In the mid-1990s, Outing was one of the first reporters to write regularly on the emergence of online journalism, through a daily column on the Editor & Publisher website. That column decreased in frequency over the years, and Outing, who lives in Boulder, Colo., joined Florida-based Poynter as a full-time employee in 2001, bringing his group blog with him.

Now Outing will devote more time to his Enthusiast Group LLC, which he calls a “publisher of a network of citizen-media-driven websites about adventure sports and activities.”

McDougal literally wrote the book on Chandler, and muses on what has happened to the once free-spending Times and its pursuit of editorial excellence under Otis Chandler. The final graf is stunning:

“I didn’t come here to elevate the good old days, but to tell you that I envy you. If I were starting out today, I’d be pouring my energy into building my own website or joining one already in progress and asking myself the hard questions of what it is I care about, what it is I want to report on, what it is as an individual I have to say. I can’t help but believe that Otis would agree.”

In “Fear and Shivering in Second Life,” I’m trying to explore how the first-person reporter POV changes inside the online world of Second Life. This is only the first installment, and I’m looking for some advice from other journalists about how to proceed …

“My super screwed up last month, leaving my building without heat for 5 days; without hot water for 7 days; without a stove for two weeks. Gas companies were called and city inspectors inspected, but I still spent $110 in electricity running a space heater 24 hours a day. On top of all that, I lost my shot at publishing the best story I had all year.

“In real life, I was pounding away on my laptop and breathing puffs of frozen air. In Second Life, I was lounging on the tropical island pictured above, with a crew of pixilated characters that included a blue skinny Martian, a Goth girl with a shimmering halo, a foot-tall monkey with cymbals, and some guy dressed tight black pants who floated in mid-air, bitching about everything he saw.”

Keep reading …

From the post:

I like the fact you used the term ‘contributing writer’ – did you consciously stay away from the citizen journalist term? If so, why?

Actually, we did choose to stay away from the term “citizen journalism.” The reason was that we wanted average readers – people who have little to no writing experience whatsoever – to feel like they could have a voice in our paper, too. The word “journalist” has some heavy connotations to it – we felt people might hear it and think they’d have to have some formal training or be thoroughly knowledgeable about grammar, spelling, style, etc., to write for us. We figured that might scare them off, and nothing could be further from the truth.

Our overriding mantra for citizen journalism is, “Journalism is a conversation,” and we want people from all walks of life to sit down at the table and join in. So far, we’ve actually been pretty successful in that regard — we’ve gotten contributions from writers as young as 12 and as old as 90, from janitors as well as doctors.

Dave Morgan, the number two editor in the paper’s sports department, will be the new Executive Editor at Yahoo Sports, in a move announced yesterday by The Times. (You can read the memo on the unofficial internal communication blog of The Times’ newsroom — Kevin Roderick’s LAObserved.)

Award a style point to Times Sports Editor Bill Dwyre for tweaking Morgan’s new employer, in final line of his memo:

“And remember, if he changes his phone numbers, you can always Google him.”

In October, Moor was elected to the board of the Online News Association. He also has served as a judge for the Online Journalism Awards and has written for OJR.

Assigning website editors AME status within the newsroom appears to be gaining popularity within the Tribune Co. In October, the Los Angeles Times, another Tribune paper, appointed Joel Sappell Assistant Managing Editor and Executive Editor, Interactive, where he oversees editorial content on latimes.com.

As the one-time publisher of Portland Communique, I was asked to contribute my views based upon my personal experience.

But the full version addressed some questions more fully, including the financial realities of blogging full-time on the local level and that pesky matter of blogs as mainstream media.

The money quote on that latter question, to entice you to read the entire piece:

“What’s considered ‘mainstream’ media is a function of what’s available to people, not a function of how that media functions or what it covers. There is not much that is more mainstream than people seeking out information and opinion to help them make sense out of their lives. As more people turn to blogs for this, that may make them mainstream, but it doesn’t have to mean the blog form somehow has ‘sold out’.”

Allow me to add my $.02 to Rosen’s excellent report, in an effort to provide some additional perspective to these sorts of things:

I spent about three years, early in career, working as an editorial writer for a GOP-leaning newspaper. In that job, as one might expect, I had regular contact with individuals and think tanks that help craft and disseminate conservative political opinion. (Less with sources on the left.) So I can say, from personal experience, that political conservatives in America years ago declared a private war on objective journalism. As part of that, the right has worked diligently to create an alternate media where information’s value is judged internally by its political utility to the right, rather than by the quality of empirical evidence supporting it.

Yet mainstream journalists remain reticent to acknowledge that fact when reporting on conflicts between the conservatives and the press.

Which isn’t surprising, I suppose. How does the press acknowledge this conflict without implicitly accepting it? And how can the press accept this conflict without abandoning its commitment to reporting on both sides of the ideological spectrum without favor? It’s just a lot easier, intellectually, to pretend the conflict does not exist – to go on believing that the right subscribes to some unspoken covenant that respects the practice of objective journalism and to treat any complaint about a reporter or a story (or a blog) as substantive on the issue of journalistic process, rather than simply being an objection to that process’s result.

But that’s not accurate. Or honest. The political right does not want Americans getting their information from objective journalists, whether they be reporters or columnists. It wants Americans to get their news from agents of the political right. (The left might entertain similar fantasies, but, to date, it has made nowhere near the coordinated effort to make them happen that the right has.) This, among daily newspapers at least, is the great underreported media story of our generation. And the Dan Froomkin flap is merely the latest episode within it.

We’ll be posting his final column for us, a look at podcasting at National Public Radio, in a couple hours. Mark’s leaving us to work on a book, and then to launch a new project with PBS.org.

Actually, I’m being quite selfish in expressing regret. Mark’s done great work for us over the past few years and has earned all the opportunities that have come his way. I’m grateful that he’s stuck with us as long as he has. (And, yes, I’m twisting his arm to come back now and then and file an occasional piece for us.)

Best wishes on your new ventures, Mark.

As for OJR, we’re going to be running pieces from a variety of freelance writers in Mark’s Tuesday slot, in addition to the features and commentaries we run on Thursdays. (And, of course, I’m here blogging each weekday, along with our USC student writers on the daily news blog.) We’re also working on a new online journalism website that we’ll be launching after the New Year. Finally, we at USC Annenberg are excited about the possibility of someone many of you know joining the school (and, I hope, appearing regularly on OJR) in 2006. Stay tuned.

Michaels lauded Koppel for “25 years of unbelievable, fabulous and incredible work” on the network’s late-night news program.

Unbelievable? Fabulous? Incredible? Not exactly the three adjectives that any journalist would want to hear applied to his work.

Still, my Colts destroyed the Steelers to go 11-0. After watching this team stumble through most of the past two decades, that’s something unbelievable, fabulous and incredible.