NOTE: Please respond to each of these articles separately.
Roanoke, Poynter Develop Ethics Guidelines for Journalists Using Facebook, MySpace and Twitter
By Kelly McBride
Poynter Institute
Jan. 19, 2009
As part of our new Virtual Poynter training, I spent an hour last week discussing social networks as a journalism tool with the journalists from The Roanoke Times. In that short time, the staff at the paper produced the skeleton of a guideline for journalists everywhere.
No one argued against using social networks in reporting stories and delivering them to the audience. It seems like everybody's mom, dad and boss has joined Facebook, turning the site and its technology into something almost as common as e-mail and not just for the young and savvy, like Twitter sometimes seems.
In Roanoke, the journalists grouped the pressure points into three categories: How to use Facebook and MySpace as a reporting tool, how to use the sites as a promotional tool and finally, how to balance your personal and professional images.
As a reporting tool, it's easy to argue that Facebook, MySpace and Twitter instantly connect journalists to stories that in the past would have taken days or weeks to surface. Last year, the Orlando Sentinel discovered a Facebook group devoted to the lack of water at the University of Central Florida's brand new football stadium. The group provided immediate access to dozens of sources who'd experienced firsthand the opening game in 95-degree heat.
In Roanoke during the Virginia Tech shootings, the newsroom staff used Facebook and MySpace pages to help chronicle the lives of the slain and injured students. And later, a newsroom reporter discovered that the university president was battling cancer, thanks to the Facebook group "We support Paul Torgersen."
But the journalists in Roanoke quickly pointed out that social networks have their challenges. It's easy to deceive and make things up, so everything must be independently verified. If all your sources came from the Internet, they would skew toward the more affluent and educated. And when you interview people digitally, you miss a lot of good information.
When it comes to promoting your work, we all agreed it was a good method for getting stories out. But when we started to look at the journalists who use it in a provocative and edgy way on a regular basis, such as The Washington Post's Howard Kurtz or ESPN's Jemele Hill, we recognized the need for some caution and best practices. Status updates are by their nature short, like a story tease. They should be catchy, even pithy, yet accurate. In the effort to simplify, it's easy to go too far and mislead the audience. Good headline writers and television writers recognize this tension.
Balancing the personal and professional turned out to be the thorniest issue. Many of the journalists in Roanoke aim to keep their Facebook or MySpace pages completely private, used only for connecting with personal friends. For the folks whose names are out there, such as reporters and photographers, that might be a losing battle. Sources tend to find you and friend you. Rejecting them is awkward. Letting them in blurs the boundary between your private life and your work. Either way, the journalists in the workshop agreed that a social network is like your car or your front yard. Because you're a journalist, you have to exercise restraint when it comes to making political statements and revealing your own biases.
Even if you keep your page completely private, you must assume it's public and that people will use it to judge you and your newsroom. So all the guidelines that apply to putting bumper stickers on your car apply to your Facebook page.
Here are the guidelines as we developed them in Roanoke. It's a work in progress. What would you add?
A newsroom guideline for using social networks: As a reporting tool
Social networks are ubiquitous enough that journalists who insist on avoiding them are likely to miss good opportunities and great stories. To that end, we encourage responsible use of such networks to form connections, find story ideas and locate sources.
* Making connections is good. And journalists should ensure they are using a full array of tools for gathering information, including face-to-face interviews and shoe-leather reporting.
* Journalists must compensate for the skew of online reporting. You are likely to find younger, whiter, more affluent sources online. Journalists should constantly strive for diverse representations in their stories.
* Information gathered online should be independently confirmed offline. Interview sources in person or over the phone whenever possible. Verify claims and statements.
* Ensure informed consent. It's easy for sources to misunderstand your intentions. It is your responsibility to tell them who you are, what you are doing and where your work will run.
* Take special consideration with children and other vulnerable people. When contacting children, make sure they connect you with a responsible adult.
* Be transparent with the audience as well as sources. Let them know how you contacted people, in what context you gathered the information and how you verified it (or didn't).
A newsroom guideline for using social networks: To promote work
It is important and valuable to promote our work through social networks. Individual staffers bear most of this burden. But the newsroom as an institution is responsible for some of this work. When promoting your work:
* Be accurate. It's easy to sensationalize or oversimplify.
* Be clear. If you are not a good headline writer, seek some training.
* Always include a link and make sure the link works.
* For ongoing issues or stories, editors are responsible for crafting a quick strategy for promoting and branding our work.
* Editors and online staff should identify work that should be branded and promoted on an institutional basis.
A newsroom guideline for using social networks: Balancing the personal and the professional
Some journalists use social networks as a professional tool. Others use it strictly as a personal endeavor. Still others blend the functions. It is increasingly difficult to keep your social networking page strictly private and personal. To that end, journalists must recognize that everything on their Facebook or MySpace pages has the potential to influence their reputations and by extension the credibility of their newsrooms.
* Don't post information that could embarrass you or your newsroom, even if you believe your page is private.
* Use the tools, such as limited profiles and privacy settings, to restrict access to your most private information.
* Recognize that your actions can be misinterpreted. You may sign up for a group to get story ideas, but people may see you as a fan. State your intentions often, in wall posts and other notifications. When appropriate, tell groups when you are signing up that you are looking for story ideas.
* One strategy might be to sign up for lots of groups. If you become a fan of a political party, become a fan of the other parties as well.
* Manage your friends and their comments. Delete comments and de-friend people who damage your reputation.
----
Mobile Journalism on Moving Ground
By Pat Walters
Poynter Institute
Dec. 6, 2006
Ever try to use your laptop in the car? I have. I set mine on the dashboard once to track down unsecured wireless networks in the town I was covering -- for a story, of course.
It was a pain in the neck.
What for me was an annoying afternoon is, for Chuck Myron, a normal one. A story in Monday's Washington Post tells me that Myron is a mobile journalist, or MoJo, at The News-Press in Fort Myers, Fla. He's just one of a fleet of journalists thrown into an experiment by parent company Gannett. He and other MoJos cover local news to the extreme, writing brief dispatches about everything -- from a minor traffic accident to a cat in a tree -- and posting them to zoned sections of the newspaper's Web site.
The Post story, written by reporter Frank Ahrens, came to me via an e-mail from a friend. Preceding the story was a note from one of her colleagues. "If this is the future of journalism," it read, "I better cash in my 401(k)."
There are lots of reasons to be concerned about the MoJo experiment. Most of the content created by MoJos wouldn't meet the standard definition of news. Much of it appears only online. And, according to the Post story, little MoJo content is proofed by an editor.
Ahrens tells me he likes the idea of getting reporters out of the newsroom and into the communities they cover. In some ways, he says, it's good, old-fashioned shoe-leather journalism. But, based on what he saw in Fort Myers, the experiment has a long way to go.
"At times it seems like there's a lack of discrimination in the material," Ahrens says. "It doesn't matter if it's a school lunch menu or a city council meeting."
No doubt, there are flaws. MoJo journalism does "some things that really stick a thumb in the eye of journalism orthodoxy," Ahrens says. But he is quick to point out that this is an early edition of an innovative project. In essence, it's a draft.
One of my colleagues, Poynter Online associate editor Meg Martin, wondered what difference there is between a MoJo and a citizen journalist. The MoJos are, of course, paid by the newspaper. But despite their expensive college degrees, they produce content that, for the most part, requires very little in the way of journalistic training.
What if a news organization were to turn the Gannett formula on its head? Instead of paying professional journalists to produce basic local content, locals could be paid to do it themselves. According to a Gannett news release, that's part of the plan -- MoJos are expected to spend half their time training locals to post dispatches of their own to the newspaper's Web site.
But to find an example of a full flip of the formula, we need only look to a recent move by Yahoo News and Reuters. According to a story in Monday's New York Times, the two news organizations have partnered to place user-submitted photographs and videos throughout their Web sites. If Reuters decides to distribute one of the photographs to the subscribers of its news service, the Times reports, the citizen photojournalist will be paid accordingly.
"This is looking out and saying, 'What if everybody in the world were my stringers?' " Reuters media group president Chris Ahearn tells the Times.
Despite the flaws inherent in experimentation, one thing is certain: It is not going away. As circulation and ad revenues continue to fall, news organizations will continue to seek ways to pull them back up -- and to find entirely new ways to make money.
Most editors agree that enhancing local coverage is key.
Ahrens, the Post reporter, knows that. On his washingtonpost.com blog Monday, Ahrens wrote that his newspaper recently underwent an attitude adjustment, shifting its unspoken slogan from "If you don't get it, you don't get it," to "If it's important to you, then it's important to us."
At The News-Press, that means deploying a team of MoJos armed with laptops, cameras and recorders. At the Post, Ahrens says, it means hiring newspaper Web site designer Rob Curley, known nationwide for his groundbreaking work in creating an intensely local and interactive Web site for the Naples (Fla.) Daily News and the Lawrence (Kan.) Journal-World. And, across the board, it might simply mean that regular reporters start to act a little like MoJos.
Look, for example, at the image of Myron, the Fort Myers MoJo, that ran alonside the story about him. It wasn't made by a photojournalist. Ahrens did it himself.
Wednesday, January 28, 2009
Wednesday, January 21, 2009
NOTE: Please reply to both of these articles. You do not have to connect them in your analysis, but I would like to see comments on both subjects.
More Journalists Switching Platforms to Work Online
By Regina McCombs
Poynter Institute
Nov. 17, 2008
When I left television news 11 years ago to do multimedia at a Web site based at a newspaper, I didn't know anyone else who had made such a change.
In October, Brett Akagi, the director of photography at one of the best TV photojournalism shops in the country, took the job I recently left at StarTribune.com. These days, he's not alone in switching between mother ships. More and more journalists are finding opportunities just by crossing the street.
On the Web, news organizations are directly competing in ways they never quite did when they were simply newspapers and television stations. As newsrooms grow their Web sites, they are discovering gaps in skills within their own staffs and searching for ways to fill those gaps.
Recently, they've started looking where they have rarely looked before -- at the competing TV stations and newspapers in town. Newspapers are finding video skills at television stations, and stations are finding interactive thinking at newspapers.
"TV and newspapers are going to be a lot alike in how they produce content, so why not move people from place to place?" Akagi asked.
The lure of another platform
Journalists with certain skills suddenly have options they haven't had, and they are taking chances on jobs in a new medium as a way to grow their careers and maintain passion for their work.
Akagi was lured away from TV by the chance to learn Web skills and share his video skills with new people.
"Since I've been here at KARE over 10 years, I've grown so much as a journalist and as a manager," he said. "For me, it's time to push in a different direction where there's going to be continued and future growth, which is the digital side of journalism."
Others are moving in the other direction, from newspaper sites to television sites. John Cutter, former deputy online editor at orlandosentinel.com, took the job as digital media manager at WESH.com in August because "I was interested in being the manager of a Web site day-to-day, the senior manager who dealt with other people in the building."
After trying to piece together live online video solutions at a newspaper, Cutter was attracted to having equipment already in place at a television station -- "having access to live trucks (and a helicopter, he joked) instead of trying to use a sling box that only worked some of the time."
Some of Akagi's friends suggested that leaving the Gannett-owned station was crazy, especially given the Star Tribune's financial problems. But he thinks he will have better long-term prospects by moving online.
That's why Pete Soby left KETV in Omaha, Neb., 10 months ago to become the first video photographer at the Omaha World-Herald. "I definitely saw growth in the Internet," he said, "and I thought newspapers would be in the best position to serve that audience."
Scott Utterback also switched from TV to a newspaper-based Web site, moving from WAVE-TV in Louisville, Ky., to The Courier-Journal just over a year ago. For him, it was a way to broaden his skills.
"I was a television news photographer for 17 years before I realized I was playing for the wrong team," Utterback said. "I still shoot video almost every day, but I do it online. I am not sure what the future holds anymore, but I do know I trust the newspapers to forge a better future for the Internet than my former brothers. The greatest thing about my transition, however, is I am now learning the greatest craft of all time: still photography."
Keith Jenkins and John Poole each left different divisions of The Washington Post to head another direction entirely -- to National Public Radio. Jenkins took a buyout from the Post in May, where he was multimedia director, and assumed the same role at NPR. Poole left washingtonpost.com a year ago to be NPR's first video producer.
"I had been looking at NPR, storytelling-wise, for a long time," Poole said, "and kind of thought in the back of my mind that if NPR ever figured out how to do video, wouldn't that be fantastic?" For him, combining NPR's top-of-the line storytellers with news photography "felt like the Holy Grail."
Poole said one of the big differences at NPR is that his colleagues will turn off the pictures and just listen to the audio, which he never would have considered doing before. "I think it's been really good," he said, "in filling in that second half of the equation for me."
Unlike the others, Jenkins has made the switch before. He worked at washingtonpost.com and AOL before the Post Magazine.
"I really wanted to work on a Web site, rather than working on the side of the legacy media," he said. "Looking around at organizations, a lot were tied to newspapers, and that wasn't appealing. A lot of newspapers are looking at the Web sites to save them, and that doesn't make for a good environment -- it makes for a desperate environment."
Most of these journalists don't think of these moves as transitions between newspapers, TV and radio. Instead, Cutter said, "It's going from being a digital journalist to a digital journalist."
The appeal
Tom Dolan, president of the recruiting firm Dolan Media Management, recruited Cutter to WESH.com from orlandosentinel.com. Dolan said he's been scoping out people who work at newspaper Web sites as he tries to fill similar positions at television sites.
