News Leadership 3.0
Posts tagged with: Jay Rosen
March 11, 2010
2010 was supposed to be the year of the online pay wall in the mainstream print news industry. But so far, we’ve seen little action on that front. (Among other things, the impending arrival of the iPad and the increasing urgency of mobile may be drawing news industry attention away from the idea that they might be able to charge people for access to content on their Web site.) At the same time, a different ethic may be taking hold. Happily, this one seems better suited to the Web.
It’s the ethic of participation and sharing.
A few examples from the past week or so:
ProPublica’s Reporting Recipe - ProPublica posted its Reporting Recipe, detailing how ProPublica and The Los Angeles Times pulled off an investigation that discovered serious breakdowns in the state of California’s regulation of nurses.
From the intro: “We realize that many newsrooms face competing priorities and limited resources, so we’re making our reporting recipe public ... We understand that many reporters and members of the public will not be able to dedicate the same resources. Still, there are many things you can do to get a good understanding of how well your state regulators are performing.”
The note also includes contact info for ProPublica staffers and lets users sign up for a conference call about the investigation. Wow. What a gift!
Open311 - The cities of San Francisco and Washington, D.C. boosted collaboration on a shared, open standard for municipal information with the announcement that those cities would launch the Open311 API within weeks. 311 systems enable citizens to report problems such as pot holes or graffiti, to government via Web or texting. The systems promise to give officials access to more information and to make them more responsive without the need for more inspectors. The idea of the Open311 initiative is to give cities a boost in developing their systems, to facilitate improvements by the development community, and to give systems the capacity to work together (jargon alert: This is often referred to as making them “interoperable”).
Social media editors - Of course, sharing is alive and well on social media. Encouragingly, the American Journalism Review reports, that more mainstream news organizations are assigning staff to focus on social networks. I hope these moves help traditional organizations move past their view that social networks are a one-way delivery system and I hope the journalists in these new roles invest some time in figuring out how do a better job of tending online comments and fostering a worthwhile discussion. Other sites manage to do this, and it’s a mystery to my why more news outlets don’t seize this opportunity to engage with their users.
Twitter - Twitter is my preferred social network, and, as I have pointed out, it’s my most significant source of news and information about topics I care about. Alberto Ibargüen, president and CEO of the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, emphasized a similar idea last week at Knight’s recent Media Learning Seminar for leaders of the nation’s community foundations, many of whom are stepping up to fund local and state news and information projects. Ibargüen noted that he’d heard some at the conference express skepticism that information delivered by new digital technology “couldn’t be taken seriously.” He showed slides of tweets by Jay Rosen and others to reinforce the idea that people are sharing serious information and discussion on social platforms. “They are real and they are useful and they are how we will continue to deliver information.” (Here’s the video of Ibargüen’s comments. He talks about Twitter from 8:00 through 11:14.) (Disclosure: I do some consulting with Knight Foundation.)
Reporter as host - John Temple, editor of the Peer News local start up in Honolulu, reinforced the idea of sharing and participation very aptly in job descriptions for the newsroom staff members formerly known as reporters. “Today it’s my pleasure to announce the names of the first people who’ll be joining the service as “reporter and host.” Yes, you read that correctly. The job profile for reporters at Peer News includes the role of host, reflecting our commitment to community engagement as a central part of the reporters’ role,” Temple said on his blog.
Local news partnerships - The Pro journalism vs. Am(ateur) journalism argument has taken up a lot of bandwidth. That’s changing. Now it’s about Pro AND Am, working together to cover the news. Pro-am efforts are merging on many fronts. More on that in my comments on the Pew Project for Excellence in Journalism‘s annual State of the News Media report, to be released Monday.
What is your news organization doing to foster sharing and participation online? Please post your ideas in the comments. Thanks.
Bonus link: Yesterday, Josh Stearns posted this list of collaborations among news organizations.
By Michele McLellan, 03/11/10 at 5:39 am
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March 16, 2010
Journalists can play a critical role of providing broad and deep context that helps us understand the headlines. It’s starting to happen at news organizations such as Voice of San Diego and Texas Tribune. Context was a hot topic at SXSW this week and the discussion is worth following.
