cases, Rummana Hussain, a reporter for the

Chicago Sun-Times, tweets every five minutes, giving followers quick updates throughout the trial. Many of those updates may never make the printed or online edition of the story (Lozare, 2011). The Orlando Sentinel journalists who reported exclusively on Twitter or in the live chat room during the Casey Anthony and George

Zimmerman trials demonstrated a similar process. The social media reporters’ content was rarely published in the legacy print edition, thereby eliminating any opportunity for a traditional byline, a detail that did not go unnoticed by both management and the reporters during a time of staff consolidation and scrutiny.

Highlighting two sensational Canadian trials, Dean Jobb (2010) points out that

Glen McGregor of the Ottawa Citizen posted more than 2000 Tweets during the two- week trial of Ottawa Mayor Larry O’Brien. McGregor was Tweeting every minute at one point during the trial, which he described as “something closer to stenography than journalism” (Jobb, 2010, p. 33). Kate Dubinski of the London Free Press added hyperlinks for depth to her Tweets, while covering an infamous murder trial involving the

Bandidos biker gang (Jobb, 2010). Dubinski picked up over 1000 Twitter followers from all over the globe while covering the seven-month murder trial. In both cases, McGregor and Dubinski worked alongside another colleague who concentrated on the print story, while they focused on Tweeting (Jobb, 2010). The Sentinel reporters worked in a similar fashion with one focusing exclusively on the print story, while the other concentrated on social media reporting via Twitter and within the live chat room.

In some circumstances, high profile cases actually begin their journey into the social media landscape with the first sign of trouble, as John Cloud (2011) wrote in Time magazine. Cloud (2011) tells us how the Casey Anthony saga originally showed up on

MySpace, well before the trial even started, when Anthony’s mother, Cindy Anthony, posted a message stating her daughter had stolen money and would not allow her to see her granddaughter. As the trial proceeded under Chief Judge Belvin Perry in the

Ninth Judicial Circuit Court of Florida, the court’s Twitter feed, NinthCircuitFL, became the official Twitter feed of record (Cloud, 2011). Meanwhile, as the court’s Twitter feed attracted hundreds of followers, the Orlando Sentinel’s OSCaseyAnthony Twitter feed added hundreds of followers by the day (Cloud, 2011).

In contrast to Armstrong and Gao (2010), Greer and Yan’s 2011 content analysis of 357 newspaper websites and associated social media pages revealed U.S. newspapers are using a variety of “digital delivery tools” to reach their audiences. Greer and Yan’s research suggests newspapers are reacting to the new media landscape by adopting new delivery methods, replacing older technologies such as e-mail alerts and

RSS with Twitter, Facebook, and text message alerts. Not surprisingly, Greer and Yan

(2011) found that larger news organizations have been more successful in developing their online communities than smaller ones, at which online readership is low and print products are still the preferred choice of information delivery for advertisers, leaving publishers little choice as to where to disperse limited resources.

Luther Turmelle (2010) of the New Haven Register reports that some pundits within journalism believe the use of Twitter is only serving to erode the existing audience of news organizations. Others suggest that the Internet, and Twitter “level the

playing field,” (Greer & Yan, 2011, p. 86) allowing traditional newspapers to compete with broadcast news organizations (Turmelle, 2010). Pavlik (2008) concurs with the latter, pointing out that news organizations are now in direct competition with any and all other forms of media that distribute news and information over the Internet, which includes another new variable — the audience. The digital age has brought a seismic shift in the traditional one-way model of communication, in which information primarily flowed in one direction from the provider to the audience. The new two-way model of communication creates an interactive dialog between audience members, news organizations, and other readers within the conversation (Armstrong & Gao, 2010;

Hermida, 2010b; Nee, 2013; Palser, 2012; Pavlik, 2008).

Audience Participation

The Orlando Sentinel’s online-chat room during the Casey Anthony trial attracted up to 124,680 people per day who came to discuss and sometimes argue different points of the trial as they developed (Prieto, 2011). Before the Casey Anthony trial, the newspaper had only used online-chat rooms for sporadic sporting events with marginal success (M. Guido, personal communication, December 26, 2013). Using

Facebook and Twitter, audience members could share their thoughts on the trial with millions of other Tweeps, (Twitter users) and Facebook users with the click of a mouse

(Prieto, 2011). During the infamous O.J. Simpson murder trial in 1994, reporters would rush out to use the phones to call in updates during breaks in court proceedings (Prieto,

2011). Now, two decades later, the reporters and photographers are conducting live chats, blogging, updating their stories and photos online, tweeting, and posting to

Facebook in real time from the courtroom throughout the development of trials (Prieto,

2011).

Whether they are citizen journalists reporting from a live news event with photos and video (Eun, 2013; Krums, 2009; Murabayashi, 2013), or retweeting their trusted sources, audience members are shifting the traditional news paradigm and raising the question of who are the gatekeepers and agenda-setters in the new media world

(Cleary & Bloom, 2011; Hermida, 2010a; Himelboim & McCreery, 2012; Lasorsa, Lewis

& Holton, 2011; Shoemaker & Vos, 2006; Singer, 2005). News media have opened up their websites to facilitate interactions with their readers, allowing them to submit photos and videos, comment on articles and email or post content to their social media circles.

Despite this new two-way flow of content and information, news organizations prefer to apply features that allow for the audience to interact with content, but not necessarily influence it (Himelboim & McCreery, 2012; Pew Research Center, 2011). When audiences have the ability to influence media content, they challenge long-standing traditional norms and practices and threaten the professional identity, social status and role of the journalist as gatekeeper (Cleary & Bloom, 2011; Himelboim & McCreery,

2012). Himelboim and McCreery (2012) found that news organizations typically prefer the type of audience engagement that protects and preserves the traditional

“hierarchical relationship” (p.438) with the audience such as comment sections or feedback forms.

User-Generated Content

Cleary and Bloom (2011) suggest that user-generated content created outside of the conventional norms of journalism has the potential to disrupt the traditional understanding of journalism and its practices. In the case of the micro-blogging platform Twitter, journalists “open the gate” (Lasorsa et. al. 2011, p. 26) when they retweet an unedited Tweet from one of their followers, which ultimately allows their

followers to participate in the news production process. However, Marenet Jordaan

(2013) found that even though journalists still consider their role as gatekeepers valid, they understand social media is challenging those traditional paradigms. When social media tools such as Twitter and Facebook are used to gather information and sources, the audience indiscriminately influences editorial decision-making and assists in setting the news agenda (Jordaan, 2013; Lysak et al. 2012, Miller, 2008; Shoemaker & Vos,

2006). This phenomena was evident during the Orlando Sentinel’s coverage of the

Casey Anthony trial when audience demand for specific photographs of the defendant that showed what clothes she was wearing each day in court were captured and distributed via social media. In this instance, the agenda-setting function that had traditionally resided within the newsroom was coming from the audience who was now telling the news media what to think about.

Web 2.0

With the advent of Web 2.0 technology, audiences are no longer sitting passively in the background, but are standing on equal footing with the institutions of news production (Napoli, 2010; Phillips, Singer, Vlad & Becker, 2009). Ron Miller (2008) describes the traditional one-way symmetric channel of information from one voice to many as “Media 1.0.” When audiences are able to engage and interact with media through program platforms and interactive tools such as Facebook, blogging, and wikis, they are participating in a two-way, asymmetric channel of information coined “Web 2.0” by Tim O’Reilly (O’Bannon, 2008). Web founder Tim Berners-Lee rebukes the concept that the purpose of Web 1.0 was only to connect computers, while Web 2.0 is for connecting people (Laningham, 2006). Berners-Lee argues that the original purpose of the Web was always to connect people through an interactive space (Laningham,

2006). O’Bannon (2008) simplifies the discussion for purposes highlighted in this study by describing Web 2.0 as that which cannot exist outside of the online space. He describes Web 1.0 as a static environment comparable to a phonebook or encyclopedia, a place where users could read, but not interact. Through software programs and platforms, users are able to interact, collaborate, and share information online in the Web 2.0 environment (Laningham, 2006; Miller, 2008; O’Bannon, 2008).

Consequently, audience members now expect to be a part of the conversation and news production process (Miller, 2008). However, when the lines between highly trained journalism professionals and audience co-creators intersect, it’s up to the professionals to maintain a sense of accuracy, integrity, and quality (Harrison, 2010;

Lâzâroiu, 2012; Lysak, et al., 2012; Palser, 2012). When journalists invite people into the conversation, they do so deliberately and carefully in order to maintain control over individual agendas (Miller, 2008). Similarly, George Lâzâroiu (2012) argues that digitalization and media convergence have blurred the distinctions between producers and audiences, whereby new media technologies have greatly facilitated the flow of information from the audience into the newsroom. However, credibility remains a concern with regard to user-generated content. Traditional newsrooms have professional production practices, whereas the audience does not. Therefore, audience produced content may lack in veracity and need to be incorporated into professional content in order to maintain quality control (Lâzâroiu, 2012). The reporters and web producers at the Sentinel who moderated the live chat experienced this first hand as much of the dialogue was racist or sexist during the Zimmerman and Anthony trials.

Editing user-generated content

The BBC, Al Jazeera, and CNN are taking a different approach to user- generated content by creating hubs to moderate and maintain industry standards, while providing a platform to engage the audience and disseminate their stories, photos, and videos (Harrison, 2010; Lang, 2011;“The People”, 2011, July 7). In 2008, the BBC created a separate hub where user-generated content is ingested and organized by editors, who then push and disseminate the UGC to the appropriate outlets within the

BBC (Harrison, 2010). Similar to CNN’s iReport, Al Jazeera uses its Sharek website to upload photos and videos from trusted sources, after the UGC has gone through a verification process (“The People”, 2011, July 7). Since audience media producers do not follow the same set of standards as professional journalists, UGC is typically disorganized and unpredictable, and therefore must be vetted to ensure accountability and accuracy. Consequently, many news organizations avoid incorporating user- generated content in their mainstream news reports (Harrison, 2010; Lâzâroiu, 2012).

Because of these inconsistencies, the BBC created a separate hub to deal specifically with UGC, through which edited content can enter into the BBC’s news report at multiple entry points (Harrison, 2010). As UGC is integrated into the weekly and daily planning meetings, it is absorbed into the established newsroom routines and practices, therefore ensuring the gatekeeping measures and the BBC’s impartiality standards are kept securely in place (Harrison, 2010).

From a print perspective, Hermida and Thurman (2008) discovered in their study of twelve UK newspapers, that all but one were providing tools and platforms for audience participation and user-generated content through the solicitation of photos and videos, reader blogs, message boards, polls, stories, and comments. Similar to the

BBC senior managers who felt UGC helped them connect with a rapidly fleeing audience, editors at the newspapers in Hermida and Thurman’s 2008 website analysis reluctantly accepted the urgent need to interact with their audience through UGC. And, although the newspapers did not have a specific hub or desk allocated to receive and edit user-generated content, the majority had systems in place to ensure that the UGC adhered to the values, principals, and standards of their individual news agencies

(Hermida & Thurman, 2008). Both the BBC and UK newspapers iterated the fact that, although incorporating UGC into the daily news report is necessary to maintain readers and connect with their respective audiences, moderating and editing the incoming UGC is not only costly in terms of staffing and resources, but also a monumental undertaking due to the volume and unpredictable nature of UGC (Hermida & Thurman, 2008).

Contrary to the suspicions and fears that UGC is simply cheap content to augment or replace professional staff and resources, for most news organizations it remains a delicate balance between the potential commercial value of UGC and the ever present need to moderate and maintain incoming content within the standards and norms of the organizing institution (Harrison, 2010; Hermida & Thurman, 2008).

In contrast, Hermida and Thurman (2008) found in their study that smaller newspaper editors did not engage in user-generated content for fear that the need to moderate the UGC would pull valuable resources away from doing the “good” (p. 352) work of journalists. Sentinel editors also had to make similar difficult resource allocation decisions when deciding which and how many journalists to dedicate to social media reporting on Twitter or to moderate the live chat room, which pulled them away from more traditional reporting procedures. And, while some UK newspaper editors feared

they would compromise their editorial product by pulling staffers away to moderate UGC

(Hermida & Thurman, 2008), other executives took an entirely different route by eliminating staff positions to make room for user-generated content. In 2011, Atlanta based CNN’s senior vice president (SVP) of domestic news operations, Jack Womack, announced in a letter to the staff that 50 staffers were being let go, including 12 photojournalists (Lang, 2011). Womack cited technological advances and workflow changes as reasons for the layoffs.

We looked at the impact of user-generated content and social media, CNN iReporters, and of course our affiliate contributions in breaking news. Consumer and prosumer technologies are simpler and more accessible. Small cameras are now high broadcast quality. More of this technology is in the hands of more people (Lang, 2011, “Note to Staff,” para. 3).

The Sentinel was already dealing with a barrage of layoffs and downsizing prior to and throughout the trials, however, these positions were not eliminated to make room for UGC, but were a direct response to the disrupted business model. The journalists remaining were faced with doing more with less, specifically as it pertained to interacting with a newly engaged audience who were populating the live chat room, commenting on stories, and driving the conversation and story on Twitter in record numbers never seen before in the history of the paper.

Is Social Media Replacing Traditional Journalism?

Social media is frequently used to describe the changing face of journalism, but journalism is often left out of the discussion about evolving digital media (Ludtke, 2009).

Wilma Stassen argues in her 2010 study that social media helps to facilitate a richer experience in which the audience is more involved in the production of content within a two-way communication process. However, audience-produced content cannot replace the objective, researched, and informed reporting that stands as the foundation of true

journalism, nor should it (Stassen, 2010). Stassen (2010) suggests that rather than trying to compete with social media, traditional news organizations need to embrace it and utilize it to their advantage by connecting and interacting with their audience, who can provide vital and personal information from every corner of society.

The value of social media

Melissa Ludtke (2009) wrote in Nieman Reports that journalists’ need to use social media in a way that adds value to the work they do. Social media can add great depth and value to journalism; however, the terminology is not mutually inclusive

(Ludtke, 2009). And, maybe more importantly, how individual news organizations measure that value is critical to the role social media plays in the evolving media landscape. Jonathan Stray (2012) of the Nieman Journalism Lab argues the question of how do media institutions measure the value of their work? Stray suggests that journalism institutions need to move beyond counting clicks and hits to better assess the overall effect of their work in the democratic process and society as a whole. What are the real metrics that matter? Which data is important and which is irrelevant? How do publishers measure and optimize engagement? News organizations have long been tracking the data that translates into money such as audience numbers and page views

(Sternbern, 2013; Stray, 2012). Many news operations are employing analytics software such as Chartbeat and Newsbeat, Google Analytics, Klout, bit.ly, and the former

Technorati, that record and track real-time data on page views, top-performing stories, unique visitors, social sharing on Twitter and the like, while giving a personalized break down on how each individual reporter’s content is circulating the Internet (Garber, 2011;

Stray, 2012; Zuckerman, 2011). Others are focusing new efforts on measuring “social lift” and “optimizing engagement” (Sterbern, 2013, para. 5), while looking for alternative

ways to monetize beyond the page view. What is of particular interest to this study however, is how that data influences editorial decision-making and affects the traditional agenda-setting mechanisms of the Orlando Sentinel, whereby the audience is actively influencing what content remains on the homepage or is circulated on social media by engaging or clicking on certain stories that are more germane to the readers own personal media agenda.

The true impact of journalism

What gets lost in the conversation about metrics and analytics is how to measure the impact of journalism (Pilhofer, 2012). How can one measure the efficacy of journalism on changing the way people think or act or whether government corruption was averted, laws were changed, or lives saved (Pilhofer, 2012)? Stray (2012) suggests that metrics are important and powerful tools that can help guide editorial decision making and monitor the monetization of content, however, they do not necessarily measure what is important. Just because a news organization can chart its social media shares or engagement metrics, does not indicate the journalism produced and published is having a meaningful impact on the world (Stray, 2012; Zuckerman, 2011).

Zuckerman (2011) warns that just because a story or a particular news item receives high volumes of page views or comments does not necessarily translate to civic relevancy. “If we measure only how many people view, like, or Tweet, but not how many people learn more, act, or engage, we run the risk of serving only the market and forsaking our civic responsibilities” (Zuckerman, 2011, para. 12). The Poynter Institute’s

Meena Thiruvengadam (2013) concurs that journalists need to connect and engage with their audience either online or in person, but how news organizations measure the efficacy of that engagement is a more difficult task. If news organizations report on

local civic issues that provide opportunities for their readers to get involved and take action on the issues surrounding their own communities, a new possible metric emerges to measure the efficacy of online journalism (Zuckerman, 2013).

Pilhofer (2012) suggests that newsrooms need a framework, methodology, and toolset that measures and interprets how journalism resonates and impacts the world at large. Through the Knight-Mozilla fellowship, the New York Times is seeking to find those answers in a way that is replicable and scalable (Pilhofer, 2012). However, Stray

(2012) highlights that not all data is numbers and not everything can be counted.

Qualitative data and narrative descriptions such as comments on stories, reactions and repercussions, further developments, or related interviews may provide better metrics with which to measure the real impact and value of journalism. This approach is particularly useful for this study, in which the data collected from in-depth interviews should provide insight into changing newsroom norms, and how those norms are affected through social media and new media technologies. In a perfect world, Stray suggests newsrooms would have an integrated system in which to collect, store, and compare both quantitative and qualitative data on the impact of their stories, which would ultimately provide the best opportunity to evaluate the true impact of journalism.

Integrating traditional and social media

Seth Mnookin and Hong Qu (2013) wrote in their narrative description of covering the Watertown, CT manhunt following the Boston Marathon bombing, there is a

“reflexive reaction” (p. 30) to pit traditional media and emerging social media against one another. The authors suggest that not only is this position counter-productive, but that we also should appreciate the interplay and interdependence that “ultimately

produces a more participatory, accurate, and compelling news cycle” (Mnookin & Qu,

2013, p. 30).

News coverage during the Boston bombing demonstrated that for journalists covering a breaking news situation, social media tools such as Twitter and Reddit might be the best resource and platform on which to gather and disseminate information

(Kang, 2013). Mnookin and Qu (2013) assert that Twitter coverage of the manhunt was a milestone for journalism, in which ordinary citizens without press credentials could and did report and influence breaking news. However, with this new milestone comes great responsibility and power, for which new tools and processes need to emerge and catch up with existing social media technology (Kang, 2013; Mnookin & Qu, 2013). And, as the audience becomes a larger voice in the conversation, a greater burden falls upon legacy journalism institutions to not only continue to provide original reporting, but to curate that which is circulating throughout the social media sphere so as to maintain a level of trust, which is the necessary foundation of journalism’s role in society (Hayes,

Singer & Ceppos, 2007; Kang, 2013; Mnookin & Qu, 2013). Social media is not going away, and neither is the need for trustworthy storytelling from credible news organizations. When legacy newsrooms and citizen journalists work together to provide a richer and deeper flow of information that can cut through the noise, the public and society at large receive a more accurate and accountable news report (Hayes, Singer &

Ceppos, 2007; Mnookin & Qu, 2013). However, when journalists and citizens collaborate through social media sites such as Reddit during breaking news events, extreme caution must be taken to ensure that false information is not propagated to the level of “fact” (Kang, 2013, p. 11). The art of reporting breaking news events is

constantly evolving through an integrated process of shared resources between legacy media companies, journalists who are writing and aggregating incoming content onto the Internet, and thousands of individuals sharing information through a host of online media platforms from the scene. When these different media spheres intersect and collide, at times the results can be extremely damaging and at minimum extraordinarily messy (Kang, 2013). Throughout the Anthony and Zimmerman trials, the Orlando

Sentinel was uniquely situated as the media source of record on the trials. And, while the audience was responsible for driving much of the narrative surrounding the highly sensational trials, the Sentinel journalists maintained a greater responsibility to dispel inaccuracies and calm volatile and inflammatory dialogue in both the traditional and newly emerging social media sphere.

