Interview: Lee Horwich, USA TODAY

An interview with Lee Horwich, senior assignment editor for USA TODAY‘s Washington desk, is serving as national editor for transportation, political editor, and a lead editor in redesignig print and online politics coverage for the 2008 election cycle.

Readers talk back

The Orange County Register decided to allow comments on all its stories, but have had to deal with a lot of problems stemming from inappropriate user comments. Issues such as who will edit the comments, the question of censorship and whether comments should be allowed on every story.

This debate seems old, or at least common in news Web site circles. Not much new here, but still haven’t figured out an answer.

Maybe a newer angle is a question asked by Rachel Nixon from BBCNews.com: do you ask users what kind of stories they want or what they want to see covered?

Michael Sokoler of the Center for at American Public Media offered an interesting point of view: there’s a big difference between watching people respond to what we do and asking what they want us to cover? It’s hard to get people to say what they want without having them rely on traditional buzzwords to identify those topics - meaning things that are already covered.

He said there’s been a decline in relevance of the news, loss of connection between the public and the news media and it’s crucial to ask readers what they want to know about and to see and to create more of a partnership between the media and its public.

Interview: Jim Smith, Boston Globe

James F. Smith is the national political editor for Boston Globe and Boston.com.

The users’ side of the bargain

Immediacy is another mixed blessing in the news Web site world, where the speed of the medium can make the accuracy v. speed battle dangerous, but there is a certain amount of responsibility expected from users, the fellows suggested today.

Users no longer pick up one, or even two or three, newspapers and call it a day. They aren’t even watching the evening news at 6 p.m. and catching the follow-up five hours later. On the internet a user will look at your site, and check that information against a handful of other sites, at least.

Especially on “breaking” news stories, the discussion suggested that readers are expected to understand that there is a difference between “breaking” news and regular news - they will recognize that the information is new, perhaps incomplete, and subject to change as more reports become available.

Users are also expected to know the difference between blogging and reporting, and not to attribute the same level of authority to a blog as they would to a news story.

So it turns out journalists are not the only ones expected to adapt for new technology - the users have to do it too. And to be honest, they are probably way ahead of all the journalists on that anyway.

WIld and Crazy

I signed up to blog the Politics in Cyberspace conference out of a sense of obligation. To my future. I am not the most technologically literate person, yet I acknowledge that if I want a job in the journalism industry, I need to make friends - best friends - with the Internet.

Tonight’s talk by Politico.com editor Bill Nichols made me rethink my attitude. He said that the benefit of blogs is that the writers don’t report on stories they feel “obligated” to do. They don’t feel a need to record all the important events of the day. But rather, he said, “We feel a great freedom to pick the most interesting and provocative stories.”

I like interesting. I like provocative. Keep talking, Bill…

He spoke of the optimism and sense of adventure surrounding online media. He said Politico.com was “built on the mantra of embracing the future.”

As a journalism student, I constantly hear professors talk about the layoffs and cutbacks at newspapers. My fellow classmates and I joke about how we came to USC Annenberg with high expectations and dreams of the kind of job we wanted when we graduated. And now, we have come to terms with the fact that ANY job offer in journalism would be a blessing.

Listening to online gurus like Nichols, who see the Internet as an exciting escapade and not a last resort, is indeed uplifting. But despite the wild and crazy adventure that is the Internet, there is nothing like seeing your byline in print. Maybe I’ll start printing these postings and leave them outside my door in the morning.

Tell ‘Em What You DON’T Know

Butch Ward gave up many words of wisdom in his presentation. One phrase in particular makes a great motto for online journalists. To paraphrase:

Tell the reader what you know. And tell the reader what you don’t know.

This sentiment was echoed at Politico.com editor Bill Nichols’ 20 minute briefer on the site, its brief history, and its ambitious mission. Politico.com was merely two months out of the box on March 22, when Ben Smith blogged that John Edwards would announce his withdrawal from the ‘08 campaign 90 minutes before a scheduled press conference at which Edwards would address the reappearance of his wife Elizabeth’s breast cancer but would indeed continue his campaign for the Democratic nomination.

Smith relied on a single source—a friend of the Edwardses—on information relayed the day before, according to Nichols. Relying on a single source was not necessarily the crucial error, the former USA Today White House reporter explained, but had Smith told the audienced what he did NOT know, in addition to what he had heard, the blog posting would not have caused such a stir. In other words, as Ward said earlier, by exposing both what you know, and definitive information that you do NOT know for sure, your reporting is validated in the eye of the audience. It’s impossible to trump the reader in the Internet age. Mistakes are not soon forgotten. As Dan Gillmor, author of We the Media wrote, “the audience knows more than I do.”