I’ve been critical of the lack of relevance of much of what we call news. Journalists often cover processes much better than they cover substance and nuance. So what we produce seems to have the opposite effect of what we say we’re trying to do: We foster detachment rather than engagement.
For example, how can I engage in the coverage of health care reform that is coming out of Washington, D.C. these days? I am vitally interested in the topic. As a self-employed, aging boomer, I pay a premium for a high-deductible health insurance plan that can cut me loose the minute I get very sick.
While I am mildly interested in the headlines about the last-minute vote-snagging on Capital Hill, I feel disconcerted and ignorant about all but the major provisions of the bill that the House may or may not pass.
I would like someone to tell me a lot more about what the bill might mean for me, the benefits, the risks, the trade offs. The answers are probably out there, but I just don’t have time to pull together the best sources and distill the key facts and arguments.
Isn’t that what journalists are for?
That question underlies a discussion Monday at SXSW Interactive in Austin, TX. A panel on “The Future of Context” pointed to an exciting role that journalists can embrace in the digital age. (I was not present but I followed it on Twitter; hashtag #futureofcontext.)
One member of the panel, Jay Rosen, has aptly described the current situation this way: “Suppose your laptop continually received updates to software that was never installed on your laptop.”
That does so describe how I feel about health care. I’m getting the incessant updates via headline and talking head. But I don’t have the background, the context (the software) that integrates and contextualizes the updates.
Isn’t that what journalists are for?
Here are links to more information about this discussion:
“Contextualizing Context,” by Elise Hu, summarizes the panel discussion.
Steve Myers’ live blog of the panel is archived on Poynter Online.
Rosen’s “News Without the Narrative Needed to Make Sense of the News.”
“An Antidote for Web Overload,” by Matt Thompson. Thompson, who recently joined NPR after a stint with the Knight Foundation, focused his 2008-09 Reynolds Journalism Institute fellowship on context in the news.
Also, there was a related discussion Monday at an event on the business of journalism at Reynolds. I posted a few highlights.
Update: One more important link: Future of Context Web site. (Hat tip to Staci D. Kramer.)
Here are examples of topics pages created by online news sites:
Rosen points to Giant Pool of Money, a This American Life segment that explains the mortgage banking crisis.
Texas Tribune, inspired by Matt Thompson, has dozens of topic pages that provide explanation and context.
Voice of San Diego has developed a regular feature called San Diego Explained. Here’s one on food stamps.
So this may be the beginning of a context page about context and journalism. Does it help you understand the concepts? How could I make it better?
Are you working on the future of context? I’d like to hear about examples of this work.
By Michele McLellan, 03/16/10 at 7:44 am
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July 26, 2010
The tired idea that born-on-the-Web news sites will replace traditional media is wrong-headed, and it’s past time that academic research and news reports reflect that. Jay Rosen, the New York University professor and media critic, calls them “replaceniks,” and it’s an apt term. Rosen is talking about people who insist on evaluating new, born-on-the-web news outlets as potential replacements for established news organizations, such as your local newspaper. As if.
As if the new online publishers are trying to replace the local traditional outlets. As if newspaper-centric standards of dailiness and comprehensiveness matter the way they did pre-Web. As if citizens can only turn to one or the other type of outlet amidst a vast and diverse emerging new ecosystem and only one type of news site will prevail.
As one online publisher, Timothy Rutt of AltadenaBlog, said in comments on a recent Time story about local news start ups:
I think those of us who run community news sites know that we’re not the only source of our reader’s news. I HOPE our readers are continuing to read newspapers for state and national politics, pro sports, etc. Our niche is covering the important parts of everyday life in a community that larger scale operations tend to ignore—for us, that means church fundraisers, local concerts and art gallery events, wildlife sightings (when a cougar is sighted in your neighborhood, you want to know!), etc. Sometimes we’re your best source—recently the cops shut down several streets because a suicidal man was sitting in his car with a gun. We covered that in real time, as people wanted to know why the helicopter was buzzing, why the streets were closed, etc. Readers on the scene—hunkered down on their floors—sent us dispatches. We’re a small community without its own radio or TV station, but our site was able to keep people informed as it was going on live.
