Image on loan from Spot.Us

There’s an interesting article by Sameer Bhuchar at PBS’s MediaShift Idea Lab about a survey of users of the community-funded journalism organization Spot.Us on what they think about the importance of objectivity in journalism. There are several charts accompanying the piece showing the results, which speak for themselves.

The most striking thing about the study for me was the fact that it gave us a glimpse of just how wide a range of definitions people have for “objectivity.” A sample of those definitions are included in the Community Views section of Bhuchar’s post. To me, that seems to indicate a need for more precise questions in future studies about objectivity. If you ask, “How important is objectivity?” and everyone responds with a different definition in mind, the data will be pretty misleading. For instance, do those who say objectivity is important think he-said-she-said journalism is ok? Or do they merely define objectivity as something that does not include the practice of creating a false balance? Also consider that “objectivity” — and “transparency” for that matter — has become a pretty loaded word in this debate, and its use likely would trigger some sort of strong reaction one way or another.

My suggestion would be that instead of asking about “objectivity” or “transparency”, a future survey should ask about the various practices and approaches associated with those concepts. For instance, you can ask people to rate, on a numerical scale, the importance of each of the following in journalism:

• Giving all sides of a debate an equal chance to make their case to the reporter.
• Giving all sides equal space in the story to make their case.
• Constructing the story to give each sides’ arguments equal weight.
• Presenting a counter-argument for every argument put forth in a story.
• Limiting the story to only information that is factually verifiable.
• The reporter maintaining a detached position from the players in the story.
• Drawing a conclusion for or against a particular argument based on the information presented in the story.
• Disclosing the reporter’s biases that are directly related to the story’s core issue.
• Disclosing anything in the reporter’s background that may be indirectly linked to the story’s core issue and thus could color the reporter’s views.
• Posting transcripts of the complete interviews with each person mentioned in the story.

This way, you avoid getting mired in a debate about the grand notions of “objectivity” and “transparency,” which can be pretty fruitless when everyone has a different idea of what exactly those terms mean and what results they lead to. Instead, you get at the real issue: Which parts of current journalism practices are not working and should be eliminated, which parts are working and should be preserved, and which new practices should be incorporated more. The resulting set of practices may not be pure objectivity or transparency per any one person’s definition, but it probably will be better than anything you can get by continuing to deal with the issue at the level of those vague, ill-defined terms.

For the Sake of Transparency

The opinions from the Community Views section of Bhuchar’s post that I agree the most with are these two:

” ‘Transparency is the new objectivity’ is a fun riff, and it’s close, but I think we (in the media business) grossly overstate the public’s interest in our affiliations and conflicts.” — Ryan Sholin

“No one is truly unbiased or objective but that doesn’t mean that a good reporter doesn’t look for the truth behind everyone’s agenda. Objectivity means not sitting on a story that would make someone look bad just because you’re invested in their success. I almost said “Transparency is the new objectivity” only because it is the latest and most fabulous word to throw around. Transparency only helps identify lapses in objectivity, it doesn’t replace it. As for transparency, it certainly helps identify lapses in objectivity, but it doesn’t replace it.” — Amanda Hickman

I bolded that sentence in the second response because it closely aligns with my thoughts on the subject. Transparency and objectivity do not occupy the same niche and are therefore not in direct competition with each other. Thus it would be folly to posit that the adoption of one necessitates the abandonment of the other. I wrote more about this thought in an earlier post.

I’ve always seen the rising emphasis on transparency as a greater benefit for the audience than for journalists. For the audience, transparency provides more information on which they can base their decision of whether or not to trust the report. For journalists, however, it remains to be seen whether that transparency earns more trust in their work — the ultimate motivation for journalists practicing transparency — or whether it simply increases the likelihood of trust and distrust equally. Transparency is a clear plus for the audience, but I’m not sure if it’s a clear plus for journalists or if it’s one of those “you can’t afford not to” things where the best you can hope for is breaking even because it beats a minus. In any case, the answer to that question doesn’t change the fact that increased transparency is here to stay. However, that fact also doesn’t necessarily dictate that we must do away with objectivity … at least the way I define “objectivity.”

Side Notes

The survey data, which the post itself admits are not scientific, raised a few other questions for me:

• In order to see whether this data represents a shift in opinions about the importance of objectivity in journalism, we need to have something to compare it to.
• The sample included both journalists and non-journalists. I’d be interested to see how the answers to the questions concerning objectivity break down within each of those of segments. Also, how does that breakdown within each segment compare with previous surveys about journalists’ and non-journalists’ opinions on objectivity?
• The answer options for some of these questions are not really mutually exclusive. For instance, on the question “Is objectivity even possible?”, the answers “Yes, that’s what journalism is” and “Possible but difficult. It separates wheat from chaff” can co-exist. The fact that I pick one doesn’t mean I’d reject the other. In fact, can you not legitimately say, “Objectivity is possible but difficult. It separates good journalism from bad. Therefore, that’s what journalism is”?
• I also question some of Bhuchar’s interpretations of what some of the responses mean. For instance, he says

A staggering 44.6 percent (199) people agreed with the answer, “Objectivity is possible but difficult. It separates wheat from chaff.” In essence the answer implies that objectivity should be seen more as a quest for honest, factual reporting.

To me at least, it’s difficult to draw a real connection between the answer and the interpretation. It seems a bit of a leap to reach that conclusion based on that answer alone. The same holds for his interpretation of the next answer option:

Of the respondents, 27.6 percent (123 people) chose the answer “transparency is the new objectivity,” implying that it is the reporting of truth that is most important, rather than a detached account of a scene.

So how does “objectivity” come to mean “a detached account of the scene” in the second answer option, but “honest, factual reporting” in the first?

Bill Gates’ recent prediction about the Internet becoming the best single source of education in five years and that the university education will be five times less important touched on something I’ve been thinking about: How technology will and will not change higher education in the near future.

I started thinking about this because of my experience in journalism and seeing how technology has affected newspapers. What struck me as kind of interesting is that if you take away the difference in the two industry’s financial situation, higher education resembles newspapers in many ways. For instance, like newspapers, higher ed

• Is a big industry.
• Has a reputation for not providing satisfactory service to a significant portion of its users (just think about how often someone says that they learned more on the job than they ever did in college, or that they never use most of what they learn).
• Is often out of touch with the people it serves (students).
• Lags behind in terms of truly embracing new technology to connect with its users.
• Is hesitant to embrace social media.
• Uses information systems that are big, cumbersome, out of date almost as soon as they go live, and difficult to upgrade.
• Has small pockets of innovation surrounded by widespread intransigence and resistance to change.
• Recognizes the need to change, yet cannot do so quickly.
• Is hampered by its own outdated performance-evaluation systems that stymie change by giving little incentive and often outright discouragement for employees to experiment with new ways of doing things.

If you think about it, in some ways the only major thing differentiating higher ed from newspapers is that newspapers’ model of scarcity — their hold on the distribution of information — has been shattered while higher ed’s model of scarcity — the universities’ status as the generally accepted and preferred accreditation bodies — remains intact. That is why I think that while technology will undoubtedly affect higher ed in some significant fashion in the near future, I don’t know if I agree with Gates’ assessment that a university education will be five times less important in five years (believe me, if it comes true, I won’t be sorry to be wrong).

Already, a vast amount of information is available online for anyone with the desire to learn, and that’s only going to grow. However, that increase in freely available information isn’t a threat to the financial stability of higher-education institutions as long as they remain the only ones who can give you a piece of paper that employers would accept as evidence that you possess enough basic knowledge and skills to be employable. That’s why universities can afford to put their lectures online for all the world to see.

