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Bay Citizen | New York Times

We continue to be amazed at the willingness of news organizations to employ the same tactics of obfuscation and doublespeak that their reporters spend their days combatting. Witness this press release from last week:

The Deseret News today announced a bold new direction to provide innovation and leadership at a time when daily newspapers throughout America are struggling to define a course for the future….New initiatives, includ[e] the creation of Deseret Connect, a broad and uniquely qualified group of story contributors, a new Editorial Advisory Board and the expansion of the news reporter base…These initiatives will increase the depth and quality of the Deseret News’ daily newspaper. As part of these changes, the organization also announced a reduction in workforce.

But this is no ordinary reduction in workforce. This is a 43% reduction in workforce, or 57 full-time and 28 part-time employees, according to Editor & Publisher. Among the victims are Editor Joe Cannon and Publisher Jim Wall. In the worst spinmeister fashion, the publisher doesn’t even touch upon the layoffs until 700 words deep in the release. That news is preceded by five bullet-pointed items peppered with words like “expansion,” “more,” “launch” and “new.” In other words, this is a major cutback spun as an expansion.

We actually see nothing wrong with what Deseret is doing. It’s combining editorial staffs with affiliated broadcast subsidiaries and shifting its focus toward digital delivery. Makes sense to us. It also makes sense that a large layoff may be needed to get costs in line with the new revenue reality. But why bury the lead so deep in the story? Why not come out and admit that tough times demand tough action?

In any case, other news outlets took care of asking the hard questions, including Huffington Post, Bloomberg BusinessWeek and the Salt Lake Tribune. Charles Apple says he hears the layoffs include the entire design staff.

Salty Words for USA Today Reorg

“It is odd that the best-read print newspaper in the country would walk away from that pre-eminence and embrace technologies in which it lags the field,” writes John K. Hartman, journalism educator and author of two books about USA Today, in an opinion piece in Editor & Publisher. He’s referring to the Gannett flagship’s bold announcement two weeks ago that it would restructure itself around online delivery to mobile devices, lay off 9% of its staff and de-emphasize print.

In a commentary bluntly titled “USA Today Setting Itself Up For Failure,” Hartman argues that not only is USA Today’s strength in print, but that is the only area in which it has innovated. He points to the decline in the national daily’s once market-leading sports coverage at the hands of ESPN and chides publisher David Hunke for betting on online delivery when USA Today isn’t even in the top 10 news sites in the world (It’s actually #21, according to Alexa, placing it behind such competitors as Drudge Report and the Times of India). In the professor’s view, a media company with such little online visibility is crazy to place such a big bet on a digital strategy.

He’s right, but what else is USA Today going to do? It’s already an also-ran on the Web and its print business is declining like everybody else’s. Mobile seems to be an open field at this point, so Gannett is making a play for the only opportunity it has to establish market leadership. There’s also a possibility that a genuine reader-funded subscription model could evolve in the mobile category. That has failed to happen online. USA Today is playing the only hand it’s got.

Part of the problem of analyzing strategic moves like Gannett’s is framing them in the context of a publication’s previous success. Will USA Today dominate the mobile market? Of course not. No one will. The barriers to entry are too low. But can mobile delivery become a growing revenue source to complement a modestly successful Web presence and a profitable print product? Sure it can.

Hartman is critical of USA Today for fumbling away its leadership in sports coverage to ESPN.com, but the reality is that broad-based media will always lose out to narrow, targeted media. The best strategy for a comprehensive news site is to be everywhere but expect to lead nowhere. In this age of hyper-focused media, that’s not a very comfortable position, but it’s about the only hope a brand like USA Today has got.

Miscellany

Also in the realm of church-owned newspapers, the price for the floundering Washington Times is $1.00. At least that’s what a Unification Church-affiliated buyer could pay, according to a memo released to the media. The selling price probably reflects a bit of a family discount, since the buyer is Doug Joo, an ally of Rev. Sun Myung Moon, whose Unification Church owns the paper. It’s not like the one-buck price is a bargain; the buyer has to assume all the paper’s unspecified financial obligations. The Washington Times has cut 40% of its staff this year.

Forgive me readers, for I have sinned.
It's been more than three months since my last blog post.

I didn't actually intend to take the summer off from blogging. But it seems I did.
At least part of that can be attributed to the ennui that I've come to associate with Web 2.0. In fact, it was a year ago this month that I expressed my sense that the revolution in journalism was ending ...that a new, more workaday era had begun.
And the truth is that it's just a lot easier to blog in the midst of a revolution than in the middle of another working day.
But part of this summer's blogging hiatus is also attributable to my long-standing attraction to the academic calendar. I just feel like I should be doing less in the summer. So sometimes I do.

But as long-time readers of this blog know, my obsession with the academic calendar means that September is the month when everything changes for me. (You can read earlier September posts here, here or here.) And this year is no different.

So let me fill you in on a few of the things that have changed for me. For perhaps they will point to things that are changing for others in B2B publishing as well.

1. My working life is now completely consumed by content marketing. As recently as December, most of my income derived from traditional publishers practicing traditional B2B journalism (although mostly on the Web, rather than print.) That is no longer true.

2. My working life is now completely consuming. My time is booked at well above 100 percent. Although my business did quite well during the financial crisis, I can't pretend that everything was perfect. There were a few weeks in 2009 and early in 2010 when I wasn't billing anyone for anything. That is no longer true.

None of this should come as a surprise to regular readers of this blog. Rather, my career track seems fairly predictable. I'm neither a prophet nor a visionary. I don't predict the weather. But I can feel it when the wind shifts.
And the wind is blowing hard, albeit from a different direction, and it's bringing lots of work for B2B types who can make the transition to content marketing. 