The irony is that Ben Smith’s blog post became an even bigger issue after being reported second-hand by other media outlets that concurrently failed to do further due diligence on the Politico.com’s lead. Ben Smith more than redeemed himself by immediately posting an apology/correction and a lengthier column later in the day, which is something you don’t often see from other outlets (an unnamed correction in the next day’s paper wouldn’t cut it here, not to mention, some news orgs posted the official news as an “update” not a “correction.”

With 6 million pageviews a month, Politico.com is well-established as a major media player. It will be interesting to watch how it’s editors’ and contributors’ old-school print media standards translate—and hopefully advance—the integrity of online journalism. 

Combining Social Media and Traditional Media

[Cross-posted on e.politics.]

More from sprawling depths of Los Angeles — in a lunchtime presentation at the Knight Digital Media Center online politics seminar, Michael Skoler of Minnesota Public Radio gave a glimpse of an promising approach to integrating social media and traditional media to broaden a news outlet’s coverage.  It’s potentially a good model for organizations or campaigns planning to use supporters to help tell their stories and to support their messages.  Plus, they have some neat games you can play — for instance, why not build your own fantasy Minnesota Legislature (what more could we want from life?).

MPR’s Public Insight Journalism project builds a partnership with public radio listeners by bringing them in as both cited journalistic sources and as a channel for finding under-reported stories.  The radio network has created a network of over 40,000 people who have volunteered to help with stories and regularly contacts individual members or groups of members if their expertise might be useful.

For instance, for a story that involves the Minnesota Islamic community, MPR might get in touch with members of the network who have indicated that they are Muslim. In some cases, members’ opinions or experiences might be cited directly, but in others their insights may work behind the scenes to shape the way stories are researched or presented.  Also, MPR will occasionally run surveys to find out what stories or aspects of stories are being under-covered, which has led in the past to coverage of issues from angles that diverge from the all-too-common journalistic pack mentality.

This approach is a hybrid of citizen journalism and traditional journalism, since MPR’s audience isn’t writing or preparing stories directly, as they might on a newspaper blog.  Instead, their experience is filtered through the expertise and judgment of MPR’s editorial staff, which allows the broadcast outlet to leverage the collective intelligence of their audience without surrendering control over the direction of coverage.  They see it as getting the best of both journalistic worlds — journalistic standards still apply, but reporters get to go beyond the usual experts (the members of their “Golden Rolodexes").

MPR has developed other ways to involve readers in stories and issues, for instance by including a “help us cover this story” button on all online stories to allow readers to add extra resources or correct errors.  Much more up my alley, they’ve also built several online games based around issues of the day, with more to come.  Balance the state budget!  As someone who worked on budgetary issues in the Texas Legislature approximately 1000 years ago, I think that anything you can do to help the public understand the trade-offs involved in appropriating money is A Good Thing (the level of ignorance of some of the folks who used to call into our office was frightening).  And, build your own fantasy Minnesota Legislature, Fantasy Football-style, with points for each milestone your team members reach in the legislative process (bill introduction, floor vote, final passage, etc.).  Political nerd-fun of the highest order, let me tell ya.

Campaigns and advocacy organizations can learn from this project!  You CAN involve your supporters without completely surrendering control over your message — social media isn’t an all-or-nothing proposition.  Just don’t forget the fun factor....

Luring Your Readers

The conversation (NOT lecture) by Amy Gahran of the Poynter Institute’s E-Media Tidbits on how to engage readers and cultivate an online community sounded less like a lesson on how to be a better journalist, and more like one on how to be an activist.

She instructed the journalists to engage their online community by giving people rewards for their contributions, cultivating a team of core people who “feel invested,” engaging people in a discussion and utilizing email lists and forums.

Gahran’s discussion reminded me of my days as a teen activist, rallying my friends to boycott the neighborhood rodeo or trying to create a team of Goshen High School students to advocate for condoms in school. You want kids to show up to your weekly meeting? Bring cookies! You want teenagers to come to your rally? Enlist the football team and homecoming queen!

I thought I left that behind. Does the new new new journalism - the one that values an online community - require the tools of an activist? The cookie jar is ready.

At the End of the Day, More Rules

A theme that continues to come up during this conference is defining the rules that govern a blog. Some say the great thing about a blog is that there are no rules! The essense of a blog, John Amato from Crooksandliars.com says, is that it allows autonomy, independence.

“Nobody tells me what to do,” Amato said yesterday, when explaining why he prefers to post video to his site rather than to YouTube.

Maybe bloggers have independence and autonomy from mainstream media, but they keep throwing out more and more rules.

After I wrote my first blog for Pop+Politics, I was told that it needed to be more conversational, looser, breaking away from structure. It should read more like an email to my friends than an article for my USC Annenberg class. But isn’t that structure? Isn’t being told that you must use a conversational tone a rule? Where’s my autonomy? What if I love the inverted pyramid so much, I want to use it all the time?