Let’s say MIT puts all of its lectures and other course material online. Without enrolling at MIT, I can watch every lecture, do every assignments, and even take every test. After four years of going through the exact same curriculum as someone who is actually enrolled at MIT, am I going to be able to walk into a job interview and convince a potential employer that I am just as qualified as an MIT graduate? Most likely not. Right now, if you want an education in the truest sense of the word, you have many options. But if you want to get a certification of your education, there is really only one widely accepted source — colleges and universities. That’s why universities can keep charging — and people will keep paying — tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars in tuition. The thing that keeps students and tuition dollars rolling in is no longer necessarily the knowledge that higher ed institutions offer or even the faculty who impart that knowledge, but rather the fact that these institutions are the only ones who can hand out certifications that enable their students to get jobs. The significant time and money that people invest in higher education are aimed at — above all else — obtaining that piece of certification.

I personally think that’s a bit of an absurdity, but I also think that model probably isn’t likely to dramatically change in the near future, much less five years. Universities have little incentive for making such drastic fundamental changes unless their model of scarcity is broken or at least seriously threatened. For that to happen, employers must generally reach the conclusion that a diploma from a university is no longer a stamp of employability, or at least no longer the sole stamp. Yet, what incentives do employers have to change that mentality? They still need an efficient and cost-effective way to gauge which among the hundreds of applicants for a job opening are equipped with the knowledge needed for the position. If nothing else, a university degree at least tells you that someone took a number of courses specializing in whatever field they majored in. In essence, the universities are conducting educational background checks and weeding out unqualified candidates for employers, at no cost to the employers. The universities are making oodles of money from this, and employers are saving oodles of money and time from not having to do such background checks on their own. I see few incentives for either to change their mindset any time soon.

To break that model of scarcity, we need to first have sufficient information on the Internet, available for free or relatively low cost, to substitute for the amount of knowledge you will acquire through a college degree program. I think we already have that, and much more, for many fields and I have no doubt the amount of publicly available knowledge for the taking will only increase. However, what we then need — and this is more important — is for someone to organize that gigantic pool of knowledge into curricula focusing on various fields and then devise an effective, less expensive, and more efficient way to certify that someone has digested the contents of a particular curriculum. There are many possibilities for how this could be accomplished (another post for another day), but the bottom line is that whatever solution they come up with has to be at least as cost-effective and efficient for employers as the current do-you-have-a-college-diploma system. If we can pull that off, then we’ll see a sea change in higher education. This involves more than just change in a few sectors or professions. It requires a fundamental rethinking of how a major component of society should function. That, I think, will take significantly more than five years.

I’ve spent the last few years working at a pharmacy school, and my experience there has me thinking that professional journalism desperately needs to develop a culture of continuing education the way the health-care professions and some other fields have. Professional pharmacists, for instance, are required to earn a certain number of continuing-education credits each year to retain their licenses, and pharmacy schools, among other entities, help provide such opportunities by offering CE programs. In addition to attending these programs, pharmacists can also earn credits through self-study — reading certain courses or articles on their own and then completing related exercises. The programs and self-study projects are approved and assigned a number of credit hours by an accreditation body. The system helps ensure that practicing professionals are up to speed on the latest developments and research in their field.

One of the biggest problems in journalism right now is that many of its practitioners are not all that familiar with the latest relevant trends and technology. Yes, journalism schools are retooling their programs to adapt and provide a more up-to-date education for their students, but that doesn’t help the journalists who are already out of school. Given the rapid pace with which communication technology is evolving, it doesn’t take that long for skills and knowledge to become dated. Yet, there is no formal professional-development system to ensure that journalism practitioners are continually updating their knowledge and repertoire. That task is left up to the individual, and in the high-stress, high-workload, modest-compensation world of professional journalism, it is far too easy, even for motivated self-learners, to let things like attending workshops or reading about the latest journalism research fall out of sight and out of mind.

Journalism Organizations’ Responsibility

I think a big part of the problem is that unlike the health-care fields, one doesn’t need to be licensed to become a journalist (and rightfully so). The lack of a profession-wide licensure mechanism makes it difficult to implement a profession-wide continuing-education system. However, I think you can build a culture of continuing education without tying it to licensure. For example, professional journalism organizations can independently require their employees to fulfill a certain number of hours of professional-development activities each year as part of the terms of their employment.

With that, of course, comes the obligation on the part of the companies to make sure their employees have the time to fulfill those requirements. That means setting aside a certain number of hours for each employee to pursue CE activities and creating an environment that encourages employees to seek out such opportunities.

There are several benefits to the news organization in this. First of all, it would ensure its journalists are up on the latest practices in the field, which can only help the organization’s work. Secondly, it could be leveraged as a recruiting tool — “Come work for us and we’ll give you time to help yourself add new skills.” That second point would obviously also be a motivation for journalists to pursue continuing education, and it’d become even more so if more and more news organizations begin adopting this approach. You may not need to be in a continuing-education program to be hired for a job at a news organization, but if that organization is taking steps to make sure its employees have the latest skills, then chances are you’d have a better shot at a job there if you have the latest skills as well.

Journalism Schools’ Responsibility

It is not enough to merely have news organizations impose CE requirements for their journalists. There needs to be a rich variety of CE programs available for those journalists. This is where journalism schools come in. I did a quick search to see how many journalism schools offer continuing education for professional journalists and was rather disappointed. Of the 56 schools on this list, only seven mentioned a CE or professional-development program on their Web site:

• Ball State
• CUNY
• Columbia University
• UNC-Chapel Hill
• NYU-SCPS
• University of Oregon
• University of South Carolina

Note: The list I linked to is obviously not comprehensive, but I think it is large enough to be a representative sample size. I went to each school’s Web site and looked for links to the effect of “continuing education” or “professional development.” On sites with a search box, I searched for “continuing education” and “professional education.” It is possible that some of the other schools do offer CE programs for journalists, but if you can’t find it through the navigation or easily through a site search …

Many of the schools offer graduate programs and fellowships that provide further training in journalism. However, such programs require the journalists to give up their current jobs for at least a year for a fellowship and more than that for a graduate program. Family obligations, financial burdens, and the prospects of having to find another job in a tight job market make these programs an unfeasible option for many working journalists.

In addition to the relatively few CE opportunities being offered by J-schools, a number of the ones I did find were simply not very accommodating for the working journalist. A weeklong immersion program is no doubt useful, but how many journalists can take off from work for a whole week and plop down a couple thousand dollars plus travel and hotel expenses to attend such programs? Worse yet are the programs that are spread out over several weeks. If attending for a whole week is difficult for many journalists, attending for one or two days a week for four or five weeks in a row would likely be impossible unless you happened to work within driving distance of the program site and have a very accommodating employer. Basically, such programs are occasional indulgences — something that a relatively few get to do once every few years if their schedules and budgets allow — rather than an ongoing process of continual learning for the masses.

Frankly, I think journalism schools are doing a disservice to their alumni by not having more comprehensive CE offerings. Think about it: You graduate from a J-school with (you hope) the latest skills. Five years later, a chunk of those skills are probably in need of an update, but journalism schools offer few opportunities for you to do that without quitting your job and incurring major expenses to enter a graduate degree program. Meanwhile, the schools have updated their degree programs’ curricula and are producing new graduates whose skills are more up to date than yours, thus making it more difficult for you to compete with them for that next job.