Or, as I said at the beginning of this year, "the old days are over. We're in the midst of a fundamental shift in how people consume information and how the cost of producing that information can be covered...(and all of us in the industry need to make changes so that) prosperity is possible and suffering is minimized."

In the weeks to come I'll write more about what this new world -- all content marketing, all the time -- means for me.

.@TheAtlanticWire is now crowdsourcing its popular “Media Diet” series http://nie.mn/cvpGDR (via @romenesko) »

J-school as news org: ASU’s Cronkite School launches multimedia site for local/state news http://nie.mn/bNNzKl (via @dangillmor) »

Public service announcement: @voiceofsandiego is hiring a “roving” investigative reporter http://nie.mn/aMxkmQ »

The Atlantic plans a premium iPad app service with daily content from the Web http://nie.mn/a2AwZs »

The conventional wisdom about how we process info–”visual learners” vs. “auditory,” etc.–may be wrong http://nie.mn/ab3Jnd »

How Stephen Glass exposer @Penenberg scooped traditional media. Again. http://nie.mn/csf7Wl »

HuffPost’s traffic nearly doubled between July ‘09 and July ‘10 http://nie.mn/cB8sfQ (h/t @Journalismo) »

After last week’s “Twitter revolt,” Paper.li makes its auto-tweets less spammy http://nie.mn/cjuSPA »

> The Guardian gives outsiders the power to publish
> Bee's Walters marks 50 years as a newsroom employee
> Yankee magazine in good shape on its 75th birthday
> More layoffs, furloughs at McClatchy's Kansas City Star
> For Utah journalists, a week to take your breath away

About.com

By Liz Cox Barrett CNN.com today posted this promo in which Kathleen Parker and Eliot Spitzer pretend to argue over the name of their upcoming 8pm show, and Parker at one point mock-scolds Spitzer with these ill-chosen (or, is it just me?) words: "I know it's hard for you to settle down and focus on the issues..."

Emphas.is is a new platform for photojournalism that hopes to find a business model to sustain the profession, by creating "a unique bond between photojournalists and their audience." Due to launch in early 2011, its website went live at the end of August.

It would work via crowd funding, "with a difference," the website says. The incentive to contribute would be "exclusive access to top photojournalists." This will work, says the site, because there are many photojournalism enthusiasts out there who would be interested in providing support, many amateur photographers who would be eager for contact with professionals, as well as many people who care about the different issues that photojournalists can address.

For more on this story, visit our sister publication, editorsweblog.org.

Bulgarian daily newspaper Klassa will be shutting down its print edition from October 1 due to economic difficulties, Novinite.com reported today.

As a part of company restructuring operations implemented by many newspapers recently to reduce costs, the Bulgarian daily will continue to publish online, while terminating its print edition.

Image: Novinite.com

The daily PP, El Verdadero hit the streets of Ecuador yesterday.

The tabloid, which has 16 pages and costs $0.40, is the latest newspaper launched by the government "to counteract the powers disguised as media," President Rafael Correa claimed, according to Agence France Press. The daily is aimed at the working class and will compete with popular titles like Últimas Noticias and Extra, the Public and News Agency of Ecuador and South America (ANDES) revealed. It will have weekly raffles in which readers can win cash and credit for prepaid mobile phones, El Telegrafo reported.

Photo Credit: AFP
El Telegrafo, a newspaper managed by the state since its owner and former banker Fernando Aspiazu went to jail in 2007, is publishing daily, Efe reminded. However, PP's director Maximo Garcia said that the tabloid will not follow the editorial line of its publisher and denied that it pages will be used for governmental propaganda, Prnoticias.com quoted.

The new daily adds to the list of media already owned by the government, including three TV channels and public radio, Efe informed.

They are unlikely to lay on a private jet to whisk him to the Med, but David Miliband has been given the seal of approval by the Murdoch empire after being invited to dinner next week by the media baron's son James.

Rebekah Brooks, chief executive of News International, is also due to attend the dinner on 17 September.

Rupert Murdoch summoned David Cameron for talks on his yacht before the Tory leader became prime minister. A private jet owned by Matthew Freud, Murdoch's son-in-law, flew him to Greece. Tony Blair flew to Australia for a private Murdoch conference in 1995. The Miliband dinner will be a more low key affair in London.

David Miliband has still not decided whether to attend because his violinist wife Louise Shackelton is playing that night. But a source said it was right for Miliband to sup with Murdoch: "That is what you do when you are trying to persuade people that Labour is a strong and effective opposition party."

Ed is not being left out. He is to have lunch next Wednesday with Dominic Mohan, editor of the Sun, and possibly Brooks.

“Once you have Google television, you’re going to be very busy,” CEO Eric Schmidt promised. “It’s going to ruin your evening.”

• Ross Hall transcribed hacked voicemail for other journalists
• Police likely to interview Andy Coulson, says Met officer
• New inquiry launched by home affairs select committee

A key witness from inside the News of World newsroom says he will testify on the phone-hacking affair, both to police and an inquiry begun by parliament.

Ross Hall, a former employee who until now has been silent, told the Guardian tonight he was willing to talk to Scotland Yard and to the newly-announced home affairs select committee inquiry by MPs: "If asked, I will tell them what I know." Metropolitan police sources said they planned to interview him.

Hall had been named in a previous MPs' inquiry as the man who transcribed swaths of hacked voicemail messages for other journalists, including the tabloid's chief reporter, Neville Thurlbeck.