Theoretical Framework

With the implementation of new media technologies, much of the traditional agenda-setting, framing, and gatekeeping functions of the news editors are modified and transferred to the individual in the field, the audience, and in some cases eliminated altogether. When journalists transmit and publish live news onto social media and

Internet platforms from mobile devices or laptop computers they bypass the long- standing editing process of the newsroom in which information was traditionally framed and filtered before going out to the public. Megan Garber (2011) suggests that news organizations have always worked as a tightly controlled group that not only serve as gatekeepers, but that also employ individual gatekeepers, whose ultimate responsibility is to determine the final product of the news before publishing on their respective mediums. That journalistic paradigm is now challenged with new media technologies

empowering individual journalists throughout the newsroom to participate in the process

(Garber, 2011).

Jane Singer suggests in her 2005 study on blogging that the Internet challenges two specific long-standing journalistic norms and practices. The first of these norms is the idea of objectivity, which Singer (2005) defines as a fact-based “journalistic method”

(p. 177) of newsgathering. The second norm, brought into question with the advent of new media technologies, is what Singer calls the traditional journalists’ “core professional role” (p. 178) as gatekeepers. Singer contends the professional norm of the journalist as the objective news gatherer and disseminator of any and all things within the public interest is at a crossroads, at which the “hegemony of the gatekeeper”

(p. 177) is now not only challenged by new media technologies, but also by the very audience it serves.

The intrinsic value in these two central professional roles is the ability of the journalist to decide what news and information should and should not be injected into the public sphere, and when doing so, present it with a level of veracity, integrity, and accuracy free from personal biases (Singer, 2005). New media technologies are indeed challenging these long-standing norms. However, the ability of the professional journalist to maintain these core values is what separates them from audience, for which truth and accuracy are not necessarily underlying principals with regards to the individual blogger or citizen journalist.

In the case of high profile trials and breaking news, those roles now fall upon the court reporters and photographers in and around the courtroom who transmit their live updates, photographs, and stories via social networking sites such as Twitter and Flickr.

One of the goals of this study is to investigate whether journalists are uploading their unedited content directly to their news organization’s websites without going through the usual channels of fact checking or editing due to the timeliness of the information or lack of resources. If this is indeed happening, the individual journalists are in a better position to select which information should or should not be distributed, and how that information should be framed. As a result, the gatekeeping function that originally resided within the newsroom would subsequently shift to the field.

Furthermore, many news organizations are extending the gatekeeping, agenda- setting, and framing roles into the social sphere by hiring social media editors, as demonstrated by the Associated Press with the hiring of Lauren McCullough (Gleason,

2010). As manager of social networks and news engagement, McCullough’s team’s

“fundamental task is monitoring what goes on in the digital world” (Gleason, 2010, p. 6).

Not only does McCullough’s team look for breaking news within the social sphere, which could complement the AP’s existing report, but the team also trains AP reporters and photographers on how to include social networking in their journalism (Gleason, 2010).

When news organizations proactively train journalists to incorporate new media technologies and social networking tools into their daily reporting, they extend the gatekeeping, agenda-setting, and framing functions into the social sphere, at which point a two-way conversation with the audience takes on a new norm.

Gatekeeping

David Manning White (1950) demonstrated in his groundbreaking case study into the selection of news that the course on which an item of news travels does so through a series of “gates” (p. 383). The journalist on the ground symbolizes the first gate in the communication process. One could also argue that the assignment editor serves just

as critical of a role in the gatekeeping process. At the time in which White conducted his study, information technologies were limited to television, radio, and print. White

(1950) wrote the typical pathway for information to travel at that time for a national newswire story was from reporter, to rewrite man, to bureau chief, to “state” file editors, and finally to the wire editor, “the most important gate keeper of all” (White, 1950, p.

384).

William P. Cassidy (2006) summarizes through case study and content analysis how journalists see their gatekeeping roles evolving with the Internet. Cassidy (2006) argues that the routinization of the newsgathering process, coupled with the norms and values of the profession and organizations for which journalists work, is more influential than individual forces such as personal and professional backgrounds, attitudes, values, and beliefs. Cassidy’s study (2006) illustrates that gatekeeping within news organizations is as much a byproduct of “bureaucratic structures” (p. 7) and “time pressures” (p. 7) as it is subjective in nature, as gatekeepers have little time to give critical thought or analysis towards dissecting and disseminating the news. Additionally,

Cassidy’s (2006) study attempted to measure the effects of individual and routine gatekeeping forces on what journalists may choose to report before their content is subjected to the normal routines of the editing process.

Preceding Cassidy’s study, Shoemaker, Eichholz, Kim, and Wrigley (2001) wrote that positive and negative forces could either facilitate or prevent a particular news item from passing through individual or collective gatekeepers. The authors suggest that social reality is constructed by the information that passes through different media channels or gates, and that social reality is deeply affected by the information that does

or does not get transmitted, depending on the forces at play (Shoemaker et al., 2001).

Furthermore, the authors define gates as “decision points” (p. 235), through which information either passes or stops. Two separate gates manage these decision points: the individuals and the institutional routines by which they abide. These two mechanisms work collectively to mitigate and decipher what information gets passed on to the next channel of the dissemination process (Shoemaker, et al., 2001). The results of their study suggest the positive and negative forces of the routines of the institution compete with, and in turn outweigh the influence of the individual reporter when deciding what information passes through the gate to become news.

One of the goals of this study is to challenge this theory in light of the influence of social media and new media technologies, in which the discriminate decisions made by the individual journalists in the field may have stronger influencing forces than the long- established newsroom routines. However, as Warren Breed’s social control in the newsroom theory (1955) suggests, individual reporters’ behaviors are still mitigated and influenced by the hierarchy of the newsroom. Shoemaker et al. (2001) strengthened this argument by highlighting how the assignment of reporters to a particular story, or in this case, trial, is not at random, but with specific intent, in which certain journalists are believed to be better suited than others. The question could certainly be raised whether particular reporters were selected for the Casey Anthony and George Zimmerman trials due to their adherence to company norms with regards to gatekeeping functions and reporting, and more specifically as it pertains to social media.

Building upon her previous gatekeeping work (Shoemaker, 1991; Shoemaker &

Reese, 1991), Shoemaker joined Tim Vos (2009) to introduce a new model of

gatekeeping theory that allows for new media technologies, in which audience members are active members in a secondary gatekeeping process as creators and distributers of media content. The authors suggest that the role of the audience in the gatekeeping process picks up where the mass media part of the process stops, and consequently is a “force to be recognized” (Shoemaker & Vos, 2009, p. 7), as readers structure and distribute content around their own interests.

Shoemaker and Vos (2009) suggest in their new gatekeeping model there are now three channels by which information travels: the source channel, the media channel, and a new audience channel. Although the audience has always maintained some agency in its ability to write letters to the editors or influence editorial content indirectly through advertisers, readers are now able to respond and redistribute content instantaneously over the Internet using platforms such as email, Facebook, YouTube, and Reddit (Shoemaker & Vos, 2009). Additionally, as a new gatekeeper in the process, the reader also has the ability to frame the news item through personal messages used to engage the recipients. This third gatekeeping channel is different from the original two however, whereby the news media select newsworthy information from the source channel and then distribute that information to the public based upon its value to the community or society at large. The third gatekeeping channel, the audience, selects the information distributed from the news media, which is significant to their interests and social circles, and then redistributes that information further along the new media spectrum (Shoemaker & Vos, 2009). This third channel is symbolic because the audience is now creating a circular flow of information in and out of each existing channel. The process is no longer a one-way symmetric flow of information

from one voice to a passive audience, but now a two-way distribution of information to an audience with agency that continues a circular distribution cycle with content tailored to its interests (Hermida, 2010b; Pavlik, 2008; Pavlik, 2008; Shoemaker & Vos, 2009).

Another goal of this study is to demonstrate if and how this third audience channel is influencing traditional agenda-setting functions and norms during high profile trials. The influence of the audience was present across all information channels of the

Orlando Sentinel throughout the Casey Anthony and George Zimmerman trials as demonstrated in Shoemaker and Vos’ (2009) new gatekeeping model. As the audience became actively engaged with the journalists reporting on and editing content from the trials, they also began to shape the newspaper’s coverage through comments, story suggestions and requests for certain photographs or evidence from the cases.

Agenda-setting and framing through social media reporting

Building on his original study with Donald L. Shaw in 1972, Maxwell E. McCombs

(2005) redefines their original definition of agenda-setting as the transfer of salience from the media agenda to the public agenda as a process that now encompasses five stages. Of particular interest to this study is what McCombs (2005) distinguishes as attribute agenda-setting or framing. McCombs reasserts the core propositions of traditional agenda-setting and attribute agenda-setting are that the media not only tell us

“what to think about,” but also “how to think about it” (p. 294). This is the point at which attribute, or second-level agenda-setting and framing intersect, a subject that remains controversial throughout the literature (McCombs, 2005; Scheufele, 1999; Weaver,

2007). McCombs (2005) describes a frame as an attribute of an object, or the dominant perspective on the object as set by communicators and their audiences. Scheufele

(1999) discusses how framing can actually be an extension of agenda-setting, in which

second-level agenda-setting describes the impact of salience of the characteristics of a particular object that is highlighted by the media, and the audience’s interpretation of the story surrounding that object. Weaver (2007) notes that not all scholars agree that second-level agenda-setting is equivalent to framing, however, both are concerned with how objects or issues are depicted in the media. Bloom, Cleary, and North (2013) argue that even though journalism is discussed in the context of objectivity, the true reality of objectivity lies within the personal perspectives and experiences of the individual, which influence how one frames a particular issue or story. The key issues for this study are which organizational or structural factors of the Orlando Sentinel’s newsgathering processes and individual characteristics of the newspaper’s journalists influenced the framing of objects involved in the two seminal trials. Additionally, Bloom et al.,(2013) add the place where particular media frames appear can have differing levels of influence and opinion, particularly within the social media sphere. It is within this space that journalists expose a higher level of opinion than in their legacy media publications (Lasorsa et. al., 2011; Singer, 2005).

When applying these concepts to high profile court cases such as the Casey

Anthony or George Zimmerman trials, the questions can be asked: Why is the court case high profile in the first place? Is the case prominent on the public agenda simply because it is prominent on the news media agenda? Or, is the public feeding the media agenda more through ratings, readership, and website traffic with interest in the case?

These two factors are not mutually exclusive. One can easily affect the other. During the Casey Anthony trial, media often focused on different details such as George

Anthony’s alleged mistress or Cindy Anthony’s lying about chloroform searches on their

home computer (Pacheco, 2011, July 14). These details not only gave the audience points of discussion, they also affected defense strategies, as when Casey Anthony’s counsel, Jose Baez, often changed his course of defense based upon the reaction of comments appearing through social media (Pacheco, 2011, July 14). Pacheco (2011,

July 14) quoted Fort Lauderdale based consultant Amy Singer who said “When bloggers and others in social-media sites started to attack George Anthony about his alleged mistress, the defense team beefed up their questions against him” (Pacheco,

2011, July 14, p. A1), which illustrates how social media platforms such as Twitter and

Facebook can have extraordinary and lasting effects on how attorneys prosecute and defend court cases.

Likewise, several news organizations framed the George Zimmerman trial around the issues of race. Many organizations originally reported Zimmerman as white, despite his Hispanic descent (Gamboa, 2012; Simon, 2013). Erik Wemple (2013) suggests that NBC went so far as to frame Zimmerman as a hardened racial profiler.

The network edited a portion of an audiotape recording between the police dispatcher and Zimmerman from the night of the shooting, that when taken out of context, portrays

Zimmerman as a racist (Wemple, 2013). Although the judge downplayed race throughout the trial, many in the black community were outraged with not only the verdict, but also the handling of the case from the beginning (Simon, 2013). Within days of Trayvon Martin’s death, Martin’s family, along with their attorneys, numerous celebrities, and civil rights activists took to social media to facilitate a campaign to have

George Zimmerman arrested and tried for the shooting death of the unarmed teenager

(Sullivan, 2013). The Martin family’s social media campaign was instrumental in

framing the death of their son as a civil rights violation, from which marches and protests and demonstrations were orchestrated nationwide via Twitter, Facebook, and

YouTube (Sullivan, 2013).

When applying traditional and attribute agenda-setting theory to news media coverage of high profile trials, the journalists covering the trials are in position to not only tell people to think about the trial, but also which aspects of the trial to think about, and how to think about them through the individual journalist’s posts across social media. The News Media & The Law’s Nicole Lozare (2011) illustrates this point by highlighting an Orlando Sentinel Tweet just before the verdict of the Casey Anthony trial that read “#CaseyAnthony is flanked by six of her attorneys. She appears to be sitting lower, making her look smaller than her defense team” (2011, p. 6). The information journalists choose to distribute via new media technologies can not only affect the public agenda, but also, perhaps, the outcome of the trials. And, due to the nature of new media and the adaptation of new routines, a vast majority of information disseminated from high profile trials only passes through one existing gate, thereby leaving the journalists in the field as the predominate forces to set and frame the agenda, even if they are following the norms and values of the profession and news organizations as suggested by Cassidy (2006) and Breed (1955).

Research Gaps

There has been a fair amount of recent research conducted with regards to

Twitter and social media effects on news organizations and news production routines.

However, many of these studies limit their research to Twitter, leaving out myriad other new media technologies that may affect newsroom functions; even the study of effects

from Facebook, which boasts one billion monthly users as of October 2012, (“Key

Facts,” 2012), is fairly limited in comparison. In 2011, Barb Palser wrote that Facebook is the newest arena for competition among news organizations vying for audiences’ attention. With Facebook referrals contributing significantly to the percentage of unique visitors to news organization’s websites, upwards of six to eight percent for some of the most popular sites such as NYTimes.com and CNN.com, publishers have to take

Facebook seriously (Palser, 2011); how seriously is the question. Facebook provides legacy journalism institutions with direct access to the coveted 18-35 year-old demographic (Palser, 2011). The potential to redistribute news and information to a host of audience members and their vast network of friends and contacts is too large to ignore (Palser, 2011).

The research on new media technologies’ effects on news organizations and routines becomes extremely narrow and limited beyond the scope of Twitter and

Facebook. YouTube, the popular video-sharing website is beginning to play a much larger role in the dissemination of news, whereby traditional news organizations are utilizing the service to display videos on their websites (Pew Research Center for

Excellence, 2012). The Orlando Sentinel used YouTube to host live streaming video from the courtroom during the Casey Anthony trial (J. Cutter, personal communication,

September 24, 2011). The newspaper also hosted daily live chats in which audience members were able to directly participate in the coverage of the trial with reporters sitting in the courtroom and newsroom. Photographers were able to select and transmit photographs from inside and outside the courtroom in real-time over the Internet that were then distributed throughout the world in minutes (T. Burton, personal

communication, March 27, 2013). Orlando Sentinel subscribers could also sign-up for text message alerts to their phone, providing them immediate access to breaking news.

Gaps in existing literature identified in this review suggest the effects of new media technologies, including but not limited to Twitter and Facebook, on traditional news organizations’ newsgathering and reporting processes is an area ripe for research. As new media technologies continue to evolve and adapt, and audience members restructure their news consumption patterns based upon the new technologies available, legacy journalism organizations will need to incorporate and invest in new strategies to reach and engage audience members in a new, two-way asymmetric model of communication (Hermida, 2010b; Pavlik, 2010; Sasseen, et al.,

2013).

Research Questions

Through a comparative case study of the Orlando Sentinel’s 2011 coverage of the Casey Anthony trial and 2013 coverage of the George Zimmerman trial, this study will attempt to answer the following questions as they pertain to new media technologies and the effects of those technologies on the traditional newsgathering and dissemination processes of the Orlando Sentinel.

RQ1: Do social media and new media technologies alter the traditional gatekeeping, agenda-setting, and framing functions of the Orlando Sentinel newsroom?

RQ2: How is the Orlando Sentinel measuring the efficacy of social media and new media technologies on their legacy, mobile, and online platforms during high profile court cases?

RQ3: How have technological advancements involving the Internet and social media changed the newsgathering and reporting process for high profile court cases at the Orlando Sentinel?

CHAPTER 3 METHODOLOGY

This case study involved a series of in-depth interviews with reporters, photographers, web and social media producers, and editors who were directly involved with the Orlando Sentinel’s 2011 coverage of the Casey Anthony trial and 2013 coverage of the George Zimmerman trial (See Appendix D). During these interviews, the researcher investigated the changes the Orlando Sentinel made with its newsgathering and dissemination processes in response to audience demand, and how those new processes directed readers to the newspaper’s multiple resources in print, online, and on mobile platforms for obtaining information about the trials. Furthermore, the study examined the significance of these altered newsgathering and dissemination techniques on existing media theory including gatekeeping, agenda-setting and framing theories.

Case Studies

John W. Creswell (2013) outlines five different qualitative approaches to inquiry, one of which is the case study. When conducting a case study, the researcher investigates and explores a “real-life, contemporary bounded system or multiple bounded systems” (Crewell, 2013, p. 97) over a period of time through exhaustive and saturating data collection. Creswell points out that not all scholars see case studies as a true methodology, but rather a choice of what is to be studied. However, he defines case study research as both a qualitative research design and the product of the inquiry.

Joseph A. Maxwell (2013) argues that qualitative research design is an organic process, one in which the design remains flexible rather than fixed. He maintains that

each step of qualitative data collection continually influences the study design; challenging, changing, and refocusing the qualitative inquiry, while addressing ongoing threats to validity (Maxwell, 2013).

Case study data collection involves a variety of methods including, but not limited to, in-depth interviews, direct and participant observations, text documents, archival records, physical artifacts and audiovisual materials (Creswell, 2013, Mack et al., 2005;

Maxwell, 2013). When working with purposeful samples that include participants who are deliberately selected to answer specific research questions (Creswell, 2013; Mack et al., 2005; Maxwell, 2013), the goal is not to apply the knowledge and outcomes of the study to a broader population, but to develop an in-depth description, interpretation, and explanation of a specific case or cases (Maxwell, 2013). The outcomes are not intended to be externally generalizable (Charmaz, 2006; Creswell, 2013; Maxwell,

2013). However, Maxwell (2013) warns that even though external generalizability in qualitative research is not applicable, having internal generalizability is integral to the validity of the conclusions of the case study in and of itself. When analyzing a case study, the researcher may look for the appearance of themes within his data that help explain the complexity of the particular case, setting, or group studied, but those themes are not generalizable beyond the individual or collective case study (Charmaz, 2006;

Creswell, 2012, Maxell, 2013, Zainal, 2007).