Aside from doing right by their alumni, J-schools also might benefit from CE programs in several ways. For one thing, it’d foster stronger ties between faculty at the schools and journalists in the field, spurring more opportunities for academia-industry collaboration. Secondly, the CE programs could be an additional source of revenue, especially if they’re designed in such a way that they can be offered to a large number of people at the same time. Third, it helps the schools be more connected to their alumni and helps those alumni be more competitive in the job market, which probably doesn’t hurt when it’s time to ask those alumni to send in their donation checks.

If we’re to build a culture of continuing education in journalism, then the nature of the CE programs being offered must change. Comprehensive weeklong or multi-week programs have their place, but we need a much greater number of shorter, less expensive programs. Also, these programs should be designed with the idea of being accessible to journalists regardless of where they are. In an era where you can produce a livestream with just a laptop and a webcam, surely a school of journalism can whip up something to deliver good online sessions to off-site participants. Delivering programs online would also eliminate physical limits on how many people can attend and probably cut down on the cost of holding these programs, making them affordable to more journalists.

How It Might Work

Here’s a scenario of how a CE system for journalism could work:

A journalism organization hires journalists based on the usual criteria — skills, experience, potential, etc. All employees of the company are required to fulfill, say, 15 hours of continuing education each year. The company sets aside a number of each employee’s annual work hours (let’s just say 40 hours — a mere five days per year) specifically for such activities, covering the duration of the programs, travel time, and time for the employees to devise ways to apply the new skills and knowledge to their jobs. That last part is important, because what good is going to a seminar if you have no time afterward to digest what you learned there and think about how to put it to use? If the budget allows, the company might also set aside some money to cover a portion of the employees’ CE expenses, though I’m not counting on this last part, at least not in the current environment.

The CE programs can come from several sources. The easiest thing to do would be for the company to organize internal sessions, led by employees in various departments. A photographer can teach reporters the basics of taking a decent photo, for instance, since reporters are increasingly being asked to do that for some of the events they cover. The company can also partner with several journalism schools and, where it makes sense, other entities to create CE programs that are designed to appeal to various types of journalists. For instance, there would be a selection of programs for reporters, a selection for copy editors, a selection for programmers, a selection for ad salespeople, etc. In addition, each focus would have courses targeted at people with different levels of expertise so that an experienced programmer can opt for a more advanced programming session while a beat reporter who’s interested in learning about programming can take an introductory workshop or something specifically geared toward how reporters can use programming in their work.

These CE sessions would vary in length and cost, but most would be relatively short (an hour to a day) and at a reasonable price ($50 to a few hundred dollars). Also, as much as possible, these sessions would be delivered online as well as in person (you’d pay more for in-person). That way, instead of having to leave their jobs for a whole week and spend a couple thousand dollars for an intensive immersion program, journalists would spread it out, spending $50 for an hour-long online seminar here, two or three hundred dollars for a four-hour, hands-on program there. What the schools might lose in offering less expensive programs can be made up by having many more attendees than before.

The journalists would be able to earn CE credits by:

• Attending the aforementioned CE programs offered internally and by partner schools.
• Leading internal sessions (which encourages people to share their expertise across departments).
• Attending other relevant conferences or workshops.
• Learning how to use new software programs through online learning sites such as Lynda.com, documenting that learning experience, AND using those programs in their work.
• Reading pieces about relevant trends and new practices, logging and sharing what they read, AND coming up with ways to put into practice the ideas from those pieces.
• Other activities as approved on a case-by-case basis.

With that system in place, the company would then make CE part of its employee-evaluation formula and tie in various incentives to reward employees for putting what they’ve learned from the CE activities into practice. The hope is that under this setup, journalists would not only be required to keep their skills current, but would also have incentive to actively seek out new skills, in part to fulfill their CE requirements and in part because there’s a carrot dangling in front of them.

Each journalist would fulfill the requirement through a combination of the above activities according to their own scheduling and budget limitations. So if you can’t afford to go to several sessions at a partner J-school, you can make up for it by doing more reading and online self-learning. And by requiring the journalists to not only read or learn new software programs, but to also come up with ways to put that knowledge to use in order to get CE credit for it, it would help spur experimentation and innovation from the bottom up, which is desperately needed at many traditional news organizations.

If a couple journalism organizations can do this and show tangible, positive results, others would follow, and with luck and time, it could become a common practice in the industry. However, it would not prevent outsiders from breaking into the business the way a licensure system would, since 1). you don’t need to work for a journalism company to be a professional journalist, and 2). even if you do want to work for a journalism organization, your lack of prior CE experience would not hurt you as long as you have up-to-date skills, regardless of how you obtained them.

So what do you think? Too crazy? Will never happen? Already being done somewhere and I just don’t know about it?

Well, that was a nice week or so away from the blogosphere. No hand-wringing, no snark, no self-righteous tomes. Oh well, break is over. Once more unto the breach. Time to get back to blogging and back to writing about the journalism business that I’m no longer a part of.

Among the items from this week that caught my attention was Gannett’s announcement that it’s going to centralize design functions for its entire chain of newspapers at five hubs, with each hub handling the design of up to 20-some newspapers. A Gannett memo said

The goal of this project is to elevate the quality of design at sites where the recession caused a loss of focus on design.  And to sustain good design at sites that have been able to keep that a strong focus.

But let’s be honest here. This is a cost-saving move. As a former newspaper designer, it’s hard for me to see how distancing the designers from the rest of the actors in the journalistic process would improve the end product. The Gannett memo also said that each paper’s look will remain unique and that copy-editing functions would remain at the individual papers. However, as with all things in newspapers these days, when a company makes statements like that, you might as well attach the words “for now” on the end. There’s no doubt that the centralizing of design functions will make it easier for instituting a common template across all papers down the road and sets a precedent for future centralization of other functions.

The Society of News Design has written an open letter in protest of Gannett’s move. The letter points out (correctly) that:

If one considers the sole value of design to be making pieces fit on pages, an “assembly line” solution may seem attractive. However, architecting publications to meet reader needs is something more complicated, nuanced and essential.

While I agree with most of that sentiment (aside from the use of “architect” as a verb), here’s the thing to consider: The job of a publication designer is certainly more complicated and nuanced than just making things fit on a page, but what if it’s not (or no longer) that essential to the organization that’s employing the designers, or as essential as other needs that require money from the same pot? This isn’t a problem restricted to newspapers; it exists in any organization where creating good designs isn’t the primary mission (which would cover just about every organization except design agencies). Case in point: My first post-newspaper job was designing course packs for a nonprofit working to increase high school students’ interest in science. When I got there, their course packs were a mess — a hodgepodge of photocopies from a dozen different sources stuffed into a binder. That didn’t stop the program from becoming a big hit with science teachers across the state. I completely revamped the course packs and made them look good, and the staff and the teachers they worked with loved them. However, when the program ran into funding difficulties, the designer position was eliminated.

Want more examples? Just look around you and you’ll see an unending stream of publications and collaterals screaming for better design. Yet, having that better design may not matter all that much for the organizations that are producing them because a mediocre (and sometimes horrible) design might not really interfere with those organizations’ main mission. Heck, I can work magic on that clip-art filled, comic sans-dotted flyer for painting service in my mail box, but will it really add much business for the painter? Probably not, and hence the painter doesn’t even think about hiring a designer to create a nicer looking flyer. That, I think, is the quandary that newspaper designers are increasingly finding themselves in.

