A 'middle man' for grassroots journalism?

Over the past few months, banner ads for Associated Content — a blog-style website that touts itself as “The People’s Media Company” — have been circulating on a wide variety of journalism-related websites and blogs.

What was Associated Content up to? Was it trying to be a new media outlet like the Huffington Post? A MySpace for the literary set? A new kind of Digg/Newsvine/Reddit/Furl/Fark/etc.? Unlike other “citizen journalism”/user-generated content sites, AC appeared to be paying for content, and often.

As I further explored AC, I found quality written essays, video and audio, all sorts of content-producing tutorials, an in-depth FAQ and a lot more information about it than I could take in at one sitting. AC is transparent about every aspect of what it offers its content producers, including detailed information on the types and kinds of rights one can choose for his or her submitted content.

AC is involved with and listening to its community, looking out for its interests in many different ways. On the company’s blog, AC founder Luke Beatty, fresh from attending the Online Publisher’s Association conference in London, acknowledged a problem that he and some in the community have with the term “user-generated content” — and that as far as AC’s content producers and Beatty were concerned, the term, as it applies to AC’s content, was inaccurate and should be dropped.

What would make a guy like Beatty — a former member of the executive management team at search developer WAND, Inc. — want to start a media company that revolves around what people wanted to publish, when they want to publish it? Where were the celebrities and guru-types? The political polemics and other populist forms of content production that seemed to be keeping other media companies afloat? What media company in its right mind is not only willing to pay for high-quality submissions but even kick stuff back to Content Produces for clean-up so that they could be paid? It all seemed to fly in the face of orthodox new-media company logic.

And that’s probably what makes Luke Beatty, Associated Content, and all its Content Producers a most curiously good read.

OJR: What’s the history of Associated Content?

Luke Beatty: I founded AC a little over two years ago, at around the same time that blogs reached the hundred-monkey-moment of ubiquity and it became obvious, painfully obvious for some in the traditional media, that people were not only willing, but eager, to consume and produce content outside the traditional media machinery. I came from a search and taxonomy background [at Wand, Inc.] and I could see that search was really about content, specifically relevancy and inventory.

I wanted to flatten the traditional relationship between content providers, consumers and advertisers so that all three groups could participate, friction-free, in the content economy in a consistent, advertiser-friendly format.

OJR: What made you want to launch a new content-focused media company at this time?

Beatty: It seemed like the right time to launch a media publishing company for the people, by the people, not just a “me me me” showcase like MySpace, but a chance to get published by and participate in a new kind of media company. Associated Content launched as “The People’s Media Company” [about a year and half after MySpace and a couple of months before YouTube], with my old college roommate, Tim Armstrong [now Google’s VP of advertising sales] as the non-executive chairman of the board.

OJR: Where’s “home” for Associated Content?

Beatty: We have offices in Denver and New York.

OJR: What’s meant by the tagline “The People’s Media Company?”

Beatty: Being “The People’s Media Company” means that the people get to publish what they want, and the people determine which content rises to the top. AC does include elements of both “citizen journalism” and “social networking,” but not in the way those terms are typically bandied about lately.

OJR: Then, what kind of “citizen journalism” does AC offer?

Beatty: We’re not focused on offering on-the-spot citizen coverage of breaking news, though we do have some of that. We offer more of what newspapers call “service” info and feature material, including a lot of “how-to” articles and videos from real people who’ve “been there and done that.” A great example is this article, which won AC’s first annual “People’s Media Award” for top content of 2006… it’s a really well-written, poignant first-person account of how not to freak out if you find out you’re HIV positive, by Barry Freiman: http://www.associatedcontent.com/article/25442/getting_hiv_isnt_a_death_sentence.html

The People’s Media Award winner for Top Content Producer is Timothy Sexton; you can visit his Content Producer page here: http://www.associatedcontent.com/user/1624/timothy_sexton.html

You can check out the complete list of People’s Media Awards winners here: http://www.associatedcontent.com/pma

We also have a tremendous amount of hyperlocal, how-to and general interest material, which does very well, and tremendous depth of content across a wide range of perennially popular niche topics.

OJR: Can you explain how AC’s community works? How is it different from social networking sites?

