What I find most outrageous about this report (done in my hometown, by the way) isn’t whether it’s biased against eating dogs and cats, but that it treats the fact that people in China eat these animals as some sort of new revelation. The first 1:30 of the two-and-a-half-minute report isn’t even about the ban, but instead takes a gawking, “look what we discovered: people here eat cats and dogs!” angle. It’s 1) sensationalist, and 2) presenting old, old news as something new. Seriously, there have been plenty of images about dogs and cats being eaten in China, so what’s the point of sensationalizing the report by having the reporter gawk at that?

Other thoughts:

• Interesting to note that the argument by the Chinese animal rights activists, as cited in the CNN report, is that even though cats and dogs are routinely raised to be sold as pets, there’s always a chance that one could be somebody’s lost pet. Notice why they are advocating for banning eating cats and dogs — not because they feel it’s fundamentally wrong to eat them, but because it’s wrong to mistakenly eat someone’s pet. Also note the other argument cited by the report — quoting a professor as saying that this ban would demonstrate that China has reached a new level of civilization — the implication that the benefit of the ban is not so much that it’s wrong to eat these animals, but that it’s good to show the rest of the world that China is hip to the new ways.
• As for my personal view on eating cats and dogs, see most of the comments on the BoingBoing post about the CNN report. I’ll just say that I can’t wait till the day China takes over the world and imposes its own culinary taboos on other countries. Buying frozen packs of long-dead chicken instead of picking out a clucking hen from the market, taking it home, bending its neck back and running a knife across it, draining its blood, plucking it, and cooking it? What disgusting barbarian ways!!

Disclosure: I’ve never eaten cats, but I have eaten dog meat in China on a couple occasions in my youth. It tasted, well, not like chicken. However, too many years in the United States has corrupted me and I can’t bring myself to eat either now. But there’s plenty of stuff that Cantonese people eat that Westerners might find bizarre or revolting. All I can say is, it’s your loss. Trust me.

Bloggers are increasingly credentialed as “press,” but that means we need a reliability index even more that we did before.

I responded that perhaps instead of a reliability index, it might better serve the users to present them with a trust index broken down by demographics. I want to expand on that thought here. I should clarify up front that I don’t think this should be the only tool we use for determining reliability of a story or source, but I do think it can be an effective one.

What would it look like?

Such an index would be compiled from votes by users on whether they trust a particular source or story. It would show an aggregate trust rating, but more importantly, it would also have multiple tabs showing different demographics and what percentage (and how many) within each group trusts that story or source. Here’s a quick-and-dirty mockup of what such an index would look like. Imagine something like this on every piece of journalism you come across online:

By demographics, I certainly mean basic categories such as age, education, or political affiliation (for stories where that’s relevant), but I also envision categories that are more specifically relevant to a particular story or source. For instance, the trust index on a science-related story would include a breakdown by voters who are scientists. A story about a particular neighborhood would include numbers for voters living within a certain proximity to that neighborhood. The index on an iPad review would include trust levels among people who own Macs vs. people who own PCs. A story about health-care reform would include a tab that shows how closely the voters in the index have kept up with the health-care debate, or how many of them work in the health-care industry, or how many are happy with their health care, or how many are from each income level.

How would this work?

Anyone would be able to sign up to use this trust index, both as a voter and as a source. The way I envision it, when you sign up, you would need to provide some basic demographic information, such as birth year, zip code, level of education, etc. All stories and sources are categorized, and users can pick which categories they want to vote on, such as politics, science, medicine, technology, or news about Chapel Hill, N.C.

From the other side, a user who is a source can also choose to add his/her story or site to the index for others to vote on. The index graphic will be displayed on the story or site, along with a “Trust/Don’t Trust” button for users to vote. When adding a story/site to the index, the source would have to pick which categories it falls into.

In order to vote on stories/sources in a particular category or to add a story/site to a category, users would first have to answer additional questions that provide more category-specific demographic data. For instance, if I want to to vote in the science category, I would have to first answer questions such as:

• Do you work in a job where you conduct scientific research?
• Do you hold an undergraduate/advanced degree in a science field?
• How many science-related stories do you read in a typical week?
• Where do you come down on evolution-vs.-intelligent design?
• Which organelles are the power plants of cells?
• What is the process by which cells reproduce?

Such questions would not only ask the users about their backgrounds as it is related to science, but also actually gauges in some elementary way their basic science literacy. The same goes for other categories. In the political news category, you might get tested on basic knowledge of how the government works; in news about a particular location, you might need to tell us how much time you’ve spent there. Now, considering that not all users would want some of these details associated with their names, I think the index must allow pseudonymous participation. Yes, that would open it up to being gamed, but then again, the same can be said of any open rating system. A hotel owner might sign in under several different names on TripAdvisor.com to give his own establishment five-star ratings. However, if you get enough participation, the numbers offset individuals’ attempts to game the system.

In addition to the questions users must answer when they sign up to vote in or add a story/site to a category, a source can also add one or two questions on a specific story that asks for demographic information specifically relevant to the subject. But these questions would be purely optional for the users who vote. After all, how many hoops are we willing to jump through to vote on something (and that may be one of the reasons this idea won’t work. It might be simply too much hassle to gain widespread participation)?

Why would sources use it?

Legitimacy. If this index catches on and gains widespread use, then the downside of not displaying it on your site would outweigh concerns about using it and getting mediocre ratings. Think about it: When you’re looking at gadgets on Amazon.com or hotels on a travel site, how likely are you to pick one without any reviews? Having a rating on your blog could be in effect saying, “Hey, this blog is participating in this index, which shows, at the very least, that we take ourselves and our content seriously enough to put an accountability meter on our site.”

Why would readers use it?

For the same reasons they leave comments on blog posts and rate products they’ve purchased: to make their opinions known and to help fellow readers. The key, as I mentioned above, is to not make them jump through too many hoops to do it, and it’ll be a balancing act between user convenience and getting enough demographic data for the index to be useful.

Why do it this way?

There a few reasons I favor doing a trust-by-demographics breakdown voted on by users over a one-number rating determined by one or a few editors running the index. First, it harnesses the power of the crowd, and in this case, I think that’s a good thing. Like product ratings at an e-commerce site or hotel reviews on TripAdvisor.com, the more participation you get from people who are actually using a particular piece of journalism, the more useful your rating system is to someone trying to decide whether to trust a source or a story.

My second reason has to do with the way I think people react to journalism versus the way they react to, say, a hotel room. On Twitter, Daniel Bachhuber responded to Jay’s and my tweets with the suggestion that reliability be derived from the quality of the content. My feeling on that is, while there is some kind of baseline, when you’re talking about how people view journalism, “quality of content” is usually a very subjective concept, in part because the subject matter journalism deals with often speaks to (or against) people’s deeply held beliefs and values. Think of it this way: Regardless of whether you are a Republican or Democrat, you are likely to have the same values when it comes to judging the quality of the hotel room you stayed in last night (cleanliness, comfy beds, nice toiletries, etc). The same cannot be said for the values you use to judge government policies or stories about them. Thus, in the case of journalism, the baseline for quality that most people, regardless of their individual backgrounds and values, can agree on would be extremely basic and deal mostly with form and structure, such as not having any typos or using good grammar. The quality of the substance of a story, however, is something much more divisive and subjective.

Therefore, if a reliability rating is handed out by only one person or even just a few people, it’ll invariably raise the question among users of the index: “What makes their judgment any more legitimate than my own?” While I agree with Daniel that the rating may be less subjective if the metrics are transparent, I don’t think it’s possible to have an objective rating system or for a rating system to escape the (correct) perception of subjectivity. In fact, which metrics you pick to evaluate a story is a subjective decision in itself.

That doesn’t mean rating systems can’t be useful if they are subjective, but I think it does mean that instead of taking the tone of, “This story/source is reliable,” a reliability index would be more effective and more widely accepted if it focuses more on telling people, “Here is how much trust this story is getting from different groups of people, classified by background attributes relevant to this story. Use this information to help yourself decide whether you trust it.”

Certainly, I think the breakdown-by-demographics index can, and perhaps should, be complemented by a rating handed down by one or a few editors, much like how e-commerce sites have their own ratings for a product as well as a rating by users. However, personally, I’ve always found the user ratings to be much more helpful, due in no small part to the simple fact that there are more of them, giving me a wider range of opinions and a better idea of how people generally feel about a product. In that context, how much value is there in a numerical rating by one editor when it is compared to the ratings of tens, hundreds or even thousands of users? For that reason, I think an editor’s job should instead be to provide objective metrics about a story or source — how many factual errors there are, how many times this source has interviewed the same person in stories about the same subject in the past three months, etc. — and to point out any important relevant facts people should know when determining the trustworthiness of the story or source (i.e.: A source writing about health-care reform moonlights as a lobbyist for for insurance companies).

Most Importantly

To talk about what I feel is the most important strength of a breakdown-by-demographic index, let’s use an example. Let’s say someone writes a piece that presents intelligent design with equal scientific legitimacy as evolution. It would probably spark the usual back-and-forth in the comment section, which is all fine and dandy for the spirit of free debate, but for someone who hasn’t made up their mind about whether this story is trustworthy, that back-and-forth is basically he-said-she-said.

In that scenario, a reliability rating handed out by one or a few editors does relatively little to help the reader, since that’s just one or a couple voices in the crowd, and regardless of whether the rating is favorable to the story or not, it’s not that hard for the other side to call into question the legitimacy of the rating since it’s merely “the biased opinion of just a few people.” However, if you have a rating that’s a composite of hundreds if not thousands of users, then it begins to 1) attain more legitimacy, and 2) give you a better idea of how this story is viewed by the public. Furthermore, and more importantly, the breakdown by relevant demographics would play a crucial role here. Imagine how it would influence your decision on whether to trust the story if, say, you can see that 99 percent of every voter who has an advance science degree don’t trust this story, or that despite an 85-percent trust rating, you see that 300 of the 400 people who voted believe in intelligent design but that of the 35 voters who are scientists, none trusts the article.

That last point illustrates what I believe to be the greatest value of such an index: It’s not just an index on the reliability of the story or source being rated; it’s also an indirect index on the reliability of the people doing the rating. I believe the latter might even trump the former in significance in how someone decides whether to trust a story or source. If the news is social, then it is the people who discuss a report and the frame in which they pass it on that give it context and weight. Therefore, information about those people are crucial to our understanding of a story. If the story in the example above appeared in a forum that attracts a mostly pro-intelligent design crowd (but doesn’t clearly label itself as such), the composite reliability rating and most of the comments might favor the article, and someone who hasn’t been thoroughly informed on the subject might be misled by that seemingly lopsided discussion. However, if there’s a breakdown right there showing that most of the people who voted have a poor understanding of science, but that the few scientists who voted all distrust the article, that puts the discussion in a new context. In this way, the breakdown-by-demographics index alerts us when we stumble into echo chambers and acts as a check-and-balance mechanism for composite ratings and discussions that are skewed simply because the story is being presented to a skewed audience.