The case study method of research is particularly beneficial for this research study on high profile trials and changing newsroom functions, as case studies are generally performed within the context of their use (Creswell, 2013; Maxwell; 2013;

Zainal, 2007). With regards to the Casey Anthony and George Zimmerman trials, the

data retrieved from in-depth interviews with journalists who covered the trials can be used to explain and interpret how new newsgathering and reporting procedures developed through real-life situations and environments. Additionally, numerical and categorical data can be collected from the participants interviewed to help explain how the changes may or may not have affected audience participation on different platforms.

Zainal (2007) points out that despite critics who argue single case study explorations prohibit the researchers from making generalized conclusions, case studies remain a valuable tool for the collection of data from real-life situations, from which detailed analysis of individual and group behaviors can be deduced.

Grant McCracken (1988) explains how qualitative research methods isolate and define research categories during the study, in contrast to quantitative methods, which isolate and define before studies are conducted. The qualitative researcher anticipates the categories to change throughout the process, and looks for patterns to develop within those categories (McCracken, 1988). When the questions of a study tend to be more ambiguous or lengthy in response, researchers may benefit from utilizing a qualitative method, including in-depth interviews, during which respondents have much greater flexibility to answer, and researchers, therefore, are able to gain a better understanding of the cultural phenomena that is shaping and influencing the subjects and categories of their study.

For this study, the researcher selected a purposeful sample of journalists from the Orlando Sentinel newspaper, which served as the news source of record throughout the Casey Anthony and George Zimmerman trials (Cloud, 2011). The individuals selected for the study were all involved in daily coverage of the trials. Many disrupted or

changed their daily newsgathering routines and dissemination procedures in response to the demands of the audience and news-cycle surrounding the sensational trials.

Through qualitative and interpretive analysis of their responses and testimonies, this study investigated how traditional newsgathering and distribution methods are challenged within the context of high profile trials. Additionally, this study examined how the Orlando Sentinel is using social networking and new media technologies to engage with and maintain new and existing audience members, whose appetite for instantaneous news updates about the trials across multiple platforms was seemingly insatiable.

Reflexivity

Creswell (2013) describes the concept of “reflexivity” in context of the researcher acknowledging his or her biases within a study, and how those biases, values, and life experiences can affect the validity of qualitative studies. To avoid having personal biases negatively affecting the outcome of a study, Creswell suggests two necessary approaches: the researcher must first discuss his or her experience and involvement within the phenomenon being studied, and secondly, how these experiences may shape the researcher’s interpretation of the phenomenon. Additionally, he cautions against conducting a study or research from within one’s own place of employment (Creswell,

2013). Citing Glesne and Peshkin (1992), Creswell (2013) suggests that conducting research within “your own backyard” provides “dangerous knowledge” that is “political and risky for an inside investigator” and could ultimately jeopardize the researcher’s and participant’s place within the organization if unfavorable data is found and published.

Despite the obvious points that studying one’s own environment or place of employment may provide specialized access and eliminate many barriers from the data collection

process, Creswell raises additional concerns with regards to power imbalances between the participants and the researchers. He recommends that if a study is designed within the researcher’s “own backyard” or workplace, that multiple strategies for validation are employed to ensure that accurate and insightful data is collected and analyzed.

The two court cases selected for this comparative case study are both monumental and seminal in the amount of news coverage they garnered due to the controversial nature of the cases. Similarly, with the rapid evolution of the news media landscape, both cases provide excellent environments in which to study changing newsroom functionality. However, in full disclosure, the researcher selected these two court cases, in part, due to the inside access and proximity to the inner workings of the

Orlando Sentinel and the employees who were involved in covering the trials. Until July

2014, the researcher was employed as a senior photojournalist with the Orlando

Sentinel, where he had worked since 2002. As a staff photojournalist, the researcher was directly involved in covering both of the trials from pre-trial hearings, to jury selection and closing arguments, until a verdict was reached in each individual case.

As an integral part of the Orlando Sentinel’s photographic and team coverage of the trials, the researcher was in a unique situation to observe and participate in the very changing newsroom functions for which this study was designed to research.

Additionally, the subjects chosen for in-depth interviews are all professional colleagues of the researcher, many of whom he knows intimately after working together for many years. Maxwell (2013) describes the influence of the researcher upon the settings or individuals studied as “reactivity”, and suggests that the goal of a qualitative study is not to necessarily eliminate the influence of the researcher, but to use it and understand its

place in the study. Maxwell quotes Fred Hess to suggest that validity in qualitative research is not a question of “indifference”, but one of “integrity” (p. 124). To avoid any issues with validity, the researcher need not try to minimize his influence upon the interviewees or interviewing situation, as that is inescapable, but should recognize how that influence affects the collected data from those interviews, and use that knowledge when analyzing the information (Maxwell, 2013).

IRB Approval

In accordance with University of Florida’s research requirements, the researcher applied for approval from the university’s institutional review board for this study. The appropriate new protocol submission and informed consent forms were downloaded from the university’s IRB-02 website, which is required for approving and monitoring research involving human subjects in behavioral and non-medical research studies.

Several weeks after the protocol and consent forms were submitted, the researcher received conditional approval for the study from the IRB in March of 2013, under the stipulations the supervisor’s contact information was added to the consent form and language was modified to match that in the protocol, which allowed for the research subject to be identified or to remain confidential. Once the required amendments were applied to the protocol, the IRB granted approval to proceed with the study for one year.

In February 2014, the researcher applied for an extension to continue the study for another year, as data collection was still in progress. The IRB approved the request to extend the study for an additional year through March of 2015.

Following IRB protocol, the subjects of the case study were provided with an informed consent form (See Appendix A) that stipulates the terms of the interview, in which they all voluntarily participated. The consent form also stated the interviewee

maintains the right to discontinue participation in the study at any point before completion.

Data Collection

A purposeful sample of 11 journalists was selected from the Orlando Sentinel newsroom for the study based upon individual reporting and editing roles during the

Casey Anthony and George Zimmerman trials. Of those eleven, six contributed to coverage in both trials, three were involved in covering just the Casey Anthony trial, and the remaining two subjects reported solely on the George Zimmerman case.

The researcher conducted a total of 12 semi-structured, in-depth interviews

(Creswell, 2013; Mack et al., 2005; Richards & Morse, 2007) with each of the participants between March of 2013 and June of 2014. One subject was interviewed twice, as the initial interview was originally conducted before the occurrence of the

George Zimmerman trial. A second interview was held with that particular subject the following year to elicit data on the second trial of the comparison case study.

Of the 12 interviews, three were conducted in the private residence of the subject. The remaining nine interviews were administered in three different vacant offices within the Orlando Sentinel newsroom. All of the offices used for the interviews contain glass windows and a door that was closed during the interviewing process to ensure privacy and a free discussion of the events. Of the nine interviews that were conducted in the Orlando Sentinel newsroom, seven were held during regular newsroom hours throughout the week. The remaining two interviews were held on the weekend, during regular newsroom hours when other reporters and editors were working, as was similar to the weekday newsroom interviews.

During the time of the interviews, seven of the subjects were currently working at the Orlando Sentinel. Two of the subjects resigned during the course of the study, and two others had previously resigned following the Casey Anthony trial and before the

George Zimmerman trial. At the conclusion of the study, six of the 11 interviewed no longer worked for the paper, as well as the researcher, who left the newspaper in July of

2014. All of the data had been collected by the time the researcher terminated employment, however the two circumstances were unrelated.

Before the interviews began, each subject was provided a copy of the IRB consent form and asked to sign, at which point they were asked whether they preferred their identity remain confidential in the study. Only one of the eleven subjects requested confidentiality. All were reminded they are provided the right to pull out of the study at any point without consequence.

The interviews began with a list of open-ended questions from the interview guide (See Appendix B) that addressed the research questions focusing on the individual’s experiences and roles throughout one or both of the trials. However, these questions served more as a starting off point, rather than a fixed objective, giving the researcher and subjects room to venture into new and different areas as opportunities arose during the interview. The duration of time for the interviews ranged from 66 minutes to 105 minutes, with an average length of 87 minutes.

While conducting the interviews, the researcher used two separate Edirol audio recorders, one of which served as a backup, to record the conversation. Notes were taken throughout, although the notes served more to guide the conversation rather than for actual data collection. Utilizing the audio recorders to capture the majority of the

information allowed the researcher to focus more attention on conducting the interview and carrying out productive dialogue with the subjects. All of the subjects were exceptionally knowledgeable, candid, and transparent about their own experiences in covering the stories and trials, as well as the new reporting procedures they adopted as a result.

At the conclusion of each interview, the interviewees were asked if there were other journalists from the Orlando Sentinel who should be included in the study. If those who were recommended were not already part of the purposeful sample, they were asked to participate until a point at which saturation began to occur.

The concept of saturation is one that is not readily agreed upon by many scholars (Bowen, 2008; Charmaz, 2006; Glaser & Strauss, 1967/2008; Guest, Bunce &

Johnson, 2006; Morse, Stern, Corbin, Bowers, Charmaz & Clarke, 2009; Strauss &

Corbin, 1990/2008). Mark Mason (2010) describes “saturation” as a point at which the researcher experiences diminishing returns. Creswell (2013) instructs researchers to continue collecting data until the research model is fully saturated. Charmaz (2006) suggests, “categories are saturated when gathering fresh data no longer sparks new theoretical insights” (p. 113). Similarly, Glaser and Strauss (1967/2008) define theoretical saturation as the point at which no additional data are found from which to create new categories. Charmaz cautions against confusing saturation with repetition, however, she does propose that studies purporting “modest claims” (p. 114) may reach saturation earlier within small sample sizes. Strauss and Corbin (2008) argue that in order for one to reach saturation, he must look well beyond simply establishing new

themes by showing the relationships between those themes, but how and why and when those themes take on greater meanings.

Furthermore, Crouch and McKenzie (2006) contend that research conducted on smaller sample sizes in “naturalistic settings” may help to facilitate more “fruitful relationships with respondents,” thereby enhancing the validity and reliability of the study. The authors maintain, “that this is the way in which analytic, inductive, exploratory studies are best done” (p. 496).

When considering potential subjects to be included in the purposeful sample for the study, the researcher needed to consider the fact that a finite number of Orlando

Sentinel journalists participated in coverage of the trials. Within that sample, many roles and disciplines were duplicates of one another. In efforts to collect the widest range of data within the possible sample, individuals were selected to represent the experiences of editors and managers, reporters and photographers, and web and social media producers (See Appendix C).

Early on in the interviewing process, several themes began to emerge and repeat from one interviewee to another. As the interviews continued, the relationships between these themes became clearer, demonstrating how certain cultural and behavioral elements both aided and hindered the adaptation of new media technologies by newsroom employees over the course of the two trials. And while Strauss and Corbin

(1990/2008) advise that complete and total saturation is likely never achieved, much of the data was redundant and no longer providing new insights into the study.

Transcription and Coding

Interviews for the study were recorded by the researcher and professionally transcribed by Landmark transcription services immediately following the conclusion of

the interview, with exception to the first interview, which was transcribed by the researcher from the corresponding audio files utilizing Express Scribe transcription software. Once the transcriptions were completed, each interview was initially read to begin the data analysis process as described by Maxwell (2013). As themes began to emerge, categories were developed, notes and memos were made, and seminal quotes were highlighted to strengthen the findings. This process of open coding involves breaking the data apart into groups and concepts, and then linking those concepts in efforts to develop a more thorough understanding of the phenomenon (Strauss &

Corbin, 1990/2008). Gery W. Ryan and H. Russell Bernard (2003) argue the process of analyzing text into themes and subthemes, from which code books and theoretical models are designed, is integral to the qualitative research methodology. As each additional interview was completed, transcribed, and initially analyzed, passages of text representing particular ideas or processes were placed into the developing codebook of repeating themes and subthemes. Many of the selected passages were placed into multiple categories as Zhang and WildeMuth (2009) confide is not only allowed in qualitative content analysis, but also difficult to avoid. New categories and subthemes were continually added as they emerged throughout the data analysis process, as suggested by Zhang and Wildemuth.

Once all of the interviews were completed, transcribed, and hand-coded, all of the original data and transcripts were uploaded into the computer-assisted qualitative data analysis software program, (CAQDAS), NVivo 10, to help organize the data and facilitate a second and more rigorous analysis. The benefit of using a CAQDAS such as

NVivo is it allows for the researcher to move seamlessly between parent nodes and

child nodes (themes and subthemes), while returning to the original data from the interviews to help develop a deeper analysis of the content. Constant comparison

(Glaser & Strauss, 1967), described by Zhang and Wildemuth (2009) as “the systematic comparison of each text assigned to a category with each of those already assigned to that category” (p. 311) was used to help strengthen and verify the existing codebook.

Another advantage of using NVivo 10 was the use of coding stripes, which allow for the researcher to visualize specific nodes with color coded stripes, illustrating where text coded at one node is also coded in another category. This constant comparison of data placed into parent and child nodes is what Strauss and Corbin (1990/2008) refer to as axial coding, or “the act of relating concepts/categories to each other” (p. 198), a necessary component of qualitative research.

Participant Observation

In their extensive field guide for qualitative research methods, Mack et al. (2005) define participant observation as a process in which the researcher studies the lives, relationships, behaviors, and events of the participants within the cultural setting of the phenomenon being studied. Participant observation is not only useful for helping the researcher understand data collected through other methods such as in-depth interviews, but it can also bring into focus new elements of the study that were not readily visible when the study was originally designed (Mack et al., 2005). When participant observation takes place before or during other methods of data collections, it can help guide researchers in determining who to include in the study and what questions to ask (Mack et al., 2005). The authors submit that, “although we may get truthful answers to the research questions we ask, we may not always know the right questions” (p. 14).

In this particular case study, the researcher was working as a senior photojournalist for the Orlando Sentinel and assigned to cover both the Casey Anthony and George Zimmerman trials. Covering the trials from inside and out of the courtrooms, in the field, and within the newsroom at the center of the study, provided a unique opportunity to not only participate and observe the cultural phenomenon surrounding the technological disruption, but it also provided invaluable insight into whom to recruit for the study.

CHAPTER 4 RESULTS

Over the course of approximately five years, the Orlando Sentinel newspaper covered two internationally sensational stories and subsequent trials involving Casey

Anthony, who was charged and acquitted of killing her two-year-old child, and George

Zimmerman, who was charged and acquitted for shooting and killing teenager Trayvon

Martin, in self-defense. During that time the breaking news team, which was predominantly responsible for covering the trials, experimented with and adopted a host of new media technologies that facilitated a deeper engagement with an active and demanding audience. Those newly adopted technologies not only altered how and when news and information were disseminated to various audiences, but they also challenged long-standing gatekeeping (White, 1950) and agenda-setting (McCombs,

2005) media theories. Furthermore, while the paper was experiencing a transformative evolution from a traditional reporting and editing structure to a more digitally focused workflow, veteran reporters and editors demonstrated a strong cultural resistance to the new processes and procedures, as well as the early-adopting, breaking news reporters who were leading the transformation. By the conclusion of the second seminal trial, the

Orlando Sentinel had developed a new norm for how and when they reported to different audiences on multiple platforms online, in print, on mobile, and throughout the social media sphere.

Impact on Gatekeeping

The first research question asked:

RQ1: Do social media and new media technologies alter the traditional gatekeeping, agenda-setting, and framing functions of the Orlando Sentinel newsroom?

David Manning White’s (1950) gatekeeping theory was alive and well during these transformative years at the Orlando Sentinel, however, many of the functions that originally resided in the hands of a single line editor were now spread across multiple mediums with several “Mr. Gates” affecting what news was disseminated, how and when that information was released, and who was the recipient of the message.

Despite the emergence of new transmitting and publishing technologies such as

Wi-Fi connectivity, laptop computers and smartphones, some editors were still requiring reporters to return to the newsroom to write their stories and enter them into the traditional editing workflow at the time the Casey Anthony story began to break and develop. Editors granted them the autonomy to write and publish the story as they saw it and experienced it, but still wanted their stories to be edited for typos and grammatical mistakes. A former breaking news editor described their practices and procedures:

The processes were, we would try to give it at least one read before it got live. Every now and then, a reporter would come in and say, “Look, I just want to add this quote that I forgot to put in.” “Yeah, sure, go ahead.” It wasn't the wild, wild West at all. There was some of that, but not a ton.

On the other hand, online stories that were also published in the printed edition of the paper still worked through the traditional editing workflows before getting placed onto the page.

One reporter who was heavily involved in covering the Casey Anthony trial elaborated on the gatekeeping process:

I would say that, as a reporter, I am the gatekeeper. I mean, I would say, on average day, I would post five things, stories or briefs, before the end of the day, and they go online, and no one looks at ‘em until late, late in the day. You figure for eight hours of the day, my story said whatever I wanted them to say. That said, I mean, editors are also the ultimate gatekeepers because they decide where it goes in the paper. If you’re talking about with the paper, they’re deciding who gets to read a brief on a

topic versus a story on a topic, which we don’t have control over that as reporters.

However, over the course of the next five years, these editing functions continued to erode and disappear, which constituted more and more reporters publishing straight to the website and social media without anyone previewing their stories. Many of them were uncomfortable with this new norm, but as new technologies came on board, the speed at which the audience expected new and timely information increased. At the same time, resources continued to shrink at the paper, which necessitated reporters begin publishing without another set of eyes on their stories. By the time the Zimmerman trial concluded, the role of the reporter had evolved to where each individual journalist was solely responsible for publishing his or her stories online along with the photos and video and any other accompanying assets.

Gatekeeping in social media

As social media began to seep into the workflows of early adopting journalists through their personal Facebook and Twitter accounts, traditional gatekeeping measures were challenged and spread across a much wider net of gatekeepers. At the time, the paper did not have any direct policies for social media guidelines or procedures. A former online editor said, “We told them, ‘Look, don't embarrass the paper. Don't get anything wrong. Report only the stuff that you know to be true. Don't use words you wouldn't use in the paper. Just try to be professional, and do as good a job as you can do.’" However, when professional journalists began using their own social media accounts to report and distribute their stories, the lines between what is personal and what is professional were blurred, which not only challenged pre-existing gatekeeping mechanisms, but also the established newsroom norms on how and what

information should be published, by whom, and when. As pressure grew within the newsroom for more journalists to start using social media, so did tensions between editors and reporters who were questioned, and in some cases reprimanded, for what they posted on their personal accounts, including a breaking news reporter who reported predominantly on Twitter during the Casey Anthony trial:

There was never anything from higher above necessarily not to tweet that, not to tweet this. The only resistance we ever got on things were when an editor would—a specific editor would say, “You shouldn't have tweeted that.” Even on our own account about something personal that they felt would reflect poorly on the paper, or posted it on Facebook. I often had that conversation because I would often put things that that particular editor did not like, and I would argue saying, "This is my account. I can do what I want to with it. How is that bad for the paper? Is this your perception of something that's bad?"