"Some skills can be taught and quickly mastered, but the Web is a culture unto itself. What we're talking about is immersing yourself in the Web culture," Dolan said. "It's more interactive and immersive, which is very different from TV, which has traditionally been a one-way street."
For instance, one can't underestimate the value in understanding interactivity, he said. "Time on the page is an important metric, and user interactivity is good for time on the page, and that's good for advertising. The early adopters on the newspaper side seem to understand this much more quickly than the TV side, although TV people are coming around to it."
Newspaper Web sites have also been quicker to adapt multimedia storytelling in ways that Dolan calls "building out the story," with interactive maps, databases and time lines. "We think some of these advanced Web editors," he said, "will help TV with that kind of content."
Meanwhile, newspaper sites are discovering that it can take awhile to develop video skills. "If you want to get good at video quickly," Dolan said, "you can hire a TV video person until your print staff gets caught up."
Cutter said it was obvious during his job interviews at WESH.com that the people there liked his background. “I had managed a staff and increased their participation in breaking news and in user participation, and they want to do that here.”
As journalism organizations change (and with that, the jobs within those organizations), how we think about what we do is changing as well. The photographers in the group, not unexpectedly, see visuals as increasingly important for everyone in the industry. But they also see the importance of a broad range of skills. Soby, for instance, said he knows he must work on his writing because the paper sometimes needs a story to refer to the online video, and he's often the only representative of the World-Herald at a news event.
"Journalists have to have a wider range of skills, period. Those skills need to include writing and audio skills, but visual skills as well," Jenkins said. "There will always be the need for professional photographers and professional videographers, but there needs to be a greater level of visual literacy among all journalists because that's the world we live in now, thanks to the Web."
It may be that this is actually the bright spot in the industry today: that those willing to expand their knowledge have many more places to find work.
"Why not add a copy editor to a TV newsroom? That would be awesome," Akagi said. "Why not add a TV reporter, a producer, to a newspaper newsroom? You'd be stupid not to think about using people from television. And for TV stations ... if we want to do better interactive graphics and better copy, why not hire people from the newspaper?"
It made sense to me 11 years ago, and it makes even more sense today.
---
Bloggers and Other Online Publishers Face Increasing Legal Threats
By David Ardia
Poynter Institute
Sept. 22, 2008
There is a widely held belief that the Internet is a legal no man's land, where people are free to publish what they wish without fear of censure or repercussions. While this may have been true back when the Internet was populated largely by techies swapping information on obscure Usenet groups, it is no longer true today. Perhaps it's a product of the maturing of the medium that lawyers are starting to take notice. Perhaps it's because some bloggers and Web site operators, albeit a small number, are making money from their online publishing activities. Whatever the reason, there has been a steady –- and dramatic –- increase in the number of lawsuits filed against online publishers.
In the last 10 years, we have seen the number of civil lawsuits filed against bloggers and other online publishers increase from 4 in 1997 to 89 in 2007 (See Figure 1). We aren't just talking about the CNN's and New York Times' of the world. At the Citizen Media Law Project, which I direct, we have cataloged more than 280 such lawsuits filed in 43 states and the District of Columbia, ranging from copyright infringement claims against celebrity-gossip bloggers to defamation claims against operators of hyper-local journalism sites.
While only a few of these lawsuits have resulted in liability, seven cases in our database resulted in verdicts or settlements in the six-figure range (See Figure 2). For example, the largest judgment to date involved a $11.3 million defamation verdict against a woman who criticized an organization she hired to help remove her son from a boarding school in Costa Rica, referring to the head of the organization as a "crook," "con artist" and "fraud." Scheff v. Bock (Sept. 19, 2006 Florida Circuit Court).
In fact, every time someone publishes anything online, whether it's a news article, blog post, podcast, video or even a user comment, they open themselves up to potential legal liability. This shouldn't come as a surprise because the Internet, after all, is available to anyone who wishes to connect to the network, and even the smallest blog or most esoteric discussion forum has the potential to reach hundreds of millions of people throughout the world.
Often the legal risks are small, but not always. Whether you are seasoned journalist or just someone who occasionally posts online, you will benefit from a basic understanding of media law. Let's start with a few of the more obvious risks.
First, if you publish information that harms the reputation of another person, group or organization, you may be liable for "defamation" or "false light." Defamation is the term for a legal claim involving injury to reputation caused by false statements of fact. False light, which is similar to defamation, generally involves untrue factual implications. The crux of both of these claims is falsity; statements of opinion and truthful statements and implications that harm another's reputation will not create liability, although the latter may open you up to other forms of liability if the information you publish is of a personal or highly private nature.
Second, if you publish private or personal information about someone without permission, you potentially expose yourself to legal liability even if your portrayal is factually accurate. For example, in most states you can be sued for publishing private facts about another person, even if those facts are true. The term "private facts" refers to information about someone's personal life that has not previously been revealed to the public, that is not of legitimate public concern, and the publication of which would be offensive to a reasonable person. This would include such things as writing about a person's medical condition, sexual activities or financial troubles.
If you use someone else's name, likeness or other personal attributes without permission for an exploitative purpose you could also face liability for what is called "misappropriation" or violation of the "right of publicity." Usually, people run into trouble in this area when they use someone's name or photograph in a commercial setting, such as in advertising or other promotional activities. But, some states also prohibit use of another person's identity for the user's own personal benefit, whether or not the purpose is strictly commercial.
Third, if you allow reader comments, host guest bloggers on your site, operate an online forum, or if you repost information received from RSS feeds, section 230 of the Communications Decency Act will likely shield you from liability for problematic statements made by your users, guests and other third-parties. You will not lose this immunity even if you edit the content, whether for accuracy or civility, and you are entitled to immunity so long as your edits do not substantially alter the meaning of the original statements. Keep in mind that this important federal law will only protect you if a third-party –- not you or your employee or someone acting under your direction –- posts something on your blog or Web site. It will not shield you from liability for your own statements.
Finally, if you publish or use the creative work of others without permission, you may expose yourself to legal liability under copyright law. It is a widely held misconception that works on the Internet are not covered by copyright and thus can be used freely. This is not true. Copyright law applies to online material just as it does to offline material. Fortunately, an important legal doctrine called "fair use" may make it legally permissible for you to use a copyrighted work without permission for purposes such as commentary, criticism, parody, news reporting, and scholarship. Whether or not a use is lawful usually depends upon how different or "transformative" the use is from the original.
David Ardia is a fellow at Harvard University's Berkman Center for Internet & Society and the director of the Citizen Media Law Project, which provides legal assistance, training and resources for individuals and organizations involved in online and citizen media. Prior to coming to Harvard, he was assistant counsel at The Washington Post and before that he practiced law at Williams & Connolly in Washington, D.C., where he handled a range of intellectual property and media litigation.
More Journalists Switching Platforms to Work Online
By Regina McCombs
Poynter Institute
Nov. 17, 2008
When I left television news 11 years ago to do multimedia at a Web site based at a newspaper, I didn't know anyone else who had made such a change.
In October, Brett Akagi, the director of photography at one of the best TV photojournalism shops in the country, took the job I recently left at StarTribune.com. These days, he's not alone in switching between mother ships. More and more journalists are finding opportunities just by crossing the street.
On the Web, news organizations are directly competing in ways they never quite did when they were simply newspapers and television stations. As newsrooms grow their Web sites, they are discovering gaps in skills within their own staffs and searching for ways to fill those gaps.
Recently, they've started looking where they have rarely looked before -- at the competing TV stations and newspapers in town. Newspapers are finding video skills at television stations, and stations are finding interactive thinking at newspapers.
"TV and newspapers are going to be a lot alike in how they produce content, so why not move people from place to place?" Akagi asked.
The lure of another platform
Journalists with certain skills suddenly have options they haven't had, and they are taking chances on jobs in a new medium as a way to grow their careers and maintain passion for their work.
Akagi was lured away from TV by the chance to learn Web skills and share his video skills with new people.
"Since I've been here at KARE over 10 years, I've grown so much as a journalist and as a manager," he said. "For me, it's time to push in a different direction where there's going to be continued and future growth, which is the digital side of journalism."
Others are moving in the other direction, from newspaper sites to television sites. John Cutter, former deputy online editor at orlandosentinel.com, took the job as digital media manager at WESH.com in August because "I was interested in being the manager of a Web site day-to-day, the senior manager who dealt with other people in the building."
After trying to piece together live online video solutions at a newspaper, Cutter was attracted to having equipment already in place at a television station -- "having access to live trucks (and a helicopter, he joked) instead of trying to use a sling box that only worked some of the time."
Some of Akagi's friends suggested that leaving the Gannett-owned station was crazy, especially given the Star Tribune's financial problems. But he thinks he will have better long-term prospects by moving online.
That's why Pete Soby left KETV in Omaha, Neb., 10 months ago to become the first video photographer at the Omaha World-Herald. "I definitely saw growth in the Internet," he said, "and I thought newspapers would be in the best position to serve that audience."
Scott Utterback also switched from TV to a newspaper-based Web site, moving from WAVE-TV in Louisville, Ky., to The Courier-Journal just over a year ago. For him, it was a way to broaden his skills.
"I was a television news photographer for 17 years before I realized I was playing for the wrong team," Utterback said. "I still shoot video almost every day, but I do it online. I am not sure what the future holds anymore, but I do know I trust the newspapers to forge a better future for the Internet than my former brothers. The greatest thing about my transition, however, is I am now learning the greatest craft of all time: still photography."
Keith Jenkins and John Poole each left different divisions of The Washington Post to head another direction entirely -- to National Public Radio. Jenkins took a buyout from the Post in May, where he was multimedia director, and assumed the same role at NPR. Poole left washingtonpost.com a year ago to be NPR's first video producer.
"I had been looking at NPR, storytelling-wise, for a long time," Poole said, "and kind of thought in the back of my mind that if NPR ever figured out how to do video, wouldn't that be fantastic?" For him, combining NPR's top-of-the line storytellers with news photography "felt like the Holy Grail."
Poole said one of the big differences at NPR is that his colleagues will turn off the pictures and just listen to the audio, which he never would have considered doing before. "I think it's been really good," he said, "in filling in that second half of the equation for me."
Unlike the others, Jenkins has made the switch before. He worked at washingtonpost.com and AOL before the Post Magazine.
"I really wanted to work on a Web site, rather than working on the side of the legacy media," he said. "Looking around at organizations, a lot were tied to newspapers, and that wasn't appealing. A lot of newspapers are looking at the Web sites to save them, and that doesn't make for a good environment -- it makes for a desperate environment."
Most of these journalists don't think of these moves as transitions between newspapers, TV and radio. Instead, Cutter said, "It's going from being a digital journalist to a digital journalist."
The appeal
Tom Dolan, president of the recruiting firm Dolan Media Management, recruited Cutter to WESH.com from orlandosentinel.com. Dolan said he's been scoping out people who work at newspaper Web sites as he tries to fill similar positions at television sites.
"Some skills can be taught and quickly mastered, but the Web is a culture unto itself. What we're talking about is immersing yourself in the Web culture," Dolan said. "It's more interactive and immersive, which is very different from TV, which has traditionally been a one-way street."
For instance, one can't underestimate the value in understanding interactivity, he said. "Time on the page is an important metric, and user interactivity is good for time on the page, and that's good for advertising. The early adopters on the newspaper side seem to understand this much more quickly than the TV side, although TV people are coming around to it."
Newspaper Web sites have also been quicker to adapt multimedia storytelling in ways that Dolan calls "building out the story," with interactive maps, databases and time lines. "We think some of these advanced Web editors," he said, "will help TV with that kind of content."
Meanwhile, newspaper sites are discovering that it can take awhile to develop video skills. "If you want to get good at video quickly," Dolan said, "you can hire a TV video person until your print staff gets caught up."
Cutter said it was obvious during his job interviews at WESH.com that the people there liked his background. “I had managed a staff and increased their participation in breaking news and in user participation, and they want to do that here.”
As journalism organizations change (and with that, the jobs within those organizations), how we think about what we do is changing as well. The photographers in the group, not unexpectedly, see visuals as increasingly important for everyone in the industry. But they also see the importance of a broad range of skills. Soby, for instance, said he knows he must work on his writing because the paper sometimes needs a story to refer to the online video, and he's often the only representative of the World-Herald at a news event.
"Journalists have to have a wider range of skills, period. Those skills need to include writing and audio skills, but visual skills as well," Jenkins said. "There will always be the need for professional photographers and professional videographers, but there needs to be a greater level of visual literacy among all journalists because that's the world we live in now, thanks to the Web."
It may be that this is actually the bright spot in the industry today: that those willing to expand their knowledge have many more places to find work.
"Why not add a copy editor to a TV newsroom? That would be awesome," Akagi said. "Why not add a TV reporter, a producer, to a newspaper newsroom? You'd be stupid not to think about using people from television. And for TV stations ... if we want to do better interactive graphics and better copy, why not hire people from the newspaper?"
It made sense to me 11 years ago, and it makes even more sense today.
---
Bloggers and Other Online Publishers Face Increasing Legal Threats
By David Ardia
Poynter Institute
Sept. 22, 2008
There is a widely held belief that the Internet is a legal no man's land, where people are free to publish what they wish without fear of censure or repercussions. While this may have been true back when the Internet was populated largely by techies swapping information on obscure Usenet groups, it is no longer true today. Perhaps it's a product of the maturing of the medium that lawyers are starting to take notice. Perhaps it's because some bloggers and Web site operators, albeit a small number, are making money from their online publishing activities. Whatever the reason, there has been a steady –- and dramatic –- increase in the number of lawsuits filed against online publishers.