James Joyner from OutsidetheBeltway.com said yesterday, “If you’ve got an editor, you’re not a blog.”

Do you agree with that?

Different media outlets have entities that they call blogs, and some are edited, some are not. Is Joyner right, and if there is an editor, they should rename their (so-called) blog?

Joyner also said that if you spend days on it, it’s not a blog.

Ok, I get the idea: raw material is best, or it’s at least the latest trend. But how do you create a rule like this? What if you spend hours on a posting? Does it get to be a blog then? What if you go back and edit it the next day? What if you spend days thinking about it?

More importantly, what is the purpose of creating rules for blogs? Is it to teach new blog users - like me - how to better communicate in this medium? Do these rule-makers have evidence that a conversational tone, lots of links, some contentious commentary and unedited material that was written in less than a day is most effective?

Or are the rules created because blogs are becoming mainstream?

To blog or not to blog?

Jason Manning mentioned that some reporters seem interested in blogging because it seems hip or cool, or that it offers a certain “cache.” He said still others don’t want to blog for essentially the same reasons.

Stop - you’re both wrong! Could there be any worse reason for a reporter to blog or not blog than the hip or cool factor?

Reporters should want to blog (and maybe I should just end that sentence there...) because blogging encourages reader interaction, opening a dialogue between the journalist and the people about whom - and for whom - they report. It also allows the journalist to share more personal experiences from their reporting, perhaps to show more of their personality and, in some cases, to troll for sources or information for stories. Some reporters also see it as an opportunity to throw out ideas or rumors they’ve heard, but haven’t confirmed.

If a reporter doesn’t want to do those things, fine. But it seems silly to blog just because it’s hip or cool. And it seems even crazier to keep from blogging for that reason.

Using ‘Serious Games’ to Engage Users

Michael Skoler of America Public Media’s Center for Innovation in Journalism (and director of APM’s Public Insight Network) showed us how Minnesota Public Radio incorporates serious games to further engage listeners and site users.

Skoler exhibited 2006 Select a Candidate, Minnesota Fantasy Legislature (see “commissioner” Bob Collins’ league notes), and The Real Agenda.

So what are “serious games” and how can they function as tools of engagement for news/political Web sites?

Some think these “serious” or “ubiquitous” games will be fundamental to harnessing collective intelligence. A lofty goal, but one that could essentially lead to more utopian, user-friendly and maintenance-free forums on a Web site or portal.

“The future of collective play: Fostering collaboration, network literacy and massively multiplayer problem-solving through alternate-reality games,” was the title of Institute for the Future researcher Jane McGonigal‘s keynote at a recent Serious Games Summit. McGonigal argues that collaborative, puzzle-like games will become integral to humans’ tendency to imagine and strive for a “best-case scenario future.” Further analysis of McGonigal’s keynote can be found here and here.

A great resource for game ideas, analysis and conception is at the Serious Games network on Ning. Ning, co-created by former Netscape co-founder Marc Andreesen, is a portal that enables any casual Web user to create their own social network (see my as-yet-undeveloped, Thelonious Monk-inspired rhythm-a-ning). For even more on serious games, see the CALT encyclopedia.

You may have heard of Cruel 2 B Kind, the latest ubiquitous gaming craze taking over the world. The name of the C2BK game is “benevolent assassination,” an extension of McGonigal’s theory that all Internet users share a desire for ”a life more worth living.” Click here to watch the game in action or find out for yourself Saturday in Santa Monica.

Another example of serious games seriously at work was the USC Center on Public Diplomacy‘s Reinventing Public Diplomacy Through Games Competition. This contest attracted submissions from around the world dealing with topics ranging from interactive after-school programs to discussing international water issues to simulating the Israel-Palestine conflict. Even the awards ceremony was simulcast in Second Life. I encourage you to read more about the project and the winners here.

Making politics interactive – and fun?

“History” in discussions of news Webs sites means looking back less than a decade. In this case the political coverage of three major news sites in 2004 and 2006 is about as far back as we need to look for perspective.

The panel for the second presentation includes Jason Manning, political editor at WashingtonPost.com; Amy Cox, special projects assignment producer at CNN.com; and Rachel Nixon, deputy world editor at BBCNews.com.

The biggest changes in just those two years between 2004 and 2006 was the explosion of blogging and the increase in interactive features on these sites.

CNN.com allowed users, not just pundits, to score debates and showed the average scores given to each candidate. BBCNews.com had a baseball graphic to explain the American elections process. WashingtonPost.com took the cake on this one, though, with a “March Madness"-style feature, Midterm Madness, that allowed users to predict winners for every congressional race. Surprisingly, 4,000 users actually submitted their predictions, and the lucky winner was about 4 or 5 races off, Manning said.

