Dr.Rosenberry's.Page

Capitalistic journalism

2012-01-25T20:06:00.005-05:00

As an entry in this month's Carnival of Journalism, participants are supposed to offer thoughts in reaction to an essay by Michael Rosenblum about whether journalists can be capitalists. (The specific wording from his piece is “Can a good journalist also be a good capitalist? If so, how? Or why not?")

The short answer -- and this is not meant to be flippant -- is they already are. While some non-profit news models are emerging, the vast bulk of U.S. journalism is done by capitalistic enterprises. History records for us the names of people who were effective capitalists and also journalists: Hearst. Pulitzer. Gannett. McCormick. The Chandlers. The Knights. The Ochs-Sulzberger family.

At the heart of Rosenblum's assertions is the assumption that "there is an instinctive aversion to the idea of making money amongst most journalists." He unfolds the argument from that point with a withering attack on some supposed financial sensibilities of journalists, and the negative result that he believes this has on the field.

I don't mean to turn this into an attack on his work, but the essay seems to be conflating the idea of "capitalist" to "person who earns a sufficient level of income" and from there sets up a false divide. In a formal sense, the capitalist is the owner of the means of production; certainly the various press barons mentioned earlier were that. They were also journalists in that as publishers they helped establish -- or flat-out dictated -- the editorial direction for their newspapers. And in filling the dual role they made LOTS of money.

Some journalists still make a lot of money; in a recent column Bill O'Reilly bragged about being a "1 percenter" and network news anchors' contracts come with seven-figure annual salaries. But the reason most journalists don't reach that stratum is not, as Rosenblum contends, because they fear making money or think it would taint them. It's because they are the labor in the capitalist-labor equation, and the returns to labor as wages tend to be lower than the return to capital. What's fair and equitable for each goes back at least to Marx (Karl, not Groucho) and is largely beside the point for this discussion.

That's because the question "Can a good journalist also be a good capitalist?" sets out a false dichotomy. There is no natural, philosophical or structural reason the two roles have to conflict. Liebling's adage about the power of the press belonging to those who own one is demonstrably false these days. The low barriers of entry to online publication, in fact, make it ever easier for the journalist as a humble scribe to control (if not own) the means of production, and in that sense be both the capital and the labor in the equation. That's largely what the CUNY program that Rosenblum mentions means to address.

The real question is to what degree the work of journalists can be scaled up to a point that offers substantial earning potential, because scale is the source of big paydays. An author who sells hundreds of thousands or millions of books becomes a wealthy person indeed. But the writers who we think of as journalists tend not to produce at that scale.

Nonetheless, we are in an era where it is possible to distribute high quality content to a vast audience very inexpensively, though the very cheapness of the distribution platform and ubiquity of the content make monetizing it more difficult. We are also in the era of what Chris Anderson has dubbed the Long Tail, meaning finding and profiting from niche audiences is more feasible than ever before.

These factors combine to mean that journalists -- those who report and write the stories -- have more and better opportunities to work independently outside of institutions and make a living at it. Institutional journalism, with the journalists as employees of the enterprises rather than owners of them, will continue. Fewer jobs are found in this milieu now than a generation ago, but that doesn't mean they all are gone. And those working as independent journalists will take up a greater proportional share of the field.

Can we call them capitalists? As long as they manage to be fairly compensated for their work, does it really matter?

The new "walled gardens"

2012-01-20T18:33:00.005-05:00

In the early days of life online, the way people got there was through services that were closed to all but registered (and paying) users who were able to interact only with each other. Among these early services were Compuserve, Prodigy and the one that eventually became most ubiquitous, America Online (AOL).

These were popularly known as "walled gardens," a metaphor for their being nice places to visit but with limited territory to explore. Beyond the walls lay the Internet, a vaster but far less organized region of cyberspace.

An interesting article by Justin Peters that I read just today (yes, still catching up on a two-month-old issue of CJR, even though the newer one came in the mail yesterday) says that today's mega-social-media sites -- Facebook, notably -- are trying to become like those original walled-off places.

Peters, however, has a different metaphor that struck me as particularly apt. Facebook, he wrote,

"offered people the cruise-ship version of the Internet—a slick, brightly colored destination for social activities and bonhomie, safely apart from the unfamiliar surrounding waters, a service-oriented environment where you can lean back and enjoy the attentions of your very own information valet. You could leave the ship, but there’s no need to—friends, information, activities, they’re all already there, and if they’re not they’ll be there soon.

"A few caveats apply. You can’t steer the ship. You can’t see how it works. You can’t suggest destinations or routes, and you’re not likely to cruise beyond your comfort zone. You can’t easily meet people who aren’t already like you. If something goes wrong, you’re not allowed to fix it; if you’re displeased with the service, nobody will listen to your complaint."

The problem with this, Peters notes, is that these destination sites seek for people to come to them, and stay with them almost exclusively, as the central feature of their online lives. They endeavor to keep the rest of the Internet -- the part where they can't make any money by collecting user data to be monetized -- outside the realm of user experience.

It's worth a read.

New media provide path to legacy reporting

2012-01-19T17:37:00.009-05:00

This morning I woke to the news that the iconic company Eastman Kodak, which is based in my hometown of Rochester N.Y., was entering Chapter 11 bankruptcy re-organization. I found this news, as I'm finding progressively more of my news, through Twitter.

But more important than where I learned it through is where I learned it from. The first tweet I saw shortly after 6 a.m. was actually a link to a follow-up story to the main news announcement, and came from the local daily, the Gannett-owned Democrat and Chronicle. (Side note: if the paper had been delivered on time, I probably would have learned the news from it in hard copy; I was reading Twitter news on my iPad because of the late delivery. Inability to get my paper on time is an ongoing problem, but I digress.)

Working my way back through the Twitter stream were more posts from legacy organizations linking to coverage on their websites. The local PBS affiliate. A local AM radio news station. The New York Times. The first of them to appear actually came from The Wall Street Journal, conveniently re-tweeted about 1 a.m. EST by a former student who now works for NBC News. Intermixed among these reports were tweets from individual local journalists whom I follow, including an on-Twitter conversation that took place about 3 a.m. between a local news producer and the executive editor of the D&C about getting copies of the paper delivered to the TV newsroom.

It was an interesting into-practice exercise in something I'd been thinking about just 12 hours earlier, when I finally got around to reading an article from the November/December issue of Columbia Journalism Review. The essay by Dean Starkman critiques the popular advocacy of journalism's evolution into a non-institutional, loosely networked form and says that news institutions still have value and are worth preserving. Starkman's essay -- which is subtitled "The limited vision of the news gurus" -- is basically a long take-down of what he calls the "Future of News consensus" (FON for short) and its advocates, notably Dan Gillmor, Clay Shirky, Jeff Jarvis and Jay Rosen. (He's especially critical of Jarvis.)

I actually have been following the work of all four of Starkman's targets for some time. In the past few years I have been to events where I have seen all of them speak, and even was on a panel with Rosen a few years back. And I like a lot of what they say, and use some of their writing and ideas in some of my teaching about the evolution of journalism. I especially like to tell students about Shirky's notion that "everything might" provide the journalism we need -- i.e., that 20 new and innovative ways of creating the news that each provide 5 percent of what the current system does might actually be more valuable than One Big Thing to replace the broken print newspaper model.

I also think Starkman is being a little hyperbolic, and polemical, in the way he presents their views, which he repeatedly summarizes as FON.

But I also think Starkman is essentially on point when he says it's wrong to be dismissive of the value of institutional news organizations and their ability ability to provide valuable public-interest reporting, and when he says that it is naive to think that all of the information we need as a society will organically bubble up from a network in which anyone and everyone can supply information to the whole world. Or that such a news system will have the cohesion and understandability to make it useful to citizens . "Gatekeeping" has become almost a dirty word in the world of networked news prognosticators. But to me, it is just another word for distillation of a chaotic mass of information into a meaningful form that is valuable to the readers.

A couple of years ago, a friend from another institution wrote a blog posting predicting that soon he would get all the news he needs from Twitter. I kind of rolled my eyes at that one.

Now I do find myself getting a lot of news through Twitter. But not, as noted at the top, from Twitter. Even when the tweet is by a friend, or even by a stranger whom I've chosen to follow, there often is a legacy source behind that shortlink that's where the news is really from.

In that, Starkman's self-described neo-institutional model addresses something that matters. He closes his essay with the thought that "rebuilding or shoring up institutions is going to take some new, new thinking, but it can be done." He's right.

Old school way to teach new media

2012-01-11T16:19:00.006-05:00

The first lesson in a brand new multimedia presentation course our department is offering was a success, using a very old school form of media. Soon, we'll be getting into blogging, video, social media and all of the other tools and techniques endemic to a course such as this. But for the first exercise on Day One, the students used what was probably the first medium they ever used in a classroom back in pre-school or kindergarten: wax crayons.

I can't claim the lesson was wholly original, as I got the idea from a syllabus from another teacher's multimedia writing course and modified it somewhat. But it was an interesting -- not to mention playful -- way to get some points across.

The lesson started with a discussion of Marshall McLuhan, and his notion that "the medium is the message" (along with his famous cameo with Woody Allen from A nnie H all). The students then wrote answers -- in crayon, on plain paper -- to a question about multimedia presentation.

After that, they were asked to reflect on the impact of the medium on the message: how writing in crayon colored (pun intended) what they produced. And that's when it got interesting.

Several students noted -- correctly, of course -- that a message written in crayon would not be perceived as serious. Others mentioned the practical, logistical limitations of the medium: that they wrote slower, and larger, and therefore used fewer words. One said something I hadn't anticipated -- that the inability to erase affected the final output. Another really good point, especially in the context of being used to writing with word processors that allow immediate deletion of any errors.

Nearly all of them wrote in multiple colors, even though no instruction was given to do so. I pointed out that it would be almost as easy to create a word-processed document in multiple colors with the font-color button -- but people seldom do. This became just another way to illustrate that the medium of crayons affected the presentation of the message.

Overall, a successful first class, and hopefully a good omen for the rest of the course.

Image used under a Creative Commons Attribution- NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 License, originally posted at http://pedagogy.dwrl.utexas.edu/node/505

What I Learned at the Journalism Interactive Conference

2011-10-30T21:22:00.003-04:00

Ways in which technology offers myriad opportunities to reinvent journalism dominated the conversation at the recently concluded Journalism Interactive conference, held at the University of Maryland on Friday and Saturday.

The discussion about new technological tools in social media, search, presentation (e.g. data visualization software), and other innovations went beyond the all-to-typical “gee-whiz” hype about these tools I’ve seen in many past conferences to really emphasize how to teach students to use such technologies effectively to create better journalism. The usual earnest intonations from assorted speakers about how “teaching the fundamentals is still important” were heard, of course – but they seemed less out of place than I have sometimes thought in the past.

In fact, at many conference sessions I’ve attended, statements about the importance of fundamentals seemed to be almost lip service when juxtaposed with implications that unless students are learning every new technology that comes along and using every gadget that comes out then they can’t be effective journalists in the 21st century. This conference reflected a better balance of the ideas: new tools allow stories to be told in new ways, yes, but the storytelling matters even more than the platform or device with which it is told. And unless the information is accurate, verified, contextual and of interest to the reader, all the technological whiz-bang in the world is meaningless. Good writing still underlies effective media presentation.

That said, it was impossible to escape the message that students must be far more savvy about two things: the inner workings of the technology that is transforming journalism, and an understanding of business. The conference had many in-depth discussions of both topics.

With regard to technological skills, several industry professionals said they have had internships and even full-time jobs available for which they could find no qualified candidates because the jobs required an understanding of scripting languages, website development tools, and the like. Knowing about analytics for audience metrics, and how to use tools such as metadata to make information stand out to audiences, is a critical skill, for example.

The journalists themselves don’t have to be highly skilled programmers, these professionals said. But if they are going to work in the growing field of multimedia presentation they need to know more than just how to use applications for word processing, image editing and social media. They need to do some of the coding for the interactive web and mobile presentations themselves and also need to be able to speak capably with those high-level programmers who make the presentations come to life. “We live in a digital world and programming is the language of that world,” Associated Press director of interactive media Shazna Nessa said in one session.

As for business skills, the idea of entrepreneurship was raised repeatedly – from students developing their own businesses to being “intrapreneurs” who help the organizations they join become more innovative and adaptable to the changing world around them. More generally, students entering the commercial world need more business acumen and an understanding of topic such as accounting and finance that comprise the vernacular of business, several presenters said.

Conference presenters from an assortment of backgrounds – working professionals, consultant and academics themselves – all said there was a need for more interdisciplinary work. Journalism and communication programs should be collaborating, especially, with business schools and computer science departments on their campuses.

A couple of other random thoughts:

Data visualization, or visual representation of large amounts of numerical and textual data, is going to be a much more significant aspect of information presentation (journalistically and otherwise) in the near future. A simple example of this are “word clouds” created by the popular Wordle site; more sophisticated examples can be found at the Associated Press’s experimental Overview project.
Developing content with mobile devices in mind also is becoming more important at an increasingly rapid pace. Predictions are that smartphones and tablet computers likely will be the main way most people access online content in just a few years.
Conference organizers deserve major props for a really thought-provoking event that featured many terrific presenters with highly valuable insights – most of whom were also entertaining and engaging. A real standout in this regard was the Innovative Storytelling panel featuring Shazna Nessa of AP, Mark Luckie of the Washington Post and Richard "Koci" Hernandez of University of California - Berkeley. Panels and presenters this good aren't all that common at conferences such as this, and overall it made for a fantastic experience.

Random thoughts from social media conference

2011-09-29T20:32:00.009-04:00

Spent a long but fruitful, and enjoyable, day at the second Social Media and Communication symposium at Rochester Institute of Technology, one full of catching up with old friends/colleagues and gathering some interesting take-aways on the state of communication and journalism.

The featured speaker was NYU professor Clay Shirky, author of the books Here Comes Everybody and Cognitive Surplus. His central message was how the interactive, collaborative tools afforded by the Internet today are fostering social change by enabling relevant communities to self-organize and apply collective intelligence to social problems. Such collaborations make use of what he called cognitive surplus -- time people have to work together productively in virtual arrangements -- in the book of the same name.

Two of his examples were related to collaborative problem-solving of a couple of very high-end, "out there" mathematical questions via the route of mathematicians sharing ideas about potential solutions via blog posts and comments. In one case, the series of posts and comments was reconfigured into a paper sent to an academic journal and accepted on the basis of its ideas. But the journal editors ran into a stumbling block with it because whomever submitted it didn't identify an author. Well, there was no one author (or even two or three), which presented a problem from the academic editor's frame of reference.

Shirky extended the example to say that it illustrates how print publishing, which for most of its history has facilitated and sped up the sharing of ideas, is now in many cases an impediment to it ... because of the cultural mindset embedded in print and its publishers.

One of the most interesting things he said (in my view at least) was that tools don't get socially interesting until they are technically boring, by which he seemed to mean when they became commonplace and mundane. This is the point he says we are at now with Internet collaborative tools but one we reached only recently. But only because we have reached that point can we use the tools for socially interesting results such as the math problem examples he gave. The most valuable outcomes of using the tools are the ones no one can anticipate or expect, he said a couple of different times.

Another interesting panel featured several journalists talking about what they are looking for in terms of relevant skills for working in modern newsrooms. Included were senior editors from Messenger-Post Newspapers, City Newspaper, The Minority Report (which serves the Rochester area African-American community), the Democrat and Chronicle and WXXI television. A special guest panelist was Tom Callinan, a former top editor of the D&C and other Gannett papers who recently retired from the Cincinnati Enquirer.

Callinan opened the panel by telling the audience, largely students, that a mindset oriented toward change was one of the most valuable assets they could bring to the job. But what was interesting was how quickly the conversation evolved into discussion of core journalistic values still being critical, including accuracy, inquisitiveness, solid ethics, strong writing skills, an understanding of news (as apart from opinion and infotainment), and passion for the work.

The importance of good writing -- meaning writing that is free of clutter, bias and errors of spelling, grammar and punctuation -- repeatedly came up. Yes, it's important to be able to work across platforms and tell stories in different ways that take advantage of the characteristics of modern multimedia tools, including social media. But what gives the work meaning and impact is adhering to all of the traditional characteristics of good solid journalism.

Other featured panelists at the event -- who offered opening and closing keynotes, respectively -- were Pam Moore of Zoom Factor and Maggie Fox of Social Media Group. Both of them focused on the impacts of social media on marketing, business and advertising.

But truly the best part of the day was the reunions with a number of old friends, mostly former work colleagues from the Democrat and Chronicle, some of whom are still working there and others (like Tom C.) who have moved along to other positions. Some of us managed to gather for a reunion photo. Networking is usually the best part of nearly any conference I attend, and this was no different.

Photo caption (L to R): Cynthia Benjamin, Jack Rosenberry, Patrick Flanigan, Bob Finnerty, Tom Callinan, Sebby Wilson Jacobson.

Earthquake news traveled virally

2011-08-23T19:18:00.004-04:00

So, we had an earthquake today. I didn't feel it. I think I was out driving around; it happened at 1:51 p.m. EDT and I was driving home around then. I'm assuming with the mildness of the quake's impact in Upstate New York, being in a moving car would obliterate any chance of feeling it.

My first inkling that an earthquake had occurred was when my wife said something about a friend texting her (and a bunch of other people in a texting group) asking whether any of them had felt it happen. That was about an hour after the quake hit.

