Category: Interactive Journalism

Case Study: Link Journalism With Publish2

I start every semester in my online news classes teaching students the fundamental concepts of HTML. Not primarily because I want them to know the technology, but because I want them to appreciate that for all the bells, whistles and buzzwords it is the lowly link that makes online journalism fundamentally different than offline journalism.

If journalism is a conversation, I tell them, the first key to being a good conversationalist is being a good listener. You’d never walk in to a party and just hijack the first conversation you come across. You listen, wait and figure out what you can add and how you can move the discussion. Putting this analogy in to practice with links from your site to another site is the first step in developing authentic conversational leadership.

After all, the man who invented the hyperlink also hypothesized this role for journalists.

This semester, we are putting this concept in to practice in the site we’re building for Public Affairs Reporting for New Media. Using Publish2, the students are getting to practice “link journalism.” The site is now live, and here’s how we’re starting to build it out.

Continue reading “Case Study: Link Journalism With Publish2”

Public Affairs Reporting for New Media: Day 1

The new semester kicked off this at 9:30 this morning in CA 132 with “Public Affairs Reporting for New Media,” a new APPLES service-learning class I’m teaching.

The goal: Partner with N.C. news organizations to create a set of multimedia, interactive news reports about the state’s high school dropout rate. And since part of the class’s mission is to be a public service, I’ll be blogging from now until May 2 about the lessons we learn.

Here’s the syllabus and here’s how the first day went …

Continue reading “Public Affairs Reporting for New Media: Day 1”

It’s a Battle of Style, Not Media

With the new Pew report out this week, a lot of people are wondering this: Is there “evidence in the survey that what the internet did to newspapers may soon happen to television”?

First, the Internet didn’t do anything to newspapers that the 1970s didn’t do more effectively.

Second, these aren’t the right questions to ask.

Continue reading “It’s a Battle of Style, Not Media”

Activist’s Death Takes Toll on Newspapers

If Chapel Hill had a patron saint of town-gown relations, it might have been Rebecca Clark. The 93-year-old woman was not only a leader in the area’s black community, but the mother of the late Doug Clark, who entertained generations of frat parties with his band, The Hot Nuts.

Ms. Clark died on Saturday. But the Triangle’s newspapers should ask not for whom the bell tolls. It tolls for thee.

Continue reading “Activist’s Death Takes Toll on Newspapers”

Leaders — Political and Editorial — Need to Work the Network

The News & Observer in Raleigh today picked up an op-ed I wrote about the need for winning political candidates to follow through on their gestures of online community connectivity. (Hat tip to WCHL for the idea…)

But this challenge isn’t unique to political leaders, it’s also one that journalists must meet and a gesture on which they are following through even less.

Hooked on the promise of the free advertising inventory generated by online comments, more and more newspaper Web sites are deploying  some type of online discussion technology.  What they aren’t deploying is the kind of human  resources that are needed to foster and develop online conversations. Why do most comments on news articles follow Godwin’s Law? Because there is little or no authentic conversational leaders. There is no human being making connections between people and ideas and, um, fact.

Just look at this recent survey of online journalists in North Carolina — online community management ranked as the skill that these editorial staffers said was least important to their jobs.

Here are my quick thoughts on how news organizations should begin to approach online comments.

N.C. Rising Dropout Rate: A Call for Media Partners

Next semester, I’m leading a group of students in a service-learning class at UNC-Chapel Hill that be using online reporting and publishing techniques to dig in to the story of North Carolina’s rising high school dropout rate. As part of this experiment, we’re working with news outlets in the state on a collaboration that will live both on their individual sites and on a centralized site at UNC. If you’re interested in participating, please take a look at our draft plan of attack here .

Your Assignment for Today Is …

I’m speaking today at two seminars at UNC-Chapel Hill’s School of Journalism and Mass Communication: the Chuck Stone Program for Diversity in Education and Media and the Institute for Midcareer Copy Editors. For a white guy who can’t spell, this is an intimidating day.

Thinking about what to say to these groups, I began to think about how important it is for each journalist who lives in a world of accuracy and accountability to personally venture in to the uncertain waters of online social networks and user-generated content. Among other things, it is a journalist’s job to give voice to the voiceless and to hold powerful people accountable. Wikipedia and Facebook are two places where the voiceless are stretching their vocal chords and where accountability is taking on new methods. If a journalist is to perform his or her job above a minimum standard of competence, it’s important to dive in to these worlds and understand how they work.

Continue reading “Your Assignment for Today Is …”

The Pimping Journalist: A Story of Money and Sincerity

Here’s an update to an earlier report about Chi-Town Daily News Editor Geoff Dougherty. He reports on the Media Shift blog that posting a story by an amateur “citizen journalism” on his site will likely cost him “between $90 and $125” in recruiting, training and other overhead costs. The amateur reporter doesn’t get anything.

Dougherty says a freelance story costs him “between $160 and $200” to get up on the site. Of that cost, the reporter gets “$125 or more per story.” That’s probably consistent with the per-story pay of an entry-level salaried reporter at a traditional paper who has a five-story-per-week quota (and let’s not even get in to the damaging impact of story quotas.)

But here’s the most important part of Dougherty’s post — he says that he doesn’t just spend less on amateur reporting; he argues that he gets MORE for less.

“Each one of the 60 or so citizen journalists working for us is an advocate for our site. They tell their friends and family about what we do, which helps drive traffic and recruit other volunteers.”

And this reminded me of a conversation I had last week with the staff of The Star-News in Wilmington, N.C.. One staffer who had a lot of experience engaging with her readers online said that sometimes she felt “like a pimp” when telling folks that she has just posted a new story in which they might be interested.

Rather than go in to my whole shpiel about how journalists need to learn from political campaigns, I tried to follow her analogy and explain that there was a difference between pimping and paying for dinner, and that the difference is sincerity.

Sharing thoughts and information with people for the purpose of building a long-term relationship with them is not pimping. Pimping is hawking services purely for transactional purposes, with no relationship implied or encouraged. Most folks can inherently tell when a human relationship is sincere and when it’s fabricated.

Which leaves me wondering this: Why are journalists not better public advocates for their own work? Why does Dougherty think that his freelancers don’t do the kind of advocacy work that his amateurs do?

After all, most journalists I know are rabid advocates for their own work when it comes to pitching stories to editors. Why, then, do they become such shrinking violets after the story is published?

Rosen: ‘Press Freedom Is Shared Territory’

In comments on techPresident last night, Jay Rosen summarized nicely the reason that the discussions about “who is a journalist” and “what is journalism” are red herrings.

“Today, the press is shared territory. It has pro and amateur zones. This is appropriate because press freedom is shared territory.”

Press freedom is shared territory.

Warts and all, press freedom is shared territory. If we can start our conversations from that point, they will more constructive.

Press freedom is shared territory, and that’s territory I want far more Americans to settle.

Citizen Journalism and Authentic Leadership

This post is a written version of comments I presented yesterday at the Future of Journalism conference sponsored by The Carnegie-Knight Task Force on the Future of Journalism Education and organized by the Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy.

Continue reading “Citizen Journalism and Authentic Leadership”