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Google News is a depressing read for a journalist. It shows you how many news outlets depend on copy-and-paste reporting, regurgitating the same press releases and quotes in an infinite loop. Who needs all these clones of the same story, with the same basic facts and sources?

This occurred to me a few weeks ago when I was sent to the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) to cover it for an IT magazine in Finland. The story assignment was the typical “go around, see what the trends are, find a couple of non-mainstream gadgets.”

Events like CES used to be fun for gadget-loving journalists. You walked around, talked to people and filed a story once a night or at the end of the show. But in 2013, everything is different.

It is almost impossible to break any news at the event, because there are tens or hundreds of journalists covering the same press events, tweeting or live-blogging them with video. Speed is everything. How could I write anything significant for a monthly IT magazine that comes out two weeks after the show?

For PR departments in technology companies, this is a dream come true. Your press releases are not buried somewhere in the “news” section of your company web site, which has probably three unique visitors a week. Instead, your products get instant publicity in Gizmodo, Engadget, The Verge or CNET. Tech enthusiasts share those stories in social media. Eventually they are translated and copied to smaller tech websites around the world.

During the CES, I followed the most hyped topics on news.google.com. It was somewhat heartbreaking to see how many almost identical copies all the journalists covering CES produced. A search for “LG OLED CES” produced 1,307 sources. “Self-driving car CES” — 1,247 sources. “Lego EV3 CES” — 234 sources. This is just the English-language media.

There is nothing inherently wrong with having 1,307 LG OLED stories to choose from. However, when they all look the same, we have a problem — hundreds of copies of the same press release, slightly tweaked. And the more you have copies, the less value a single copy has. In the old days, when all the publications had their own, small print market, readers did not realize they were reading copies. Neither did advertisers.

But the Internet made all this transparent, and this is the main reason why traditional publishers are losing audiences, especially paying ones. Readers will not pay for stories they have already read elsewhere. It does not matter if your brand is 100 years old or you used to be the IT or business publication for the decision makers. A copy is a copy, even behind a paywall.

What is even worse, advertisers realize this as well. They are not willing to pay a premium for a product that is a duplicate, no matter if it is a digital or a print copy.

From a journalistic perspective, this is both good news and bad. The bad news is that fewer stories are needed overall as more and more people cut out the middleman and go straight to the source. This means fewer jobs in traditional media. So if you notice yourself writing the same stories as everyone else, or even worse, using copy-paste more than before, run. Your job will become extinct.

However, there is some good news, too. The abundance of copies forces journalists to find their own voice, niche and style. This is why opinion pieces and columns are doing pretty well on the “most-read” story lists. A personality, at least for now, cannot be broken down to zeroes and ones and copied to hundreds of other sites. It is no coincidence that in the exclusive story of Google Glass in The Verge, there were more pictures of the editor-in-chief, Joshua Topolsky, than there were pictures of Google Glass.

The new idea of “more personal” journalism is a challenge, not just for newsrooms but for journalism schools, as well. When I was in journalism school at the end of last century, I learned that journalists create similar stories when they are based on pure facts. You put 10 journalists in a room, give them the same information, and get 10 identical stories.

Nevertheless, as we are moving from an industrial age to a digital one, this notion of a journalist as a kind of “fact mechanic” is slowly transforming. The Internet still needs a few good, solid news pieces about CES that are based on facts. But we don’t need the massive overflow of copies or near-duplicate stories. A computer already does that faster and better with some of the business and sports news.

With computer-generated journalism, the old quote “information wants to be free” is becoming a reality. And it is happening exactly the way Stewart Brand predicted: “the cost of getting it (information) out is getting lower and lower all the time.”

Luckily for journalists, the free part is only half of the quote. It actually begins with “information wants to be expensive, because it’s so valuable.” As Brand points out, some of the things you read or see can literally change your life.

Finding life-changing stories every day might be an impossible task. So start from the other end of the quote, by dumping the low-cost stories. Stop making copies – unless they are produced by a computer.

Start to look around in your organization for things that cannot be copied to zeroes and ones. Humans with personal style are a good start: who is the Andrew Sullivan or Kara Swisher of your newsroom? Or think about adopting a voice or style that is distinctive just for your publication. If you are a local newspaper, be fiercely local. Passionate about food, a sports team or cars? Let it show.

If nobody in the newsroom is wasting time making copies, journalists have more time to dig deeper, make that extra phone call and find another source. That is when you start producing the expensive information. As Brand would say: information so valuable that it might change lives.

With that said, too few journalists have a solid understanding of guns and gun violence. Here are three major things the media gets wrong.

1. Semi-automatic rifles are not battlefield weapons or machine guns.

Failing to understand the difference between semi-automatic and fully automatic weapons is probably the most common and most amateur mistake journalists have made when reporting on guns.

CNN’s Piers Morgan has been one of the most vocal media personalities advocating for more gun control, and has not let his apparent trouble with grasping this distinction get in the way of his crusade.

The following is from Piers’ July 23, 2012 broadcast (shortly after the Aurora shooting), in which gun rights advocate and author John Lott, Jr. explained what a semi-automatic rifle is:

LOTT: OK. You said a civilian version of the gun. OK. Basically what that means is it’s the same as any other hunting rifle or any other rifle in terms of inside guts. One trigger, one bullet goes out. It’s not the same weapon that militaries would go and use.

MORGAN: How did he fire off so many rounds then?

LOTT: Because he pulled the trigger many times.

The excerpt below is from Piers this month, talking to Fordham University law professor Nicholas Johnson, still confused about the capability of a semi-automatic civilian model AR-15 rifle:

MORGAN: Right. Because AR-15 with 100 bullets in a minute and somebody like the shooter in Aurora, Holmes, used a magazine with 100 bullets and an AR-15, they are effectively machine guns. Are they? I mean —

JOHNSON: No, they are not.

The difference between semi-automatic and fully automatic is one of those things best explained visually, and this video does a great job of it (in under two minutes). I’d recommend it for anyone covering gun policy who is still unclear as to the distinction between the two.

As a semi-automatic rifle such as the civilian AR-15 and its derivatives can only fire one round per trigger pull, Morgan’s “100 bullets in a minute” math doesn’t seem to be physically feasible, even with a rare 100-round drum that would require no pauses to swap magazines. (Magazines holding 30 rounds are the most common among AR-15 owners, although in California capacity is restricted to 10.)