My next instinct was not to turn on the TV, as I might have in the past, but to jump on the computer to see what people were saying about it on Facebook and Twitter. The first such entry I saw was from a former student who works in Washington, DC -- not far from the epicenter -- who had FB and Twitter entries with references to the HuffPo website's coverage of the event (which he didn't much like). Another friend who lives in eastern Pennsylvania, still relatively close to the quake's location, had a Facebook post about it. Several Rochester area friends mentioned feeling things shake as well.

Another friend from eastern Pennsylvania, who now teaches at a college there but is originally from California, had at least a couple of dozen Twitter observations about the differences between West Coast quakes he had experienced and this one. He also provided my absolute favorite social media news tidbit with the observation "I was able to pinpoint the epicenter pretty quickly based on descriptions and known locations of tweeters. Took me about a minute."

Now, that's some social media based reporting.

It wasn't until about 4 hours later that I turned to legacy media for news about the quake, and even then I didn't turn on the TV or navigate to a news website. Rather, I looked at the AP news app on my iPad, which had a nice summary story as typical of a wire service. I looked at USA Today's coverage through its iPad news app also. Thus I augmented the first-person reports I had read with the professional coverage that had the "official word" on magnitude of the quake, along with details from a wide range of areas affected by it (from South Carolina to New England to Ohio).

I suppose I'll read about it in tomorrow's print edition of the local paper, too, but that will most likely be a version of the AP story I already have read, augmented by comments from local people whom I don't know. Hearing from people whom I do know is more worthwhile to me, and social media have allowed me to do that already.

Put another way, Twitter and Facebook told me most of what I needed to know, from trusted sources who experienced the event. (To paraphrase Jay Rosen's framing of journalistic authority: they were there, I wasn't, I let them tell me about it.) The AP story was a nice follow-up and I appreciated having the immediate access to it that the mobile app gave me.

Most significantly, both the viral distribution of individual experiences and the professional summary have a role to play in coverage of events such as this. Today's experience was a nice microcosm of that.

Observations from the AEJMC conference

2011-08-15T20:27:00.004-04:00

A few random thoughts from the recently concluded AEJMC conference in St. Louis.

* The best line I heard all week in any session was Lisa Williams of Placeblogger during her talk at the J-Lab luncheon. In discussing the emergence of small news operations, Williams compared current large institutions (think: big metro daily newspapers) to the Titanic, and said that when you're coming upon the iceberg you're better off in a kayak (think: small, entrepreneurial organization).

In another terrific analogy, she compared the current media landscape to the high-tech industry of the late 1980s, which was dominated by large, centralized institutions who clung to outdated technologies and ways of working, and eventually went out of business. (One of those was Digital Equipment Corp., which she called "the Knight-Ridder of its time," drawing a laugh from the audience.) As companies such as DEC disappeared, smaller startups such as Google came on the scene using technology in innovative ways to better serve customer needs. "The future is small," she said, meaning many smaller organizations will collectively make bigger impacts than the large central ones that are now fading away. That applies to technology, and needs to apply to journalism as well, she said.

* The same session featured David Boraks of DavidsonNews.net, an online community news site in North Carolina. Boraks talked about how he started off with a journalistic mindset, but quickly learned that success required a business mindset. The operation now employs three people, including one who is editor of a companion site in a neighboring town.

In a post-session discussion among me and several friends, someone asked about whether Boraks should be considered a journalist? Citizen journalist? Citizen who IS a journalist? My reply: he's a publisher, plain and simple. His operation is virtually identical in the scope and style of its coverage to any small-town weekly printed newspaper, led by an editor/publisher with a variety of responsibilities to the operation and the readership; Boraks just does it without printing his work on paper and stuffing it in the mail to readers.

When Boraks described his work, it seemed he is doing exactly what my good friend Howard did in operating the weekly newspaper in Seneca Falls when I lived and worked there 30 years ago. The main difference is that Boraks is able to publish on a more ongoing basis rather than writing and editing his stories for several days to meet a once-a-week deadline. And he doesn't have the expense of printing and mailing the product. But the journalism is the same, it seems to me. And so is the business side, with support from local business as advertisers and readers as "subscribers"/supporters. (Boraks doesn't have formal subscriptions but does ask for and does receive voluntary contributions, and said he might some day investigate a pay wall.)

* There seemed to be less talk at this year's convention about j-schools as community news providers. Last year, there were multiple sessions on that topic and I attended as many as I could. It's something I'd love to see my program get into, if at all possible. But no real mention of it this time around. It seemed to be replaced, to some degree, by talk about journalistic entrepreneurialism, as illustrated by what Williams and Boraks had to say.

* AEJMC did its usual fine job of organizing everything, but they sure have a knack for finding convention hotels that are confusing places to traverse. This one's quirks included:

Meeting rooms in two different places separated by a city block walk along the street, or underground passage between the two buildings.
One small suite of presentation rooms on the 21st floor of one of the buildings, reachable only by a particular bank of elevators that were well hidden.
A mezzanine level in one of the buildings up what should have been one short flight of stairs from the lobby, but with no stairs or escalator to it. Getting there required riding the elevator.

And next year we go back to Chicago. If it's in the same hotel that was used for the 2008 convention in that city, there is a a floor that cannot be reached directly by the escalators from anywhere: you need to go to the floor above it and take a set of stairs down. At least the St. Louis location didn't have that.

Two neat takes on news webpage design

2011-07-31T13:19:00.005-04:00

(Disclosure: This started life as a GooglePlus post, then I decided to repeat it here in the blog with some additional information)

I've long maintained that news organizations shoot themselves in the feet regularly with cluttered, hard to navigate or difficult-to-access websites. I think this is related to the whole "people won't pay for news on the Web" issue. It seems to me many people think "I'd have to pay for THIS mess? It's a pain to access for free. No way I'd pay for it." Maybe people would pay for better, more functional access; maybe that's why they are willing to pay for apps.

Two neat presentations I came across today bring the point home. One, a serous take that I found from Nieman Lab's Week in Review for this week, walks through a designer's critique of the NYT website with some suggested revisions. Many of the same points are made, albeit in a somewhat snarkier way, in a funny post on Laughing Squid.

The same Week in Review column had this very informative link from Jonathan Stray about evolving news story forms as part of its Reading Roundup. Mark Coddington always does a remarkable job with this column and I'm pleased to be able to pass along some of his work but he deserves the credit for these interesting reads.

Growth of Patch, indie sites shows citizen journalism going mainstream

2011-06-09T17:27:00.005-04:00

Note: This article also appears in the Summer 2011 edition of the CCJIG newsletter and on the AEJMC Civic & Citizen Journalism Interest Group blog

One of the most striking recent developments in the world of online news, and citizen journalism, has been the rapid expansion of the Patch.com network of local news sites owned by AOL.

Patch was started in 2008 by a group that included Tim Armstrong, a former Google executive. Armstrong joined AOL in early 2009, and the company acquired Patch that June. Patch sites were located in 11 communities in New Jersey and Connecticut in late 2009 but grew to about 100 sites in nine states by August 2010 and approximately 800 sites across 20 states by early 2011.

These local news sites primarily cover affluent bedroom communities that surround large cities such as New York City, Los Angeles, Chicago, Atlanta, and Washington, DC. Each site has an editor, who is provided with equipment – a computer, cell phone and digital camera – but no office; instead, editors work from home or from community locations such as coffee shops.

More recently, Patch has moved aggressively to augment the paid professional editors with a citizen journalism component of volunteer writers and local bloggers contributing to the sites. Each site lists all of its contributors, which can run to several dozen on some sites, and a section of the home page highlights local bloggers.

But independent online community journalists have been critical of Patch, notably the idea that an outside corporate entity can ever have the true community connection that they see as the heart of local journalism. In an interview with LA Weekly, Timothy Rutt, who runs the hyperlocal site altedenablog.com, compared Patch to “Walmart moving in and driving out the mom-and-pop businesses.”

Now, Rutt and operators of some other independent sites are joining forces in a network seeking to counter the influence of Patch. The coalition, which calls itself Authentically Local, announced its formation in mid-May 2011 with 30 founding members. By the end of May it had grown to nearly 50. The list includes names that are familiar to many CCJIG members from having representatives of the sites on CCJIG convention panels – including BaristaNet, Oakland Local, West Seattle Blog, Twin Cities Daily Planet and iBrattleboro.

In a news release announcing the coalition’s formation, the members said they “have joined forces to launch an ‘Authentically Local’ branding campaign to emphasize the importance of supporting homegrown media, stores and places.”

“Local journalism doesn’t scale and it doesn’t need to scale. It needs to emerge from people deeply engaged in their local community, determined to make a difference and provide a vital service,” Lance Knobel, a co-founder of Berkeleyside.com, said in the news release.

While the Authentically Local group’s concerns are understandable, it’s not entirely clear why an a priori conclusion that “local doesn’t scale” is warranted. Operators of the Authentically Local sites are in the same situation as – and essentially fighting the same fight as – local retailers and dining establishments against national big box stores and restaurant chains. They make that analogy themselves on the AL website.

But is it necessarily and automatically the case that out-of-town ownership degrades the quality of the journalism?

For decades before online hyperlocal news coverage emerged, out-of-town ownership of small local newspapers was not the exception but the rule. And while many of those chain papers were poor to mediocre, some were pretty good – while some of the small locally owned ones were true rags. In other words, ownership had no general correlation with quality. In a similar vein, there seems to be little fundamental difference between small local newspapers being owned by large corporations (e.g. Gannett, which owned dozens of such papers but was not the only corporation that did so) and a local news website being owned by a large corporation (i.e. Patch/AOL).

Patch encourages editors to share information about themselves on their sites, and a quick review of a few sites revealed that many editors had local roots, as either natives or at least longtime residents of the communities they cover. Many have worked for local weeklies or dailies in their coverage area before joining Patch. If these individual journalists are capable and sensitive to their communities they will find good, local stories to cover. And if the editors are conscientious about soliciting and curating the work of citizen journalists in their area, local flavor and connections will emerge.

Patch is still an experiment, and one trend that has developed with ventures into online local coverage by large legacy media organizations is that such experiments have a short leash and their owners are quick to cut them loose if the economics don’t work out as hoped. Loudon Extra, TBD, and sites launched by The New York Times that were later taken over by AL member Barista.net stand as evidence of that.

But the interesting and important thing about the emergence of Patch and other legacy media forays into this arena is how they indicate that hyperlocal and citizen journalism are no longer some exotic oddity.

Instead, citizen journalism is becoming a routine part of the landscape of news coverage, a development documented by J-Lab in its New Media Makers (2009) and New Voices (2010) reports and encouraged by its Networked Journalism project.

The more routine and more expected such coverage becomes, the more it will contribute to the emerging news ecosystem, no matter who owns the site where it is published.

- - - - - - - - -

Background information in this story about Patch came from published reports in sources such as Columbia Journalism Review, Newsweek, LA Weekly and The New York Times. The author has completed a comparative content analysis of Patch sites and independent hyperlocal ones (though not specifically the Authentically Local ones); the results of that research will be presented at the Thursday Scholar-to-Scholar session at the St. Louis convention.

GoogleDocs helps in teaching journalistic writing

2011-06-09T16:30:00.007-04:00

This month's Carnival of Journalism is about "life hacks," specifically addressing the "tips, tools, apps, websites, skills and techniques that allow you to work smarter and more effectively."

One of the best tools/sites I've found for work as a teacher of journalism is GoogleDocs. For collaborative work of teacher and student on journalism writing assignments, it's a great device.

On the extremely unlikely chance that anyone reading this isn't familiar with GoogleDocs, it's very simply a cloud word processing application that lets the creator of a document share it with anyone else so that both can edit. This makes it an outstanding writing tool for journalism classes.

In-line comments, "footnote" side comments and color-coding of text/highlighting are all aids in giving feedback, and said feedback can be more immediate because there is no need to wait until the next class period to return items done on paper. Files are time-stamped when shared, so it's painfully obvious when a deadline is missed. For in-class work that's not completed by the end of the class and needs to be finished later, students can just save into their Google accounts and access it later from anywhere else they have Internet access: no concerns about saving to servers that students can't access from home or dorm, corrupted files on flash drives, incompatible word processing files, and the like.

For a draft-and-revision process, one electronic document is created, and updated as many times as called for with editing/comments from the teacher and revisions by the author (plus revisions are tracked neatly). This is far superior to attachments flying back and forth with a new version for every exchange, and the accompanying lack of clarity about which is the most up-to-date version.

All of this adds up to a process that is the closest thing I've found in an academic setting to the system used in actual newsrooms, where a writer files a story electronically into a database where editors can access it, edit it, comment on it, return it for revision, and check the revisions all within a tightly time-specific environment. I'd recommend it to anyone teaching journalism at any level.

Traditional-form journalism a "luxury"?

2011-05-30T13:18:00.003-04:00

I read an interesting online exchange between two social media thinkers whose opinions I really respect, and what was most interesting was how far apart their thinking was on the topic of Twitter, journalism and the place that traditional articles have in the mix of modern-day reporting.

Appropriately, I was alerted to the exchange from several tweets.

It started with a post by Jeff Jarvis on his blog Buzz Machine that led off with the comment "A few episodes in news make me think of the article not as the goal of journalism but as a value-added luxury or as a byproduct of the process."

That prompted a response from Matthew Ingram at GigaOm making the point that as important as stream-of-news coverage is, more fully fleshed-out articles that add meaning and context are just as valuable. (Both of their posts were later updated to include the other's reaction, and their own reaction to the reaction, which later evolved into a lengthy back-and-forth on Facebook.)

The crux of Jarvis's argument is that when journalists' time is so precious, he'd rather have them putting that time into reporting, and dispensing it to the audience as rapidly and efficiently as possible, primarily via Twitter. That's why he calls articles summarizing news events after the fact as "an extra service to readers. A luxury, perhaps."

The gist of Ingram's response is that considering articles a luxury goes too far off in one direction because "while real-time reporting is very powerful, we still need someone to make sense of those streams and put them in context. In fact, we arguably need that even more."

My own view lies closer to Ingram's. The contemporary environment is incredibly rich in information, much of which is original on-the-ground reporting from professionals and also from citizen journalists. While I see Jarvis's point about journalists making the best use of their time, arguably there is no shortage of reporting out there. Sense-making is what is in short supply.

The exchange reminded me of an article in Nieman Reports a fews years ago by Simon Waldman, who at the time was director of digital publishing for Guardian Newspapers. He wrote that “The disciplines of traditional media aren’t just awkward restrictions. Deadlines, limits on space and time, the need to have a headline and an intro and a cohesive story rather than random paragraphs, all of these factors force out meaning and help with understanding. Without the order they impose, it’s much, much harder to make sense of what’s happening in the world.”

In the 2005 article, Waldman said with regard to citizen-witness contributions to coverage of the December 2004 tsunami in southern Asia, the power came from the vividness and volume of the comments. “But out of this sheer volume, " he also wrote "the movement’s great weakness was exposed – the lack of shape, structure and overall meaning to all that was available. There is a fundamental difference between reading hundreds of people’s stories and understanding the ‘real’ story. … Making sense of it all needed the sort of distillation, reduction and, yes, the editing process that happens in traditional media.”

Even when the reporting is being done by professional journalists -- as in the several examples cited in Jarvis's post -- I think that holds true. The ongoing process of the reporting is important, but so is the follow through of articles that provide context and summary.

I also found it interesting that a number of comments attached to Jarvis's and Ingram's posts compared after-the-fact curation to the old journalistic practice of the rewrite desk, which I think offers a good analogy and a good perspective on the worth of traditional journalistic values and practices even with all of the modern tools and techniques at journalists' disposal.

Failing to try

2011-05-05T14:43:00.003-04:00

This month's Carnival of Journalism entry is supposed to address "A failure in your life (personal or professional) that has lessons. It must be your failure and you must take responsibility."

Given that I sat out the past couple of month's worth of J-Carns (does that count as failure? It feels like it) because I was buried in grading (oops, that's the forbidden apologizing -- or maybe excuse-making, which is even worse), this seemed like a good time and a good topic for which I could return to the fold.

I have to say I've never failed spectacularly at anything; I don't expect to be in the running for the "fight at the end for the biggest failure of the lot," as David described it in the assignment. But a major reason for not failing at anything spectacular is not trying anything spectacular. Which is essentially the failure I'm choosing to discuss.

Early in my career, while working as a beat reporter for a small newspaper, what I wanted more than anything was to be an independent free-lance writer, supporting myself with my work outside of the context of an institutional employer. I'd spend free time combing through Writers' Market, looking for ideas of places to pitch for my work. I had some small successes at it, getting a few small contracts for trade journal pieces and such.

But where the failure came was passing up a golden moment to make the move at trying to carve out a career path along that line.

I had left that staff job to spend two years back in school, full time, earning a master's -- an MBA in fact, which gave me a certain level of knowledge and expertise about businesses that could have been leveraged into writing, perhaps, for finance magazines and the like. My wife was the primary breadwinner the whole time I was in school. I had those occasional free-lance pieces and a part-time job at the local daily, but we mostly lived on her paycheck.

Then even the part-time job ended when I finished school and the paper said they had no openings and no plans to hire me. So there I was: no steady job, lots of free time (with no classes to worry about), finances reasonably well covered. We weren't rich but we weren't starving either, and this was before the kids came along to complicate life and family expenses. Hence, the golden moment.

And I blinked.

Rather than take the opportunity that was presenting itself to really see if I had it in me to be a self-supporting independent free-lancer, I sought out (and fairly quickly found) another newspaper staff job. It was in copy editing, rather than reporting, and I found that the tasks of editing fit my skills and personality better than writing. I had a long and successful career as a copy editor that led to my current academic position, so I have no complaints or regrets really about how things did turn out. (Like I said, not a spectacular fail.)