The SND’s open letter said that “If designers are used solely as decorators or mechanical paginators, their publications are not leveraging their full value.” However,  mechanical paginators might be all that news organizations need or want going forward as the print component of the organizations becomes more and more de-emphasized and the focus shifts to online. This shift will mean we won’t get print news products that are as well-designed as they used to be, but it likely won’t mean we’ll be getting less or worse news, which is the primary mission of a news organization. Perhaps a well-designed print news product will be — and may have always been — more a luxury than a necessity, and that all the fantastic skills a good designer has to offer a news organization will just make him or her over-qualified for the job. That’s one reason I left newspapers — I could see that the things I enjoyed most about my job — the things that went beyond mere pagination — were probably going to start disappearing from my job and my position could be increasingly reduced to little more than a smart monkey who knows how to use InDesign. That’s not what I went into visual journalism to do, nor is it a good direction for my professional development.

As for that SND letter, I’m sad to say that given the current climate, it comes off more like a desperate plea or a toothless battle cry on the retreat than a defiant stand. Really, would any company listen to a “you’ll miss us when we’re gone” cry from the people they are ushering out the door? The letter’s call for news companies to restore training investments to help print designers broaden their skills is unrealistic at a time when budgets are tight and journalism schools are dumping thousands of younger, cheaper workers who have more updated skills — skills obtained at no cost to the newspapers — into the labor pool every year. The letter also raises the issue of a “creative brain drain,” the idea that in losing designers, newspapers also lose their creative and adaptable thinking that could positively influence the organization in areas other than just the design of the print product. I can see some merit in that, but no one gets to hang around just to contribute creativity. You still need to perform a certain function, and that gets back to the fact that the importance of the print design function at a news organization is in decline. Also, who’s to say that if news organizations swapped print designers for more multimedia reporters and Web developers that the latter two won’t bring creativity with them?

As much as I appreciate designers and as much as I know that many of them can adapt and expand their skills to do other things (in fact I think that’s what they need to do to survive in journalism), if I were a news organization looking for a multimedia reporter or a Web programmer, my first choice would likely not be retraining existing print designers to do those things, not when I can go out and find people who would cost less and come in already with that training.

Yesterday, I finally got around to reading the Rolling Stone profile of Stanley McChrystal that led to the general’s downfall. After digesting the piece, what really struck me was that the controversial remarks by McChrystal and his aides about the administration, which ended up costing McChrystal his job, were actually a relatively small part of the story and, I would argue, not even the best journalism in the piece.

On the Rolling Stone site, the article is split into six pages. If you break it down, the parts of the article that actually deal with the now infamous snipes only make up about one page. The more interesting parts, at least to me, were the last three pages of the story, which paint a picture of a general struggling to win the war and, more disconcertingly, struggling to deal with his troops’ increasing anger and frustration over the counterinsurgency policy he’s pushing. For someone like me, who doesn’t follow the developments of the war in Afghanistan very closely beyond what tidbits I pick up on NPR on the evening commute (usually stories about the latest casualties), it was an informative and revealing look. Unfortunately, that has gotten nary a mention amid all the hoopla over the remarks about the administration.

As for the badmouthing of the administration, my main reaction to it was more or less a shrug. Considering the stakes, the amount of power involved, and the stature of the players, one would be surprised if there weren’t clashes, and there already had been reports about past tensions. The surprise in this isn’t that the general and (quite reasonably) his aides don’t like certain members of the administration and talk smack about them behind their backs, but just that they would be so careless as to say those things within earshot of a reporter in their traveling party.

And then there’s the matter of the fallout from the report. In this interview with MSNBC, Michael Hastings, the author of the article, said that the soldiers he had been talking to after the firing say they are glad about the change in leadership. But note the reason for which they were glad — they weren’t glad to see the general get canned because he had a strained relationship with the administration, but rather because they disagreed with his policy.

Was McChrystal fired for the ineffectiveness of his policy? For his role in previous scandals? For losing the support of his troops? No. He was fired for a couple careless remarks to a reporter about certain members of the administration (and really, his aides said much more and far worse things in the story than he did). Basically, he got fired for being a bad media manager, for letting a political pissing match slip into public view. What’s more, it’s not even a new pissing match. It’s hard to imagine the president and his team were unaware of the general’s opinions of certain members of the administration before this report, so the administration was obviously willing to more or less let such clashes go … until they spilled into public view.

Though the firing was necessary since those remarks painted the president into a corner publicly, I wish it was done for better reasons than what basically amounted to a few tabloid moments by people in high places. Considering the reason McChrystal was fired, it doesn’t seem likely any of the real concerns about the war effort raised in the Rolling Stone story will be addressed (and Hastings himself said as much in this interview). And it’s a shame that the story has so far managed to primarily incite only a national “OMG, he said what?!” response. I can only hope that the attention surrounding this story will eventually shift to its more worthwhile components.

Related Thoughts

The Rolling Stone Headline

After reading the story, I couldn’t help but be a bit ticked about Rolling Stone’s headline on the story:

The Runaway General

Stanley McChrystal, Obama’s top commander in Afghanistan, has seized control of the war by never taking his eye off the real enemy: The wimps in the White House

For one thing, that subhead says pretty much the opposite of what the story says. If anything, the story conveys the idea that McChrystal has been struggling to seize control of the war and in fact is having problems convincing even his own camp that what he’s doing is the right path. And then the “the real enemy: The wimps in the White House” part just strikes me as being sensational.

The Reporter’s Reaction

I also found Hastings’ reactions to the responses to his piece interesting. In the MSNBC interview above, he said he really didn’t expect the general to lose his job over the story. Also, in an NPR interview, he seems to get agitated when the NPR anchor asked him whether the general admonished his staff when they were making fun of the vice president (you have to listen to the audio clip to get the full effect):

NORRIS: When that joke was made, did McChrystal admonish that aide in any way? Or did he go with the flow?

Mr. HASTINGS: No, they were laughing. Have you hung out with the military much?

NORRIS: I certainly haven’t spent the kind of time that you have spent with the military. In that statement, I guess…

Mr. HASTINGS: I know. I mean, these guys – that’s who these guys are. That’s why I’m so shocked. These guys have been living these wars for the last nine years, you know? They don’t see their families. They hang out with a bunch of other guys and then, you know? You know, they’re in fights. They lose their people they love. I mean, they (unintelligible) some of this humor.

The “(unintelligible)” part in the transcript actually says “it’s a release valve, some of this humor.” Hastings certainly doesn’t seem surprised that the general and his aides make such remarks among themselves and seems to be almost defending them a bit by pointing to the stress they are under. Between this and the MSNBC interview, it seems that Hastings assigned less significance to those remarks than seemingly everyone else has.

Reporters and Access

The story has also sparked a discussion about reporters and access to sources. Many have argued that beat reporters would not have written about the inflammatory remarks because they want to preserve future access to the sources, whereas Hastings, a freelancer, has no such concerns. I think there’s certainly a level of truth to that sentiment. However, I would point out that even as a freelancer, Hastings would not have been able to gather the inflammatory part of his story in the first place without — that’s right — access.

The issue here isn’t whether the desire for access is bad. Much of journalism, no matter who’s doing it, depends on access, on sources being willing to engage the reporter on some level. Preserving access isn’t a yes or no issue, but rather a balancing act — how do you balance future access to a source against reporting everything you encounter through the access you currently have? The guiding principle isn’t so much “Don’t write anything bad about a source so you can keep access,” but more like “Is this story important enough to burn this bridge?” Consider what Hastings himself wrote in this GQ piece about covering the 2008 elections:

The dance with staffers is a perilous one. You’re probably not going to get much, if any, one-on-one time with the candidate, which means your sources of information are the people who work for him. So you pretend to be friendly and nonthreatening, and over time you “build trust,” which everybody involved knows is an illusion. If the time comes, if your editor calls for it, you’re supposed to fuck them over; and they’ll throw you under a bus without much thought, too. (I should say that personal friendships can actually develop, despite the odds.) For the top campaign officials and operatives, seduction and punishment of reporters is an art. Write this fluff piece now; we’ll give you something good later. No, don’t write it this way, write it that way. We’ll give you something good later.