Fully automatic weapons like machine guns, which actually can fire 100 rounds per minute, have been (with extremely rare and complicated exception) illegal for civilians to own since the passage of the National Firearms Act in 1934.

2. Assault weapon bans target guns based on appearance, and not on any higher destructive potential or disproportionate influence on gun violence.

Because, as pointed out above, semi-automatic military-style rifles are functionally the same as semi-automatic hunting-style rifles, assault weapons legislation restricts guns based on their outfits and not on their outputs. To wit, the following language in the California Penal Code was part of its currently active Assault Weapons Control Act of 1989:

(a)Notwithstanding Section 12276, “assault weapon” shall also mean any of the following:

(1)A semiautomatic, centerfire rifle that has the capacity to accept a detachable magazine and any one of the following:

(A)A pistol grip that protrudes conspicuously beneath the action of the weapon.

(B)A thumbhole stock.

(C)A folding or telescoping stock.

(D)A grenade launcher or flare launcher.

(E)A flash suppressor.

(F)A forward pistol grip.

The only one of these features that actually impacts the destructive capability of the weapon is the grenade launcher, but explosive grenades have been banned since the same law restricting machine guns went into effect almost 80 years ago. Everything else is essentially cosmetic.

The expired Federal Assault Weapons Ban, which President Obama would like to see reinstated in an updated form, had largely the same classifications. New York’s recently passed gun bill, which goes the furthest of any state with a seven-round magazine limit, also bans any semi-automatic pistol or rifle with a “military-style feature.” This is all a ban on assault weapons is — a glorified dress code.

Vice President Biden, who is heading the president’s task force on guns, acknowledges most shooting deaths are tied to handguns, but even among spree shooters, assault rifles have hardly been a uniquely dangerous presence. The deadliest school shooting in American history, Virginia Tech, was committed with handguns. The D.C. sniper used a bolt-action hunting rifle.

3. States with higher rates of gun ownership do tend to have higher rates of gun violence, but it’s important not to confuse this correlation with causation.

The Washington Post’s Ezra Klein pointed out the South’s relatively high murder rate in a piece published shortly after Sandy Hook. The South is also the region where gun ownership is most widespread.

Klein cited work from Duke University sociologist Kieran Healy in making that point, and provided a link to more of Healy’s charts, including this one comparing historical rates of assault death across states.

Louisiana, Alabama and Arkansas have high rates of gun ownership and high rates of gun violence. However, drawing a connection between hunters in the Ozarks and gang crime in Little Rock is tenuous at best. Alabama has a lot of guns because it has hunters and a long history of gun culture. This is not necessarily why it has a lot of gun violence.

Richard Florida of The Atlantic dug deep into data two years ago and found a strong correlation between poverty and homicide rate when comparing states. I found the same when comparing countries last year. Florida’s analysis did reveal a somewhat weaker negative correlation between an assault weapons ban and gun crime, but as only four states — all of which skew wealthy — have such bans, only so much should be read into that data point.

Utah and Minnesota have high rates of gun ownership but among the lowest homicide rates in the country. Illinois is 44^th in gun ownership and 10^th in assault deaths, with its main city of Chicago notorious for its high murder rate. In these exceptions to the general trend, poverty and the relative strength of social institutions seem to be more of a predictor of gun violence than gun ownership.

A surface-level understanding of gun culture and data without context do not combine to make a strong argument. Any journalist seeking to properly cover this complicated issue would be wise to follow a version of the Fourth Law of Gun Safety: keep your finger off the trigger until you know what it is you’re targeting.

Perhaps this will be the year that we can end forever the silliest and most self-destructive debate in our industry, that of “mainstream” vs. “citizen” journalism. (Here’s today’s example of journalists promoting this totally unnecessary division, courtesy the St. Paul Pioneer Press.)

Journalism is journalism, no matter who does it, or where. Let me show you one recent example where a “mainstream” news report could have benefited from adopting “citizen” journalism techniques, as a way of illustrating the missed opportunities that this “you’re one or the other” attitude can create.

The Los Angeles Times yesterday ran an intriguing story by staff writer David Streitfeld on Amazon.com. ["Amazon mystery: pricing of books", Jan. 2, 2007.] Streitfeld had noticed that the price of an item he’d wanted to buy from Amazon had increased between the time he’d selected it and he went to go pay for it the next day.

Price shifts like this are not uncommon online. Most travel websites warn buyers to purchase right away, as airlines and hoteliers change prices frequently. And the price of newly issued books and music can swing wildly, as retailers put items on or off sale in an effort to dump product or cash in on a hot release.

But a two-year-old title like “The Cast Iron Skillet Cookbook,” which Streitfeld sought to buy (and, by coincidence, my sister-in-law bought me for Christmas – thanks, Katie!) usually stays the same price for a long time. When Amazon hiked the price on him 51 cents, Streitfeld got curious.

He selected a variety of other items, put them in his Amazon shopping cart, and noted what happened to their prices. Many went up; a few went down. Amazon evaded questions about its pricing strategies, and analysts offered opinions about “dynamic pricing.”

Interesting, but the story didn’t offer supporting data beyond Streitfeld’s experiment. And here’s where readers could have been involved.

Obviously, many Times readers have bought books and other merchandise from Amazon. Perhaps some of them have noted similar price shifts. But some Times readers, including myself, have access to quite a bit more than personal shopping data from Amazon.com.

For 10 years I’ve included “associates” links to Amazon.com from the statistics tutorial on my personal website. Amazon’s associates program, for those who do not know, pays Web publishers a small percentage of an item’s sale price whenever a customer buys something after clicking to Amazon from that Web publisher’s site.

Amazon provides its associates a reporting tool tracks the number and price of the items that it sells via the links from their sites. That gives Amazon’s associates access to a potentially impressive amount of sales and pricing data.

For example, by far the most popular item sold from links on my personal site is a book called “The Cartoon Guide to Statistics.” Clicking through the associates’ sales data for 2006, using the reporting tool Amazon provides, I found that Amazon had sold 90 copies of the book to my site’s readers.

But, supporting Streitfeld’s report, not all of those copies were sold at the same price. Here’s the distribution:

27 @ $11.02
14 @ $11.53
22 @ $11.67
27 @ $12.21

Clearly, Amazon is not keeping prices constant for this title, despite the facts that it was published more than a decade ago and remains in print. But I wanted to dig deeper. When did Amazon change these prices during the year?

