:Journalistopia

Live from the ONA conference in Toronto…

A coalition of small, niche community publications can become a premier source of news in Minnesota, says Jeremy Iggers, director of of the Twin Cities Media Alliance at TCDailyPlanet.com.

The Twin Cities Daily Planet –inspired by OhMyNews — “is conceived as an experiment in participatory journalism, built on a partnership between professional journalists and individual citizens. One goal of the Daily Planet is to harness that community intelligence and enable individuals to share information and work together for the common good. [More here.]”

The Planet partners with other small, niche media outlets to cover Minnesota — specifically areas they feel are underserved by the Minneapolis Star-Tribune. Iggers labeled his former employer, the Star-Tribune, as “the newspaper of the most desirable zip codes” for its giving coverage priority to affluent neighborhoods.

Currently, TCDailyPlanet is receiving an assortment of grants, including a Knight-Batten award and a grant from the McCormick-Tribune foundation. They also plan to hand out small amounts of funds –in $50 to $100 amounts– to assist some of its partner publications in publishing stories that have a broad appeal.

But the question, as always, is whether TCDailyPlanet –and publications of its ilk– can sustain financially in the long run. A call for financial help from the public resulted in only about a dozen donations, Iggers said. He hopes that TCDailyPlanet.com can adopt the NPR style of public fundraising within the next two to three years.

Will online niche community publication grow to the point where such ventures can be solidly profitable? Or will TCDailyPlanet and the many microlocal blogs remain passion projects dedicated to being an alternative to the big newspapers and TV stations in town? Passion project or otherwise, it’s the readers who likely stand to win.

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Steve Outing’s recent column titled “Climate Change: Get Over Objectivity, Newspapers” has resulted in a firestorm of nasty e-mails and postings, according to Outing in his blog.

An idealist would say objectivity arose from a desire to have an enlightened, rational discussion. A cynic would say it was a good business decision made to sell more newspapers by catering to partisan readers of all varieties. It’s been about a century now, but I’d guess from my own studies that the truth is probably somewhere in between.

Check out Jay Rosen’s well-worded take on objectivity:

“Part of the problem is that journalists don’t realize what objectivity was in the first place,” says Rosen. “From the beginning it was a way of limiting liability, and allowing journalists to take a pass when it’s hard to figure out who’s right and what’s really going on. From the beginning it was meant to dull the knife edge of the press. It was meant to ‘de-voice’ or defang the individual journalist, so that more people would be comfortable with the product. But the costs of that system have built up over time.”

My sense is that Outing’s column comes less from a desire to save polar bears and more from a desire to see a passionate, interesting newspaper. I also sense it comes from frustration with us journalists worshiping objectivity while many in the public shamelessly hate us and call us biased anyway.

Throwing out the expectation of objectivity in reporting isn’t the answer. The answer is not being ashamed of our editorials and of the discussion we generate.

When confronted by some random person on the street with accusations of my news organization being biased, I don’t placate him or her with cries of objectivity and drone on about the newsroom/editorial board “firewall.” Instead, I spit back that newspapers are supposed to take a stand on issues and do their best to dig up the truth — even if it pisses people off some times. I say that if you have something to say, then here’s my card and come spit fire on one of our blogs or message boards; I’d love to have ya.

The standard newspaper writing style is often stale and homogeneous. Newspapers seldom publish (in print) commentary from the blogosphere and message boards. Many newspaper Web sites bury their interesting blogs at the bottom of their home pages and don’t regularly link to local blogs. And, most poignantly, killer editorials almost never appear on the front page; they’re buried in the back of the A-section.

Let’s begin with truly respecting objective news stories and subjective opinion slinging as being partners in creating a compelling newspaper. Let’s do our best to be fair to the subjects of stories while increasingly embracing our role as discussion leaders in our respective communities.

Otherwise, I foresee many news organizations literally dying of boredom.

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The L.A. Times editorial board on Saturday scoffed at the principles of free speech and open information with an editorial claiming that “Many publishers consider the Internet, and Google in particular, a greater threat to their livelihoods than Osama bin Laden.”

The Times is upset by the fact that Google will be allowing the people who are written about in stories to comment via their Google News service. It says that Google “isn’t journalism.”

Google is a search engine and content aggregator. This huffing about Google not being journalism is akin to lambasting the guy who drives the newspaper delivery truck for not having a journalism degree.

Nevertheless, the Times does not cite copyright issues in its editorial.

It does not discuss the difficulty in managing such a comment system.

It does not even ask how it will verify the contributors’ identities (never mind that Times editorials carry no bylines — a whole other issue).