But it's impossible not to wonder where things could have gone had I chosen the other path. The story I've told happened in the mid-1980s, when personal computer technology was just starting to explode on the scene. Dozens of technology and computer magazines appeared over the next few years; with that as a specialty I might have had more work than I could handle.

Or, one of the things I liked, and was pretty good at, as a copy editor was page design. Could I have been on the ground floor as a Web designer, and maybe founder/owner of a design shop, as the Internet took off a few years later? Who knows where I might have ended up -- if not for a failure of nerve.

College-based community media workshops

2011-02-17T18:24:00.004-05:00

This month's Carnival of Journalism topic asks those of us participating in it to address how the sources of news in a community could be expanded, playing off the recommendations of the Knight Foundation's exploration of information needs of communities in a democracy.

I think universities with communications programs are especially well positioned to help address one of the 15 needs cited by the Knight Commission report, specifically:

Recommendation 7: Fund and support public libraries and other community institutions (my emphasis) as centers of digital and media training, especially for adults.

Our college is a community institution, right?

One of the ideas that's been in the back of my mind for a while that would articulate this recommendation is using the school's resources to help local citizens learn more about being news providers with some sort of workshop or seminar.

I could see it taking shape as a day or day-and-a-half event, consisting of a combination of lecture, exercises, small-group and large-group discussion of issues in the emerging news ecosystem, followed by break-out workshops on principles of basic journalism and skills development for writing and multimedia. We have faculty, staff and even student expertise in these areas plus a core of alumni who are working professionals who might be involved as guest presenters. We have the facilities, including classrooms, computer labs, large and small meeting spaces, and on-campus catering capability for meals or snacks.

Or, more formally, it could be done as a certificate program for non-matriculated students who could take some combination of our traditional (or non-traditional, e.g. online) courses on topics such as journalism basics, multimedia journalism, Web design, digital video production, and desktop publishing.

All the potential is there. Finding the human and financial resources to act on it is the next step.

UPDATE (Saturday Feb. 18) : Courtney Shove has created a roundup summary with links to all of the posts in this month's carnival. Check it out.

Budget conundrum

2011-02-15T18:54:00.004-05:00

I dislike paying taxes as much as anyone. But I have to wonder when Washington politicians are going to get serious and talk about tax increases to stem the tide of progressively deeper national debt.

President Obama's 2012 budget proposal, according to The New York Times, totals $3.7 trillion with a $1.1 trillion deficit. That means it budgets $2.6 trillion in revenue. Obama says it's fiscally responsible; Republicans say it doesn't cut deep enough. All kinds of arguments are taking place about little nips and tucks to the budget of a few billion here and a few billion there to try and bring it into better alignment.

But here's the thing. Four areas of the budget that no one is talking about cutting add up to a figure that already surpasses total revenue by a wide margin. Thus, it's mathematically impossible to make enough cuts to areas of the budget where everyone is looking to bring this budget into balance, or even to reduce the projected deficit by a meaningful amount.

Three of the four areas -- Medicare/Medicaid, Defense, and Social Security -- are supposedly untouchable for political reasons. The fourth is interest on the national debt, which we have to keep paying because defaulting on it would truly collapse the world economy.

Those four areas added together total about $3 trillion in spending (see table below). With projected revenue of $2.6 trillion, this means that if every remaining dollar in federal spending were eliminated, the country would still be in the hole by $400 billion. Read that carefully. Not just trimming some programs, but completely eliminating EVERY federal agency except for the Defense Department, Social Security Administration, and portions of Treasury and Human Services that deal with debt issuance and Medicare/Medicaid, respectively, wouldn't be enough to get the budget back to positive.

And the cuts that are being talked about are, by comparison, a pittance. $1 billion sounds like a lot of money, but here's an analogy to explain what that amount means in relation to the overall budget situation:

Picture an upper middle class family with a very comfortable -- what some people would consider truly lavish -- income of $260,000 a year. But for a variety of reasons they were overspending their income by around $110,000 a year, and need to cut back. How effective would they be in closing the gap with savings of $100 here and $100 here? Equivalently, that's what $1 billion is in a $3.7 trillion spending plan. So when you read about $5 billion here or $10 billion there, it's like that family trying to close its six-figure deficit with tweaks of $500 or $1,000. Realistically, it cannot be done.

This federal budget has reached a point at which it cannot be balanced with cuts. Sadly, none of our political leaders has the courage to say so.

$1100 billion (1.1 trillion) Medicare and Medicaid
$808 billion Social Security
$677 Defense
$474 Interest on debt

= $3059 billion ($3.059 trillion) total spending on "big four" areas

against

$2600 billion ($2.6 trillion) projected revenue

= $459 billion deficit

Funny line from TV's Big Bang Theory

2011-02-13T11:50:00.004-05:00

One of the things I like best in a TV show is smart writing, and one of the shows out there with that characteristic is the CBS sitcom The Big Bang Theory.

For those who may be unfamiliar with the show, it centers on the interaction of four researchers at a university who meet every stereotype of the classic nerd. The nerdiest of them all is an astrophysicist named Sheldon Cooper, well played by a talented actor named Jim Parsons.

It's not the most high-brow show in the world; in fact, a disappointingly large proportion of episode plot lines and within-the-show jokes resort to the "nerds-never-get-laid" cliche. (Even the show's title plays off that theme, of course.) I'm no prude and the jokes don't offend or bother me. I'd just like to see the writers reach beyond them more often than they do. They're surely capable of it, as last Thursday's episode illustrated with some of the funniest lines I've heard on TV in a while.

The storyline begins with university president "inviting" the four compadres -- more of an ultimatum to attend than an invitation, really -- to a reception with major donors. Sheldon initially refuses to go, feeling it is beneath him.

He changes his mind when a friend persuades him that unless he's there to argue for donations to support the work of hard science, the money might go to the geology department -- whom Sheldon disparages as "the dirt people." He admits the prospect scares him.

Then prepare to be terrified, his friend continues, because the benefactors might even decide to support -- gasp! -- the liberal arts. Millions, she implies, could go to poets, literary critics and "students of gender studies." I was already laughing at that as she said it.

Sheldon's horrified reply: "Oh, the humanities!"

I laughed harder than I have in a long time at a TV show. Good job, Big Bang writers. More smart stuff like that and fewer cheap sex jokes and I'll like your work even more.

The power of viral media

2011-02-09T18:54:00.004-05:00

Buffalo-area Congressman Chris Lee isn't the first politician to resign in the wake of publicity over a personal scandal, and unquestionably won't be the last. But his case may have set some kind of record for speed with which the downfall took place, and shows the power of viral dissemination of information outside of the mainstream news media.

Not so long ago, when news cycles were measured in hours or even days, it would take quite a while for a scandal to play out far enough to result in a powerful person's downfall. Weeks or months could go by as news came out and slowly made its way into public consciousness, those affected by it could work to get favorable counter-information into public view, etc. Even the situation with Eric Massa, another upstate New York congressman who resigned over some unsavory personal behavior, took a few days to unwind.

But with Lee, news of a flirtatious e-mail conversation he apparently had with a woman he contacted via Craigslist was posted on Gawker in mid-afternoon, and led to his resignation by dinnertime. In a story posted at 2:30 p.m., his spokesman was saying that the congressman believed his e-mail account had been hacked; at 5:30 Lee was calling it quits. That was before it could even be reported on a traditional TV newscast.

Traditional media were still trying to figure out how much credence to give a report on Gawker when Lee made it easy for them by giving the story both a more powerful angle (his departure) and instant credibility (why would he have resigned if it wasn't true).

News truly does move in hyper-speed these days.

The downside of constant connection

2011-02-06T16:26:00.001-05:00

I check my e-mail pretty frequently, from first thing in the morning until maybe 9 or 10 in the evening. (More on what "first thing" means shortly.) I have Facebook and Twitter accounts that I check a few times over the course of a day, too. I don't post a lot, just a few times a week to each; mostly I check to monitor information other people are putting out there.

However, I don't have a smart phone. I don't want a smart phone. I don't use my "dumb" cellphone all that much; a few calls and texts a week mostly to my wife and kids. (Only a few people other than family members even have the number, and it's turned off more hours of the week than it's turned on.) Without a smart device, of course, e-mails, tweets and Facebook updates can't reach me constantly. Sometimes, a few hours pass before I get them.

Does that make me a Luddite? If you took what's said in a lot of the news ricocheting around the tech world at face value, it would seem so. Being technologically up to date is equated with being constantly connected, constantly on. When Mashable posts an entry titled "31 New Digital Media Resources You May Have Missed" there's a subtle implication that unless you have all of these latest and greatest tips, tools and tricks, you're just not with it. (That post was shared 105 times on Facebook and tweeted more than 1,700 times, BTW).

But being constantly connected can take a toll, as an article from today's New York Times points out:

All of this amped-up productivity comes with a growing sense of unease. Too often, people find themselves with little time to concentrate and reflect on their work. Or to be truly present with their friends and family.

The Times writer quotes Ana Dutra, 46, a top manager at a Chicago-based executive recruiting firm, as saying that technology has afforded her more freedom, “but there’s a little bit more slavery as well ...If you are available all the time, what does that mean?”

Balance of work and life is something professionals have always struggled with, but technology has torn down some barriers permanently, in the eyes of people who study it. The Times quotes Lee Rainie, director of the Pew Research Center’s Internet and American Life Project, as saying that "home has invaded work and work has invaded home and the boundary is likely never to be restored ... The new gadgetry has really put this issue into much clearer focus.”

The theme of the Times article is nothing new; I've seen others almost exactly like it. Perhaps it is a recurring theme because of a growing recognition of how corrosive an always-on life can be.

Being connected is important to me, which is why I check my e-mail and social networks numerous times over the course about 13 or 14 hours a day, seven days a week. But balance, and downtime, are equally important. Without them, there's no time to synthesize or think about the information flowing in. That's why it doesn't bother me that it might take a while for me to get to an e-mail or see a tweet, even about something that's interesting and important to me. Very little of it is SO urgent that a few minutes or few hours will make a difference.

And, I've even redefined "first thing" in the morning. Until a few weeks ago, that meant about 6:30 a.m., right after breakfast, when I'd pour a second cup of coffee and fire up the computer to check e-mail, Facebook, Twitter and some online news sites. But I found that spending 20 minutes or so doing that was a real impediment to getting out of the house in a timely fashion to go to the gym and get some exercise before work. So these days, when the computer gets turned off for the evening it goes into my briefcase, and the next time I'm online is when I get to the office around 8:30 or 9 the next morning. I can honestly say I haven't had to address anything since the beginning of the semester for which those two hours in the morning have made a difference.

(Granted, not all people could say that. If I were still a working journalist, I doubt I'd make such a blanket statement because in that world, these days, urgency of information delivery and dissemination is the cardinal value.)

To me, having the time to assess and think about information flowing in is crucial for understanding it and what it means. Constant connection to an endless torrent of data undermines the ability to do that.

More on j-schools as news providers

2011-01-20T10:34:00.004-05:00

(Author's note: This post is being made as part of a "blog carnival" being organized by David Cohn of the University of Missouri. Many thanks to David for his efforts and for selecting such a great topic -- "The changing role of universities for the information needs of a community.")

The idea that journalism schools should be contributing to the ecosystem of local news is one that's intrigued me for the past year, since I read some of the ideas along those lines that Michael Schudson and Len Downie suggested in their report on "The Reconstruction of Journalism." And, as David Cohn pointed out in his message organizing the blog carnival, it's something the Knight Commission has suggested as well.

Not all of the ideas in the Reconstruction of Journalism report were well-received, but this one deserves to be. In their discussion of the topic, Downie and Schudson use what I think is a great analogy, which is that of teaching hospitals. Wherever a top-flight medical school is found (and we have one here in my town, associated with the University of Rochester), there is an affiliated hospital offering treatment to the community, much of it by the medical-professionals-in-training.

In like fashion, Downie and Schudson reason, why shouldn't journalists-in-training provide news coverage for their communities. This is already happening and it's fairly easy to find examples of this, actually.

The challenge for me, at a small institution where I am essentially the only teacher of both traditional and emergent journalism classes, has been figuring out how to do this on a shoestring. But this semester I'm taking a shot at it, using off-the-shelf tools and a "baby-steps" approach to getting student work about the community out there for public consumption.

My approach is going to be using a Feature Writing class that until this semester has followed the traditional model of stories produced basically for the professor's eyes only and making it into a truly public effort. Using basic blogging software, I'll set up a class "website," with headlines and story summaries, each of which link to the full story on a student's blog. By using the same blogging software and similar templates, the class site and all of the student sites will have a coherent look. The students will of course produce text stories on the the topics, but some multimedia extensions as well (likely slide shows and/or short videos).

As for the "baby steps" toward community coverage, that will come in the form of the story assignments themselves. One themed assignment will be the college's engagement with the community. Fisher has a wide range of programs in which service learning classes, student organizations and other campus groups go into the Rochester community for service activities. A set of class stories -- one from each student -- will focus on some of these activities. Another assignment will be to profile young alumni from our program who are active in the community.

Neither of these is exactly the same as using a class to cover an entire community the way, say, NYU is able to do in partnership with The New York Times on The Local: East Village. But they are a starting point to tell community-based stories through the classroom experience. It's a novelty for our school, and my teaching, so I'm looking forward to working on it and seeing how it comes out.

Value in reading the news

2011-01-17T19:33:00.004-05:00

Getting students to pay attention to news coverage can be a challenge. As Harvard University researcher Tom Patterson noted in a study a few years ago, "in the case of the newspaper and the Internet, an absolute majority of teens and young adults are non-users. The newspaper particularly has little appeal to young Americans." I've noticed the same tendency in my classes: many students just aren't interested in reading the news.

Which is why I so enjoyed an article in today's New York Times about young professionals whose jobs involve attending to the news, and how important that attention is. As the article points out, "these 20-something staff members are learning [that] who knows what — and when they know it — can be the difference between professional advancement and barely scraping by."

A great quote attributed to David Perlmutter, the director of the School of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Iowa, stood out also. The author quoted Permutter as saying:

“You don’t want to be coming into the office at 8 a.m., and everyone is saying, ‘Oh, my God, can you believe what happened?’ And you’re going, ‘What happened?’ ”

I posted link to it in the course website. Let's see if they read the story!

Random thoughts for a Saturday

2011-01-15T11:53:00.004-05:00

It was heartening to see a couple of really positive blog posts Friday about journalism careers. For one, Robert Hernandez at Online Journalism Review wrote about how more journalism jobs seem to be available now, a bit of a thaw from the retrenchment that's been going on in recent years. Also, Mark Luckie of 10,000 words posted this guide for doing well at an interview for such a job.

When I hold academic advising sessions with students, I always ask what they have in mind at the end of the road ... what type of career they hope to start with after graduation. A surprisingly large, and growing, proportion answer along the lines of "I have NO idea..." (often with that sort of emphasis on the "no," meaning none). I'm going to start suggesting they check out journalism again. With all of the bad press (pun intended) about the state of legacy journalism industries that's been a hard sell in recent years. Maybe we're entering an era where it again will be cool (and feasible) to aspire to a journalistic career.

* * *

On a totally unrelated note ... while I love the Daily Show and think Jon Stewart generally does a great job of most things, there is one thing about him that annoys me and, in my view, undermines what he tries to accomplish with the show. All too often, he can't get out of his own way when he asks a guest a question. The interview on Wednesday's show with former Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty was a perfect example.

Stewart had a particular premise he was pursuing, and wanted Pawlenty to comment upon, and it was this: why are conservatives, and GOP leaders in particular, so vociferous in crying "tyranny" over the actions of the Obama administration that expand federal authority and spending when they were so accepting of expansion of federal mandates and spending under the Bush administration?

It's a great question, and one I've wondered about. Getting someone like Pawlenty -- who likely will be throwing his hat into the GOP presidential ring -- to answer it would have been an interesting thing to see. Stewart even had the perfect foil to pursue this, in the No Child Left Behind Act, which hugely expanded federal authority in local education. He even tried the tack of: imagine what the reaction of the right in the current environment would be if Obama had proposed that law rather than Bush?

But rather than just asking that in a straightforward way, and waiting for Pawlenty to answer it, Stewart asked it and kept talking, and talking, and by the time he was through Pawlenty could just ignore the basic question. Stewart does this often -- asking six questions at once, sidetracking himself in the process of asking the questions to throw in some jokes and/or observations, and the like. In doing this he generally buries a good, and often important, question in so much dross that the interviewee is either unable to answer it or can avoid answering it if he doesn't want because he can just respond to something else in Stewart's info barrage.

Maybe I'm expecting too much. Stewart is, after all, a comedian not a journalist. But at the same time, he is really intelligent, often has good questions about public affairs he wants to pursue with guests who are involved in the issues, and has the willingness to ask some tough or nasty question even some journalists wouldn't. Maybe that's precisely because he's not a journalist; he doesn't have to worry about currying favor with the interviewees as sources for future stories.

But I still think he could do a better job of this much of the time. When I teach my intro journalism students about interviewing, one of the key skills I stress is learning when to shut up and let the source talk. I kind of wish Jon Stewart would do the same sometimes, especially with his political interviewees.

Social media as a news pointer -- but that's about it

2011-01-09T09:52:00.006-05:00

A couple of news stories this weekend -- one trivial, one tragic -- helped to highlight for me the connection and interrelation of social and legacy media.

Starting with the trivial,* I didn't watch the Saints-Seahawks playoff game Saturday for a variety of reasons, the main one being that my daughter had a friend over and they were watching the TV. I wasn't all that interested in the game so I was happy to let them use it.