Amazon’s associates sales reporting tool makes it somewhat difficult to plot the dates of individual sales. But I could easily break down the sales data by quarter.

Q1: 11 @ $11.02, 12 @ $11.53
Q2: 16 @ $11.02, 11@ $11.67
Q3: 11 @ $11.67, 12 @ $12.21
Q4: 15 @ $12.21

The data supports the hypothesis that prices vary on Amazon.com throughout the year on well-established titles. And that the price trends higher as the year goes on.

What the Times needed was a way for associates like me to append our data to Streitfeld’s report. That way, the Times’ reporter and its readers could, together, draw a more detailed picture of Amazon’s pricing patterns. Are price adjustments based upon time an item spends in a user’s shopping cart? Or do prices move with the calendar?

Unfortunately, the Times website [full disclosure, again, especially for new OJR readers, I used to work there] does not offer a way for readers to post relevant data to a database that could test Streitfeld’s hypothesis. Nor does it even provide a way for a reader to append a simple comment to the story, where readers like me could add our experiences.

“Citizen journalism” provides professional reporters the chance to collect many more data points than they can on their own. And “mainstream media” provide readers an established, popular distribution channel for the information we have and can collect. Not to mention a century of wisdom on sourcing, avoiding libel and narrative storytelling technique.

And our readers don’t care. They just want the most complete, accurate and engaging coverage possible. They don’t how we make the sausage, or even who makes it. They just want to eat.

So let’s resolve in 2007 to set this division aside, quit arguing about how we’ve done journalism in the past and start finding new, innovative ways to do it better in the future.

“Backpack” journalism? How old fashioned. My newsroom is in my pocket.

I may have literally picked up the future of journalism while in London this fall. For the past two months I have field-tested a cell phone so sophisticated it defies that name. It’s the forerunner of a new generation of convergence device that could change the way we do our job.

I came to the UK to shepherd a class of Missouri School of Journalism students for four months while they learned how the rest of the world gets its news.

The trip gave me the opportunity to scratch one of my biggest technology itches. When I went to Korea a few years ago, I saw a society that was rapidly moving away from the laptop computer and toward hand-held super cell phones. But between the language barrier and my own awe, I never really figured out why the Koreans could watch video on their phones and I could only check my voice mail.

The answer to my question came from Mark Squires, head of communications for Nokia UK. Rather than give me a technical answer, he reminded me that it’s “Knock-y-ah” and handed me an impressive chunk of aluminum, silicon and glass. It looked something like Spock’s tricorder.

The Vulcan’s machine only worked in three dimensions, however. This N93 is on paper a 3G (Third Generation) cellular telephone. But in fact it shoots high quality still and video photos, displays them for you on a 2.4-inch active matrix screen or connects to a standard television, downloads any Web page you want, produces copy on Microsoft Word, displays your presentations on PowerPoint, keeps your expense account on Excel, opens that e-Book on Adobe Reader, records the mayor’s speech in digital audio, phones Mongolia free on Skype, polishes your shoes and teaches your kids Latin.

Well, maybe not the last two. But it does include a bar code reader if you are ever curious about those thick and thin lines.

I’m not a technologist, but I proudly speak basic Geek. Nevertheless, I was overwhelmed. Maybe hyperwhelmed.

The N93 is Nokia’s latest attempt to pack the whole technology world into a pocket-sized package. It is the big brother of the N90, a lighter and simpler camera-cum-telephone that has made American inroads and which several of my students gleefully tested.

In fact, a super telephone is just a pocket or purse away on any London street. People here can buy 3G telephones at any of the Orange, Carphone Warehouse, O2 or T-mobile shops that occupy every other doorway on High Street. As you watch the world go by from the second deck of a bus, the people around you check their e-mail or text messages, share photos, find a map to a restaurant or listen to music.

Yes, listen to music. The techno world predicted that video messaging would be the killer app for 3G. But the iPod generation discovered the system allowed them to download music or even music videos to play through the phone.

The N93 has a dandy MP3 player as well as an MP4 player for your videos. But I’m old fashioned – I liked the built-in FM radio.

As much as I loved to play with the buttons on the slick little machine, my job was to see if it had a future in the journalism world.

It does. And it will only get better as Nokia, Samsung and the other cellphone wizards improve the concept by making smaller and lighter units

Calling wonder boxes like the N93 a “cell phone” is a misnomer. They are advanced communications devices with telephony thrown in – more like a little laptop that can call home.

We are still installing a 3G network in the United States and it will be some time until it is ubiquitous. Japan and Korea are so far ahead they are looking at 4G and the European cell system upgraded to that level some time ago.

What are we are missing out on with our clunky second generation cell phones? Incredible bandwidth, for one. The 5 Mhz frequency of 3G allows 384 kbps from mobile systems and a blazing 2Mbps from stationary systems. This means mobile video calls are a reality. But it also means that we in the information world can burst tons of data back to the office and even stream video from our phone.

But that’s in the future for most of the U.S. And it’s not why I’m excited by a 4×6-inch device.

Even without the capacity of 3G, the N93 allows journalists to do almost everything they would with a host of other appliances. The phone comes with two cameras. The “ordinary” low-rez camera comes on when you flip open the phone, letting you see your own smiling face until you launch a video call.

But more significant is the 3.5 MP camera with a 3x optical zoom that tops the N93. Both my students and I used the camera to shoot everything from crowds to portraits to landscapes in London. We sent side-by-side test shots back to the Mizzou photojournalism department and found they were as sharp as those from my Canon A520 (usually in my other pocket) and quite usable for print and online reproduction.

It’s the video, however, that astounds. It records and plays at full VGA – 640 x 480 pixels – at 30 frames per second. One UK reviewer said the resolution combined with the optics competes with almost every amateur camcorder on the market. And we are not talking about brief clips here. Pop a miniSD chip into the expansion slot and you can shoot a 90-minute feature.

A journalist with only an N93 can then go to a coffee shop, edit the feature with the included Adobe Premiere software and send it to the office.

Oh, yea. Not having a 3G connection is less of a problem than it sounds. The N93 has built-in Wi-Fi.