I came across this piece by Mimi Johnson yesterday about her husband’s decision to leave newspapers and wanted to share it. Many of the sentiments expressed within it are no doubt familiar to anyone who has worked in newspapers. Yes, newspapers are like a demanding mistress. Yes, newspapers never love their journalists back. Yes, walking away is like ending a relationship. And yes, it sucks to have to move every time you changed jobs in this profession (one of the reasons I got out).

Personally, I’m very glad I walked away from the business before my relationship with it got to the state described in this piece. My decision to leave came in 2005. There had already been a couple waves of layoffs at newspapers around the country, including one at my paper, though nothing like what has transpired the last couple years. I was a month shy of 26, and it was the first time I had gone through a layoff. That early January night when I found out two of my colleagues in the sports department (along with many others at the paper) — both excellent and dedicated journalists — were laid off was the only time I’ve ever found myself struggling to concentrate at work, so much so that at one point I had to go outside and clear my head just so I could focus enough to get the paper out.

Wounds heal, as those wounds did, to a degree, over the course of that year. But it was obvious that it was only a matter of time before fresh wounds would be inflicted, in the form of more layoffs and budget cuts. As news of the shakeup at my paper made the rounds in the journalism circle, other papers started pilfering our talented journalists who were looking for an out. I got a few inquiries myself from good papers. Yet when I looked out over the newspaper landscape, I could see that the same tsunami was coming for every port-of-call. It wasn’t a matter of “if”, but merely “when”. When recruiters from other newspapers told me, “We don’t lay off people,” my unspoken response was “Yeah, but you will.”

I had always known that I wanted to try my hand at other fields before settling on one, yet I loved journalism and newspapers so much that when I rejoined my first paper at age 25, I honestly could see myself working there until I was 30 — well beyond my original career plans — and I could see myself possibly coming back to newspapers someday after adventures afield. But a year later, I knew that when I walk away from the business, I wouldn’t be coming back, at least not full-time and not with anywhere near as much blood, sweat, and tears as I had poured into it over the previous six years.

Four years after I walked away from working at newspapers full-time, I’ve had absolutely no regret about the decision. I have regrets about the fact that I had to leave and about watching once-great papers torn down, but never about the decision to leave. I actually still go into my old paper every now and then and help my friends out a bit. The little extra money is nice and it’s always good to get back in the saddle again, however briefly, but mainly I do it out of a sense of loyalty to friends who are still in the biz. Those little glimpses into the newsroom today — walking into a building where 4/5ths of the cubicles are unoccupied, seeing people bust ass just to get the paper out when in the past they were busting ass to put out a great product, and seeing the products get thinner and thinner and the workloads get heavier and heavier — remind me that I walked away at the right time, before a once-beautiful relationship had degenerated into bitterness, frustration, and scorn. I can still at least look back at my time with newspapers with more fondness than anguish, without feeling the need to demonize, villainize, or ridicule them for what they did to me, and for that I’m thankful.

The Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism released a study of a news ecosystem yesterday. The study examined the coverage of six major storylines by traditional and new media over a one-week period in Baltimore. There were a lot of interesting findings, and the one that has generated the most buzz is that 95 percent of the stories that contained new information came from traditional media, most of them newspapers.

The study, and that point about the 95 percent in particular, has spurred  a lot of reaction online. Traditional media, as one can imagine, has held up the study as reaffirmation of the important role they still occupy in the media landscape, while much criticism has emerged from the new media quarters about the study’s limitations and flaws. After reading some of these critiques, here are my suggestions for how to fix those flaws:

1. Instead of Baltimore, pick a market with a much, much bigger online media presence.
2. Instead of the six storylines that were studied, pick six subjects that new media tend to focus on and old media tend to ignore.
3. If the results still do not come out in new media’s favor, place findings into hat, wave magic wand, and — POOF! — pull out new-media-friendly results.

The reactions to this study are a perfect demonstration of the reasons why I’ve become increasingly jaded with the online media discussion. I’ll get to that in a second, but first, a couple thoughts on the study itself:

• I thought the study was fairly even-handed in its reporting of the findings. Upon reading the whole report, it didn’t strike me as being skewed in favor of traditional media. In fact, many of its findings are more condemnation than praise — such as the fact that 83 percent of the stories were essentially repetitive or that 62 percent of the coverage originated from the government.
• I love the detailed way in which the study tracked how a particular story developed. It’s the kind of in-depth study that we haven’t seen enough of.
• The scope of the study is indeed fairly limited (six stories, one week, one market), but I suppose such confines are necessary to make the study more manageable. I would definitely like to see more of such studies, with different stories in the same market and in different markets as well. However, I felt that the study was upfront about its limitations. In fact, it said (emphasis added by me):

This study is only one attempt at trying to understand who is producing news and the character of what is produced. Additional reports could tell more. But this snapshot was in many ways a typical week—marked by stories about police shootings, state budget cuts, swine flu, a big international soccer game in town and a mix of fires, accidents, traffic and weather.

The array of local outlets within this snapshot is already substantial, and as times goes on, new media, specialized outlets and local bloggers are almost certain to grow in number and expand their capacity, particularly if the Sun and other legacy media continue to shrink. New outlets such as local news aggregators, who combine this increasingly mixed universe into one online destination, have cropped up in some other cities such as San Diego. There is a good deal of innovation going on around the country, much of it exciting and promising. But as of 2009, this is what the news looks like in one American city.

To me, that passage there, along with other parts of the report that clearly state its limitations, is a pretty obvious caution for its audience to not draw overly broad conclusions from the findings. Alas, best of intentions …

The Reactions

Predictably, the new-media camp mostly did not take too kindly to the findings of the report and didn’t waste much time trying to discredit it. For instance, Jeff Jarvis reacted with “no shit!” (but it’s a detailed and nuanced “no shit”). Steve Buttry says the study “has too many flaws and limitations to be taken very seriously.” Granted, Jarvis and Buttry both said the study had some value, but in the context of their posts, that compliment was akin to when Homer Simpson, in his brief stint as a food critic, blasts a restaurant and then ends with “P.S.: Parking was ample.”

My responses to some of the criticism:

The Issue of Scope

Much of the criticism centers on the limited scope of the study. However, aside from the fact that the study readily admits this, I also wonder if its findings were more favorable to new media, if we would be hearing this complaint at all. Don’t believe me? Let’s hop in the time machine and go back to March 9, 2009 (I know, almost Pre-Cambrian in Internet time). Jay Rosen posted this tweet:

I wrote more about this back then, but the point that’s relevant here is that what Rosen cited were basically two people each counting one day’s worth of stories in one paper — a far narrower scope than the PEJ study. Yet that didn’t stop people from citing those numbers numerous times in the ensuing months as they tried to show newspapers’ declining relevance. Where were the critiques about narrow scope then? Virtually non-existent, of course. Do I really have to connect the dots as to why? And this is hardly a one-time occurrence.

No Shit? Well, Actually, Yes Shit

Jarvis may try to say that we’ve all known all along that most original reporting still come from major media, but I’m not so sure about that. Can somebody please point to evidence of that acknowledgement in the online media discussion? In the example I cited above about the number of local stories in a newspaper, what do you think people were implying (or just flat out claiming) about major media’s role in the changing news ecosystem? Where were the frequent “… but traditional media still produces the bulk of original reporting” reminders then, or in any recent media discussion? And if the idea that traditional media produces the bulk of original reporting is commonly acknowledged, then why the strong reaction to a report giving data to back up that idea? My guess: It’s precisely because that idea isn’t commonly acknowledged among most in the new media camp, even if they know it. And this report puts that idea in a public spotlight and draws attention to it, and that is the threat, from the new-media perspective, because hey, if people are reminded of old media’s importance by numbers from a study rather than just self-serving proclamations from journalists, they might believe old media is more relevant than has been portrayed.

Jarvis also criticizes the study for defining “news” as it has been traditionally defined — in terms of “articles”. However, as I pointed out in the comment section of his post, that’s just not true. The study, in fact, tracked not only articles, but also tweets and links to and from other sites — parts of the news ecosystem that Jarvis advocates. In his post, Buttry does make a good and fair point that the study should have included how news breaks on Twitter via the public, not just Twitter feeds from news organizations and “official” sources like the police department.

Story Selection

Another major criticism of the report is that its selection of stories focused on things like government, crime, health care — subjects that are inherently tilted toward traditional media. My main reaction to that is while that criticism may be true and valid, those are also some of the core subjects that the search for new journalism models is supposedly most concerned about, so why not focus on them? Yes, new media may own other niches like technology, entertainment, and sports, but I haven’t really heard anyone voice concerns about who’s going to cover those beats in a new media model, and since they are already well-covered by new media, why would we even need to worry about them?

And again, I question whether this would’ve been an issue had the findings turned out more in favor of new media. If the study picked six subjects that are new media’s bread-and-butter, would we see that point brought up, dwelled on, and hammered home? The ultimate issue here, I fear, may not be methodology, but rather ideology, and that’s the most disappointing thing about this for me.

Sick of It

In many of these new-media reactions, including the ones I cited above, the first and foremost thought seemed to be: “This is going to give old media new ammunition to use against us.” It was first among the concerns that Jarvis raised, and it was the opening to Buttry’s post. It just begs the question: Why, why, why? Why the heck does a study that reports so many findings about a news ecosystem immediately gets framed in the context of not just old vs. new media, but also as a weapon to be used against one side or the other and therefore must be immediately neutralized? Why must everything be turned into a microcosm of an old-vs.-new media conflict that we keep saying is over, a war we keep telling ourselves we aren’t going to fight anymore, an argument that we’ve supposedly moved beyond?

This underscores exactly why I’ve been becoming increasingly frustrated with the journalism discussion online. The debate has become so polarized that “insights” on any issue or new data have become pathetically predictable, and interactions between the two sides have frequently degenerated into little more than a repugnant game of gotchas, snarks, nitpicks, and mutual strawman accusations.

I sympathize with those in traditional media for the massive job losses, and from having worked with many of them, I know that they are actually much cooler people than the egomaniacs that some have tried to paint journalists to be. However, I am discouraged by the denial that some of them still cling to and the combination of individual and corporate intransigence that stymies attempts at change. Their industry is falling apart and yet some of them are still grasping at straws, such as that 95-percent figure from this study. Even if the study’s findings were undeniably correct, what good does it do to produce 95 percent of news when you are in danger of going out of business?