But in the early evening as the game was wrapping up I was online, and saw some Twitter chatter that seemed to indicate an upset was in the making and that ex-Bill Marshawn Lynch had a role in that via a long TD run. My daughter was no longer watching the TV, so I turned it on in time to watch the last few minutes of the game, confirming that indeed an upset was happening.

Twitter gave me a sense of things regarding the game, and if I worked hard enough I could have found a live blog about the game, or a hashtag with a more complete set of tweets where I could have found the score and other details lacking in the first few items I read. It was a whole lot easier and faster to turn to legacy media -- the NBC broadcast -- for the definitive story.

With regards to the tragic, I'm of course talking about the shooting of Congresswoman Gabby Giffords and several other people in Arizona. From Twitter and Facebook postings early this morning, I got a sense that something had happened involving the shooting of a political person in Arizona, and that she wasn't the only one shot because others (notably a 9-year-old girl) were killed. But again the picture was hazy. As a sort-of experiment (with this blog post in mind) I deliberately avoided jumping right to a news site and spent a few minutes trying to determine how complete a picture social media would give me. In short, not very complete.

So after a few minutes I linked to the NYT where of course I got a fairly quick and complete summary of the five W's and much more. Before I went there I also had followed a link from one tweet to a Keith Olbermann commentary that had some of the background mixed in with Olbermann's very pointed editorial about language and imagery of violence in political discourse.

There's no arguing that social media add richness, context and recommended referrals that enhance news presentations. A friend in Tucson posted photos from a memorial gathering for the dead bystanders in the Giffords shooting to Facebook, adding a layer of coverage the New York Times wouldn't have. I doubt I would have found the Olbermann piece without the Twitter referral, and with regard to the other news event mentioned here a Facebook link also led me to a video of Lynch's run.

But while recognizing that referral/curation value, I still I think some people go too far in dismissing the value of the legacy media in the emerging world of news. Lots of conversations in social media (on Twitter, especially) seem to regard legacy news operations in the news ecosystem with outright disdain. "Well, yeah, newspapers ... *big sigh* + *eye-roll*..."

In my view, legacy news still has a crucial place in the emerging news ecosystem, and online news sites associated with legacy media (NYT, MSNBC) were my main sources on the Giffords story. But as the legacy economic model becomes ever more tenuous it's hard to fathom what the news world will look like if/when most of them disappear.

*OK, if you are a Saints or Seahawks fan this isn't game wasn't trivial, and I probably wouldn't have used the adjective if the Bills were involved. It's used mostly as a comparative term to the other example in this post.

A rose by any other name ...

2010-11-25T10:28:00.010-05:00

"What's in a name?" Shakespeare asked in the intro to the quote in that headline. Journalism programs around the country are trying to figure that out, and ours may be among them.

Two developments on this front over the past week have been getting a lot of attention.

In one of them, faculty at the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University voted by a wide margin -- 38-5 -- to change the name to "The Medill School of Journalism, Media, Integrated Marketing Communications." The vote, which took place earlier this month according to a report in Northwestern's student newspaper, sparked a lot of criticism among alumni and Chicagoland observers.

In the other, a panel at the University of Colorado Boulder on Nov. 17 recommended "discontinuance " of the School of Journalism at the institution. In reality, the term "discontinuance" is a piece of bureaucratic jargon within the UC system that doesn't mean journalism instruction will cease, but rather that the organizational framework of the program will change. Nevertheless, when the proposal was first floated during the summer it drew a lot of outcry from both proponents and opponents. (As an aside, the dean who is at the center of that particular firestorm, Paul Voakes, is a good friend.)

Colorado's action is more substantial than merely re-labeling a program, of course, but is rooted in the same phenomenon: that upheaval in the legacy journalism industry means colleges that prepare students for journalism careers need to re-think their approaches, including how they label and present themselves to the outside world.

I'm following these situations with particular interest because of a similar discussion happening within my own department, which is the "Communication/Journalism Department." Some faculty members believe, fairly adamantly, that having "Journalism" as part of the program's name is a serious impediment to student recruitment efforts.

As a journalist or journalism teacher for all of my adult life, I bristle at the suggestion, of course. Throw journalism under the bus? Yikes!

But in truth, it's hard to argue with their logic. In the public mind, journalism = newspapers, and newspapers are dying, ergo, why in the world would someone go to school to study in a Journalism program?

I can't predict where the discussion will end up, either at Fisher or in the larger academy. But the fact that the conversations are happening so earnestly says something about the state of journalism and journalism instruction today.

"Town-Gown" journalism projects

2010-09-26T12:24:00.007-04:00

A short Twitter exchange with two former students inspired me to compile a list of exemplar sites where colleges are getting engaged in community news coverage, something that's been interesting to me for a while. And having compiled the list, I thought it would be good to post it here as well.

This idea is something that Len Downie and Michael Schudson raised in their Reconstruction of American Journalism report as an idea that could help add some valuable elements to the news ecosystem. These projects take various forms but generally entail online presentation of student coverage of the community, sometimes in collaboration with local media and sometimes in collaboration with local community members in a hyper-local format. Some of the projects in this list have been around for a while while others are new.

The context of the Twitter exchange was that I mentioned to these former students that this had been a topic of some extensive discussion at the AEJMC conference in Denver a few weeks ago. I attended about three different panels on the topic, and it seems to be something the industry and the academy are interested in bringing about in a lot of places. So this is by no means an inclusive list; I'm sure there are many more out there and would welcome additions to the list in the comments. But to get things started, here are a few high quality student-community collaborations that have come to my attention either at the sessions I attended in Denver or earlier.

Chicago Talks (project of Columbia College, Chicago)
The Local: East Village (New York University)
The Local: Fort Greene (Brooklyn) (City University of New York)
New York City News Service (City University of New York)
New England Center for Investigative Reporting (Boston University)
My Missourian (University of Missouri)
Reese Felts Project (University of North Carolina)
Multi-Media Urban Reporting Lab (Philadelphia) (Temple University)
We-Town (Elizabethtown, Pa.) (Elizabethtown College)
Latina Voices (Columbia College, Chicago)

Additionally, there is the recently announced Patch-U, offering student collaboration with the Patch.com string of hyper-local sites operated by AOL.

(In Denver I also heard about projects affiliated with Louisiana State University and University of Colorado Boulder but didn't write down any URLs and couldn't find them with Google searches. The LSU one sounded a lot like the CUNY City News Service one, partnering student journalists with media outlets in New Orleans, Baton Rouge and other places in the state.)

I think these projects offer a lot of promise for helping the next generation of journalists develop skills in settings outside of traditional newsrooms, which is where progressively more journalism is going to be done. They are especially valuable as in-the-newsroom internships and summer jobs wither with the declining fortunes of legacy news organizations.

They also offer value for news audiences in the communities they cover. Downie and Schudson liken such news operations to the medical field's teaching hospitals, where medical-professionals-in-training help meet the needs of their surrounding communities.

Students and the News

2010-09-19T20:41:00.003-04:00

I just finished reading the first week's worth of entries in the news-blog assignment for my intro reporting class. This ongoing assignment's purpose is to get students -- many of whom might not be naturally inclined to do so -- to read and critically react to news reports.

It's not a heavy, time-consuming assignment. They are required only to post four blog entries a week, each with a link to a story and a brief --like 4 or 5 sentences short -- reflection on it in the context of what we're talking about in class at the time. For this first one, the blog instructions were to "Select stories from your regular reading of news Web sites and describe what qualities make them newsworthy." The assignment also requires posting a comment on a classmate's entry.

By and large, the entries were well-done, with good story selection and good reflection on what was chosen. A few missed the mark, but it was the first assignment after all.

One of the best parts of reading the responses to these assignments is that a few students each week manage to find really interesting stories that I've somehow missed. I think my favorite in that category this week was a Sept. 10 story in USA Today about weddings planned for Sept. 11. Of course, summer Saturdays are prime days for weddings, and this year Sept. 11 was on a Saturday. But the idea of matching a joyous anniversary with one that forever will be the anniversary of such a horrific event is something some embrace, while others shy away from it.

I'm already looking forward to seeing what the students come up with over the course of the coming week.

I'm on Facebook. Now what?

2010-09-14T18:35:00.008-04:00

Over the weekend I finally set up a Facebook account, about 2 to 4 years behind nearly everyone else that I know. And behind about half a billion people worldwide, which by any definition makes me a late adopter.

Now I'm trying to figure out: What do I do with it?

That's a serious question, by the way, not an attempt at humor, sarcasm or facetiousness. I'm genuinely unsure of what utility this program is going to have for me, which I suppose is why it took so long for me to join. I wasn't sure -- and still am not sure -- that the observations I might post about my life are interesting to anyone else, or vice versa.

The main rationale for finally signing up is just so I can experience something that is becoming so integral to the modern communication world, and so I have the ability to "like" and follow some group pages that I feel I ought to be following (such as several associated with Fisher). But where Facebook is going to integrate into MY communication world is something I still haven't figured out.

Now, I'm not exactly a social media Luddite. I've been on Linked-In for years, on Twitter for a little over a year, and maintain/occasionally contribute to a couple of other blogs besides this one. I see value in all of these things, especially Twitter, which I use as a surveillance device to keep track of some people whose ideas I find illuminating. I like knowing what they are thinking about and writing about (in their own tweets and blogs, primarily).

But Facebook doesn't seem geared to that sort of instrumental communication. One of the first things to appear on my wall was a posting from my daughter musing about what sort of take-out food to order. Unlike information I might get from other sources, this makes no sort of difference to my life, even if it has consequence for her. Whether I know this about her, or not, has no impact on our relationship. The types of news that would be important for me to know about her life, for good or for ill, I hope would come to me through some venue other than Facebook. In the meantime, whether or what she orders for dinner is of no consequence to me.

In a similar vein, my own first posting was an observation about the incredibly banal topic of the weather, which I made mostly out of a feeling that I had to post something. That posting did draw a comment from a cousin who now lives in New Orleans and whom I've seen maybe once in the past 30 years. The fact that Facebook helped us reconnect after all that time is a source of some value, I must admit. And on his page I saw posts from a couple of his sisters (also my cousins, of course) to whom I could reach out and "friend" so that we also could reconnect.

But even if I manage to connect with people such as my southern cousins, or co-workers from long ago (a couple of whom have sent me friend requests), I'm still not sure what being a part of Facebook is going to add to my communication mix, or what difference it's going to make to my life. Maybe it's just too early to tell. I was sort of a late adopter of Twitter, also. I finally joined last summer after the annual AEJMC convention, mostly to "follow" several good friends from other colleges who were talking it up when I saw them at the conference. And I have found Twitter to be very worthwhile since then, following them and many other smart people whose tweeted insights are interesting and valuable to me. Maybe eventually Facebook will find a similar niche.

I also guess that like so many other things in life you also get out of a social network what you put into it. As soon as I figure out what that ought to be.

Great example of news as conversation

2010-09-11T13:08:00.006-04:00

Here is a great example of how old-line journalism organizations can use the power of social media to tell stories in new ways.

The Washington Post is collecting and presenting -- well, more like curating and passing through -- tweeted responses to the question "Where were you on Sept. 11, 2001?" Essentially, this involves nothing more than putting a window on the site where the responses carrying the hashtag #wherewereyou stream by.

I'm not sure when they started or how long they plan to continue. It first came to my attention yesterday afternoon when I saw a friend's tweet with that hashtag. I added my own recollection, clicked on the hashtag to view others, and found several tweets with reference to what the Post was doing. So I switched to the Post site just in time to see my own tweet float by. My wife saw my tweet, added one of her own, and I saw hers.

So it's been going on for at least about 24 hours. I'll bet tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of tweets have been made on this topic. Just stopping to read them for a few minutes is bound to bring some really poignant ones. I can't imagine a better example of the principle that "news is a conversation."

Random curation

2010-09-08T20:00:00.003-04:00

Some random jottings about some really interesting reads I've found recently, and links to all (trying to follow the model of summary and curation of good stuff that's out there) ...

The Memphis (Tenn) Commercial Appeal had a good two part series about the evolving state of newspaper journalism both in form and content and in its business model. Not a lot of depth, but a really good summary of the changing state of the industry.

The blog Journalism Lives had a great summary of all of the different types of tasks that fall under the heading of journalism these days. They include the mobile maven (creating content delivered via mobile devices), the multimedia backpack reporter (who creates content for various platforms), the Jack or Jill of all trades (responsible for overseeing nearly everything having to do with a given site), and the more specialized online content guru and online engagement specialist. These jobs exist in traditional and untraditional media organizations, large and small. I've basically just listed the labels here; the post is worth a deeper read.

Finally, there is the advice for up-and-coming journalists from Bob Niles of the Online Journalism Review and from NYU professor Jay Rosen. (Rosen's piece is really long. The history lesson on the relationship of the media and the public is worth reading. But if you want to cut to the chase, a bullet list of specific ideas is near the end of the posting. ) At the heart of what both Niles and Rosen are saying is this idea: effective journalism today means becoming engaged with a topic through engagement with the audience.

Thoughts on a new school year

2010-08-29T17:20:00.003-04:00

One of an educator's truisms -- to the point of pretty much being a cliche -- is that the end of summer is bittersweet. For while it is sad to see the summer's slower pace replaced by the whirlwind of activity that defines a semester, it also is good to get back into a routine and reconnect with the life of the academy.

It helps that at St. John Fisher we get an extra week over many Rochester area colleges that start classes tomorrow. Our classes don't begin for another week (Tuesday Sept. 7), but even still the school year in essence begins this week with a bunch of meetings and activities.

One of the characteristics of working in a small program is that I have a long roster of courses that I teach: Introductory Newswriting, Advanced Newswriting, Feature Writing, Copy Editing, Media Law and Senior Seminar. It's great having a variety of material to work with and bring to the students. The downside is that I can't teach all of them every semester. (It would be nice if I could, but that would involve cloning!)

This semester's offerings are the intro course, which I teach every semester, the law course and Senior Seminar. The "sweet" part of the "bittersweet" transition to autumn is that September comes in the form of a fresh start and opportunity to improve on past work.

I've been working on revisions to each of the courses I'll be offering, including adding more multimedia components to the intro journalism course, finding ways to make the law course more vibrant with more discussion and application, and redesigning the dreaded senior seminar research project to help the students grasp what it means to design a project more effectively before getting started on it.

On the administrative side, we'll be finalizing some adjustments to the curriculum that we began talking about last year (to take effect for students entering the program a year from now). We'll also be implementing some ideas for attracting new students and enhancing the experiences of returning ones. We have an updated computer lab with brand new iMacs and a newly renovated, state-of-the-art television studio, which is very exciting indeed for the students and faculty who will be using both of these facilities.

All in all, looking forward to a fantastic year.

Digital barrage may not be good for us

2010-08-25T20:07:00.006-04:00

Ignoring for now the irony that I found it through Twitter, I think this New York Times story about research into excessive use of digital devices has some interesting and important points.

As the article points out,

when people keep their brains busy with digital input, they are forfeiting downtime that could allow them to better learn and remember information, or come up with new ideas.

The author notes other research as well about how "processing a barrage of information leaves people fatigued."

This makes a lot of sense to me. If the flow of incoming information is constant, how can the recipient ever make sense of larger patterns in it? I get my best ideas and insights when I'm not actively thinking about anything in particular and not taking in more information, such as when I'm walking, driving, mowing the lawn, or taking a shower.

I don't own any sort of digitally connected mobile device like an iPhone or Blackberry, and in a similar vein to the ideas in this article, I really don't want to. I feel no need or desire to be that connected, that constantly updated on the world beyond my reach. That's not to say I'm a Luddite or want to live under a rock. I check e-mail at my home and office computers quite frequently, read my Twitter feed a few times a day, get RSS feeds from a number of locations into Google Reader and engage in other digital monitoring, such as looking at online news sites.

But the difference is that I'm not concerned about getting any or all of it immediately as it comes available. If it takes me a while to get an e-mail or if I read tweets that are a few hours old, that's fine. And the research noted in this article seems to say that being unplugged for a notable part of the day this way is crucial to become more effective at understanding the information that does come my way.

The article reminded me of another piece I saw, and blogged about here a few months ago -- a Frontline report called "Digital Nation: Life on the Virtual Frontier." A quote in there from MIT professor Sherry Turkle summed it up nicely: "There really are important things you cannot think about unless it's still and you are thinking about only one thing at a time."

That's worth stopping to ponder.

Non-anonymous comments

2010-08-22T20:04:00.004-04:00

The Buffalo News published an article today that by its nature had "controversy" written all over it. It was a follow-up to a horrific incident a week ago in which eight people were shot, four of them fatally, after a party at a downtown bar. All were African-American. Today's follow-up reported details about the criminal records of seven of the eight victims.

What was of special interest to me, given my recent research into online audience postings, was the comments section of the article.

If there ever was an article that seemed ripe for racially fraught diatribes in the online commentary, it was this one. A typical anonymous online commentary thread on such a story would descend into such vile race-baiting that many readers would close the screen in disgust.

Of the 25 comments posted as of Sunday evening, a few were racially tinged. One mentioned "racial profiling." Another listed several of the crimes associated with the victims then added "These crimes may not be a big deal in the black community,but in the rest of civilized society they are a HUGE DEAL and are not tolerated or accepted!" A later posting called that comment "inappropriate and racist." There were some other sharp disagreements among the commenters, especially on the appropriateness of such an article so shortly after the deaths when loved ones are grieving for those they lost.

But all-in-all the comments were restrained, on point and polite in spite of the controversial subject matter and the disagreements among the contributors.