Despite all that, I wasn’t ready to go into the field without my trusty PowerBook until I discovered the Microsoft Office suite and the ability to hook to a portable keyboard via Bluetooth or USB 2.0.

I didn’t have a keyboard available in London. But I once had one for my now-retired Palm Pilot. I loved the ability to pull the Palm from one pocket and the folded-but-full-sized keyboard from another and type for hours. The smaller screen is really not bad for text entry and becomes second-nature quickly. Remember, half the world communicates by text-messaging on even smaller screens and 10-key pads.

At this stage in the technology’s development, using a device such as the Nokia N93 is not yet a perfect solution for the journalists. There are many times when a bulky camera, a powerful computer or a sophisticated digital audio unit is needed. The N93 is chunky for a phone (about 6 ounces) but lighter than the combined pieces of equipment it replaces.

Squires said the larger size of business cell phones is less of a problem in Europe than in the U.S. Purchasing cell phones at face value instead of via a calling plan is so common that many people have multiple units. He has a wafer-thin “evening phone” to which he transfers his SIM when the workday is done, similar to a woman who exchanges her shoulder bag for an elegant clutch for an evening at the theater.

But I’d put up with the size. I will whimper when I give my loaner N93 back to Nokia and will have the $699 gadget on my wish list. I’m looking forward to the day I always work from a pocketful of technology.

My dream scenario is walking into a neighborhood in jeans and sweatshirt, an N93 in one pocket and a keyboard in the other. Sans my tell-tale computer bag and camera, I think I could be just one of the boys as I developed my contacts. And when the time came, I could record audio clips of background sounds, take a few photos of the street corner crowd then shoot a video clip of that great old codger. Back at the café, I could type my story, file it to the office and amble into the sunset.

Now that’s new media journalism. And who knows how we will do journalism when Nokea gets to the N203? Beam me up.

China, Eritrea and Cuba top the list of governments responsible for jailing journalists, but the United States is responsible for incarcerating two journalists without charges, as part of the War on Terror. Bilal Hussein, a free-lance photographer for the Associated Press, has been held by US Security forces since April 12, 2006. Al-Jazeera cameraman Sami al-Haj was arrested December 15, 2001 by US forces in Afghanistan; he is currently held at Guantanamo Bay.

According to the 2006 Press Freedom Index compiled by another journalists’-rights group, Reporters Without Borders, the United States’ treatment of journalists placed it at 53rd on its press freedom list, tied with Botswana, Croatia and Tonga. China, Cuba and Eritrea ranked 163, 165 and 166 on the list, making them the countries with third, fifth and sixth most repressive records in the area of free expression. When the RSF began producing its list five years ago, the US rank was at 17.

Abi Wright, CPJ’s communications director, spoke to OJR about the new study of jailed journalists:

Wright: I think the rise in the number of Internet journalists on our prison list this year is startling, and reflective of trends that we’ve been following since 1997, when we documented the first jailing of an Internet writer. I think there’s two things going on. First of all, there are more people writing and doing journalism online. Secondly, the perennial offenders, China and Cuba , in particular, are just saying an increasing, or ever-present, I should say, intolerance towards reporting and dissent in any form, and online in particular.

OJR: You’ve pointed out that one in three of the journalists now in jail is an Internet blogger, web-based editor, or online reporter, and a large number of these people are not necessarily paid journalists, but citizen journalists?

Wright: Exactly. The nature varies from country to country. In countries like China, access to work as a journalist is very restricted. There’s party membership and all kinds of memberships required and it’s highly regulated and restricted. Writers and citizens have found the Internet to be one way that they can get information and transfer information. In Cuba, which is a slightly different example, a lot of journalists whose work ends up online, they actually telephone or transmit the information through different means, but it ends up being published online because they have no other way of just doing journalism there through official routes. So it’s reflective of the media environments in all of those countries.

OJR: Many of the people you are talking about are being held in secret locations and without charges. How do you get information about what’s happened to them?

Wright: Well, that is another sort of regrettable trend that we have documented, that 20 of the journalists on our imprisoned list this year, or 15 percent, are being held without charge. We have sources in countries like Eritrea, where we are able to verify information about journalists there. But it’s very difficult. We have reports that [several journalists held in Eritrea] may have been killed or may have died since they’ve been in prison. So, it’s challenging to get information about them, but it’s a real priority for us, absolutely. Journalists like [AP] photographer Bilal Hussein, and the cameraman for al-Jazeera, Sami al-Haj, we work closely with news organizations who have had employees detained to get information. And we also appeal directly to the US government about these cases.

OJR: Have international human rights organizations, the Red Cross, the UN or similar organizations been able to get to these people to verify their well-being?

Wright: In the case of Sami al-Haj, I know his lawyer has been in touch. He has a lawyer who is in communications with him. Communication with Bilal Hussein has been more problematic. He’s been held since April. We have called repeatedly on US authorities to make public the information that they allegedly have on these individuals and to either charge them, or release them. Different officials have assured us that they have evidence of some activity that could be seen as criminal, but we just don’t know what that is.

OJR: Leaders of the new Congress that will take office in January have promised new investigations into various aspects of the conduct of the War on Terror. Do you know whether the treatment of journalists will be part of that investigation?

Wright: I don’t know whether the treatment of journalists or international press freedom will be an issue for them, but I can tell you that during the confirmation hearings for [newly-confirmed US Defense] Secretary [Robert] Gates, Senator Warner of Virginia specifically asked about journalists’ safety, and mentioned CPJ. So we know that it is on lawmakers’ minds. And we are certainly doing everything we can to make sure that the situation for journalists, especially imprisoned journalists, in countries like China, Cuba, Eritrea, and also of course, those in US custody — that these cases are brought to the attention of lawmakers.

OJR: One case that CPJ has expressed concern about is the murder of Brad Will, an independent journalist who was gunned down October 27 while filming a protest by striking teachers in Oaxaca, Mexico . Some have called for the US to get involved in the investigation. What’s CPJ’s position?

Wright: My understanding is that the most recent development in that case has been very disturbing — the individuals who were arrested and charged with his murder have been set free.

OJR: Right.

Wright: We’ve been very active in Mexico, where there has been a string of murders, especially along the [US-Mexican] border area, where there’s known drug trafficking. We called on Mexico to appoint a special prosecutor for crimes against journalists. Under Pres. Vicente Fox, such a prosecutor was appointed, and I know that there is momentum to bring these crimes to a federal level, which would help expedite the prosecution of these cases. So from CPJ’s standpoint, we are pressuring Mexican authorities to bring those responsible for the murder of Brad Will to justice.