At the same time, the breaking news editor expressed how some veteran reporters would publish comments on Twitter that never would have been written in newsprint:

These are folks who would never, ever do that in the newspaper and I don’t know, it’s almost like a temporary disconnect. I dunno’. I just think it’s a whole new world and it’s impossible to monitor that stuff, and it’s also not the best use of anyone’s time. You gotta trust people. You need to set some ground rules. I think you hafta’ pop in on occasion and see things, or people will bring ’em to your attention.

Once jury selection and daily court proceedings began for each trial, the newspaper embedded a live video stream and chat room on its website, which created an entirely new platform for two-way communication and audience interaction. The paper experimented with using chat rooms for many years, particularly in the sports department during live game coverage, but never before had they embedded a live stream of an on-going trial proceeding, while at the same time providing the audience a platform on which to interact in real-time with a professional reporter or editor about

those proceedings. And whereas this was groundbreaking and highly effective for audience engagement—on verdict day there were nearly 500,000 people logged into the chat room, commenting and watching the trial—it created new challenges for the reporters who were hosting the chat and guiding the conversation.

Early on in the court proceedings, as new audience members began flooding the chat room, one of the journalists involved in monitoring the conversation and approving the comments said that people moderating the chat realized they were going to have to set “some rules of the road” to keep the forum clean and educational about law and the trial, rather than gossip filled with expletives and racist comments.

We were really strict, but I can’t tell you how many emails and private messages I got of people who said, “You were the only chat that actually focused on information and educating people.” All the other chats were letting people, just conspiracy theorists, and talk about Casey’s pimples, and talk about her outfit. We just said, “This is not that place. If you want to do that, that’s fine, but we’re a newspaper. We’re here to educate you. We don’t allow expletives, and we don’t allow you to talk about having sex with Casey. We’re just not gonna be that source.” It was a learning curve that you very quickly—within a week we figured out. Then we had four or five more weeks to get it worked out.

As the audience’s appetite for information on the trial grew more insatiable, the paper began distributing arrest reports via Twitter and uploading those reports along with judge’s orders, witness statements and discovery documents to the website. At no point in the paper’s history had they ever shared such intricate, detailed, and personal information with the audience. Some of the documents they distributed contained personal phone numbers, credit card numbers and social security numbers, most of which had been redacted by the court. However in some circumstances, the numbers were still legible or the phone numbers were left included. Some of the reporters questioned these practices as they evolved:

Should we do a common courtesy to this neighbor who has nothing to do with it? Should we leave their phone number in? Do we take their phone number out? Do we put a post—“ these were decisions that were made above my head,” but I do remember going through those saying, “Hey, on page two up high, here’s a whole bunch of phone numbers that were in her phone book. Do we put them all out there?” They’re public record, I mean, they are public, but—I don’t remember whatever came of those, but we did have a lot of discussions about public—I think we put them all up as they were. I don’t think we censored them at all, but I just remember thinking—

Throughout the trials, editors and web producers used web analytics software such as Omniture and Chartbeat to closely monitor how certain content affected audience engagement, which directly influenced where and when stories were placed on the homepage or sent out through social media. The homepage producer needed to balance the news of the day with the incoming stories from the trials and would make those decisions based upon where the readers were on the website at the time.

They guided my placement of stories because there were times when we could have two Trayvon Martin stories in a day. We could have a story about, I don't know, George Zimmerman’s sister being in court, and we could have a story about Trayvon Martin’s parents, and we could have the trial story of the day. I’m looking at where readers are, which story should I place above which story, because I can’t just stack Trayvon Martin stories all through the home page. There are other things happening. I had to figure out where to place them, sometimes, if a story wasn’t urgent, when to place it, or whether to place it on the home page. All those things were happening, and I was making those decisions based on what I was seeing in Chartbeat and Omniture.

Gatekeeping with photos

The photography staff of the Orlando Sentinel was the official “pool” for the

Casey Anthony and George Zimmerman trials as dictated by the courts, which meant they were the lone media outlet allowed to photograph in the courtroom during the trial proceedings. A separate media organization was selected to provide video of the trial.

As the pool, the Sentinel was required to transmit still images from the trials to all other interested media outlets around the world.

During the Casey Anthony trial the paper experimented with a new photo transmission system that allowed the photographer in the courtroom to transmit every photo taken throughout the day’s court proceedings back to the paper by hardwiring the photographer’s camera to the Internet. A dedicated photo editor would then receive the images on a computer in the Orlando Sentinel newsroom and edit approximately 90 images each day from the hundreds that were transmitted to upload onto to Flickr, an online photo sharing application, for pre-approved and credentialed media to access.

The setup for the photographer working in the courtroom was slightly different for the George Zimmerman trial. The courthouse was not equipped to hardwire the camera into the Internet for transmitting photos as was the procedure for the Casey Anthony trial. Consequently, the photographers would edit a select group of images, rather than every single picture, on a laptop computer in the courtroom during breaks in the proceedings and transmit them over a Wi-Fi network back to the paper. A photo editor would then upload approximately 30 to 40 images a day to Flickr for the rest of the media to access. In this circumstance the gatekeeping filters shifted to the individual photographer in the courtroom who decided which images he would edit and transmit to the photo editor to distribute to the media at large. If questions arose about pictures that were not sent, the photo editor communicated with the photographer via text message:

All three of the photographers who were working the courtroom are very experienced at working on deadline and event kinda’ coverage, so they’ve covered news events and sports events and so forth. I trust them in their quick editing. If there was something that I wasn’t seeing that we needed,

it was a simple communication with them via text message saying, “Do you have pictures of this or that?” We were always very good at that.

As the gatekeeper in control of which images the rest of the world would see from the trials, the photo editor often times had to balance the right to know versus the right to decency and privacy. In one instance during the Casey Anthony trial the judge issued a court order for the paper to obscure the skull and bones of the dead child pictured in evidence photos before sending them out to the rest of the media. During the

George Zimmerman trial evidence photos transmitted by the photographers in court included images of the face of the dead victim. In that case the judge did not issue any specific orders, but the photo editor made decisions about which photos to publish online and in the newspaper, and which ones would be distributed to the rest of the media. However, if other media agencies wanted access to the entire collection of photos that were not distributed onto Flickr, they were allowed by the court and it was the responsibility of the Orlando Sentinel to share that content with them in a timely manner. Only one other media organization requested full access to every photo taken throughout the George Zimmerman trial. That particular media organization copied every photo taken onto a hard drive each day at the conclusion of the day’s events at the courthouse.

As the paper continued to grow their engagement and interaction with the audience, traditional gatekeeping measures eroded precipitously. For the first time in the history of the organization, content was getting published on multiple platforms by dozens of reporters, web producers, and photographers without ever going through the traditional editing processes. The associate editor said:

It's changed from when you start where we did think of ourselves as these gatekeepers to information who know better. There are definitely more

people who are acting as their own—making their own judgments, and that includes our readers. There's a lot more people who have direct access to publishing. There are reporters who publish things that haven't been looked at first by an editor, both in blogs and occasionally stories. There are photographers who edit their own photos. I'm guessing back in the day, you didn't always get to pick the photo that went in the paper, yet you could create a photo gallery with 50 photos that you've taken that haven't been looked at.

As this new norm evolved and took hold, no longer could a single line editor affect the outcome of the newspaper as described in David Manning White’s original gatekeeping theory.

Agenda-setting

White’s gatekeeping theory was not the only media theory at play over the course of the two trials. Shaw and McCombs’s (1972; 2005) original agenda-setting theory and McComb’s (2005) more recently defined attribute agenda-setting, or framing, theory, were also active, however, the media were no longer the only force telling the audience “what to think about,” or “how to think about it” (McCombs, 2005, p. 294). As the audience got more involved with the coverage of the trials through the various publishing platforms, they also took on the role of setting the agenda and framing the coverage of the trials.

Early on in the coverage of the Casey Anthony trial, the readers began asking for pictures from the courtroom via Twitter. They wanted to see what clothes Casey

Anthony was wearing in court each day. They wanted to see photos of each and every witness who took the stand. The paper responded by attaching pictures to their tweets and sending out a photo of Casey first thing every morning to satiate the audience requests. A web producer interviewed for the study said, “That was something that we

responded to, based on people's feedback. Okay. They wanna see pictures of these people. Let's give them pictures of these people."

Likewise, the audience often drove the conversation for which stories got covered and which ones remained on the homepage based upon their activity online and story requests. The homepage producers who are responsible for driving and keeping audience traffic on the website would constantly change the story content throughout each day in response to how many people were clicking on the stories.

Some stories would stay up for twelve hours. Others would last only three.

Furthermore, if consistent feedback from the audience posed a particular question or story, the homepage producer took their ideas and thoughts into consideration for expanding coverage on the topic:

Okay, a hundred people have asked us the same question. Maybe it's worth doing a longer story that answers some of these different things as far as, what exactly are the charges? What are the possible outcomes? How does jury selection go? People were very interested in just what was happening, and how it was happening, and the rules or laws that surrounded everything, and where the jury came from.

Conversely, the audience also voiced their opposition to the exclusion of particular content from the trials, which they earnestly believed they had the right to see, and questioned the paper’s motives and authority to limit their access to certain information. In response, the associate editor reached out to the audience:

I wrote a blog post that said, “We're choosing not to use it.” The reaction then was like, “You're not giving us access to what we want. You should let us have that. Who are you to decide what we should hear or not hear?” That's one of the early times I remember somebody telling me, “Who the heck do you think you are telling me I can't hear something in a story I'm interested in?"

In this scenario, not only was the audience challenging the agenda of the paper, they were also confronting the traditional gatekeeping functions with regards to what

information the Orlando Sentinel chose to publish and what information was withheld, and why. Particularly with the George Zimmerman trial, much of the dialogue was vitriolic as evidenced in the dialogue included from the Live Chat:

Figure 4-1. Orlando Sentinel Trayvon Martin Live Chat. Source: http://www.orlandosentinel.com/os-trayvon-martin-live-chat-20120326- htmlstory.html

The associate editor said the audience members at times created heated debates questioning the paper’s coverage:

There's a questioning of our motives when we don't put something up. What are we trying to hide? Whose side are we on? Why are we using that photo of Trayvon and not the other? Why are we calling Zimmerman Hispanic when he's got a mother who was from—wherever? I think it was Peru—or his father. Why don't we call Barack Obama biracial?

The audience’s influence on the trials was not limited to just media coverage.

They also played an integral role in how the trial played out in the courtroom each day, specifically in how the defense presented their case and questioned and treated certain witnesses on the stand during cross examination in the Casey Anthony trial, as explained by the Director of Photography:

The defense attorneys had somebody who was monitoring the Twitter feed to get a feel for how um, their cross examinations were going. And, so, they would get a feel that there was a negative reaction if they went to aggressively towards the mom, but they could, they could be very

aggressive against the dad, and there wasn’t a negative reaction, so they would actually change their approach in the trial as attorneys.

The reporters covering the trial for the Orlando Sentinel picked up on these subtle nuances, which in turn led them to write stories explaining how the audience’s feedback was affecting how the case unfolded in court.

Audience Demand and Engagement

The audience, readers and participants, were the driving force for the adaptation of new media technologies and the proliferation of new reporting procedures throughout the newsroom. The Orlando Sentinel was able to analyze where and when their readers were going for trial coverage across their online, mobile, and print platforms, and could adjust their reporting structures accordingly throughout. One study participant said:

I think the important thing as we cover(ed) this trial is that we watched how our site (website) was being used, and how people reacted to our coverage and realizing that different people were following the trial in different ways. We got the information to the people who wanted it in the way that they wanted it.

The audience demand for information on the trials, particularly the Casey

Anthony trial was insatiable. Sentinel journalists described being “bombarded” with questions and inquiries about the case on Twitter and Facebook, through e-mails, phone calls, and comments on stories, as well as the live chat room. Readers were absorbing content about the trials in the traditional broadsheet, on desktop computers, via their smart phones and tablets, through social media and text alerts. The associate editor talked about how the paper reacted and where it published news and information based upon how and where the audience was engaging with the content:

There's people who might never have come to us on desktop but are checkin' their Twitter account or their Facebooks. There's people who are just gonna watch the video stream because maybe they don't have a TV in

their office, and they can—there's people who just wanna be part of the crowd so they can be part of this virtual crowd in the chat.

He continued to explain how there were different audiences within the online audience, subcategories, who wanted as much information as possible. As a result, the online producers created specific Twitter handles and Facebook pages on which to update regularly throughout each day, rather than flood their main accounts and regular online audience with too much information about the trials. At the same time, the editors and producers also realized that different platform audiences wanted different things.

The Twitter audience wanted minute by minute updates with pictures and descriptions from the courtroom. The Facebook audience was more discerning. Consequently, the paper was more selective in what they posted on the Facebook pages for each trial.

The associate editor said, “Casey taught us how to be in the spaces that readers wanted us to be in and to be with them.” However, the audience was moving throughout the trial, and the paper was not always successful in connecting with them in those new spaces at the same time during the Casey Anthony trial. By the time the

George Zimmerman trial began, staff had developed new workflows and work routines to better engage with an active audience, even though the audience for the Zimmerman trial was not nearly as large as the one for the Casey Anthony trial.

The paper realized during their coverage of the trials that not only was the audience moving into new and different spaces, but they also wanted to be engaged in the conversation like never before. Readers got actively involved in the coverage by commenting on stories, asking questions via Twitter, flooding the blogs with their voice and their conversations. They held reporters accountable by pointing out fact errors and questioning their sources. Editors asked the reporters to provide feedback and

comments on their stories so that the audience knew they could reach them. The audience was no longer interested in remaining a passive recipient of a one-way symmetrical flow of information from one source to many. They broke down the barriers of traditional legacy communication and created a two-way asymmetrical dialogue with the content creators, the editors of the paper, the sources of the stories and fellow audience members. The audience was now setting the agenda and becoming a part of the story alongside the very journalists who were covering the trial. The associate editor discussed this shift in the traditional journalistic paradigm:

One of the things I've had to learn is that it's not your website. It's ours (audience). I think with Zimmerman I started to see that the readership helped form some of the ways you cover something. The response you get to what you post is a lot more immediate. We were part of a community in a different way, that our coverage was impacting people in a way that I'm not sure I could point to many stories in my time that did.

The Role of Metrics

The second research question examined the role of metrics in measuring the success of the newspaper’s efforts:

RQ2: How is the Orlando Sentinel measuring the efficacy of social media and new media technologies on their legacy, mobile, and online platforms during high profile court cases?

As the audience shifted away from the traditional print product while the disruption took hold and readership habits changed, newspapers needed to find new and effective ways to engage their readers. To know whether they were successful, newspapers needed to measure the efficacy of developing platforms and reader experiences. About the time the Casey Anthony story began to develop, the Orlando

Sentinel was beginning to discover and experiment more with pushing their content into the digital space through varying platforms and new media technologies. Some of those

platforms such as live chat rooms had been around for many years, but never realized much success outside of sports coverage, and even then, the numbers were marginal at best. Other technologies such as text message alerts and social media were quickly gaining traction as a way to grow traffic and audience engagement, while increasing page views on the website remained the priority, specifically local page views.

The paper had a variety of ways to measure the number of readers who came to the website and whether they came directly to the site through a search engine or web browser, or if they were directed to a particular story from Twitter or Facebook. During the Casey Anthony trial the paper primarily used the analytics software, Omniture, to measure audience traffic and engagement. By the time the George Zimmerman trial began, they had added Chartbeat, another analytics program that provides real-time data about how many people are on the site at any particular time, where they are on the site, how long they stayed, and from where they came. Additionally, comments on stories, active followers on Twitter, and participants in the live chat rooms and blogs highlighted the number of active audience members who were consuming and participating in coverage of the trials through two-way, asymmetrical communication by means of emerging media technologies.

The metrics surrounding the Casey Anthony trial set records not only for the

Orlando Sentinel, but also for all of Tribune Company, the Sentinel’s parent company.

At the time of the trials, Tribune Company was comprised of eight major newspapers including the Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune and Baltimore Sun, as well as 23 television stations (James, M. 2013, July 1).

From the day jury selection began through the end of the trial, May 9 – July 17, orlandosentinel.com received over 250 million page views, which was two and a half times the normal traffic of 98.8 million, recorded the previous year during the same time period. On July 5, the day the verdict was announced, orlandosentinel.com received more than 22 million page views. The traffic peaked in the 2 p.m. hour with nearly 3.7 million page views within that 60-minute time frame. On that one day, orlandosentinel.com received more page views than all of the other Tribune Company publishing and television websites combined (J. Cutter, personal communication,

September 24, 2011).

In contrast, page views for the George Zimmerman verdict were roughly one- fourth of those for the Casey Anthony verdict, falling just short of four million for the entire day. However, those metrics were still significantly larger than the average daily local page views for the time periods before and after the trials, which usually hovered around the one million mark. And, even though the total number of page views was significantly lower for the Zimmerman trial than the Anthony trial, the paper reinforced the lessons learned during the Anthony trial, and in doing so, began to realize the power of social media to contribute significantly to the overall number of viewers absorbing content from the trials on different platforms.

One reporter who was instrumental in developing the coverage of the Anthony trial on Twitter commented:

Seeing those 22 million hits was really a landmark for us, but the change was still slow. I think now, we could understand how social media worked and how it worked in our advantage. It was applied to Zimmerman, not in the same—I think not in the same way as we did with Casey Anthony. Again, that case was—played very differently from Casey Anthony. We wish it would have played the same, but it didn't. I think there was a—we

saw that social media was a tool everyone should use for their stories, and we see why it's important.

The editors and reporters covering the Anthony trial began to comprehend the significance of social media when the number of Twitter followers on @oscaseyanthony grew from 3,000 to 6,000 in just a few hours on the first day of jury selection. By noon on that day, the breaking news editor leading trial coverage made the decision to dedicate a journalist to reporting full-time on Twitter. By the end of the trial,

@oscaseyanthony had over 36,000 followers. The paper could monitor those followers and see how many were coming directly to the website via Twitter as well as who was retweeting and how often.

The online producer would then share that information with the reporters covering the trial:

We can look at anyone who tweets or retweets an Orlando Sentinel story. We can do that in Chartbeat, and in HootSuite, and TweetDeck. Anybody, anywhere, who tweets or retweets an Orlando Sentinel link, we can tell, and we can tell how many times it gets tweeted and retweeted. We can see the evidence of that, and we’re able to give that information back to reporters.

As the paper continued increasing their coverage on Twitter, they could directly see the audience “flooding” the website as a result. However, at one point, Twitter shut down the paper’s account for exceeding the maximum allowed 150 Tweets per hour.

The reporter who was Tweeting full-time on the trial said, “We had to call the Twitter people and let them know, ‘Hey, we're a news organization. We're Tweeting the Casey

Anthony case. You see it's ranking on your Tweet stats...’"