Why? Likely because all of the commenters had to attach their real names to the comments, similar to a signed letter to the editor in the printed paper. The Buffalo News earlier this month began requiring such identification. That requirement probably led to fewer comments -- only 25 on the story, compared to many dozen that typically get attached to controversial stories at sites where anonymous comments are allowed. But it seems as if it works to raise the bar in terms of quality of comments.

Dropping the newspaper

2010-08-21T11:53:00.003-04:00

I woke up this morning for the first time in nearly 24 years of living in Rochester without a delivery of the local Democrat and Chronicle -- the paper that brought me to Rochester when it hired me as a copy editor in 1986. Yes, a hardened print guy has cut his ties to the printed product -- though not for any of the reasons that popular opinion has about the death of newspaper as a function of content or format. As I explained it in an e-mail to a good friend who's a high-up news executive there:

In the end, poor customer service won out over my desire to continue receiving the paper in print. Despite literally dozens of complaints over a period of months, I could NEVER get the paper delivered in a timely fashion. Despite the 5:30 a.m. delivery promise, the delivery time kept creeping later. First it was a little after 6 a.m., then more like 6:30 and most recently the carrier had been arriving at close to 7 a.m. Once school starts in the fall, my wife, my daughter and I all will be getting up by 6 a.m. and out the door by around 7 a.m. So a paper that arrives that late does us no good.

And in a final, ironic twist on the poor customer service, I actually wanted to keep getting the paper until my credit-card pre-paid monthly subscription ran out in early September, and told that to the customer service person when I called Friday afternoon to take this action. But she canceled it immediately anyway. So, no paper this morning. Or, probably, ever again.

Being without a paper to read in the morning will take some getting used to. It also means I'll most likely visit the website more often, although I really dislike the site because of the clutter and "visual noise."

I still maintain -- as I wrote about in a post a few months ago -- that the newspaper industry should take a serious look at moving away from advertising-supported print models to reader-supported e-new models that get rid of all the junk related to a typical site in favor of a clean, unvarnished presentation of well-written, well-curated news. Yes, that's a "pay wall" -- but what the customer would be paying for is the convenience of format. This is similar to how people now pay for apps, and consider them to be worth the money, because of the functionality they offer. A better designed news site is likely worth paying for, too.

Numbers in the age of social media

2010-06-01T19:54:00.006-04:00

Just finished looking through the list of 20 people involved with journalism to follow on Twitter, as suggested in an article in the Society for Professional Journalists' Quill magazine. A good number of them I have been following for a while, and I may add many or all of the rest to my list as well.

But as I was clicking through to each individual's profile to learn more about them, I took a peek at how many followers each has, a number the Quill exposure should help to expand. Many are in the 3,000-4,000 follower range, a few top 10,000 and one -- NYU professor Jay Rosen -- has 35,000.

What occurred to me as I looked at the numbers was that the circulation of the first newspaper I worked at was around 20,000. And that was 30 years ago; it's probably smaller now. So even if we take Rosen out of the equation for a moment, about a quarter of the people on Quill's list have single-handedly built a readership base of nearly half what my first paper had as its readership. (And Rosen far surpasses it.)

Of course, your average recent college grad can't be expected to do quite as well as some of the established individuals on Quill's list -- though Quill did include at least two people whom I follow and thus recognized as recent grads: Suzanne Yada and Vadim Lavrusik, both in the 4,000-follower neighborhood. And my friend and former student Craig Kanalley, while he didn't make Quill's cut, has a following of around 3,500 a just a year out of grad school (and just two years after finishing at Fisher.)

But the Quill list offers some great examples of the ability of social media to help people become digital media entrepreneurs. If you're a smart, effective communicator with interesting things to say, the audience will find you. And you will reach them.

"Preservatives" protect status quo

2010-05-30T12:00:00.002-04:00

Just finished reading through Jeff Jarvis' trenchant analysis of the recently released Federal Trade Commission report on ideas for preserving journalism. Jarvis is one of the sharpest analysts of the trends in the emerging news ecosystem, and I'd highly recommend this particular piece.

The comments are good, too, although one in particular caught my eye as potentially coining a new political term.

In a comment about how the general gist of the report seemed to be protecting the status quo, a commenter named Dave Chase wrote:

This is another example where traditional political labels don’t work. The labels “conservative” and “liberal/progressive” are inaccurate in describing the perspective of the power structure in the D.C. system. The proper title would be something like “preservatives.”

In other words, when you have progressives who don't stand for real change, but want to take the conservative approach of protecting entrenched interests that match their views, smush the words together and you get: preservatives. Great term, Dave! Hope it catches on

New collaborations validate research from past

2010-05-26T14:38:00.007-04:00

I'm not a fan of "tout" pieces, particularly ones in which the author basically tries to say "see how smart I am," and I have never (consciously) written such a piece -- until now. Fair warning and disclosure: that's basically what this post amounts to, once you near the end. So if you similarly dislike such self-promotion, feel free to stop reading at any time.

* * *

One thing that's become pretty clear on the news innovation front is that collaborative work between citizen journalist operations and traditional mainstream ones is becoming more popular. It seems as if both sides are seeing the merits of such partnership projects, which are being announced with increasing frequency.

The value of such symbiosis is something I explored in my dissertation five years ago.

A Poynter Online column by Mallary Jean Tenore marking the debut the Bay Citizen, a San Francisco project that went live today, cites four emerging trends among news startups, including "A working relationship with a mainstream news organization." (The other three are community engagement, a hybrid business plan, and an experienced staff.)

The New York Times is in on several such projects, including Bay Citizen as well as the Chicago News Cooperative, which kicked off last fall, and The Local: East Village, a collaborative with New York University set to begin this fall.

Similar projects have been reported on by the Online Journalism Review, which in February covered a collaborative effort involving some at Hearst papers, and Nieman Lab, which similarly reviewed a project in Charlottesville, Va. back in October.

Then there is the new Washington, D.C. site backed by Allbritton Communications, called TBD.com.

And last but definitely not least, one of the most prominent projects that J-Lab: The Institute for Interactive Journalism has been sponsoring this year -- called The Networked Journalism Project -- has five large news organizations from around the country each working with at least five hyper-local news sites or producers in their communities.

I think all of these are terrific projects. I am especially encouraged because they provide evidence against a line of argument prominent in the journalism blogosphere that traditional news media deserve to die, and that we would be better off (or at least not worse off) without them. (OK, that's hyperbolic. No one is really saying that, at least not in so many words. But a lot of blog postings and tweets sure lean in that direction.)

I hold the opposite view because I remain convinced that in our complicated society with powerful institutions that need to be called to account, we need credible, professional journalism. It ought to be augmented by participatory and hyperlocal efforts, no doubt. But that's why one of the chapters in my recent book Public Journalism 2.0 (co-edited with Burt St. John of Old Dominion) is titled "A Place for the Professionals."

These new journalistic collaborations also validate a point I made in my dissertation five years ago (here comes the self-promotion), which is that traditional news organizations must assert leadership that helps to organize, highlight and present a broad range of citizen views for the most effective form of accountability journalism.

Traditional media offer an ability to lend worthwhile prestige and credibility to bloggers, individual hyperlocal reporters and the like -- including the hyperlocal sites at the heart of so many of the recently announced projects. The view that because the network (read: blogosphere, or social media-sphere) makes effective knowledge of the world theoretically possible means that participation in it makes such knowledge inevitable is just plain wrong -- some observers' views notwithstanding. (In my snarkier moments, I refer to those attitudes as the "blogging-will-save-the-world" mentality. Or the "I can learn everything I need to know from Facebook and Twitter" world-view.) The word gatekeeping has bad connotations of keeping information away from people. But its value lies in making information exposure manageable. Which may be why filtering is the more popular term these days.

The dissertation itself was built around two primary pieces of research done in October 2004, at the height of that year's national election. One these was a content analysis of online news sites, later republished as an article in Newspaper Research Journal, while the other part was a case-study of the Spokane (Wash.) Spokesman-Review, which at the time was doing some really innovative things to engage the community in its election and other public affairs coverage.

What follows (further warning: at some length) are some of the observations, and conclusions, made as a part of that dissertation about the value of presenting citizen content under the umbrella of the traditional news organization -- which seems to be coming to pass with greater frequency in the news collaboratives that are now coming on the scene.

Excerpts from: The Fourth Estate in the Networked Age
Dissertation done at State University of New York at Buffalo
Jack Rosenberry, 2005

"Online papers can provide a sense of authority and direction for information such as links to online sources. Louis Bloom of Camano Island, WA does the kind of work that exemplifies disintermediated, citizen-directed democratic action that proponents of cyber-democracy find so valuable. Bloom files Freedom of Information requests with the state government to get the names of state employees, the agencies they work for and their salaries, then posts the information on a World Wide Web site. He writes on the site that he does this to expose nepotism and cronyism in state government. This is cyber-democracy in action, at least in the sense of providing interesting and valuable political information for widespread use, even if it lacks a forum for its discussion or mobilization of action upon it.

"But realistically speaking, how likely is it that Bloom’s work would become widely known or accessed under most circumstances? Those most likely to locate the fruits of his labors and use them are those who are already politically savvy and knowledgeable. But reporter Rich Roesler, who covers Washington state government for the Spokesman-Review, has made sure that anyone who looks at his blog on the paper’s Web site knows about Bloom. Roesler encourages readers to look at Bloom’s site and offers a link to it near the top of the page where Eye on Olympia is posted. Further, this exposure is persistent; unlike a one-time report in the print paper, the publicity for Bloom’s work is on Roesler’s page day in and day out. People will not miss out on accessing Bloom because they happened to not read the paper the one day he was profiled, or because they misplaced the paper clipping with the URL in it. The way Roesler directs readers to Bloom’s work exemplifies how Kovach and Rosenstiel say journalists have to help readers find the “good stuff,” and another example of journalists adding authority, structure and facilitation that makes cyber-democracy work better. "

* * *

"Arguably, motivated and interested citizens would find these links on their own. But motivated, interested citizens can attend City Council meetings, too. Nevertheless, newspapers cover City Council because not everybody can or will attend the meetings, and the journalists see it as their job to improve the public’s access to what happens there by reporting on it. The online paper provides the same sort of public service, based in technology, when it collects and presents valuable links to the public."

* * *

"But critics of cyber-democracy ... note that the power of the network can be harnessed through settings that provide a certain degree of management, editing and gatekeeping. Such online interaction works best when it is fostered by such facilitation, research such as Dahlberg’s indicates. But who should the facilitators be, and how are they to be found? Anyone can post a Web page with his or her political views, invite and even moderate discussion. But what credibility will they have with respect to the community at large? What level of traffic will they achieve? What impact will they have on the political power structure?

"This is where a new role and function for journalists could emerge, using the interactive power of online journalism to reclaim their eroded Fourth Estate role in ways that are not possible under traditional source-message-channel-receiver models of mass communication. Online and off, journalists already can and do fulfill important roles regarding surveillance and social cohesion/construction of common knowledge. Combining these with sponsorship/facilitation of discourse and extension of the forms by which political information is presented can add up to a more powerful impact on public opinion and a more powerful process for reconnecting the public with public life.

"Two crucial features separate this model from basic notions of cyber-democracy. One is the framing and backgrounding of basic information provided by the news coverage. The other is that the involvement of the paper, a community institution, gives the information exchanged and expressed there a certain traffic level and institutional authority that makes the interaction more meaningful than would be accorded to independent agents who are doing the same thing—but who may or may not be working with accurate, credible information and whose work may or may not even be noticed by any sort of larger public, much less institutional decision makers.

"This new conception builds on theories that are well-established in the literature, such as computer-mediated communication’s ability to merge characteristics of mass and interpersonal communication, the opportunity (some would say obligation) provided by interactive presentation for journalists to adjust their role with respect to the audience, and cyber-democracy’s capacity to foster discourse but its accompanying need for structure and facilitation to do so effectively. By integrating the theories, weaknesses associated with each that undermine their practicality can be mitigated by strengths of other models. "

The REAL Twitterers

2010-05-21T17:37:00.002-04:00

A family of wrens has taken up residence in our back yard, and after a short time of watching and listening to them, it's pretty clear why a cartoonish wren is the symbol (mascot?) of Twitter, the website:

The word "twitter" is very much an onomatopoeia for a wren's warble. (If you're not familiar with their song, you can hear some in this short video.)
They're very small -- less than 5 inches long -- kind of like 140 characters is a small amount of space.
But despite their size, they crank out the volume. The decibel level coming from such a diminutive creature is truly impressive. I could hear them over the sound of the power mower!

Kaizen journalism instruction

2010-05-20T18:55:00.006-04:00

Back in the '80s, when I read a lot from magazines like Inc. and books such as Tom Peters's In Search of Excellence, the approach that was all the rage was Japanese management methods. William Ouchi, for example, developed Theory Z to supplant Douglas McGregor's Theory X and Theory Y about employee motivation.

Another big area of focus was how Japanese corporations had adopted principles of kaizen, or continuous improvement. (Toyota, its recent problems notwithstanding, used this principle to turn itself into a company whose product reliability was downright legendary.)

Ever since learning about this principle, I've realized its value in terms of making my work better, first in the newsroom and now in the classroom. I've never taught a course the same way twice. Sometimes the semester-to-semester adjustments are minor tweaks, and other times they're more significant revisions. But as the pace of change in the industry accelerates, looking to continuously improve journalism courses becomes even more crucial.

Here are some lessons learned this semester that I'll be using, kaizen-style, to improve fall course offerings.

One of my big changes in the recently finished academic year was to experiment with true multimedia journalism in what had been a print-centric advanced newswriting course. Students were required to report and present on multiple platforms -- text, photo, video, flash graphics -- and collaborated with an advanced Web design course to create a site where it all could be presented. As with many new projects, there were some rough spots, notably with the video, but overall a success.

But the biggest take-away from the course for me was that so much of what I tried to bring across in that advanced elective course really belongs in the mandatory introductory newswriting course our program offers. This would provide a baseline knowledge that could be expanded upon in the upper-level courses, both in journalism and other courses within the program.

I'm looking forward to making the adjustments.

Why social media is crucial to journalism

2010-04-24T17:23:00.003-04:00

Two recent research studies that I ran across today -- appropriately enough, through Twitter -- are all the evidence anyone in journalism today should need with regard to how important social media and mobile access are for the future of the craft.

Study 1: From the University of Maryland.
UM students were asked to go without media for 24 hours and write about the experience in a group blog, which was analyzed. Many students described the experience in terms of an addiction that had gone unfulfilled. The university described the study in a news posting and summarized some additional details (again, appropriately) in a blog posting. (I especially like the Wordle summary.)

Study 2: From the Pew Research Center.
For teenagers, online text messaging has become the dominant form of social interaction -- surpassing even face-to-face contact with close friends.

Findings such as these are so important because these are the news consumers (I am deliberately avoiding the term "readers") of the future. Understanding and addressing these media usage habits is necessary for anyone developing future models of journalism

AP Style changes on Internet terms

2010-04-17T09:00:00.003-04:00

The Associated Press in the newest edition of its industry-standard Stylebook will be changing its style on Web site to "website," catching up with the way the rest of the world thinks and writes.

I saw several tweets* praising this move for its common sense, and have to agree. But I also saw a tweet (re-tweeting another author) advocating for making "internet" lower case as well.

That one, I must disagree with. There is only one Internet. That makes it a unique entity that deserves the status of a proper noun, and proper nouns are capitalized. In my opinion, there's not even room for debate on this one. Internet needs to be capitalized in all usages.

The same for World Wide Web as a descriptor of the largest and most commonly used part of the Internet, for that matter. It's also a unique entity and therefore a proper noun.

For anyone who cites "consistency" as the reason to maintain lower case with either of these terms, let me cite some precedents for adjectival forms being lower cased even when the nouns they draw from are proper. AP style says "congressional" goes downstyle as an adjective (e.g. congressional committee) but I would hope no one would use that as grounds for saying its OK to write "congress" just to maintain parallel capitalization.

I'm all for guarding against excessive capitalization in journalistic writing and it's time for "Web site" to go. But let's not jump overboard.

- - - - - - - -

*Note that I'm fine with "tweet" in lowercase as the noun and verb for activity on Twitter. But for the same reason as Internet I would maintain that the name of the site should be capitalized as a proper noun. As should Facebook, IMO, even though it likes to confuse things by having a logo with a lower-case "f".

More on making up for lost journalism

2010-04-09T18:51:00.004-04:00

I keep coming up from behind on this story, for some reason. Probably because I collect a whole lot of great stuff in GoogleReader, then let days pass without reading it and coming upon it later.

But Steve Outing made a really insightful reply to the same Alan Mutter piece about non-profit journalism that I used as a jump-off point for my last entry (immediately below).

Outing points out that a lot of the "lost capacity" in newsrooms -- calculated at $1.6 billion by Poynter's Rick Edmonds -- isn't exactly irreplaceable accountability journalism but the type of commentary and redundant functions easily found elsewhere in the new journalistic ecosphere:

"Of all that lost for-profit journalism that used to be published by newspapers, lots of it is no longer needed. Newspapers have lost plenty of movie and book reviewers; foreign and Washington, D.C., correspondents; sports reporters who travel across the country to cover every away game; and on and on. I don’t mean to belittle the loss of those jobs, but the Internet has made available plenty of credible replacements.

"Is it necessary that my hometown paper have a professional movie reviewer, when I can read a wide range of professional and movie-goer reviews on my laptop or phone? I’m not the only person who’s stood in front of the multiplex theater deciding what movie to see by checking the reviews and trailers using Flixster on my smartphone. … That the local metro paper no longer has a correspondent in D.C. is lamentable, but there are plenty of replacements just a few clicks or finger-taps away. … Foreign news coverage? I’ve never had such a wide range of sources available to me, for free, no less.