Steve Buttry, the Director of Community Engagement at the Washington, D.C start up TBD.com and recent Editor & Publisher Editor of the Year, offers a strong analysis of the shortcomings of one recent study, ““Comparing Legacy News Sites with Citizen News and Blog Sites: Where’s the Best Journalism?” from University of Missouri researchers in “Academics measure new media (again) by old media yardstick”. (Post includes the Missouri study and a response from Margaret Duffy, a respected Missouri researcher.)
Buttry wrote:
For academics studying whether “citizen journalism” is going to “replace” traditional journalism, let me save you some time: It won’t. It’s not trying to. It shouldn’t.
Journalism is not, never has been and should not become a zero-sum game.
I share Buttry’s criticisms. I think such studies fail to assess other sources of news and information, and I think these all complement, rather than rival, traditional news media. Also, a traditional newsroom of any size is going to produce consistently better journalism than a lone blogger but I think overlooks the idea that it only takes one determined digger to uncover an important story that a larger outlet might miss.
I pushed back at a similar study, also from the University of Missouri, where I recently completed a one-year fellowship at the Reynolds Journalism Institute. The Project for Excellence in Journalism invited my comments and I responded in February with an essay that said:
... the new news ecology is dizzying. As it develops in ways and with a speed we can’t predict, the requirements of academic research may leave out the context of a rapidly changing environment. As a result, this new research could be read to reinforce the out-of-date idea that citizen news and professional news are in competition.
If professionals and nonprofessionals were ever producing news and information as distinctly separate groups, this is becoming less so every day. They’re merging. They’re joining forces in exciting experiments that will help shape the future of news, information and civic engagement.
I also added my own community news research to my fellowship activities. I decided to evaluate as many new local sites as possible against a very simple set of criteria (drafted with Jay Rosen’s help) that included producing original news; attempting to be accurate, fair and transparent; and working on a sustainable revenue model. My research partner, Missouri PhD student Adam Maksl, and I reviewed more than 1,200 sites, including sites on which the Missouri study for PEJ was based.
The result was a list of what I called “promising” online news sites, ones that are starting to figure things out. Perhaps not surprisingly, most of the sites on the list are run by or employ journalists, often working with citizen contributors, local nonprofits and foundation seed funding. At the same time, most put a very high priority on citizen engagement, more, I believe, than traditional news outlets typically do. That doesn’t mean these sites don’t struggle, especially with business and revenue aspects.
My point was to give us something specific to talk about rather than a replacenik either/or abstraction. I wanted to help us begin to understand what local news start ups may be able to accomplish and how we might help them do that. I also thought such a list might help some traditional news organizations think about how they might form local partnerships that would help provide better news and information to their communities. I reject the notion that there is only one solution for bringing news and information to communities. While established media may be an important part of any solution, I also reject the idea that effective ways of producing and delivering journalism must look just like what’s gone before.
My work bumped up against another replacenik offering last week, this one from Time magazine under the headline: “Are Hyperlocals Replacing Traditional Newspapers?”
As if. Or as John Paton (@jxpaton), CEO of the Journal Register Co. and 2009 E&P Publisher of the Year, tweeted: “Interesting Time story but headline shows the zero-sum attitude of those who don’t understand the new news ecology.”
Apparently the writer also didn’t understand what I told him about my research. Or perhaps my comments had to conform to the replacenik frame of the story. The result: My research conclusions were misstated.
According to Time, I “concluded that 1 in 10 hyperlocal sites is producing “good” content, some good enough to give traditional journalism a run for its money—sometimes literally.”
My response in the comments-
To clarify: I did NOT find or say that only one in 10 hyperlocal sites are “good.” I never made such an assessment.
First of all, I looked at a range of sites, not just hyperlocal ones. Out of more than 1,200, about one in 10 met a very specific list of criteria I developed, and I described them as “promising.”
List: bit.ly/micheleslist.
Criteria: http://bit.ly/sitecriteria
I think it’s impossible to use a blanket characterization of “good” or not. Is a site good if it’s useful? Is it good if it has a large user base? Is it good if journalists think it is? You get my drift. That’s why I tried to be very specific in my criteria.
As well, I did not say these sites give traditional media a run for their money. I don’t know that. I think it would vary from community to community and depend on a variety of factors that I did not study.