Beatty: Community-wise, we have very active backstage forums where Content Producers share tips and support, but also feel free to criticize each others’ work. The community also provides strong feedback to me and the rest of the team, and that’s as it should be. It has to be totally transparent and open. Content Producers often riff off of one another’s content. I’ve heard of many instances where AC Content Producers located in the same geographic area have met and collaborated not just online but in real life, which is great.

At the end of the day, it’s all about the content; but the community aspect is also hugely important. Many people become contributors to AC because they want to sharpen or share their skills and insights as part of a larger community of purpose. It’s not the same as having your own blog or profile page at a social-networking site where you have a stand-alone soapbox aimed at just your circle of friends. We’ve found that the people who consistently contribute quality content are more often than not the same people who participate most actively in the “community” aspects of AC. I see our most popular and prolific Content Producers as being analogous to “Power Sellers” on eBay. EBay is a commerce site, not a social networking site, just as AC is a publishing platform, not a social networking play, but the social aspects are central to the site’s mojo.

OJR: Can you give us a sense of the size of AC’s community, and are there some “average” characteristics to Content Producers?

Beatty: AC is right now reaching the milestone of 50,000 registered Content Producers, up from 10,000 six months ago, with roughly 20 percent actively submitting content. There’s really no “average” CP profile; the pool is incredibly diverse, roughly reflecting the diversity of the online population at large, though it’s interesting that about 40 percent self-identify upon registration as full or part-time media professionals.

OJR: What are the advantages to being featured on AC vs. publishing to one’s own independent blog?

Beatty: AC has earned its reputation as a venue that responds quickly and publishes, and in many cases pays hard cash, fast, which is a big motivator for many, particularly for freelancers who regularly get ignored [and] strung along by other, less responsive outlets. Many contributors are attracted to being part of something bigger than themselves. They like participating in a new kind of democratic media company. Anyone can write an article, or create a video and upload it and it gets looked at promptly by a real person on our content-buying team. It either gets published or kicked back for polishing fast. If it’s something we especially want, you get a quick, clear offer for payment.

On the technology side, AC provides optimization and exposure in a consistent, advertiser-friendly format, and on the community side, there’s support and the feeling that you’re part of something larger than just yourself. Many of our Content Producers have migrated their content from personal blogs to AC because they didn’t want the administrative hassles of hosting their own blogs anymore. Others continue to maintain their own blogs, but see AC as a way to magnify the impact of their personal blogs, building a bigger audience for both outlets.

OJR: Does AC fact-check or edit content in any way? Is there an official “editorial staff?”

Beatty: Nope. Our content-buying team reviews each piece of content submitted and often kicks back to the producer for polishing. We won’t publish content that contains obscenities, but there’s absolutely no editorial control exerted. The content team chooses the pieces that we highlight based on organic popularity and subjective calls regarding quality. They issue calls for desired content, but they don’t do line editing or any other kind of editing or fact-checking. We could go down that road, but if we did that we wouldn’t be “The People’s Media Company.” AC is a publishing platform; it’s people-driven, not editor-driven. While that may be scary to people in traditional media, it’s not at all scary to regular people, who are now accustomed to a media diet that regularly ranges beyond traditional, “authoritative” sources.

OJR: One of the big incentives to publishing on AC, at first glance, looks to be that one might get paid. I understand that content is “bid” on before it is paid for. Can you further explain the bidding process?

Beatty: The bidding process is totally transparent. We’ve built a system that allows people to easily submit content for publication. Each submitted piece of content is reviewed promptly by a real person on our content buying team. If it needs polishing, we’ll bounce it back to be re-worked, and it if it’s something we think that people will want to access (based on our proprietary evaluation criteria), we’ll tell the contributor exactly what we’re willing to pay, and we’ll typically bid higher for exclusive rights. The key is that the communication is fast and straightforward. We put the Content Producer in the driver’s seat. If we’re interested in paying for the submitted content, we make a clear, fast offer. If the offer is accepted, we pay promptly, which many of our contributors really appreciate. But for many, the prospect of payment is clearly not the key motivator for contributing; many submit for “no pay.”

OJR: Does one lose all rights to republish any content that’s bid on and paid for by AC?

Beatty: It’s flexible. We keep the Content Producers in control by enabling them to submit each piece of content for either “exclusive” or “non-exclusive” publication. We typically pay more for exclusive submissions, and we currently hold exclusive rights to about 50 percnet of the content available on the site.

OJR: When did you start taking audio and video? Is audio and video content also paid for?