"In other words, plenty of that $1.6 billion in lost newspaper journalism is not going to be replaced; it already has been by other parties.

Those are important, and relevant, things to consider as we talk about what's being lost as newspapers decline. For more read Outing's complete post.

Paying for just the journalism, revisited

2010-04-03T18:01:00.006-04:00

I'm a little late to this party, but want to react to Alan Mutter's post from a few days ago (March 30) about non-profit news funding, which drew a lot of (mostly negative) attention. Mark Coddington in this week's Nieman Lab Week in Review examines the controversy and curates a bunch of links to other posts about it.

Most of the debate -- especially in the comments at the end of Mutter's post -- centered on the likelihood and practicality of charitable donations being able to fund journalism to the tune of $4.4 billion a year currently spent on newsrooms. Mutter used that figure based on some calculations by Rick Edmonds of the Poynter Institute a few months ago.

But one of the comments -- which was made and ignored, garnering no reaction from other commenters -- pointed out that $4.4 billion amounts to $44 each from 100 million households nationwide. From my perspective, an even better way to look at it is that amounts to about $100 a year from each of the 44 million subscribers who currently pay to receive a daily newspaper, a figure remarkably similar to what I calculated and discussed in a post right here a few weeks ago.

It seems as if no one is putting any time or effort into figuring out how to get people who are now paying more than $200 a year for printed newspaper journalism to pay a fraction of that, say roughly half, for comparable online journalism. I'm repeating myself from the earlier post, but I don't think the issue whether paywalls will succeed is lack of willingness to pay for content. If it were, no one would pay for print, either. The real issue is that the weak content and crappy interface of most online news sites isn't worth paying for.

The newspaper industry's moguls should be working on create an online user experience that comes very, very close to reading the newspaper on paper with online delivery of interesting story selection, decent design and good writing. Then they should price it basically to cover just the overhead of paying for the journalists who will produce it. If this were to happen I'm convinced people who are still willing to pay for print would pay for this improved online version -- especially if it were to cost LESS than they were paying for the physical version.

Why is no one talking seriously about this? Develop an interface to the news worth paying for, and people probably will do so.

State of the News Media highlights pro-am collaboration

2010-03-15T21:12:00.005-04:00

The annual State of the Media report from the Pew Research Center and Project for Excellence in Journalism was released today. This project each year offers a treasure trove of information, statistical and narrative, that does exactly what the name says it does: provide an overview of the state of the news media.

It documents in very stark terms just how bad off the newspaper industry is, with numbers on plummeting revenue and circulation. As the report's overview put it:

"For newspapers, which still provide the largest share of reportorial journalism in the United States, the metaphor that comes to mind is sand in an hourglass. The shrinking money left in print, which still provides 90% of the industry's funds, is the amount of time left to invent new revenue models online. The industry must find a new model before that money runs out."

The six major trends highlighted in the introduction to the report also offer valuable perspectives:

As we learn more about both Web economics and consumer behavior, the unbundling of news seems increasingly central to journalism's future.
The future of new and old media are more tied together than some may think. One concept that will get more attention is collaborations of old media and citizens in what some call a "pro-am" (professional and amateur) model for news. Yet how traditional news organizations cope with such partnerships, the rules for what is acceptable and what is not, remain largely uncharted.
The notion that the news media are shrinking is mistaken. Reportorial journalism is getting smaller, but the commentary and discussion aspect of media, which adds analysis, passion and agenda shaping, is growing -- in cable, radio, social media, blogs and elsewhere.
Technology is further shifting power to newsmakers, and the newest way is through their ability to control the initial account of events.
The ranks of self-interested information providers are now growing rapidly and news organizations must define their relationship to them.
When it comes to audience numbers online, traditional media content still prevails, which means the cutbacks in old media heavily impact what the public is learning through the new.

Some other highlights from the overview that stood out for me:

"Citizen journalism at the local level is expanding rapidly and brimming with innovation. This year's report includes a new study of 60 of the most highly regarded sites. The prospects for assembling sufficient economies of scale, audience and authority may be most promising at specialized national and international sites -- efforts like ProPublica, Kaiser Health News and Global Post.For all the invention and energy, however, the scale of these new efforts still amounts to a small fraction of what has been lost."

"Yet the energy and promise here cannot escape the question of resources. Unless some system of financing the production of content is developed, it is difficult to see how reportorial journalism will not continue to shrink, regardless of the potential tools offered by technology."

"Old media are trying to imagine the new smaller newsroom of the future in the relic of their old ones. New media are imagining the new newsroom from a blank slate and news ecosystem.Among the critical questions all this will pose: Is there some collaborative model that would allow citizens and journalists to have the best of both worlds and add more capacity here?"

I think it's significant that Pew and PEJ recognize the importance of an emerging pro-am model for news. How exactly that relationship takes form is an open question at this point, but clearly the additional eyes, ears and perspectives of citizen journalists can offer a useful supplement for shrinking legacy operations. Equally clearly, "volunteer journalism" isn't sufficient to do the job alone, any more than volunteer EMTs could be expected to provide all of the emergency care in a community. (See analogies in posting about the "fifth estate" a while back.)

Figuring out the connection points may not be easy, but it will be necessary.

Virtual editions and news-payment models

2010-03-05T16:07:00.006-05:00

One thing that’s become apparent about the imploding newspaper business model is that the decoupling of advertising and journalism lies behind it.

The most intelligent and articulate examination of this was New York University professor Clay Shirky’s talk at Harvard University’s Nieman Journalism Lab a few months ago. In it, Shirky describes how advertising-supported journalism in the public interest is a historical anomaly, which existed for about half the 20th century simply because newspapers were literally the only way for advertisers to reach audiences for certain purposes. The rich stream of revenue supported all kinds of effective public-service journalism, a revenue stream that is now shrinking dramatically. This is because as soon as the interactive nature of the Internet made it possible to bypass newspapers, advertisers did so. As Shirky colorfully but accurately puts it, Best Buy never signed up to help pay for the Baghdad bureau in the first place.

So increasingly the question becomes: how can the industry get audiences to pay for the journalism, rendering the advertising support less crucial. Usually this is called erecting a “pay wall.” The conventional wisdom has become that pay walls just won’t work because simple economics states that the ability to charge a price for something is related to scarcity of the good, and there is no scarcity of journalistic information out there.

But something that I recently saw got me thinking about all of this, and led to some ideas for how getting people to pay for the journalism might work in a typical metro market – exactly the markets being hit worst by the collapse of newspaper business models.

This came about as I was looking at a virtual edition of my hometown newspaper and [disclosure] former employer, the Rochester N.Y. Democrat and Chronicle. The D&C, a Gannett property, doesn’t make this virtual edition widely available. Curious about it, I asked a former colleague, who told me that it’s used for some special purposes such as the NIE program. But when a huge snowstorm hit Rochester a week ago, making it difficult to deliver printed papers in a timely manner, they disabled the login wall and let anyone who was interested take a peek. I really liked what I saw, which led to the thinking described in this post. (This is what the login page looks like; it's the best I can do as far as offering a look at the product.)

On the screen, this virtual edition looks exactly like the printed paper in one part of the screen; clicking on an element such as an article or photo puts it into an adjacent space in expanded form for easier reading. I don’t think there is anything unique about this; I believe products such as Times Reader from The New York Times work similarly.

Now, I’m an old-time newspaper guy. I’m still a seven-day print subscriber to the Democrat and Chronicle. But as I sat there looking at the virtual edition, what came to mind was how close it was to reading the paper in print. It had the same typography, layout and organization. The experience was essentially the same: scan a full page, focus in on one element of it, i.e. an article of interest, and read it. Flip through the pages; find another article of interest. It was even printable; I printed out the day’s crossword puzzle just to be sure.

“I’d pay for this,” I thought – perhaps even as much, or close to as much, as I pay for the print edition (about $18 a month, charged to a credit card for ease of payment). The virtual edition even would have certain utility that my print paper doesn’t, which includes that it could have a later deadline, could be delivered more reliably (my print paper NEVER comes on time), and could save me a walk to the end of the driveway in the snow.

And that’s what set off my thinking about newspaper business models. The D&C has a print circulation of around 125,000 daily, and a bit more on the weekend (145,000 Saturday; 183,000 Sunday). If every one of those subscribers were paying the same $18 a month as I am, that’s about $25 million in annual revenue. (That is a very rough guesstimate, since there are various pricing models for the paper including weekend/holiday-only subscriptions, single-copy sales, etc.) Since the “rule of thumb” in the business is that circulation revenue is about 25 percent of total revenue, that puts gross annual revenue for a paper such as this one at somewhere around $100 million a year. That’s an even rougher number, but for purposes of this “thought experiment” these general ballpark figures are sufficient. The salient point is that this paper, and others comparable to it, have nine-figure revenue streams and still have undergone layoffs, reduced the size of the paper (both width of the page and number of pages), and been forced to do other economizing because it’s an expensive business and advertising support for those expenses has declined dramatically.

But suppose we tried to construct a model based around a virtual edition where audiences interested in getting just the journalism could do so in efficient manner, and had to pay for all of it – but not pay for a great many things that are baked into the cost of producing a print newspaper. Any discussion of pay walls generally is infused with a comment or two along the lines of “It costs money to do good journalism – reporters and editors deserve to collect a decent paycheck, y’know – so giving content away for free is something news organizations literally can’t afford any more.” No argument there. So would what would it take, in terms of costs and revenues, to do good journalism and get readers to pay for all of it?

Well, let’s run some numbers and make a few assumptions – the first of which is that the virtual edition would be the ONLY way to get the news. It would not be offered on paper or on the Internet. People who want news from the organization traditionally known as “the local paper” would have to get the virtual edition of it. Period.

Would a substantial part of the audience be willing to subscribe in this manner? Well, given how much these virtual editions can be made to look (if not feel) like the traditional paper, and given how comparable the reading experience is, I think a lot of people would. (Assumptions about attrition rate are stated below.) Not having it available in print or other online venues creates the scarcity for the product that is currently lacking from the business equation. It would make sense to maintain an accompanying Web site, but it basically would become a portal and promotional tool for the virtual edition and a repository for good multimedia work (interactive graphics, videos, databases) that would be behind the same pay wall erected for the virtual edition.

Losing the ink-on-paper version means giving up a big revenue stream – the revenue that’s currently keeping the industry afloat, in fact. But ditching the printed product also means losing huge amounts of costs: ink and paper, of course, but also all of the capital equipment costs (presses, plate-makers, stuffer/folders, trucks, real estate to house it all) and the costly wages of all of the people who run all that equipment.

But the key fact here is that print advertising is a shrinking revenue stream, a trend that’s not likely to be reversed as circulation declines continue – driving down rates—and as advertisers get even more savvy about reaching audiences without the printed paper. The revenue already is out of balance with the costs, so lopping off the presses and ancillary costs associated with them is where we start in making the costs of the journalism smaller so that it can pay for itself.

The other major assumption is that advertising wouldn’t be a part of the mix. This reduces revenue further but cuts additional costs in terms of sales and administrative staff, advertising designers, etc. Remember, what we’re trying to do is make this model as lean as possible: just the journalism, and then get people to pay for it directly.

Now suppose … just suppose (and here’s where my “thought experiment” really begins) … that three-fourths of the subscribers in a typical market Rochester’s size -- rounding off, roughly 100,000 -- were willing to pay half what they pay in print to get a virtual edition. Using the cost of my print subscription as a benchmark, that would generate a little less than $11 million in revenue ($9/month = $108/year x 100,000 = $10.8 million). Note that this is allowing for a 1/4 attrition rate from current subscribership because some people just aren’t going to make this jump, though cutting the price in half is designed to keep as many of them as possible. What we’d end up with is probably about a tenth of the current revenue stream supporting this paper. So would $11 million a year be enough to do good journalism?

Well, let’s make a few more assumptions. A standard “rule of thumb” for newspaper staffing is to have one journalist for every 1,000 units of circulation. Research has shown that this varies widely, with the ratio generally less for smaller papers and greater for larger papers. (Of course, this research was done before big papers such as those in Chicago, Los Angeles and New York started cutting newsroom jobs by the hundreds.) A 1-to-1,000 ratio seems like a reasonable place to start, so our 100,000 circulation virtual edition would need 100 journalists.

The mean salary for newspaper reporters is around $40,000. But let’s assume a slightly higher average given that some of those 100 journalists are going to be editors, who tend to be paid more. So let’s work with $50,000 as an average salary -- recognizing that there would be lots of variability around that mean. Editorial assistant "news clerks" probably would earn in the $25K range; senior editors might approach or surpass $70K or $80K.

And even if press operators and ad sales reps are no longer a part of the staff, this news organization is going to need some level of support beyond the journalists: info technology people to tend to the computers, a human resources staff, a finance and accounting group to manage the subscriptions, etc. This can be a fairly lean group, but let’s assume another 30 people, and let’s assume the same average salary. So that’s 130 people x $50,000 each (on average) for a payroll of $6.5 million.

Benefits vary by industry, but a typical benchmark is that benefits are about 30 to 35 percent of gross salary; if we pegged it at around 31 percent of the payroll that would add $2 million, for a total of $8.5 million in personnel costs.

That would leave $2.5 million out of the $11 million in annual revenue for overhead: office space, utilities, computers and other equipment, wire services, travel, etc. This is a pure wild guess, but nearly a quarter of a million dollars a month seems like enough to support the activities of 130 people doing this work.

This is a break-even scenario, of course, whereas commercial entities require a profit margin. So let’s go to a $10 per month subscription (actually, $9.95 might be more appealing, but $10 makes the math easier) and assume the same cost structure. Revenue climbs to $12 million; with costs of $11 million the profit margin is about 9 percent. That’s below the license-to-print-money-along-with-printing-newspapers environment of a few years ago, when newspaper industry margins were in the 30 to 40 percent range. But 9 percent is respectable … well above retail and many other businesses.

Now, this has been a chain of conjecture built upon guesses supported by assumptions. But that’s one of the nice things about “thought experiments;” they can take some flights of fancy. But as fanciful – made up – as some parts of this are, I have tried to be fairly realistic and reasonable about how the numbers would work. I think something like this is deserving of serious consideration in journalism’s future.

When I meet people and they learn that I teach journalism, they often ask my opinion/guess about the future of the newspaper industry. My typical, admittedly flippant, response is that my crystal ball is as clouded as everyone else’s. But I think I’m going to change that to talk about some of these ideas. Part of the problem with the pay wall discussion is that it assumes payment would be attached to the type of news now typical on the Internet. No one is going to pay for access to a Web site that, for many news organizations, is a cacophony of links and images, loads slowly because of all the blinking/spinning/moving ads, and is impossible to navigate.

Giving readers a virtual version of the paper they’ve come to know and respect, on the other hand, could well be something they would find worth paying for. The value added – what makes it worth paying for – is the familiarity of form to go with the content.

It might even be “meatier,” and thus provide more value added. Many papers have shrunk their printed product because of the costs of paper. What's usually trimmed is high-quality syndicated material, such as news analysis pieces from the wire services or syndicated columnists, that the organization has paid for but just has no room to place in the shrunken paper. Adding pages to a virtual edition using such material wouldn’t cost anything more than the time of the copy editor assembling them. This means the disappearing Op-Ed pages and dramatically shrinking wire reports common across the industry could grow back to where they were a few years ago for many papers .

And, maybe best of all, this model would be very amenable to tablet delivery. A lot of commentary has been made lately about the impact of Apple’s new iPad on the news industry. But an even stronger model, in my view, would be to use a dedicated tablet that the news organization would supply for free or at a deep discount in return for a certain subscription guarantee – say 2 years, akin to wireless phone plans that include the phone hardware for little or no money. This would answer the portability question, and make the virtual paper equivalent in nearly every respect to the current printed one.

Think it could happen?

College-pro collaboration in journalism

2010-02-24T21:54:00.002-05:00

In their report titled "The Reconstruction of Journalism," one of the ideas proposed by Len Downie and Michael Schudson was that journalism schools ought to be contributing to the news mix to a greater degree. As they describe it:

"Universities, both public and private, should become ongoing sources of local, state, specialized subject, and accountability news reporting as part of their educational missions. They should operate their own news organizations, host platforms for other nonprofit news and investigative reporting organizations, provide faculty positions for active individual journalists, and be laboratories for digital innovation in the gathering and sharing of news and information."

To be sure, this is already happening; elsewhere in the report the authors point out examples from institutions such as Berkeley, Missouri, Columbia, and Florida International.

A new one coming on the scene is a cooperative venture of New York University and The New York Times. The Local: East Village is set to launch in fall 2010, and will consist of NYU students and faculty producing the coverage, which will appear under the Times' brand on its site. As NYU professor Jay Rosen describes it,

"It’s about innovation; it’s about the classic virtues, like shoe leather reporting. It combines the discipline of pro journalism with the participatory spirit of citizen journalism. It’s an ideal way to study the craft, which is to say it’s an entirely practical project. It’s what J-school should be doing: collaborating with the industry on the best ways forward."

NYU apparently has had some kick-back from some stakeholders about this; Rosen mentions that near the end of his posting that "not everyone is thrilled" about the plan but says any problems that arise will be dealt with in course. (Read Jay's full post.)