His emergence came on a day when multiple developments put more pressure on the prime minister's press adviser, Andy Coulson, who has been accused of "actively encouraging" the practice while editing the tabloid.

• Assistant commissioner John Yates told the home affairs committee that, in light of material published last week in the New York Times, police were likely to interview Coulson and "take stock after that".

• Yates faced hostile questioning from MPs over whether the Met had warned potential victims of phone hacking; he declined to say whether owners of 91 mobiles whose PIN numbers were found on a list held by a private detective working for the News of the World were notified.

• Yates also conceded the Met's original phone-hacking inquiry should have questioned Thurlbeck.

Hall was a central figure behind one of the most explosive items placed before a previous select committee inquiry, which heard how a lengthy email from Hall headed "Transcript for Neville" was never brought to prosecutors' attention by police at the time.

It contained a record of the contents of a sequence of more than 30 voicemail messages from Gordon Taylor, chief executive of the Professional Footballers' Association, who the paper was interested in. A typical message Hall listened to and transcribed at the time read: "Hiya kid. I'm just ringing to say thank you again." Others were more personal, and all were unmistakeably transcribed from voicemail.

Friends of Hall said that he had made up to 20 such transcripts, on instructions from three different News of the World executives, but was unaware of anything illegal in his work.

Following his return from a round the world trip which made it impossible for him to be summoned to answer the committee's questions, Hall in June found a job with a London PR firm.

He advertised himself on a professional networking website as someone with a "deep understanding of tabloid investigative techniques" gained from his role as "a senior reporter at the country's biggest-selling newspaper".

His friends said that he was unlikely to have had direct knowledge of Coulson's alleged role, because he took instructions from others. But MPs are likely to want to ask about his personal links with NoW management: he is nephew of a former NoW editor, Phil Hall. News International's lawyer, Tom Crone, told the committee Hall was a "junior reporter" of 20, made up from a job as messenger; he did not mention the high-level connection. News International later issued clarifications, conceding Hall was 28 at the time and saying Crone may have become confused by MPs' interruptions.

Hall's website entry says: "Ross currently helps clients facing scrutiny. Using his deep understanding of tabloid investigative techniques, he advises on how to neutralise media attacks."

Police are expected to interview Hall about his knowledge of phone-hacking at the News of the World, who was involved, and whether senior bosses were aware of or condoned the practice. A source with knowledge of Scotland Yard's thinking told the Guardian: "Any new evidence will be studied, any new witness will be talked to."

The inquiry will be markedly different to the one in 2006, which ended with the jailing of a single reporter and one private investigator. Stung by criticism that police missed the systemic nature of wide scale phone-hacking, detectives will this time be directed to concentrate on the "senior level" at the News of the World and their "awareness" of phone hacking.

The investigation's starting point will be the former reporter Sean Hoare, who has given media interviews contradicting Coulson's account that, despite being editor of the News of the World, he knew nothing of the practice.

Police and the Crown Prosecution Service will have to decide whether Hoare is interviewed as a witness, or under criminal caution as a potential suspect. After his interview and its contents are discussed with the CPS, Coulson will be interviewed. It is expected he will be questioned as a witness, but strong testimony from Hoare could mean the prime minister's top media aide is questioned as a criminal suspect.

The source said detectives would be hoping Hoare is able to name others who can corroborate that phone-hacking took place and senior executives knew about it. "The investigation will not go for the troops, unless there is strong evidence. It is looking for evidence of complicity at the senior level, and with corroboration …. evidence there was a conspiracy at the News of the World to hack phones."

Detectives will be told the investigation must be thorough, as the Yard's reputation has suffered because of criticism of its first investigation, and officers are described as "geared up for it". Police expect the home affairs committee inquiry will be postponed until detectives finish inquiries and the CPS has made a decision.

Police confirm that Tory PR chief will be asked about new News of the World hacking allegations after fresh inquiry is launched

Scotland Yard and News International were tonight facing further parliamentary pressure over the News of the World phone hacking scandal as a Commons committee announced a fresh inquiry into the affair.

As police confirmed that Andy Coulson would be questioned following new allegations in the New York Times suggesting he knew about the illegal activity, the home affairs select committee said it would examine the law on phone hacking.

The committee is to question the Metropolitan police, including Assistant Commissioner John Yates, and possibly News International executives such as Rebekah Brooks.

There will be no evidence sessions in public. The committee will write to witnesses, collate their evidence and publish a report in February.

Keith Vaz, the Labour chair of the committee, announced the inquiry after Yates, who led the Met's investigation into the hacking, admitted today that the law needed clarification. Appearing before Vaz's committee, Yates said it was difficult to prove wrongdoing because the law was "prescriptive".

Vaz asked Yates about the 91 people whose mobile PIN numbers were obtained by Glenn Mulcaire, a private investigator paid by the News of the World and later jailed with the paper's former royal editor, Clive Goodman.

Yates said that personal details of between 91 to 120 people had been seized but to say they were the victims of hacking was "taking it a bit far". He said: "Hacking is defined in a very prescriptive way under the Regulatory and Investigatory Powers Act. It is very prescriptive and it is very difficult to prove. There are very few cases [where we] were able actually to prove people had been hacked – that is intercepted the voicemail prior to the owner of that voicemail intercepting [it]."

Vaz said that obtaining a PIN number was an offence under the data protection act. Yates said: "So it is a matter for [the] data protection commissioner." The narrow definition of the law meant that just 10 to 12 people had been the victims of criminal hacking. He added that the small number of criminal cases explained why the Met had taken a cautious approach with the larger number of people whose personal details had been obtained by Mulcaire. This group is believed to include Chris Bryant, a former Foreign Office minister. Yates said that Lord Prescott was not on this list.

