Sunday, March 21, 2010

Journalism, news work and paying the bills




In any revolution one of the biggest fights begins with language.

Today for instance, in a 24/7 world of print, cable, broadcast and Web updates, what exactly is "journalism"? Does it cover both The New York Times and my neighbor's blog?

Jan Schaffer says there's a difference between journalism and "news work." And the people we call citizen journalists, she says, might be better described as "citizen media makers."

Schaffer, executive director of J-Lab: The Institute for Interactive Journalism, spoke March 20 at the Indiana Coalition for Open Government's Citizen Journalism Boot Camp.

She credits Columbia University doctoral student Chris Anderson with terms like news work and "fact entrepreneurs" - bloggers like Matt Drudge, for example.

Journalism is about collecting, validating, producing and publishing news, Schaffer said. "News work is bigger than journalism. It is sharing information, facilitating conversation, crowd-sourcing stories, smart curation and aggregation, data-mining and visualization ... social shout-outs."

It's less fun to talk about but I'm glad the business of news is getting some attention, too.

Schaffer's remarks in Indianapolis reflected views she's expressed elsewhere on entrepreneurism and the future of news, including at the University of Southern California in February.

"As I look at how the media ecosystem is evolving in communities large and small across the United States, I am more optimistic than pessimistic that citizens will get their information needs met," she said then.

"I also think that traditional journalists will play a smaller - albeit still important - role as the gatherers and disseminators of news.

"Others, though, will have increasingly important roles to play. They include citizen media makers, but also fact entrepreneurs, creative technologists, philanthropic foundations, universities, advocacy groups and even governments."

The J-Lab has been funding news startups around the country. Schaffer refers to "the promises and perils of this new breed of citizen journalists."

"They are not merely bloggers, inveighing against something they don’t like," she said at USC. "They are more than photographers or videographers, bearing witness to some catastrophe or breaking news event. They do more than post tweets shouting out some bit of news.

"These people have deputized themselves to systematically cover town news as best they can. Some have “beats;” they have formulated rules of governance for their news enterprises; they have guidelines for content; many have sought nonprofit status from the IRS. They edit content that comes from other contributors. They moderate comments on their sites. Many buy libel insurance."

Aside from grants, how does this work get funded?

"For the most part, they are doing this as a labor of love," Schaffer said.

"They are lucky if they can raise enough money to get reimbursed to drive to a town meeting or pay for a babysitter. They are looking to do more than just dispassionately cover their communities. They are seeking to connect and inform people in ways that might help their communities do well."

That economic angle haunts me because I teach journalism to college students. The work they're preparing for is hard, and they deserve to be paid.

Projects like J-Lab do a great job of helping us think through the nuts and bolts of content creation. The startups they fund are helping point the way to a future clouded for now by tough economic times.

We also need something like an "S-Lab," as in sales, to find economic support.

The future of news won't be decided by people who do it as a labor of love. There aren't enough volunteers for the endless hours of commitment it takes to produce serious enterprise reporting.

We'll always have blogs or outlets like them. Civic-minded volunteers will play an important role in crowd-sourcing, local-local coverage and community organizing. But if we want dispassionate beat coverage and enterprise reporting we'll need the kind of money that comes from self-sustaining businesses.

We're working on it: Online revenue is growing again, and the Web sites at some metro newspapers generate enough cash to equal newsroom payrolls. Some of us are experimenting with inexpensive multimedia tools to produce cost-effective online ads.

Ultimately, the same kind of energy and creativity we direct to the editorial side will help us through the business challenges.

We'll do the vital news work we need to do - and pay people fairly for doing it.
- John Strauss, jcs1122@yahoo.com

Saturday, March 20, 2010

First lesson for citizen journalists - get it right


I was presenting at a conference for citizen journalists this weekend, talking about the "Marlboro Marine" story on the fascinating multimedia site Mediastorm.com.

The Mediastorm audio slideshow, here, recounts the story of Lance Cpl. James Blake Miller, whose photograph by Luis Sinco of The Los Angeles Times became an icon of the Iraq war.

The Mediastorm piece is a very powerful story of post-traumatic stress disorder, and Sinco not only took the photographs but befriended the young Marine and tried to get him help.

Sinco's work has been widely hailed, so I was surprised when one of the people at the conference, a woman whom I later learned writes for the Web site Daily Kos under a pen name, raised her hand to ask this question:

"What do you think about the way that cigarette was Photoshopped in?" she said.

I'm not aware of that, I said, and moved along to the next topic in the presentation.

Afterward I asked her about this claim that one of the best-known photos from the Iraq War was a fake.

"It's on Snopes," she said, referring to the myth-busting Web site, Snopes.com.

As we talked I did a Google search with my iPhone but couldn't find anything.

"It's on there," she insisted. "You have to go to Snopes and do the search from there."

By then the next session was starting, and I had to go back inside. But when I got home, I looked again. In fact, a check of Snopes - and everywhere else I could look on the Web - turns up nothing. The photo and Sinco have been widely acclaimed, and as best I could tell no one has seriously charged that the image was faked.

Miller, who according to media accounts accepted his fame only reluctantly and in no way celebrated his appearance in the photo, has never challenged its accuracy. Again neither has anyone else, as best I could tell.

Which made me wonder why someone would raise an accusation of journalism fraud in the middle of a journalism workshop on such shaky grounds - if any grounds at all.

I wanted to ask the woman that, and looked her up on the Daily Kos site. Three things struck me:

- The Web site allows its writers to publish anonymously.

- There's no contact information that I could find for the person.

- Kos is the nickname of the Web site's publisher. Accuracy doesn't appear to be a big concern. If a reader wanted to point out an error in one of the pieces on his blog, he offers this advice on the site's "Contact" page:

"I only write those posts written by "kos". Please do not send feedback on other posts since, well, I didn't write them."

Get it? If you think something's inaccurate here, the publisher doesn't want to know about it.

I couldn't find any contact information for the woman who attended the seminar and impugned the photographer's integrity. So I left her a note in care of Kos, asking for more information about the Photoshop claim.

Bottom line: It's good that we're hearing more media voices, and I'm happy to help train them. But maybe along with the lessons in audio, video and interactive graphics we need to stress the highest value of all.

Trustworthiness.



- John Strauss, jcs1122@yahoo.com


Daily News brings home national online awards


The Ball State Daily News won 15 Gold Circle Awards for Online Media on March 19 from the Columbia Scholastic Press Association, including all six places in the Interactive Graphics category.

It was the DN's best-ever showing in the CSPA online division. The newspaper's online sister publication, Ball Bearings, added a trio of awards for Online Magazine Design and Multimedia Presentation.

The Daily News won first, second and third place, and all three honorable mentions in the Interactive Graphics category for stories about utility bills, a plane crash, astronomy and other topics.

The newspaper took first and second place, and an honorable mention for Multimedia Presentation for stories on the Peru Circus, energy drinks and Ball State men's volleyball attendance.

Other awards included:

- Second place, Secondary Coverage, for "Flight Path," the newspaper's explanation of a light plane crash that occurred after the pilot lost consciousness.

- Second place, Breaking News, for coverage of a bomb threat at LaFollette Complex.

- Second place for News Site Design

- Two honorable mentions in the Photo and Audio Slideshow category.

- One honorable mention in the Video category.

Here is a list of all the Online Media awards presented by the CSPA today:

http://cspa.columbia.edu/docs/contests-and-critiques/gold-circle-awards/recipients/2010-collegiate-circles.html#N1076D


- John Strauss, jcs1122@yahoo.com