In the last 10 years, we have seen the number of civil lawsuits filed against bloggers and other online publishers increase from 4 in 1997 to 89 in 2007 (See Figure 1). We aren't just talking about the CNN's and New York Times' of the world. At the Citizen Media Law Project, which I direct, we have cataloged more than 280 such lawsuits filed in 43 states and the District of Columbia, ranging from copyright infringement claims against celebrity-gossip bloggers to defamation claims against operators of hyper-local journalism sites.
While only a few of these lawsuits have resulted in liability, seven cases in our database resulted in verdicts or settlements in the six-figure range (See Figure 2). For example, the largest judgment to date involved a $11.3 million defamation verdict against a woman who criticized an organization she hired to help remove her son from a boarding school in Costa Rica, referring to the head of the organization as a "crook," "con artist" and "fraud." Scheff v. Bock (Sept. 19, 2006 Florida Circuit Court).
In fact, every time someone publishes anything online, whether it's a news article, blog post, podcast, video or even a user comment, they open themselves up to potential legal liability. This shouldn't come as a surprise because the Internet, after all, is available to anyone who wishes to connect to the network, and even the smallest blog or most esoteric discussion forum has the potential to reach hundreds of millions of people throughout the world.
Often the legal risks are small, but not always. Whether you are seasoned journalist or just someone who occasionally posts online, you will benefit from a basic understanding of media law. Let's start with a few of the more obvious risks.
First, if you publish information that harms the reputation of another person, group or organization, you may be liable for "defamation" or "false light." Defamation is the term for a legal claim involving injury to reputation caused by false statements of fact. False light, which is similar to defamation, generally involves untrue factual implications. The crux of both of these claims is falsity; statements of opinion and truthful statements and implications that harm another's reputation will not create liability, although the latter may open you up to other forms of liability if the information you publish is of a personal or highly private nature.
Second, if you publish private or personal information about someone without permission, you potentially expose yourself to legal liability even if your portrayal is factually accurate. For example, in most states you can be sued for publishing private facts about another person, even if those facts are true. The term "private facts" refers to information about someone's personal life that has not previously been revealed to the public, that is not of legitimate public concern, and the publication of which would be offensive to a reasonable person. This would include such things as writing about a person's medical condition, sexual activities or financial troubles.
If you use someone else's name, likeness or other personal attributes without permission for an exploitative purpose you could also face liability for what is called "misappropriation" or violation of the "right of publicity." Usually, people run into trouble in this area when they use someone's name or photograph in a commercial setting, such as in advertising or other promotional activities. But, some states also prohibit use of another person's identity for the user's own personal benefit, whether or not the purpose is strictly commercial.
Third, if you allow reader comments, host guest bloggers on your site, operate an online forum, or if you repost information received from RSS feeds, section 230 of the Communications Decency Act will likely shield you from liability for problematic statements made by your users, guests and other third-parties. You will not lose this immunity even if you edit the content, whether for accuracy or civility, and you are entitled to immunity so long as your edits do not substantially alter the meaning of the original statements. Keep in mind that this important federal law will only protect you if a third-party –- not you or your employee or someone acting under your direction –- posts something on your blog or Web site. It will not shield you from liability for your own statements.
Finally, if you publish or use the creative work of others without permission, you may expose yourself to legal liability under copyright law. It is a widely held misconception that works on the Internet are not covered by copyright and thus can be used freely. This is not true. Copyright law applies to online material just as it does to offline material. Fortunately, an important legal doctrine called "fair use" may make it legally permissible for you to use a copyrighted work without permission for purposes such as commentary, criticism, parody, news reporting, and scholarship. Whether or not a use is lawful usually depends upon how different or "transformative" the use is from the original.
David Ardia is a fellow at Harvard University's Berkman Center for Internet & Society and the director of the Citizen Media Law Project, which provides legal assistance, training and resources for individuals and organizations involved in online and citizen media. Prior to coming to Harvard, he was assistant counsel at The Washington Post and before that he practiced law at Williams & Connolly in Washington, D.C., where he handled a range of intellectual property and media litigation.
Wednesday, January 14, 2009
Photojournalism: How To Get The Shot
NOTE: Because there was a technical issue with the readings not being available until Tuesday morning, your deadline to post a comment has been extended until the start of class at 5:45 p.m., Wednesday, Jan. 21.
Flickring Out
What will become of photojournalism in an age of bytes and amateurs?
By Alissa Quart
Columbia Journalism Review, July/August 2008
Clichés are sometimes true. Here’s one—photographers don’t like to give speeches. At a recent event, photographer Antonin Kratochvil screened slideshows of his work: American soldiers coolly observing the Iraqi distressed and dead; Lebanese militant youths standing restlessly near decaying walls; American evangelicals speaking in tongues. The photographer then clambered onstage, ruddy and scarf-wrapped (“The Bedoins wear them!”) for his talk, but he was no Christopher Hitchens. He hated talking about himself—as uncomfortable in the role of sage as the rest of us would be in a war zone—and he left the stage with half the time for his “speech” unused, encouraging his audience to spend it smoking cigarettes instead. Kratochvil is not alone in his taciturnity. When I recently asked one of the greats of the form for his thoughts, he e-mailed the aphorism: “To live happy, live hidden.”
Perhaps this distrust in the verbal complaint—so loved by windy print journalists—is why we don’t hear so much about the difficulties facing photojournalism, from street corner news photographers to the deans of the eminent agencies Magnum and vii. They’ve been struggling with downsizing, the rise of the amateur, the ubiquity of camera phones, sound-bite-ization, failing magazines (so fewer commissions), and a lack of money in general for the big photo essays that have long been the love of the metaphoric children of Walker Evans. Like print journalists, photographers are scrambling not only to make sense of the new world, but to survive in it intact.
Yet, paradoxically, visual culture is ever more important. It seems that everyone now takes photos and saves them and distributes them, and that all these rivulets supply a great sea of images for editors to use. This carries certain risks. If they are taking snapshots, amateur photographers are likely not developing a story, or developing the kind of intimacy with their subjects that brings revelation. So what’s the actual photojournalistic value of all of these millions of images now available on Flickr and other photo-sharing archives—so many that they can seem like dead souls? And what about the fate of photographers like Kratochvil, whose ashily stylish images honor Modernist photography? He will clearly continue shooting—and avoiding public speeches—but what of his tradition?
At photo agencies, or in private conversations with newspaper and magazine photographers and editors, you hear the same end-of-the-world-as-we-know-it dirge that plays in the print world. But these worries don’t tend to go public in speeches about The State of Photography. There are few deathbed panel discussions about the genre, unlike all the discussions about in-depth reporters shuffling to the graveyard. Maybe part of it is that while photojournalism may be harder to practice, there is no shortage of photos—we are deluged by images. I am optimistic about the future of photojournalism, but not of the photojournalism I most admire.
Yet events like the one where Kratochvil showed his images—a four-day photography festival in Brooklyn where the magi of photojournalism appeared—inevitably raise the question of whether these super talents will soon be supplanted. Photographic storytellers are competing with the millions-strong army of amateur photographers whose work is housed on Flickr, which editors cull for cheap or free images, and the rise of amateur-supplied agencies, including iStockphoto—owned by the largest stock agency of them all, Getty Images. There are also outlets that claim to separate the digital wheat from the chaff, like PhotoShelter, a “global stock marketplace,” or the jpg Magazine, which threshes out a few hundred images submitted by Web amateurs and publishes them on paper. As Magnum photographer Chris Anderson glumly puts it, he and other professionals are “watching the decline of editorial sales of images, both what we are assigned to produce and the buying of editorial images—and I am waiting for that moment when that decline drops straight off a cliff.”
Meanwhile, local newspapers, while featuring photography much more prominently than they did in the past, are increasingly limiting their payments and their hiring of shooters. At The Record, in Bergen County, New Jersey, a paper known for quality photography until now, for instance, staff photographers are struggling with the paper’s decision to fire them all and then allow them to reapply for their jobs. (Those who are fortunate enough to be rehired will likely receive lower salaries and fewer benefits than before.) Like so many others, photojournalists are also facing the ugly downsizing euphemism—“mojo,” or mobile journalist, for print journalists who are given autofocus digital cameras to do the work that they once did. A photographer at the Baltimore Sun tells a less extreme story but also notes that there is no new hiring at his paper. When someone retires, his or her job line ends. Some (but not all) photographers also complain about the insistence that they go “multimedia” and that their still images are sometimes getting overwhelmed and undone (although also sometimes improved) by the sound and moving images that accompany them. The most salient critique of this practice is not the rise of the slideshow, but how it is replacing the still image. Movies and television may light up and flicker but they disappear, while photos, even photos in magazines and newspapers, are objects and, unconsciously or not, often feel more personal to the observer. After all, we tend to remember still images, not moving ones.
Photojournalists also question the journalistic reliability of the images of their amateur rivals. Photographers like Anderson, a thirty-eight-year-old well known for his conflict photography, wonder about the lack of “vetting” of the millions of images that are supposed to be carrying the truth to readers. “There’s a case already of an iReporter whose photos were bullshit,” says Anderson, speaking of media companies publishing the work of amateur photographers. “News organizations will get burned by photographers they don’t know and blur the lines between what is credible information and what isn’t.” (Of course, there have been pros who have faked images as well, but they are rare.)
What Magnum is selling “is the story aspect of the craft,” says Mark Lubell, the agency’s New York bureau chief. Anyone can take a decent photo, as the bromide goes, through talent or luck, but few can extend it into masterful narratives. There’s still a special recipe to be a “real” photojournalist, and it’s not just the “trained” or “expert” eye but rather the sheer hours put into each assignment and the ability to sustain a thought, image, or impulse through a number of images, not just a single snapshot. This brings to mind the art photographer Steven Shore’s remark that photography is like fly-fishing. It takes extreme patience—a sort of intelligence about time.
But is the rise of still-photos-as-films and “citizen photojournalism” only a big nightmare? Or is it also a liberation?
Some would say yes. There are bright spots to the amateur-image revolution. Lots of photos of “my girlfriend’s feet,” true, but bystanders also now often shoot the most crucial events of our day. Amid the chaff are photos of oil flares in West Africa and of the 2005 London bombings. Combat in Iraq is often shot by the soldiers themselves. The photos from Abu Ghraib, of course, are the most striking and horribly spectacular case for the new power and impact of amateur photography-of-fact. The photographs that define a war gone wrong are amateur ones: the amateur snappers’ presence altered and also helped create the scenes of violence and humiliation. Abu Ghraib’s most iconic image was of the hooded prisoner: an occult pantomime of the suffering that was actually going on elsewhere in the same facility. It was evidence of what Susan Sontag called “picture-taking . . . as an event unto itself.” There will, for better or worse, be many more occasions of image-making by participants in news events in the future.
While professional photographers are suffering, news photography and photography of all kinds is flourishing. Citizens around the world can cheaply photograph and distribute images of their own countries and cities, places like Dhaka and Freetown. Citizen journalism projects like Rising Voices teach photography in Africa and elsewhere. Local image-makers challenge both the valor and necessity of the American or European photographer shooting in a foreign clime, a model that has a certain amount of voyeuristic baggage, as the critic W. J. T. Mitchell has written—a dynamic where a “damaged, victimized, and powerless individual” is “taken” by a photographer who is a “relatively privileged observer, often acting as the ‘eye of power.’ ” Instead, we will have amateur photographers—some lucky people at the right awful place at the right awful time (Nigerians who are at the next explosion of a pipeline, say). And I hope that innately gifted photographers will emerge as well—a Chinese Kratochvil, a Nigerian Gilles Peress.
According to some, the rise of the amateur news image itself is a thing of value. “What distinguishes the icon is not professionalism,” says Robert Hariman, a professor of communications and co-founder of No Caption Needed, a blog about photojournalism as a public art. “The Challenger photo was a screen grab. All the photos at Tiananmen Square were not good photos—they were too far away.”
There are also some bright spots for the professional photojournalists, though they aren’t the predictable ones. Right now, as its value on the open market of news magazines falls, photojournalism’s prestige, paradoxically, rises: a Dorothea Lange bread line photo from 1932 sold for $720,000 a couple of years ago; a dozen New York City galleries showed Magnum photographers’ work in 2007. Magnum’s enormous back catalog of everything from Castro in a paroxysm to Paul McCartney as a pre-tabloidal Beatle to Cambodian refugees will soon be for sale. (Some already line the walls of a boutique hotel in Manhattan, although most likely none is of famine victims.) In a sense, following all genres and fields whose commercial power has faded or is evaporatinge—what they lose in income and the more ineffable “heat,” they gain in the rarified status of art object.
Yet this status of photojournalism as art, or even as an accessory in a new waterfront condo/loft apartment, won’t necessarily help photojournalists as they try to conceive, shoot, distribute, and get paid for complicated images of difficult places.
We’re all journalists, but writers—scarf-free and spell-checked as we are—know deep down that photographers are different. Despite all the critics who have claimed photos are “a grammar,” images are more like a half-language (as John Berger, the critic who wrote Ways of Seeing, said), always both objective and freighted with meanings that even the photographer and her audience only sometimes understand. Good photography somehow can tell more, with its pulp and its present-ness.
That combination of directness and mysteriousness that is part of being a half-language must be preserved into the future. Despite the fact that amateurs have made iconic images in the past—the famed 1970 image The Picture From Kent State was taken by a student working in the college’s photo lab—there have been many more iconic images that are actually extremely professional: Robert Capa’s Death of a Loyalist Soldier, from the Spanish Civil War, or Eddie Addams’s General Nguyn Ngoc Loan executing a Viet Cong prisoner in Saigon, from Vietnam.