In contrast, the Twitter account for the George Zimmerman trial,

@ostrayonmartin, only garnered approximately 6,000 followers, but remained a powerful tool for disseminating information and engaging with the audience, as well as

driving people to orlandosentinel.com, which ultimately then affected the number of page views.

Furthermore, while Twitter and page views on the website were groundbreaking in terms of visitors and followers, several other platforms were also experiencing record numbers including text alerts, comments on stories, video views, photo galleries, blog posts, and live chat rooms. The homepage producer for orlandosentinel.com said, “We would have hundreds, and in some cases, thousands of comments on Trayvon Martin stories. Casey, we would have hundreds. I’m fairly certain that Casey Anthony and

Trayvon Martin are our most commented, ongoing subject matters, ever.”

The Orlando Sentinel TV blogger, Hal Boedeker, also wrote about the Anthony trial everyday as it was streamed lived on the website and throughout the local television stations. The breaking news editor who coordinated much of the Anthony trial coverage could discern how many people were tuning into the coverage based upon the overwhelming response from the audience on Boedeker’s blog:

Hal’s blog was a really good barometer for us because he wrote about Casey every single day and just thousands and—I mean like we had never seen those kinda’ numbers for blogs before, ever. That just kind of let us know. Now it wasn’t the most popular local story, but that didn’t matter cuz [sic] the numbers were so stratospheric, really.

Similarly, the live chat rooms were attracting participants in the tens of thousands with almost 500,000 people logging in on verdict day. Never before in the history of the paper had they experienced such a staggering response from the audience as they did with the live chat for the Anthony trial. The editor in charge of monitoring the chat room was as shocked as the reporters who were attempting to moderate the conversations:

We were just like, “Holy crap. Now we have 10,000 followers. Now we have 15,000 followers and today there were 225,000 people on the live chat.” I mean those kinda’ things were just like—they just blew us away. I

mean we couldn’t even wrap our minds, at the moment, around what was happening. It turned out we had something like 19 million user minutes or something like that, which I guess they calculate by however many people were in there for how long. We approved 130,000 comments through the course of the trial and we deleted just about that many as well. None of us expected the numbers, though. We were all shocked by the numbers. It was amazing that many people were spending that much time talking to us about this child.

The number of people signing up to receive SMS text alerts to their phone at the moment the verdict was announced was also indicative of a significant increase in audience engagement. Although text messaging alerts had been utilized for sports, weather, traffic, and breaking news for many years, never before had the paper experienced subscriptions in the tens of thousands for a single event. Before the

George Zimmerman trial started, they had already signed up over 75,000 subscribers.

Still photographs and video were also instrumental in driving traffic to the website and engaging the audience in unusually large numbers. Photo galleries populated from evidence photos released in the discovery, including hundreds of personal photographs of Casey Anthony’s, in addition to those from the trial proceedings, are still some of the most viewed galleries on orlandosentinel.com to date. The breaking news editor discussed the impact the photos had on traffic to the website:

The photos, both in Casey and Zimmerman—those were huge. I mean nothing generated more traffic for us in either story, than photo galleries— nothing. I mean the Casey evidence photo galleries are still among the top page-view getters on our website, four years after we first got those discover photos or whatever they are. The same with the Zimmerman stuff.

Additionally, the paper also benefited from carrying a live video feed of the trial proceedings each day on the website. The response was so great from the audience they had to switch to a different format by embedding the video stream onto orlandosentinel.com via YouTube, because the paper was losing money daily by paying

for the extra bandwidth required to stream the trial to so many viewers. However, by switching to YouTube to host the live video stream, the paper ceded the opportunity to profit from the high number of viewers. This was a source of frustration for the online editor who realized the missed opportunity to monetize the record-breaking page views and visitors coming to the website to watch trial:

It was terrible. It was horribly mismanaged. Advertising never could find a sponsor for Casey coverage… The live stream, which we all loved so much, cost the paper a lot of money. We thought it would drive traffic. It did drive traffic, but the bandwidth was off the charts every single day, and it cost them money. They lost money on the Casey trial.

Several of the subjects interviewed understood the goal of monitoring and increasing the audience metrics was ultimately to increase revenue during a time in which the business model for legacy newspapers was experiencing a major technological disruption. Increasing audience engagement was only part of the goal.

The paper desperately needed to capitalize on the historic influx of readers and viewers coming to their various platforms to experience the trials.

Not everyone agreed on whether the paper was successful in monetizing the trial coverage including the Director of Photography:

I mean you get the information out there, but is it a business model? Was it something that’s monetized? Does it really help your brand or does it dilute it? Those are the kind of things we’re all sort of asking our questions about, but we know it’s possible.

The Twitter reporter understood the basic premise was to increase advertising sales based upon the inflated metrics from the trials: “Again, that's the whole point of this. We're trying to get enough page views that we could say, ‘Hey, this ad, we're gonna charge you this for it because we get this many page views.’ That is still the end product.”

The main courtroom reporter for the George Zimmerman trial, a 24-year veteran of the paper, also understood that the driving force behind incorporating social media into the trial coverage was to increase revenue, but was not nearly as accepting or understanding as some of the other newsroom employees:

What Twitter does is it drives traffic onto the Sentinel website for people seeking information. That’s why the Sentinel wants me to tweet; to drive revenue, to drive page views and revenue…I think what it does is it captures an audience and makes them more inclined to come back to the Sentinel. I’m thinking revenue here. I don’t know how it works. I don’t know if there is a sponsor to LiveChat so there is an advertiser paying, or if what the Sentinel is counting on is that these are people who will come back to the Sentinel and they’ll click on stories and as a consequence will result in greater revenue.

The Director of Photography concurred:

Are people gonna [sic] pay for it? People don’t pay for their Twitter feed. In fact, I don’t know how Twitter pays for itself. I really don’t. I don’t understand their business model but it’s not really part of what I do. I think there’s more mystery to things right now than we’d like to admit.

Everyone involved directly with the trials understood the need to increase revenue by increasing audience engagement across the multiple platforms, even if they did not fully understand how the business model worked. While some would argue whether the paper successfully capitalized on the financial opportunities provided by the trials, almost everyone agreed the trials helped get more people focused on adapting to the new technologies, while remaining optimistic their efforts somehow, in some way, provided a much needed infusion of income. Some, including the homepage producer, believed the Sentinel would have suffered more layoffs without the trials:

I think we would be an even smaller organization than we are now. I think that—because we wouldn't have had the—at least the temporary increases in traffic, and I think that—especially with, say, video revenue during Trayvon. We have ads on the videos. I think we might not have seen things do as well as they had, and they were not—it’s not like things

were doing well, but they were doing better than they were before all this happened.

The Role of Early Adopters

The third research question explored how the use of social media changed work processes in the newsroom:

RQ3: How have technological advancements involving the Internet and social media changed the newsgathering and reporting process for high profile court cases at the Orlando Sentinel?

The Orlando Sentinel journalists leading the change toward digital were an amalgam of senior editors, who were originally involved in early digital initiatives dating back to the early 1990s, and a new group of young, aggressive millennial reporters, digital natives, who brought with them technical acumen, an uncompromising desire to be first, and a fearlessness to experiment. The culture to innovate was set in the previous decade under the direction of a former editor when the paper became one of the first in the country to offer an online version on AOL (America Online). Social media was not around at the time, but different departments, particularly sports, experimented using live chats and message boards, streaming and edited video, and prioritizing getting content online. As different technologies began to show up in the media sphere, such as Twitter, sports reporters were historically the first to see them and start incorporating them into their workflows. And while some of the veteran editors who had been around in the previous decades felt that the paper had once excelled at, but since fallen back, with their digital efforts, most everyone interviewed agreed the paper had never before dedicated so many resources to digital operations as they had during the

Casey Anthony and George Zimmerman trials. The associate editor reinforced this

when interviewed for the study: “There've been plenty of events that we've thrown a lot of people at, including a lot digitally, before that, but nothing like Casey.”

Breaking news team

Many of the people dedicated to trial coverage came up through an early rendition of what evolved into the breaking news team, whose purpose was to get breaking news onto the website, early, often, and most importantly, fast. The fledgling team was first led by a former sports editor and mainly comprised of young, digitally savvy reporters. The breaking news editor understood the success of the team was determinate upon their buy-in to the process:

The biggest thing was—the big initiative at that point was to get reporters involved—get reporters bought into getting stuff to the online team as quickly as they could get it, helping them understand, ‘Look, you're at a crime scene. Just call me in three graphs.’ The breaking news team pretty much got it. It was everybody else that didn't want to do it.

One reporter on the team, who had recently completed her master’s degree at

Columbia University, recognized the opportunity to lead the way for the rest of the newsroom:

It was news. It was exciting, and it was an opportunity to do more….You need to send the story back quickly. You’re gonna [sic] have to write it on your phone. I liked that excitement. It was a team that wasn’t scared of Tweeting stories, or Tweeting sources, and getting somebody to call you back. I liked that willingness to experiment and explore. It was a really good move for me.

She also noted that many of the journalists recruited for the breaking news team were recent graduates who had experience with new media technologies from classes included in their curriculum.

By the time the breaking news team began covering the Casey Anthony story when her child, Caylee, went missing in June 2008, much of the groundwork and

infrastructure had already been laid for the digital convergence that took place over the next five years, encompassing both the Casey Anthony and George Zimmerman trials.

For some newsroom veterans, including the homepage producer, who was involved in the early digital initiatives in the 1990s, the difference between the older more experienced reporters and the incoming millennial journalists was not just the level of comfort with the new technologies, but also the standards applied to the reporting:

People who have been dealing with smartphones and computers their whole lives, including their formative years when they were still in school, elementary school, middle school, high school, I think have a much greater level of comfort and understanding of the way the digital world works than I do. Also, my standards were set back in an earlier time. When you have all day to gather information and write a story, you write a better story than when you have 30 minutes and you rush something onto the Internet. Then you gather more information, and rush it onto the Internet. Then gather more information, and rush it onto the Internet. My standards are different.

The breaking news team understood that journalism was changing, interests were changing, and audience engagement was changing. They wanted to be a part of that change, and lead that change.

However, in doing so, they not only had to embrace new media technologies and entirely different workflows, but also the disdain of their traditional print-reporting peers.

Many of the veteran reporters felt there was too much emphasis on breaking news or the breaking news team was always on the most important story of the day. When the breaking news reporters and web producers were recognized during the newsroom’s annual awards, they could sense the contempt of their colleagues; they could see the

“eye rolls.”

Social media

Social media was mostly still in its infancy in 2008, when Caylee Anthony first went missing. The paper had explored using it previously for select breaking news stories, but it was yet not incorporated into the daily workflow of the newsroom. About the time the Anthony story began to break, editors had begun to emphasize the importance of using social media to drive readers to the website for specific stories.

Over the next several years they launched training sessions on how and when to use social media to maximize its potential. Newspaper readership and advertising were in a sharp and perpetual decline, and company management viewed social media as a mechanism to help increase readership and revenue. They began requiring reporters and editors to launch their own Twitter and Facebook accounts. Annual reviews included increasing social media followers for employee benchmarks. The paper hired a full-time social media coordinator to develop best practices and alleviate some of the burden from online producers.

By the time jury selection began in the first of the two trials, the editors knew social media was going to play a much larger role in trial coverage, they knew they needed to dedicate someone full-time to reporting on social media from the courtroom.

Most of the breaking news reporters were already using it on some level at the start of the trial. Many would credit the Casey Anthony trial as the turning point for widespread acceptance and adoption of social media reporting, including one of the staff photojournalists:

I would say that the Casey Anthony case opened the eyes of, I think, the photo department on the power of social media. There were a handful of people involved in social media before the Casey case, but afterwards I think everybody figured out like, oh, yeah. This really is how people are accessing news and images, and so after that—I mean I think it was

probably right after that was probably when I got moving on all the social media stuff…

When the Zimmerman trial came along, the photographer noted that social media reporting was already deeply embedded into the workflows of the field reporters and newsroom editors:

…yeah, totally different than Casey. Whereas Casey, social media wasn't being used by everybody, and then the—you were much more likely to do that centralized thing where you had one person in the newsroom, social media for everybody. It was a social media fest out at the Zimmerman courtroom. I was posting to Facebook several times a day; Twitter several times a day. It was much more 21st century, what we think of as social media by the time we had gotten to 2013. Zimmerman, yeah, it was up and running and filing hits every few hours, either on Facebook or Twitter.

Everyone interviewed agreed that social media, and more specifically Facebook and Twitter, were much more commonplace during the Zimmerman trial than the

Anthony trial. The Anthony trial was the catalyst, it was the beta test and the point at which the rest of the newsroom began to realize the potential of social media to engage with the audience and drive readers to their stories, photos and video, blogs, and chat rooms.

Twitter

The paper had initially experimented with the social media and micro-blogging platform, Twitter, as a way to update their readers with timely information regarding space shuttle launches at the Kennedy Space Center, which was a regular beat until the end of the space program in 2011. However, it was not until reporters began using it to update the newsroom and their stories to limit the need to call into the newsroom during the early developments of the Casey Anthony story that they began to realize the full potential of the service.

At the time, only a few reporters were occasionally using Twitter to promote their stories, but not while the story was developing. Once they realized they were not only updating their editors back at the paper with timely information, but also a growing and highly engaged audience, they started incorporating Tweeting into their daily workflow in the field. The paper could see the audience was monitoring the story using the hashtag,

#caseyanthony; consequently, the Sentinel launched the @oscaseyanthony Twitter handle in February 2009. By then, tens of thousands of people were actively following the story on Twitter.

Figure 4-2. Orlando Sentinel Casey Anthony Twitter Account. Source: https://twitter.com/oscaseyanthony .

On that first day of jury selection in May 2011, the reporter, who ultimately was assigned to report on the trial solely through Twitter, first received resistance from his editor until he was able to develop a new workflow that proved his methods were

gaining significant traction in only a few hours. He described his conversation with his editor and his new processes when interviewed for the study:

I think we should—I think you should pull me off from doing the rewrites all the time and have me do just Twitter. Her response was, ‘Absolutely not. I'm not paying you here to Tweet all day about the case. That's ridiculous. No. You're not doing that.’ I'm like, ‘Can you just let me do it today and we'll see what happens?’ She was like, ‘I'll let you do it until noon.’ I said, ‘Okay, fine, but I'll be updating the rewrite that I keep putting together.’ We tried it.

What I did was, I had three televisions in front of me, and I was trying to grab snippets of what the witnesses that were called on the stand had to say. I would write their direct quote of what they said. People were eating it up because they were people that were not in front of their TV. They're at work, but they were addicted to that story. They knew now that the Sentinel had a Twitter account, and they would see that the updates were coming… every minute, every two minutes.

The Sentinel continued to dedicate a reporter or web producer to live Tweet for the entirety of the trial. They embedded the @oscaseyanthony Twitter feed into the live chat room on ScribbleLive; they attached photos to Tweets based on audience demand

— they could see a stark difference in what was retweeted based upon whether it had a photo attached. The audience wanted to see who was in the courtroom, who was on the stand, and what the defendant was wearing. They continued to grow their Twitter audience to over 36,000 followers.

While Twitter was one of the more successful new tools adopted over the course of the trials, the paper continued to experiment with other platforms and technologies as ways to connect with different audiences. They found early on during the Casey

Anthony story that while the audience’s appetite for information on Twitter was seemingly insatiable, readers on Facebook wanted a more selective distribution of content that was not so heavily focused on the trial.

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Facebook

As the paper continued its process of moving toward becoming a digital first publication, management asked every reporter and editor to create a Facebook page as a way to push and promote stories. Although a few newsroom employees objected to the request, most understood the value of the platform for creating a community to connect with readers. Managers experienced greater compliance with Sentinel journalists joining and using Facebook than with any other new media technology.

While incorporating Facebook into the daily workflow, the online producers realized that while Twitter was an effective tool for receiving and distributing information,

Facebook was better for driving traffic to the website. Similarly, while readers following the Casey Anthony trial were flooding the Twittersphere, the Facebook audience was somewhat indifferent to it, or at least disengaged from it. As a result, the producers limited how much Casey Anthony news they published on Facebook. They still used

Facebook to drive people to the website for other areas of interest and other stories, but relied more on Twitter, search engine optimization (SEO), and the landing pages on the website to attract readers who were more specifically interested in the trials.

Alerts

Other ways the paper reached out to their readers and the audience was through text message and email alerts, as well as mobile alerts through the Orlando Sentinel app for Android®, iPhones® and iPads®. The paper had been using some form of SMS

(short message service) technology since its inception many years earlier, most often for sports, traffic, and breaking news, which was consistent with how most new technologies were introduced into the daily workflow of the newsroom.

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In addition to the existing breaking news alerts, the paper also set up special trial news alerts for both Casey Anthony and Trayvon Martin. Depending on the significance of the news, they would either send it out through just the trial alerts, or through both the trial alerts and the breaking news alerts if the news was of interest to a greater audience. Having the ability to develop and distribute subcategories of news alerts was a new development to the technology the paper had been using previously for SMS messaging.

The homepage producer was predominantly the person to send out the alerts.

When deciding when, how often, and what news to distribute, she needed to be judicious, as the paper was limited to how many they could send out to mobile phones each week because the user had to pay standard text messaging fees. On most days she would send out just one text alert, sometimes two. However, the email and app alerts were free, and consequently were utilized more frequently.

In the early stages of the paper using text alerts for breaking news, sports, weather, and traffic, it was not uncommon for them to have 10,000 subscribers. By the time the Trayvon Martin started to unfold, they had received over 75,000 requests for the service.

Figure 4-3. Orlando Sentinel Trayvon Martin Twitter Account. Source: https://twitter.com/ostrayvonmartin

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Live chat

Similar to SMS messaging, the Sentinel had been using some form of chat rooms since first going online with AOL in the 1990s. Most often these chat rooms were used by sports reporters and editors looking for stories and following fan groups for their beats. They also experimented with hosting live chats during specific sporting events such as Orlando Magic basketball and Florida Gators football games. At most, these early live chats attracted a couple of hundred participants, nowhere close to the numbers they experienced during the Casey Anthony and George Zimmerman trials.

The impetus to use the chat as a reporting mechanism came when the paper was able to secure a second seat in the courtroom during jury selection and trial proceedings. They knew that one of the reporters was going to have to focus his efforts on writing the daily traditional print story. The second reporter was to focus on social media and interacting with the audience, answering questions, and sharing with them the events unfolding in the courtroom. The breaking news editor who coordinated the coverage of the Casey Anthony trial said the live chat was the turning point, in terms of technology, in how the paper covered the trial:

That was like the big thing that changed everything for us and we decided to start that—we started it before jury selection.

The benefit of that was that she sat in the courtroom, so she was able to talk about a lot of things on the chat that people couldn’t see on the television feed. “George and Cindy are here now. Now they’re crying. This is what whoever is wearing. Here are the other people. Ashley Banfield from CNN.” Ya know those kinda’ things, and then also answer questions from people in the chat. What does this mean? What does that mean? Then it became a kinda’ [sic] place where people in the chat just talked to each other basically. We had never used that as a tool before then.