Beatty: We started accepting, and paying, for video and audio in the first half of 2005. As is the case for text, AC is unique in that we pay upfront for video content rather than resting on the revenue share model.

OJR: What’s AC’s revenue model? What are future plans for AC and its content producers?

Beatty: AC currently has two revenue sources: advertising and content syndication. We’ve spent next to nothing, just a few small campaigns running, and in the last six months, submissions and traffic have soared exponentially.
Fortunately we built a system that was designed to scale without significant retooling, so we’re able to devote our attention to finding additional ways to reward people for submitting content that’s apt to attract enough interest to support advertising.

OJR: What incentives and features will you offer AC’s Content Producers in the future?

Beatty: We just launched a beta of a new page view bonus program to augment our upfront payments for desirable content: http://www.associatedcontent.com/performancebonus.html.

In order to offer this bonus, we felt it was necessary to provide our Content Producers with a personal dash board of statistics to track the popularity of individual pieces of content. This is in line with our “people’s media” philosophy. A contributor to a traditional media company never even gets a glimpse into how his or her content performs over time; at Associated Content, we’ve tried to create an atmosphere of total transparency, because we’re all in this together. There’s been a lot of talk in the industry about the need for transparency in reporting to advertisers, but nobody talks about transparency for the people who actually produce the content. At AC, our goal is to demystify the process and make it open and honest for all.

Everything we do moving forward is driven by that philosophy; everyone wants exposure and everyone wants a clear deal.

I think sometimes people have a hard time getting what AC is all about, because it’s so simple and obvious and it’s as if we’re hiding in plain site. But we have nothing to hide, and that’s the whole point. AC is what it is: a place where anyone can get published (maybe get paid) and advertisers get to go both broad and deep into the contextual niches in a consistent, advertiser-friendly environment.

Canadian site finds new ways to elicit reader reports

Among the 350 members of the mainstream media that packed a Vancouver, B.C. Superior Courtroom where the trial of Robert Pickton began on January 22, were two “citizen correspondents” from Orato.com.

Based in Vancouver, Orato.com went live in mid-June of 2006 and hosts a worldwide cadre of citizen correspondents. To say Orato.com’s content is unique may be something of an understatement. Glancing down its front page, one can find an array of fascinating stories: from “I Biked From Mendoza to Alaska: The Story of My 15 Thousand Mile Solo Trip” to “The Day The World Stopped: Surviving the Mumbai Bombings” to “The Worst 100 Days of My Life” (about the hijacking of a Somali ship sent to deliver good to victims of the Tsunami in 2005) to “Bukowski Spotting In New York.”

Editor-in-chief Paul Sullivan is a 30-year veteran of both print and broadcast media. He has been Western Editor of The Globe and Mail, Managing Editor of The Vancouver Sun, Editor-in-Chief of the Winnipeg Sun, host of CBC Radio’s Vancouver morning show and Senior News Editor at The Journal news program on CBC-TV. Sullivan is also President and Director of Strategy at Sullivan Media.

(About the trial: Pickton, a 57-year old pig butcher, is accused in the killings of 26 sex workers from Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside section. This first trial will deal with six of the charges. This is the biggest murder trial in Canadian history, and is drawing comparisons with the OJ Simpson and Scott Peterson trials. News media is being tightly controlled by the courts: reporting information about the case is prohibited until after the jury has heard it, and media cannot identify websites revealing banned information. The only television coverage will be closed-circuit broadcasts to the media overflow room, where most of the news media will be observing the trial. There are only 16 seats for media in the courtroom.”)

OJR: Did Orato.com start with a “beta” site? When did it officially go “live”?

Paul Sullivan: We’ve had a sort of “beta” version of Orato online since 1999, with a number of demonstration stories. It sat there for a while, while we slowly… very slowly… figured out how to do it. In 2005, we revamped the site, soliciting correspondents. We ended up with 1500 correspondents, many of whom were pros hoping to be paid, as in the early days, we figured we’d run a mix of citizen and professional journalists’ stories. The pros would be paid for their stories, and we thought we’d ask people intending to post unsolicited stories to pay $2 a post.

The current version of the site, one which allows people to post stories which we feature in a variety of newsy ways, has been live since mid-June, 2006. As we got closer to the date of launch, we decided to drop the necessity to pay for posts – on either end, as it seemed like a barrier to activity. Now we offer $100 for the best story of the month, selected by the editors from reader and editor five-star finalists, and that’s it.