If we are to keep this history alive, we need to find ways to support professional photojournalists outside of the magazine and newspaper industry. Some of the future Kratochvils of the world—those not capturing the moment but capturing the context—will in twenty years be seen primarily as artists of fact, their images bought for a pretty euro in London and Berlin. But meanwhile, they must live and work. And perhaps those of us who “paint with words,” or what have you, and have gotten good at complaining about our own fate, should start to speak up on photojournalists’ behalf as well.
Flickring Out
What will become of photojournalism in an age of bytes and amateurs?
By Alissa Quart
Columbia Journalism Review, July/August 2008
Clichés are sometimes true. Here’s one—photographers don’t like to give speeches. At a recent event, photographer Antonin Kratochvil screened slideshows of his work: American soldiers coolly observing the Iraqi distressed and dead; Lebanese militant youths standing restlessly near decaying walls; American evangelicals speaking in tongues. The photographer then clambered onstage, ruddy and scarf-wrapped (“The Bedoins wear them!”) for his talk, but he was no Christopher Hitchens. He hated talking about himself—as uncomfortable in the role of sage as the rest of us would be in a war zone—and he left the stage with half the time for his “speech” unused, encouraging his audience to spend it smoking cigarettes instead. Kratochvil is not alone in his taciturnity. When I recently asked one of the greats of the form for his thoughts, he e-mailed the aphorism: “To live happy, live hidden.”
Perhaps this distrust in the verbal complaint—so loved by windy print journalists—is why we don’t hear so much about the difficulties facing photojournalism, from street corner news photographers to the deans of the eminent agencies Magnum and vii. They’ve been struggling with downsizing, the rise of the amateur, the ubiquity of camera phones, sound-bite-ization, failing magazines (so fewer commissions), and a lack of money in general for the big photo essays that have long been the love of the metaphoric children of Walker Evans. Like print journalists, photographers are scrambling not only to make sense of the new world, but to survive in it intact.
Yet, paradoxically, visual culture is ever more important. It seems that everyone now takes photos and saves them and distributes them, and that all these rivulets supply a great sea of images for editors to use. This carries certain risks. If they are taking snapshots, amateur photographers are likely not developing a story, or developing the kind of intimacy with their subjects that brings revelation. So what’s the actual photojournalistic value of all of these millions of images now available on Flickr and other photo-sharing archives—so many that they can seem like dead souls? And what about the fate of photographers like Kratochvil, whose ashily stylish images honor Modernist photography? He will clearly continue shooting—and avoiding public speeches—but what of his tradition?
At photo agencies, or in private conversations with newspaper and magazine photographers and editors, you hear the same end-of-the-world-as-we-know-it dirge that plays in the print world. But these worries don’t tend to go public in speeches about The State of Photography. There are few deathbed panel discussions about the genre, unlike all the discussions about in-depth reporters shuffling to the graveyard. Maybe part of it is that while photojournalism may be harder to practice, there is no shortage of photos—we are deluged by images. I am optimistic about the future of photojournalism, but not of the photojournalism I most admire.
Yet events like the one where Kratochvil showed his images—a four-day photography festival in Brooklyn where the magi of photojournalism appeared—inevitably raise the question of whether these super talents will soon be supplanted. Photographic storytellers are competing with the millions-strong army of amateur photographers whose work is housed on Flickr, which editors cull for cheap or free images, and the rise of amateur-supplied agencies, including iStockphoto—owned by the largest stock agency of them all, Getty Images. There are also outlets that claim to separate the digital wheat from the chaff, like PhotoShelter, a “global stock marketplace,” or the jpg Magazine, which threshes out a few hundred images submitted by Web amateurs and publishes them on paper. As Magnum photographer Chris Anderson glumly puts it, he and other professionals are “watching the decline of editorial sales of images, both what we are assigned to produce and the buying of editorial images—and I am waiting for that moment when that decline drops straight off a cliff.”
Meanwhile, local newspapers, while featuring photography much more prominently than they did in the past, are increasingly limiting their payments and their hiring of shooters. At The Record, in Bergen County, New Jersey, a paper known for quality photography until now, for instance, staff photographers are struggling with the paper’s decision to fire them all and then allow them to reapply for their jobs. (Those who are fortunate enough to be rehired will likely receive lower salaries and fewer benefits than before.) Like so many others, photojournalists are also facing the ugly downsizing euphemism—“mojo,” or mobile journalist, for print journalists who are given autofocus digital cameras to do the work that they once did. A photographer at the Baltimore Sun tells a less extreme story but also notes that there is no new hiring at his paper. When someone retires, his or her job line ends. Some (but not all) photographers also complain about the insistence that they go “multimedia” and that their still images are sometimes getting overwhelmed and undone (although also sometimes improved) by the sound and moving images that accompany them. The most salient critique of this practice is not the rise of the slideshow, but how it is replacing the still image. Movies and television may light up and flicker but they disappear, while photos, even photos in magazines and newspapers, are objects and, unconsciously or not, often feel more personal to the observer. After all, we tend to remember still images, not moving ones.
Photojournalists also question the journalistic reliability of the images of their amateur rivals. Photographers like Anderson, a thirty-eight-year-old well known for his conflict photography, wonder about the lack of “vetting” of the millions of images that are supposed to be carrying the truth to readers. “There’s a case already of an iReporter whose photos were bullshit,” says Anderson, speaking of media companies publishing the work of amateur photographers. “News organizations will get burned by photographers they don’t know and blur the lines between what is credible information and what isn’t.” (Of course, there have been pros who have faked images as well, but they are rare.)
What Magnum is selling “is the story aspect of the craft,” says Mark Lubell, the agency’s New York bureau chief. Anyone can take a decent photo, as the bromide goes, through talent or luck, but few can extend it into masterful narratives. There’s still a special recipe to be a “real” photojournalist, and it’s not just the “trained” or “expert” eye but rather the sheer hours put into each assignment and the ability to sustain a thought, image, or impulse through a number of images, not just a single snapshot. This brings to mind the art photographer Steven Shore’s remark that photography is like fly-fishing. It takes extreme patience—a sort of intelligence about time.
But is the rise of still-photos-as-films and “citizen photojournalism” only a big nightmare? Or is it also a liberation?
Some would say yes. There are bright spots to the amateur-image revolution. Lots of photos of “my girlfriend’s feet,” true, but bystanders also now often shoot the most crucial events of our day. Amid the chaff are photos of oil flares in West Africa and of the 2005 London bombings. Combat in Iraq is often shot by the soldiers themselves. The photos from Abu Ghraib, of course, are the most striking and horribly spectacular case for the new power and impact of amateur photography-of-fact. The photographs that define a war gone wrong are amateur ones: the amateur snappers’ presence altered and also helped create the scenes of violence and humiliation. Abu Ghraib’s most iconic image was of the hooded prisoner: an occult pantomime of the suffering that was actually going on elsewhere in the same facility. It was evidence of what Susan Sontag called “picture-taking . . . as an event unto itself.” There will, for better or worse, be many more occasions of image-making by participants in news events in the future.
While professional photographers are suffering, news photography and photography of all kinds is flourishing. Citizens around the world can cheaply photograph and distribute images of their own countries and cities, places like Dhaka and Freetown. Citizen journalism projects like Rising Voices teach photography in Africa and elsewhere. Local image-makers challenge both the valor and necessity of the American or European photographer shooting in a foreign clime, a model that has a certain amount of voyeuristic baggage, as the critic W. J. T. Mitchell has written—a dynamic where a “damaged, victimized, and powerless individual” is “taken” by a photographer who is a “relatively privileged observer, often acting as the ‘eye of power.’ ” Instead, we will have amateur photographers—some lucky people at the right awful place at the right awful time (Nigerians who are at the next explosion of a pipeline, say). And I hope that innately gifted photographers will emerge as well—a Chinese Kratochvil, a Nigerian Gilles Peress.
According to some, the rise of the amateur news image itself is a thing of value. “What distinguishes the icon is not professionalism,” says Robert Hariman, a professor of communications and co-founder of No Caption Needed, a blog about photojournalism as a public art. “The Challenger photo was a screen grab. All the photos at Tiananmen Square were not good photos—they were too far away.”
There are also some bright spots for the professional photojournalists, though they aren’t the predictable ones. Right now, as its value on the open market of news magazines falls, photojournalism’s prestige, paradoxically, rises: a Dorothea Lange bread line photo from 1932 sold for $720,000 a couple of years ago; a dozen New York City galleries showed Magnum photographers’ work in 2007. Magnum’s enormous back catalog of everything from Castro in a paroxysm to Paul McCartney as a pre-tabloidal Beatle to Cambodian refugees will soon be for sale. (Some already line the walls of a boutique hotel in Manhattan, although most likely none is of famine victims.) In a sense, following all genres and fields whose commercial power has faded or is evaporatinge—what they lose in income and the more ineffable “heat,” they gain in the rarified status of art object.
Yet this status of photojournalism as art, or even as an accessory in a new waterfront condo/loft apartment, won’t necessarily help photojournalists as they try to conceive, shoot, distribute, and get paid for complicated images of difficult places.
We’re all journalists, but writers—scarf-free and spell-checked as we are—know deep down that photographers are different. Despite all the critics who have claimed photos are “a grammar,” images are more like a half-language (as John Berger, the critic who wrote Ways of Seeing, said), always both objective and freighted with meanings that even the photographer and her audience only sometimes understand. Good photography somehow can tell more, with its pulp and its present-ness.
That combination of directness and mysteriousness that is part of being a half-language must be preserved into the future. Despite the fact that amateurs have made iconic images in the past—the famed 1970 image The Picture From Kent State was taken by a student working in the college’s photo lab—there have been many more iconic images that are actually extremely professional: Robert Capa’s Death of a Loyalist Soldier, from the Spanish Civil War, or Eddie Addams’s General Nguyn Ngoc Loan executing a Viet Cong prisoner in Saigon, from Vietnam.
If we are to keep this history alive, we need to find ways to support professional photojournalists outside of the magazine and newspaper industry. Some of the future Kratochvils of the world—those not capturing the moment but capturing the context—will in twenty years be seen primarily as artists of fact, their images bought for a pretty euro in London and Berlin. But meanwhile, they must live and work. And perhaps those of us who “paint with words,” or what have you, and have gotten good at complaining about our own fate, should start to speak up on photojournalists’ behalf as well.
Wednesday, January 7, 2009
Blogging: Is It Journalism?
From Time Magazine's Lev Grossman:
Sunday, Jun. 13, 2004
Meet Joe Blog
By Lev Grossman
A few years ago, Mathew Gross, 32, was a free-lance writer living in tiny Moab, Utah. Rob Malda, 28, was an underperforming undergraduate at a small Christian college in Michigan. Denis Dutton, 60, was a professor of philosophy in faraway Christchurch, New Zealand. Today they are some of the most influential media personalities in the world. You can be one too.
Gross, Malda and Dutton aren't rich or famous or even conspicuously good-looking. What they have in common is that they all edit blogs: amateur websites that provide news, information and, above all, opinions to rapidly growing and devoted audiences drawn by nothing more than a shared interest or two and the sheer magnetism of the editor's personality. Over the past five years, blogs have gone from an obscure and, frankly, somewhat nerdy fad to a genuine alternative to mainstream news outlets, a shadow media empire that is rivaling networks and newspapers in power and influence. Which raises the question: Who are these folks anyway? And what exactly are they doing to the established pantheon of American media?
Not that long ago, blogs were one of those annoying buzz words that you could safely get away with ignoring. The word blog — it works as both noun and verb — is short for Web log. It was coined in 1997 to describe a website where you could post daily scribblings, journal-style, about whatever you like — mostly critiquing and linking to other articles online that may have sparked your thinking. Unlike a big media outlet, bloggers focus their efforts on narrow topics, often rising to become de facto watchdogs and self-proclaimed experts. Blogs can be about anything: politics, sex, baseball, haiku, car repair. There are blogs about blogs.
Big whoop, right? But it turns out some people actually have interesting thoughts on a regular basis, and a few of the better blogs began drawing sizable audiences. Blogs multiplied and evolved, slowly becoming conduits for legitimate news and serious thought. In 1999 a few companies began offering free make-your-own-blog software, which turbocharged the phenomenon. By 2002, Pyra Labs, which makes software for creating blogs, claimed 970,000 users.
Most of America couldn't have cared less. Until December 2002, that is, when bloggers staged a dramatic show of force. The occasion was Strom Thurmond's 100th birthday party, during which Trent Lott made what sounded like a nostalgic reference to Thurmond's past segregationist leanings. The mainstream press largely glossed over the incident, but when regular journalists bury the lead, bloggers dig it right back up. "That story got ignored for three, four, five days by big papers and the TV networks while blogs kept it alive," says Joshua Micah Marshall, creator of talkingpointsmemo.com, one of a handful of blogs that stuck with the Lott story.
Mainstream America wasn't listening, but Washington insiders and media honchos read blogs. Three days after the party, the story was on Meet the Press. Four days afterward, Lott made an official apology. After two weeks, Lott was out as Senate majority leader, and blogs had drawn their first blood. Web journalists like Matt Drudge (drudgereport.com) had already demonstrated a certain crude effectiveness — witness l'affaire Lewinsky — but this was something different: bloggers were offering reasoned, forceful arguments that carried weight with the powers that be.