"We have taken what I consider to be all reasonable steps in conjunction with the mobile service providers to make sure where we have even the minutest possibility that they have been subject of an attempt to hack, we have taken all reasonable steps," Yates said.

He was challenged by David Winnick, the Labour MP for Walsall North, on claims by Bryant that the police had not kept him properly informed. Winnick said: "If I may say so with respect, it is a very simple question: yes or no, was Mr Bryant notified by the police?" Yates replied: "I am trying to protect other people's privacy. Mr Bryant has been in correspondence with us for some time around these issues."

Bryant last night accused Yates of giving a misleading account. Asked on Radio 4's PM programme about Yates's claim about privacy, Bryant replied: "It was a fib."

Labour stepped up the pressure on the police when Harriet Harman, the party's acting leader, wrote to the Met commissioner, Sir Paul Stephenson, asking him to inform any serving or former Labour MPs whose PIN numbers had been obtained.

Experts in the law on interception dismissed as "nonsense" the claim by Yates that the hacking into voicemails could not be investigated if the victim had already listened to messages. "That is nonsense, and a recurring problem with this police position in this case," said Simon McKay, author of the book Covert policing: law and practice.

Government guidelines on the use of the act state that it is illegal to intercept communications "at any time when the communication is being stored on the communication system in such a way as to enable the intended recipient to have access to it". Experts say that this rule covers voicemails.

The new inquiry could put some pressure on Coulson, who resigned as editor of the News of the World after the paper's royal editor was jailed. Coulson, now David Cameron's communications chief, has denied knowledge of the hacking.

The committee will examine the law governing payments by newspapers to police. Coulson told a commons select committee in 2003 that any payments by the News of the World were within the law. But Yates described the practice as "reprehensible" and illegal. Asked by Vaz whether such a payment was within the law, Yates said: "Of course it is not."

By Liz Cox Barrett The AP today lays out evidence that "politics, for all its focus on the gloomy economy, is a recession-proof industry," in that "this year's volatile election is bursting with money, setting fundraising and spending records in a high-stakes struggle for control of Congress amid looser but still fuzzy campaign finance rules." Worth a read, particularly if you took...

By Lucas Graves Miami has deep ties to the Caribbean. So when a devastating earthquake struck Haiti on January 12, The Miami Herald mobilized for one of its biggest stories of the year. Reporters were on a flight to the Dominican Republic that night and filing from Haiti the next day. The sense of mission extended to the paper’s Web site, where...

By Joel Meares Fascinating story from the Times’s Marc Lacey on sham candidates running for the Green Party in Tempe, Arizona. Sham candidates, that is, signed up by a Republican candidate for the State Legislature to siphon off votes from the Democrats. Naturally, Lacey reports the expected outrage from the Dems: “It’s unbelievable. It’s not right. It’s deceitful,” said Jackie...

Remarks by Jan Schaffer, J-Lab Executive Director
Sept. 3, 2010
Melbourne Writers Festival
Melbourne, Australia

Hello. And thank you for inviting me to be with you. It has been good to be here the last couple of days and understand how similar your issues are to what is happening in the United States.

We are in exciting, but daunting, times in the enterprise of journalism.

As I look at how the media ecosystem is evolving in communities large and small across the United States, I am much more optimistic than pessimistic that citizens will get their information needs met. However, I also think that traditional journalists will play a smaller -albeit still important - role as the gatherers and disseminators of news.

The New News will give other kinds of people important roles to play. They include citizen media makers, partnership coordinators, fact entrepreneurs, creative technologists, philanthropic foundations, universities, advocacy groups and even governments.

In this future, both professional and amateur journalists will need to do more than commit acts of journalism. They also need to commit acts of data, acts of information gathering, acts of collaboration - and acts of engagement as well.

All this means we have to expand our scope of work just as we are forced by economic realities to reduce our feet on the street. In the New News era, journalistic enterprises must engage in new kinds of “news work” to serve their audiences. “News work” is more than reporting, validating and writing a story.

It also requires such things sharing information, facilitating conversations, crowdsourcing [inviting people formerly known as the ‘audience’ into the act of newsgathering], smart curation and aggregation, data mining and data visualizations, commissioning news games and exercises, gathering lists and resources, shouting out your good work to others - and responding to readers’ comments on it.

What this really means is that Big-J Journalism organizations can’t do it alone anymore, sitting in their ivory towers.  We need to deputize new feet on the street, incentivize new sources of news, empower new ideas, and re-imagine what journalism could be it if were to be a product that no one could do without.

Imagine a journalism where our audiences could walk away, saying: “Wow, that was a really useful story.”  Instead of wanting to plug their ears at the noise of the latest political fisticuffs. Or glaze over more mind-numbing reports of the latest celebrity mishap.

Unfortunately, we still await developments in the definitions of news. However, many developments are already happening in the delivery of news.  I see at least eight trends in the U.S. and you may be seeing some of them here as well.