“If the time comes,” and in this case, Hastings obviously believed it was important enough for him to burn this particular bridge (and as Rachel Maddow said in this segment, other reporters would, too).

As some have pointed out, the fallout from the Rolling Stone story likely will mean less access for reporters in the future. I think that’s an accurate assessment. Jon Stewart, in lampooning some of the media’s reaction to the story and how it affects future access, said of access, “I don’t need it anymore. I got this amazing story.” Of course, that doesn’t answer the question of what will you do when you need access to help you nail down that next amazing story. And while we may feel the temptation to say, “A good journalist can get that without access,” consider that had Hastings not been allowed to follow McChrystal around for a month, the general would most likely still have a job right now. The concern going forward isn’t whether Hastings has ruined it for hacks who coddle their sources to curry favor, but rather how much more difficult will things be for the next Michael Hastings as officials clamp up even more after seeing what happened to McChrystal. This is something that will affect all journalists, whether they are beat reporters or freelancers.

So was this a worthwhile tradeoff? I’m ambivalent on that question. On one hand, his story has certainly generated a huge response and led to big changes. On the other hand, the response and the changes more or less missed the more important points the article was trying to convey. I do think Hastings has written a good story, but I don’t think the things for which he burned potential future access were the best part of his article. In fact, he may have burned his bridge to write about the aspect of the story that ended up making the biggest splash, but in making that splash, that aspect also seems to have pulled attention away from the more crucial issues he was trying to shine a light on.

Scott Rosenberg has a post at MediaShift Idea Lab today in which he wonders, “Why do so many journalists find it so hard to handle public criticism?” It’s a good thing that Rosenberg isn’t one of those, because I’m about to offer some public criticism of his piece.

A Matter of Context

The part of Rosenberg’s post that bothers me more than anything else is where he cites a passage from the New York Times editor Clark Hoyt’s farewell column:

One passage in Hoyt’s column jumped out at me as a fascinating window onto the psyche of the working journalist today:

Times journalists have been astonishingly candid, even when facing painful questions any of us would want to duck. Of course, journalists don’t relish being criticized in public any more than anyone else. A writer shaken by a conclusion I was reaching told me, if you say that, I’ll have to kill myself. I said, no, you won’t. Well, the writer said, I’ll have to go in the hospital. I wrote what I intended, with no ill consequences for anyone’s health.

“If you say that, I’ll have to kill myself”? Even in jest, the line suggests a thinness of skin entirely inappropriate to any public figure. “Journalists don’t relish being criticized in public any more than anyone else,” according to Hoyt. Yet the work of journalists so often involves criticizing others in public that it is something they must expect in return. Surely they, of all professionals, ought to be able to take what they readily dish out.

In itself, this passage seems ok, until you actually go read Hoyt’s column. Here’s the passage immediately after the paragraph that Rosenberg cited (emphasis added by me):

Those histrionics were extreme and unique. The rule was thoughtful engagement. Take Steve Berman, a respected veteran photo editor, one of several journalists who failed to check out the obituary of a photographer who for years had claimed, falsely, that he took the iconic picture of John F. Kennedy Jr. saluting his slain father’s casket. After a column pointing out all the missed warning signs, Berman came to thank me. He said he believed in accountability and had learned from the experience. I was surprised but came to know that I should not have been.

Bill Keller, the executive editor, once joked as we walked down the passageway to his office for an interview that he was heading for his weekly proctological exam. But throughout my tenure, Keller was gracious and supportive. When we had what was certainly our disagreement of greatest consequence — over the Times article suggesting that John McCain had had an extramarital affair with a young female lobbyist — Keller showed great equanimity. I said The Times had been off base. Though the story gave ammunition to critics who said the paper was biased, and it was no help to have the public editor joining thousands of readers questioning his judgment about it, Keller said mildly that we would just have to disagree on this one.

That certainly paints a different picture than “if you say that, I’ll have to kill myself.” Whereas Hoyt cites that example as “extreme and unique”, Rosenberg uses it as evidence that such behavior is the norm, calling it “a fascinating window onto the psyche of the working journalist today.” In introducing the excerpt from Hoyt’s column, Rosenberg wrote of New York Times journalists:

It seems the process of being critiqued in public in their own paper continues to be alienating and dispiriting to them.

That’s quite a claim based on one example, an example that the Hoyt himself said was the extreme. When placed in its original context, that passage from Hoyt’s piece is less a window and more a periscope — a tunneled vision showing what lies in one narrow direction — and the way Rosenberg uses the passage, he’s avoiding panning the periscope to see what else is around, since what he would see would conflict with his narrative.

The People Who Are Better Than Journalists at Handling Criticism

Rosenberg starts his piece by pointing to professional athletes, artists, government officials, and businesses as examples of other fields that receive a lot of public criticism and says, “In all these cases, the seasoned professional learns to deal with it. But over and over today, we encounter the sorry spectacle of distinguished reporters losing it when their work is publicly attacked — or columnists sneering at the feedback they get in poorly moderated web comments.”

Yes, it’s a good thing that professional athletes are so much better at handling public criticism …

and government officials …

not to mention artists …

and of course, businesses …

What’s that? I’m being unfair by pointing to a few instances and drawing blanket conclusions? Well, what do you think Rosenberg was doing? As evidence for his argument, he offers up two links — a “bloggers in pajamas” comment from James Risen (which Risen quickly apologized for and yet still got razzed for it) and a “look at the ideologues in my comment section” column by Dana Millbank. He provides a third link later in the post — back to the Risen piece again (and I know there are enough instances of journalists responding badly that you don’t need to recycle links). The fact is, for every spectacle of a journalist behaving badly in response to criticism, there are countless instances when journalists do take criticism in stride and respond thoughtfully. Of course, those don’t get blogged and retweeted because they don’t fit the “old-media curmudgeons in their crumbling ivory tower raging at the world outside that they do not understand” narrative. I think this comment on Rosenberg’s post sums it up pretty well:

I wouldn’t disagree that some journalists can be thin skinned. But the categories of folks you mention at the start all hire armies of public relations people and spend huge sums of money to counter any negative portrayals and massage their reputations with buckets of spin. They hardly take criticism in stride.

On the other hand, the press is one of the most self-flagellating industries I know.

I would argue that when you consider the amount of criticism and the dynamics between the critics and the criticized compared to that in other fields, journalists as a whole handle public criticism about as well as any other professions and are better in some ways and worse in others. Consider:

• How many other professions invite and publish criticism of their work? And traditional media has been doing it for a long time. Newspapers’ publication of letters to the editor look antiquated and outdated as a means of dealing with criticism — and it is, when compared to the kind of transparency and interaction pushed by the Internet — until you consider how many other professions don’t even bother going that far.
• Having worked in and out of the news media, I can say that it is, as the commenter above stated, one of the most self-flagellating industries. How many companies in other industries hire somebody specifically to publicly criticize all the ways in which the company screwed up?
• How many athletes, CEOs, artists, or politicians can you call up directly and berate about their performance? And how many actually have to sit there and listen to you berate them? Journalists do, because a critic is also a consumer of their work — a customer — and hence they cannot simply brush the critic aside.

That said, I do think Rosenberg has a point when he wrote “the typical blogger has more experience dealing with criticism — measuring a reasonable response, managing trolls and restraining the urge to flame — than the typical newsroom journalist.” However, I think this isn’t so much about dealing with criticism as it is about responding to criticism in the blogosphere. I would suggest that a more accurate way of putting it would be “the typical blogger has more experience interacting in a blog setting than the typical newsroom journalist,” which only makes sense.