Blogs act like a lens, focusing attention on an issue until it catches fire, but they can also break stories. On April 21, a 34-year-old blogger and writer from Arizona named Russ Kick posted photographs of coffins containing the bodies of soldiers killed in Iraq and Afghanistan and of Columbia astronauts. The military zealously guards images of service members in coffins, but Kick pried the photos free with a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request. "I read the news constantly," says Kick, "and when I see a story about the government refusing to release public documents, I automatically file an FOIA request for them." By April 23 the images had gone from Kick's blog, thememoryhole.org, to the front page of newspapers across the country. Kick was soon getting upwards of 4 million hits a day.
What makes blogs so effective? They're free. They catch people at work, at their desks, when they're alert and thinking and making decisions. Blogs are fresh and often seem to be miles ahead of the mainstream news. Bloggers put up new stuff every day, all day, and there are thousands of them. How are you going to keep anything secret from a thousand Russ Kicks? Blogs have voice and personality. They're human. They come to us not from some mediagenic anchorbot on an air-conditioned sound stage, but from an individual. They represent — no, they are — the voice of the little guy.
And the little guy is a lot smarter than big media might have you think. Blogs showcase some of the smartest, sharpest writing being published. Bloggers are unconstrained by such journalistic conventions as good taste, accountability and objectivity — and that can be a good thing. Accusations of media bias are thick on the ground these days, and Americans are tired of it. Blogs don't pretend to be neutral: they're gleefully, unabashedly biased, and that makes them a lot more fun. "Because we're not trying to sell magazines or papers, we can afford to assail our readers," says Andrew Sullivan, a contributor to TIME and the editor of andrewsullivan.com. "I don't have the pressure of an advertising executive telling me to lay off. It's incredibly liberating."
Some bloggers earn their bias the hard way — in the trenches. Military bloggers, or milbloggers in Net patois, post vivid accounts of their tours of Baghdad, in prose covered in fresh flop sweat and powder burns, illustrated with digital photos. "Jason," a National Guardsman whose blog is called justanothersoldier.com, wrote about wandering through one of Saddam Hussein's empty palaces. And Iraqis have blogs: a Baghdad blogger who goes by Salam Pax ( dear_raed.blogspot.com) has parlayed his blog into a book and a movie deal. Vietnam was the first war to be televised; blogs bring Iraq another scary step closer to our living rooms.
But blogs are about much more than war and politics. In 1997 Malda went looking for a "site that mixed the latest word about a new sci-fi movie with news about open-source software. I was looking for a site that didn't exist," Malda says, "so I built it." Malda and a handful of co-editors run slashdot.org full time, and he estimates that 300,000 to 500,000 people read the site daily. Six years ago, a philosophy professor in New Zealand named Denis Dutton started the blog Arts & Letters Daily artsandlettersdaily.com) to create a website "where people could go daily for a dose of intellectual stimulation." Now the site draws more than 100,000 readers a month. Compare that with, say, the New York Review of Books, which has a circulation of 115,000. The tail is beginning to wag the blog.
Blogs are inverting the cozy media hierarchies of yore. Some bloggers are getting press credentials for this summer's Republican Convention. Three years ago, a 25-year-old Chicagoan named Jessa Crispin started a blog for serious readers called bookslut.com. "We give books a better chance," she says. "The New York Times Book Review is so boring. We take each book at face value. There's no politics behind it." Crispin's apartment is overflowing with free books from publishers desperate for a mention. As for the Times, it's scrutinizing the blogging phenomenon for its own purposes. In January the Gray Lady started up Times on the Trail, a campaign-news website with some decidedly bloglike features; it takes the bold step of linking to articles by competing newspapers, for example. "The Times cannot ignore this. I don't think any big media can ignore this," says Len Apcar, editor in chief of the New York Times on the Web.
In a way, blogs represent everything the Web was always supposed to be: a mass medium controlled by the masses, in which getting heard depends solely on having something to say and the moxie to say it.
Unfortunately, there's a downside to this populist sentiment — that is, innocent casualties bloodied by a medium that trades in rumor, gossip and speculation without accountability. Case in point: Alexandra Polier, better known as the Kerry intern. Rumors of Polier's alleged affair with presidential candidate Senator John Kerry eventually spilled into the blogosphere earlier this year. After Drudge headlined it in February, the blabbing bloggers soon had the attention of tabloid journalists, radio talk-show hosts and cable news anchors. Trouble is, the case was exceedingly thin, and both Kerry and Polier vehemently deny it. Yet the Internet smolders with it to this day.
Some wonder if the backbiting tide won't recede as blogs grow up. The trend now is for more prominent sites to be commercialized. A Manhattan entrepreneur named Nick Denton runs a small stable of bloggers as a business by selling advertising on their sites. So far they aren't showing detectible signs of editorial corruption by their corporate masters — two of Denton's blogs, gawker.com and wonkette.com, are among the most corrosively witty sites on the Web — but they've lost their amateur status forever.
We may be in the golden age of blogging, a quirky Camelot moment in Internet history when some guy in his underwear with too much free time can take down a Washington politician. It will be interesting to see what role blogs play in the upcoming election. Blogs can be a great way of communicating, but they can keep people apart too. If I read only those of my choice, precisely tuned to my political biases and you read only yours, we could end up a nation of political solipsists, vacuum sealed in our private feedback loops, never exposed to new arguments, never having to listen to a single word we disagree with.
Howard Dean's campaign blog, run by Mathew Gross, may be the perfect example of both the potential and the pitfalls of high-profile blogging. At its peak, blogforamerica.com drew 100,000 visitors a day, yet the candidate was beaten badly in the primaries. Still, the Dean model isn't going away. When another political blogger, who goes by the nom de blog Atrios, set up a fund-raising link on his site for Kerry, he raised $25,000 in five days.
You can't blog your way into the White House, at least not yet, but blogs are America thinking out loud, talking to itself, and heaven help the candidate who isn't listening.
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From Poynter's Steve Outing:
What Journalists Can Learn From Bloggers
By Steve Outing
Bloggers and journalists do not need be the Red States vs. the Blue States -- though in some quarters both sides have acted that way lately. We're heading into a period, I hope, where each group takes tips from the other to enhance their own craft.
Bloggers and mainstream journalists likely won't end up as twins, but perhaps cordial cousins.
What's a blog?
At this point, I probably don't need to explain what a blog is to most people. But it's worth defining the type of blogs I refer to in this article: those written and published by independents, rather than blogs produced by journalists under the brand name of their employers. It's not that journalists who blog aren't bloggers; they are. Yet it's the independents who are doing most of the innovation -- and thus have the most to teach traditional journalists.
Are bloggers journalists? That's a loaded question, and not one I mean to take up in this article. Suffice it to say that among the millions of people now publishing blogs -- and among the relatively small number who blog professionally and/or have built up huge audiences -- some act as journalists, some do not. Some bloggers see themselves as journalists; some do not.
No-restraint journalism
If there's a leading complaint that traditional journalists often make about bloggers, it's this: Some bloggers are too quick to publish anything that falls into their laps -- without bothering to vet the material to determine if it's accurate, or to consider the consequences of publishing it. In some cases, such "careless" publishing can have far-reaching results. Even bloggers, the traditionalists say, have a responsibility to the public not to trade in unsubstantiated and possibly dangerous rumors.
The poster child for just-about-anything-goes is Ana Marie Cox, otherwise known as Wonkette, who does a popular daily news and gossip blog covering the Washington, D.C., political scene. Cox insists she's not acting as a "journalist" with Wonkette, though she is a journalist by background.
On November 2, Cox was one of the bloggers who received leaked early results from exit polls in the U.S. presidential election -- the ones that led many to believe early in the day that John Kerry was on his way to victory. Cox's popularity has left her with a big group of sources -- people who feed her interesting tidbits and sometimes leaked material. People with access to exit-poll numbers sent her leaked numbers; she posted them quickly, with cautionary words to the effect of, "don't take this too seriously."
Cox acknowledged during an interview that she didn't think much about the ethics of it all that day, though she's well aware of the controversy surrounding exit polls affecting voting in states where the polls haven't yet closed. "Exit polls are like crack," she quips, and just like curbing drug use, no one is likely to stop early publication of them by bloggers as long as there are people with access willing to leak the results.
"It's impossible to maintain privileged information" in an environment where anyone can instantly publish leaked information to a potential worldwide audience on the Web, she says.
But there's more to Wonkette's method than "I publish anything because I can." Cox points out how she also posted pre-election reports sent to her of rumors that presidential candidate John Kerry had an affair with a young woman. "I posted the Kerry affair stuff and said it's stupid," she says. (The affair rumor turned out to go nowhere.)
Cox's point of view reflects a libertarian notion that it's fine in a democratic society for people to receive most any information. This line of thinking suggests that the publisher's responsibility lies in being clear about what's been confirmed and what hasn't been, acknowledging that the information, depending on circumstances, could be accurate or could be groundless. Let readers decide for themselves whether it's useful information, in other words, but be transparent in explaining where you got it and how much of it you've confirmed. Respect the intelligence of the audience, this argument goes, and don't try to play nanny by deciding what you will and will not publish without audience input.
The key word in the paragraph above is "transparency." Many bloggers feel that it's OK to publish just about anything if they make it clear where it came from, what they know about it, and that it may or may not be accurate.
The news, faster
Could such an approach be taken by mainstream news organizations? Let me suggest that current trends are pushing them toward a new way of doing journalism that is a bit more blog-like.
The Internet, of course, has speeded up the news publishing cycle. No longer is it easy for a news organization to sit on a big story and publish it at a set time, when all the dust has settled. (Think of how the Monica Lewinsky story played out -- when blogger Matt Drudge published leaked reports of a Bill Clinton affair that Newsweek was investigating but wasn't ready to make public -- to understand what I mean.)
"Newspaper people (especially) still have the mindset of putting out the edition and then they're done with it," complains Glenn Reynolds, a law professor best known as the blogger behind Instapundit, one of the most popular blogs on the Internet today.
What Mainstream Journalists Can Learn from Bloggers
In an interview, Reynolds explained that the way he approaches information that comes his way is profoundly different than how a traditional journalist would. For instance, he says, if the infamous "Rathergate" documents about George W. Bush's military record ended up in the hands of a blogger like him rather than CBS News, the approach likely would have been to publish them immediately. Rather than find an expert or two to review the documents, a blogger would recognize that among members of his audience would be people capable of doing credible analysis. Imagine the ensuing conversation as the story started in one blog, quickly spread to others, and people far and wide started discussing the credibility of the documents.
It's not hard to imagine a different outcome than what actually happened: CBS News got dragged through the mud when it became obvious that the Bush documents were faked and CBS messed up.
Yes, it is hard to imagine the New York Times or Washington Post taking this approach, I admit. Yet it might make sense in some cases.
Imagine, say, the coverage of Watergate being treated in part this way. Rather than Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward being the sole storytellers, blog-influenced journalism would have had them in part leading a conversation about the scandal -- and probably turning up new sources in the process. What if Woodward and Bernstein had accompanied their Watergate investigative pieces with a blog that facilitated public conversation and brought in tips from government insiders? I suspect that a Watergate investigation in the blog era would have come to a conclusion faster.
News is a conversation
"Big media has to learn to be more honest," says Jeff Jarvis, a media executive who moonlights as a blogger, "that is, to level with its public, to reveal its prejudices, and process as citizen journalists (bloggers) do."
The popularity of bloggers is leading to a new way of thinking about news. Jarvis said in an e-mail interview that the most profound thing he learned when he started blogging is this: News is a conversation, not just a lecture. The story doesn't end when it's published, but rather just gets started as the public begins to do its part -- discussing the story, adding to it, and correcting it.
Jarvis is by day president of Advance Internet, the new-media arm of Advance Communications; by night he is the popular independent blogger behind BuzzMachine. As a 50-something media executive with a lengthy print-journalism background (including as a reviewer for TV Guide) and a new-found enthusiasm for blogging, he's well suited to advise the profession on striking a middle ground between traditional journalism and blogging.
"The news isn't done when we print it," he says. "That's when the public can add questions, corrections, perspective. That will improve news. And it also will change our relationship with the public."
Bloggers have adopted this credo, and mainstream news organizations would be well advised to do so, too, at least to some extent.
"We have owned the printing press for centuries; now the people have the power of the press" through blogs, Jarvis says. "They are speaking and it's our turn to listen and engage them in conversation."
To do that represents a profound shift in the type of journalism practiced in the U.S. and most Western countries with a free press. Engaging the public at the level Jarvis suggests would likely mean inviting readers to contribute to the end product, either in the form of published reaction to articles written by professional journalists or by reader-produced content in such forms as blogs or "citizen journalism" entries.
Personality journalism
Most blogs are highly personal, usually reflecting their authors' personalities. If you have favorite bloggers, you probably know their political views and even a fair bit about their personal lives.
With the exception of columnists, you probably know next to nothing about a newspaper's staff journalists. Reporters keep their opinions to themselves, for the most part, to comply with newsroom policy and longstanding journalistic convention.
But what if reporters were allowed to reveal more about themselves? Would the journalistic world end? Many bloggers doubt it; indeed, the refusal of mainstream news organizations to allow their journalists to reveal their opinions and personal perspective is a leading criticism leveled at news companies by bloggers.
Perhaps Slate, the successful Microsoft-owned webzine (and not a blog), suggests a coming tidal shift. Before this last U.S. election, Slate announced that 45 of its 49 editorial employees planned to vote for John Kerry. Can you imagine the New York Times announcing a breakdown of how its employees planned to vote? That would represent quite a departure from the traditional candidate endorsements the paper publishes, without bylines, on its editorial page.