• First is the blossoming of hyperlocal community news sites. Many communities around the U.S. and now here in Australia, too, have begun getting regular reports of town and school meetings for the first time ever. The impetus for these sites is coming from several places:
  
  
  • Individuals are launching some local news websites.
  • Companies such as AOL’s Patch.com are rolling out others.
  • Traditional news outlets are trying to local reports under their own brands, such as the New York Times’ Local sections.
• Second is the rise of statewide news ventures, many of them focused on covering a state capital and many with an investigative bent. These include things like California Watch and NJ Spotlight and Texas Tribune.
• Third is the birth of independent metro news sites. We now have at least 10 sites that have staffs of professional journalists covering news in such cities as Chicago, San Diego, San Francisco, Minneapolis, St. Louis and New York City.
• Fourth: the growth of more university-based news sites using students but also working with local residents to cover nearby communities. We have funded several, including Grand Avenue News at the University of Miami, Grosse Pointe Today at Wayne State and Intersections: South Los Angeles at the University of Southern California-Annenberg.
• Fifth: the increasing participation of creative technologists in building innovative news applications. Last year, the New York Times won J-Lab’s Knight-Batten Awards for Innovations in Journalism with a body of journalistic work built on computer programming skills. They included such things as Document Cloud to read documents online, Word Train to track key words, and Represent to track elected officials.

• Sixth: the increase in collaboration, instead of competition, between old media and new media makers, and organizing these experiments into citywide networks.

  A year ago, J-Lab funded a Networked Journalism pilot project that paired five legacy news organizations with five local news sites in their communities.  All have added new partners and all the partners want to continue working together for a second year to develop some ad networks. 

• Seventh: The increasing participation of philanthropic foundations in supporting independent journalism startups and community information needs. Foundations once worried about funding projects that might compete with fragile legacy news organizations. More recently in the U.S., however, they have become so alarmed at the diminishing news coming from downsized local news outlets that they are seeking ways to intervene.
• Last is the rise of respected advocacy news sites on both the national and local level. Sunlight Foundation is a key example of advocating for transparency in government while also creating amazing ideas for news coverage. It just won this year’s Knight-Batten Awards for Innovations in Journalism with its dynamic, multi-faceted coverage of last spring’s health care summit. In such cities as Chicago and Philadelphia, local niche news sites are reporting on public education while also advocating for good schools.

But there’s a caveat here: We’re also beginning to see the emergence of more agenda-driven, politically partisan sites that are masquerading as neutral news sites.  How will readers know which advocacy sites have some journalistic DNA and which do not?  This is yet to be determined.

All of these developments involve tremendous experiments in the area of “news work.”  Not all of these initiatives will be successful, but many are producing excellent journalism.

Most are exploring hybrid models of support, eking out income via a variety of sources - memberships, donations, sponsorships, advertising, coupon deals, events, fee-based training, crowd-funded stories, grants and consulting. Yes, some if these news sites are starting to make money by training local businesses and nonprofits in how to build websites or use social media.

It’s interesting to me that while all this experimentation is going on around business models for journalism and delivery models for journalism, there seems to be very little invention around that involves the product itself - the stories that comprise our journalism. At best, we’ve added some multimedia bells and whistles, some moving parts and some digital options.

I think there are a lot of opportunities to offer journalism that has more added value that what we are now generally producing.  There are opportunities for:

• Coverage of “master narratives:” Stories that take the 5,000-foot view instead of the 50-foot view of important issues.
• Stories that connect the dots on trends or developments that help people make sense of their world.
• More explanatory journalism that really unpacks issues and not just parrots pro and con viewpoints.
• Stories that do a better job of asking the obvious questions that readers have - but somehow don’t always occur to journalists.

I will tell you that as I’ve moved from being a story editor to just an every-day reader, I frequently fume when reading a story and wonder who edited it. Why is there so much missing information? Why didn’t the story even address the most basic of questions? I’m sure you do, too.

• Stories that revisit paradigms that define conflict as “news,” that engage in scorecard journalism, that pretend at balance by only parroting extreme points of view.
• Stories that zag instead of zig.  That description comes from a former editor of mine, Gene Roberts, some 30 years ago, but I think it very much applies in new ways today. There’s too much duplication of story effort.  We need journalists who are skilled at rendering important things as journalism, journalists who can examine issues from fresh viewpoints.

Once when I was spearheading a big civic journalism initiative in the ‘90s, one of our funded newspapers, the Myrtle Beach Sun News, mailed postcards to its readers with six questions. One was: What really makes you mad right now?

What emerged were issues - such as offensive signs defacing that beach community - that the newspaper did even realize were bubbling beneath the surface.

• I also think there are opportunities for stories that make clear that truth is a plural, not a singular. word. There are many truths depending on various points of view.  What if, for instance, instead of reporting on where people disagreed, we focused on where they agreed?

As journalists we do a very poor job of validating consensus. If a reporter is sent to cover a meeting where everyone agrees, he’ll likely come back and say, “There’s no story.”

Increasingly, news organizations should be liberated to just say “no:” They are not going to cover something just because everyone else is. They should take the lead to say: It’s not a story worthy of our resources.

To be honest, I’m not sure we know how to do this kind of journalism very well. We are so trained in the competitive race to publish seconds ahead of others, so initiated into the tribe of journalists that we don’t want to be shunned, so beholden to some of our sources that we don’t dare disappoint, so steeped in the conventions of journalism on auto-pilot that we don’t even know how to build up the right reflexes.

J-Lab funds a small hyperlocal news project in the town of Deerfield, N.H., that has going for five years. It’s mostly a volunteer effort, but it now has some 350 contributors and posts 50 original stories a week.  They cover local town meetings and state legislature. I found it enlightening that its readers, in a recent survey, said they felt they were “better educated” than readers of the nearby daily newspapers about state and local government.

How can that be? Well, if you parse their coverage, they not doing scorecard journalism. They are just explaining to readers what a piece of legislation is about and who’s voting for it and why.