On the other side, I love the fountain of ideas bubbling up from the new-media camp, but am frequently turned off by the fact that the camp often exhibits simultaneously symptoms of a superiority complex and massive insecurities, creating the need to shout down any shred of evidence that might prove contrary to their beliefs. Time and again, it just feels like their focus is more about being (or appearing to be) right than about improving journalism, and that despite statements to the contrary, they relish the verbal sparring against old media a little too much. Did anyone tell these guys that they are already winning, that time and momentum are on their side? Lose that Mt. Everest-sized chip on your shoulders for crying out loud!! Honestly, if someone stumbled upon the surefire path to a successful new journalism model tomorrow and that path runs counter to what some of these guys have been pushing, I question whether they can bring themselves to embrace it.

Buttry opened his post about the study by saying that the reactions to the findings may tell us more about the state of the industry than the study does. Well, apparently the reactions have also held up a mirror to the face of the online discourse about journalism, and I for one am disgusted by what I see. This is part of the reason I’ve been blogging less about the subject lately. Staying away from the journosphere for most of Christmas break was such a pleasant break from the ceaseless cycles of kvetching, self-promotion, back-patting, ego-stroking, and hypocrisy. And that’s how a former journalist who’s still damn passionate about journalism comes to find it more enjoyable to read and write about Victorian costume dramas and fried chicken ads than journalism.

Michael Arrington of Techcrunch.com had a piece Sunday in which he lamented the coming rise of what he calls fast food content, — “cheap, disposable content on a mass scale, force fed to us by the portals and search engines.”

The prime offender in this category is Demand Media, which has developed a system in which it uses an algorithm to figure out what people online are searching for, then produces pieces providing that information. These pieces are produced by people who get very little compensation. In this way, Demand Media basically runs a sweatshop for content, making a ton of money off ads that show up on content related to trending topics while giving back relatively little to the content producers.

My Brief Experience with Demand Media

I did a couple pieces for Demand Media a bit more than a year ago. I saw one of the company’s ads while browsing online. Out of curiosity, I signed up to be a writer on their site and looked through the available topics. I picked one — a Photoshop question — and wrote a tutorial about how to create a nebula and star field in Photoshop. The requirements asked that the tutorial be written so that a novice can reasonably follow it and achieve the end result. You can see from the linked page how much work was put into that piece, which included making screen captures in addition to writing the instructions (not to mention spending time later, at the request  of a Demand Studio editor, to rewrite a couple steps). All in all, I probably spent about 90 minutes working on that piece — for $15. But I didn’t care too much at that time and actually did another piece. I had free time to squander on such things back then. It was a topic I knew off the top of my head and therefore easy to write (and being a former journalist, $15 for 90 minutes of work didn’t seem that unfair at the time. Now I know better). However, for the second piece that I wrote, I pitched an even easier topic because my experience from the first one taught me that this is how the game works.

A few months later, I got an e-mail from Demand Media informing me that most of the assignments listed on its Web site would now pay only $5. At that point, I simply scoffed and drew the line there. From my perspective, I would rather be writing Photoshop tutorials for free than for such measly and insulting compensation. It’s one thing if I spend two hours writing a tutorial for someone on a Photoshop forum for free — that’s something I do out of the kindness of my heart and out of the spirit of sharing. But when you pay the producer of a piece of content, then it becomes a business transaction, and quite frankly, $5 for work that — if it’s to be done properly — would need at least an hour is ridiculous, especially considering what the company makes from selling ads on the content. Furthermore, as someone who actually cared about the quality of the content he created, I knew that pushing compensation to such unreasonable levels would mean I would have to lower my standards to unreasonable levels to make this a remotely profitable venture, and that was not a compromise I was willing to make.

Arrington’s Lament

In his column, Arrington warns that content sweatshops like Demand Media “will surely, over time, destroy the mom and pop operations that hand craft their content today” and “create a race to the bottom situation, where anyone who spends time and effort on their content is pushed out of business.”

To a degree, I understand and maybe even share Arrington’s concerns. However, I can’t help but notice how eerily similar his complaints are to those of old media when they gripe about the influx of crap brought about by the rise of blogging and tweeting. Laments about the poor quality of much of this new type of content? Check. Worries about not being able to compete with this new model, which has significantly lower costs than your business? Check. Dire predictions about the future of quality content when this deplorable new model takes over? Check. Oh yeah, and the inventors of the new model declaring that they do care about quality and are in fact investing in it. Check.

In other words, what goes around, comes around. The last wave of innovation gave birth to online content-creation companies that run a leaner operation than the companies that had existed before. Only a fool would assume that someone else won’t come along and figure out a way to squeeze even more money out of content by further lowering expenses and out-compete its predecessors. As Arrington himself wrote, “The disruptors are getting disrupted.”

All Trapped in the Same Game

Here’s the thing: Fundamentally, old media, new media, and Demand Media aren’t all that different from each other. They are all predicated on the premise of squeezing the most value out of content, in part by spending the least amount possible on its creation while still ensuring that the content draws audience and hence advertisers, who actually subsidize the content creation. All of these models, in essence, are trapped in the same constraints in which content and the act of creating it are assigned relatively little monetary value by the people who consume it, and the creators must be compensated by sources other than the consumers of their products. So while the consumers of the content want quality, that is not necessarily the primary concern for the content creators because the consumers do not provide their primary revenue stream. Instead, concerns that deal with attracting and retaining advertisers take precedence. It’s a realm in which we happily accept the contradiction that we value quality content but embrace a system that, for all its positives, increasingly marginalizes quality’s role as a factor in profitability for content-creation businesses. We value good content, but we keep ourselves from being the masters whom the content creators serve through our unwillingness to subsidize the time and manpower it takes to create content. This forces the content creators to worry first and foremost about the parties that will subsidize them. As a result, our top priority is relegated to, at best, a tie with the priorities of the parties providing the subsidies and, at worst, non-existence.

In that light, content sweatshops like Demand Media are perhaps nothing more than the natural, inevitable next step in the path that we set ourselves on the moment we, as a society, opted to accept this contradiction. Maybe we are simply witnessing the death of content creation as a profession and the sweatshops are just another attempt to wring a few bazillion more pennies out of this business before the whole industry dies. If producers of high-quality content lose their living, the cause won’t be the content sweatshops, but rather the system that spurred the evolution leading to such a model. Our progression down this path was accelerated with the advent of technology that removed the financial barrier to entry for anyone who wanted to publish, which flooded the marketplace with freely created and freely available content, driving our perception of content’s worth down even more. The explosion in the amount of available content — and its high crap-to-good ratio — numbed us to crappy content as we happily accepted them as part of the tradeoff for having so much more content to consume. This abundance of content also caused us to emphasize, above all else, relevance as the most important attribute in our content-indexing, search, and organization tools (as in how relevant our search results are). Both of those factors helped push quality down even farther on the totem pole of priorities for content-creation businesses.

While new media have used some of the new technology to significantly cut their costs (and thus out-compete their old-media counterparts who are chained to legacy businesses based on expensive printing presses), they haven’t figured out a way to actually break out of this contradiction. In essence, they just found themselves a higher plateau. They are still not out of the way of the same flood that’s drowning old media, and it’s only a matter of time before the water rises higher to engulf the dry land they are standing on. Demand Media falls into the same category as well, just a bit more extreme and a bit leaner than its predecessors. Old media, new media, and Demand Media are all just points along the same curve, and it’s inevitable that another model will supplant them all by figuring out a way to cut costs even more at the expense of quality without significantly impacting its appeal to advertisers.

Let me stop and clarify here: I’m not saying free content is the root of all evil. There are many perfectly good reasons why we embraced a system in which the consumers pay little or nothing for content, and it has brought many positives, but it’s an undeniable side effect that it has forced content creators to cater to interests other than those of their consumers. Nor am I  saying that online content is going to be crap if content sweatshops prosper. What I’m saying is that professionally produced content — the pieces created by people paid to produce them — will continue to decline in quality as long as we continue to accept the contradiction I stated above. Content value to consumers is already at virtually zero, and advertising revenue is getting more fragmented as the Web becomes more niche-oriented, so the content-creation businesses will be under ever increasing pressure to keep cutting costs to stay competitive. Outside the professional content-creation sphere, however, there is a whole world of people who, on an individual basis, are willing to invest the time and sometimes money needed to produce good content, without seeking compensation. And the quality of that content will not be affected by this and may even improve as more former professional content creators turn to other professions and take up content creation as a part-time hobby.

Looking Ahead

So what happens as we go forward? I see a couple possibilities: One, society looks at the situation and decides it can live with it, in which case creating quality content for a living virtually dies out, and almost all content — outside of those from sweatshops and maybe a very few rare exceptions in unique niches — is produced on the side, in our spare time, without expecting compensation. Two, society reaches a point where we collectively say we’ve gone too far, and we either retreat back up the path to an earlier point that tilts the equation back a bit more in quality’s favor, or we break out of the contradiction entirely and turn content into a direct transaction between consumer and producer, and consumers pay significantly more for content, just as they would for most other products or services. The likelihood of the last scenario happening is … umm … not good. I think the most likely end game is the first scenario, but that won’t come until after many rounds of innovations to come up with new models to stay above the rising flood for a little bit longer.

So what do I, as someone who creates content for a living, do? Innovate, branch out, and diversify my skills and my career as much as possible to stave off that end-game scenario for as long as possible, and hope my pottery-making skills improve enough for me to jump to that profession when the flood water gets ready to engulf my little strip of dry land. Unlike content, people will actually pony up good money for pots, sometimes for more than what it cost, in time and material, to produce the piece.

Photo by Lindsey Hoshaw. Borrowed from Spot.us.

Let’s talk about garbage — namely, freelance journalist Lindsey Hoshaw’s project on the Great Pacific Garbage Patch (and no, I’m not calling the project garbage), which culminated with the New York Times’ publication of a story she wrote. The project had been receiving a lot of attention in the journalism sphere primarily because it was funded through Spot.us, an innovative platform for community-funded journalism, and because the NYT agreed to run a story that developed as a result of this platform.

The NYT story ran on Monday, Megan Garber of the Columbia Journalism Review gave it a less-than-stellar review on Tuesday, and then the fun began. Read the extensive comments on Garber’s piece to see how strongly some objected to her criticism, with complaints ranging from “You’re wrong. The piece was fine” to “Don’t blame Spot.us; blame the NYT” to the always-relevant “Well, your piece sucks much more than the NYT piece”.

UPDATE (11/13): Hosham has written a classy post reacting to good and negative feedback on her project.

Before I delve into my thoughts on the subject, the requisite disclaimer: My critique of the garbage patch project is exactly that — a critique of THIS particular project, not of Spot.us. I think Spot.us is an intriguing platform with potential and wish it the best of luck. And oh yes, the usual “I’m cool; I’m with it; I love new media” bit so as to avoid having rocks or, worse, accusations of curmudgeonry hurled at me by zealots who take any criticism of anything produced by new media as condemnation of the entire concept and their personal way of life. But then again, you are not one of those people. Right?