Some bloggers would say that kind of opening up is a good idea, and maybe mainstream news organizations would be smart to acknowledge the obvious -- that their staffs of professional journalists do have opinions. How surprising was it that Slate's staff leaned heavily to Kerry? Would it surprise anyone, say, if Fox News employees overwhelmingly supported President Bush? As I said, this probably wouldn't cause the media world to collapse.
Indeed, you can view this loosening of the grip on editorial employees' personal lives as a way to better connect journalist and reader -- to forge a stronger relationship between them and in theory support greater loyalty by readers.
'We were wrong'
One significant difference between mainstream journalism and blogging is the way each handles its mistakes. On this one, the bloggers seem to have an edge.
Although the working styles of bloggers varies considerably, some of today's leading bloggers take a similar approach to mistakes: They prominently post corrections to errors, publishing them quickly. Reynolds typically posts a correction of an earlier item as a new item at the top of the blog if the item in error has scrolled down the page, so his readers are sure to see it.
And because most bloggers embrace interactivity with their audiences, they hear about it when a mistake is made (via the comments areas on their own blogs, and from other bloggers noting and publicizing the error if it's significant) -- and so do all the other readers.
Contrast that with how the typical old-media news organization handles mistakes. It's a rare day when a TV news program announces a mistake in the previous day's coverage; newspaper corrections typically are relegated to an inside page in a special corrections area, unseen by many readers.
Perhaps bloggers rank higher when it comes to corrections because they are in more direct touch with their readers. When a blogger makes a mistake, his or her readers make it known; there can be no ignoring it. As mainstream news organizations evolve to have more direct interaction with their readers and viewers, they'll have to change how they acknowledge and handle mistakes.
A different reporting style
While reporting styles among bloggers of course vary wildly, you do often see (among those bloggers who do reporting, not just commentary) a different approach than what's typical in mainstream reporting. After all, many bloggers are not journalists and have not had training in traditional reporting techniques. Perhaps there's something to be learned from this fresh perspective on reporting.
In covering a technical story, you sometimes see bloggers go far down the corporate ladder; perhaps it's partly not having the access to or experience at reaching people at the top for comment. The conventional journalist will seek out company executives or go through the PR department. But bloggers sometimes get their information from people further inside an organization -- the programmers. It makes for a different type of storytelling, as new and different voices are heard.
Again, it leads back to the theme that bloggers often get closer to the people than do mainstream journalists.
Of course, in many instances it's the people "down the corporate ladder" doing the blogging themselves. Take, for example, the blog Call Centre Confidential, written by the anonymous team leader of an unidentified phone marketing call center.
Other lessons
What else can mainstream journalists learn from bloggers? Perhaps …
* That publishing unpolished thoughts (written by smart people) can be valuable -- that in the lightning-fast Internet era, unrefined commentary and analysis has a place. And the polishing process sometimes takes place after the Publish button has been pushed -- as the audience adds its knowledge and perspective to keep a story alive well past the point when it is first published.
* That fast-to-publish content like that on blogs doesn't have to go through a rigorous editing process -- that there's value in the speed of blogging that can be applied to mainstream journalism. (If that sounds scary to editors, remember than when reporters go on live radio and TV programs, there's no editing there either. It's a matter of trust in the journalist to be given such freedom and responsibility.)
Meeting of the media
From an old-media perspective, the ideas presented above may sound unreasonable. Indeed, presented in 1990, they would have seemed outlandish. Yet in today's world, they represent possibilities that traditional news organizations should be considering.
I'm not suggesting that newspapers and TV news operations mimic blogs, only that they experiment with some of the ideas that blogs present.
Choire Sicha, editorial director of Gawker Media, one of the leading publishers of independent blogs (including Wonkette), said in an e-mail interview of the difference between mainstream journalists and blogs: "I think there's really not that much to distinguish between journalists and bloggers except for a formalized edit process before print.
"Nearly all journalists traffic privately in gossip, anonymous sources, and thinly veiled juicy items -- they just don't usually get to throw those things into print, and so they IM these tidbits to us bloggers," he says. "Bloggers are really just the id of the journalism world."
Put another way, by Wonkette's Ana Marie Cox, "On blogs, it's all chocolate cake and no potatoes."
And if you really want to get a sense of how blogs and mainstream journalists are coming together, Sicha offers this: "Here's a little peek behind the curtain over here at Gawker Media HQ: I just had a two-hour meeting with a blogger who edits one of our sites. We discussed new staffing assignments and rotations, some feature ideas, and six-month goals. Sound familiar, print people? Sound boring, bloggers?"
With much in common as well as many differences, bloggers and mainstream journalists should be looking to one another for ideas on how to navigate our newly revised media world.
CORRECTION: An earlier version of this article incorrectly identified the blog Call Centre Confidential.
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Also from Poynter's Steve Outing:
hat Bloggers Can Learn From Journalists
By Steve Outing (More articles by this author)
More in this series
Blogging can be not only influential, but also great fun. As Wonkette.com's Ana Marie Cox has said, "It's all chocolate cake and no potatoes."
Of course, as blogging has grown up -- from exclusively the domain of hobbyists typing for the world from their spare bedrooms to the addition of top-flight bloggers making careers of it and bringing in professional salaries -- the diet has become a bit more balanced, at least for some.
THE FLIP SIDE
What Journalists Can Learn From Bloggers
Bloggers need to eat their vegetables, too, if they expect to grow up and win the respect of larger audiences and survive the rigors of long-term publishing.
So, while mainstream journalists have much that they can learn from the experiences of bloggers (as this article explains), bloggers could learn a thing or two from traditional journalists.
Let us count the ways.
Checks & balances (a.k.a., the editor)
The principal difference between traditional journalists and the vast majority of bloggers is: an editor. The lack of one is one of the charms of blogging, of course. The blogger ponders, perhaps reports, analyzes, types, and publishes. It's fast; it's creative; it's different from mainstream journalism.
Even when there is an editor involved with a blogger, it's often after publication.
But having an editor involved -- even if it's immediately after hitting the Publish button, a.k.a. back-editing -- is a brilliant idea, even for solo bloggers. An extra pair of eyes can certainly help to catch spelling, grammar, and factual errors, but more importantly they can catch really dangerous issues -- such as when you're about to libel someone.
With so many new people involved in blogging, most of them having no training in journalism practices, ethics, and media law, personal legal liability is a big deal. Bloggers publishing without the protection of an employer to pay for their libel defense are on their own should they make a mistake. In the years ahead, I expect to see some solo bloggers get in trouble -- and some get driven to personal ruin when they lose libel lawsuits. It's a wonder it hasn't happened yet.
Ah, but some bloggers say, audience members are our editors. Mistakes are pointed out quickly and bloggers readily acknowledge and correct their errors in plain sight. Good point, but a blog item that libels someone will remain on the record, likely archived for a good long time, and a libelous statement left online for even a day puts a blogger at tremendous risk. So bloggers, take a tip from traditional journalists and find yourself some form of editing safety net.
Reporting isn't a dirty word
Let's face it, the majority of bloggers don't do original reporting. They comment on the work of others, or write about personal experiences. But more and more, we are seeing bloggers who do reporting. The only real difference between what they do and the work of professional journalists is that most bloggers lack the credentials to gain access to sources as easily as their journalist cousins. That's become less of a problem for top bloggers lately. Quite a few of them got credentialed to cover the U.S. national political conventions this year, for example.
But solid reporting can help any blogger. Learn the value of journalistic legwork. Talk to multiple sources, and check out the credibility of those sources. Double-source information that seems suspect. Seek out the aid of public- and media-relations professionals for corporations and public institutions; today, many of them are accustomed and willing to work with bloggers as well as traditional journalists. Don't be afraid to go to the top of an organization for comment, but also know the value of seeking information from those much further down the organizational ladder.
Avoid anonymous sources when you can, for just as in traditional journalism, bloggers can lose credibility when quoting from them, unless there's a darn good reason.
Speaking of anonymous sources, there's talk in the U.S. about the idea that bloggers should be entitled to the same protection against revealing sources that traditional journalists get. First Amendment lawyer Floyd Abrams has suggested that bloggers acting as journalists should get that protection -- but that bloggers who confine their writing to personal opinions and reflections should not get any special protection.
The blogger's toolbox
Bloggers have much in common with journalists, of course; ergo, they have the same rights to gather information. And that includes using resources long available to traditional journalists to help get the right information.
The U.S. Freedom of Information Act is a journalist's best friend, and a blogger's, too. Anyone has the right to access public records (at least here in the U.S.), and sometimes FOIA is the tool necessary to get the job done. It's not just for professional journalists.
Bloggers also would be wise to frequent resources designed for journalists. Poynter Online, publisher of this article, can be a useful site for bloggers. And there are so many more journalistic and reporting organizations whose resources will help bloggers produce better, more accurate work. Poynter Online maintains lists of them here and here.
Bloggers may not get chosen to participate in in-person seminars at the Poynter Institute or other journalistic training organizations, but increasingly such institutions are offering online learning programs that allow bloggers to join in -- sometimes for free. At Poynter, NewsU is the institute's e-learning program, offering a variety of online courses. Bloggers wishing to get better at their craft, just as with journalists, should consider taking advantage of these opportunities.
Let's think about ethics
If there's one area about blogging that raises the most concern, it's ethics. With most mainstream news organizations, you can pretty much be assured that a reporter isn't taking money for writing about someone or some company.
But guess what: That's not the case with blogging. A hot controversy in the blogging world right now is a company that's paying bloggers a monthly fee to write about its clients. While some of those participating bloggers are being up front and acknowledging when they do this, there's nothing stopping other bloggers from doing this surreptitiously.
Part of the problem is lack of any community blogging standards that might discourage unseemly behavior. Perhaps a current effort to establish a blogging ethics committee, as suggested by Jason Calacanis of Weblogs Inc. and Nick Denton of Gawker Media, will lead to a blogging model that at least articulates ideal blogger behavior. While still in the planning stages, such a committee might provide member bloggers with a sort of "seal of approval" that suggests adherence to reasonable ethical standards.
Bloggers need only to look at the ethical standards developed by various journalism groups to get ideas on important issues to be included in a bloggers' guide. Cyberjournalist.net's Jon Dube also wrote a Blogger's Code of Ethics in 2003 that's worth reviewing.
Ask before you attack
Here's something you frequently see with bloggers that trained journalists usually avoid: Making accusations or strong criticisms without asking the target for reaction. For the sake of balance, it just makes sense to be fair and to seek the other sides of the story.
Get to the point quickly
In journalism, one of the first things you learn is the importance of the inverted-pyramid style of news writing. Putting the most important information in a story up top makes much sense online, where attention spans are short and you can't count on readers looking beyond the first sentence or paragraph.
Write those headlines with care, too. Strong, intuitive wording is important in getting readers to go beyond the first words. Professional journalists have long been refining the craft of headline writing, and bloggers should pay equal attention to it. Ignore this aspect of traditional journalism and bloggers risk not engaging their audience.
That's not to say that bloggers can't be creative -- I'm not suggesting that they copy the styles of mainstream journalists -- but I do advise that bloggers take traditional news writing theory into account.
Some of those journalism resources cited above can lead you to advice on better headline writing .
Accuracy, accuracy, accuracy
Finally, bloggers can learn a thing or two about accuracy from traditional journalists. No, I'm certainly not implying that journalists reporting for mainstream news organizations don't make mistakes -- they make plenty of them. But there's an institutional ethic in professional journalism to try to always get it right.
With blogging, it's up to the individual blogger. With no institution or organization watching over them and guiding their behavior, we can only hope that most bloggers adhere to a mission of accuracy and accountability.
When done without proper care and thought, blogging can be dangerous -- not only to the blogger's reputation, but to the community at large. Inaccurate blogging can damage personal reputations and worse, just as can sloppy journalism. So bloggers, please make accuracy a guiding principle, just as it is in all successful journalism.
Journalists, as members of the "Fourth Estate," have long held power. Now bloggers are positioned to share some of that. Take care, please.
Sunday, Jun. 13, 2004
Meet Joe Blog
By Lev Grossman
A few years ago, Mathew Gross, 32, was a free-lance writer living in tiny Moab, Utah. Rob Malda, 28, was an underperforming undergraduate at a small Christian college in Michigan. Denis Dutton, 60, was a professor of philosophy in faraway Christchurch, New Zealand. Today they are some of the most influential media personalities in the world. You can be one too.
Gross, Malda and Dutton aren't rich or famous or even conspicuously good-looking. What they have in common is that they all edit blogs: amateur websites that provide news, information and, above all, opinions to rapidly growing and devoted audiences drawn by nothing more than a shared interest or two and the sheer magnetism of the editor's personality. Over the past five years, blogs have gone from an obscure and, frankly, somewhat nerdy fad to a genuine alternative to mainstream news outlets, a shadow media empire that is rivaling networks and newspapers in power and influence. Which raises the question: Who are these folks anyway? And what exactly are they doing to the established pantheon of American media?
Not that long ago, blogs were one of those annoying buzz words that you could safely get away with ignoring. The word blog — it works as both noun and verb — is short for Web log. It was coined in 1997 to describe a website where you could post daily scribblings, journal-style, about whatever you like — mostly critiquing and linking to other articles online that may have sparked your thinking. Unlike a big media outlet, bloggers focus their efforts on narrow topics, often rising to become de facto watchdogs and self-proclaimed experts. Blogs can be about anything: politics, sex, baseball, haiku, car repair. There are blogs about blogs.
