Author: Ryan Thornburg

Sohaib Athar wasn’t a journalism major, and neither are you

The story of Sohaib Athar is an especially important anecdote precisely because he was accidental journalist.The value of social media isn’t as much about giving a microphone to people who seek it, but about amplifying unheard voices.

In the great debate about the future of journalism and the relevance of journalism schools, the Athar anecdote supports my belief that *every* college student should take a course in journalism. Whether they practice the profession or not, many of them will be “brothers in the crowd” — to borrow a phrase and a scene from Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man.

At those moments, we don’t need journalists as much as we need people — like Athar — who practice journalistic thinking.

‘Fake’ MLK quote small hint at pernicious popularity of lies

Making its rounds on Twitter recently has been a “fake” quote attributed to Martin Luther King: “I mourn the loss of thousands of precious lives, but I will not rejoice in the death of one, not even an enemy.”

Some people — most prominently Megan McArdle at The Atlantic — thought it just didn’t sound right.

The problem is that you can’t prove he didn’t say it. A couple of people have tried, and have come up with a good partial explanation. But disproving something you can’t see is nearly impossible. This is a great example of a problem often faced by reporters — a problem that’s becoming even more vexing with the development of social media.

Making its rounds on Twitter recently has been a “fake” quote attributed to Martin Luther King: “I mourn the loss of thousands of precious lives, but I will not rejoice in the death of one, not even an enemy.”

Some people — most prominently Megan McArdle at The Atlantic — thought it just didn’t sound right.

The problem is that you can’t prove he didn’t say it. A couple of people have tried, and have come up with a good partial explanation. But disproving something you can’t see is nearly impossible. This is a great example of a problem often faced by reporters — a problem that’s becoming even more vexing with the development of social media. As it turns out, people say a lot of stuff that just isn’t true.

A quick Google search of the quote turns up more than 10,000 results — almost all from Twitter, Tumblr, Blogspot or WordPress posts written since the death of Osama bin Laden. But as I try to teach my journalism students, popularity does not equal accuracy. Ten bad sources aren’t as useful as one good source. Google says that some date as far back as Feb. 1, 2001, but that may be a default date on the Tumblr micro-blogging platform. In any case, date-based search on Google is useless for this effort. (Similar searches on Bing and Technorati were also not effective.)

My favorite explanation, by tech writer Frederic Lardinois, points most of the quote to King’s 1963 book Strength to Love. He found that the one-sentence quote used on Twitter could also be found as part of a longer quote on other social media sites. Most of that quote — but not the first sentence — is directly from Strength to Love. But that first sentence remains a black swan. I can’t prove that King didn’t say it. But I can’t prove that he did. And I can’t figure out where or when in the contemporary digital folklore that the quote originated.  As a recently popular book points out, just because you’ve never seen a black swan doesn’t mean they don’t exist. Europeans had only seen white swans. Until a black one showed up in Australia in 1697.

Taken as an isolated incident he harm from this misquote is pretty abstract. At worst it becomes George Washington’s cherry tree — a story that everyone hears, that has its accuracy questioned, but that cannot be disproved. It muddies our understanding of history and it contributes to a changing narrative that we tell about ourselves, our history and our heroes.

The problem in the era of social media is that these misquotes are rampant and pernicious. Fabricating the words of political nemeses has become an acceptable and common tactic. Check out the archive of fact-checking that Snopes.com has done on fake quotes attributed to a variety of political lightening rods from Sarah Palin to Hillary Clinton. There is a library of fake quotes and fake legislation that gets distributed via e-mail and social networks. They’re complete fiction. It’s bad enough that political leaders — from Sarah Palin to Hillary Clinton — make up stuff all the time and assert it as truth. But it’s as if we’ve suddenly corrupted the value of the First Amendment by acting as if the answer to bad speech is not less speech but more bad speech. Lies are no longer combated by the often difficult-to-ascertain truth, but by more easy-to-fabricate lies.

It’s possible that the person — and it was one person — who decided to “upgrade” the actual King quote with an additional line was unconsciously mashing up King with another speaker. There’s plenty of historical precedent for that practice. Or perhaps she just incorrectly remembered the real quote and didn’t look it up in the book before she posted it to her blog. That happens all the time. I swear my wife told me to get chicken at the store yesterday. She swears she wanted me to get fish.

This happens all the time, and double-checking things that we “know” is probably the hardest habit for my reporting students to acquire. Good reporters — like good scientists — don’t care so much about what you know as they do about how you know what you know. We want to see it. I teach my students that “If your mother says she loves you, check it out” and I play for them a bit of Marvin Gaye — “believe half of what you see, some or none of what you hear.”

The real problem for our nation is the intentional lies that are spread — and spread in a very smart way that adds to the malice of the act. My favorite is the YouTube video that shows Obama talking about “my Muslim faith.” Here’s the clip…. and here’s the whole clip. The 12-second clip — both totally accurate and totally incomplete — has been viewed nearly a million times. The full clip has been seen nearly two million times. But how many looked for the second after watching the first?

With the advent of democratic media distribution anyone can report what they see and hear. But who will look at the world around them and wonder what is unseen? And who will take the time not just to doubt, but to check it out?

“Bringing OpenBlock to Rural America” is a Knight News Challenge Finalist

I posted an earlier draft of this proposal already, but here is the full version of the proposal that has been selected as one of the finalists by the Knight Foundation in their 2011  Knight News Challenge. Let me know your thoughts. Thanks to everyone who has helped spawn and cultivate this project. Every conversation has me more excited about what we’ll be able to do for rural newspapers in North Carolina and across the country.

Describe your project

We will build a not-for-profit clearinghouse of data from state, county and municipal governments in North Carolina and deploy them through pilot OpenBlock installations at the websites of nine rural newspapers in the state. The datasets will include public records of particular interest, such as crime reports, real estate and restaurant inspections.

We have already conducted research, funded by the McCormick Foundation, that indicates deployment of OpenBlock on the websites of small and mid-sized papers could provide significant digital revenue potential  — given the interest readers have in understanding their communities.  But that the main barrier to implementing OpenBlock is a lack of technical expertise at small papers as well as the high cost of ongoing data collection.