OJR: Any final thoughts that you hope readers will take away from this report.

Wright: I think it reflects a real change in the journalism landscape, when you have the second category of journalists behind bars being online journalists that shows a tremendous growth over the last decade. I think there’s no question. I think there’s no question, especially in Western democracies, but also in these other growing developing countries, that the Internet is a major conduit for information, and it will continue to be so. We will be fighting government attempts to crackdown on this as much as we can.

When the Internet was formed, the idea behind it was that it would be impossible to control and to censor. These governments are challenging that notion. I think it’s important for groups like CPJ and other members of the online community to remain vigilant in publicizing these attacks on journalists.

A newspaper then takes up the notion or the feeling which had occurred simultaneously, but singly, to each of them. All are then immediately guided towards this beacon; and these wandering minds, which had long sought each other in darkness, at lengths meet and unite. (Democracy in America, Book Two, Chapter vi.)

As we wrap up another U.S. election, one may ask: are newspapers, in their modern online versions, still meeting de Tocqueville’s great expectations?

Research from the Pew Internet Project shows that the number of Americans who now turn to the Internet for information about campaigns on a typical day has jumped from 11 million in 2002 (the last mid-term election cycle) to 26 million. Surely, a considerable chunk of this 26 million may be visiting national sites such as CNN, NPR, MSNBC, blogs, and increasingly, YouTube. But as the late Tip O’Neill once said, all politics is local, and most online newspapers can offer their readers a uniquely local focus that sites such as CNN and MSNBC cannot.

To better assess the online newspaper industry and its commitment to providing citizens with information on the election, I decided to conduct an inventory of each daily newspaper website in the country from October 14 through November 3, 2006.

According to the 2006 International Year Book printed by Editor & Publisher, there are 1,452 daily newspapers in the United States. Only those online newspaper sites that were free for readers and had fully functioning websites were included, which ultimately reduced the total number to 1,312 sites.

Criteria

First, I determined if the site had carved out a section of the site and devoted it exclusively to the 2006 election. It had to be a section that was a clearinghouse created specifically for the campaign that a voter would be able to access if he or she wanted news and information just about the election. While virtually all sites integrated news about the election in their general local and national news sections, this alone would not meet the criteria.

Next, I examined the individual components of those sites with special election sections to determine their depth and richness. First, I calculated the number of sites that exhibited multimedia, other than polls. Were there podcasts or video clips of debates, or staff-generated interviews of the different candidates, for instance?

Second, I tallied how many sites offered information specifically on the candidates, and sought to break down the issues for the reader. For example, could visitors read individual profiles of a particular candidate?

Third, I surveyed how many of the sites provided readers with a chance to interact with either reporters or other readers. Were there blogs or forums in which readers could express their own opinions?

And fourth, I determined the number of sites that included details on the logistics of voting: registration information, polling locations, voter-eligibility requirements, and primary results.

Results

I found that the industry’s overall performance can probably best be assessed as uneven. Just 27% of all online newspaper sites offered a separate section for campaign and election news. Digging deeper, a few findings stand out.

First, it may be that the rich are getting richer. Those sites with the largest print circulation, and arguably, the most revenue and resources to allocate for an online election section, were most likely to display one. According to the International Year Book, the average daily circulation of all newspapers in the country is roughly 36,700. Meanwhile, the average daily circulation for those newspapers sites that offered a special election section was more than double that number at 86,500.

Breaking down the numbers by state also shows that those states with the highest concentration of registered voters were more likely than others to have sites with election sections.

Among those states with the highest number of sites that included election sections were Florida (56% of all daily sites displayed an election section), Maine (50%), Maryland (60%), Oregon (59%), North Carolina, (40%), Oregon (59%), South Carolina (40%), Vermont (43%), Virginia (42%), Washington (57%), and Wisconsin (43%). With the exception of Virginia, all of these states had a voter registration percentage equal to or higher than the national average, according to the latest registration data from the U.S. Census Bureau. One might assume that registered voters were already the most engaged citizens while unregistered voters could have most benefited from additional coverage.

On a different note, there was also the possibility that ownership affected the overall number of sites offering an election section. As other research has shown, there is a heavy concentration of ownership among the country’s newspapers. While conducting this study, I noticed that many sites were straight-jacketed by the homogenous online format associated with a particular newspaper owner. Thus, if there was one company that did not offer an election section, all the sites owned by that company did not do so–if they were locked into a general Web structure. The one exception to this trend was Gannett.

The sites fared slightly better when their individual components were measured. Fully sixty percent of all sites with election sections offered in-depth information on the issues and candidates participating in the elections. There were many biographical and professional profiles, and “Q & As” allowed citizens to quickly compare and contrast opposing candidates.

Meanwhile, 56% of all sites with an election section provided readers with the opportunity to interact with stories and other readers. Not only did many sites offer readers the chance to post a comment on a news story or profile, but several sites established campaign-specific blogs for the election.

Next, 54% of the sites with election sections listed information on voting logistics. Perhaps this is the most surprising finding since it involved seemingly so few resources. Many sites simply linked to the local Board of Elections where voters could find their polling place or request an absentee ballot and this was sufficient to meet the criteria for this aspect of the study. Why only a small majority was able to do so baffled me.

And finally, roughly four in 10 included multimedia in their election sections. Since it could very well be that resources were the key factor for online website editors and staff, it is perhaps not surprising that so few sites could offer video, audio, interactive maps, or slideshows for citizens.

Many Americans may be satisfied with the breadth and depth of online coverage of the election. National sites like MSNBC and CNN offer a dizzying array of multimedia and investigative journalism that only a handful of newspaper sites have the personnel and resources to provide. Moreover, there is the 800-lb gorilla–television–that still serves as the overwhelming choice for most Americans when it comes to election news and information. But because newspapers have long been considered the standard bearer of quality and reliable reporting on local politics, particularly as the nature of the web is able to overcome the limits of space that limited print newspapers, it seems rather disappointing that such a small number of sites are able to meet the lofty ambitions set by de Tocqueville over 150 years ago.