Big whoop, right? But it turns out some people actually have interesting thoughts on a regular basis, and a few of the better blogs began drawing sizable audiences. Blogs multiplied and evolved, slowly becoming conduits for legitimate news and serious thought. In 1999 a few companies began offering free make-your-own-blog software, which turbocharged the phenomenon. By 2002, Pyra Labs, which makes software for creating blogs, claimed 970,000 users.
Most of America couldn't have cared less. Until December 2002, that is, when bloggers staged a dramatic show of force. The occasion was Strom Thurmond's 100th birthday party, during which Trent Lott made what sounded like a nostalgic reference to Thurmond's past segregationist leanings. The mainstream press largely glossed over the incident, but when regular journalists bury the lead, bloggers dig it right back up. "That story got ignored for three, four, five days by big papers and the TV networks while blogs kept it alive," says Joshua Micah Marshall, creator of talkingpointsmemo.com, one of a handful of blogs that stuck with the Lott story.
Mainstream America wasn't listening, but Washington insiders and media honchos read blogs. Three days after the party, the story was on Meet the Press. Four days afterward, Lott made an official apology. After two weeks, Lott was out as Senate majority leader, and blogs had drawn their first blood. Web journalists like Matt Drudge (drudgereport.com) had already demonstrated a certain crude effectiveness — witness l'affaire Lewinsky — but this was something different: bloggers were offering reasoned, forceful arguments that carried weight with the powers that be.
Blogs act like a lens, focusing attention on an issue until it catches fire, but they can also break stories. On April 21, a 34-year-old blogger and writer from Arizona named Russ Kick posted photographs of coffins containing the bodies of soldiers killed in Iraq and Afghanistan and of Columbia astronauts. The military zealously guards images of service members in coffins, but Kick pried the photos free with a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request. "I read the news constantly," says Kick, "and when I see a story about the government refusing to release public documents, I automatically file an FOIA request for them." By April 23 the images had gone from Kick's blog, thememoryhole.org, to the front page of newspapers across the country. Kick was soon getting upwards of 4 million hits a day.
What makes blogs so effective? They're free. They catch people at work, at their desks, when they're alert and thinking and making decisions. Blogs are fresh and often seem to be miles ahead of the mainstream news. Bloggers put up new stuff every day, all day, and there are thousands of them. How are you going to keep anything secret from a thousand Russ Kicks? Blogs have voice and personality. They're human. They come to us not from some mediagenic anchorbot on an air-conditioned sound stage, but from an individual. They represent — no, they are — the voice of the little guy.
And the little guy is a lot smarter than big media might have you think. Blogs showcase some of the smartest, sharpest writing being published. Bloggers are unconstrained by such journalistic conventions as good taste, accountability and objectivity — and that can be a good thing. Accusations of media bias are thick on the ground these days, and Americans are tired of it. Blogs don't pretend to be neutral: they're gleefully, unabashedly biased, and that makes them a lot more fun. "Because we're not trying to sell magazines or papers, we can afford to assail our readers," says Andrew Sullivan, a contributor to TIME and the editor of andrewsullivan.com. "I don't have the pressure of an advertising executive telling me to lay off. It's incredibly liberating."
Some bloggers earn their bias the hard way — in the trenches. Military bloggers, or milbloggers in Net patois, post vivid accounts of their tours of Baghdad, in prose covered in fresh flop sweat and powder burns, illustrated with digital photos. "Jason," a National Guardsman whose blog is called justanothersoldier.com, wrote about wandering through one of Saddam Hussein's empty palaces. And Iraqis have blogs: a Baghdad blogger who goes by Salam Pax ( dear_raed.blogspot.com) has parlayed his blog into a book and a movie deal. Vietnam was the first war to be televised; blogs bring Iraq another scary step closer to our living rooms.
But blogs are about much more than war and politics. In 1997 Malda went looking for a "site that mixed the latest word about a new sci-fi movie with news about open-source software. I was looking for a site that didn't exist," Malda says, "so I built it." Malda and a handful of co-editors run slashdot.org full time, and he estimates that 300,000 to 500,000 people read the site daily. Six years ago, a philosophy professor in New Zealand named Denis Dutton started the blog Arts & Letters Daily artsandlettersdaily.com) to create a website "where people could go daily for a dose of intellectual stimulation." Now the site draws more than 100,000 readers a month. Compare that with, say, the New York Review of Books, which has a circulation of 115,000. The tail is beginning to wag the blog.
Blogs are inverting the cozy media hierarchies of yore. Some bloggers are getting press credentials for this summer's Republican Convention. Three years ago, a 25-year-old Chicagoan named Jessa Crispin started a blog for serious readers called bookslut.com. "We give books a better chance," she says. "The New York Times Book Review is so boring. We take each book at face value. There's no politics behind it." Crispin's apartment is overflowing with free books from publishers desperate for a mention. As for the Times, it's scrutinizing the blogging phenomenon for its own purposes. In January the Gray Lady started up Times on the Trail, a campaign-news website with some decidedly bloglike features; it takes the bold step of linking to articles by competing newspapers, for example. "The Times cannot ignore this. I don't think any big media can ignore this," says Len Apcar, editor in chief of the New York Times on the Web.
In a way, blogs represent everything the Web was always supposed to be: a mass medium controlled by the masses, in which getting heard depends solely on having something to say and the moxie to say it.
Unfortunately, there's a downside to this populist sentiment — that is, innocent casualties bloodied by a medium that trades in rumor, gossip and speculation without accountability. Case in point: Alexandra Polier, better known as the Kerry intern. Rumors of Polier's alleged affair with presidential candidate Senator John Kerry eventually spilled into the blogosphere earlier this year. After Drudge headlined it in February, the blabbing bloggers soon had the attention of tabloid journalists, radio talk-show hosts and cable news anchors. Trouble is, the case was exceedingly thin, and both Kerry and Polier vehemently deny it. Yet the Internet smolders with it to this day.
Some wonder if the backbiting tide won't recede as blogs grow up. The trend now is for more prominent sites to be commercialized. A Manhattan entrepreneur named Nick Denton runs a small stable of bloggers as a business by selling advertising on their sites. So far they aren't showing detectible signs of editorial corruption by their corporate masters — two of Denton's blogs, gawker.com and wonkette.com, are among the most corrosively witty sites on the Web — but they've lost their amateur status forever.
We may be in the golden age of blogging, a quirky Camelot moment in Internet history when some guy in his underwear with too much free time can take down a Washington politician. It will be interesting to see what role blogs play in the upcoming election. Blogs can be a great way of communicating, but they can keep people apart too. If I read only those of my choice, precisely tuned to my political biases and you read only yours, we could end up a nation of political solipsists, vacuum sealed in our private feedback loops, never exposed to new arguments, never having to listen to a single word we disagree with.
Howard Dean's campaign blog, run by Mathew Gross, may be the perfect example of both the potential and the pitfalls of high-profile blogging. At its peak, blogforamerica.com drew 100,000 visitors a day, yet the candidate was beaten badly in the primaries. Still, the Dean model isn't going away. When another political blogger, who goes by the nom de blog Atrios, set up a fund-raising link on his site for Kerry, he raised $25,000 in five days.
You can't blog your way into the White House, at least not yet, but blogs are America thinking out loud, talking to itself, and heaven help the candidate who isn't listening.
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From Poynter's Steve Outing:
What Journalists Can Learn From Bloggers
By Steve Outing
Bloggers and journalists do not need be the Red States vs. the Blue States -- though in some quarters both sides have acted that way lately. We're heading into a period, I hope, where each group takes tips from the other to enhance their own craft.
Bloggers and mainstream journalists likely won't end up as twins, but perhaps cordial cousins.
What's a blog?
At this point, I probably don't need to explain what a blog is to most people. But it's worth defining the type of blogs I refer to in this article: those written and published by independents, rather than blogs produced by journalists under the brand name of their employers. It's not that journalists who blog aren't bloggers; they are. Yet it's the independents who are doing most of the innovation -- and thus have the most to teach traditional journalists.
Are bloggers journalists? That's a loaded question, and not one I mean to take up in this article. Suffice it to say that among the millions of people now publishing blogs -- and among the relatively small number who blog professionally and/or have built up huge audiences -- some act as journalists, some do not. Some bloggers see themselves as journalists; some do not.
No-restraint journalism
If there's a leading complaint that traditional journalists often make about bloggers, it's this: Some bloggers are too quick to publish anything that falls into their laps -- without bothering to vet the material to determine if it's accurate, or to consider the consequences of publishing it. In some cases, such "careless" publishing can have far-reaching results. Even bloggers, the traditionalists say, have a responsibility to the public not to trade in unsubstantiated and possibly dangerous rumors.
The poster child for just-about-anything-goes is Ana Marie Cox, otherwise known as Wonkette, who does a popular daily news and gossip blog covering the Washington, D.C., political scene. Cox insists she's not acting as a "journalist" with Wonkette, though she is a journalist by background.
On November 2, Cox was one of the bloggers who received leaked early results from exit polls in the U.S. presidential election -- the ones that led many to believe early in the day that John Kerry was on his way to victory. Cox's popularity has left her with a big group of sources -- people who feed her interesting tidbits and sometimes leaked material. People with access to exit-poll numbers sent her leaked numbers; she posted them quickly, with cautionary words to the effect of, "don't take this too seriously."
Cox acknowledged during an interview that she didn't think much about the ethics of it all that day, though she's well aware of the controversy surrounding exit polls affecting voting in states where the polls haven't yet closed. "Exit polls are like crack," she quips, and just like curbing drug use, no one is likely to stop early publication of them by bloggers as long as there are people with access willing to leak the results.
"It's impossible to maintain privileged information" in an environment where anyone can instantly publish leaked information to a potential worldwide audience on the Web, she says.
But there's more to Wonkette's method than "I publish anything because I can." Cox points out how she also posted pre-election reports sent to her of rumors that presidential candidate John Kerry had an affair with a young woman. "I posted the Kerry affair stuff and said it's stupid," she says. (The affair rumor turned out to go nowhere.)
Cox's point of view reflects a libertarian notion that it's fine in a democratic society for people to receive most any information. This line of thinking suggests that the publisher's responsibility lies in being clear about what's been confirmed and what hasn't been, acknowledging that the information, depending on circumstances, could be accurate or could be groundless. Let readers decide for themselves whether it's useful information, in other words, but be transparent in explaining where you got it and how much of it you've confirmed. Respect the intelligence of the audience, this argument goes, and don't try to play nanny by deciding what you will and will not publish without audience input.
The key word in the paragraph above is "transparency." Many bloggers feel that it's OK to publish just about anything if they make it clear where it came from, what they know about it, and that it may or may not be accurate.
The news, faster
Could such an approach be taken by mainstream news organizations? Let me suggest that current trends are pushing them toward a new way of doing journalism that is a bit more blog-like.
The Internet, of course, has speeded up the news publishing cycle. No longer is it easy for a news organization to sit on a big story and publish it at a set time, when all the dust has settled. (Think of how the Monica Lewinsky story played out -- when blogger Matt Drudge published leaked reports of a Bill Clinton affair that Newsweek was investigating but wasn't ready to make public -- to understand what I mean.)
"Newspaper people (especially) still have the mindset of putting out the edition and then they're done with it," complains Glenn Reynolds, a law professor best known as the blogger behind Instapundit, one of the most popular blogs on the Internet today.
What Mainstream Journalists Can Learn from Bloggers
In an interview, Reynolds explained that the way he approaches information that comes his way is profoundly different than how a traditional journalist would. For instance, he says, if the infamous "Rathergate" documents about George W. Bush's military record ended up in the hands of a blogger like him rather than CBS News, the approach likely would have been to publish them immediately. Rather than find an expert or two to review the documents, a blogger would recognize that among members of his audience would be people capable of doing credible analysis. Imagine the ensuing conversation as the story started in one blog, quickly spread to others, and people far and wide started discussing the credibility of the documents.
It's not hard to imagine a different outcome than what actually happened: CBS News got dragged through the mud when it became obvious that the Bush documents were faked and CBS messed up.
Yes, it is hard to imagine the New York Times or Washington Post taking this approach, I admit. Yet it might make sense in some cases.
Imagine, say, the coverage of Watergate being treated in part this way. Rather than Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward being the sole storytellers, blog-influenced journalism would have had them in part leading a conversation about the scandal -- and probably turning up new sources in the process. What if Woodward and Bernstein had accompanied their Watergate investigative pieces with a blog that facilitated public conversation and brought in tips from government insiders? I suspect that a Watergate investigation in the blog era would have come to a conclusion faster.
News is a conversation
"Big media has to learn to be more honest," says Jeff Jarvis, a media executive who moonlights as a blogger, "that is, to level with its public, to reveal its prejudices, and process as citizen journalists (bloggers) do."
The popularity of bloggers is leading to a new way of thinking about news. Jarvis said in an e-mail interview that the most profound thing he learned when he started blogging is this: News is a conversation, not just a lecture. The story doesn't end when it's published, but rather just gets started as the public begins to do its part -- discussing the story, adding to it, and correcting it.
Jarvis is by day president of Advance Internet, the new-media arm of Advance Communications; by night he is the popular independent blogger behind BuzzMachine. As a 50-something media executive with a lengthy print-journalism background (including as a reviewer for TV Guide) and a new-found enthusiasm for blogging, he's well suited to advise the profession on striking a middle ground between traditional journalism and blogging.
"The news isn't done when we print it," he says. "That's when the public can add questions, corrections, perspective. That will improve news. And it also will change our relationship with the public."