At the end of our 27-month funding period, we will have reduced the costs of acquiring, aggregating and publishing public data at community newspapers. We will also have developed one or more revenue models that demonstrate how meeting the information needs of a community can also be good business, even in small towns and rural counties of fewer than 75,000 people.

Rural news organizations are struggling to move to the digital age in part because their staffs are so small that they don’t have the capacity to identify, digitize, re-aggregate and map all the various public records available at the state and local level into databases that can be accessed intelligently by both reporters and the public.

This project tackles the lack of capacity at rural papers from two directions. It will create a centralized clearinghouse of state, county and city schemas and datafeeds that could be easily used in OpenBlock. It will also create compelling editorial content that will draw new, young readers to community information presented in a format and medium they want. Audiences for this kind of editorial product are loyal. They generate repeat visits by returning to seek updates on crime especially. And they also generate page-views and increased time-on-site as they search and sort the information.

We expect through this project to lower the costs of data acquisition and organization through a variety of methods that we will be able to assess and compare. In some cases, volunteers will pick up CDs of data from county offices. In others, journalists may scan and upload PDFs of hand-written police incident reports. In still other cases, people would key into a database the information on those PDFs. This job is so big that no single small news organization could do it. But with the support of a not-for-profit organization that provides centralized technical, editorial and advertising expertise, we could create a model for gathering valuable public records from rural America. To individual communities, these records are necessary to foster an informed civic dialog and healthy economy. But in aggregate, these records may also be able to shed light on trends in rural America that would otherwise go unreported.

This project will demonstrate one way that universities can support and advance journalistic activity – by providing a launchpad for new ventures that draws upon broad faculty expertise and student workers to lower the costs of professional, independent public affairs journalism and by absorbing some of the risk associated with new editorial product development.

Knight funding will get us off the ground and put us in a position to be a self-sustaining not-for-profit company, serving North Carolina journalists and citizens and providing a model for other states and regions to adopt.

Improving Delivery of News and Information to Geographic Communities

In small towns and rural America, the local newspaper is more than just a source of information and an engine of commerce.  More importantly, it fosters and builds geographic community and sets the agenda for public policy debate.  By making public records readily available and well-organized, we will support decision-making and accountability in local and state government.

This project most clearly improves the delivery of news and information to geographic communities by helping rural community newspapers make the transition to the digital age and remain relevant for younger audiences that are less informed and engaged in their own communities.

We expect several community newspapers to incorporate crowd-sourcing – a technique once known in their newsrooms as “neighbors editors” – into the process of data acquisition. Where this happens, we expect an increase in civic and community engagement.  — first, by forming a network of knowledgeable volunteer citizen-journalists and by creating greater demand for truly open government records.

Unmet Needs

In many cases, data that is readily available in GeoRSS or at least CSV format from big cities is simply not available even in print from rural governments. For example, journalism students at the University of North Carolina working last semester to gather and organize public records in two rural counties for an OpenBlock application met with a number of obstacles – ranging from significant photocopying fees to inappropriate redactions and denial of access to public information.

Even when acquisition of public datasets is relatively simple – for example, public health restaurant inspections — someone must request that data from a specific county be exported in fielded data format. It is inefficient for each rural news organization to make separate requests for this data in each of North Carolina’s 100  counties. In these cases, our centralized organization would outline an initial request for the data for each county.

When Rick Thames, the editor of The Charlotte Observer, reviewed our proposal, he offered his enthusiastic endorsement. “There is no question but what this would fill a need,” he said. “Small papers can’t do this sort of work on their own.  So, sadly, it just isn’t getting done. What a gift this would be for those communities. A very worthy effort that would be warmly received by the editors and publishers of every small and mid-sized paper that I know.”

What’s New?

Currently there is no tool or service that can efficiently gather, format and publish public records on rural news organizations’ sites. In part, this is a technology problem that may soon be overcome with the alpha rollout of OpenBlock later in 2011. But a much bigger piece of the problem is the data itself – neither OpenBlock nor any other technology has the ability to obtain public records as fielded digital data and create a newsworthy user interface for all the various types of records that a news organization might need.

Without a project like this there is no indication that OpenBlock will be a viable option for papers in rural communities.

What Will Change?

By the end of the project, we will have …

1. About 95 up-to-date feeds of local government data in standardized, fielded formats such as GeoRSS. These feeds will be available under a Creative Commons Attribution, Share Alike license. By providing public information in this format, we will lower the barriers to North Carolinians interested in researching trends or patterns in public policy and we’ll provide the raw material for the development of mashups or entrepreneurial applications we haven’t even thought of yet.

2.  Nine community newspapers using OpenBlock to publish fresh, local government data to their audiences. These newspapers will be on the frontlines of a statewide effort to get complete and current government datasets in open, machine-readable formats. They will demonstrate multiple approaches to implementation that will be relevant to others’ during the broader roll-out.

3. Identified new revenue opportunities structured around the presentation and analysis of this data that will support their journalism.

4. Journalists and citizens interested in public policy issues will have a new tool for analyzing trends and patterns in rural issues such as environmental stewardship, public health, crime and justice, education, and economic development. Community newspapers will be able to more easily compare the experiences of their communities with the experiences in other places across the state.

5. A cost-effective model for building similar independent, not-for-profit data repositories in other states.

6. Most importantly, we will have raised public awareness of open government and we will start seeing rural counties and towns publish public data in standardized, machine-readable formats on the Web.

Why are you the right person?

This project would be tested in North Carolina and rolled out nationally. While the Raleigh-Chapel Hill area is a hub for information technology, the state has a high percentage of rural counties (roughly 70 out of 100) and a strong tradition of quality community news organizations.

The project builds on extensive and longstanding  collaborations between the University of North Carolina and North Carolina Press Association.