My Thoughts on the Project

It’s important to note — and Garber does in her critique of the piece — that the NYT story is only part of the project funded through Spot.us. The promised deliverables on the Spot.us pitch for the project also include an online slideshow and a blog. So when evaluating the success of the project, one must take into account all three components. So, let’s do that.

The Slideshow

The pictures in the slideshow were fantastic, plain and simple. Not much else I can say on that.

The Blog

Garber says in her critique that Hoshaw’s blog was a much better read than her NYT piece, and I agree. Her posts generally left me wanting more and really did a good job of taking you there. However, since we are evaluating the journalistic merit of the project, I do think it’s important to make this next point: For me at least, the blog was a riveting read as a travel blog, but not as a work of journalism about the human connection to the garbage patch. The captivating aspects of the blog posts were the “Here’s what we did today” stuff. If we are to look at the journalism being done in the blog, I would rate it as mediocre at best. Nothing there really digs far beneath the surface or goes beyond just telling us what she experienced that day.

Some examples:

• At the beginning of the journey, we get a quick introduction to the crew of the ship Hoshaw was on, but overall, we learn very little about the ship and her crew beyond cursory descriptions of their activities on particular days. As a reader following the journey, some basic questions go unanswered: What kind of ship is this (from the posts, you can determine that it’s a research vessel, but we never get any kind of backstory)? Who are these people (beyond their names and titles)? How did they come to be on board this ship? What’s their story? How did the reporter come to be on this ship? Answering those questions would be a basic step in setting the stage for the narrative. Hoshaw has a couple of Q&A posts in which she answers questions from readers, and it’s in those posts that we find more journalism and less travel diary. It’d be nice to have gotten more of those answers without needing questions from the readers.
• During one stage of the journey, Hoshaw writes that the ship is slated to meet up with some “mystery guests“, piquing our curiosity. When ocean conditions made a face-to-face rendezvous impossible, she writes:

So who were these mystery people? Rumors were floating that maybe the Honolulu mayor was on board or even Jack Johnson since he’s friends with filmographer Mike Prickett who helped organize the trip. But we may never know.

Here’s the problem with that: She had the name of the person who organized the meeting and the name of the film company he runs. A journalist would follow up on those leads. A simple phone call to the guy could have solved the mystery. Yes, it may not have been possible to do right then and there in the middle of the ocean, but she could’ve followed up after she got back. Instead, we’re left with “we may never know”, which begs the question: Did you try to find out?

• In another post, Hoshaw relates the experience of catching a fish, finding debris in its stomach, and then eating it for dinner. When she expressed misgivings about eating a fish with trash in its gut, the crew quickly assured her it’s ok:

Bill and Moore were quick to reassure me that this fish is no more toxic than other fish I’m likely to eat. Are farmed fish any better seeing as they’re pumped full of antibiotics and kept in close quarters with hundreds of their brethren? Are other wild fish better even though they may also contain mercury or dioxins?

For me, that passage would set off all sorts of sirens and alarms to dig deeper. She posed those questions rhetorically, but as a reader, I would like an answer to them. And how about some background information about data on toxins in fish to put some of those claims into context? That incident is a great catalyst for more in-depth reporting about toxins in fish, but we are left with just the incident, not the follow-up.

All in all, the blog did a great job chronicling Hoshaw’s experiences on the expedition, but from the standpoint of reporting about the human connection to the garbage patch — how this floating debris affect us –  it went barely an inch deep. I explain in this comment below why I feel this is a problem (starting with the third paragraph of the comment).

The NYT Story

To put it bluntly, the piece that ran in the New York Times is pedestrian by most newspapers’ standards, much less the NYT’s. The piece tries to tackle too many aspects of the story within a limited amount of space (it came in just under 900 words). As Garber says in her critique, it reads like it could’ve been written from anywhere. It jumps from a general overview of the garbage patch to its history to a few paragraphs about the researchers on the boat to something about how celebrities are using the patch to promote their causes. None of the topics get much in-depth attention.

If this piece was intended to be an overview, then one must ask, “What’s the point?” As Garber pointed out in her critique, there has already been a good amount of reporting done on the garbage patch, and a lot of information is already available on Wikipedia. In fact, the NYT piece reads a bit like a Wikipedia article, with a few quotes added for a “human” touch and a few sentences thrown in for transition.

Some commentors on Garber’s critique have said that it’s the NYT’s fault for trying to force Hoshaw’s reporting into a format that may not have been friendly for her content. There may be some merit to that, but since I have no insight into the behind-the-scene workings between the NYT editors and Hoshaw and how the piece developed, I won’t comment on that. I will just say this: Good journalists and good writers adapt to whatever format they have to work in. Is reporting via blog posts different from reporting via a 1,000-word narrative in print? Of course! But when you know that you have to work within particular confines, you must adjust how you write to get the most out of it. So when given a 900-word limit, maybe instead of trying to address everything, Hoshaw could have picked one particular topic and drilled deep into it, producing a piece that would add much more unique value rather than becoming another generic overview story.

Update (11/19): In her post about the reactions to the project, Hoshaw wrote this about her NYT story:

I wrote what I believed the Times wanted though they never specified the type of article they expected.

The Project as a Whole

I’ll evaluate this project based on how well it met the goals it set out to accomplish in the original Spot.us pitch. First, the deliverables. I would say the project met this goal since it produced what it said it would: a blog, a slideshow, and an NYT story.

Now, let’s take a look at another part of the pitch, one that goes beyond just line items on a proposal and gets at what the journalist was hoping to accomplish:

I will focus on the human connection to the Great Pacific Garbage Patch—a vast accumulation of floating garbage located within the North Pacific Subtropical Gyre. This swirling current keeps marine debris, mainly plastic, floating together in what amounts to an enormous maritime landfill.

Though the media has covered how plastic is affecting marine life—that animals are strangled by soda rings and that fish and birds die with bellies full of indigestible plastic trash—reporters haven’t focused on the garbage/human connection. This is because no one knows how this trash is affecting us—until now.

On this front, I feel like the project fell short. After reading the blog, viewing the slideshow, and reading the NYT story, I really don’t have a better idea of the human connection to the garbage patch aside from what I already know — garbage breaks down in water, toxin gets in water, fish is in water, fish ingests toxins, humans eat fish, toxins get into humans, bad. Looking at the pitch, I would’ve been expecting much more on how the garbage came to be in the ocean, how long it would stay in the water, and much much more information on how serious a problem this is for human health.

Then, let’s look at the “How Will This Reporting Help?” section of the pitch:

(UPDATE: After pointing Dan to this post, he responded in the comment section here that he wasn’t done updating yet when I wrote this post. I checked and indeed there is now a note at the end of his post. By my rough estimate, it’s been about 15-20 minutes since I first published this post. Kudos to Dan for the quick reply. My original post continues below.)

In the post, Gillmor criticizes a story in the Arizona Republic about how more people are turning to psychics and astrologists for financial advice during the recession. If you read the post now (I’m writing at about 12 p.m. Eastern Time on Sunday, Oct. 11), you’ll likely agree that much of Gillmor’s criticism is legitimate. The story does fail to cite any real source for data showing that psychics are getting more customers, and it does fail to include any quotes from the customers.

So what’s my beef with the post? Well, see that little “Updated” line at the top of the post? Any idea what that update entailed? There’s nothing in the current version of the post to denote the changes. In this case, the changes are pretty drastic. Unfortunately, the original version wasn’t up long enough for me to find a Google-cached version. Here’s a screen capture of the current post, with the updates highlighted (I did this from memory, so it may not be all-encompassing). Basically, Gillmor added the following paragraphs:

Consider the way the story starts. The word “apparently” is a tip-off that the piece is based on no actual data. Who’s the source for this alleged mini-flood of new customers? Why, the people selling the product. Makes sense to me: In I-can-see-into-the-future territory, we can just take their word for it.

Not a single customer is quoted. We hear only from the people who are claiming to be getting this influx of new customers. Can’t the newspaper find even one client?

It even provides a helpful sidebar explaining the difference between psychics, astrologers, fortune-tellers and mediums (in each case with the same level of “here’s what they say, never mind what science says” logic). For example, we learn that a psychic is “sensitive to non-physical or supernatural forces and influences, able to see into the future and into the events in a person’s life. Often uses tools such as tarot cards, crystals or tea leaves.” Gosh, thanks the the deeper insight.

Now, look at my comments on that post (Nos. 1, 2, and 5) and note the timestamps. If you wonder why none of those comments addressed Gillmor’s reaction about the lack of data and quotes from customers, it’s because those passages did not exist when I posted those comments, the last coming before I went to bed well after 2 a.m. Eastern Time on Saturday night. And this isn’t a case of Gillmor hitting “Publish” prematurely. He tweeted the post Saturday night (that’s how I found it in the first place). Heck, there was even a discussion thread on Twitter based on that version of the post Saturday night. Look at the exchanges in the discussion shortly after Gillmor’s initial tweet, and you’ll also not see any mention of what is now his main criticism of the article.

Hey, I make revisions to my blog posts all the time. If it’s something minor, like correcting a typo or rewriting a sentence so it reads more smoothly, I won’t bother to highlight the change. However, it’s a different story if it’s something that drastically changes the nature of the post, and I believe that to be the case here. Before the update, Gillmor’s main — in fact, only — reason for calling the article irresponsible was that it didn’t include a disclaimer warning readers that psychics’ predictions are not reliable financial advice. Now, in the updated version, that has been relegated to a secondary complaint. The first criticism in the post is now about the lack of data and customer quotes (which I agree is a legitimate complaint). So he goes from calling the article irresponsible because of the lack of a warning that astrological financial advise is not reliable to calling it irresponsible because of shabby reporting about the increase in customers for fortune-tellers. That’s just a tad more than fixing a typo or tagging on an additional thought.

I don’t have a big problem with him making the change — although it does strike me as a bit of a “Well, my initial criticism didn’t hold as much water as I thought, but they also sucked at this” move — but I do have a problem with such a drastic, material change not being clearly marked because it does affect the way people perceive the post and the comments. The honest, and transparent, thing to have done would’ve been either attaching “no data, no customers” criticism at the end of the original post, or putting it into the original post in a different font or color and clearly noting, with a timestamp, that this was added later. As a result of neither of those being done, the pre-update comments that I left on the post, which take issue with his suggestion that without a disclaimer people would take psychic predictions as serious financial advice, now come off as nitpicking or missing the point since they seem to be focusing strictly on a secondary item in the post and completely ignoring the first and primary criticism. If we’re serious about responsible, transparent reporting and a commitment to reality, then surely we can do better than this.

Media critic Clay Shirky recently conducted a study in which he literally weighed how much local hard news his hometown paper, the Columbia Daily Tribune, produced in one day. His findings: With a staff of 59, his hometown paper, which has a circulation of about 100,000, had only six local news reporters, and in the edition he looked at, those six reporters produced nine stories, 1/6th of the total content in that day’s edition.