Another of our funded sites, NewCastleNOW.org, recently covered hot-button meeting in town with video and pretty much a chronological iteration of the session. This is totally contrary to what we are taught in journalism schools. Yet 35 people who couldn’t make the meeting weighed in with powerfully substantive comments and suggestions.  When I got to thinking what that coverage would have looked like in a traditional daily newspaper, it would have had a lead that said something like: School Board Criticizes Developer’s Proposals. It would have had a strong high quote, another from the opposing side, a few paragraphs of background and some reaction from key players and it would be a wrap.

How citizen reporters define news and report news differently from professional journalists are just a couple of the things we have learned in funding community news startups.

J-Lab has funded 55 projects since 2005 with small grants, about $25,000.  Many of these efforts sought to train citizens to generate stories for the site. Some were university projects. Others were launched by so-called “civic catalysts” - those bumblebees that pollinate a lot of community groups and carry a lot of knowledge about their communities.

Here are five of our key takeaways:

• Citizen journalism is a high-churn, high-touch enterprise: Citizen journalism math is working out this way: Fewer than one in 10 of those you train will stick around to be regular contributors. Even then, they may be “regular” for only a short period of time. Projects that counted on citizens to produce content had to develop alternative plans for stories or they struggled with little compelling content. Our recommendation is to tease out, rather than train in advance, these contributors.
• Sweat equity is key: Projects built on the grit and passion and community knowledge of a particular founder or corps of founders have created the most promising models for sustainability.
• Social media is game changing: Facebook, Twitter and other social media tools are ushering in a New Age for Community News, creating robust recruiting, marketing, distribution, collaboration, reporting and funding opportunities that can put a new startup on the map with the speed of light.
• The academic calendar is not good enough: University-led projects built with student journalists need to operate year-round to avoid losing momentum and community trust. They hold great promise but must surmount great hurdles.
• Hyperlocal sites are not a business yet: There is great demand for local news and information but the supply is very fragile. Many of the projects that we funded are volunteer efforts. But others definitely want to be able to pay salaries and health benefits and build sustaining operations.

If we were to measure the New Voices projects by mainstream media or venture capitalists’ measures of success, we’d looked at how much money they raised or how many unique visitors they received. And some did very well.

But we also identified some other measures for success that may rise in importance as we look at future funding models. We found that the projects:

• Gave a community regular coverage that either never existed before or was, at best, episodic.
• Triggered other news coverage of community issues. The community sites served as listening posts for bigger media.
• Became go-to places for crisis information that town officials could not provide. 
• Imparted political knowledge and empowered voters in new ways. Newcomers were elected to office; voter turnout increased.
• Helped solve community problems or elevated community issues. Problems that might not rise to the level of a Big-J journalism story got addressed in the small-j journalism world.
• Fostered community media skills. These projects trained a lot of community residents in how to interview and videotape and edit - even if not all those trained stuck around to write for the sites.

We emerge from this stage of our grant experiences with some recommendations ?both for startup community news sites and those who wish to support them:

• Try everything. Keep what works and redo what doesn’t.
• Remember that the community doesn’t only want news; it also wants connections.
• Think of your task as not just covering community, but building it as well.

With everyone in search of new revenue models for journalism, there is an assumption that sites must bring in money to be sustainable.  Again and again, we’ve seen volunteer New Voices efforts that are sustaining themselves with little income. And we do believe that community news, as a new form of civic volunteerism, is one important model.

We also believe some kind of support, be it private, philanthropic or government, will evolve to support these enterprises because, once whetted, we believe citizen demand for this kind of information will endure.

Moving forward, the landscape keeps changing in exciting, but challenging, ways. Commercial competition is moving full bore onto the community news scene. Professional journalists, gone from their newsrooms, are ferreting out new ways to continue practicing journalism in the local news space.  Social media is ramping up the speed of site launches. And, new technologies continue to introduce new opportunities and efficiencies.

What is not changing is the keen demand for news coverage - and for connections - in communities large and small, from metro suburbs to college towns to rural areas. We have seen how the opportunities for empowering citizens to be citizens are activated when they have the news and information they need to do their jobs as citizens.

Matching that civic demand with civic sustainability continues to be the challenge for the future.

Remarks by Jan Schaffer
Sept. 3, 2010
Melbourne Writers Festival
Melbourne, Australia

As I look at how the media ecosystem is evolving in communities large and small across the United States, I am much more optimistic than pessimistic that citizens will get their information needs met. However, I also think that traditional journalists will play a smaller -albeit still important - role as the gatherers and disseminators of news.

Remarks by Jan Schaffer, J-Lab Executive Director
Sept. 3, 2010
Melbourne Writers Festival
Melbourne, Australia

Hello. And thank you for inviting me to be with you. It has been good to be here the last couple of days and understand how similar your issues are to what is happening in the United States.

We are in exciting, but daunting, times in the enterprise of journalism.

As I look at how the media ecosystem is evolving in communities large and small across the United States, I am much more optimistic than pessimistic that citizens will get their information needs met. However, I also think that traditional journalists will play a smaller -albeit still important - role as the gatherers and disseminators of news.

The New News will give other kinds of people important roles to play. They include citizen media makers, partnership coordinators, fact entrepreneurs, creative technologists, philanthropic foundations, universities, advocacy groups and even governments.

In this future, both professional and amateur journalists will need to do more than commit acts of journalism. They also need to commit acts of data, acts of information gathering, acts of collaboration - and acts of engagement as well.

All this means we have to expand our scope of work just as we are forced by economic realities to reduce our feet on the street. In the New News era, journalistic enterprises must engage in new kinds of “news work” to serve their audiences. “News work” is more than reporting, validating and writing a story.