“WOW! This is an interesting and ambitious project and I know there will be many Carolina newspapers that will want this service,” Beth Grace, the director of the N.C. Press Association, told us.  “At a time when papers have lost staff and have had to postpone in-depth/investigative and trend reporting, this could bring some of that information back to papers and their readers. The North Carolina Press Association stands ready to assist — we can work with you to help assess what records most papers –and importantly, their readers — would want.”

This project will address a critical need that’s been identified through the work of UNC Knight Chair Penny Muse Abernathy with three rural papers, and in partnership with professor Ryan Thornburg, whose students have already begun collecting digital public data in these rural counties.  The project was funded by the McCormick Foundation to develop sustainable business models for community news organizations.

“Our newspaper has worked with Ryan Thornburg for the past year as we try to figure out how to take advantage of  OpenBlock for Whiteville.com,” said Les High, the editor and publishers of The Whiteville News-Reporter.  “As is the case in most rural communities in this state, the public information we plan to display is not readily downloadable to the site. This project would provide an important community service to residents of all of North Carolina’s 100 counties – bringing the benefits of the digital highway to even the most remote areas.  And just as important, OpenBlock could well be an important source of new revenue for community newspapers everywhere.  This is a very important first step in making OpenBlock economically feasible for small papers to implement and use.

A database of local information – and we believe OpenBlock is the best solution at this point —  is a central component of the financial strategy in the digital age.  Yet, the obstacles in collecting and digitizing loom as a barrier to successful implementation.”

What tasks/benchmarks need to be accomplished to develop your project and by when will you complete them?

The project has three phases, each with its own tasks and benchmarks. We have developed a detailed timeline and budget that are available immediately upon request.

Phase I is underway with funding from the McCormick Foundation to install the OpenBlock codebase on a virtual machine, to format, ingest and publish two datasets from North Carolina local governments, and write a public report on the technical risks of the project.

The report and any code we develop will be shared with the OpenBlock community. We will publish this report by April 15. (We understand this is before funding would be available from the Knight News Challenge.)

This summer, with Knight funding, journalism students and community newspaper reporters around the state will conduct a census of public records. We will pay participants to complete forms describing the location and characteristics of state and local datasets.

At the completion of Phase I, we will publish a directory of the datasets and a report that describes the economic cost to journalism of governments not publishing data in machine readable format.

Phase I will end September 30, 2011.

Phase II: The focus in this Phase will be on reducing the costs of deploying OpenBlock at rural papers as well as the costs of acquiring, organizing and maintaining data feeds that can be easily integrated into the OpenBlock application.

By the end of this Phase, we will install eight additional OpenBlock sites, publish relevant data feeds and make them freely available under a Creative Commons non-commercial, share alike license.

We will also design, test, iterate and document sample data-collection processes for a variety of scenarios we expect to encounter during the statewide deployment of OpenBlock installations. The documentation will be critical to news organizations across the country as they plan and budget their own efforts.

Phase II will run from October 2011 through September 2012..

Phase III: During the final phase of the project we will focus on generating for community newspapers revenue models that will be used to support and encourage the continuing maintenance and development of our OpenBlock installations.

During this phase we will begin a phased, statewide rollout of OpenBlock to community newspapers and we will have a comprehensive, statewide collection of public records feeds available from our clearinghouse.

Phase III will also see the incorporation of a not-for-profit organization that will house the project after the end of the grant. It will be funded with the annual membership fees from community newspapers at which we have installed OpenBlock. This organization would also maintain the clearinghouse of public data, some of which may come from places where we don’t have media partners. Finally, it will provide editorial guidance to anyone interested in using the data to create their own data tools or to write stories about trends or patterns revealed by the aggregated data.

Phase III will run from October 2012 to August 2013.

How will you measure progress?

We will measure progress primarily by meeting our benchmarks on deadline and within budget. We will recruit partners, successfully install OpenBlock at community news websites, and collect and distribute feedback from partner newspapers.

We have developed a detailed timeline and budget that are available immediately upon request.

Ultimately, we hope to see a statewide movement to support laws and systems that make government documents and data more easily accessible to North Carolina citizens. With those public policy shifts, we believe we will see more and better public affairs journalism as well as faster and more equitable resolution of civic debates.

Do you see any risk in the development of your project?

The risks of our project fall into three categories: data acquisition, data management and publication, and revenue generation.

Data Acquisition — The goal of the project is to reduce the cost of acquiring current and complete local government data in small communities. The costs now make widespread deployment of the OpenBlock application prohibitive for small publishers.

Challenges to low-cost data acquisition are technical, political and legal. The technical problems are all surmountable – at some cost, perhaps higher than we hope. In our early going, we anticipate many data sources that will require manual entry. The risks with these data sources will be accuracy and efficiency. We hope to test various quality assurance methods across our nine initial sites.

But the real challenge we believe will be reticent government agencies and uncooperative vendors with government that make their money through government contracts for digital data storage and management.

Our experiences with student efforts to collect digital, fielded data in rural communities give us a pretty good idea of the type of challenges, if not their scope. For this project, we intend to employ reporters within each community to leverage their community-based knowledge and relationships to help overcome these challenges.

Through conversations with attorneys for the N.C. Press Association, we don’t see any legal reason that we cannot gather the data we need for the feeds to be editorially meaningful.

Data Management and Publication — This project depends significantly on the successful alpha launch of the OpenBlock installations at The Columbia Daily Tribune and The Boston Globe. We anticipate these Knight-funded launches to happen late Spring 2011.

To mitigate this risk, we have already consulted with developers to help us more clearly see the technical challenges that might stand between data collection and our goal of deploying the OpenBlock application at nine community newspapers by the end of August, 2012.

As we understand it now, the technical challenges involve scraping data, developing locally meaningful schemas for various datatypes, the development of a simple user-interface for data editing on the backend, and customizing the front-end look and feel of OpenBlock to match the websites of existing community newspapers, many of which use the commercial TownNews CMS/service.

To ensure this is adequately addressed by those with sufficient technical experience to assess and solve these problems,  we will hire a qualified and cost-effective group of developers to help us.