Bloggers have adopted this credo, and mainstream news organizations would be well advised to do so, too, at least to some extent.
"We have owned the printing press for centuries; now the people have the power of the press" through blogs, Jarvis says. "They are speaking and it's our turn to listen and engage them in conversation."
To do that represents a profound shift in the type of journalism practiced in the U.S. and most Western countries with a free press. Engaging the public at the level Jarvis suggests would likely mean inviting readers to contribute to the end product, either in the form of published reaction to articles written by professional journalists or by reader-produced content in such forms as blogs or "citizen journalism" entries.
Personality journalism
Most blogs are highly personal, usually reflecting their authors' personalities. If you have favorite bloggers, you probably know their political views and even a fair bit about their personal lives.
With the exception of columnists, you probably know next to nothing about a newspaper's staff journalists. Reporters keep their opinions to themselves, for the most part, to comply with newsroom policy and longstanding journalistic convention.
But what if reporters were allowed to reveal more about themselves? Would the journalistic world end? Many bloggers doubt it; indeed, the refusal of mainstream news organizations to allow their journalists to reveal their opinions and personal perspective is a leading criticism leveled at news companies by bloggers.
Perhaps Slate, the successful Microsoft-owned webzine (and not a blog), suggests a coming tidal shift. Before this last U.S. election, Slate announced that 45 of its 49 editorial employees planned to vote for John Kerry. Can you imagine the New York Times announcing a breakdown of how its employees planned to vote? That would represent quite a departure from the traditional candidate endorsements the paper publishes, without bylines, on its editorial page.
Some bloggers would say that kind of opening up is a good idea, and maybe mainstream news organizations would be smart to acknowledge the obvious -- that their staffs of professional journalists do have opinions. How surprising was it that Slate's staff leaned heavily to Kerry? Would it surprise anyone, say, if Fox News employees overwhelmingly supported President Bush? As I said, this probably wouldn't cause the media world to collapse.
Indeed, you can view this loosening of the grip on editorial employees' personal lives as a way to better connect journalist and reader -- to forge a stronger relationship between them and in theory support greater loyalty by readers.
'We were wrong'
One significant difference between mainstream journalism and blogging is the way each handles its mistakes. On this one, the bloggers seem to have an edge.
Although the working styles of bloggers varies considerably, some of today's leading bloggers take a similar approach to mistakes: They prominently post corrections to errors, publishing them quickly. Reynolds typically posts a correction of an earlier item as a new item at the top of the blog if the item in error has scrolled down the page, so his readers are sure to see it.
And because most bloggers embrace interactivity with their audiences, they hear about it when a mistake is made (via the comments areas on their own blogs, and from other bloggers noting and publicizing the error if it's significant) -- and so do all the other readers.
Contrast that with how the typical old-media news organization handles mistakes. It's a rare day when a TV news program announces a mistake in the previous day's coverage; newspaper corrections typically are relegated to an inside page in a special corrections area, unseen by many readers.
Perhaps bloggers rank higher when it comes to corrections because they are in more direct touch with their readers. When a blogger makes a mistake, his or her readers make it known; there can be no ignoring it. As mainstream news organizations evolve to have more direct interaction with their readers and viewers, they'll have to change how they acknowledge and handle mistakes.
A different reporting style
While reporting styles among bloggers of course vary wildly, you do often see (among those bloggers who do reporting, not just commentary) a different approach than what's typical in mainstream reporting. After all, many bloggers are not journalists and have not had training in traditional reporting techniques. Perhaps there's something to be learned from this fresh perspective on reporting.
In covering a technical story, you sometimes see bloggers go far down the corporate ladder; perhaps it's partly not having the access to or experience at reaching people at the top for comment. The conventional journalist will seek out company executives or go through the PR department. But bloggers sometimes get their information from people further inside an organization -- the programmers. It makes for a different type of storytelling, as new and different voices are heard.
Again, it leads back to the theme that bloggers often get closer to the people than do mainstream journalists.
Of course, in many instances it's the people "down the corporate ladder" doing the blogging themselves. Take, for example, the blog Call Centre Confidential, written by the anonymous team leader of an unidentified phone marketing call center.
Other lessons
What else can mainstream journalists learn from bloggers? Perhaps …
* That publishing unpolished thoughts (written by smart people) can be valuable -- that in the lightning-fast Internet era, unrefined commentary and analysis has a place. And the polishing process sometimes takes place after the Publish button has been pushed -- as the audience adds its knowledge and perspective to keep a story alive well past the point when it is first published.
* That fast-to-publish content like that on blogs doesn't have to go through a rigorous editing process -- that there's value in the speed of blogging that can be applied to mainstream journalism. (If that sounds scary to editors, remember than when reporters go on live radio and TV programs, there's no editing there either. It's a matter of trust in the journalist to be given such freedom and responsibility.)
Meeting of the media
From an old-media perspective, the ideas presented above may sound unreasonable. Indeed, presented in 1990, they would have seemed outlandish. Yet in today's world, they represent possibilities that traditional news organizations should be considering.
I'm not suggesting that newspapers and TV news operations mimic blogs, only that they experiment with some of the ideas that blogs present.
Choire Sicha, editorial director of Gawker Media, one of the leading publishers of independent blogs (including Wonkette), said in an e-mail interview of the difference between mainstream journalists and blogs: "I think there's really not that much to distinguish between journalists and bloggers except for a formalized edit process before print.
"Nearly all journalists traffic privately in gossip, anonymous sources, and thinly veiled juicy items -- they just don't usually get to throw those things into print, and so they IM these tidbits to us bloggers," he says. "Bloggers are really just the id of the journalism world."
Put another way, by Wonkette's Ana Marie Cox, "On blogs, it's all chocolate cake and no potatoes."
And if you really want to get a sense of how blogs and mainstream journalists are coming together, Sicha offers this: "Here's a little peek behind the curtain over here at Gawker Media HQ: I just had a two-hour meeting with a blogger who edits one of our sites. We discussed new staffing assignments and rotations, some feature ideas, and six-month goals. Sound familiar, print people? Sound boring, bloggers?"
With much in common as well as many differences, bloggers and mainstream journalists should be looking to one another for ideas on how to navigate our newly revised media world.
CORRECTION: An earlier version of this article incorrectly identified the blog Call Centre Confidential.
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Also from Poynter's Steve Outing:
hat Bloggers Can Learn From Journalists
By Steve Outing (More articles by this author)
More in this series
Blogging can be not only influential, but also great fun. As Wonkette.com's Ana Marie Cox has said, "It's all chocolate cake and no potatoes."
Of course, as blogging has grown up -- from exclusively the domain of hobbyists typing for the world from their spare bedrooms to the addition of top-flight bloggers making careers of it and bringing in professional salaries -- the diet has become a bit more balanced, at least for some.
THE FLIP SIDE
What Journalists Can Learn From Bloggers
Bloggers need to eat their vegetables, too, if they expect to grow up and win the respect of larger audiences and survive the rigors of long-term publishing.
So, while mainstream journalists have much that they can learn from the experiences of bloggers (as this article explains), bloggers could learn a thing or two from traditional journalists.
Let us count the ways.
Checks & balances (a.k.a., the editor)
The principal difference between traditional journalists and the vast majority of bloggers is: an editor. The lack of one is one of the charms of blogging, of course. The blogger ponders, perhaps reports, analyzes, types, and publishes. It's fast; it's creative; it's different from mainstream journalism.
Even when there is an editor involved with a blogger, it's often after publication.
But having an editor involved -- even if it's immediately after hitting the Publish button, a.k.a. back-editing -- is a brilliant idea, even for solo bloggers. An extra pair of eyes can certainly help to catch spelling, grammar, and factual errors, but more importantly they can catch really dangerous issues -- such as when you're about to libel someone.
With so many new people involved in blogging, most of them having no training in journalism practices, ethics, and media law, personal legal liability is a big deal. Bloggers publishing without the protection of an employer to pay for their libel defense are on their own should they make a mistake. In the years ahead, I expect to see some solo bloggers get in trouble -- and some get driven to personal ruin when they lose libel lawsuits. It's a wonder it hasn't happened yet.
Ah, but some bloggers say, audience members are our editors. Mistakes are pointed out quickly and bloggers readily acknowledge and correct their errors in plain sight. Good point, but a blog item that libels someone will remain on the record, likely archived for a good long time, and a libelous statement left online for even a day puts a blogger at tremendous risk. So bloggers, take a tip from traditional journalists and find yourself some form of editing safety net.
Reporting isn't a dirty word
Let's face it, the majority of bloggers don't do original reporting. They comment on the work of others, or write about personal experiences. But more and more, we are seeing bloggers who do reporting. The only real difference between what they do and the work of professional journalists is that most bloggers lack the credentials to gain access to sources as easily as their journalist cousins. That's become less of a problem for top bloggers lately. Quite a few of them got credentialed to cover the U.S. national political conventions this year, for example.
But solid reporting can help any blogger. Learn the value of journalistic legwork. Talk to multiple sources, and check out the credibility of those sources. Double-source information that seems suspect. Seek out the aid of public- and media-relations professionals for corporations and public institutions; today, many of them are accustomed and willing to work with bloggers as well as traditional journalists. Don't be afraid to go to the top of an organization for comment, but also know the value of seeking information from those much further down the organizational ladder.
Avoid anonymous sources when you can, for just as in traditional journalism, bloggers can lose credibility when quoting from them, unless there's a darn good reason.
Speaking of anonymous sources, there's talk in the U.S. about the idea that bloggers should be entitled to the same protection against revealing sources that traditional journalists get. First Amendment lawyer Floyd Abrams has suggested that bloggers acting as journalists should get that protection -- but that bloggers who confine their writing to personal opinions and reflections should not get any special protection.
The blogger's toolbox
Bloggers have much in common with journalists, of course; ergo, they have the same rights to gather information. And that includes using resources long available to traditional journalists to help get the right information.
The U.S. Freedom of Information Act is a journalist's best friend, and a blogger's, too. Anyone has the right to access public records (at least here in the U.S.), and sometimes FOIA is the tool necessary to get the job done. It's not just for professional journalists.
Bloggers also would be wise to frequent resources designed for journalists. Poynter Online, publisher of this article, can be a useful site for bloggers. And there are so many more journalistic and reporting organizations whose resources will help bloggers produce better, more accurate work. Poynter Online maintains lists of them here and here.
Bloggers may not get chosen to participate in in-person seminars at the Poynter Institute or other journalistic training organizations, but increasingly such institutions are offering online learning programs that allow bloggers to join in -- sometimes for free. At Poynter, NewsU is the institute's e-learning program, offering a variety of online courses. Bloggers wishing to get better at their craft, just as with journalists, should consider taking advantage of these opportunities.
Let's think about ethics
If there's one area about blogging that raises the most concern, it's ethics. With most mainstream news organizations, you can pretty much be assured that a reporter isn't taking money for writing about someone or some company.
But guess what: That's not the case with blogging. A hot controversy in the blogging world right now is a company that's paying bloggers a monthly fee to write about its clients. While some of those participating bloggers are being up front and acknowledging when they do this, there's nothing stopping other bloggers from doing this surreptitiously.
Part of the problem is lack of any community blogging standards that might discourage unseemly behavior. Perhaps a current effort to establish a blogging ethics committee, as suggested by Jason Calacanis of Weblogs Inc. and Nick Denton of Gawker Media, will lead to a blogging model that at least articulates ideal blogger behavior. While still in the planning stages, such a committee might provide member bloggers with a sort of "seal of approval" that suggests adherence to reasonable ethical standards.
Bloggers need only to look at the ethical standards developed by various journalism groups to get ideas on important issues to be included in a bloggers' guide. Cyberjournalist.net's Jon Dube also wrote a Blogger's Code of Ethics in 2003 that's worth reviewing.
Ask before you attack
Here's something you frequently see with bloggers that trained journalists usually avoid: Making accusations or strong criticisms without asking the target for reaction. For the sake of balance, it just makes sense to be fair and to seek the other sides of the story.
Get to the point quickly
In journalism, one of the first things you learn is the importance of the inverted-pyramid style of news writing. Putting the most important information in a story up top makes much sense online, where attention spans are short and you can't count on readers looking beyond the first sentence or paragraph.
Write those headlines with care, too. Strong, intuitive wording is important in getting readers to go beyond the first words. Professional journalists have long been refining the craft of headline writing, and bloggers should pay equal attention to it. Ignore this aspect of traditional journalism and bloggers risk not engaging their audience.
That's not to say that bloggers can't be creative -- I'm not suggesting that they copy the styles of mainstream journalists -- but I do advise that bloggers take traditional news writing theory into account.
Some of those journalism resources cited above can lead you to advice on better headline writing .
Accuracy, accuracy, accuracy
Finally, bloggers can learn a thing or two about accuracy from traditional journalists. No, I'm certainly not implying that journalists reporting for mainstream news organizations don't make mistakes -- they make plenty of them. But there's an institutional ethic in professional journalism to try to always get it right.
With blogging, it's up to the individual blogger. With no institution or organization watching over them and guiding their behavior, we can only hope that most bloggers adhere to a mission of accuracy and accountability.
When done without proper care and thought, blogging can be dangerous -- not only to the blogger's reputation, but to the community at large. Inaccurate blogging can damage personal reputations and worse, just as can sloppy journalism. So bloggers, please make accuracy a guiding principle, just as it is in all successful journalism.
Journalists, as members of the "Fourth Estate," have long held power. Now bloggers are positioned to share some of that. Take care, please.
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