Earthquake news traveled virally

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

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

(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

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.

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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

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"?

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

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.