I also have said that IF nine out of 10 local news sites are not very good, as other research has asserted, then I think it’s valuable to study the other 10 percent to learn what they can teach us and support them. That’s what we’re doing at Block by Block: Community News Summit 2010 in September. Link: http://bit.ly/BlockByBlock
Ironically, the article cited the West Seattle blog as its example of “giving traditional media a run for their money”. As it happens, the West Seattle Blog has a content partnership with The Seattle Times.
The article also refers to the Knight Foundation as a “a nonprofit journalism organization,” which is sort of like calling a Mazerati “a car.” (Disclosure: I do consulting for the Knight Community Information Challenge, which funds community news start ups, and for the Knight journalism program.)
I e-mailed the Time writer, Gary Moscowitz and flagged my comments about how I was quoted. Here’s his response:
Thanks for the heads up, and thanks for posting your comment. The 1 in 10 comment got much debate from me throughout the editing process, but they seemed to be intent on keeping it. The “give them a run for their money” I know are not your words verbatim, just us paraphrasing.
So there it is. While I don’t buy into replacement thinking, indulge in this comparison: Many fledgling news sites do a better job of accuracy than Time managed on this story.
By Michele McLellan, 07/26/10 at 4:15 am
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August 16, 2010
As news organizations struggle for relevance and engagement, Jay Rosen’s “The Citizens Agenda in Campaign Coverage” revives a way for journalists to produce stories that mean something to voters.
The more things change, the more they stay the same. No kidding. If the latest dispatches from the campaign trail are any indication, we could be back in the 90s (or 80s or ...).
The horse race - who’s up today, what’s the marketing strategy, who has the most money to spend, and the fact-challenged barbs and counter-barbs - dominates much of what passes for elections coverage even in the pre-Labor Day going. It is, as Jay Rosen once said, as if news media believe citizens want above all to be spectators at their own bamboozlement. (Disclaimer: I report this comment from memory of over 15 years ago, and I want to attribute the idea. but it’s definitely “Jay said something like this.”)
This week, Rosen brought back a radical departure for campaign coverage that a few news organizations, notably The Charlotte Observer under editor Rich Oppel, tried in the 1990s. “The Citizens Agenda in Campaign Coverage” is not all that complicated.
The basic idea is for journalists to ask citizens what issue they want the candidates to address during the campaign, create an advisory group to help you hone the list, publish it, and use it to guide your coverage - including questions you ask candidates to address. Read Jay’s 10-step list here, and then come back, because I have a few additional suggestions.
In the 90s, few newspapers tried to create citizens’ agenda. Rosen says he thinks political journalists just didn’t want to do it. That’s part of it - the lure of conflict and the comfort of familiar practice (not to mention some journalist arrogance) run strong. I also recall that the old guard of the newspaper industry freaked out at any assertion that citizens might be better equipped to create an agenda than editors were. But those days and that old guard are gone. Now, the Web offers opportunities to deploy Rosen’s plan even more effectively.
We attempted a version of this plan at The Oregonian during the 1996 presidential campaign, when I was politics editor. Based on that long-ago experience, I have some suggestions to add to Jay’s excellent list:
- Set benchmarks for how much of your coverage will be devoted to issues on your citizens’ agenda. Make it more than half. Heck, try 75 percent. When we tried this back in the 90s, we had two open pages a day for campaign coverage (those were the days, right?). At least one full page had to be issues coverage. If we produced less, we reduced the amount of space overall for politics that day. What happened: This forced is to plan and devote reporter talent to issues coverage first and build the rest around it. On the Web, space may be less of a determinant, but you can use story counts.
- Write only briefs about daily doings, including the horse race and campaign strategy. Develop a series of questions to ask when considering expanding one of these stories. The key question: Does a closer look contribute to the citizens’ agenda or better understanding important issues and the qualifications of the candidate? If not, keep it brief.
- Assign a reporter to analyze campaign ads and statements and create a graphic that keeps content tight and forces the reporter to fact-check the advertising. Do the research and take a stand about what’s accurate and what’s not accurate, rather than relying on the opposition to shoot it down.
Sound like good political journalism? Let’s hope some of you give it a try. (And please let me know if you do.)
By Michele McLellan, 08/16/10 at 6:57 am
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