OJR: What inspired you to lean toward first-person, citizen-journalism rather than creating a publication featuring only professional journalists?

Sullivan: The inspiration for Orato comes from Vancouver businessman Sam Yehia, who I’ve known since 1999, who has been enthusiastic about a site featuring first-person, eyewitness reporting from people involved (intentionally or otherwise) in stories. People who are living these stories. Back in the early days, no one had yet coined the term citizen journalism, and our vision was (and is) broader than that. Anyone can post on Orato, even if they’re a pro. Pros often do, even if they don’t get paid, just to get the story online.

OJR: The various Canadian mainstream press outlets have referred to Orato as either “first-person news” “citizen journalism” or “community journalism”– do you see any difference in the terms,?

Sullivan: We’re always looking for first-person reporting. We don’t always get it, but that’s our preferred voice. It’s more immediate and, I think, stories come naturally when they’re told in the first person. We offer citizen journalists a platform, and we encourage citizen journalism, but we are not exclusive in any sense. Anyone can post on Orato. All you have to do is register and be prepared not to get paid!

As for “community journalism” – don’t know where that came from, although I have said we are a community of first-person correspondents from around the world – and we have more than 1800 registered to date. First-person is obviously a voice and a perspective; I would define citizen journalism as reporting and analysis from people not trained as journalists; and community journalism must be journalism that comes from and pertains to a recognizable community. I plead guilty to the first two, not the third, unless the world makes sense as a community – the global community, perhaps.

OJR: Oranto.com offers $100(USD) for five high-rated citizen stories. In what other ways does Orato encourage citizen contributions?

Sullivan: We do a number of things to encourage citizen contributions: Every week, we post “This Week in Orato” and “Orato’s Top 10 Story Ideas,” at the same time sending them out as an email to correspondents. We also offer $100 to the best story of the month. We hope that these efforts spur people to post and take some care with their posts.

We’ve had several winners—the monthly winner is posted on the home page with a link to his or her bio. Stories are rated on a five-star system by readers and editors – you’ll see Editors’ Picks and Readers Picks highlighted throughout the site. Our software allows only one vote per IP address, but that doesn’t prevent your mom or your boyfriend from pumping your stars via another computer. So it’s not flawless. But I find that as we gain more traffic, the stars seem to fit the best stories (from my point of view).

OJR: Can you explain a bit about Orato’s editorial staff: Are they also writing stories? Are you looking for Orato to be a melding of citizen and professional journalism?

Sullivan: Staff are Heather Wallace the first a graduate of Langara College’s j-program here in Vancouver; and Cecilia Jamasmie, a grad of University of British Columbia’s masters program in journalism, also here in Vancouver . Cecilia was a student in one of my classes at UBC. Heather is the senior editor and Cecilia the associate. Both will edit stories and work with correspondents. We try to pick our spots – some stories we’ll assign (like the Pickton trial). We’ll work with pitches. We’ll encourage people who have posted on other sites to customize their pieces for Orato.com. We contact contributors when we want to feature their stories in one of our various showcase windows and work with their pieces. To date, every story on the site has at least been read – carefully – by an editor, and many have been edited (with the correspondent’s cooperation).

I think the best way to describe our goal is to create and sustain a quality environment so our visitors find the site and its contents accessible and readable and our correspondents feel some pride of authorship when they see the finished product.

OJR: Do you encourage interaction between the editorial staff and people who comment on stories? Or is the “Comments” feature just to give readers their say?

Sullivan: We love it whenever conversation breaks out over a story, and neither Heather nor Cecilia (nor I for that matter) can resist engaging the correspondents in conversation. I’m a little frustrated by the lack of user friendliness of the Forum right now – the commenter has to leave the story to register, and then has to click back to the story to post the comment, which doesn’t encourage conversation. We’re working on a new version of the content management system (it’s Drupal 5.0 based) that will allow people to comment on stories more easily.

OJR: Where, and who is Orato’s community–the hyper-local Vancouver area? Orato’s readers? or just the folks who leave comments and interact?