Shirky’s point is that if you want to convert a newspaper into a nonprofit news operation, you can’t do a wholesale institutional conversion because the all-in-one model is failing. Instead, he argues, you must “rescue” the handful of journalists who are reporting on hard local news, along with a small number of support staff for those reporters, from the rest of the failing newspaper bundle (sports, columns, horoscopes, lifestyle section, etc.).

I agree with the idea that if you were to start a nonprofit aimed preserving local news reporting, you definitely should aim for a narrower focus than what newspapers have traditionally offered. However, Shirky’s post brings to mind a similar study that raises questions for me on this topic.

Back in March, Jay Rosen did an impromptu survey, asking people to count how many locally produced news stories were in their local newspaper. In his post, Rosen explains part of the impetus for the survey:

Geoff Dougherty, who runs a news start-up in Chicago, said in this comment thread that the Chicago Tribune had that day published eight homegrown, original-reporting-required non-sports stories. (I followed up with him by email and got his counting rules correct.)

In the comment thread that Rosen refers to, Dougherty said:

Today the Trib ran eight local stories. We’ll run the same number tomorrow with a staff of four and a couple of freelancers and volunteer neighborhood reporters.

That would seem to support Shirky’s conclusion. However, here’s the epilogue on that story: Dougherty’s nonprofit start-up, Chi-Town Daily News, closed shop in September when he couldn’t raise enough money and decided to abandon it and pursue a for-profit venture instead. Note that we’re not talking about a big operation here. Chi-Town Daily News’ contact page lists a staff of six — two in management and four reporters. And after four years, it could not raise more than $300,000 a year (and as Nieman Journalism Lab reports, even that is a great accomplishment).

That brings me to my next point: How should we look at the fact that the Columbia Daily Tribune has six local news reporters in its staff of 59? Is that number too small, or is that number what this market can support? How many reporters can a nonprofit focusing exclusively on local news in this market afford? If you can’t raise enough money in a market the size of Chicago to sustain a nonprofit with four reporters focusing on local hard news, what are the chances of you being able to do that in a much smaller market in Columbia, Missouri? Of course, Chi-Town Daily News is but one example, so we should probably refrain from drawing sweeping conclusions from its fate (and there are some nonprofit local news operations that have fared better in fundraising). But I do believe these are questions worth asking.

In that light, then, should we view the non-local news portions of the Columbia Daily Tribune as burdens weighing down the operation’s core mission of local news reporting by adding expenses, or are those parts actually generating the money that makes it possible to have those six local news reporters? What is the nature of the relationship between the news and non-news portions of a news operation? Who’s propping up who here?

My feeling on this is that, relative to a market’s size, the number of paid, full-time, local hard news-gathering journalists it can support is relatively small, regardless of the business model. I’m for whichever model brings us closest to that number in a particular market. From that perspective, how much of the content in a newspaper is local new isn’t really the right question to ask. Rather, we should be asking how close that amount is to the local news-gathering capacity this market can support and whether a nonprofit model can get us closer to that capacity.

Related Notes

A couple other points about the Columbia Daily Tribune’s staff of 59:

• The count of 59 is actually misleadingly high. Shirky pointed out that there were a lot of columnists, but just from clicking on those columnists’ names on the Tribune’s staff page, I could see that 16 out of 24 columnists are guest columnists who have full-time jobs elsewhere, not really part of the newspaper’s staff. I don’t know how much the Tribune pays its guest columnists, but at the papers I worked in newspapers in the early to mid-2000s, a sports correspondent generally got anywhere from $50 to $100 per story, and I know at least one of our guest columnists got less.
• I don’t know much about the sports scene in the Tribune’s coverage area, but the 11-person sports department does seem a bit high. My former paper, which has three major Division I schools, a FCS D-I school, an NHL team, a high-profile minor-league baseball team, and about 15-20 high schools within 20-some miles of its office has a sports staff of five full-timers and one part-timer.
• However, I found it odd that Shirky wrote “There are also eleven people covering sports, including one assigned just to cover the area high schools.” If my former paper, whose circulation has dipped to the 30,000 range, has 15-20 high schools in its coverage area, I can only imagine how many high schools are in a 100,000-circulation paper’s area. Having one person to cover that beat is likely barely enough, and as much as some might dismiss sports as “not news”, it’s also widely acknowledged that prep sports is something that matters to local readers, not to mention the fact that it’s something relatively unique to the local paper, usually with few substitutes.

If you are a journalism student or a professional journalist looking to switch fields, listen to this outstanding podcast from the Center for Media Innovation and Research at the University of Florida School of Journalism and Communications. It has a lot of good advice about non-journalism fields where you can use your journalism skills, where to find those jobs, etc. The discussion is tilted more toward graduating students or young journalists, but there are things in there that even seasoned veterans can use. The one thing mentioned in the podcast that’s particularly worth repeating is that a journalism degree is very versatile. Done right, it gives you a wide range of skills that can be applied to a lot of fields. So don’t despair and wonder “What kind of job can I get if not a journalism job?” There are many out there; just think creatively.

Oh man, those newspaper dinosaurs are at it again. Listen to their complaints about a new Web tool:

We’re losing control over our content!

It opens the door for someone to post malicious comments about us!

This doesn’t help our site! Google is benefiting from it, but not us!

It’s another thing we have to monitor!

This is OUR site. We can’t just let anybody post whatever they want on here!

Get with the times, you Luddites, or you’re going to go extin … wait, what? Those aren’t comments from cavemen in the newspaper biz?

Instead, they’re reactions from some in the blogosphere to Google’s newly introduced Sidewiki, a Web annotation tool. Among its loudest critics is Jeff Jarvis, whose reaction I find surprising and ironic because he has often blasted traditional media for having similar sentiments about the Web. I can’t help but find some of this kind of hypocritical.

Louis Gray has a nice response to criticism of Sidewiki from Jarvis and Steven Hodson. I share many of Gray’s sentiments. In the spirit of the subject matter and to sadistically fragment the online conversation even further, I thought it only fitting to comment on both of those critical posts via a Web annotation tool (just click those links above).

I tried out Sidewiki for a little bit and thought it was alright, though its interface and features can certainly stand to improve (threading comments would be nice, for one thing). I do like the concept of Web annotation. I use Diigo, and I find it useful, but I don’t think Web annotation is a replacement or even a legitimate competitor for the typical commenting feature you see on blogs and other sites, and I believe using it as such would be a mistake. That’s why I don’t think blogs with a decent commenting system really have to worry about losing a lot of their conversations to this. We might see people try to use it that way in the beginning, but as with anything else, I think a set of best practices will emerge for Web annotation tools if they ever catch on.

I find Web annotation tools most useful when I want to highlight and comment on specific sections of a page that I’m sharing with someone else. Annotation tools also come in handy when I want to comment on a passage inline — when that context is important — rather than post a comment after the article and have to cite the passage to which I’m responding. It is also helpful when I’m writing a blog entry to respond to significant, separate portions of an article, a situation where the standard blogging practice of quote-and-comment would mean quoting nearly every segment of the article, which I feel like essentially constitutes stealing the content of the article. So instead of quote-and-comment, I just include a link to an annotated page in those instances. So mostly, I don’t use Web annotation as a conversation tool with the general public that’s reading the article, but rather as a way to highlight something within the article when I’m sharing it with a specific few people.

Related Note

Aside from Jarvis and Hodson’s posts, Gray’s piece also links to a post by Josh Schnell titled “Content Aggregators are Killing Content Creators.” As I read it, I couldn’t help but laugh at the irony. While the article is complaining about social networks like Digg and Friendfeed, if you replace those terms with the word “blogs”, you’ll have a virtually verbatim copy of newspapers’ angst about how the Internet is making it difficult for journalists to make a living from their content.

It’s something I’ve witnessed many times before in discussions about journalism careers: A journalism student, nearing graduation and scared by the rapid collapse of traditional media institutions and the  still-in-question profitability of new media companies, asks someone who’s supposed to be in the know — be it a professor, a publisher, or working journalist — what they think about the career outlook for professional journalists. The answer the student gets is some variation of “The world will always need good journalists” or “There will always be a spot for journalists who do X, Y, and Z.”

I’ll be blunt here. The next person to give that as career advice to aspiring journalists deserves to be held down and have citric acid squirted in their eyes.

First of all, it’s a nebulous, cop-out non-answer. Secondly, and more despicably, it’s a misleading response, if not a lie, aimed at not telling the students the truth — that the likelihood of them finding full-time employment in journalism after they graduate is not good. It’s feeding them feel-good fluff when what they need are cold, hard facts.

If you truly want to give students useful advice on which they can base their decisions about their futures in journalism, point them to things like this story and the University of Georgia study it quotes instead of misleading them into thinking, “If I do X, Y, and Z, I’ll be able to find a job. Those people who won’t have jobs are the ones who can’t do X, Y, and Z.”

Why It’s Misleading

By themselves, statements like “the world will always need good journalists” are OK. However, when you give them as responses to questions about the probability of finding jobs or building careers in journalism in the present landscape, it’s almost tantamount to a lie because you are not telling the students the other half of it: The world will always need good journalists, but there aren’t anywhere near enough jobs for good journalists, and you may not be among the good journalists who get hired.

This is a bit like the “Most Likely to Become President” picks in high school yearbooks. In every class at every high school in every school district in every state in America, there are bound to be a couple of people who are so brilliant that their classmates look at them and say, “They’re going to be somebody important.” And of course, within the tiny fishbowl of that one particular class of students, they stand out. Throw all those brilliant people from all the graduating classes across America into one big fishbowl, however, and you can see how much the odds are against any one of them becoming anybody important, much less president. In other words, as talented as you think you are, you are not all that unique, especially when, according to that UGA study, journalism schools are dumping 55,000 new graduates a year into the labor pool. Even if only 1 percent of those graduates are as talented as you, that’s still 550 people. In just three years, you will find yourself competing against more than 1,500 people who have the same talent as you, and two-thirds of them will be younger and cheaper than you.

Catch 22

The AP article I linked to above cites the example of a recent J-school graduate who had to take a marketing job in order to avoid having to turn to her parents for financial support because the journalism gigs she has pay little or not at all. For her, journalism has had to become a hobby rather than a career. I can see that being the case for more and more new graduates, considering that the UGA study found that 40 percent of J-school graduates fail to find full-time employment within six to eight months of leaving school.