The paper embedded the live chat into the website along with the Twitter feed using CoveritLive, a web-based live blogging platform. What started out with only a

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couple of hundred people grew to a few thousand during pre-trial hearings and ended with almost 500,000 people logging into the chat room on the day of the verdict.

Figure 4-4. Orlando Sentinel Casey Anthony Live Chat. Source: http://www.orlandosentinel.com/news/breaking-news/os-casey-anthony-trial- live-chat-for-the-casey-anthony-trial-20110703-htmlstory.html

While one reporter in the courtroom was writing a complete and thorough news story and the second courtroom reporter was interacting with the audience in the chat room, a third person, a producer, was in the newsroom gathering information and researching the paper’s archives to assist with answering questions submitted by the audience. A fourth reporter was dedicated to live Tweeting on @oscaseyanthony and a fifth person, an editor, was cleaning up the stories as they came in, while monitoring other elements of the trial through different mediums and channels to ensure they were not missing anything. At no point before had the paper ever dedicated so many people to one story, for this length of time, with specific digital responsibilities.

By the time the Trayvon Martin and George Zimmerman story began to evolve, the paper knew they needed to get the live chat up and running at the onset. The

CoveritLive software they used previously was no longer available for free.

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Consequently, they switched to a similar version, ScribbleLive, to host their chat room, which also allowed for them to embed the streaming video of the trial into the chat, but was also less reliable and suffered periodic technical problems.

Figure 4-5. Orlando Sentinel Trayon Martin/George Zimmerman Live Chat. Source: http://www.orlandosentinel.com/os-trayvon-martin-live-chat-20120326- htmlstory.html

The chat room for the George Zimmerman trial was also largely successful in capturing and engaging a wide spread audience throughout the trial, however, the number of participants never came close to those of the Casey Anthony trial. Even though everyone at the paper was better prepared to launch and manage the chat due to their previous experiences, almost all of them agreed that the level of interest in the

Zimmerman trial was simply not the same.

One journalist who worked as a producer for the Casey Anthony trial and a reporter for the George Zimmeran trial suggested that switching the hosting software from CoveritLive to Scribblive may have also contributed to the smaller number of participants due to the technical problems they experienced in the early stages of trial coverage. Furthermore, many of the journalists involved with either one or both of the trials intimated the paper also had fewer resources with which to cover the Zimmerman trial. The Sentinel continued to lose newsroom employees due to layoffs and attrition,

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and consequently could not dedicate as many people to trial coverage. Everyone had to do more with less; morale was at an all time low.

Online

Aside from developing new workflows for social media, the trials were also instrumental in changing the mentality of when and how quickly stories were published on orlandosentinel.com. Before the trials, reporters were still holding onto valuable information to publish only after their print stories hit the streets. The homepage producers for the website could see their traffic spike early in the morning and fall off precipitously throughout the day. The audience was not coming back to the website because there wasn’t anything new for them to read. The editors knew they were publishing quality journalism and stories, but they were not keeping or attracting the audience’s attention. They began to question their approach to what and when stories were placed on the website. They had to force reporters to think differently about the news they gathered throughout the day. The paper needed them to publish online, early and often, before their competitors. This was a major philosophical shift in thinking from decades-long workflows developed and honed in legacy print operations.

All of the study participants credited the Casey Anthony trials as the “driving force” behind moving the paper to a “web-first” mentality. After seeing the success of 22 million viewers coming to orlandosentinel.com in one day, the remaining laggards and skeptics began to transform to digital-centric workflows.

SEO – landing page

One of the ways the paper addressed the falloff in traffic on the website after the morning spike was by getting more new content onto orlandosentinel.com throughout the day. Another technique the paper used was search engine optimization (SEO),

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which improves the likelihood their specific content would show up first in Internet search engines by using key words in the tags, titles, and metadata of their story assets.

The homepage producers needed to ensure that Orlando Sentinel remained number one or two in search engine results. At times they would fall below other national media organizations, which was concerning since both stories were happening in Orlando and no other news organization was producing the amount of content as the

Orlando Sentinel was for either trial. The producers also created landing pages — single-subject, stand-alone web pages that were linked from the orlandosentinel.com homepage — for both the Casey Anthony and Trayvon Martin stories, which housed all of the content produced for each story from beginning to end. This not only improved their search engine results, but also helped to better organize the content for the audience.

The paper had been using SEO techniques previously, but it wasn’t until the

Casey Anthony trial that they began to realize the full potential of optimizing their content. As with the majority of the other new workflows and procedures, the SEO techniques that evolved during the Casey Anthony trial were employed more quickly and with greater precision during the Zimmerman trial. One newsroom employee who worked as a producer for the first trial and a reporter for the second trial had a better understanding of the role of utilizing best SEO practices to connect the audience to the content:

During both trials, it was a daily thing of making sure we're SEOing [sic] things correctly, and especially with the Zimmerman trial because after it, there's been so much spin-off with his wife and his girlfriend. Those are a lot of different examples of when the SEO has to change, and you need to stay on top of it to make sure that when people are Googling [sic] what trouble Zimmerman's been in lately, your story comes up first.

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The associate editor also summarized their efforts, explaining the learning curve the paper experienced between the two trials:

For lessons we applied: all the things that we were doing, we continued to do, but we'd gotten more at ease with the technology and getting things up on the site. I think the only thing—one of the things that we did immediately with Zimmerman that we did a little later in Casey is we really worked on the search engine optimization of it—the SEO.

Photos

Editors at the paper realized early on as the Casey Anthony story was breaking that the audience responded well to photos. They asked for them on social media and continually clicked on them online. No other content from the two trials attracted more readership, more clicks, and more shares than photos from the ongoing stories. Several years later after the verdict, the Casey Anthony and George Zimmerman photo galleries on orlandosentinel.com still attract some of the highest number of page views.

The reporter who was managing the @oscaseyanthony Twitter feed and watching those from the reporters working in the field could see the engagement for

Tweets with photos was much higher than for those without. At that time, Twitter did not embed photos along with the Tweet. Instead, there was a link for users to click on to view the photo. And, despite the second step to see the photo, Tweets with photos attached and linked were retweeted at a much higher rate. Furthermore, the higher engagement was not limited to just Twitter; Facebook and the live chat also proved more successful when photos were included.

Like most newspapers, the Orlando Sentinel had a photography staff and department for decades. And while technology for the photo staff was constantly changing, particularly when transitioning from film to digital in the previous decade, the fundamental change in the paper’s use of photos during the two trials did not come

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primarily from the photo department, but from the breaking news reporters and the homepage producers. Much of that change was facilitated by the introduction of

Blackberry® mobile phones, and later iPhones®, into the reporters’ workflows. However, the reporters who first starting using Blackberries® in the field had to purchase them on their own, as the paper had not yet transitioned to providing them for the staff.

One of the lead reporters on the Casey Anthony story talked about how she, along with her breaking news team cohort, bought her own Blackberry® to have the ability to email in stories, photos and video from the field and get them online as quickly as possible:

I had a personal Blackberry® that I used for years because we didn’t have—we had company-issued cell phones but they were the flip, or the old school, no Internet access. I used my own money to buy and pay for myself to have a Blackberry® so I could email stories in, so I could send pictures in. I did that for probably two or three years before we got Blackberries®. Several people on the breaking news team did the same. We all just paid our own money for—Blackberries® was the thing then, obviously iPhones® weren’t around yet. Yeah, we paid our own ‘cuz (we) wanted to get ‘em online.

The Twitter reporter talked about how this process was particularly beneficial for breaking news:

The breaking news team, the way breaking news is, things are happening now that you could take pictures of. Crash site, press conference showing evidence, someone walking out of the jail in handcuffs. These are things that are, by nature, part of breaking news, so they lend themselves to photos. I think it was just easy. You shoot it. You e-mail it. That's it. There was nothing else. There was no production to it. Send it to me, I'd look at it, make sure there are no limbs hanging anywhere, push it through.

As jury selection in the Casey Anthony trial got underway, the audience began asking for more photos via Twitter and email. The Twitter audience was a different audience than those watching the live video stream or consuming the trial on other platforms. They were experiencing the trial in the Twittersphere and wanted to read

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about and see images from the courtroom in their Twitter feed. The Twitter reporter began capturing screen shots from the live stream on his computer and attaching those screen shots to the Tweets he sent out on @oscaseyanthony, but the quality of the images was low and also carried the call letters of the competing television station,

WESH, in the bottom corner of the screen shot.

The paper had a photographer in the courtroom who was transmitting every image he shot back to the paper in real-time over a hard-wired Internet connection. A photo editor in the newsroom would then receive the images via FTP, file transfer protocol, and edit them before uploading a select group of photos to orlandosentinel.com and Flickr, a photo-sharing website, from which the rest of the credentialed media could gain access to the photos for wider distribution.

Once the Twitter reporter and photo editor realized the audience was responding more to photos in the Twitter feed, they expedited their workflow to attach the higher quality photos coming from the Sentinel photographer in the courtroom to the Tweets going out on @oscaseyanthony. As soon as a new witness took the stand or family members entered the courtroom, the photo instantly transmitted from the photographer’s camera in the courtroom, to the photo editor in the newsroom and to

Twitter via the Twitter reporter who attached it to relevant Tweets of what was transpiring during the trial. By the time the Trayvon Martin and George Zimmerman story took hold approximately eight months after the verdict in the Casey Anthony trial, the paper immediately prioritized a similar workflow to attach photos to Twitter and

Facebook posts, as well as the live chat, as they knew the audience would engage more with photos in the social media feeds. Twitter had also evolved at this point so that

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users could now embed photos directly into their Tweets, rather than attaching a link to a photo, which then helped to increase audience engagement. Consequently, the paper used many more photos in their social media reporting for Zimmerman than they did for

Casey Anthony because they could directly embed the photos into the Twitter feed, which was also embedded into the live chat through ScribbleLive, and therefore helped facilitate conversation and discussion between those participating on the various platforms.

For the photographers in the courtroom, majority of the new distribution methods employed happened outside of their workflow, once the images were transmitted and received into the newsroom. However, the process by which the photos were sent over the Internet directly from the courtroom to the newsroom through a hard-wired connection exposed some vulnerabilities on verdict day during the Anthony trial. The workflow was dependent on a fast and reliable Internet connection, which was not always available depending on the number of viewers streaming the trial from within the courthouse and on the Orlando Sentinel network and Internet servers. When 22 million viewers logged in to watch the outcome of the verdict, the system was overloaded beyond its capacity, which prevented any of the verdict photos from transmitting from the courtroom to the newsroom. In hindsight, the photographers said they could have more effectively walked the compact flash card containing the images from the camera back to the newsroom, as the Orlando Sentinel is located across the street from the

Orange County Courthouse where the Casey Anthony trial took place. That specific technical breakdown heavily influenced the choices the photo staff made when preparing to cover the George Zimmerman trial at the Seminole County Courthouse,

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which is approximately 20 miles away. As a result, the photo staff abandoned the workflow of tethering the camera to the Internet to instantly transmit every single photograph from the courtroom. Instead, they reverted to a more traditional process of editing the pictures on laptop in the courtroom throughout the course of the trial and periodically transmitting a select group of pictures rather than hundreds at a time. And while this more traditional process did place a much larger gatekeeping role on the photographers covering the trial, it helped streamline much of the editing in the newsroom. By the time the photos were received they had already been edited and captioned and were ready for mass distribution to the Sentinel’s audience via social media and the website, as well as the rest of the credentialed news media through the photo-sharing website Flickr.

One of the photographers who covered both trials iterated that in comparison to the Casey Anthony trial, the George Zimmerman trial was much easier from a technological standpoint:

Again, I think it also goes back to the technology. The cameras were better. The bandwidth was better. Everything about it was just faster and more efficient. Just two years difference was just night and day. Casey, it was just like dragging this trial through and getting the—it was just, to me, very heavy to get all this content out there and distribute it, whereas Zimmerman, it was hard work, but it worked. Every day it worked.

And, even though the process of transmitting the images from the courtroom to the newsroom through a direct connection to the Internet proved unsuccessful from a bandwidth and technological perspective, the innovation involved in developing the workflow was groundbreaking for the paper and photo staff.

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Video

An increased demand for video from the audience and advertisers was beginning to take hold about the time Casey Anthony’s daughter, Caylee Anthony, was originally reported missing in 2008. The editors of the Sentinel could also see from the metrics provided by Chartbeat they had much longer audience engagement times for video on the website. For the reporters covering the story in the field, most of who were from the breaking news team, shooting video, either with a smartphone or handheld video camera, was already becoming part of their normal workflow. One of the lead reporters on the story shared her experiences shooting video outside the home of the Anthony’s when police arrested and took Case away:

We learned a lot during Casey, but we already had that foundation of, “This is what new reporting looks like.” I mean, I stood out at their house every day, and took pictures, and took video. That was very natural and ingrained in me at that point, to do that.

I feel like I took the most video, and I did the most social media starting with Casey. I mean, I specifically remember throwing elbows with cameramen, and being tall—‘cuz [sic] I’m tall—has its advantage. I could just stick my arm up and film. We have some great videos of Casey getting put into a cop car, and her family fighting.

It was very natural, and I’m certainly not a good videographer by any means, but it doesn’t intimidate me to use it. I’m just the mentality of, “Here’s the faster way to get it. I tried my best, and here’s a video. If it works, great. If not, I tried, and we didn’t have a photographer there.”

The downside of having the breaking news reporters incorporate shooting video into their daily workflow was they did not have the proper training or software to efficiently and effectively shoot, edit, and upload their video to the various platforms.

Moreover, the editors did not completely understand the amount of time it takes to edit video, nor what technology was needed to do so. The reporters found that editing a two

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or three minute video would add at least an hour to their day, which was already overloaded with other responsibilities.

Another barrier to the newly developing video workflow was not everyone was equipped to send video in from the field over a Wi-Fi Internet connection with company provided “hot-spots.” Even for those who did have the hot-spots, the ability to successfully transmit and upload video back to the paper depended on their location in the city — not everywhere had a strong enough signal or enough bandwidth to transmit video, particularly the areas in and around Sanford, Florida where the George

Zimmerman and Trayvon Martin story took place.

By the time the Zimmerman trial began in June of 2013, most of the breaking news reporters had upgraded from standard cell phones and Blackberries® to iPhones® and Android® smartphones, which made shooting, transmitting, and posting photos and videos to social media much easier. However, they still struggled with bandwidth issues due to the limited infrastructure and the high volume of media who were covering the story and using the existing bandwidth to transmit assets and information back to their newsrooms all over the country.

Another major development for creating and distributing video in the paper’s digital products was the implementation of interview “talkbacks,” during which the trial reporters would record a question and answer segment related to recent developments in trials. These segments would then be uploaded to the landing page and played during their television partner’s, Fox 35, newscasts.

The most significant adoption of video into the workflow and content distribution during the trials came with the embedding of the live video stream on

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orlandosentinel.com. For each trial the court provided a live video stream of the daily proceedings that news organizations could record and stream on their own platforms.

For the Casey Anthony trial, the Sentinel relied upon their South Florida television station, WSFL, to capture the feed via satellite. WSFL then uploaded that feed onto their company intranet for the Sentinel to embed onto orlandosentinel.com. They followed a similar protocol for the George Zimmerman trial, but that time they downloaded the court feed from their broadcast partner, Fox 35 Orlando.

Once the paper had the live-streaming video of the trial on the website, they placed the video into the live chat room, which also incorporated the live Tweeting by the Sentinel reporters. This gave the audience members the opportunity to engage in myriad ways while watching the trial and simultaneously commenting with other members of the audience as well as Sentinel’s reporters and editors.

Additionally, the paper also recorded the trial from the live video stream from which they edited eight to ten separate video highlights each day of specific testimony or arguments in the case. Those videos ranged in length from one and a half to two minutes and were placed into the aggregated landing page for each story on orlandosentinel.com. Those video playlists on the landing pages also included the talkbacks, voiceovers, reporter videos from the field, and evidence videos of Casey

Anthony and George Zimmerman including jail meetings with family members.

By the time the Zimmerman trial was over, video was deeply embedded into the daily workflow of most everyone on the breaking news team and his or her respective editor. Shooting video was no longer the exception, but the norm, as the breaking news editor articulated:

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We just weren’t shooting on-the-spot video with the regularity that we do now. Video was something that we kinda’ [sic] planned more for in 2008 and 2009. Now it’s just sort of like a given that if you’re at a place where something is happening, you’re gonna [sic] do video. You don’t need a special permission to do that or you shouldn’t hafta’ [sic] ask for that special—ya [sic] know what I mean? Now it just seems like we kind of default to making sure we have video of everything.

However, despite all of their efforts with adding different kinds of video to their workflow and onto their various platforms, the associate editor still felt they had room to improve: “The videos—we've tried different ways, with everything from flip cameras to whatever, and I still think that's just not a nut we've cracked with non-photographers.”

Cultural Resistance

Even though the Sentinel and Tribune Co. had a long history with Internet publishing and digital media, the precipitous shift to a digital first newsroom that began to accelerate with the developments in the Casey Anthony and George Zimmerman trials generated a base level of anxiety and resistance in certain sectors of the newsroom. Meanwhile, the early adopters led the convergence under a barrage of criticism and mocking from their professional colleagues and peers. At the same time, the paper was downsizing its staff through layoffs and attrition by those who were near retirement or no longer interesting in making the necessary changes from a traditional print workflow to those required in the more immediate digital publishing space. The downsizing and layoffs created fear and apprehension throughout the newsroom for both the early adopters and the laggards. Some on the breaking news team expressed concern over whether their bosses completely understood and valued their new digital efforts, some of which did not always produce a byline— especially at a time when byline counts had been implemented to measure the productivity of employees throughout the downsizing efforts. The more traditional and veteran reporters

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bemoaned the need to do more with less, the perceived lack of training, the deviation from solid, standard reporting practices, and the overall stress the new digital initiatives brought to an already stressful job. Many of the older journalists openly questioned how social media helped the bottom line of the newspaper. They chastised and mocked their younger, more digitally savvy colleagues for losing sight of the fundamentals of journalism and challenged management for moving the paper away from the one thing that still made money — the printed newspaper. The transformation was taking a toll on everyone involved. Morale was low; resentment was high. People were stressed and anxious; the change was hard.

Even after the departure of dozens of journalists, either voluntarily or involuntarily, the newsroom still had sharp divides between acceptance and resistance of what was slowly becoming the new norm. The associate editor saw roughly three different groups in the newsroom:

I've always divided in my head the newsroom into—I don't know if these are rough estimates or accurate or not. I've always divided them into thirds, and I'm not sure it's changed. There are the third who are really into it and, if anything, they're disappointed we haven't moved faster. They're the people who are always saying, "Hey, give me this. I wanna [sic] an iPhone® that—and I wanna learn to do iMovie. Can't you set me up with something like that?" or "I wanna hot spot so I can file—" There's always that group. I don't necessarily think of 'em as digital natives cuz [sic] — some are. They've grown up with it, but some aren't. They've just embraced it. Then there's that middle group that know they have to do it, that have tried really hard, that know it's a career extender, that it's important to the business. I do think there's still some group—and I don't know if this is in the industry or our newsroom, but I still say there's still some group that—they would much rather all of the attention we devoted—attention and resources we devoted to Casey were devoted against something that they thought maybe wasn't as unseemly. Give 'em a good Watergate. [Laughter] There's just gonna be a group that's gonna be uncomfortable with the idea that the most popular stories on most days are gonna be things that are about death or destruction, a murder, mayhem, or silliness, or entertainment, or sports.