Along with a business partner, she launched Barista of Bloomfield Ave., a site that covers a small town in New Jersey. “I had name recognition and publisher blood,” she says. “I thought it might be better than being a freelancer—always subject to the whims of other people.”

Two years later, she has a small staff of reporters and freelancers, and a dedicated Internet server to keep pace with the site’s growing readership. Galant spoke to OJR about the challenges of running a hyperlocal site, building its credibility and making a living off the publication.

OJR: A New Yorker article by Nicholas Lemann in August about blogging and citizen journalism called you “one of the most esteemed ‘hyperlocal bloggers’ in the country.” But it was a backhanded compliment. The article, “Amateur Hour,” went on to say that sites like yours amount to nothing more than a “church or community newsletter—it’s heartwarming and it probably adds to the store of good things in the world, but it does not mount the collective challenge to power which the traditional media are supposedly too timid to take up.” How do you respond to that?

Galant: Well, you know I don’t mind being part of the store of things that improve the world. I don’t consider that a terrible insult, number one. Look, we’re not changing journalism in the way that Woodward and Bernstein did necessarily, but we are a serious threat to our traditional competition in the local market. We are using the medium really well. We are working very well with small resources. And we are doing certain things that are creative and innovative. You probably saw the teardowns map and the story in The New York Times. We used Google mapping technology to show how Montclair was changing with old houses being torn down. I think that tells the readers in a creative way what’s going on and it would be harder to tell in any other way.

We’re also doing live chats with local politicians. We did a live chat with a councilman who said that the rest of the council is in cahoots and that they’ve been using patronage. He called for the ousting of the mayor and that happened on our site. We had a post on our site about someone who started going around and called our advertisers and telling them to no longer advertise with us. So obviously we are threatening the establishment enough.

And we’re doing another live chat with the county executive about another controversy. There was a movement to get rid of county government. There’s this huge controversy over the new jail that was built, and the union that runs the jail has been very much anti-local administration. A lot of tax issues in this town, so that could be very interesting, as well.

You could easily look at The New Yorker and pull out a cute little anecdote from “Talk of the Town” pieces that would be just like my piece that Lemann quoted… about kids chasing each other on move up day. There are many charming, charming pieces in The New Yorker that are equally worthy of a church bulletin. I didn’t have any shame over the anecdote he quoted. I was tickled to be mentioned in The New Yorker even though it was a left-handed compliment.

OJR: How has Baristanet evolved since the original launch?

Galant: The design has really pretty much stayed the same. But I’d say it’s bigger. There are a lot more people involved. When I started Baristanet, it was basically a one-person operation. I did have a business partner, but I did all the editorial myself. And now, there’s at least three different people doing editorial stuff. That deepens it. And a lot of it changed, we now have interactive stuff–like the teardown map.

If you go back into our archives to 2004 you’ll find stories with just a comment or two comments. Now, virtually every story we have has a dozen at a minimum. Anything with a controversy to it can easily have ninety to a hundred comments. So that definitely changes the whole personality of the site.

A lot of people interact with us by sending us either pictures or giving us tips about stories that we couldn’t have anticipated.

OJR: You have a certain amount of name recognition from your Times column. Have your contributors also acquired “name recognition?” Do people also come to Baristanet to read what these “personalities” have to say about local issues?

Galant: Oh, absolutely, absolutely. Well, first of all, Liz George, my business partner and co-editor, is a professional. She freelances for the [New York] Daily News. She was less well known in New Jersey two years ago. She definitely has not only a lot of personality in her writing, but has expertise that I don’t. So she really brought a lot of knowledge of real estate and, and is also much more of a food writer than I am.

We pay Annette Batson to write a page four days a week. She doesn’t have any journalism background but actually in some ways she is a better reporter than us. She tends to pick up the phone more to follow things up. And she also has this kind of sweet personality that she just has friends all over town. So, you know, in this good cop/bad cop world, she is our good cop. No matter how controversial things get, pretty much everybody likes Annette. Her personality is not as caustic as ours is. Her voice is not as professional in terms of having a writer’s voice for years and years. We had a fourth writer, but we unfortunately came to a mutual conclusion that it wasn’t working out. She was having a lot of problems with typos and mistakes and the audience just really pounced on her. She was pretty much rejected by readers because of all the mistakes.

OJR: That’s interesting because a lot of times when people think about blogs, they think of free flowing copy–that it’s okay to have mistakes and typos–but here you have readers pouncing.

Galant: Yeah…

OJR: Are people expecting something different from blogs now? Are the standards evolving?

Galant: Well, I don’t think they think of us so much as a blog. I think they think of us as sort of a professional product. We don’t necessarily carry the banner of journalism to feel like we have to get one quote from the pro guy and one quote from the con guy. That’s what journalists are trained to do. We are much more… shooting from the hip and smart-alecky. We’re more like the front of the book in Newsweek or like those sly Entertainment Weekly-type magazines.

But what people have come to expect is a certain kind of professional polish. So while we’re not pretending to be completely objective–we do have a point of view–there is a certain amount of professional polish that they do expect from us and if they don’t get it they feel cheated.

That’s one of the things that’s been really interesting about this and has surprised us is how much people come to take ownership of the product. They are not paying a cent for this unless they are an advertiser and yet they get really mad if you make any mistake, if you make a typo, if you don’t cover the blackout that was in their neighborhood last night. They expect full coverage in your style and at your level and all the time. They are pretty demanding.

OJR: So the role of the professional journalist continues online…

Galant: The journalism really kicks in for us when there’s some emergency. Our shining hours have been during fires and this microburst last summer that was just like a tornado and that’s when we utilized the medium really well. We get normally like 5,000 to 6,000 visits a day but after the microburst hit overnight and hundreds of old, big trees fell down, and the power was out over half the area, we had ten thousand hits and we almost doubled the number of hits the next day.

And the local newspaper surprisingly enough, even though they were out reporting it and even though they have a website, they didn’t use that material and saved everything for their newspaper on Thursday–which was two-and-a-half days after everything happened. And so we just really felt like we completely kicked their butts.

OJR: You’re using blogging as a publishing platform…

Galant: Yeah, as a publishing platform but with the commenting and with the interactive features. It’s instant publishing relatively cheap and with interactivity. So it has all those aspects of the blog. It also has the general snootiness and attitude and voice of many blogs.