These collaborations are terrific ideas, in my view, and could really contribute something valuable to the new ecology of journalism. Downie and Schudson make an interesting analogy to other types of professional training, where the faculty are practitioners and contributors to the field:

"In addition to educating and training journalists, colleges and universities should be centers of professional news reporting, as they are for the practice and advancement of medicine and law, scientific and social research, business development, engineering, education, and agriculture."

That's a very powerful idea for what journalism schools could contribute to the craft and society at large. I'm excited for the faculty and students at NYU and I'll be looking at the NYU-NYT collaboration to see how it plays out. I hope it's a real success and becomes a model for other colleges and news organizations. Maybe, if I'm fortunate, I'll be involved in something like this one someday.

Addition by subtraction

2010-02-21T17:00:00.000-05:00

Tracy Boyer at Innovative Interactivity offers a good summary of what must have been an interesting talk by Brian Storm, founder and president of MediaStorm, at the University of North Carolina recently. Two of the bullet points pulled out from the talk offer terrific advice for creating better presentations online -- and maybe in other venues as well. Boyer cites Storm as saying (among many other things):

We work from a subtraction process … we take out what isn’t interesting.
We use text because it is the non-emotional way of giving information. Viewers read the text in their own voice.

I love the idea of strengthening your work by looking for whatever isn't interesting, and removing it. And, while I'm a big fan of the power that interactive multimedia can add to a story, the idea that there are some things best told in text -- best experienced by the readers via their own voices in their own heads -- is a really under-appreciated aspect of journalism in the contemporary age.

Pyramid Power

2010-02-20T16:48:00.009-05:00

An entry in the Knight Digital Media Center's Online Journalism Review by Benjamin Davis proposes an intriguing way to think about news presentations, something he calls the digital media pyramid. Significantly, it's shaped like a standard pyramid because it's meant to update the traditional news formulation known as the inverted pyramid.

In the inverted pyramid, the width is a metaphor for importance -- wider at the top means more important, narrowing as it goes down to less-important material. In the digital media pyramid I'm guessing the width is a metaphor for breadth of the presentation, or perhaps the number of elements or individuals contributing to it? (I presume the width is a metaphor for something, otherwise what's the point of the visual representation. I'd welcome clarification on this.)

As Davis puts it:

"The basic premise of the Inverted Pyramid remains sound, but the device desperately needs to be adjusted for the fast-moving digital world. ... The 'Digital Media Pyramid' does not replace the analog-based Inverted Pyramid. It simply enhances it by bringing it into a 21st century digitally dominated information universe."

Mostly it adds a number of considerations to the mix that journalists need to account for in an online environment, including cut-and-pasted and linked material; artwork and ads (often auto-generated ones that appear almost seamlessly with the text); and the ways in which reader content and sharing through social networks and other resources extend the presentation.

At the risk of sounding like a fan for reductionism, I like models such as this that sum things up with a visual shorthand for something that has a lot of moving parts. So I was intrigued to read about it and think it might offer a useful frame for talking about the differences between digital and traditional storytelling. I highly recommend checking out Davis' entry for much more explanation and detail than I have offered.

An also-interesting postscript was added by digital journalist Mark Luckie, who blogs about online and digital journalism at 10000 Words. In a comment on Davis' entry, Luckie points out that

If the digital age has taught us anything it is that storytelling is no longer linear. A pyramid, whether it is inverted or "digital," is still linear.

(His comment brought to mind another Web site with some other visual depictions I recently used in a lesson about nonlinear storytelling, Mazzba Productions' summary on Web Content Design.)

While I certainly understand Luckie's point and, and I am intrigued by Davis' thoughts, I want to offer a humble (and very brief) defense of linear thinking and the traditional IP construction.

Certainly, news presentations at the macro-level are nonlinear. But most of them always have been, even in print newspapers. As I love to tell my students, I usually start with the comics and sports and double back to the "A" section of hard news only when I'm on my second cup of coffee. Few, if any, people read the paper from page 1A to the final page in order, starting every page at the upper left and going through to the end. Random access is the rule.

A key difference, of course -- and what Luckie really means -- is that non-linearity is now the rule at the individual story level, as well. Many Internet news presentations consist of several individual parts, and readers may choose to access some, all, or just one of them, and readers who do look at several of them can choose the order of reviewing them. Journalists who don't account for this take the risk of creating weak presentations that confuse their readers.

But below a certain level of granularity in the presentation, the information MUST be presented and processed linearly. A text block, even if it's only 200 words, isn't read by looking at the sixth paragraph first, then the fourth, before doubling back to the lead. It's read in order. A video, even a short one, or a narrated slide show, runs from beginning to end as the producer put it together. We haven't become completely disattached from our linear storytelling roots when it comes to the components that comprise the overall presentation, even for non-linear presentations.

And in my classes I still teach the inverted pyramid as something more than the historical curiosity that Davis frames it as. It's still a simple device for organizing the facts of a story, especially for breaking news on the Web, and powerful in that simplicity.

If there's one fact that stands out from nearly every reading on Web usability, it is that on-screen reading is slower and more difficult than ink-on-paper, so online readers scan presentations, absorbing short chunks of text best. That seems almost tailor-made to IP presentations, getting the basic ideas and facts up front for the readers. Then, the Digital Pyramid can take over in terms illustrating how the rest of the mix enters in.

The Good, the Not-So-Bad and the Ugly in Multimedia Presentation

2010-02-17T21:57:00.004-05:00

My students have been finding some excellent -- or at least pretty good -- examples of multimedia presentations, such as these from the Miami Herald, New York Times and Times again.

Then, there are the truly awful ones out there, such as this one found and tweeted by my friend Serena Carpenter of Arizona State. In my re-tweet of it I said it looked like a cliche ransom note assembled out of letters cut-and-pasted from newspapers and magazines!

Clever switch in Super Bowl ad

2010-02-14T16:02:00.004-05:00

This sharp-eyed observation comes courtesy of my wife, Missy.

It concerns an ad for Flo TV that first aired during the Super Bowl last week. The spot, titled "Spineless," shows a young man being dragged along on a shopping trip with his girlfriend, and missing "the big game" as a consequence. Just to sharpen the point, for most of the commercial he's walking around with a red bra draped over his shoulder.

When we saw the game during ESPN's telecast of the Syracuse-Louisville basketball game on Sunday, Missy noticed that the big-screen TVs in the background of the stores they walk through, as well as the FloTV sample screen close-ups, showed basketball action. Remembering that it had been a Super Bowl spot, she was a little incredulous. They didn't have basketball action in the background during the Super Bowl, did they? she wondered.

So, we found an online version of the ad as it was broadcast during the Super Bowl and, sure enough, the sports clips in that one are football. Same commercial in general regarding dialogue, actors and all ... but customized for the sporting event it appears within. Very clever use of post-production technology to target an audience.

So, now that we've noticed this I'll be looking for it during NBC's telecasts of Olympic hockey to see whether it has skaters in the scenes rather than cagers or gridders.

Important Date in Journalism History

2010-02-09T10:25:00.001-05:00

See posting about why Feb. 9 is an important date in journalism, particularly for the practice known as civic or public journalism.

(The link is to a post I made at another blog to which I occasionally contribute, that of the Civic and Citizen Journalism Interest Group of AEJMC)

The Myth of Multitasking

2010-02-05T20:17:00.003-05:00

Frontline had a very interesting documentary the other night about the impact of digital technology on a wide variety of things in our lives.

In the built-in irony department, I had recorded this Frontline episode on DVR, then watched it with my laptop in front of me, and I'd be lying if I said my attention never wandered from the show to look at my e-mail or Twitter. But mostly the laptop was there to take notes for this posting.

The show's opening had producer Rachel Dretzin talking about her home with her husband and son on two different computers, and younger kids playing a game on her i-Phone. The scene looked a lot like our house much of the time; in fact as I watched the program, with laptop at hand, my daughter was on the other computer, working on a project of her own.

But my favorite part of the program was the juxtaposition of quotes from an MIT professor and MIT student, demonstrating what I call the myth of multitasking.

When I teach classes in computer labs I have very strict rules for use of the computers, basically forbidding them being used for ANYTHING other than assigned classwork. If I catch students violating that rule, I dismiss them from class and mark them absent. I think the students are sometimes resentful of this stern, zero-tolerance attitude. But I stand by it because I agree with the MIT professor, Sherry Turkle, who said that students do themselves a disservice by believing that they can pay adequate attention when multitasking. I'm with her in thinking that "There really are important things you cannot think about unless it's still and you are thinking about only one thing at a time" (Turkle quote).

I wholly disagree with the counterpoint statement by a student named Lauren that: "I feel like the professors here do have to accept that we can multitask very well and that we do at all times. If they try to restrict us from doing it, it's almost unfair because we are completely capable of moving between lecture and other things and keeping track of the many things going on in our lives."

She portrays it as some kind of new generation gap; older people can't do this but younger people can, with no adverse impacts on their ability to absorb and process the information. But I consider it a hubristic display of a generational "third-person effect" for her to say that she and others of her generation can do it because they're young and the older generation just doesn't get it.

I just don't think it's possible to do for Lauren -- and others, including likely many of my own students -- to pay attention to multiple things at once as effectively as they claim they can. If you're writing an e-mail during class, you can't possibly absorb the ideas of a professor's lecture; it's the words of the e-mail that are running through your brain, not the words of the professor. If you're writing text messages or reading Facebook updates you can't be paying enough attention to a classmate's comments to respond to them in a discussion. I've even dismissed students from class for playing solitaire during a lecture. What the student would probably call multitasking to me seems more like a choice that playing a game is something he'd rather be doing than paying attention to the teacher.

Students may not like my lab rules, but I'm standing by them because in my judgment multitasking is a pure myth.

Employers seek mix of traditional, modern skills

2010-02-03T18:37:00.007-05:00

Arizona State professor Serena Carpenter has completed a really interesting study that highlights the importance of students learning both traditional journalistic skills and modern technological ones. (Full disclosure: Serena is a friend and collaborator; she contributed a chapter to my recently published volume Public Journalism 2.0 And, as a further aside, as a researcher, I especially admire the creative approach she took to the methodology -- a content analysis of postings on the Web site Journalism Jobs.)

The study, published in Journalism and Mass Communication Educator and summarized on AEJMC's "Hot Topics" site, says that on the traditional-skills side, solid writing, working under deadline, editing, teamwork and communication skills, and familiarity with Associated Press Style all still matter both for traditional media organizations and non-traditional ones. But also important to both types of organizations are skills such as content posting and management, image editing, blogging, video editing, and social media knowledge. (Interestingly, though, the non-traditional news organizations rate the tech skills as less important than the non-tech ones). But when it comes to these non-traditional news outlets, something that Serena calls "adaptive expertise" -- things such as creativity, critical thinking, and problem-solving -- takes on added importance.

In my view, these findings are interesting and important ones as we try to figure out how we should be teaching today's college students to be tomorrow's journalists. The challenge this presents, naturally, is how to fit all of this instruction into our courses.

(As I wrote that I couldn't help but recall the phrase used by my first real journalism "boss," the crusty managing editor of the Buffalo News during an internship I had there more than 30 years ago, who described the task of an editor trying to fit all the news into the newspaper as "fitting 10 pounds of s#%t into a 5-pound bag." But I digress.)

This old-vs.-new milieu was a topic of some discussion at some sessions I attended at the AEJMC convention in Boston last summer, also. To what degree should we as educators be providing what amounts to trade-school training in software packages and other technical skills? How much of a distraction can that become to our traditional role teaching reporting, writing and editing, not to mention topics such as accuracy and verification, ethics, law, etc.?

In programs such as ours, with one main journalism course, what can we drop out of the current curriculum to make sure all of the new aspects are covered? When the industry is saying "teach all of the traditional skills and values" and also "make sure your graduates are technically skilled and capable" at the same time, it's hard to determine the answer to that question. At what point does the emphasis on the new attenuate the old, diminishing it to the point of damage? Or, to put it another way, how do we fit 10 pounds of ... stuff ... into a 5-pound bag?

Journalism and short-attention-span politics

2010-01-30T07:56:00.009-05:00

One of the central ideas we've been talking about in my advanced journalism class so far this semester is the changing nature of journalism, especially how it's evolved away from a traditional top-down, institutionally controlled model for selecting and creating the news report.

The central concept behind the change is "on demand." Audiences have embraced, and come to expect, accessing media presentations in an on-demand way. With an entire library of songs on an iPod, music lovers can program their listening rather than waiting for their favorite song to pop up on radio. DVR makes it exceptionally easy to time-shift television viewing so you can watch what you want, when you want. Netflix delivers movies right to you, or even lets you watch them online (saving even a walk to the mailbox).

With regard to journalism this means a shift way from the "institutional" model, in which readers/viewers were locked into absorbing a presentation based on what the journalists said ought to be in it -- delivered to the doorstep at 6 a.m. or to the TV screen at 6 and 11. (Usually this is referred to as the gatekeeper model). Now, with access to a far greater range of choices for reporting and presentation, audiences can create their own reports through aggregation (e.g. Google and Yahoo collections), surfing to their favorite sites, subscribing to RSS feeds, following media organizations on Twitter and mobile updates, etc. Journalists don't determine the news report an individual consumer sees; consumers determine it for themselves. (And, increasingly, they help create it. But that's another matter.)

On balance this is a good thing, but not without a certain down side. With so many choices, it's nearly impossible to avoid attenuating our attention to any one of them. As we get lost in the "flow" it becomes difficult to pay sufficient attention to complicated matters. That's the subject of an interesting column by Charles Blow in today's (Sat. Jan. 30) New York Times.

The column is mostly about how President Obama presents his thoughts to the public on important ideas of the day, reflecting on the recent State of the Union address. But at the end, Blow has some idea about how that connects to news ecosystem and the way citizens access and react to the news of the day. Blow's comments include:

"Obama has to accept that today’s information environment is broad and shallow, and we now communicate in headline phrases, acerbic humor and ad hominem attacks. Sad but true."
"We subsist on Twitter twaddle ... (where) thoughts are amputated at 140 characters."
"The most trusted 'newsman' may well be a comedian (Jon Stewart), and stars of the 'most trusted news network' (Fox) may well be a comedian’s dream."

Blow's comments remind us that it's important to make sure that somehow -- despite the emphasis on in-demand, in-the-moment, flow-related journalism -- reporting and presentation don't become so reductionist that they harm rather than help our society's ability to address important issues of the day.

Incivility in reader forums

2010-01-26T20:38:00.005-05:00

Back when the Democrat and Chronicle introduced a revamped Web site with lots of new social media tools back in 2008, I found idea of participating in online discussion about community and national issues really intriguing. I became active, for a while, in the online forums that were a part of the new site.

Now, joining in these online conversations isn't for the thin-skinned or faint-of-heart. Most of the participants are anonymous, and hide behind that cloak to make rude, insulting comments about other participants with whom they disagree. I won't even use the word "discussion" to describe what goes on there because to me, that word implies respectful give-and-take with the goal of reaching common ground, or at least a civil conclusion about agreeing to disagree. NOTHING about the exchanges in most of the D&C's most active forums is respectful, civil or directed at finding common ground.

I was posting under my real name, with a photo, so the insults could be (and were) directed at me by name. I'm not particularly thin-skinned, so the rough-and-tumble nature and even the insults didn't really bother me. And I tried really hard to cultivate civility. I never returned fire with the insults, and tried to encourage other participants toward more respectful behavior. To absolutely no avail.

After swimming upstream against this I eventually got tired of it, and stopped participating. I still look back in occasionally, and the same rude individuals are at it. I guess they find it fun; I found it crashingly boring to watch people hurl insults rather than try to engage in civil discussion.

Which brings me to a recent column by Columbus (Ohio) Dispatch editor Benjamin Marrison. He notes that anonymity seems to be at the root of the problem with uncivil discourse in newspaper forums. His column was a follow-up to an earlier column in which he'd asked for feedback about the paper's coverage of Haiti. He reported that among those who chose to give comment via e-mail "None of [them] were mean-spirited (even the two who disagreed). Is it a coincidence that all of those civil people are reachable (and somewhat accountable) through a return e-mail?"

On the other side: "Of the 20 anonymous comments attached online to the column asking for feedback on earthquake coverage, most were negative. Several comments devolved to personal attacks, both on me and those readers who said anything positive"

And when he asked for comments about the comment feature itself, "Dozens said the online comments are so vitriolic and mean-spirited that they have stopped reading them. Many said it appears that the online comment option -- aimed at providing a community forum to discuss stories and issues important to central Ohio -- devolves so quickly into name-calling and hate-mongering that it's not worth their time."

The italics there are mine, not Marrison's. I emphasized those passages to raise the point that it appears I'm not the only person who'd like to have a civil discussion online but finds it a waste of time when the dominant ethos is anonymous name-calling. It appears if newspapers really want their story-comment sections and open forums to be places where productive discourse can occur, they will need to get rid of the anonymity.

There's a piece of academic research in here that I actually started work on a while ago; even did some lit review and collected some data. Reading Marrison's column reminds me that I ought to get back to it. It appears to be a topic worth further exploration.

Stock and flow in journalism

2010-01-24T20:35:00.003-05:00

Twice within the past week I've seen references to "stock" vs. "flow," a distinction that appears to originate in economics and describes the static vs. dynamic aspects of a system.

New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman used the terms in in a column about economic development in China, contrasting how historically what's mattered in economic growth was making the best use of knowledge stocks but now managing a dynamic flow of knowledge is increasingly important.

Robin Sloan blogged about how stock and flow serve as a metaphor for modern media, with the flow of tweets and blog postings being more prominent in media consciousness than substantial works such as books. Even as she says flow is "ascendant," her view is that stock (the more durable creations) is something "we ignore at our own peril." Both are important and striking a balance of time and attention to creating both is crucial, she says.