Journalism as a hobby is fine if you are content to merely dabble in the craft, but if you want to make a career out of it, I can see several problems:

• Every year you stay out of the game, you have 55,000 newcomers in the job market who are a year younger and a year cheaper and, at least theoretically, possess knowledge that’s a year more current, fighting for the same entry-level positions.
• Considering the rate at which J-schools continue to pump out graduates, even if the journalism market starts to rebound, there will still be a huge pool of surplus labor out there for years to come. Factor in the exploding availability and plummeting profitability of content online, it doesn’t take a genius to figure out what that will do for future journalist compensations. This definitely is, and most likely will be, an employers’ market.
• The longer you stay in a non-journalism job, the more you’ll likely have to give up to go back into journalism. Aside from the non-career-related responsibilities that come as part of getting older — family, mortgage, and various other types of property — you probably would’ve also moved up on the career ladder in whichever field you went into instead of journalism in order to keep the bills paid. How willing will you be to give that up, especially in the face of increasing financial obligations, to go back into a field with little security and long lines of applicants eager to do your job for less?

Oh Crap! I’m Graduating This Year! What Should I Do?

From what I’ve written above, you might think I’m against people pursuing journalism careers. But I’m not. I loved my six years as a full-time journalist and think some journalism experience would do any new graduate, not just J-school students, some good. However, I don’t want graduates making their decisions based on the false promise of “If you do X, Y, and Z, you’ll have a job.” I want them to look around and realize that there are plenty of people who do X, Y, and Z who are sitting at  home unemployed. I want students to know what they are getting themselves into. Know that it’s a job market where the numbers are not on your side right now and may not be for years to come. Know that it’s a time with tremendous opportunities for new inventions, but that for every success, there are going to be many more failures, and the failures won’t all be due to lack of talent, vision, or commitment. Know that there’s a good chance you’ll spend months, if not years, without a full-time journalism job after graduation. Know that many of you might have to swallow your pride and turn to your parents for help to get by. Know that even after you get that full-time gig, there’s a good chance you’ll lose it in a couple years to someone younger and cheaper.

Now, if upon knowing all of that, you still want to go into journalism, then I salute you and wish you the best of luck with all sincerity. Just don’t let me see you complain on Twitter a year from now that no one is hiring a journalist who can do X, Y, and Z. I told you: They do need those people and they are hiring them; you’re just not one of the ones they hired.

Today’s Lens blog at the New York Times Web site features a post by photojournalist David Hume Kennerly excoriating Newsweek’s crop of a photo he took in Dick Cheney’s kitchen. The cropped photo (right), used to illustrate a quote from Cheney saying that he would be ok with CIA interrogation tactics going beyond legal boundaries,  drastically changed the focus and feel of the original image. Kennerly pulled no punches about his reaction:

Newsweek’s choice to run my picture as a political cartoon not only embarrassed and humiliated me and ridiculed the subject of the picture, but it ultimately denigrated my profession.

I do think there are some ethical issues with the way Newsweek used the photo, but not because of the cropping. My problem with it is that

1. it’s a very forced union between the photo and the editorial content, and
2. the use of the photo implies something much more sinister than what the actual editorial content says (an issue of the presentation not fitting the content). Even though anyone who spends more than a few seconds looking at the picture will realize Cheney is just carving steak, the blood still plants a very negative image in their head. Newsweek’s VP of communications defended the photo usage as making a point about “the former vice president’s red-blooded, steak-eating, full-throated defense of his views and values”, but that strikes me as a very weak and dubious explanation. When you look at that package, you are much more likely to think “butcher” than “red-blooded” or “full-throated”, and I suspect that’s what the Newsweek editors wanted, even though the quote from Cheney hardly would make anyone think “butcher”.

However, unlike Kennerly, I don’t really have a problem with the fact that the original photo was drastically cropped. I can see where he is coming from: He took a photo that he felt told a story or chronicled a moment of history, and the crop does change the tone of the story. However, where he and I diverge on the subject is when he calls the crop “photo fakery”.

Why is the cropped image considered “fakery” while the original photo is considered authentic? The original photo, after all, is just another crop. It captures everything within a certain frame and discards everything outside that frame. Whether this is done in the camera’s viewfinder or on a computer screen is irrelevant. Who knows, something that didn’t make it into the original photo — a picture hanging on the wall, perhaps — could have totally altered the feel of the scene. Or look at it this way: What if the photographer also snapped a closeup of Cheney carving steak? Would that be considered fakery since we know there were other elements in that scene in that moment but they weren’t included in the photo?

While we’re on the subject of reality, here’s something that has always bugged me about the idea that an untouched photo tells an authentic story: A photo captures but a split second in time, which in many cases does not actually tell you what happened. The example that always pops into my mind is something like this: Let say you see a picture of a running back out in front of a couple of defenders. From the picture, it looks like the running back is doing well since he’s eluding the tacklers. But what really happened? He could have been pummeled a split second later by a guy who wasn’t in the frame when the photographer pressed the shutter. Or this scene could have taken place 20 yards behind the line of scrimmage, after the running back really, really screwed up, and he could have ended up being tackled for a big loss. But you can’t tell that from the picture, cropped or not. A photo, by its very nature, lifts something or some moment out of context and elevates it above all the other elements in that particular scene or above all the other moments that immediately preceded or followed it and says, “This is what happened.”

The end or the beginning?

I think this case also underscores the difference in the way photographers and designers perceive a photo. To a photographer, the photo he or she submits is a finished product, the end result of meticulous work, planning, and editing. As such, only minimal, if any, editing should be done to it. To a designer, however, the photo is not the end, but the beginning — just one of the pieces of raw material waiting to be molded into a coherent package. In that light, cropping a photo is no more an ethical breach than rewriting a headline to fit a story. If the headline you had written before doesn’t fit the tone of the story, you change it to fit. And so it is with the photo. It’s easy to see the conflict inherent in that situation. When I was designing newspapers, as much as I could, I tried to preserve the photographer’s vision, just as a good editor tries to preserve a writer’s voice in a story. However, if a photographer takes a photo for an editorial package, he/she should understand and accept the fact that what they submit is but one piece of the puzzle and by no means a finished product. That’s a fact of life, and there’s not much to say about that except “Deal with it.”

Then there are times when the story that a photographer sees through the lens on assignment is completely different from the story the writer tells. I think we should distinguish between photos taken as standalones or for a photo story and photos taken with the expressed intent of accompanying a written story. In the former, I would lean toward giving more weight to the photographer’s vision, whereas in the latter I would be more inclined to go with the writer’s. It also underscores the need for photographers, editors, writers, and designers to communicate with each other BEFORE the photoshoot so that they are all on the same page about what story they’re telling.

Another, more practical, reason for drastic cropping that I’ve come across is simply a built-in limitation of print — the need to fit the content into certain fixed dimensions (though that’s pretty obviously not the reason behind Newsweek’s cropping of this photo). This is a horrible reason to crop a photo, but it is also an unavoidable need, although good, advanced planning will cut down on this.

In my time as a newspaper designer, I saw egregious crops that butchered a good photo simply to fit a predetermined hole, and I also saw instances where a photographer was leaning over a designer’s shoulder, complaining about the smallest of crops. As much as I could, I tried to preserve the photographer’s vision for the photo, unless it was something that completely ran counter to the tone of the story. However, at the end of the day, my No. 1 obligation was always to the overall tone of the entire presentation — story, photo, display type, graphics.  If a dramatic crop of a photo contributed to achieving that aim, I would have no qualms about doing it. The photo was not the end in itself, but one of the means to an end.

Back in the late 90s and early 2000s, while I was making my way through J-school and starting my career in journalism, one of the trends developing in many newsrooms was W.E.D. — which stood for Writing, Editing, and Design. What was it? Let this Poynter article from 2000 explain:

It is a marriage of words and visuals. It is a practice that encourages teams of writers, editors, photographers, artists, and designers to tell stories in the most effective and vivid way. Here is how it works.

HOW IT WORKS

A team discusses a story to determine how to tell and display it. For example, if photographs will enhance the story, photographers are involved before a word is written to discuss with the writer the most compelling images and the best display possibilities. If graphics are needed, a graphic artist is present at the start talking over what information is needed to strengthen understanding. If a typographic treatment alone is the best way to convey the message of the story, a designer gets involved early to talk about the content and design of the headline and all other type elements. Then an editor, copy editor, and designer join the team to discuss space and overall packaging. In the end, W.E.D. pages work together like a well-directed symphony.

This idea had a good amount of support back then, especially from designers and photographers because it set up a mechanism that allowed them to inject their expertise into the story-development process at the beginning rather than at the end. This meant developing stories and other text elements that are specifically designed to jive with the visuals rather than getting the text elements and than trying to come up with visuals to fit them (usually on deadline). It resulted in a more cohesive final product, and it was also a way to spur collaboration among various departments that traditionally didn’t have a whole lot to do with one another.

Personally, I thought this was a terrific idea, mainly because it advocated advance planning, which newspapers generally suck at. Even though the newspaper I spent most of my journalism career didn’t really have this mechanism in place, I tried to put some of its principles — advanced planning with writers, editors, designers, and photographers — into practice, and it did pay off in some situations.

Fast forward less than 10 years, and the W.E.D. concept has pretty much faded into dust. The idea of consistently getting together a team of journalists, each with his/her own specialized skill, to work on a project seems like wishful thinking in a time when most newsrooms have been cut to the bone, especially in the visual departments. Forget getting a designer to work with a team on a specific project. At many papers, a designer is all you have for entire sections most days. Instead of teaming up specialists to combine their expertise, newsrooms have been forced to take a detour and hire (or keep) journalists who are jacks-of-all-trades instead.

It’s not only journalists with traditional skills who are being affected by this shift toward individuals who can do a little bit of everything. Journalist Angela Grant wrote yesterday on her blog, newsvideographer.com, that she’s taken to referring to herself as an all-purpose journalist rather than a multimedia specialist because she’s seeing so few job opportunities in news for people with that title. Instead, she writes,

Nearly every reporter job description I’ve seen indicates that multimedia skills are either part of the job requirement, or that it’s highly regarded if you can produce multimedia. This indicates to me that there are many more opportunities for multi-skilled journalists who can write, shoot, and produce multimedia all at the same time. It indicates there are fewer opportunities for the multimedia specialist.

So how do I feel about this? Personally, I’ve always placed a huge emphasis on versatility. If you ask me what my strongest skill is, I would tell you, without being facetious, that it’s my ability to be solid in many different areas. There are no doubt many better writers, graphic designers, Web programmers, photographers, Flash developers (and so on) than me, but there are significantly fewer who can easily transition from one of those tasks to another and then to another and another. I feel like my versatility is one of the biggest reasons I’ve been able to remain gainfully employed in the information/communications field and make myself valuable to my company. That’s especially true where I work now. They hired me to write and edit (before that I was a designer in an ad agency), but the position has morphed over these two-plus years around my skill set. What I offered was someone who is intermediately skilled in many different things, and that was what they needed (even if they didn’t know it when they hired me) — a little bit of everything rather than a lot of any one particular task. They have graphic design needs, but if I were just a master designer, I won’t have a job there. They have events and people that need to be photographed, but if I were only an ace photographer, I won’t have a job there. They have programming needs, but if I were just an code ninja, I won’t have a job there. They hired me to write, but if I were just a writer, I won’t be as valuable because I would not be able to meet the needs of the company.