It also requires such things sharing information, facilitating conversations, crowdsourcing [inviting people formerly known as the ‘audience’ into the act of newsgathering], smart curation and aggregation, data mining and data visualizations, commissioning news games and exercises, gathering lists and resources, shouting out your good work to others - and responding to readers’ comments on it.

What this really means is that Big-J Journalism organizations can’t do it alone anymore, sitting in their ivory towers.  We need to deputize new feet on the street, incentivize new sources of news, empower new ideas, and re-imagine what journalism could be it if were to be a product that no one could do without.

Imagine a journalism where our audiences could walk away, saying: “Wow, that was a really useful story.”  Instead of wanting to plug their ears at the noise of the latest political fisticuffs. Or glaze over more mind-numbing reports of the latest celebrity mishap.

Unfortunately, we still await developments in the definitions of news. However, many developments are already happening in the delivery of news.  I see at least eight trends in the U.S. and you may be seeing some of them here as well.

• First is the blossoming of hyperlocal community news sites. Many communities around the U.S. and now here in Australia, too, have begun getting regular reports of town and school meetings for the first time ever. The impetus for these sites is coming from several places:
  
  
  • Individuals are launching some local news websites.
  • Companies such as AOL’s Patch.com are rolling out others.
  • Traditional news outlets are trying to local reports under their own brands, such as the New York Times’ Local sections.
• Second is the rise of statewide news ventures, many of them focused on covering a state capital and many with an investigative bent. These include things like California Watch and NJ Spotlight and Texas Tribune.
• Third is the birth of independent metro news sites. We now have at least 10 sites that have staffs of professional journalists covering news in such cities as Chicago, San Diego, San Francisco, Minneapolis, St. Louis and New York City.
• Fourth: the growth of more university-based news sites using students but also working with local residents to cover nearby communities. We have funded several, including Grand Avenue News at the University of Miami, Grosse Pointe Today at Wayne State and Intersections: South Los Angeles at the University of Southern California-Annenberg.
• Fifth: the increasing participation of creative technologists in building innovative news applications. Last year, the New York Times won J-Lab’s Knight-Batten Awards for Innovations in Journalism with a body of journalistic work built on computer programming skills. They included such things as Document Cloud to read documents online, Word Train to track key words, and Represent to track elected officials.

• Sixth: the increase in collaboration, instead of competition, between old media and new media makers, and organizing these experiments into citywide networks.

  A year ago, J-Lab funded a Networked Journalism pilot project that paired five legacy news organizations with five local news sites in their communities.  All have added new partners and all the partners want to continue working together for a second year to develop some ad networks. 

• Seventh: The increasing participation of philanthropic foundations in supporting independent journalism startups and community information needs. Foundations once worried about funding projects that might compete with fragile legacy news organizations. More recently in the U.S., however, they have become so alarmed at the diminishing news coming from downsized local news outlets that they are seeking ways to intervene.
• Last is the rise of respected advocacy news sites on both the national and local level. Sunlight Foundation is a key example of advocating for transparency in government while also creating amazing ideas for news coverage. It just won this year’s Knight-Batten Awards for Innovations in Journalism with its dynamic, multi-faceted coverage of last spring’s health care summit. In such cities as Chicago and Philadelphia, local niche news sites are reporting on public education while also advocating for good schools.

But there’s a caveat here: We’re also beginning to see the emergence of more agenda-driven, politically partisan sites that are masquerading as neutral news sites.  How will readers know which advocacy sites have some journalistic DNA and which do not?  This is yet to be determined.

All of these developments involve tremendous experiments in the area of “news work.”  Not all of these initiatives will be successful, but many are producing excellent journalism.

Most are exploring hybrid models of support, eking out income via a variety of sources - memberships, donations, sponsorships, advertising, coupon deals, events, fee-based training, crowd-funded stories, grants and consulting. Yes, some if these news sites are starting to make money by training local businesses and nonprofits in how to build websites or use social media.

It’s interesting to me that while all this experimentation is going on around business models for journalism and delivery models for journalism, there seems to be very little invention around that involves the product itself - the stories that comprise our journalism. At best, we’ve added some multimedia bells and whistles, some moving parts and some digital options.

I think there are a lot of opportunities to offer journalism that has more added value that what we are now generally producing.  There are opportunities for:

• Coverage of “master narratives:” Stories that take the 5,000-foot view instead of the 50-foot view of important issues.
• Stories that connect the dots on trends or developments that help people make sense of their world.
• More explanatory journalism that really unpacks issues and not just parrots pro and con viewpoints.
• Stories that do a better job of asking the obvious questions that readers have - but somehow don’t always occur to journalists.

I will tell you that as I’ve moved from being a story editor to just an every-day reader, I frequently fume when reading a story and wonder who edited it. Why is there so much missing information? Why didn’t the story even address the most basic of questions? I’m sure you do, too.

• Stories that revisit paradigms that define conflict as “news,” that engage in scorecard journalism, that pretend at balance by only parroting extreme points of view.
• Stories that zag instead of zig.  That description comes from a former editor of mine, Gene Roberts, some 30 years ago, but I think it very much applies in new ways today. There’s too much duplication of story effort.  We need journalists who are skilled at rendering important things as journalism, journalists who can examine issues from fresh viewpoints.

Once when I was spearheading a big civic journalism initiative in the ‘90s, one of our funded newspapers, the Myrtle Beach Sun News, mailed postcards to its readers with six questions. One was: What really makes you mad right now?

What emerged were issues - such as offensive signs defacing that beach community - that the newspaper did even realize were bubbling beneath the surface.