But it does assert that “a seemingly heartfelt comment may carry the CEO’s name, but the words will probably have been typed by corporate flacks.” Fair enough, but what about the comments made by experts with thoughtful insights? What about the lady who was inaccurately reported dead telling the world she is, indeed, alive. What about the families of disaster victims who simply want to thank the world for their prayers?

I quote from the Times’ own editorial board mission statement:

On the editorial page, the newspaper sets aside its objective news-gathering role to join its readers in a dialogue about important issues of the day.

The Times is offended by the notion that the people who contribute comments to Google News will be making them “unedited.” This means the comments will not be altered and filtered by people like the writer of the Times editorial, who has such splendid judgment as to compare a medium we use to learn about the world in unprecedented ways as being equivalent to an extremist who murdered nearly 3,000 people.

This is exactly the kind of idiotic hubris that causes the public to hate journalists and, by extension, the journalism they produce. It is also the sort of attitude that could throttle the life out of newspapers online and make the prophecies of out-of-touch opinion mongers come true.

I can only pray that today’s newspaper leaders do not have the same lowly opinion of the Internet and public forums as do the Times‘ editorial board. If so, we journalists are in worst trouble than I thought.

***

More responses from Robert Niles at Online Journalism Review, Jeff Jarvis at BuzzMachine and Amy Webb at MyDigiMedia.

And a reminder of exactly to what the editorial board has compared Google:

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The Knight Citizen News Network has produced a list of 12 tips for growing positive online communities. This is as dead-on a list as I’ve ever encountered, so be sure to give it a read.

Among the tips:

The “if you build it, they will come” approach to online community rarely produces good results. Most people don’t want to be the first one to strike up a public conversation. It’s helpful to do some behind-the-scenes recruiting of knowledgeable, reasonable, friendly, interested, and gregarious people to check in with your community regularly.

And:

If possible, find a way to spotlight the best posts and threads from your community. Slate.com does this in its political forum, The Fray. That forum’s main page highlights the following kinds of contributions: editor’s picks, most read, and highest rated.

Read more from this great list.

And, check out this Journalistopia list of more resources on communities and citizen journalism.

[Photo by aleske]

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J-Lab has announced the 2007 winners of the Knight-Batten Awards. The finalists include WashingtonPost.com’s OnBeing, Reuters’ Second Life reporting and the Orlando Sentinel’s Varsity MyTeam site (woo-ha!).

See the list of finalists here (with links), as well as the 2007 notable entries. The winners will be announced at a Sept. 17 symposium.

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American Journalism Review takes a hard look in its June/July issue at whether hyperlocal journalism is a financially sustainable practice. Paul Farhi writes:

Is there a real business in this kind of business? So far–and admittedly it’s still very early –the answer is no. A few of the estimated 500 or so “local-local” news sites claim to show a profit, but the overwhelming majority lose money, according to the first comprehensive survey of the field. The survey, conducted by J-Lab: The Institute for Interactive Journalism (affiliated with the University of Maryland’s Philip Merrill College of Journalism, as is AJR), documents a journalism movement that is simultaneously thriving and highly tenuous.

While national sites will have a difficult time pursuing a Backfence-style model, I still believe newspapers should be aggressively catering their content to smaller geographic niches. By categorizing your content into narrowly tailored categories, you’re going to be better serving a greater number of people by making your site’s content more relevant to them. Whether this will translate into big ad dollars is anybody’s guess. But can you afford to ignore catering to your local audience, where many of your advertisers reside?

[Via Romenesko]

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A roundup of some online journalism bloggers’ posts regarding today’s shootings:

[UPDATE] Poynter’s Al Tompkins has links to all sorts of excellent coverage: http://www.poynter.org/column.asp?id=2&aid=121541

Steve Outing: Social networking plays a role in another big story

Bloggers Blog: Blogs, Cell Phones Provide Coverage of Virginia Tech Shootings

Innovation in College Media: The problem with pre-roll advertisements: now is not the time

Mashable!: Virginia Tech Shootings: Facebook Groups to Join

Arvinder Kang: Virginia Tech Shooting- News Coverage Analysis (via Bryan Murley)

Make sure to check the Roanoke Times’ blog-style coverage. They were quick to get maps, video, photos and all other sorts of content to their site. Also, Josh Hallett points out how the university wisely switched to a low-bandwidth version of their site.

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The French Constitutional Council has enacted a law to prevent the filming of an act of violence by anybody other than a professional journalist, according to a report from Macworld.

While the law is meant to target the practice of “happy slapping,” it seems as if it could be citizen journalists who get slapped down, a French civil liberties organization argues, referencing the 1991 Rodney King incident. The law is also notable for drawing a distinction between who is a professional journalist and a citizen journalist.

Rather than targeting the actual assault with punishment, the French council is targeting the filming of the act. Such a law, enacted without being narrowly tailored, could have far-reaching consequences.