From seeing fellow journalists respond to criticism over the phone or via e-mail day in and day out for a decade, I get the sense that they know how to do that relatively well and that for most of them, they don’t instinctively lash out when faced with criticism. Sure, they are flabbergasted after the fact when they encounter criticism that they feel makes no sense. But when a critic raises a valid point, most of the journalists I’ve worked with respond in a reasonable manner. The problem is that just as they’ve learned how to calm down an irate caller on the other end of the line and settle into something of a reasonable discussion, some traditional journalists need to learn how to respond to a critique in the blogosphere without pouring gasoline on the fire. There are different rules for different mediums. They need to learn rules such as, “No matter how  much the blogger snarks and generalizes about traditional media, you CANNOT snark and generalize about bloggers because it will only enhance their claim about you being out of touch. It may not be fair, but it is what it is. JUST DON’T DO IT.”

Also adding to the bad appearance is the fact that traditional journalists often seem to face a no-win or hard-to-win situation in responding to criticism from the blogosphere because some of the rules don’t favor them. A snarky and angry blogger is just showing personality and voice, and a little tiff between him and another blogger is just good entertainment. A snarky and angry traditional journalist, on the other hand, is accused of losing it, and a tiff between him and a blogger becomes a battle of old vs. new, good vs. evil, rebel vs. establishment. Sometimes it’s like being in a boxing match where all you can do is deflect the other guy’s punches, and the minute you punch back, you’re disqualified.

Journalism professor Jay Rosen had a couple of questions on Twitter last week that got me thinking. First he asked how we can change the news system to better serve news users of different levels in terms of their understanding of a topic. Later, in a related tweet, he pointed to an American Journalism Review article about attempts to crack the context-of-news puzzle, with Google’ s Living Stories project and Salon’s topic pages (like this one) as examples.

The two problems are obviously interconnected, and I think solutions to the context-of-news dilemma will help answer the multi-level-users question. To me, a key part of the solution is breaking the news down into granular bits of information and then organizing those bits to create 1) an overarching, constantly updated narrative/visualization of the news that elucidates the connection between those bits and 2) a basic-to-complex progression of information that users can jump in at whichever level best fits their familiarity with the issue.

What We Have Now

Let’s look at the make-up of news stories. They are made up of various bits of information, which can include anything from an event (e.g.: a speech, a study, a milestone accomplishment) to an evergreen piece of information (e.g.: a building code, a scientific concept). Let’s call these newggets (pardon my lack of skills in coming up with clever made-up nouns).

Usually, something happens (which is in itself a newgget) that spurs a journalist to write a story by pulling together a number of newggets and arranging them in a way that draws connections between them to form a narrative.

As news related to that initial story develops, more stories are written, each usually spurred by the introduction of some new newggets, which are given some background by referring back to some existing newggets. Each of these stories show the connection among the newggets within it, but they are isolated units.

And then along came the wonderful Internet, which allowed us to link from one story to another. That established connections among stories.

The Internet also made it easier for us to organize stories in other ways to help add context, such as chronologically:

When tags came along, we gained the ability to easily put the stories into different groups:

This is where we are today, and formats such as topic pages and Google’s Living Stories use linking, timestamps and timelines, and tagging to demonstrate the connection among stories.

Where the Current Efforts Fall Short

To be honest, when I looked at the Living Stories project, my first reaction was “meh”. Even now, I’m not convinced it’s all that big a leap. Granted, the presentation and packaging of the stories are a bit of a departure from the norm you typically find on a news organization’s website, but ask yourself this: What does the Living Stories format contribute to context that you can’t get with just some good tagging, timestamping, and a brief summary of the topic? My feeling is: not that much. Even without the timeline, you would still be able to see which story happened when just by looking at the timestamps, and since most such story lists are in chronological order anyway, all you have to do is scroll to bottom of the list and work  your way back up to get an idea of the sequence of events. As for the categorization by sub-topics and types of stories, that’s just tagging.

I think while the Living Stories project is a step in the right direction in terms of presentation, its effectiveness was hampered by the fact that it did not have the right type of content for its format. The entries are still pretty much your typical newspaper articles with just minor tweaks. Each is written as a one-off, so each is a self-contained narrative with new and old newggets. Because of time and space limitations and the need to stay tightly focused on the new newggets that were the impetus for writing the story, none of these stories include all the newggets for the topic, so whatever connections they draw among the newggets are localized to just one corner of the vast web of connections that exist among all the different facets of the issue. While inter-story linking, the timeline, and the tagging help explain the relationship among the stories, we don’t really have a good elucidation of the relationship among all the newggets. So despite all the organizations of stories illustrated above, when it comes to the information they contain, we often have a jumble like this:

Possible Solution

To understand the connection among tidbits of information rather than among the stories they comprise, we need to deal with the news on the basis of those tidbits rather than the stories. This is where granular bits of information may help. The idea that the “article” is an obsolete basic unit of news has already been floated, such as in this Jeff Jarvis piece, in which he suggests using “topic” as the basic unit and presenting a topic in an ever-updating, blog-style approach. That’s a good idea, but I think “topic” is too big a unit. Perhaps the basic unit should be just a newgget — a piece of information. For instance, the basic unit in our system would not be a story about a new study on climate change, but rather each of the individual findings in the study that lead to the study’s conclusion. Instead of a season preview story about a sports team, our basic unit would be things such as the team’s returning players, its performance last season, and its off-season additions.

Breaking the news up into granular bits could provide the content type that would be a better fit for a Living Stories format. Right now, the format is dealing with stories — whole collections of newggets old and new that are picked out of the pile by the journalist and arranged in a way to create a narrative focusing on the latest newgget that was the impetus for the narrative. From that perspective, its focus is too narrow and its bundling of newggets too cumbersome and inexact if we attempt to use it to explain how everything fits in the big picture. If you break it down to tidbits and fit each tidbit into the organizational structure that Living Stories provide, I think you would get much more utility out of the format. Doing so creates a database of objects that can be used in a variety of ways. The output from this collection can be something in the form of a typical narrative or a non-traditional presentation. To ensure that kind of flexibility, however, I think the input format needs to be granular. Another advantage is that if you enter your news in the form of newggets and then build narratives out of them, it would be easier to set up a system where when one newgget changes, you update that newgget and the update is reflected everywhere that original newgget appears.

Connecting the Dots

But granular newggets are just the beginning. Once you have all these individual bits of information, you need to organize them. The easiest and most obvious one is chronologically, at least for the newsy tidbits. Another is by subject (tagging). However, more important is a diagram, whether literally or figuratively, that explains where everything falls. Compared to this, chronology and categories are but blunt instruments of organizing information. Consider this family tree for dinosaurs:

This tree gives us information that we don’t get just from a list of the the organisms (granular bits of information), the general groups each falls into (tagging), and the approximate time in history when each existed (chronology). This is something that I think current approaches to providing context for news, such as the Living Stories format and topic pages, have not addressed. Putting timestamps and tags on stories is easy but a relatively crude way to connect items. What’s much more difficult but ultimately much more useful is putting each tidbit of information in the right place in the big picture, connecting them in a way that shows their relationship to each other, and revising the diagram as new tidbits of information emerge. If we are able to do that, we might go from this:

to this:

Imagine that the diagram above represents a science and policy issue. Let’s say it’s about a city’s debate over whether to require every resident to build a koi pond in their yard because scientific studies have shown koi ponds to be wonderful things for the environment. Newgget C and the branches under it represent the science aspect of the debate. The organization of the diagram alone tells us how significant each tidbit of information is to the big picture (e.g.: Newgget M is but one of several components making up one of several studies that support koi ponds).