I know that there are many who subscribe to the “jack-of-all-trades, master-of-none” school of thought on this, who believe that you should have one specialty that you really kick ass in. However, I feel like many jobs in the communications field might be shifting toward the versatility end of the spectrum because many companies don’t have enough recurring needs for any one particular communication skill to warrant creating a full-time position for it, and outsourcing is expensive. So if you can hire someone who can address a host of these occasional needs, all the better. And that’s especially true in journalism, where legacy companies are slashing staff and most startups are forced to stay small while they figure out how to make money off content online. It’s not that the do-it-all guys can take better pictures, develop better Web sites, shoot better video, or design better looking pages than those who specialize in those fields. It’s that these do-it-all guys can do those things decent enough, and when you are in the financial situation that many journalism companies are in, decent enough is, well, enough.

On the other hand, it stings to see that newspapers are increasingly unable to afford specialized experts. A newsroom of journalists who are solid/decent at everything makes sense from a business standpoint, but there’s a part of me that still delights in seeing amazing photography, wickedly creative designs, and stunning illustrations. Those are things that can only be produced by masters of those respective crafts, and you can only attain that level of skill by specializing. I’m saddened to see more and more of those masters jettisoned from the field because of economics. Yes, if it comes down to picking between either journalists who are good at news reporting or journalists who are good at those “peripheral” skills — and that certainly seems to be the case now — news organizations should pick the ones who are good at reporting since that is the skill most critical to their core mission. Nonetheless, it’s just disheartening that journalism no longer seems to have the capacity to have both.

Post-screencast clarifications/additions:

• As I mentioned in the screencast, one thing I do wonder is how much time the very thin staff at the paper will be able to put into maintaining the site beyond just updating stories. With the new social media features, engagement with the users is important, but I just don’t know if they have enough bodies there to do that effectively.
• By “manage the user-submitted content section”, I don’t mean a lot of hands-on curating. Ideally this section would be set up in a way that users can curate the content themselves through things like rankings and tags. I do think the newspaper needs to monitor submissions in this section for story ideas and to occasionally highlight certain submissions, as well as listen to audience feedback and add or tweak features to make it serve the users better.
• Of the two local news site re-launches this weekend, the DTH’s new site is definitely the more exciting and promising one, in part because I know they intend to experiment with new things on their site and more importantly, they have the manpower to do it. The Herald-Sun’s new site looks pretty nice and is a big improvement over the old, broken site, but I just don’t know if they have the resources and manpower to use the site to its full potential. I hope I’m wrong, and I definitely wish them good luck.

For a more in-depth review, check out this post from Bull City Rising.

UNC’s student newspaper, the Daily Tar Heel, launched a new Web site over the weekend, and my initial reaction to it is that it is a huge improvement over the previous version. The site is only a couple days old, so obviously there are things that haven’t been fleshed out yet and sections that are still waiting for content, but here are some of the things I like from the first look, and some things that I’m waiting to see if it gets better.

What I like

• RSS feeds!! A year and a half ago, I spent probably an hour and a half poking around the DTH site trying to find an RSS feed to subscribe to, with no success. I remember being very surprised at that time that a college paper of this caliber was missing such a basic feature from its site. The fact that I couldn’t get the paper’s latest stories in my Google Reader is the main reason that I’ve still been picking up a copy of the printed edition on my way into work every morning. Now, when I pick up papers for people in the office, I think I’ll take one fewer copy.
• Tags: It looks like every story now has tags, making it very convenient to see all stories related to the same topic. I’m interested to see how specific the tagging will be (broad, like just general topics, or very specific, like people’s names).
• Twitter names: The staff directory not only lists e-mail addresses, but also Twitter accounts.
• What We’re Reading: I found this column on the “From the Pressbox” sports blog, and while there isn’t any content in it right now, it looks like it’ll be listing interesting articles that the sports staff discovers.
• And lots more. See this story for more information about what’s in store for the Web site.

Things I Would Like to See Improved/Added

• About those RSS feeds … I loaded up an iGoogle tab with feeds from the DTH site and noticed that all the feeds from the different sections have the same feed title — “dailytarheel.com, serving the university community since 1893″. As you can imagine, that’s not very helpful in differentiating one feed from the next.
• Where’s your main Twitter feed? Ok, I know it’s @dailytarheel and I’m already following it. But it certainly can’t hurt to have a prominent “Follow us on Twitter” link on your homepage to make it easy for those who may not know. I see the Facebook box there, and a Twitter link should be right above or below that.
• So what is this blog about? Some of the main sections house a blog in addition to the regular stream of stories. I think it would be beneficial to just have one sentence under each blog’s logo telling visitors what this particular blog is about. Some of it is pretty obvious, but others perhaps not so much. Each blog’s scope is explained in this story, but those short blurbs should be on the blogs themselves as well.
• Speaking of blogs … I would also like to be able to see the entries from the blog as part of the stream of news stories on the main section page. After all, the entries from The Orange Ballot blog are probably of interest to people who visit the City section, so why make them have to go to a separate page? It would be nice if, for instance, I can get both the City section stories and the Orange Ballot entries in one view and/or in the same RSS feed.
• Letting the public come to your editorial meetings is nice, but … it would be even nicer if the DTH brings its meetings to its public. For most staff and faculty, it’s impossible to take time out from work to go to the Student Union at 3:30 p.m. on a weekday. And if you’re a student, unless you happen to be near the Pit around that time, do you really want to make the trek just for this meeting? If you really want the public to take advantage of your open meetings, it’s not enough to just make them open; you have to make it easy for the public to attend them. As I mentioned to DTH editor Andrew Dunn on Twitter, I would really like to see the meetings livestreamed. All you need is a computer, an Internet connection, a Web cam, a decent mic, and Ustream or another similar, free livestreaming service. It’s easy to set up and it requires little time and almost no technical expertise to start a broadcast. It also allows for interactivity in the form of live chats (which we have been taking advantage of at the UNC Eshelman School of Pharmacy by livestreaming our applicant information sessions and answering questions from people watching online in real time). I can’t really see myself physically attending these editorial meetings, but I can definitely see myself having the livestream play while I’m working on other stuff.
• One-click contact: Right now, if you click on a writer’s byline on a story, it takes you to a list of everything that reporter has written, which is fine, but if you want to contact that reporter, you would have to go to the staff directory to find the reporter’s e-mail or Twitter account. Why not have both of those things accompany the byline on a story?
• So how do I submit story ideas again? According to this story about the new site, the DTH is welcoming reader-submitted photos and story ideas. I would like to see a prominent “Submit Your Stuff” link on the homepage or as part of the site-wide navigation. I’m not going to submit stuff everyday, so it’s likely I’ll forget who or where to submit stuff. Don’t make me have to hunt for that information.

Disclosure: As a freshman and sophomore back in 1997-98, I spent about a year working for the Daily Tar Heel as a general assignment sports writer and the all-important third-string writer on the men’s lacrosse beat (I think you’d have to go dig up the microfilm to find my byline). I wrote stories about stadium renovations, “grilled” Carl Torbush at practice one day about the academic standards of football recruits, and at my first men’s lacrosse game, I asked then-coach Dave Klarman whether he regretted switching goalies at halftime after watching his lead vanish in the second half. That was followed by a long, silent, icy stare from him, during which I thought laser beams would dart out from his eyes and burn a hole in my chest, but I managed to survive that episode relatively unscathed.

Start at the nine-minute mark of the first clip, when our all-important (and all-impotent) strip-mall critic enters and then continues being an obnoxious jerk through the entire second clip. Then again, it’s hard not to become corrupted when you hold such immense powers in your hands. Oh, and by the way, the guy who played God, I mean, Cooper — John Terrence — never appeared in anything after this (I guess after what must have been the role of a lifetime, nothing else could spur his interest).

There was just one slight problem, as John Robinson, the paper’s editor, pointed out on Twitter:

Cringe-inducing moment: we used a Fender Strat to illustrate Les Paul’s death.

In the paper’s defense, that’s kind of a tough one to catch unless you had someone who knew a Fender Strat from a Les Paul working on your design or copy desk. Heck, I play guitar a little bit, and I would’ve looked right past the promo and not noticed it. To the paper’s credit, they didn’t try to hide the error, since Robinson’s tweet is how I found out about it. And one of the good things about working at a newspaper is that you may have screwed up today, but you get to start with a clean slate tomorrow (and a chance to make all new screwups).

As I’ve mentioned before, “transparency is the new objectivity” has become a popular notion in media criticism circles. The idea is that people are more apt to trust journalists if they make clear their personal biases — “this is where I’m coming from”, as Jay Rosen says — than if the journalists claim to be objective.

But what happens if people distrust you precisely because they know where you are coming from?

For a non-journalist example, consider the case of FTC chairman Jon Leibowitz, who said in an interview in The Wrap that the FTC will look at whether it should loosen antitrust laws for newspapers as they struggle to survive. On True/Slant, Michael Roston pointed out that Leibowitz is married to a Washington Post columnist, which Roston cites as reason to be skeptical of Leibowitz’s judgment on the issue. Roston does point out that the marriage is no secret, as it is mentioned in Leibowitz’s bio and has been addressed by Marcus, and that Marcus’ work for the Post doesn’t overlap with her husband’s at the FTC. Nonetheless, Roston writes:

It’s nice and all that Mr. Leibowitz wants to ‘look at this issue,’ but I’m afraid that one of the things he can’t help but consider is the job security of his wife Ruth Marcus, a columnist for the Washington Post.

and

… if her paper’s revenues continue to decline, Marcus is exactly the type of employee who might find herself forced into accepting a buyout. So it’s difficult to believe that the findings Leibowitz helps shape will not be affected by the fact that his family’s current standard of living depends in part on his wife’s income working as a prominent columnist for one of America’s most storied newspapers.

Certainly Roston was right to point out a potential conflict of interest, and one can definitely argue that the FTC and Leibowitz should address this, but let’s look at this purely from Leibowitz’s perspective for a moment. If his findings come down against loosening antitrust regulations for newspapers, then obviously everything is fine since he would be going against his personal bias. However, if he writes a report in favor of antitrust exemptions, is there any possible way for people to believe that his bias didn’t influence his ruling? So how exactly has transparency helped him build trust in this case?

The way I see it, there are three groups of people to earn trust from: the people who agree with his report, the people who disagree with his report, and people who have no strong opinion on it. I don’t think he needs to do much to earn the trust of those who agree with the report, since no one wants to believe that the opinion they agree with was arrived at through shady means or motives. However, I just don’t see how the knowledge of Leibowitz’s personal ties to a journalist can help increase the trust from the other two groups. If anything, that knowledge has provided more reasons for them to distrust him and extra ammunition for discrediting his judgment, however fair and impartial he might’ve been in forming it.