The various uses of the U.S. map were really fascinating, and there might be a whole field of study there - how the map of the country has become a powerful visual in representing the political views of the United States.

It was heartening to see these editors focused on getting users to their sites and interested in and informed about politics. Isn’t this the goal of a free press in the first place?

The curse of the internet

I certainly don’t want to suggest that Thursday morning’s discussion was entirely negative, but a few points came up about the downside of news Web sites and advances in technology, from the perspective of reporters and editors.

For example, the ability to record every interview and put audio clips up online is great, except, as Lee Horwich from USA Today pointed out, someone has to take all the material - sometimes hours of tape - and edit it. We are making more work for ourselves, sometimes without a concurrent increase in resources or time for the journalists who have to do that work.

Several reporters said they often felt overwhelmed with all that was expected of them. If they are asked to write a news story for the paper that will also go on the Web site, write a blog about it, and put together some multimedia content, suddenly all the work suffers.

The issue of overwhelmed journalists comes up in reporting too. How does a reporter record an interview, take pictures and get notes for a story all at once?

The unlimited size of the “news hole” could be something of a mixed blessing too. Reporters now see the space on the Web site as an opportunity to write a 2,000-word story whenever they feel like it - but that may not be in the best interest of the readers, or the editors who have to check the story. The obvious answer, as someone pointed out, is to give the story the length it deserves

So it seems we’re just dealing with the same questions we’ve always dealt with in journalism - we’re just learning how to apply them in new media. How much space does a particular story warrant? The curse of the internet might be the temptation to write as long as you want (the lazy choice), but the advantage of the internet is that the story can get the length it deserves without worrying about how much space is left in the paper. Making that decision can only make the product better.

Malaria, TB and Laptops

In an effort to explain just how monumental the Internet is and will become, Phil Noble asked if you would rather be a Harvard-educated kid in America with no computer or a peasant in India with one. His answer: the peasant in India. He went on to say that he predicts that in the future, poor kids all over the world will be getting $100 laptops.

This may be a first, but I am not the idealist in this debate.

I asked during tonight’s “The Future of Politics Online” dinner discussion, if we - as in wealthy Westerners - have failed to get enough mosquito nets and malaria pills to the world’s poorest children, who’s going to give them laptops?

And even if they get a laptop, what about Internet access? Electricity? Education on how to use the laptop effectively? Northwestern University professor Eszter Hargittai argued at USC on April 16 that technological advances have not lead to a Tom Friedman “flat world” but rather to more social inequalities and a deeper digital divide.

Some journalists in the audience responded that the poor already have these technological capabilities. The widespread use of cell phones - rather than land lines - was given as an example.

But a cell phone is not a laptop. It does not require electricity or much training.

Furthermore, is that really where wealthy donors should be spending their limited funds? Yes, it is better to teach a man to fish, and maybe the poor would greatly benefit from being connected to the global community. But if millions of children are dying from malaria, tuberculosis, AIDS and starvation, what good is a laptop?

The Big 3 Weigh In

Aron Pilhofer of the New York Times lamented his web site’s lack of interesting features, saying it was nothing more than posting the day’s paper online.

“I don’t think we are doing anything smart,” said Pilhofer.  “Who is doing anything smart?’

Jason Manning, a politics editor at the Washington Post, opportunistically threw up his arm, which drew some scattered laughter.  I am inclined to agree that the Post does outdo the Times in its blog content, particularly in the politics field, where they have some great non-stop political junkie content put out by Chris Cilliza in his excellent blog, The Fix.

Michael Owen, a young web producer at the Los Angeles Times offered that his paper is trying to cover the political races through the California perspective: that the state serves as the “ATM” for politicians who raise tremendous amounts of money here, but don’t stay to campaign since we reliably line up in the blue column.

Looking at the L.A. Times site they do in fact have an excellent feature for tracking money found here.  You enter a zip code and can find out who your neighbors are giving money to.  Do you live in a Clinton, Edwards, or Obama neighborhood?  Or in the case of East Los Angeles (90022), a 100% McCain neighborhood (only $1000 has been donated).  Here is your chance to find out. 

The discussion also turned to finding ways to keep blog readers involved.  Drew Clark of the Center of Public Integrity talked about the importance of having interaction through blog comments, pointing out that sites that just allow the comments to add up without addressing any of them quickly lose popularity, while those where the original blogger weighs in on the issues brought up in the comments section prosper.

Colin Delaney of epolitics.com praised slate.com for its comments section, and noted that the site isolates the best reader comments in a section called In the Fray, which allows people to navigate the section without reading hundreds of comments.

However, Martin Wicksol, of the Orange County Register, noted in a side conversation that too much interaction can be a bad thing.  The ocregister.com web site has rules that allow readers to delete comments if three posters agree they are offensive.  Unfortunately, this led to readers banding together to delete the comments of people they did not agree with.