Revenue Generation – Community newspaper publishers will participate in this project only if we can demonstrate a positive return on their investment. While Foundation support is essential to the launch of this project, sustaining it will only be worthwhile if we can help small newspapers generate revenue. On the cost side, we quickly discover the most efficient strategies for data acquisition and maintenance. On the revenue side, Penny Abernathy has been working with three small newspapers to develop sponsorship models that we believe will yield enough revenue for publishers to justify the annual cost of the service.

How will people learn about what you are doing?

There are three critical audiences for this project. First, is a national audience that we will reach through trade websites and conferences as well as the OpenBlock community that is being so well nurtured by OpenPlans and its Knight-funded efforts.

In North Carolina, we have a statewide audience of newspaper publishers, editors and engaged citizens. Our affiliations with the N.C. Press Association, the N.C. Open Government Coalition, and the School of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of North Carolina will help us identify partner newspapers and datasets that are editorially significant.

Our most important audiences will be the local news site users and advertisers. We expect and need these citizens to become consumers of public records and advocates for digital, fielded government local government data. In many cases, we also expect that these audiences will also be our collaborators and key elements of the data collection workflow. For these audiences, the local newspaper partners will be our most important channels of communication.

Is this a one-time experiment or do you think it will continue after the grant?
The information needs of our state’s communities will be best served if this project continues beyond the term of the grant. Our application anticipates that and asks the Knight Foundation to help us create a sustainable not-for-profit organization that will be self-funding at the end of the grant.

But even if one of the risks we’ve outlined prevents us from creating a self-funding not-for-profit, the journalism community at the end of this grant will have several hard deliverables that will be used to guide further efforts:

  1. A description of state and local datasets in one of the nation’s most populated states. (August 15, 2011)
  2. A Paper that describes the economic cost to journalism of governments not publishing data in machine-readable format, compared to the costs of the governments – and taxpayers – to do so. (September 30, 2011)
  3. A clearinghouse of state and local government datasets, in open, machine-readable format. (September 30, 2012) A handbook of data collection processes suitable for six different public records request scenarios. (September 30, 2012)
  4. Nine installations of the OpenBlock application at community newspapers. (July 2011 to August 2012)
  5. Scraperscripts, schemas and other contributions to the OpenBlock Project. (April 2011 to August 2013)

Social Media and News Judgment in the Classroom

When I walk into the classroom to teach my introductory news writing students at UNC, I remind myself that I’m giving a map to people who have always driven sports cars, but never out of their neighborhood.

Some of the students are younger than Mosaic, and throughout their lives, their access to information technology has outpaced their understanding of it.

The answer to the question of “What is news?” for many of them is “Whatever my friends share on Facebook.” And that means popularity — and for many of them it’s popularity among a narrow subset of people who look, act and see the world similarly — trumps all the traditional news values of impact, proximity, prominence, timeliness, emotional appeal, oddity and conflict.

But rather than try to replace one with the other, I’m trying a technique that I hope will use their familiarity with social media to get them to think more about their audience. Try the following and let me know how it works for you, too.

1. Have the students organize their Facebook friends into various lists, using traditional news values. So, for example, students might organize their friends by geography, share experiences, relationship status, number of friends they have, frequency of posting, or a combination of those. Instructions for Creating a Facebook List

2. Throughout the semester, your students are already required to read the news. But this technique also asks them to share the stories they read with their friends on Facebook. Instructions for Sharing a Link on Facebook

3. The key is that they can’t share a link with ALL their friends. They have to pick no more than two lists with which they share each story. This gets the students thinking about how different audience value different information. Or how different audiences value the same information, but for different reasons. Instructions for Sharing Links With Specific Lists

Sharing an article on Facebook4. Finally, with each link that a student posts she is required to “Say something about this link …” It doesn’t count if the annotation is merely a re-phrasing of the facts in the story. And it doesn’t count if the student merely writes about why she likes the story. The annotation must answer the question “So What?” for that particular list. The goal here is get students to change their belief that writing is about self-expression into a journalistic mindset in which writing is selfless expression.

Journalists have to give audiences what they want and need, and often must go to great lengths to explain to them why they need it. This isn’t paternalism. This is a service, and it’s the same one that attorneys and physicians and financial advisers provide. The choice remains in the customer’s hands. But we — as journalists — have a professional obligation to provide the best advice on the most relevant information possible.

Grading: You have two choices for grading this assignment. One option is to get a Facebook account and require that all of your students friend you and put you on every list they’ve created for the class. That way you’ll be able to see what they’re doing and use your own rubric to score their efforts. The other option is to have the students write a weekly reflection about their experiences sharing stories with their friends. What did they share with whom? How did they describe it? What didn’t they share? Why not? What responses did they get from their friends?

(For the sake of ease, you may consider creating a mock version of this assignment in which students simply write Word documents using imaginary friends, imaginary lists, imaginary stories or use an imaginary social network. But do not do that. It smacks of being phoney. And students — and journalists — hate phonies.

Top 10 Best Things About David Broder

The future of news looks less bright today with the death of David Broder, one of the best journalists of the 20th century. I had the change to work with him at The Washington Post, and all I can think about today is how much I’d enjoy replaying the last 50 years of his life, the last 10 of mine and putting us at the same news organization again.

Here are the Top 10 Best Things that the students in my journalism classes need to know about Mr. Broder.

10. Be a reporter first and an analyst second. Long after Mr. Broder was a television talking head, a syndicated columnist and a Pulitzer Prize winner, he knocked on the doors of voters in the Ohio River Valley.

9. Respect democracy. Mr. Broder believed in the value of public service and respected the sacrifice of candidates and elected representatives. I saw him treat the most influential members of both parties as human beings rather than targets, even as he probed them with smart, aggressive questions. I suspect the esteem in which he held public service allowed him to have high expectations that required tough questions.

8. Do not be driven by the “scoop.” By the time I had the chance to meet Mr. Broder, political journalism was already on its way to being driven mostly by the ability to deliver small details before your competitors could put together a cogent narrative. But even then, he cared more about being able to explain the story than break it.

7. Write plainly. Mr. Broder’s columns, news stories and books are a pleasure to read for their precision and economy of words. His prose seemed to be designed to make people feel smarter than they really were rather than dumber.