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The resisters voiced loudly that social media, multimedia, and the new digital workflows were getting in the way and preventing them from doing their jobs, which in their minds still consisted of writing a traditional print story at the end of the day. The early adopters were driven by a deep desire to be the first to publish the news and information of a particular subject or story, regardless of the medium. For them, if

Twitter was the best avenue to reach the audience, and more importantly beat their competitors, they reported on Twitter. If they could shoot and capture video from a news scene that gave them a leg up on the competition, they went out and purchased the necessary tools to do so if the paper did not yet supply them. They filed their stories online, early and often from the field, and shared them on Facebook. Most importantly, they were not intimidated by new technology or reporting procedures; they embraced the opportunity to be the first and the best in the market on any given story.

When the annual newsroom rewards came around, the early adopters and breaking news teams were the ones who received praise and recognition from senior management. Reporters who had a strong presence online with deep audience engagement and heavy traffic on their stories were singled out as the stars of the newsroom, replacing some long-standing veteran print reporters who had dominated the awards of traditional print journalism. Whether they agreed with it or not, the rest of the newsroom could see the focus was clearly shifting to digital.

One subject, who previously worked as a breaking news reporter on the Casey

Anthony team before migrating to the web production desk prior to the start of the

George Zimmerman trial, described how much of the newsroom expressed concerns about the abundance of coverage given to one particular story during the Anthony trial:

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I think the rest of the newsroom thought it was insane. I’m certain they thought it was insane, that we were giving so much focus to that particular case. I think that, at the time, our management had not done a good job of trying to explain how the increase in traffic—what that meant for everyone. I think there was—there were some issues and some concerns in other parts of the newsroom.

However, she thought the Anthony trial was also the turning point for many in the newsroom to start buying into the new workflows:

I think it was during Casey that, really, people started to understand how this thing worked. They thought it was a nice idea before, but then they saw, wow, this is something that can really do something for us.

Mocking

For many on the breaking news team, the hardest part of covering the trials was not the new technology or adapting to evolving workflows, but the scorn from their professional colleagues who openly mocked their use of social media as a reporting tool and the hyper-focused fixation on one story and one trial. Many of the loudest detractors were well-respected columnists and institutional print reporters with high social and professional capital in the newsroom and community. At the same time they ridiculed the efforts of those involved in the trial, they also lamented their frustration over the placement of their stories on the homepage, often blaming the homepage producer for the lack of audience engagement. In response, when interviewed for the study, she said:

…and even now, I end up having to talk with reporters and explain, “I know you think your story was really, really great, but the fact of the matter is that nobody read it. We did whatever we could to promote it, but nobody read it.” Frankly, we’re in a game, where it’s an art. It’s not a science, and we have to figure out a way of balancing vegetables and dessert. That’s my job now. I balance vegetables and dessert on the homepage.

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The commentary from the more senior reporters was at times caustic, especially to the younger reporters, many of who were recent graduates. Those recent graduates were not only less resistant to using new media technologies for reporting, but also more experienced in using those technologies from their classes in school.

One of the recent graduates worked as a web producer during the first trial before leaving the paper to take another job. She came back to the paper a year later as a breaking news reporter and worked on the second trial. She ended up leaving the paper once again to take a job with a local competitor a few months after the

Zimmerman verdict. She talked about how the contempt from the others around the newsroom affected morale during the course of the trials:

You definitely see more of the entire room buy into social media and the benefits of it, but the commentary from veteran journalists or columnists mocking it is, I think, incredibly unproductive, and also just insulting to the people that are—Jeff Weiner and Rene, who are working 12, 15, 16-hour days during a trial and doing everything they can. They're on MSNBC. They're up early on the radio. They're writing for print. They're writing for online. They're in chats. They're using Twitter. When you have reporters or a team of reporters working that hard, and then you have people just across the room that are not only resisting it, but really sharing opinion of how they don't see the purpose, it just gets—I guess the best word would be exhausting, ‘cuz [sic] you're already working so hard.

The mocking continued over the course of the two trials even as many of the ones openly criticizing the use of social media began using it to communicate with their readers, while pulling story and column ideas from Facebook and Twitter. Several of the breaking news team producers and reporters felt the traditional print reporters who openly questioned the new reporting procedures simply did not understand or could not accept that journalism was changing, that interests were changing, and that audience engagement was essential to maintaining readership. Simply put, the legacy print

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reporters could not see the value in incorporating social media into their daily reporting structures or workflows— many of them outright resented it.

Resentment

“My job is to write stories. Everything else to me is crap.” This was the sentiment from the lead reporter for the George Zimmerman trial. She is a veteran, old school reporter who openly and outwardly despised the shift in journalism, but adapted as best as she could to maintain her employment with the paper. When working with other reporters to compile a comprehensive online and print story from the court proceedings, she lamented how the millennial reporter sent her Tweets to update the story rather than written paragraphs of coherent information:

The nut is she filed nothing to the person in the newsroom writing the story. All she did was file tweets, and she thought that that was good enough for the story. I was appalled by that, didn’t ever tell her that, but I thought this is crazy. This is not good journalism. What you need to do is tweet some, but write paragraphs about what you’re witnessing and send them to me so I can incorporate them in the story. Instead of these little 140 characters bits of information, we can write something coherent and comprehensive and write a good story.

Others in the newsroom continued to voice their frustration with the new social media requirements. "Now they expect me to do social media? I don't fucking have time for this. I don't need to be doing this."

The legacy reporters were not the only ones expressing resentment, however.

The early-adopters also resented the traditionalists for openly chastising their reporting methods, but then asking for help when they needed to increase their Twitter following to meet their benchmarks outlined by upper management in annual job performance reviews. About the same time that social media benchmarks were incorporated into the job descriptions, the paper also hired a social media coordinator, who’s job was to

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assess the strengths and weaknesses with regards to social media reporting of everyone on staff, and subsequently mentor and coach those who needed to improve their comprehension and skills. This too elicited great resentment and derision among the staff.

One by one, people throughout the newsroom began to accept the changes, particularly after seeing the successes from the Casey Anthony trial. There was still a stigma attached to the breaking news team, but the rest of the paper was starting to see how it all worked and how social media was driving traffic to the website and engaging the audience by the millions over the course of the trial. Everyone was tired of reading and writing about Casey Anthony, but the audience demand was too strong to ignore and the early adopters had proven they knew how to capture the audience and keep them engaged with new content on a multitude of social media platforms.

Lack of training

When senior managers began requesting reporters to establish Twitter and

Facebook accounts to promote their stories, there was a deep discrepancy with regards to how much training was provided for everyone. The reporters maintained there was no training or guidance for any of the new digital initiatives, specifically Twitter. For some, the resistance to adapt to new technologies was a symptom of fear and lack of understanding, as explained by the veteran Zimmerman trial reporter:

I’m real smart, and I always did real well in school, but I just don’t—the way digital things work, things related to a computer work are not intuitive to me. It’s like I have dyslexia and I don’t understand. The people who do really well on digital things are people who are uninhibited, and not afraid to make mistakes, and use trial and error, and that’s not the way I work. I was raised where if you don’t know what you’re doing, don’t do anything cuz [sic] you’re gonna [sic] screw up. It’s a combination of temperament and an inability to intuitively understand the way the digital world works.

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Even the Twitter reporter for the Anthony trial struggled to understand the platform before he eventually grew the @oscaseyanthony handle to incorporate approximately 36,000 followers:

It's not everyone that can figure out how to tweet something. I'm telling you, from my own experience, I didn't understand the hashtag. I didn't understand this 140-character count. I didn't get it, and I resisted it… We, as in most of the reporters who were doing it or told to do it, we didn't understand this—where does this go? Where does this little 140-character tweet go? Who sees this? Why do people care? How does this serve our purposes? Why should we dedicate all this time? We weren't really given that direction. We were just told it was important. You need to do it. Why? We weren't given any direction. I felt like, here's something new that I was unfamiliar with. No guidance, no anything. I pulled away from it.

Conversely, the breaking news team manager who brought many of the digital initiatives into the newsroom from his experiences working in sports, understood that in order for there to be widespread adoption and acceptance of disruptive workflows, reporters needed to understand the benefit of the technologies and how to properly use them:

The digital, even though we'd been doing it for a long time, we were starting to ask more and more from people at the ground level. We needed reporters to promote their stories on Facebook. We needed them to understand Assembler, which was the content management system at the time… and help them understand why this is good for the paper and good for them professionally. You shouldn't send anybody out into the— into court or into an interview situation, a crime scene, what-have-you, without a video recorder because the world is going video. It's going digital. It's going fast, and we want to get it back as quickly as we can get it. You have to train people. You can't just say, "Here's a video recorder. Go do it." They have to understand. They have to be motivated to do it.

Some of the editors also struggled to completely understand and comprehend how certain devices such as Twitter could be properly used. One reporter was reprimanded for Tweeting a slanderous remark about the National Basketball

Association’s Kobe Bryant from her personal Twitter account. Another reporter was

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scolded for Tweeting too often and posting comments such as "It's Wawa everywhere today” on his personal Facebook page in response to an abundance of advertisements the paper was running online and in print for the convenience store, Wawa.

At the same time the early adopters were beta testing the new platforms, the punitive remarks from their editors created deep resentment and set back the adoption rate. It wasn’t until the Casey Anthony trial that adoption rates picked back up and editors and reporters alike once again began testing the efficacy of the new publishing platforms.

Stress

The increased digital work responsibilities brought with them an added level of stress. Reporters who had long been accustomed to gathering information throughout the day and writing for one daily deadline were now posting their story online from the field either by phone or laptop as soon as possible, while continually updating it and revising it with new developments.

Furthermore, those same reporters were also now being asked to shoot still photos and videos, while simultaneously Tweeting any new information to not only the audience, but also the editors back at the paper. The lead reporter on the Zimmerman trial articulated her frustration with the additional workflows:

Yeah, but when you’re tweeting, again, that’s another impediment. I’m in court covering a trial. There’s a witness on the stand. I’m taking notes in my notepad as to what this person is testifying to. If it’s powerful, important, and compelling, I’ll Tweet it. Then, I’m also supposed to keep the story on orlandosentinel.com updated. I’m doing three things simultaneously.

Of course, what you're supposed to be doing as a journalist is concentrating on what's happening in front of you and conveying that. If you're distracted with these other things, you can't be doing that. So seamless, no; manageable, yes.

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One of the lead reporters for the Anthony trial also shared similar concerns:

I mean, it’s really hard. I mean, if you think about it now, it kinda [sic] panics me sometimes if I go to an assignment, and a photographer can’t go. It’s kinda like, “Okay, well I’ll just videotape it.” Sometimes the audio on my iPhone® does not work. It’s kinda of like, “Okay, well I can’t hold a phone up, and hold a pen and paper at the same time.” I mean, I’m confident that at one of those trial-run hearings I realized that you can’t do—because you can’t listen to what witnesses are saying if you’re typing and trying to explain another issue to someone online; it doesn’t work.

All of the reporters interviewed expressed how stressful and physically and emotionally draining the trials were. The hours they worked were “monumental.” At the same time they were incorporating all of these new technologies and workflows into their daily reporting, they were also competing with CNN, The New York Times, The

Wall Street Journal and the like. They were proud of the work they produced and credited the trials as the catalyst to learn new reporting techniques and procedures.

However, not everyone thought the new procedures were necessary or even applicable outside of the trials. Others, particularly the web producers, felt the paper still had a long way to go to get where they needed to be technologically and saw a steep fall off immediately after the trials concluded.

Fear of layoffs

The fear of layoffs permeated throughout the newsroom, affecting nearly every role including management, reporters, photographers, and web producers in some manner. All of them had seen numerous colleagues and friends from their departments laid off during the constant downsizing. In 2007 alone, the paper laid off 70 employees during a major staff re-organization and downsizing. Whether an early adopter or laggard, young or old, manager or worker, everyone was concerned about his own professional well being throughout the course of both trials and beyond. And while much

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of that fear was detrimental to morale, it was also partially responsible for some workers adopting the new technological processes and procedures.

The reporters interviewed believed the lack of flexibility and interest in adapting was a major influencing factor in identifying those who would be laid off. They deduced the paper “scored” employees on how valuable they were to the organization and compiled a working list of who would be let go in the next round of job cuts. Regardless of their personal feelings toward the digital initiatives or social media, they speculated that by embracing and utilizing the new mediums, they moved further down the existing layoff list. There was a base level of anxiety and paranoia that motivated them to learn new skills and accept that times were changing, that journalism was changing, and if they wanted to remain a part of the industry, or at very least an employee at the Orlando

Sentinel, they needed to accept, adapt, and adopt.

Low morale

Despite all of the progress made, the paper continued to struggle. The temporary spikes in website traffic and print readership, no matter how monumental, were just that

— temporary. Employees were continually asked to do more with less. Orlando

Sentinel’s corporate parent, Tribune Company, was still mired in a four-year-long bankruptcy reorganization. The future for the company and the industry was, and is, uncertain. Much of the newsroom still resisted digital conversion, even after the trials.

Those who understood the value in digital reporting and the role of social media to engage online audiences began to leave for new jobs and opportunities. Several of the breaking news reporters, editors, and web producers who were instrumental in trial coverage left. Of the eleven people interviewed for this study, only four remain at the paper; the other seven moved on out of frustration or better opportunities. The constant

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fear of layoffs, the cultural resistance to change, low morale, and the lack of resources wore on the staff. Whatever momentum was gained as a result of the trials was quickly replaced. Those who could move on, did.

Lack of resources

The paper dedicated more resources and more people to cover the Casey

Anthony trial than they had for any other story in recent memory. They developed new workloads and routines with those resources and then carried those new procedures forward to implement during the George Zimmerman trial, although with fewer people.

The associate editor addressed the irony of employing new technology that required more resources at a time the paper was shedding employees:

There's one side of me that—because at a time when our newsrooms were getting smaller and our need to do these online things was growing so we could connect with where our audience was—that those two things intersect very dramatically. In the time that we've been doing more digital, we've let people go every year since then.

The paper did hire a social media coordinator to relieve some of the burden from the reporters, but the newsroom could no longer afford the luxury to have five people covering one court story by the time the Zimmerman trial began. Everybody had more work to do, which required more time and more effort with less people and fewer resources.

Additionally, reporters were routinely publishing stories, photos, and video to the website and on social media without anyone else editing the content. This was a direct result of staffing shortages and not ideal for anyone involved. If time permitted, the reporters would go back and give their stories a close read and make any necessary changes after they published, but more often than not, nobody was editing the content before or after it went out to the public. This made even the most seasoned of veterans

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uncomfortable. Nobody wanted their stories published without “another set of eyes on it.”

In hindsight, one of the web producers interviewed suggested rotating more people in from other departments to ameliorate the burden on those working around the clock on the trials, particularly the Zimmerman trial, which had significantly fewer people dedicated to coverage than the Anthony trial:

I know that a lotta [sic] people were really tired. A lotta people worked day after day after day, without a day off. I think that we were fortunate and nothing too terrible happened; nothing awful happened. You run the risk of burning out your people. If you’re able to, it’s probably best to try to rotate people. Maybe even people in different departments who can write, but maybe don’t write breaking news, could’ve taken on some of those things. I think the staffing was very difficult during that time.

Others interviewed suggested coverage was not as thorough for the Zimmerman trial as a result of the dwindling resources, that “staff reductions limited the amount of personnel and employee hours to the endeavor of gathering information.” And, despite learning new reporting methods and publishing platforms, consensus was the paper was not better positioned going forward or better prepared for the next big story due to the staffing cuts and lack of resources most believed would continue to decline.

Standards

As the pressure increased to get more information online and to do so as quickly as possible, the quality and accuracy of that content suffered. Although the reporters had extra tools to help collect data for stories, those tools also took away from their ability to spend time talking to sources and crafting a better story. The court reporter for the Zimmerman trial suggested, “It cuts against the grain of what high-quality journalism produces.” She also proposed that much of what went online probably shouldn’t have:

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What we put on orlandosentinel.com—this is gonna [sic] sound really mean—a lot of times was not very good at all. It was something that was done in the moment, done fast. Sometimes we missed the lede. In fact, there were times where I think our writing was quite poor there because our focus wasn’t in telling the most important stuff. It was getting SEO high in the lead.

None of those interviewed wanted to accept that typos or poor writing or sloppy journalism were a necessary consequence of digital journalism. The early adopting breaking new producers were frustrated the traditionalists were not faster and better at incorporating the new media technologies and methods into their daily workflow. The traditionalists were frustrated the new procedures were impeding on their time and ability to write quality stories. Everyone wanted to produce timely, quality journalism that lived up to the expectations of the individual and the paper as a whole. However, the priorities were widely different depending on the viewpoint of the journalist.

Better off

Some of the respondents felt without the two seminal trials, the resistance would have been much greater from reporters and editors alike. Others suspected there would not have been the willingness to experiment. The trials got everyone in the newsroom more focused on shooting video, more engaged in social media, and more responsive to posting online early and often. They learned to launch live chat rooms with streaming video and embedd Twitter feeds as soon as news breaks. Reporters and photographers who had to problem solve in the field eradicated the intimidation that comes with testing new technologies and procedures. They learned “to just get in there with the technology, just go with it and make it work.” The breaking news editor who led both teams for each respective trial asserted the Casey story was the catalyst that forced the paper to evolve from traditional newsgathering and dissemination:

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I mean this particular story was the story that changed everything in terms of how we gather and disseminate news. I mean in terms of breaking new for us, it really was. I mean, I can’t say that that’s the same for all reporters in the newsroom, regardless of their beat or whatever. I think it should be on some level but it’s not. It just changed everything.

Most everyone agreed they were better off for having gone through the trials, if for no other reasons, the increased website traffic, readership in print, and audience engagement across all platforms may have temporarily staved off more layoffs and downsizing.

Despite everything learned, the associated editor contemplated how the paper might have benefited from experimenting outside the trials:

In one way, it would've been interesting to see if we had—if we had had some more time to play and learn as opposed to learning on the job—but I do think we got very good at moving quickly, and updating quickly, and writing accurate and authoritatively in short spans, of filing photos and videos from the field. We've continued to get better cuz [sic] we've had circumstances that our readers had expectations we would do it and, competitively, others in this market forced us to.