But it’s a little bit different from that because it is a more of a public service and most blogs promote a point of view of whoever writes them. We have lots of different types of pieces… we let people know what’s going on.

OJR: How has your writing itself evolved for Baristanet compared to what it was like for the Times?

Galant: I’ll look back at some of my columns from The New York Times and they’ll look a little floppy and a little long. The writing for Baristanet is a much shorter format. The joke is that you have to make the point in a 100 words instead of 800 words.

I’d say I’m also much more courageous now. I remember one of the first posts I wrote was about a fundraiser in 2004 for Kerry in the backyard of some very wealthy liberal. I wrote a teasing post and I remember really struggling over it, afraid people would be mad at me. And they were but that’s the kind of thing I can do now in an instant. I’m much more likely to just press the button and be decisive and not worry about who’s going to like this and who isn’t going to like this.

OJR: What was the biggest challenge you faced when you first launched?

Galant: There were issues like it was a lot easier to get people to call you back when you could say “This is Debbie Galant from The New York Times” than it is when you say, “This is Debbie Galant from Baristanet.” We had to explain it to every single person every time we made the call. That slows you down. But now there is a lot more name recognition for Baristanet but it is not universal.

But the biggest challenge is simply to become a real entity and keep running it. I said earlier that readers expect all this stuff of us that you struggled to build. To keep that going is a professional and personal struggle. I remember the first time we received an ad for a whole year and I gulped and said, “Oh, my God. Does that mean for sure I’m going to be doing this in a year.” It was just hard to believe I had made that commitment to someone. You think this is cool, but, boy, I have just committed to being here next year, to being here on weekends, to being here when I don’t feel like it.

It was like claiming the territory of being almost like a newspaper single-handedly. It’s not very glamorous from the viewpoint of new media as a business and nobody talks about that. But it’s absolutely important for Liz and I to rationalize it as a business and to make it work as an organism, so that we have procedures, we are allowed to have vacations and go out of town. So that when somebody has agreed to be an advertiser, somebody is making sure that the bill is sent, and the money is collected and all those things. Writing is natural since that’s what we have done professionally, but it’s a whole different set of skills that has to be learned to run a business.

OJR: You have to devote time to editorial and business concerns. Are you concerned about breaking down the sacred separation that journalists have between advertising sales and the editorial side might compromise your work?

Galant: In some ways we’re shameless about it. But we have our own standards. I’ll give you an example: one of our advertisers called and said they are having parent workshops and they wanted publicity about it. It didn’t seem unethical to help an advertiser publicize the fact that they are having these adult workshops and the first one was about gay and lesbian parenting which makes it even more interesting. I happened to look at the backend and saw what Annette had written. It had really come out like a press release and it made me want to vomit.

I called Liz and I said “Have you seen this?” and she said “Yeah, I’m talking to Annette about it,” and she said, “Oh, I also found out that people from the advertiser wanted to see this story ahead of time, before it went up.” Liz told Annette that we don’t do that. We never do that. So basically we had our own values. We have our own standards for polish, we have our own standards for groveling.

OJR: And now does your audience also expect a different standard from you than it does of traditional media?

Galant: Oh, I think so. There will be people who will criticize us, and that’s part of the course. The comment function allows them to do that.

In a way, we are more like the editorial page. We don’t pretend to be objective but we do try to be fair. But we are more and more trying to be provocative and to provoke conversation. We’re almost more like what a TV talk show would be like to journalism.

OJR: What’s your advice for the many young people out there who want to start something like this?

Galant: We’re now after two years really starting to make some decent money. It took at least that long to build up the readership so we could become a viable competitor in the local advertising market. It certainly helped that during that time Liz and I both have husbands who were bringing in the health insurance and the steady income. My advice would be, don’t count it being your income right off the bat. But there is definite real economic potential there and I think we’re just starting to hit that. It’s not nearly as instant as I had hoped it would be. So you have to do some other work–like freelancing–to have some other source of income.

When we launched, we were on Typepad at the $15 per month level. The main thing that this technology allows is for you to throw something up. You can build a castle for free. Just try it, and that was what we did. There are many, many people in journalism who have this dream of starting their own small town newspaper. And it’s certainly something nobody could have done for $15 per month twenty years ago.

Once you become successful, then issues of the reliability and bandwidth come into play and so now we actually have some real expenses. We now have a dedicated server and we pay almost $400 a month for hosting and if the site grows where we want to go, we will have to expand the number of servers. And we now pay people on a freelance basis, both technical people and editorial people. So, yeah, I think the attraction is at first that you can do it for free, but as you become more serious you realize that you can’t really do it for free–you actually pay for things.

If there is a new media journalist who you would like to see featured in a Q&A, e-mail Sandeep here.

“It was a great place to learn and to let my own style come to forefront,” says Fox. “I didn’t have deadline pressure, I didn’t have editorial pressure, I didn’t have many viewers.”

How times have changed. Fox is now one of seven “Video Journalists” for the Washington Post. He has produced pieces out of the Middle East, Asia, Europe and the United States, viewable here. This year, two of his pieces “Fueling Azerbaijan’s Future” and “Hurricane Katrina Coverage in New Orleans” are nominated for Emmy awards.

Travis Fox in 2004 reporting on tsunami damage to a Sri Lankan fishing village.

OJR spoke to Fox about how the role of an Internet video journalist is evolving at the Washington Post and what makes compelling video for the Web.

OJR: You said that hardly anyone was watching videos on the Washington Post site at first. What was the turning point that led to the creation of a “video journalist” at the Post?

Fox: I think it was the Iraq war. And it was doing stories that are high profile enough that people couldn’t help but notice. That’s when the top editors both at the Website and the newspaper noticed. They had known me before, obviously, but this was a chance to show that in a high pressure, dangerous situations we can tell stories and we can do journalism that’s on par with the newspaper.

OJR: How were these videos different than those on television that they made the top editors want to nurture this media?

Fox: I can’t speak for them but the fact that it was different from television was not necessarily so important. It was the fact that we were doing it. And I think my style in general is different from some parts of television but not all. It’s not reporter driven and it’s not celebrity-anchor driven. That’s not to say that it’s not heavily reported and heavily narrated because a lot of them are. I would say the ones we did in the beginning were more different from television–they were more character-driven pieces, less narration. We still do those types of pieces as well but we mix it up with more heavily-narrated pieces.