6. Work hard. I suspect that if given the choice between a deadline and party, Mr. Broder would choose the deadline every time.

5. Clean up your office. Seriously. Mr. Broder’s was a death trap. The La Brea Tar Pits of political reporting. Nobody’s perfect, after all.

4. Try new things. Mr. Broder was doing live online discussions with washingtonpost.com readers in 1998. What’s your excuse?

3. Have a sense of humor about yourself. During one of those early online discussions, the website’s political editor sent him an email of thanks and encouragement. Mr. Broder’s response is one I hope to get made into a t-shirt one day: “Did I do something bad on the Internet?”

2. Be an optimist in a world of cynics and naysayers. Mr. Broder cheered for the Cubs. He never tried to convince anyone that the world was worse than it is, and nor did he try to convince them it was better.

1. Take the kids to lunch. When I’m 81, inshallah, I’ll still remember the lunch I had with Mr. Broder. Just he and I. He had lunch with me not because he wanted anything from me. Not because he owed me anything. But because I asked for his time and he was kind enough to offer it. It was sometime around the 2004 election and we talked about his 1981 book, The Changing of the Guard. I had been wondering what the book would look like if it were a series on washingtonpost.com about yet another generation of political advisers and candidates. We talked about how it could be interactive and multimedia. He let me ask questions and make statements that alternated between naive and presumptuous. But he never checked his Blackberry, never looked around the room and never interrupted.

Mr. Broder had so many wonderful characteristics that I try to emulate. Being a great journalists is just one, and far from the most important. He was a great journalist because he was so much more. And I hope that the future of journalism can yield many more in his mold.

The Non-Linear Inverted Pyramid

This post is excerpted from Chapter 12 of “Producing Online News“,  from CQPress.com

When news producers begin to get into “that data state of mind” they are trying to achieve both a business goal—ubiquity of their news organization’s information and influence, and a social goal—efficient use of information. If one person has a piece of information and can share it at no cost to everyone else, other people shouldn’t have to repeat the work that went into acquiring that information. The DRY principal of programming when applied to news creates a sustainable news ecology. The energy that is used to gather a fact needs to be expended only once. After finding information from a trustworthy source, journalists can spend all of their energy on analyzing and providing relevant context that adds value to the piece of information. Within a news organization, journalists can also reduce, re-use and recycle content. Consider the way that hyperlinks in a story make news consumption and news production both more efficient.

Often in news stories the audience wants to know more about specific people or organizations than just their names. In print journalism, reporters provide this information in an appositive immediately after the name of the person or organization. For example: “Irwin Collier, an economy expert for North American at the John F. Kennedy Institute at the Free University, pointed out that [German Chancellor Angela] Merkel, who has backed the package, holds a majority in parliament.” Online, by linking the words “Irwin Collier” to a biographical page about the expert—a page that would not be limited to the cursory information presented in the appositive example—the sentence would be almost half its original size.

Once you begin thinking of facts as pieces of organized data, you are ready to start thinking about how you might “program” information as a nonlinear narrative, one that doesn’t proceed in the usual order from top to bottom, but instead might update or rearrange pieces of information dynamically depending on the conditions and context of the audience.

The inverted pyramid has long been used in journalism as a metaphor to describe the traditional structure of a basic news story—the most important information is summarized in the lead, with details of decreasing importance following in each subsequent paragraph or section. For an audience that skims articles rather than reads them, the inverted pyramid remains one of the best ways to construct a news story for the Web. But by using links, online journalists can turn a news story built as an inverted pyramid into a story presented as several inverted pyramids. While printed inverted pyramids are linear, online inverted pyramids can be nonlinear.

In a linear inverted pyramid, every reader starts in the same place—the first paragraph—and ends at the last paragraph, taking the only logical path between those two points. This is a perfectly accept- able way to write news stories both online and off.

But some news events lend themselves to a nonlinear story structure, which breaks apart the traditional news narrative and creates several paths of links the audience can choose to follow. By establishing links from the lead to various elements of the story, and also links among those story elements, journalists can craft a nonlinear narrative that helps each reader more quickly find the specific information he or she wants.

Adrian Holovaty, a pioneer of online news, wrote in 2006 that for journalists to take full advantage of the Web’s hypermedia, they first needed to abandon what he calls “the story-centric world view.” Using as his example a newspaper story about a local fire, Holovaty wrote on his blog:

“[W]hat I really want to be able to do is explore the raw facts of that story, one by one, with layers of attribution, and an infrastructure for comparing the details of the fire— date, time, place, victims, fire station number, distance from fire department, names and years experience of firemen on the scene, time it took for firemen to arrive—with the details of previous fires. And subsequent fires, whenever they happen.”

By breaking down a story into its atomic pieces and using hyperlinks to reconnect those pieces, readers can explore different aspects of the story, each at a level of detail chosen by the visitor. In nonlinear storytelling, journalists gather the input and information as usual, but then tell the story using links that allow the audience to drive the experience.

Journalistic Thinking and Intro Newswriting

The value of journalism programs today is not that we place students in reporting and editing jobs, but that we teach them how to think journalistically (as I’ve written about before here and here.)  One way we can expand journalistic thinking to the entire campus community as well to amateur journalists is to help our students form a peer-editing corps. Journalism students internalize their classroom learning as they explain it to others. The quality of amateur journalism increases and the curiosity and precision required by journalistic thinking becomes part of our campus culture.

Students studying news writing, reporting and editing would hold periodic peer-editing sessions with a small group. Perhaps three journalism facilitator-students to 10 participants. Journalism students would critique the writing and reporting of the participants. Is the writing precise and concise? Is the spelling and grammar accurate? What questions are left unanswered?

An “each-one, teach-one” approach such as this would cost next to nothing. A few thousand dollars a year to support the role of a faculty mentor and various community-building activities.

Assessing the effect of a program like this would be easy as well. Survey all participants. Analyze content of participants before and after. Compare participant’s blog posts with non-participants blog posts.