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CHAPTER 5 DISCUSSION AND CONCLUSION

A New Norm

The purpose of this study was to discover and highlight how technological disruptions in traditional newsgathering and dissemination procedures affected coverage of two internationally sensational court trials. It focused on the Orlando

Sentinel newspaper and how the paper adapted to those new processes during and following the conclusion of the trials. Throughout the development of the Casey Anthony and George Zimmerman stories and resulting court proceedings, audience demands for live and continuous information was a driving force in changing outdated journalism paradigms and leading to a new norm. This new norm also challenged existing gatekeeping and agenda-setting media theories whereby news and information is now distributed across multiple distribution channels by myriad individual journalists, while the audience assists in setting the agenda and framing the context of the stories through two-way asymmetrical communication with these newly anointed gatekeepers.

Over the course of the two trials, the breaking news team was largely responsible for breaking down technological and cultural barriers to change, which ultimately led to the adaptation of traditional reporting procedures throughout the majority of the newsroom. They took intelligent risks and moved on quickly when they failed. They changed the way reporters gathered sources. They changed how they promoted their stories on social media and online. They changed the speed and time in which news was reported. They incorporated photos and videos while using smartphones to send email and updates to stories. Eventually the rest of the newsroom followed. The breaking news team’s and their editor’s willingness to experiment and adapt was

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integral to the culture of innovation that began years before, but accelerated and expanded with emerging technologies and evolving readership habits as the Casey

Anthony and George Zimmerman stories unfolded.

But, without their willingness to experiment, to fail, to push for new technologies, the newsroom likely would have remained mired in outdated reporting and delivery methods and ill prepared for the technological disruption sweeping the legacy news industry. And, without an internationally sensational trial to bring forth an insatiable audience with new demands for how and when they want to absorb content, the

Orlando Sentinel would not have experienced the same challenges to its traditional reporting and dissemination procedures, and consequently, may not have implemented the necessary changes to engage the audience using new media technologies. If legacy news organizations hope to reverse a 30-year trend in the decline of newspaper readers, they must adapt to these new media technologies, engage their audience in two-way asymmetric communication, and restructure antiquated newsroom workflows.

Pivotal Point

All of the study participants agreed the Casey Anthony trial was the pivotal point at which the paper began to respond to the changing demands of an active audience.

The breaking news reporter who hosted the online chat room throughout the entirety of the trial asserted, “Casey definitely was the driving force that pushed us on our team to do all the web and social media.” She continued to describe how the trials were the catalyst from which a new journalism emerged, particularly with regards to her experience hosting the live chat room:

I mean, you just have to tell yourself, “This is the new journalism. It’s going to be okay if I don’t have a byline. I know that I served a role. I served a purpose. Five hundred thousand people talked to me in one day, and read

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what I had to say. You definitely learn that your role changes, and it did change. No other trials are of that magnitude on a day-to-day basis. Definitely now I’m like, “Well, if I need to tell a story via Twitter, okay, that’s what I’ll do.”

This new journalism became the starting point from which all information was disseminated. It didn’t necessarily replace all of the existing legacy workflows and procedures, but it did reset the priorities of how and when content was delivered to the audience. After the Casey Anthony trial, there was no excuse for anyone in the newsroom to question the efficacy and use of new media technologies. The audience came to the Sentinel’s various news platforms in record-setting numbers. They demanded constant communication with real-time updates across a multitude of publishing platforms. Different audiences wanted different content. Facebook readers were generally more selective than Twitter followers. People came to the Sentinel’s website from all over the world to watch the live video stream or take part in the live chat room where reporters and editors could break down the trial proceedings and explain the legal process. Social media opened the door for the audience to become part of the story. They pitched story ideas and questioned the journalists working the trial. They didn’t just want to read about the trial, they wanted to see it and experience it through photos and video from the courtroom and outside the Anthony’s Orlando home.

The paper had been experimenting with social media prior to the trials, but it wasn’t until they grew their Twitter following on @oscaseyanthony to 36,000 followers that they realized the true power of social media. The Casey Anthony story was the impetus for updating stories continuously on the web, often times with a Blackberry® or iPhone® from the field. Reporters began emailing in videos and photos to accompany their story updates. Photographers transmitted pictures live from the courtroom. The

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homepage producers maximized their search engine optimization by building a website landing page to aggregate all of the stories and information pertaining to the case in one place, making it easier for search engines and readers to find the stories, photo galleries, chat rooms, and Twitter feeds.

This new journalism didn’t just change how the paper reported and published information; it also challenged decades-old media theories. No longer did information pass through one specific gatekeeper; everyone in the newsroom is now making individual decisions about which information to publish, and where and when to publish it. Print stories still make their way through a traditional workflow in which “Mr. Gates”

(White, 1950, p. 384) can effectively control the legacy platform, but web stories are written, posted, and updated throughout the day by individual journalists, and social media reporting is ongoing in real time. And while nobody participating in the study preferred to have their unedited work published online, the reality of the diminishing resources within the newsroom and the increased urgency to publish information as soon as it is obtained, is many stories are shared with the audience before an editor has an opportunity to read it.

Additionally, the audience now has an active voice in setting the agenda and framing the context of the story. The readers are now engaging with the reporters and editors who are drafting the stories through the multiple channels of two-way communication that came with the new media reporting tools. They influenced the journalists covering the trial as well as the lawyers in the courtroom. They are a force in prioritizing which stories get told and why. They wanted to see a photograph each day at the beginning of the trial to see what clothes Casey Anthony was wearing in the

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courtroom, and the paper obliged. Those photos were distributed to the Sentinel’s

36,000 Twitter followers each day, in addition to the millions of people coming to orlandosentinel.com. Likewise, if the defense attorneys were seemingly too harsh on a particular family member or witness on the stand during cross-examination, the audience responded in the social media sphere. The attorneys monitoring the Twitter feed during the trial could then change their approach or line of questioning to appease the audience, and ultimately change the course of the trial.

Furthermore, the audience, as well as the media, was largely responsible for perpetuating the race narrative throughout the developments of the George Zimmerman trial. Following the death of their son, Trayvon Martin’s family launched a strategic social media campaign that successfully framed Zimmerman as a racially motivated and overly aggressive grown man who intentionally targeted an innocent teenage boy. In reality, Zimmerman is Hispanic, not white, as originally portrayed, and Trayvon was older and more physically mature than photographs distributed by the family via social media immediately following his death initially depicted. As a result, much of the news media and public constructed a false narrative that Trayvon Martin’s death was a civil rights violation, which garnered the attention of national celebrity activists including

Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton, as well as the Black Panthers. The news media and audience both contributed to the narrative by covering and attending the subsequent civil rights protests and marches, which were heavily reported on in legacy mediums as well as social media, in addition to the dialogue and comments that took place online and across the social media sphere.

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Never before in the history of the paper had the audience had such a direct influence on the outcome of a trial or how that particular trial and story was covered.

Once this paradigm shift occurred, the gatekeepers, agenda-setters and framers were seated in the courtroom and within the audience throughout the community, who were then as much a part of the conversation as the journalists who were covering the trials.

The Casey Anthony trial was a seminal moment in the Orlando Sentinel newsroom from which standard reporting procedures forever changed. The paper began writing stories about how social media was changing the way audiences consumed information and how media organizations reported on trials. The paper was no longer just reporting on what happened, but also where it was happening, when it was happening and why it was happening — all in real-time. They were interacting and engaging with an active audience who were part of the story. The Sentinel’s

@oscaseyanthony Twitter feed was so successful that Time magazine cited it as one of the best sources for coverage on the trial. If a reader missed some detail of the trial, they could go back through the Twitter feed and read all of the developments chronologically. It was a time of great experimentation for the paper. Never before had they dedicated that many people to one story, and more specifically, that many people to report for the digital platform using social media.

By the time the George Zimmerman story began to develop the night he shot and killed Trayvon Martin in February 2012, Twitter was no longer in its infancy. News media were regularly using it for reporting and gathering sources, as were police departments, attorneys, activists, family members, and court officials. The Sentinel was using Twitter to distribute arrest reports and witness statements, quote governing

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bodies and policing agencies, and disseminate news from press conferences. The public information officer for the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals even used Twitter to announce the verdict to the media, as email was no longer an effective tool to reach everyone. None of these procedures was happening prior to the Casey Anthony trial.

Some were the product of technological evolution and natural adoption. Others were a direct result of the way social media was utilized during the trials.

Dissension

Despite the measurable success, not everyone at the Sentinel bought into the new reporting methods. Some viewed social media and the online demands as a distraction and a hindrance to quality journalism and good writing. And while the detractors did at times participate, most did so out of resentment and fear of losing their jobs. The time between the two trials was relatively brief, less than two years, but the paper had significantly fewer resources for the George Zimmerman trial than they did for Casey Anthony trial. Downsizing through layoffs and attrition was ever present due to the technological disruption of the newspaper industry, and those who embraced the new world of digital journalism were better positioned to keep their jobs. They were celebrated during annual awards and aligned with laggards in the newsroom to help facilitate learning and acceptance of the new reporting procedures. The early-adopting millennial reporters, as well as a select group of veterans, were largely responsible for introducing and experimenting with the emerging methods. However, they were also subjected to scorn and ridicule from their colleagues.

The changes in the industry and newsroom produced anxiety and stress for everyone and much of that stress was projected toward management and the journalists who more readily accepted the changes and were catalysts for bringing them

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into the newsroom. The overarching theme from the dissidents was new media journalism was moving the paper away from the one thing they all knew still made money— the print edition. And, without quality journalism steeped in traditional reporting and publishing methods, the critics feared for the financial stability of the paper and the future of the industry. They resented the changes and their colleagues who embraced them; they resented the lack of training and the stress of having to do more with less; most of all, they resented not knowing whether they would have a job, and if so, for how long.

The uncertainty of the industry, and more specifically the Orlando Sentinel and its parent company, Tribune Company, wore on the staff. High-performing journalists, both millennials and veterans, early-adopters and laggards, began leaving the paper even before the Zimmerman trial concluded. More than half of the study participants left the paper by the end of the study. In many cases, those who helped bring about necessary changes in the newsroom were more highly sought after in the job market, and consequently left the paper when opportunities arose. This trend was problematic for the paper, as they were not only losing the very employees they desperately needed to innovate and challenge traditional workflows, but also left with those who were more reticent to change and more reluctant to experiment with emerging technologies and reporting methods. Despite all of the progress made over the course of the two trials, without the early-adopters and high-performers to initiate change and ameliorate the masses, the paper remained vulnerable to stagnation.

Everyone interviewed agreed the paper was much better off having experienced the trials and the changes they brought about. And while those who remain at the paper

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continue to push through the technological disruption of the industry, they do so without many of the resources and people who contributed greatly to the paper’s success over the past six years. Those who were interviewed for the study after their departure from the paper said the paper was struggling to keep the successes they gained during the trials. They could see how the lack of resources was hurting morale and stifling momentum. Without reinvesting in staffing and training to replace the journalists who helped facilitate the transformation to the “new journalism,” the paper risks falling further behind and losing whatever edge they may have achieved over the course of the two trials.

For legacy news organizations like the Sentinel that are looking to stave off extinction and remain relevant within a digital world, having a seminal news event to help usher in new reporting and dissemination procedures might be the very lifeline stagnant companies need to break down the technological and cultural barriers impeding widespread adoption of disruptive, yet transformative systems. One could reasonably argue that without an overly demanding audience insisting on continuous coverage across multiple platforms online and throughout social media, traditional media companies may not have the incentive, nor feel the urgency to adapt and change their anachronous reporting and delivery methods. And, without a strong and desperate impetus for innovation, legacy news organizations stand little chance of surviving the historic disruption transforming the industry. With or without a seminal news event, news organizations need to forge a sense of urgency and provide the necessary resources for training to implement digitally savvy workflows. Concurrently, they must work to eliminate the stress and anxiety that accompany transformational change to set

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the tone for widespread adoption throughout the newsroom from early-adopters and laggards alike, lest they find themselves irrelevant and unable to connect with the audience in the new journalism paradigm.

Limitations and Future Research

Due to the qualitative nature, the results of the study are not meant to be generalizable. The purposeful sample of study participants from the Orlando Sentinel was selected due to the individual subject’s participation in one or two high profile court cases. The goal of the study was not necessarily to apply the knowledge and outcomes to other legacy news organizations, but to develop an in-depth description, interpretation, and explanation of the specific case and events, and how those events affected traditional newsgathering and dissemination procedures within the Orlando

Sentinel. However, other news organizations facing similar disruption patterns may benefit from examining the common themes that emerged from the data.

Another limitation of the study is the relatively small sample size. However,

Crouch and McKenzie (2006) propose that studies including small sample sizes conducted in native environments can help to facilitate more productive relationships and subsequent interviews with the study participants, which ultimately leads to greater reliability and internal validity. Charmaz (2006) argues that studies professing modest claims may reach saturation sooner with smaller samples sizes.

Although theoretical saturation, described by Mark Mason (2010) as the point at which the researcher experiences diminishing returns, was achieved within the existing sample of people who directly participated in coverage of one or both of the trials included in the comparative case study, the sample did not include other Orlando

Sentinel journalists who did not actively participate in coverage of the trials. Interviewing

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other newsroom employees could add insight and knowledge to the understanding of the breakdown of traditional newsgathering and reporting structures, as well as the cultural resistance and adoption rates of the new media technologies highlighted in the study.

Future research would be necessary to determine whether other legacy news media organizations have experienced similar technological and cultural disruptions within the newsroom as a result of a significant news event, and whether those disruptions were beneficial to the overall transformation to digital publishing platforms.

Another possible area for future research would be to study the rates of adoption for new innovations within emerging and legacy news organizations from a theoretical perspective utilizing Everett M. Roger’s (2003) Diffusion of Innovations theory.

Additional areas of research could include the perspective of the audience. A limitation of the study is it only takes into account the perspective of the working journalists who were engaging with the newly active audience participating in the two- way asymmetrical communication system. Subsequent research could include focus groups, surveys, and in-depth interviews with participants from different sectors of the audience and the various platforms on which they are actively engaging with the news workers and the content produced from distinctive news events. Future research should further investigate the role of the audience in framing the context of news as a result of personal agendas and the efficacy of influencing news media coverage through two- way asymmetric communication via new media technologies.

Follow-up research should be conducted at not only the Orlando Sentinel, but also other news organizations mitigating the disruption of the industry to discover and

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highlight whether those that adapted earlier than later were able to stave off extinction or develop long-term profitability and stability. And lastly, it would be of value to examine whether having a significant news event was beneficial to expedite the introduction and adoption of new publishing technologies into existing workflows for other legacy news operations.

The Orlando Sentinel made great strides by transforming antiquated newsgathering and dissemination methods with early-adopting journalists responding to a demanding audience during a hyperactive news event. However, with the exodus of many of the journalists who served as change agents over the course of the two trials, the paper lost momentum and suffered low morale from continual layoffs and staff downsizing. If the paper hopes to continue evolving and remain competitive within the new journalism paradigm, it must reinvest in and replace the journalists who led the charge for transformational change. Without an explicit effort to continue innovating and adopting new reporting and publishing methods as they emerge, the future for legacy news organizations operating within anachronous systems remains tenuous at best.

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APPENDIX A INFORMED CONSENT

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APPENDIX B INTERVIEW GUIDE

Questions:

1. What was your role in covering the Casey Anthony trial?

2. What was your role in covering the George Zimmerman trial?

3. How did the Orlando Sentinel cover the Casey Anthony and George Zimmerman trials? In what ways?

4. Were there any differences in how you approached reporting the two trials, technologically or otherwise?

5. How did those differences affect your individual coverage of the trials?

6. What was the impact of the trial on the workflow of the newsgathering and news dissemination at the Orlando Sentinel?

7. What role did social media play in covering the trials?

8. How did the use of new media technologies affect trial coverage? For instance, chat rooms, live video, scribble live, Storify, Google Plus, Twitter, Facebook, etc…

9. What metrics or audience analysis tools were used to capture and measure readership engagement through the Orlando Sentinel’s multiple platforms during the two trials?

10. What was the impact of trial on the workflow of capturing, downloading, editing and transmitting of photographs and/or video?

11. Were any special arrangements made throughout the trials to accommodate the transmitting and posting of photographs or video?

12. How has covering the Casey Anthony and George Zimmerman trials changed or affected the Orlando Sentinel?

13. Is there anyone else with whom I should speak that was involved with trial coverage and who might provide insight into how the newsgathering and news dissemination process was affected by the trials, or who’s individual job and duties were changed or affected by covering the trial?

14. Thank you for participating in my study and interview. Your confidentiality will be protected throughout and following the study. You may opt out of the study at any point. All of the audio recordings will be destroyed once the study is concluded. I will be the only person who could identify you as a participant. Should I have a

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need to conduct a follow up interview to clarify information, are you willing and available?

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APPENDIX C INTERVIEW SUBJECTS

Burbank, Joe. Senior photojournalist, Orlando Sentinel.

Burton, Tom. Former Director of Photography, Orlando Sentinel.

Cutter, J. Associate Editor, Orlando Sentinel.

Guido, Michelle. Former Breaking News Editor, Orlando Sentinel.

Hey, Kris. Community Manager for Local News, Orlando Sentinel.

Pacheco, Walter. Former Technology/Social Media reporter for Orlando Sentinel.

Palm, Anika. Former online producer and reporter for the Orlando Sentinel.

Pavuk, Amy. Former reporter, Orlando Sentinel.

Former Breaking News Editor for Online, Orlando Sentinel.

Stutzman, Rene. Senior reporter. Orlando Sentinel.

Sullivan, Jerriann. Former breaking news reporter. Orlando Sentinel.

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APPENDIX D NEWSROOM FLOWCHART OF INTERVIEW SUBJECTS

Associate Editor

Online Breaking News Editor

Community Manager for Local Director of Breaking News Editor News/Homepage Photography Editor

Breaking News Soclal Media Online Senior Court Senior Live Chat Reporter Reporter/Online Reporter Producer/Reporter Reporter Photojournalist Producer

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BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH

Gary W. Green is the deputy news editor of WUFT News and digital director of

University of Florida’s Innovation News Center. Green came to the College of

Journalism and Communications in 2014 from the Orlando Sentinel, where he worked for 12 years as a photo/video editor, multimedia producer and senior photojournalist.

Before joining the Sentinel, he worked for several newspapers, magazines and wire services in Florida, Ohio and Kentucky, culminating in over 20 years working as a visual journalist.

His portfolio includes coverage of some of the biggest stories of the last two decades, including Sept. 11, deadly hurricanes, presidential campaigns, space shuttle launches, controversial court trials and sporting events including seven Super Bowls,

NCAA Final Four championships, MLB World Series and the NBA Finals.

His professional work has been published by numerous national newspapers, magazines and websites including: Time, Sports Illustrated, New York Times, The

Washington Post, Sporting News, USA Today and Huffington Post as well as several international publications.

His journalism has been honored by the American Society of News Editors,

Associated Press, National Press Photographers Association, Ohio News Photographer

Association, Florida Society of News Editors, Ohio Prep Sports Writer’s Association and

Associated Press Sports Editors.

He is a graduate of Ohio University’s School of Visual Communication and is currently completing his thesis as a master’s degree candidate in mass communication at UF. His thesis explores the opportunities and challenges posed by the digital disruption of legacy newsrooms.

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He teaches News Center Practicum in the Innovation News Center and

Advanced Multimedia Narratives.

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