In journalism, especially, flow appears to be ascendant these days, with news tweets, mobile updates, live blogging, aggregation and the like getting so much attention and effort. But the "stock" of journalism is the information that's developed through original, independent reporting -- the vast majority of which comes from mainline news organizations. So much of the flow, especially through the blogosphere, just moves this stock around. But as news organizations shrink, the durable stock of vetted, verified information developed in this way shrinks along with them. As Sloan points out, we ignore this at our peril.

"Big moves" for hyperlocal involve big partners

2010-01-20T19:54:00.002-05:00

North Carolina-based blogger and free-lance journalist Andria Krewson, writing for PBS's MediaShift, recently took note of five significant developments in the world of hyperlocal journalism. (5 Recent Big Moves In Hyper-Local News, Jan. 19, 2010)

Two of them entailed hyperlocal aggregators raising significant funding to expand their efforts; interestingly both also have partnerships with legacy media businesses (Cowles Media for one and CNN for the other). Two more of her highlights were about other partnerships of "big media" -- The New York Times for one and and Los Angeles Times for the other -- with independent players to provide closer-to-the-audience coverage of parts of their geographic areas. (Actually, the NYT partnership was with City University of New York; the LA effort was with a company that calls itself "A network of of interactive community hubs.") The fifth entry in Krewson's list also addressed a hyperlocal network Patch.com, which has a partnership with a national-brand media outfit (AOL), that is seeking to expand by ... hiring professionals under the job title "regional publishers."

More evidence of the evolving ecosystem for news that has places in the mix for the pros and the independents together.

"Fifth Estate" may describe pro-am journalism

2010-01-19T20:11:00.007-05:00

Just read a terrific (though not recent)* post by Poynter's Roy Peter Clark about the updating of the Fourth Estate role of journalists to a Fifth Estate encompassing traditional media and commentators from the public. He credits the term to an unnamed speaker at a Poynter conference. The phrase caught my eye because I always use the term "Fourth Estate" in the unit I do in my intro journalism class about the role journalism plays in supporting democracy.

In the column, Roy Peter makes some wonderful analogies to other situations where the work of "amateurs" augments that of the professionals such as: citizen crime patrols who help police, lay ministers who assist ordained clerics at church, and even by-standers with proper first aid training who provide assistance in medical emergencies. As he puts it, "You do not want me to perform brain surgery on your granny, but I assure you that if granny is choking in a restaurant, I'd know how to perform the Heimlich maneuver on her."

While amateurs in these and other fields are no replacement for professionals, he notes that "in the right context, with appropriate training, amateurs can contribute to the professions." Further, "Amateurism may have special potential in a field like journalism where you do not need a license to practice." As a final point, he mentions that legions of "expatriate" journalists are now among the citizenry, with the knowledge, inclination and ability to report and comment on community affairs. Put it all together, and we have a Fifth Estate.

I think Clark is on to something here. It seems all too often the discussion over the fate of journalism gets framed from one of two polemic standpoints, either:

"If newspapers die, accountability journalism dies with them, and nothing will replace it;" or
"Newspapers deserve to die because the crusty curmudgeons associated with them just don't 'get it,' and never will, and the new free-range media of bloggers, hyperlocals and the like will do just fine in their place."

I've never liked polemics in the first place, and find myself quickly losing patience with anyone who makes either of those arguments too vociferously. My own view is that the answer lies somewhere in the middle. The credibility and "trusted brands" of legacy media, not to mention the professionalism and training that the practitioners affiliated with them bring to the table, have to account for something. But having citizen journalists and bloggers extending the reach of overstretched professional journalists can't do anything but help the situation.

If I can add another analogy to Roy-Peter's list, think of the tremendous work done by volunteer firefighters, ambulance drivers and EMTs as first responders -- often working side-by-side at the accident scene with the paid pros, but also letting the paramedics and MDs follow through with treatment that extends beyond their capacity and training. Could that be a model for journalism?

There certainly seems to be a place in the mix for both professional journalists and their amateur counterparts. What we struggle with is articulating exactly how the pro-am relationship ought to be conducted. A defining concept such as the "fifth estate," and analogies such as the ones Clark uses, might help us down that road.

*Clark's piece was dated May 5, 2009. I was directed to it via a tweet by good friend @ljthornton, who was re-tweeting an item about blogger Todd Vogt's comment on Clark's work.

What's the link between virtual discussion, civic engagement?

2009-09-05T09:48:00.006-04:00

Just skimmed over the recent report on The Internet and Civic Engagement from The Pew Research Center's Internet & American Life Project (available here). Interesting stuff about how civic engagement generally and online posting about political issues are correlated. It definitely will require a deeper read.

I'm especially interested to see if it sheds any light on something that I think is a critical, but under-rated, aspect of the whole issue surrounding online civic engagement: the question of causality.

In other words, are people who are just naturally inclined (for whatever reason) to become social/political activists using the Internet as one more tool to communicate, the way earlier generations of activists used newsletters, phone-trees, mailing lists, etc.? Or, does the ability to build communities of interests around specific agendas (political or otherwise) using interactive online communcation really lead people to become engaged in civic matters when they otherwise would not have done so (if the online tools weren't there)?

I've tried to explore some of this in my own research and the evidence I've seen on it is kind of mixed, but leans toward the first of those approaches; i.e., that people tend to be civic activists first. Joining social networks, discussion forums, and the like is just a natural progression for them, building on their innate interests to become involved. Despite the ease and efficiency of becoming "virtually engaged" in civic matters, the Internet isn't creating large-scale civic engagement out of nothing as some of the "cyberutopians" predicted it might back in the early days of its development.

There probably isn't a definitive answer here, and in fact there may be causal influences both ways -- that someone with a mild tendency to be engaged who participates in online civic engagement strengthens that natural tendency, which makes them even more inclined to become more engaged virtually. In other words, a feedback loop develops.

Like I said, it will be interesting to read the Pew report more thoroughly to see if it says anything about these issues. If anyone has any thoughts or ideas about this or suggestions for other research in the area to look at, I would be interested to hear them.

PS: Thank you to Len Witt at PJNet.org for his post about this, which led me to it.

Torn between two approaches to reading assignments

2009-08-30T09:16:00.003-04:00

This is an interesting read, about the idea of letting students choose what they want to read -- even comic books as middle-school-level "literature" vs. assigning them the "classics." The story does a good job of setting out the pros and cons.
In my view (not the story writer's) the disadvantage is an inevitable dumbing down of the classwork. But, on the plus side, at least they are reading something. If students are not reading at all in the assigned-book model, is that even worse than reading lower-grade material?

Students Get New Assignment: Pick Books You Like
NYT Week in Review Aug. 30, 2009

What I learned in Boston

2009-08-08T15:18:00.002-04:00

Just returned from four days at at annual convention of Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication (AEJMC), held in Boston this week (Aug. 5-8). I've been a member of AEJMC since 2003 and attended every convention since then. They're always great fun, reconnecting with friends/colleagues from around the country whom I've met at prior conventions and establishing new friendships as well.

Here are a few ideas or recurring themes that seemed to stand out from some of the sessions I attended.

The two ideas about the future of newspapers that appear to be reaching a consensus are (1) that editors finally seem to "get it" in terms of the industry being in a new situation that requires a different apporach to doing journalism; and (2) that there is no single approach that is going to solve the industry's problems (or even a clear path to one).

Several times I heard top editors, from well-known and respected news organizations such as the Boston Globe, Cleveland Plain Dealer, Miami Herald and Christian Science Monitor say that what the industry is embarking on is an era of experimentation. Some experiments will succeed, others will fail. Until they're implemented and allowed to run for a while, there's no way of telling which way these innovations will turn out.

What's heartening is to hear editors talk this way. Newspapering is an industry that historically has been averse to innovation. But editors who recognize that there's no turning back the clock are now open to the idea of trying things that a decade ago would have been unimaginable, such as the Miami, Ft. Lauderdale and Palm Beach papers combining their efforts on certain stories rather than using depleted staffs in inefficient, competitive ways.

Newspaper leaders also seem to recognize that audience contributions to the news mix are desirable and invaluable. During a session involving four top editors from the Boston area, talk turned several times to story comments, with a range of opinions from the editors including some positive assessments. The value that newspapers can add is aggregation, filtering and guidance to the worthwhile elements in the glut of audience-created content.

And journalistic innovation is happening outside of the legacy news organizations as well, of course. The conference featured a well-attended session on non-profit models for journalistic coverage which, while also not a panacea, are one of those experiments that may bear fruit. Several times I heard discussion about the need for those interested in journalism today to be "entrepreneurial;" staff reductions from legacy organizations create opportunities for those with good ideas to fill the gaps left in the coverage.

Among educators, the debate over teaching basics vs. teaching modern technical skills rages on. Even though knowledge of certain media production software (for publication design, Web design or audio or video editing) is a part of many modern jobs, it's unclear how much classroom time should be devoted to software training vs. nuts-and-bolts such as grammar, newsgathering and ethics. One clear message is that all communication programs need to have multimedia convergence incorporated thoroughout their curricula, since it touches all aspects of communication work.

For their part, some of the editors said they want to see students emerge from college with a better understanding of how the world works. That includes a better general understanding of the impacts of modern communication technology, and how it affects the world and the way people communicate with each other. This was something the editors rated as more important than knowing how to use a particular piece of software.

They also said the most valuable characteristic of a new journalist is something that can be developed but not really taught (as a piece of instructional content). This is that the best journalists have an innate sense of curiosity and desire to find out everything they can about the world around them.

That's one point on which there was consensus.

What the "birther" controversy says about fact, opinion and verification

2009-07-25T10:10:00.001-04:00

I find it amazing that the President Obama birth certificate controversy has gained such traction that it's still in the news nearly a year after it was first raised.

When it first came up during the election campaign, I discounted it as a weak attempt at a campaign smear by the far-right wing-nut, tinfoil-helmet crowd. I still think that's what it is, although instead of having the goal of undermining Obama's election, the purpose has become undermining his credibility.

Of course, what's put it back in the news is exposure on some national news programs, notably Lou Dobbs of CNN. Jon Stewart's recent send-up of the whole thing was terrific; my favorite part was when Stewart pointed out that CNN's most recent point-by-point debunking came from Kitty Pilgrim while she was filling in on Dobbs' show!

Of course, another part of the controversy is how CNN has stood by Dobbs, as illustrated in comments by network president Jonathan Klein to blogger Greg Sargent. (And, many thanks to @jayrosen_nyu for the Twitter post that led me to Sargent's piece.) In the article, Sargent writes that Klein told him Dobbs had presented “a few conversations with people representing a wide range of opinions.” (My italics added for emphasis - jr.)

Klein's statement is seriously flawed, on this fundamental account: what the "birthers" say is not, repeat NOT, a matter of opinion (and I'm flabbergasted that the head of a major news network can't tell the difference). Let me illustrate the difference for him.

The following are statements of opinion:

"Obama has done a terrific job in his first six months in office getting the country back on track."
"Obama's first six months have been nothing short of disastrous, and I fear for what the next several years will bring."
"Obama's health care plan is the fix we need now to a system that's gone way off the rails."
"Obama's health care plan will do nothing other than make a bad system worse."

The problem comes -- and this is evident in the birther controversy, but other areas of political discourse as well -- when people put the words "I think..." or "I believe ..." in front of some unsupported hypothesis or factual statement of dubious accuracy or authority, and justify it by calling it an opinion. Some examples, including one ridiculous one just to make the point:

"I believe the world is flat and the Sun revolves around it." (Debunked by every bit of scientific evidence known to humankind.)
"I think the mayor is a corrupt thug who takes bribes." (Either he is, or he isn't. Saying you think it doesn't make it true, any more than saying "I believe ..." in the previous example makes the world flat. And putting "I think" in front of it doesn't give you any extra leeway in expressing it in a public forum. You'd better not report such things about the mayor in any venue unless you can produce the evidence, preferably from a legal source such as court records.)
"It's my belief that President Obama is not a natural-born citizen."

Jonathan Klein may label that third statement an "opinion" in the context of defending Lou Dobbs' right to have people with "a range of opinions" on his show (i.e., those who believe that statement and those who don't). But that is NOT an opinion. Based on thoroughly researched evidence, it is an incorrect factual statement with the word "belief" in front of it. Klein may as well defend Dobbs' right to bring people on the show offering the "opinion" that the world is flat. The statements are functionally equivalent.

What this illustrates about flaws in our general discourse is the following: under the guise of "everyone is entitled to express an opinion," a great many people spew false facts and various conclusions based on flawed evidence and bad logic, vigorously defending their privilege to make such expressions. But that doesn't make these "facts" and conclusions valuable contributions to the public sphere; rather they serve to clutter it and make political discourse more confused and cumbersome.

This should not be construed as an attack on free expression or the right of people to hold and express opinions; as a journalist and journalism instructor I absolutely respect and support those rights. But I am trying to make a point about the importance of verification in the process, a quality generally associated with traditional media who still (as near as I can tell) operate under the mantra of "try to get it first, but be sure to get it right." In the free-range expression of the mediasphere that doesn't follow this mantra, a great deal of information unburdened by context, support or verification poses as "fact." It's how things such as the "birther" controversy get started, and gain traction.

Limits of Citizen Journalism

2009-07-16T08:57:00.000-04:00

A breakfast conversation with my wife prompted me to some observations about the limits of citizen journalism.

The following is one part disclosure/one part necessary background to understand the situation: My wife, Missy, is a citizen journalist. She blogs under the auspices of our local paper, the Rochester (NY) Democrat and Chronicle and also contributes to a hyperlocal site that covers our community of Webster, NY.

Our morning ritual includes reading the morning paper -- in print -- over breakfast. (Admitting this probably says more than I should about our age/generation.) An ongoing story that the paper has been covering in another local town (Greece, NY) concerns trouble in the police department there. A couple of officers have lost their jobs and been convicted of crimes; the chief has been suspended as part of an investigation into the hiring of these officers and his handling of the situations surrounding them.

So, as I read an update about this the other day, I looked across the breakfast table and asked Missy: if this were happening in Webster, would you be writing about it? Despite being only halfway through her first cup of coffee for the day, she just looked back with an expression that said: you're kidding, right?

In other words, as a citizen journalist, she wouldn't go anywhere near such a story. And I doubt she's alone. Missy has certain assets make her a very capable citizen journalist -- including a background in public relations that makes her very adept at collecting information and composing stories, and 25 years of marriage to a journalist/journalism professor that influences her ability to recognize stories (news judgment). If any citizen journalist could delve into such a community "trouble" story, it would be one with her skills and background. But she wouldn't, because she doesn't see that as her role or function. I think most citizen journalists would approach it the same way.

Which brings me to my point about limitations: if it weren't for the trained journalists, getting paid by a major organization (Gannett, in this case) who show up for work each day ready to tackle the "tough stuff" that falls outside of the umbrella accessible for citizen journalism coverage, we wouldn't hear about a great many of the police scandals and other vital news of our local communities. Citizen journalism can provide many benefits to community coverage by increasing the number of ears and eyes monitoring comings and goings and putting information about them out there. But there are certain stories it's just not going to touch.

On one level, this is not a startling observation; even the staunchest advocates of citizen journalism say they see it as a supplement or complement to traditional news organizations, rather than a replacement for them. But here is why I think it's a pertinent observation nonetheless: as news consumers have been caught up in a series of "next new things," from freely available text news on the Web to multimedia presentations to aggregation (e.g. Yahoo! News) to blogs to Twitter, newspapers have slid further and further down the list of "must" media in people's lives.

It almost doesn't matter that the citizen journalists themselves -- and the advocates and experts who promote and evaluate and research citizen journalism as a practice -- always carefully include the disclaimer "this won't replace traditional journalism." I say that because the people who really matter -- the audience -- don't get that drift. The heart of the financial crisis surrounding traditional newspapers is that too many people (and this might include some of those experts and advocates) see them as falling somewhere along a spectrum ranging from "optional" to "irrelevant" when it comes to regular news consumption; an ever-declining number of people see them as "irreplacable."

Almost 40 years ago* Joni Mitchell sang "don't it always seem to go that you don't know what you've got 'til it's gone ..." Will we be saying that about professional coverage of local news at some point in the not-too-distant future?

*"Big Yellow Taxi," 1970

Social media's ties to journalism

2009-07-14T10:31:00.000-04:00

Here's a link to another interesting article about linkages of social media and journalism, which appropriately enough came to be via a Twitter feed from my friends at AEJMC.

Jumping in to Social Media

2009-07-12T14:36:00.000-04:00

In the beginning was the Web. Then came blogs, and Facebook, and lately Twitter. No question about it, social media is changing the face of communication and journalism.

That's why I've taken this page, which was a static listing of information about my work, and started using the blog features built into it for their intended purposes. My intention is update it with some frequency with observations about this changing milieu. (The depth of that intention and the frequency remain to be determined; right now the intention is strong to keep the frequency both regular and often ... but that's easier to say in July than to do in October.)

Actively engaging myself with these tools so that I can better teach about them is why I've also started a Twitter account (@JackRosenberry) and become more pro-active about regularly updating and using my LinkedIn account. I'll probably join Facebook as well, although I haven't to date.

So, let me start with a link to something I recently read that I see as a terrific summary of the current state of journalism education with regard to convergence. It's a column for the July 2009 AEJMC newsletter by Jane Singer of the University of Central Lancashire/University of Iowa, who's done a lot of work on digital journalism and convergence that can be found here. Many thanks to Jane for providing something that, in my view, is a really concise and cogent blueprint for how we should be preparing students for a converged environment.