It incorporates research, teaching and community service.

Some questions:

* Would there be interest among journalism students?

* Would there be interest among non-journalism students?

* Would there be interest among amateur, volunteer journalists in the community?

* How would the program reach volunteer journalists in communities far from campus?

* If you’re an employer, how much do you think an applicants participation in a program like this — as a mentor — would  influence your hiring decision?

* Are there similar programs out there that already exist?

* Could you incorporate this as service-learning component of a basic news writing/editing/reporting class?

Knight News Challenge Proposal: Crowdsourcing Data to Bring OpenBlock to Rural America

At the top of my To Do List this week is the completion of one of the proposals I’ve submitted to the Knight News Challenge this year. I’m posting it here in the hope that you’ll have some feedback on whether/how a service like this would be technically feasible. editorially useful and financially viable. I’m especially interested in hearing from editors of small papers, public records experts, civic/community organizers and anyone who’s worked on the OpenBlock code.

Under what conditions would you volunteer to help a project like this in your community? News organization — how much would you pay for a service like this? What characteristics would it need to have to make it worth your money? What else do you see here that needs further clarification?

(And a big hat-tip here to Penny Abernathy, the Knight Chair in Digital Media Economics here at the UNC-Chapel Hill School of Journalism and Mass Communication. She got this project kicked off with a grant from the McCormick Foundation and who is my co-pilot on this application.)

Here’s our draft pitch:

Crowdsourcing Data to Bring OpenBlock to Rural America

This project would create a co-op to develop and deploy public records databases at news organizations, especially those serving communities of fewer than 75,000 people, preparing those records for presentation and integration in an OpenBlock format.

These rural news organizations are struggling to move to the digital age in part because their staffs are so small they don’t have the capacity to identify, digitize, re-aggregate and map all the various public records available at the state and local level into databases that can be accessed intelligently by both reporters and the reading public.

The project would tackle the lack of capacity at rural papers from two directions. It would create a centralized repository of state, county and city schemas and datafeeds that could be easily used in OpenBlock. This a job well-suited for a small group of experts. In addition, the project will create a statewide corps of amateur data-checkers and records requesters. Data quality assurance and data gathering are jobs well-suited for a crowd of many people, each working on a small piece of the puzzle.

These volunteer citizen-journalists would actually be member-owners of a co-op business. Each task they perform would earn them additional shares in the company’s annual profits. We would generate revenue by charging rural newspapers a fee. The more records and the better their accuracy, the more news organizations would sign on for the service.

In some cases, volunteers would pick up CDs of data from county offices. In others volunteers would scan and upload PDFs of hand-written police incident reports. In still other cases, people would key into a database the information on those PDFs. This job is so big that no single small news organization could do it. But with a corps of member-owners working together, we could create a model for gathering valuable public records from rural America. To individual communities, these records are necessary to foster an informed civic dialog and healthy economy. But in aggregate, these records may also be able to shed light on trends in rural America that would otherwise go unreported.

Improving Delivery of News and Information to Geographic Communities

In small towns and rural America, the local newspaper is more than just a source of information and an engine of commerce.  More importantly, it fosters and builds geographic community and sets the agenda for public policy debate.  This project will foster civic and community engagement — first, by forming a network of knowledgeable volunteer citizen-journalists, and also, by making public records readily available and organized to support decision-making and accountability at all levels of government.

Unmet Needs

In many cases, data that is readily available in GeoRSS or at least CSV format from big cities (such as this example from San Francisco) is simply not available even in print from rural governments. For example, journalism students at the University of North Carolina working last semester to gather and organize public records in two rural counties for an OpenBlock application met with a number of obstacles (which they describe in their blogs) – ranging from significant photocopying fees to inappropriate redactions and denial of access to public information.

Even when acquisition of public datasets is relatively simple – for example, public health restaurant inspections — someone must request that data from a specific county be exported in fielded data format. It is inefficient for each rural news organization to make separate requests for this data in each of North Carolina’s 100  counties. In these cases, our public records coop would outline an initial request for the data for each county.

What’s New?

Currently there is no tool or service that can efficiently gather, format and publish public records on rural news organizations’ sites. In part, this is a technology problem that may soon be overcome with the alpha rollout of OpenBlock later in 2011. But a much bigger piece of the problem is the data itself – neither OpenBlock nor any other technology has the ability to obtain public records as fielded digital data and create a newsworthy user interface for all the various types of records a news organization might need.

Without a project like this there is no indication that OpenBlock will be a viable option for papers in rural communities.

What Will Change?

By the end of the project, we will have

•          at least one member-owner in each county in North Carolina

•          at least 12 news organizations subscribing to the service

•          at least one type of schema for which we’ve collected data from each county

Most importantly, we will have raised public awareness of open government and we will start seeing rural counties and towns publish public data in standardized, machine-readable formats on the Web.

What tasks/benchmarks need to be accomplished to develop your project and by when will you complete them?

How will you measure progress?

Do you see any risk in the development of your project?

How will people learn about what you are doing?

Is this a one-time experiment or do you think it will continue after the grant?

Journalism at Universities: Research Should Lead, a Journ.D. Would Raise the Ante

(This blog post is a belated act — an encore shall we say — in the Carnival of Journalism, organized by David Cohn. It’s a rushed draft. Please send me corrections in grammar, fact or logic.)

Leadership Will Come From Research

Fewer Journalists, Better Journalists, Higher Pay

Journalism Schools and We the Media

Why Have Journalism at Universities Anyway?

At least once a week I get an e-mail with an amazing offer for students – “write for my fledgling entertainment/product-review/sports/music/opinion Web site and be rewarded with fame, a clip and a variety of other compensation that don’t pay the rent.”

If you’ve sent me one of those emails recently, there’s a pretty good chance you’re still waiting for me to take advantage of the opportunity.

Maybe I’m missing out on the chance to make UNC the “hub of journalistic” activity in a changing news environment. After all, this recommendation from the Knight Commission on the Information Needs of the Community is really an economic one – its goal is to reduce the cost of providing news and information. And one of the ways that news organizations have always reduced the cost of production is to rely on an apprenticeship system of unpaid college students. The benefit for the student has always been that “clip” – currency that can be later traded for a paying gig.