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Salon’s Gary Kayima has written a thoughtful, well-written (if somewhat long) piece examining how the outpouring of public commentary is affecting writers’ relationships with their readers. Also, make sure to browse through the comments.

Some highlights from his article:

“All of us — writers and editors and readers alike — are still struggling to get used to this cacophonous cornucopia of communication. It is a brave new world, filled with beautiful minds and nasty Calibans and everything in between. Its benefits are undeniable. But it has some downsides, too — not all of them obvious.”

“The information revolution has set off a million car bombs of random knowledge at once, spraying info fragments through the marketplace of ideas.”

“Formality? The context of online communication is more like being in your car in a traffic jam than sitting across a table from someone and having a talk — and it’s easy to flip somebody off through a rolled-up window.”

“Nasty and ignorant letters affect the reader, too. A few ugly or stupid comments in a discussion thread have a disproportionate impact. Like drops of iodine in a glass of water, they discolor the whole discussion and scare more thoughtful commentators away.”

“Forget the word “elite”: In our laudable all-American haste to trash bogus royalty, let’s not forget there’s a completely different category. It’s called professionalism.”

Thankfully, Kayima does not simply tear into message board users and does concede that certain controls can better the situation. For instance, Slashdot has a tiered system for weighing users’ contributions. Lifehacker requires you to ask nicely. Wikipedia has its own complex system and hierarchy of users.

Many in the online news industry agree that story comments, while excellent to have, often result in simple-minded, often boorish spleen-venting and do not constitute a true online community. Personally, I am not even slightly loathe to nuke a message board if the conversation takes an offensive or disgusting turn, particularly when it involves someone’s death.

However, through user blogs and other innovative tools, I believe it’s possible to elevate the conversation to something that is even more useful for both writer and reader.

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Martin Stabe highlights a story by the Guardian’s Jemima Kiss covers a forum by the Association of Online Publishers in which representatives from CNET and Yahoo! get into the nitty-gritty of how they’re leveraging content from users and some of the practical challenges associated with that (including grumbling from the editorial staff at CNET).

Buried way in the story is an interesting nugget about CNET’s blogs:

“Every journalist has their own blog and are not allowed to “hide behind a brand”, [Suzie Daniels, head of business media at CNET Networks] said. They must use their real name because users nowadays expect transparency, honesty and authenticity. Where the authority of editors used to be in being in charge, it is now in participating and building a relationship and credibility with users in a more direct way. The life of a journalist, she said, looks very different now and is as much about responding and blogging as reporting.”

Sounds like a stab at the infamous unsigned editorial to me.

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In response to a question on the Placeblogger listserv, I put together a list of Web sites that are great for citizen journalism tutorials (particularly free ones). Here’s the list:

Knight Citizen News Network -  http://www.kcnn.org  This site was created by J-Lab: The Institute for Interactive Journalism (another great resource), which is funded in part by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation. KCNN  features training modules, tutorial, featured multimedia and more.

J-Learning - http://www.j-learning.org/ Online journalism tutorials galore for reporting and Web technology.

News U - http://www.newsu.org/about/faq.aspx Run by the non-profit Poynter Institute and has many great (and FREE!) online journalism courses open to everyone.

OurMedia Personal Media Learning Center - http://www.ourmedia.org/learning-center/topic/citizen-journalism A great resource containing interviews with citizen media pioneers, summaries of media law and more.

EditTeach.org - http://www.editteach.org/ A site funded by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation with many resources for editors, as well as a growing online section.

Online Journalism Review Wikis - http://www.ojr.org/ojr/wiki/ A series of in-depth articles here cover everything from news terms to ethics to how to make money off your work.

Investigative Reporters Resource Center - http://www.ire.org/resourcecenter/ Has great tips on developing leads and using public records. You can also buy cleaned public data from them if you’re interested. Check out the IRE listserv as well.

Reporters Cookbook - http://forjournalists.com/cookbook a wiki with how-tos, particularly about computer-assisted reporting

Florida Public Records Handbook - http://www.newsu.org/about/faq.aspx Perhaps your state has an author who has done what Joe Adams has for Florida. His book is a staple for Florida journalists. He highlights Florida stories that have used public records in them.

I’ve also been compiling whatever Journalistopia tutorials I write into the Tutorials category.

Suggest any other nifty sites in the comments, and I’ll be sure to add them to the post.

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If you haven’t perused the Top 10 list of placeblogs over at Placeblogger, you are certainly missing out. There were a few local blogs on the list I had not yet run across that I will be sifting through in the next few days. The list is a great starting point for educating yourself about what’s out there, preparing for a presentation or for sharing as an example of what local citizen journalism is all about.

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