• I also think there are opportunities for stories that make clear that truth is a plural, not a singular. word. There are many truths depending on various points of view.  What if, for instance, instead of reporting on where people disagreed, we focused on where they agreed?

As journalists we do a very poor job of validating consensus. If a reporter is sent to cover a meeting where everyone agrees, he’ll likely come back and say, “There’s no story.”

Increasingly, news organizations should be liberated to just say “no:” They are not going to cover something just because everyone else is. They should take the lead to say: It’s not a story worthy of our resources.

To be honest, I’m not sure we know how to do this kind of journalism very well. We are so trained in the competitive race to publish seconds ahead of others, so initiated into the tribe of journalists that we don’t want to be shunned, so beholden to some of our sources that we don’t dare disappoint, so steeped in the conventions of journalism on auto-pilot that we don’t even know how to build up the right reflexes.

J-Lab funds a small hyperlocal news project in the town of Deerfield, N.H., that has going for five years. It’s mostly a volunteer effort, but it now has some 350 contributors and posts 50 original stories a week.  They cover local town meetings and state legislature. I found it enlightening that its readers, in a recent survey, said they felt they were “better educated” than readers of the nearby daily newspapers about state and local government.

How can that be? Well, if you parse their coverage, they not doing scorecard journalism. They are just explaining to readers what a piece of legislation is about and who’s voting for it and why.

Another of our funded sites, NewCastleNOW.org, recently covered hot-button meeting in town with video and pretty much a chronological iteration of the session. This is totally contrary to what we are taught in journalism schools. Yet 35 people who couldn’t make the meeting weighed in with powerfully substantive comments and suggestions.  When I got to thinking what that coverage would have looked like in a traditional daily newspaper, it would have had a lead that said something like: School Board Criticizes Developer’s Proposals. It would have had a strong high quote, another from the opposing side, a few paragraphs of background and some reaction from key players and it would be a wrap.

How citizen reporters define news and report news differently from professional journalists are just a couple of the things we have learned in funding community news startups.

J-Lab has funded 55 projects since 2005 with small grants, about $25,000.  Many of these efforts sought to train citizens to generate stories for the site. Some were university projects. Others were launched by so-called “civic catalysts” - those bumblebees that pollinate a lot of community groups and carry a lot of knowledge about their communities.

Here are five of our key takeaways:

• Citizen journalism is a high-churn, high-touch enterprise: Citizen journalism math is working out this way: Fewer than one in 10 of those you train will stick around to be regular contributors. Even then, they may be “regular” for only a short period of time. Projects that counted on citizens to produce content had to develop alternative plans for stories or they struggled with little compelling content. Our recommendation is to tease out, rather than train in advance, these contributors.
• Sweat equity is key: Projects built on the grit and passion and community knowledge of a particular founder or corps of founders have created the most promising models for sustainability.
• Social media is game changing: Facebook, Twitter and other social media tools are ushering in a New Age for Community News, creating robust recruiting, marketing, distribution, collaboration, reporting and funding opportunities that can put a new startup on the map with the speed of light.
• The academic calendar is not good enough: University-led projects built with student journalists need to operate year-round to avoid losing momentum and community trust. They hold great promise but must surmount great hurdles.
• Hyperlocal sites are not a business yet: There is great demand for local news and information but the supply is very fragile. Many of the projects that we funded are volunteer efforts. But others definitely want to be able to pay salaries and health benefits and build sustaining operations.

If we were to measure the New Voices projects by mainstream media or venture capitalists’ measures of success, we’d looked at how much money they raised or how many unique visitors they received. And some did very well.

But we also identified some other measures for success that may rise in importance as we look at future funding models. We found that the projects:

• Gave a community regular coverage that either never existed before or was, at best, episodic.
• Triggered other news coverage of community issues. The community sites served as listening posts for bigger media.
• Became go-to places for crisis information that town officials could not provide. 
• Imparted political knowledge and empowered voters in new ways. Newcomers were elected to office; voter turnout increased.
• Helped solve community problems or elevated community issues. Problems that might not rise to the level of a Big-J journalism story got addressed in the small-j journalism world.
• Fostered community media skills. These projects trained a lot of community residents in how to interview and videotape and edit - even if not all those trained stuck around to write for the sites.

We emerge from this stage of our grant experiences with some recommendations ?both for startup community news sites and those who wish to support them:

• Try everything. Keep what works and redo what doesn’t.
• Remember that the community doesn’t only want news; it also wants connections.
• Think of your task as not just covering community, but building it as well.

With everyone in search of new revenue models for journalism, there is an assumption that sites must bring in money to be sustainable.  Again and again, we’ve seen volunteer New Voices efforts that are sustaining themselves with little income. And we do believe that community news, as a new form of civic volunteerism, is one important model.

We also believe some kind of support, be it private, philanthropic or government, will evolve to support these enterprises because, once whetted, we believe citizen demand for this kind of information will endure.

Moving forward, the landscape keeps changing in exciting, but challenging, ways. Commercial competition is moving full bore onto the community news scene. Professional journalists, gone from their newsrooms, are ferreting out new ways to continue practicing journalism in the local news space.  Social media is ramping up the speed of site launches. And, new technologies continue to introduce new opportunities and efficiencies.

What is not changing is the keen demand for news coverage - and for connections - in communities large and small, from metro suburbs to college towns to rural areas. We have seen how the opportunities for empowering citizens to be citizens are activated when they have the news and information they need to do their jobs as citizens.

Matching that civic demand with civic sustainability continues to be the challenge for the future.