But with those paying gigs becoming fewer and farther between, this relationship between the classroom and newsroom is going to change. The only students left taking unpaid writing opportunities are those who do it for their own psychic gratification or who don’t get the changing economics of journalism.

If universities are going to be “a hub for journalistic activity” in a world where Demand Media and Associated Content have turned low-quality “news” writing into hourly shift work, we’re going to have to be part of this economic shift in a way that benefits our students, our faculty and the communities that those of us at public universities are paid to serve.

Leadership Will Come From Research

Universities can lead change not my managing it, but by informing it – by providing the road map of answers to complex questions.

Innovation is the buzzword that we all toss around when we talk about the risks that many media companies are unwilling to take. The theory goes something like this: universities can innovate because they don’t have to show a return on their investment. They don’t have to spend resources on product maintenance.

But innovation without a problem and a hypothesis is aimless. Universities don’t need to create new stories or better stories for a market in which there’s insufficient demand. They need to formulate precise questions with answers that will impact the free exchange of ideas and support communities’ information needs.

It’s not that universities aren’t conducting research in the fields of psychology, economics, management, political science, sociology, biology that are relevant to the information needs of communities. But it seems as if there’s a failure to connect that research to environments where it can be applied.

The failures come both from the newsroom and the classroom side. Newsroom leaders, as a broad generalization, are too myopic in the questions they think are significant to the futures. Driven by incredibly demanding and increasingly frequent editorial and financial deadlines, the requests they make of universities are narrow in scope and short in term. On the other hand, academic research tends to further theory rather than change newsroom behavior. The standards of academic research FAR exceed the standards of industry research. The statistical rigor, the theoretical grounding, the editorial process of academic journals and conferences favor slow, careful dialog. We need to find a way to get “half-baked” research into the hands of industry where it’s more important to take an educated guess today than to make air-tight reviews of missed opportunities.

If I had the time, I’d love to go through the last five years of published academic research on all fields of mediated communication and create a “So What?” guide that would identify places where the direction of research can lead newsroom decisions about story choice, story presentation, audience development and information efficacy. Maybe someone’s already done this, but I’m going to bet that fewer than 5 percent of all working journalists in the U.S. today could name a single academic journal related to their field. If I’m even close to being right, then this is a foundational disconnect for which both the newsroom and classroom bear responsibility and for which the price is a an industry and a public discourse that is less healthy than it could be.

And maybe industry – and government —  is already paying for academics’ time. But my guess is that the information industry invests far less in research and new product development than they spend on research in the health sciences. If universities are going to be the hub of journalistic activity then they are going to need to make research a spending priority and they are going to have to find businesses, governments and foundations willing to provide long-term financial commitments to it.

Universities aren’t going to lead the journalism industry by providing undergrads with new skills. They will only lead if they are providing a new roadmap founded in research. This is primarily the job of faculty in journalism, but also faculty in a broad range of fields with which academic journalists need to continue to seek collaboration. We can and should expose our undergrads – and certainly our grad students – to research. If we do that, then we’ll be churning out leaders who can get into newsrooms with an appreciation of research and understand how to manage its application.

Fewer Journalists, Better Journalists, Higher Pay

My UNC colleague Phil Meyer was right when he said back in 1991 we are “raising the ante on what it takes to be a journalist.”

Part of my emphasis during my four years on the faculty at UNC has been to find a way to “infuse online journalism” into courses that already exist in the curriculum. Lord knows I’ve tried and continue to do so. <plug>The most tangible evidence of my efforts is my new textbook Producing Online News.</plug>. But my problem has been this: the Accrediting Council on Education in Journalism and Mass Communication requires that at least 80 hours (out of a typical 120-hour four-year undergraduate career) be taken “outside of the unit.” Infusing new skills and concepts into journalism education is a zero-sum game. I can’t add new lessons without removing something. Or I have to find a VERY creative way of teaching the old and the new both at once.

I actually strongly support the goal of the ACEJMC requirement. Journalism students MUST have a broad understanding of the world. A broad liberal arts education ensures that a journalism degree doesn’t just mean that students have learned the trade of laying out pages in CSS or operating a camera or applying AP style. I tell my intro news writing students that a good definition of news is when the world doesn’t behave as you’d expect. And that means you have to be familiar with the natural, social and economic rules that determine how the world usually behaves. You don’t learn those rules in the J-school.

So rather than narrow the breadth of a journalism degree or reduce the importance of spelling and grammar, I’d like to see the ACEJMC introduce a new professional journalism degree that is neither an undergraduate nor a graduate degree program. The model for this would be the Pharm.D program that the American Association of Colleges of Pharmacy created in 1990 for pharmacy students.

(For those of you heard me mention this idea at the ONA conference in October, I hope this further explanation helps with your well-founded suspicions that I might have finally gone off the deep end.)

Here’s how a “doctor of journalism”, or Journ.D., program would work. Students would take the standard 80 hours of “General College” requirements, half of which would need to be in communication-intensive courses (selections in departments such as communications, psychology, politics, literature, sociology, computer science, and – yes – even journalism). Introductory course from the journalism school – such as news writing, media law & ethics, design, photography, media history, and media criticism — might even be required

This requirement would be similar to requirements at the Pharm.D. program at UNC — 40 hours of general education and 45 hours of math and science course at the undergraduate level.

After completion of the general education requirements, students would take a test and be selectively admitted to the Journ.D. program. This program, again modeled on the Pharm.D. program, would require another 80-100 hours of classroom instruction in communication skills and subject-specific reporting techniques. It would also require nine to 12 months of supervised field work. From freshman year to graduation, the degree would take six years to complete.