Sullivan: We interact most often with the people registered on the site. By registering, they’ve expressed interest in being part of the Orato community. So we correspond with them weekly (unless they no longer want to receive emails from Orato, then we take them off the list like the responsible e-mailers we are). At the same time, we try to strike up conversations with people on our site, and we participate in the citizen journalism community by joining conversations on other sites. While we have some cherished regular contributors, everyone who considers his or herself part of the Orato community is automatically an honored member of the community! We’re an international site with a Vancouver , Canada flavor (if we were hyper-Canadian, I would have spelled that word “flavour”), because that’s where we are. But if you explore the site, I think you’ll be amazed at the dispatches from far-flung regions. Interestingly, most of our traffic comes from the US.

OJR: Two weeks before the trial, the Canadian Press reported on Orato’s call for citizen journalists to cover the trial–and that one of the criteria was for the person or persons to have worked in the sex trade. Who are the people covering the trial, and what will they be doing during the trial?

Sullivan: The two people, Pauline VanKoll and Trisha Baptie, are accredited and at the first day of the Pickton trial today (January 22). They answered the call on Orato and we were impressed with the quality of their e-mails. We interviewed them and signed them. They’re what we call “citizen correspondents.” We’ll see how the coverage unfolds. I think, though, they will spend most of their time in one of the overflow rooms adjacent to the main courtroom, covered by closed circuit – there are only 16 spots in the main courtroom. Sometimes I think the women are wondering what they’ve got themselves into, with all the media requests for interviews.

OJR: Orato offers free advertising. So, without advertising, what’s driving Orato’s business model?

Sullivan: Not all advertising is free – we got a $147 cheque from Google Adsense the other day! Our plan is to build traffic to the point where we can offer custom onsite ads at an industry-competitive CPM. Further down the pike, we also plan to syndicate story packages to interested buyers. But right now, our mission is to get the page views up.

Can we all just learn to interact?

As more newspapers use the Web to engage with readers, rather than treating the medium as just another publishing platform, their reporters will need to learn the skills necessary for interacting with the public. Unfortunately, these skills are not evident merely from observation, and take some time to develop.

Consider two recent failures: Los Angeles Times columnist Michael Hiltzik, a Pulitzer prize winner, lost his blog, and print column, when he was caught posting under aliases on his and other blogs, and Justin Quinn, a court reporter for the Lancaster (PA) Intelligencer-Journaller, left the paper after he was caught posting comments to the I-J’s online forums using pseudonyms.

In both cases, the reporters tried to engage the public according to what they perceived to be the rules of the game. Their intuitions, however, were incorrect. The reporters not only violated the mores of online communication, but also violated ethical principles of journalism.

Rushing reporters to interact is, in some respects, increasing a fear of interaction and confusion about how to interact. The popular impression of blog comments sections, and sometimes of blogging in general, is that the interaction is less than civil — and that the comments sections inevitably end up resembling trolled-to-death, flame-happy “echo chambers.”

That’s not the case when it comes to interaction on many popular blogs. Rebecca Blood, who has over the years written extensively on blogger ethics, gives several highly constructive don’ts of interaction in The Weblog Handbook — don’t attack others (but feel free to disagree), don’t ask for links, and don’t respond to flames. Blogging evangelist Andy Wibbles, in his book BlogWild! gives what he believes are some basic guidelines for “cultivating a climate for comments”: don’t be afraid to “unapprove” a comment, but respond to every comment posted. Even send a separate thank you e-mail. Many bloggers will follow Blood’s suggestions, and implement at least the former of Wibbles’ suggestions. Even the most ardent bloggers are often caught in a comment-response time-crunch and don’t have time to double-up on acknowledgments.

Time-crunch is a concern for the interactive newsroom, and evidence of a time-crunch for reporters surfaced in a recent article by Washington Post ombudsman Deborah Howell. In “Have You Emailed the Post Lately?” (Sunday, May 21, 2006) Howell notes that “Reporters today get more daily feedback from readers than any journalists in history,” and surveys several editors and reporters at the Post about how they manage the email they receive from the public. The response was mixed, with some reporters loving it, and others hating the “rude, crude, sexist, racist, anti-Semitic email” that seems to come as knee-jerk reactions to stories. Howell, though, having been the lightening rod for a series of hostile comments posted to Washingtonpost.com in response to a statements she made in January regarding Jack Abramoff, understands how an insufficient response to the public can harm a paper. She concludes: “The opinions can be accepted or not, but knowing them is important. And replying–even quickly,–to local subscribers lets them know they’re needed. We blow them off at our peril.”