Now, let’s say we get a new finding (Newgget O in the diagram below) that calls into question the validity of the the scientific component represented by Newgget M. So you update your diagram:

What this shows us is that what has been thrown into question is but one of multiple components making up one of multiple studies that provide scientific support for koi ponds. This is a much more exact idea than “A new study has cast questions on existing scientific support for  koi ponds.” This gives us context on how much impact the new study has and whether it’s significant enough for us to throw out the scientific data for koi ponds. It shows us that if Newgget H is disproved instead of Newgget M, it might be a more significant blow to the science behind the politics.

Of course, a more realistic diagram for elements of a news story would not be so neat and straightforward. It would probably look more like this:

However, even a messy diagram such as this is useful (and perhaps more useful) for context. Compare the impact of the displacement of Newgget E above with the displacement of Newgget B below:

Such a diagram would also help us identify holes in the context that need to be filled by making us ask, “Are there lines to be drawn between X and Y?” or “How does what happened to X affect Y?” Going back to the koi pond example, imagine the Newgget B is a scientific study and that Newgget G is the fact that a city council member cited the study in voicing his support for koi ponds. Now, if Newgget K discredits Newgget B, we can easily see from the diagram that the basis for the councilman’s stance has been undermined. That should lead journalists to go back and ask the councilman how the revelation of Newgget K affects his stance, and then if that changes Newgget G, the journalist would follow the connecting lines to trace its effect on newggets connected to G.

Of course, the diagram itself is not enough to give full context. You still need an overarching narrative updating people on the latest developments and explaining in greater detail how those developments affect the big picture. However, instead of writing a fresh narrative every time, you might be constantly updating the same narrative instead. Also, such a narrative may not take the form of a long article, but rather serve more as a central hub pointing to various shorter items about individual newggets or groups of newggets.

Building a Visual Quickstart Guide for A News Story

Now, to use the system we’ve set up to help address the issue of multi-level news users. When I’m trying to teach myself a new design program or a new programming language, I almost always pick up a reference book from the Visual Quickstart Guide series. These books are very handy because each is written in such a way that it first helps you build a basic foundation of knowledge on the topic, and then builds upon that a little bit more with each chapter. Also, a book is broken up into basically sets of information about particular subjects rather than as one continuous narrative, so if you’re a more advanced user but need help with one particular topic, you can jump straight to that topic and quickly get your answer.

Now, take that concept and apply it to news. Start by providing people with the information they need to form the basic foundation of knowledge necessary to understand the issue. Great explainer pieces, such as This American Life’s “The Giant Pool of Money“, already do this. They first explain the basic terms in a way that the lay person can understand. Then they use those basic terms to explain intermediate concepts, and then refer to the intermediate concepts in explaining even more complicated ones. It’s a great way to break down the knowledge barrier to true comprehension as people read the latest update about a news topic.

The granular tidbits of information we entered into our system to create the context diagrams can be repurposed to create such news quickstart guides. Arrange the newggets in order of complexity, then tell the users to start with Newgget X and Y before they move on to Z. Then, after they’ve groked all those items, they should be able to understand A and B. Often, this will not be clearcut, but I think there are general levels of complexity that we can assign newggets to.

Since writing the How to (Voluntarily) Become an Ex-Journalist series, I’ve gotten occasional e-mails from journalists who are looking to change careers asking me for advice on their résumés and cover letters. I always feel kind of embarrassed when I respond. I hope they don’t think I’ve got the magic bullet or anything. Really, the only person I know how to write a cover letter for is me.

However, there are some things that I see over and over again in these cover letters, so I figure I’ll write them down here. My cover-letter advice for journalists looking to change careers always boils down to this:

Use your cover letter to explain why you would make a good [fill in blank with whatever job you're applying for].

It sounds simple and reasonable enough, yet many of the cover letters I’ve seen fail to do this. Often, they give a myriad of reasons why the journalist applying for a particular job would make, well, a good journalist. They rattle off experiences, awards, and job responsibilities that would sound impressive to people in journalism, but mean relatively little to outsiders. The fact that you’ve covered 10 World Series, six Final Fours, and seven NBA Finals tells me you’re a very experienced sports journalist, but it doesn’t tell me how good a fit you would be for the non-journalism job you’re applying for, where you won’t be covering any of that stuff.

The advice I always give for tweaking such cover letters is to talk less about your past experiences and responsibilities, and more about how what skills you acquired from those experiences, what skills you used to do those jobs, and how those skills would translate over to the non-journalism job you’re applying for. To me, focusing on experience and job responsibilities is mostly counterproductive in this situation, because you are trying to change professions, so your experience and past job responsibilities will most likely pale in comparison to people who have been working in the field you’re trying to jump to. But that doesn’t mean you don’t have equal or better skills. The key, then, is to show prospective employers how you demonstrated said skills in your current and past jobs and how those skills would translate over to the job you’re applying for.

For example, the fact that you were a preps editor for a decade doesn’t tell me why you’d be a good anything other than a preps editor. But the fact that as preps editor, you had to maintain good relationships with a myriad of local coaches, parents, and players, juggle all those competing interests, and stay on good terms with them even though you sometimes write negative pieces about them could be cited as a demonstration of your people skills, which could be useful if you’re applying for a job that involves interacting with the public or clients.

There you go. That’s the one tip I have to offer for cover letters. The only other advice I can give is that your cover letter should explain why this particular job appeals to you. People know traditional media is in financial trouble and that many journalists are trying to get out. You have to show a prospective employer that you are genuinely interested in the position for reasons other than that it’s a lifeboat off a sinking ship.

Governor Perdue announced her budget proposal yesterday. Let’s see if you can make sense of its impact from these reports:

Education bears load in budget (News & Observer 4/21):

The governor’s budget would slash 600 jobs, most vacant. Agency budgets would be trimmed by 5 percent to 7 percent. Schools, community colleges and universities would take a 4 percent hit.

UNC system says it can’t absorb the cuts (News & Observer 4/21):

Perdue calls for a 4 percent cut on top of the 2 percent reduction already included in the two-year budget adopted last year.

That could result in the elimination of 1,200 positions across the UNC system, half from faculty ranks, UNC President Erskine Bowles said Tuesday in a written statement. The result would be bigger classes, fewer course offerings and the elimination of administrators critical to academic and financial integrity, Bowles said.

Gov. Perdue spares UNC system (Daily Tar Heel 4/21):

The 2010-11 budget recommendations released Tuesday by N.C. Gov. Bev Perdue were mostly better-than-expected news for the UNC system.

Perdue rolls out changes for $19B N.C. budget (Associated Press 4/21):

Another 600 positions would be eliminated in addition to the 2,000 this year, according to Perdue, although most of newly targeted positions are vacant.

…

Districts that eliminated more than 4,000 teacher positions this school year while finding a combined $225 million in savings could have to eliminate another 2,430 positions next school year, the North Carolina School Boards Association said.

Hmm. Amazing how different media outlets can look at the same piece of information and present totally different pictures (as in the case of the N&O UNC story vs. the DTH story). Even more amazing that it’s nearly impossible to look at any one of these stories and get an accurate idea of how many jobs are going to be lost. The first N&O story says 600, but then of course, that doesn’t include the 1,200 that the UNC system would lose from its 4 percent budget cut (mentioned in the second N&O story) or the 2,430 that the public schools would need to cut to meet its budget trim (in the AP story). As a current state employee, it bugs the heck out of me that I can’t get a complete picture of the impact of this budget from any of these stories. As a former journalist, it bugs the heck out of me that none of them tries to pull it all together and give me a relatively straight forward answer to a question as simple as “How many jobs could be affected?”