The supervised field work supports the Knight Commission goal of creating a hub of journalistic activity and it has a model in the Pharm.D. program. Pharmacy students at UNC are sent to work with one of 500 “preceptors” – or professional mentors – at one of 275 sites around the state. Some students also choose – at greater expense to themselves – of working at national or international sites. While many of the students want, understandably, to work near Chapel Hill, the field work is done all over the state including urban and rural environments that desperately need health care professionals beyond those that the private market alone can support. Can these communities need any less the civic capital and personal decision making tools that high-quality journalism supplies? Are a community’s information needs any less important to just public policy and rural economic development? I know from working with small and medium sized newspapers, non-profits, public radio stations, and hyperlocal bloggers that there ain’t a one of them that couldn’t use more journalistic firepower. They do, after all, come seeking free undergraduate labor…

Precpts, for their part, may or may not get some salary from universities. But they certainly all get free labor and access to the university’s faculty expertise and research. In exchange, they develop a curriculum with learning goals and give the students a pass/fail grade. And that to me seems like a fair trade.

In some cases, universities provide pharmacy students with subsidized housing at their fieldwork sites. But in other cases, the students foot the bill.

And discussions about footing the bill is perhaps where the Pharm.D. model begins to show some flaws. From my cursory research as well as from anecdotes provided by friends in both fields, starting pharmacists in any market and at any level of experience make about twice what journalists make. Pharm.D. students are willing to invest in six years of tuition payments because their return is much better.

I think Phil Meyer was right – being a great journalist today takes a lot more than being a great journalist 15 years ago. The need for advanced training is clear. But the justification for students to invest in it is pretty weak. Until the demand for high quality journalism increases and/or the supply of high quality journalists decreases, we have a pretty weak argument for requiring students to spend more time and money breaking into the field.

Universities, through research, should play a role in increasing demand. If advertising, social pressure and public policy changes can get people to exercise, quit smoking, seek counseling, stop bullying, recycle, and eat local then those same tools can certainly be used to increase demand for public policy news and information – maybe not among everyone equally, but some.

Universities can also help throttle back the supply of journalists who are anything less than excellent. The market is doing a pretty good job on its own of reducing the ranks of experienced, expensive journalists. But we owe it to our young students that they are not just cheap production inputs that the industry needs today. Every journalist student must be equipped for long-term success and inoculated as best as we can against the next generation of young, cheap, inexperienced labor.

Many of our journalism students are incredibly idealistic and would work for not much more than food. But how are we rewarding and supporting their engagement in public life by chucking as many of them as possible as quickly as possible into a market that doesn’t value them?

Looking at the success of trade publications, Congressional Quarterly and Bloomberg lead me to believe that high quality reporting that has a direct impact on its audience will always have a market.

We need to raise the ante on what it takes to be a journalism student.

Journalism Schools and We the Media

For at least 100 years, one of the biggest criticisms of journalism programs at universities is that they are anti-democratic. Who are you, pointed-headed professor, to tell us who is and who is not qualified to participate in public debate, to watchdog the government and to tell our own stories of the world the way we experience it?

And with the decreased barriers to publishing journalism, this criticism only gains traction. The distance between a non-partisan professional journalist, a professional advocacy journalist and an amateur journalist – once the audience – is smaller than ever.

More and more people are banging down the door of the MSM and the institutions that develop it. While raising the ante on what it takes to become a professional journalist, J-schools can also throw open their doors and take advantage of amateur interest to develop more and better journalistic activity and capacity in the communities we serve.

Journalism schools – perhaps staffed by some of those new Journ.D. students in their fifth or sixth years – should be running programs that teach technical – and that includes writing – skills as well as programs that advance the journalistic values of verification, precision, brevity, relevancy.

Amateur journalists, engaged in narrow and personally satisfying swaths of public life, are an important tool in filling the information needs of a community. These amateurs will report small datapoints that aren’t economically rational for a professional journalist to ferret out. Those datapoints, in the hands of professionals, can help illustrate trends and structures that might otherwise remain obscured or misunderstood.

Amateur journalists who appreciate journalistic values will also have a greater appreciation for professional journalism.

Journalism schools should be places that train and – hang with me on this one – accredit amateur journalists. I would never – NEVER – support any legal privilege that would make the First Amendment work better for one person than another. Accreditation of amateur – or professional — journalists is merely a way that can help the marketplace of ideas function more efficiently. The more accrediting bodies the better (up to, I suppose, a point of diminishing return). The market of individual choices can determine what the different accreditations actually mean. But at least give that blogger who completed nine continuing education credits in reporting, community management and communication law put a little JPG on her site. Degrees have value, and they differ from accreditation badges only in scope and scale.

Why Have Journalism at Universities Anyway?

I don’t know whether the Knight Commission intended this, but it seems to emphasize the role of community colleges as hubs of journalistic activity. Maybe I have my own insecurities about this, but I wonder if that’s not part of a broader trend in academia that historically, and I suspect increasingly, doesn’t value journalism schools, classes, departments as much as it values history, biology and mathematics. I think that many professors at research universities might see journalism as a trade more apropos for a community college.

Perhaps that’s because we in J-schools talk – a lot – about job placement of our undergrads. The students and faculty measure our own success in these terms probably as much as any other. But journalism belongs at universities not because we teach students how to be journalists, but because we teach students how to think journalistically.

Journalistic thinking approaches the world in a certain way. As I mentioned earlier, it values verification, curiosity, precision and brevity. And those values – perhaps sparing brevity – are the values of the academy. But journalistic thinking also values immediacy and proximity. A shorter way of saying it might be that it values impact. Curiosity leads to verification. That leads to answer that help people make personal and public decisions here and now.

Journalists, as the Knight Commission said, connect the university to the world. Journalists democratize intellectualism. Universities and higher education aren’t just a tool for economic development. Curiosity and verification and precise communication are tools for civic engagement – for social change as well as social stability.

For all our emphasis on changing communication technologies and changing economics of media, universities are a hub of journalistic activity when they yield curiosity, rigorous verification of fact and wisdom that has immediate impact.

Journalism is essentially applied or clinical social science. Universities should just be hubs of journalistic activity. Journalism programs should be hubs of universities.

Correction, 2/15/11: An earlier version of this article misnamed the professional mentors in a pharmacy program. They are called preceptors.