It’s not hard to see how this applies to journalists. Once a reporter covering health care publicizes his stance on a health-care issue, that will influence how readers perceive his work. Rather than trust him more because they know that bias, people are more likely to assume his work is tinted and perhaps even tainted by it. The same goes for journalists covering any topic. Just as Leibowitz’s report can be dismissed as influenced by concerns for his personal financial situation, journalists’ report can be dismissed as influenced by anything from their political loyalties to their allegiances to a particular sports team. Just as it is humanly impossible for a journalist to have no opinion on anything, it is equally impossible for readers who disagree with a story to look past a disclosure that’s basically a giant neon sign flashing “BIAS” or “CONFLICT OF INTEREST”. Readers, like journalists, are only human.

Does that mean I favor pretending journalists are superhuman beings with no opinions? Of course not. I think transparency is a necessary part of journalism. Instead, I wrote this post to raise these points for consideration as we figure out how journalists can earn trust in the changing media landscape:

• If transparency is a trust-earning mechanism, whose trust are you actually earning? If it’s only the trust of those who already agree with you (with your transparency providing further affirmation of their beliefs), then you need to ask whether you actually had to work to earn that trust anyway, or if the stance of your story had already secured it.
• If saying “this is where I’m coming from” doesn’t convince those who disagree with your story that you reached your conclusions in a fair manner, then how effective a trust mechanism is transparency?

My stance is that transparency alone doesn’t earn enough trust. Leibowitz’s trust problem in this example isn’t one of transparency, but rather what that transparency revealed. The fairness of his judgment is being questioned not because he tried to conceal his personal ties (he didn’t), but rather because of the personal ties he didn’t try to hide. That’s a good illustration of the limitations of transparency as a trust-earning mechanism. To go beyond those limitations, I believe you still need (gasp!) objectivity.

Right + Good-natured: The rarest of media critics. They consistently put forth good, knowledgeable insights without feeling the need to deliver them like a fist to the face. They care about journalism, and it shows, but they can also accept the possibility that people can arrive at different conclusions than them in an intelligent discussion without being idiots. Their writings take on a constructive tone by focusing on finding solutions, not harping on others’ mistakes or deriding those pursuing a different path to the future than them. However, their good nature sometimes means their voices are drowned out by the next group.

Right + Ass-clowns: This breed of critics has keen ideas, but their message gets overshadowed by the wrapper of arrogance and snobbery in which it is delivered. To them, every debate has two sides: Their side, and the side that’s wrong. Their style occupies so much of the spotlight that it gets in the way of their substance, so much so that sometimes you can’t tell what’s more important to them, journalism or self-promotion. You know they make some good points, but they act like such self-important, arrogant attention-whores that you feel inclined to disagree with them just on principle. Sadly, this is often the most widely read group, since there’s no better way to draw attention to yourself online than acting, or writing, like an ass. If someone can create a 3D graph, it would be interesting to add a Z-axis to plot a pundit’s reach to see if nice guys really do finish last.

Wrong + Good-natured: These are good people, and you can tell from their writing that they care deeply about journalism, which is why you bury your face in your hands when you read their pieces and realize how clueless they sound and you know they are setting themselves up for ridicule, usually from the “Right + Ass-clowns” group or this next crop.

Wrong + Ass-clowns: The worst of them all. These pundits try to make up with noise what they lack in real knowledge. They see the “Right + Ass-clowns” pundits’ success and try to emulate them, but can only match them in the ass-clownery department. Their so-called analysis are shallow and laughable, yet their heads are too deeply buried in their own self-importance to realize it. Even more unfortunate is the fact that, because they act like jerks, they are rewarded by attention from many of the same people who pay attention to the “Right + Ass-clowns” group. Sometimes it makes you mad enough that you want to build a woodshed on Second Life and drag them behind it.

Note that these aren’t black-and-white, either-or categories. We all fall somewhere on those scales, not on either sides of clear-cut dividing lines. If I were to plot myself, I would say it would be something like the graph to the right. I’m definitely good-natured, which is why I’m resisting the temptation to actually plot anybody else. If I plot the “Right + Good-natured” ones, then I would feel duty-bound to plot the ass-clowns as well, and you can imagine where that’ll lead. This post just isn’t worth making enemies over. As for the right/wrong scale, I suppose no one ever actually thinks they are wrong more often than they are right, though I don’t think I can in good conscience move my mug much farther to the right, into actual “knowledgeable” or “insightful” territory.

Plot away. Have fun.

I think the photographers who are complaining about the $30 price tag in this case are wrong. It would be different if Time specifically commissioned this photo and only paid the photographer $30, but that’s not what happened here. Time went to a stock photo site and bought an image, just as anyone has the right to do. The fact that Time is a huge company has no relevance in this case. As long as they follow iStockphoto’s licensing rules and pay the appropriate amount for their usage of the image, I see absolutely no issue with them paying only $30 for a picture that they used on their cover. I won’t have any issue with it either if they went to a free stock photo site like stock.xchng and got their cover image for free.

Time may pay thousands of dollars to hire someone specifically to shoot a photo for a cover, but can anyone in their right mind see the magazine shelling out that kind of money for a picture of a jar of change? It’s such a generic image that if Time didn’t use that particular photo, it could have easily found a substitute. Or, if Time wanted to skimp on even the $30, it could have easily set up the shot. Heck, for thousands of dollars, Time could have gone out, bought a whole new set of camera equipment, and still had enough change left to fill a few hundred jars. If someone there actually said, “Hey, let’s pay someone a few thousand bucks to shoot a jar of change,” that person should be fired immediately.

Does stock art ruin it for the pros?

That was the charge raised by one commenter on the discussion thread about the Time cover, and Charles Apple also has a discussion on that subject. Will publications just resort to using stock art and lay off their staff photographers/illustrators/designers or not give work to freelancers?

My take: If a staff photographer’s job security at a publication depended on whether or not they get to shoot generic images like a jar of change, then their position would likely have been extraneous anyway. If, as a freelancer, you depend on clients paying you thousands of dollars to shoot an object against a white background, then you are either not going to make a living from that, or if you have been making a living from it, then you had a pretty good racket going and now that ride is over.

The way I see it, there are two markets: One for great work, and one for work that’s good enough or sufficient. Professionals used to be able to get work in both markets because of the scarcity of knowledge and tools. Now, there is still a market for great work, but the market for work that’s merely good enough is either quickly vanishing or rapidly filling up with new competitors, depending on how you look at it. If someone is looking for a great, top-quality photo, they’ll still seek out a professional’s services. However, if they are looking for a photo that’s just good enough, they no longer have to pay a premium price for it.

This isn’t just limited to photography. Look at all the Web 2.0 applications that have been cropping up. Every one of them is aimed at making it easier for the average person to produce work that’s “good enough” with relatively little expertise or expense. Some examples:

• Want to build an online photo gallery? It used to be that you either had to know programming or pay someone who did. Now, it’s just upload to Flickr and click the “Share” button.  Same goes for if you want to stream video or produce live Web casts. Can a pro with design and programming chops build something better? Sure, but why pay more when the free option is good enough?
• Want a Web site? Blogging software like Wordpress has removed virtually all the knowledge barriers involved in putting up a halfway decent site. Of course, if you want customizations or advanced features or a really good looking, user-friendly site, you’ll still need to know design and programming. But again, for every person who wants a professional site, there are many more for whom that classic Wordpress theme is good enough for their purposes.
• Are online photo editing programs like Picnik as good as Photoshop? Of course not. But they meet the needs of most common consumers, and they are free instead of the hundreds or thousands of dollars that Adobe software can cost. Of course, professional designers need much more horsepower than that in their image-editing software, and so they gladly shell out the money for Photoshop. For the rest of the population, however, the simple, free online tools are good enough.
• I wanted to put together an interactive timeline for work the other day. But instead of spending a couple days working in Flash or paying a Flash programmer oodles of cash for a less-than-significant project, I just googled “make your own timeline” and found a handful of free, easy-to-use Web apps that basically only required data entry. It only took me a couple hours to build one (embedded below), and its functionalities were beyond anything my paltry Flash skills could concoct. Sure, there are limitations (the inability to change the colors, for instance), but for my purposes, it was good enough. If we needed a really fancy timeline, we would of course place it in professional hands.

From a consumer point of view, these developments are great. It allows the average person to produce work that’s at least presentable without significant investments of time and money. It’s no longer either “pay a professional a hefty price” or “don’t do it”. Now you have extra options between those extremes. For the professional, this presents a challenge. You can no longer just build your business around producing work that’s merely presentable or good enough. You have to take it to the next level, beyond what these new applications can do. If the core of your business was based on building simple five-page sites that can be replicated in Wordpress with relative ease, then you’re in trouble. But if your business is based on building advanced, complex sites, then you still have a market.

Tying it back to journalism

As King Kauffman wrote in his piece about the Time cover, the same pricing dynamics that allowed Time to get a cover photo for $30 is in play in journalism. Technological advances have made it ridiculously easy to publish and disseminate information, and that has led to rapid depreciation in the market value of professional journalists’ work as user-generated content stream in. Some of these are as good as the professionals’ work, and much are not. But when you pour this much content, regardless of quality, into the marketplace, it inevitably drives down the value of all the content in the market. To make a living in such a marketplace, professional journalists will need to elevate their work to consistently great rather than just good enough with an occasional great piece.

The question, however, is whether there is enough demand for great journalism for those who consistently practice the craft at that level to make a decent living. There’s definitely enough to support some good journalists, but I think it is a very real possibility that our new marketplace will not be able to support the same number of great professional journalists as before. That may or may not be a cause for alarm, since so many parts of this new equation are still being sorted out: the impact of amateur journalists, changing practices, new funding models. Whether we end up with better journalism or not, this much is certain: Many professional journalists’ careers will be (and already have been) ground up in the gears of change, and it’s not all because they refuse to adapt (can it ever be that simple when you are in the midst of such rapid shift?).

One other parallel to draw between the Time’s $30 cover and journalism: Much of the discussion surrounding newspapers’ move toward charging for online content cite the argument that it’s the consumers who determine the value of a piece of work, not the content producer. In this case, why did the photographer make $30 from Time’s use of his photo instead of zero when there are certainly other jar photos out there, including many for free? I would argue that it is in part because he decided to sell the picture on iStockphoto rather than post it to a free stock site. If Time saw the same image on a free stock site, would it have determined that the picture was worth $30 anyway and sent the photographer a check? While consumers do, to a large extent, determine the value of the work, the price at which a producer offers the work, also has some impact on the consumers’ perception of its value, even if it’s the difference between free and chump change.