The new feature has received a mixed reception. Some like the show because they feel it gives them a behind-the-scene look at how news coverage is shaped, while others have panned it as being boring.

After watching the three episodes so far, my reaction is “meh”. The main problem, I think, is that the Webcast isn’t sure what it wants to be: a behind-the-scene look at how news coverage develops at the NYT, or the NYT’s own daily news show.

This piece in the Guardian says TimesCast “is taking the transparency of a news organisation to a new level,” but I disagree. Now, to be fair, in its own announcement about TimesCast, the NYT never said its aim was to provide more transparency, and I’m not really sure why anyone would make that claim on their behalf, especially after seeing the show. TimesCast reveals way too little real behind-the-scene stuff to shed any light on how things work at the NYT, and it is way too polished and over-produced to convey a sense of authenticity. Once you get past the initial “Hey I’m looking at the NYT page one meeting” novelty, you quickly realize that just because the NYT brought a camera into the meeting, it doesn’t mean it’s actually showing you much of anything. The clips of the meeting that we get to see are just the “tell us your biggest story” tidbits, with little real discussion about how they plan to cover it. In effect, there’s not much more there than what you would get out of a list of the day’s top headlines with a brief summary under each.

Hey, it’s the NYT page one meeting. Why, it looks … pretty much like any other meeting …

The interviews with individual editors and reporters also do little to add any real transparency. It basically turns the interviewees into talking heads and resembles segments from TV news, with the interviewer playing the role of the studio host and the interviewees standing in as on-site reporters. As for what they discuss in these interviews, mostly it’s not them telling us how they are covering this story; it’s them reporting the story. The interactions in the Webcast comes off as staged. I mean, when’s the last time an editor called a reporter and said, “Hi Bob, why don’t you tell us a little bit about what you are working on?” Even the clips of the page one meeting feel like they were edited not for authenticity but for the purpose of serving as a stage-setter for the rest of the Webcast. They are in the newsroom, but they’re not showing you how the newsroom works. You’re not being shown behind-the-scene stuff; you’re seeing a front erected just for you. In essence, you’re a member of the newsroom tour and there’s no wandering off.

In the instances where there was actual talk about how the NYT is covering a story, it runs into the problem of “so what?” Unless you’re a hardcore news junkie, how interested would you be in things like, “We’re looking at the Google-China story from the angle of how this is going to affect each’s reputation.” Geez, that’s great. Maybe I’ll pay attention when you actually tell me how this would affect their reputation. The only reason I would pay attention to someone telling me how they plan to report something is if I have a way of interacting with them right then and there and telling them “That’s good” or “You’re on the wrong track.”

If transparency isn’t the goal and the NYT is looking at this Webcast as its own daily news roundup, then I think the format is ill-suited. I agree with Jeff Bercovici’s assessment on this point:

It faithfully captures the aesthetics of life in a newsroom — the queasy lighting, the unflattering hairstyles, the droning story meetings. What it doesn’t have are any of the elements that viewers have come to expect from TV news: lively pacing, polished delivery, dynamic visuals.

…

Trust me, you will find yourself checking your email after the first 30 seconds.

And Bercovici is right. I did find my attention flagging after about 30 seconds, and a minute into the six-minute Webcast, I was already doing other stuff and not really paying much attention to the voices droning in the other browser tab.

It’s been close to three years since I wrote the original four installments of this series, and they have been by far the most read posts on this blog. That’s a bittersweet feeling. I’m happy that something I wrote has offered a little bit of help to so many, but at the same time, it’s a reminder of the very real negative impact that the revolution in the media landscape has wrought on so many dedicated and talented journalists. In the two-plus years since I wrote the original entries, the newspaper business’ disintegration has sped up considerably, thanks in part to this recession. Every day, I become more thankful that I got out of the biz when I did instead of waiting till now, and I really sympathize with the journalists who are looking to get out of the biz in the current economy, where the jobs are few and the competition fierce.

Considering how long it’s been since the original posts, I figured I should write an update with a few things I’ve learned over the past couple years about getting a non-journalism job that still uses some of the core journalism skills.

Versatility is more important than ever

When I started my current communications job, I was told, “We hired you to write.” A couple years later, however, my job has transformed into an amalgam of responsibilities. Writing still takes up a big chunk of my time (probably about 50 percent), but to it I have added photography, design, social media, and Web development adviser. The shift has been driven in no small part by the broad set of skills I brought to the job and my own willingness to reach outside of my job description. Also, as the economy soured and budgets tightened, people within the organization became more and more motivated to look to me for their photography and design needs, and I’ll be the first to say that my ability to meet those needs has made me a more valuable part of the organization at a time when there’s little money to hire contractors for creative services. Being able to meet occasional needs like these is a strong asset for a job-seeker.

Design jobs are getting tough to find, too

The ad agency I was with before my current job has slimmed down to less than half the number of employees it had when I was there in 2007, and many other design firms are having financial problems, too, and design jobs have been scarce. Unfortunately, design and marketing are often among the first things to go when budgets tighten, which again ties back into the previous point.

Social media is changing the PR/communications game, too

From my experience, the PR/communications field isn’t all that far ahead of the news industry in terms of adopting social media. Back in 2008, I attended a session about social media for campus communicators. There were more than 30 of us in the room, and when the presenter ran down the list of Web 2.0 standards — YouTube, Flickr, Facebook, FriendFeed, Twitter — and asked how many in the room had used each one, only a few hands went up each time. Since then, however, I have noticed a number of departments on campus (including us) starting their own Twitter feeds and Facebook pages and making use of YouTube and Flickr. The difference, of course, is that unlike newspapers, the business models of the organizations we are working for aren’t being shredded, so our ventures into social media don’t necessarily carry the same sense of urgency and demand for immediate results, which, as we know, is hard to achieve in social media.

If you think getting out of newspapers can get you away from being swept up by the social-media craze, then you better not go into communications. For someone trying to get into PR/communications these days, an understanding of social media is a definite must. If anything, I think you have even less of an excuse to not use social media. After all, if a big chunk of your audience is using one of these platforms, how can you justify not engaging them there? In one of my original installments in this series, I said you NEED to have a Web site. Now, I would say that in addition to that, you really need to have experience using social media platforms such as Twitter and Facebook.

Mobile is moving on up

Mobile devices really are the next great frontier for information dissemination. While I don’t think you necessarily need to become a mobile-app developer (though it certainly can’t hurt to know), you should definitely be aware of what tools are available in this realm and the fact that it’s becoming an increasingly important part of  an organization’s online presence.

Add curiosity to your resume

The way communication technology is constantly changing, there’s no way for anyone to go into a communications position with all the skills they would need to do that job well in a year or two. Yesterday it was Web 2.0. Today it’s mobile apps. Who knows what it’ll be tomorrow. That’s why it’s absolutely imperative to never stop learning new skills and to keep up with new trends in media technology. Reading sites like Mashable on a daily basis would be a good start.

PR/communications people know journalists are desperate to get out

And for that reason, I think it’s important to show potential employers that you want the job at their company for more reasons than just the fact that it’s a lifeboat off a sinking ship. What is it about this particular job that interests you? Why are you applying for this job versus another PR/communications job?

Don’t get frustrated

I’ve written this before, but it’s worth repeating, especially in the current economy: Don’t get frustrated by repeated failures in your job search. Put it into proper context: Changing careers isn’t an easy thing to do even in good times, much less in this economy. The good news is that it only takes one “yes” to make all the effort worthwhile.

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.