However, when we consider that the position of ombudsman did not exist prior to 1967, and that many newspapers still do not have this sort of basic attempt at interfacing with the public in their newsrooms, how can newsrooms expect reporters to make the leap into knowing exactly how to communicate like bloggers?

When the transparent, peer-to-peer interaction necessary to interact effectively on blogs has never truly been part of the average reporter’s day to day tasks, and when negative perceptions of blog commenters seem to overshadow the positive aspects of blogger to blogger interactions, newspapers in their rush to interact online can surely expect to have some very confused people in their newsrooms. And some might end up making very big, career-costing mistakes.

But is it even necessary to even have comments on a blog? It is generally agreed upon — although often debated — within the blogging community whether or not blogs need comments to be considered “real” blogs in the first place. That ideal, though, has been challenged in the current environment of “Web 2.0,” where conversation and peer-to-peer communication are as valuable, if not more valuable, than the dissemination of information, linking to others, and good storytelling. Newspapers are aware of this, and are establishing policies that allow for interaction, but are not educating reporters on the subtleties necessary for effective interaction.

In an effort to try to figure out how reporters can bridge maintaining journalism’s ethics while developing the skills necessary for positive interaction, I recently asked conversational media consultant, freelance reporter and former editor Amy Gahran for some suggestions. First, Amy advised that reporters, “get rid of [their] egos.” When reporters blog or write about subjects that get people emotionally charged, “realize that you are not responsible for how they feel about it” when they leave a comment. Learn to intuit the syntax comments, and try to “separate what they say from the tone in which it is conveyed. Then decide what’s worth listening (or responding) to and what’s not. ”

The appropriate response will also depend on cultivating a non-reactive temperament: “Learn not to snap back at hurtful, rude, inaccurate comments that misconstrue what you say or report on. It’s okay to say things strongly, and to be clear about what you are saying, but resist the urge to react back” to readers’ negative or contentious comments. Even if they’re acting like jerks right now, on another issue later on they might be valuable allies,” Gahran said. If you disagree with a commenter, make your point and “give them some room to save face. Most will tend to take the option.” If they persist to hammer at you ” you can ignore them or take out the big guns of the witty repost,” Gahran said. Just be prepared for the consequences.

Not all comments a reporter receives, however, will be negative, and Gahran suggested that reporters guard against big-ego responses to positives as well. “Don’t too swelled a head when people like what you say. You’re not responsible for that reaction either.”

Unlike standard journalism that strives for independent objectivity, blogs function best when the bloggers’ opinions and thought processes are known. There is room for both types of communication — objective and conversational — to develop within a newspaper’s web presence. “Not all journalism needs to be conversational. When it is conversational, it should have balance. When someone points out mistakes and makes a reporter think extra-hard about what’s been said, it should give a reporter more to write about.

“Reporter-bloggers should strive to develop a level of transparency. People want to see and know that the reporter is a person and revealing one’s thought processes can help. Show how you got your information and where you got it from,” Gahran advised. This will allow readers to backtrack and discover their own perspective. They may then bring up points that cause the reporter to re-think his/her position. If readers “see that a reporter is willing to reconsider a position in the face of criticism, readers will respond well to it,” Gahran said.

Asking reporters to blog, and to then interact like successful bloggers, is perhaps at this point in time asking for a quantum leap in the ways in which reporters have been instructed to perform their jobs. Misperceptions about blogging abound — in part because of the constant negative attention that is given to contentious comments and snarky blogs as much as it comes from simply not knowing the community. Focusing on the negatives, however, only serves to feed a fear of interaction. Positive interaction can occur, but reporters must first cultivate a non-confrontational temperament and other subtle skills — such as interpretation of syntax and a level of transparency — if they are going to interact successfully.

If newspapers are truly interested in cultivating interaction, and do not want to see some of their best reporters go down in flames because of bad interactions, newspapers will need to do more than give their reporter-bloggers a “blogging policy.” Newspapers cannot expect reporters to be able to immediately intuit a form of conversational media where the manner of interaction appear to run counter to the ethics journalists must uphold in their reporting, and has its own particular communication quirks. Rather, newspapers should neither rush nor refuse their reporters the task of interaction. They should allow for exploration and for asking questions.

A strategy for increasing revenues based on increased reporter interaction cannot be rushed. To do so might not just cause more reporters to unintentionally wreck their careers, but may also have the undesirable effect of driving readers, and revenue, away from newspapers.