OJR: What is your subject’s reaction to being in a multimedia presentation versus being in the print version of the Post? Is there still a preference nowadays?

Fox: I think when I say I am from washingtonpost.com and I have a video camera they automatically think Washington Post and they think video and the two don’t match up–much to their surprise. I think it depends on where you are. I do a lot of foreign coverage and I think abroad it is not as surprising as it is here in the States. But I think here especially, in the last year, Web video is becoming so common that it is surprising fewer and fewer people. I should also say that a lot of my pieces do air on television in different forms. So I always say both. I say that it’s for the Washington Post online but also for possibly for other places.

OJR: So do you frame shots differently for the Web and for TV, or do you work with the same material for both?

Fox: In terms of the production of the video, I think they are pretty close to being the same. You can make the argument that the video screen is smaller on the computer monitor, therefore we should shoot tighter. But shooting tight is a good technique, whether you are shooting for television or for film. People typically sit closer to their computer screens than to their televisions, so proportionally the Web video looks bigger. I don’t think it makes any difference.

In the beginning, there was the notion that you should have everything on a tripod to be stable because any sort of camera shake would cause the pixels to be refreshed, which would slow down your processor, which would slow down your computer. So that’s still a concern, if you are dealing with slower computers.

I would shoot it the same way, whether it was for television or whether it was for the web. I have a certain style and a certain way of shooting, that’s considered a Web style or Web way of shooting perhaps because that’s where I learnt how to do video. But it also works on television.

OJR: Do you cut it differently for TV than you do for the Web?

Fox: These are interesting questions. You know my friends who work for television tell me that I am so lucky because people actually click my videos. That means they want to watch them. Whereas their shows on television are in the background when someone is making dinner. And at the same time I am jealous of them because it’s a better experience when you are on your couch and watching it on television than when you are on your computer monitor.

So there are different ways of thinking about how to cut it. This is something we constantly talk about and we constantly deal. How tight and how fast moving to cut it? On television you want it to be fast moving because you don’t want anyone to click on their remote control and go to the next channel, right? You want to keep their attention all the time.

Whereas on the web you don’t want someone to go to a different Website. Obviously you want it to be tight and you want it to be fast moving. I don’t have the answers but it’s a different medium and it is interesting to
think of it in different ways.

OJR: What new ways of conveying a news story have you tried with which you were pleasantly surprised?

I think the key is always finding the right balance between the different media. So when to do a video? When to do some sort of Flash graphics? When to do panorama? What’s the combination? When to do a blog? And how to integrate them all? How to do that without getting completely overwhelmed by everything?

There are several projects that I think have been successful. Those would probably be ones where you took the various media and combined them in a way that was logical, using a blog for user feedback and conversation; using the panoramas to give you a sense of place; and using videos to give you a sense of people, the character, the location, and then combing the two to give you a full picture of the story. As opposed to just doing a video, just doing a blog, just doing a photo gallery. I think those are the most successful examples.

OJR: What new ways of conveying a news story have you tried that fell flat? Can you tweak it to make that idea work?

Fox: The project I am thinking of is both a success in some ways and a failure in others. I did one in Sri Lanka after the Tsunami. It’s using videos to capture the characters’ stories, panoramas for a sense of place and destruction, and a blog to update the stories that you initially got from the videos. In the beginning I feel like it was very successful in combining those media and telling the story, but at the same time this was one where we underestimated how much effort it would take to maintain the blog over the days and the months after the Tsunami.

OJR: So when you try something like that again or if you’ve tried something…

Fox: I’ll think twice about it…

OJR: …you’ll think twice about it. That’s a big issue: maintaining a blog.

Fox: Yeah, I think the lesson is that you just need to decide whether the story is worth that long-term work commitment or not. Or you see how it is for the first few months and you see what kind of readership you get and
then you decide what to do with it at that point.

OJR: Is there a model that has worked well that you plan to keep working with?

Fox: My job now is really to do evergreen projects. I’m not really doing news. I covered the Lebanon war and Gaza this summer but typically I am supposed to be doing these evergreen-type projects. And I think that’s also a good model that we have tried in the past and we’ve liked so much that it is now kind of institutionalized.

These projects are thematic in nature. The themes will be reoccurring in the news. The themes, the issues that have been in the news, and will be in the news over and over again. The nuclear issue, and Iran, groups like Hamas or Hezbollah, for example. I did a piece a couple of years ago on the fence in the West Bank that Israel is building. This is an issue that’s in the news over and over and over again. The piece had stories from each side of the fence, panorama photos, and a Flash graphic showing the route of the fence.

And now every story the Post has about the fence (we have had several and we will continue to have several in the future) this project will be linked to them This project gets traffic over, and over, and over again. Traffic on the web is not like a subscription to a newspaper–the same people reading it over and over again. You are going to get new traffic from different places constantly. Because this project is a couple of years old, our regular users have already clicked on it but the new user who are coming in to the new story from Yahoo or from Google are going to click on it. And it is going to draw traffic and it’s going to give depth to the article. Now I am setting out in the next year to do these types of projects that are reoccurring themes that are in the news.

That’s not the nuts and bolts but that’s an example of trying something that has worked well. This Israel fence story is more than two years old and it continues to get good traffic and that’s something that we noticed. So that’s essentially a good model–not covering news on a day in and day out basis but the kind of stories that have legs and can go on for several weeks, several months, several years even.
OJR: You started with photography and moved on to video. How do you think your role is likely to evolve over the next five years?

Fox: I am content with video. Video is where I have made my mark. Video is what I want to do. I am not interested in doing still photography. There are many gifted still photographers out there. But it’s more difficult for single individuals to produce videos from start to finish because traditionally television news has worked in a crew. It is a more unusual for people like me who produce video from start to finish. I’d like to keep exploring that. This video journalism vision of single authorship throughout the process will get you some really interesting results. And as the technology gets simpler, if more individuals shoot and cut video–like they create writing–you are going to get a lot more interesting styles, and a lot richer body of work as a whole. I am very committed to that process.

OJR: What about the role of video journalist within the paper and Website?

Fox: I think I it will be much more integrated with traditional news reporters at the newspaper. I think we will be working much more collaboratively. I would guess we are going work on their stories or work with them to develop their stories into video. We have had some successes with that but we haven’t nailed that down as much as we really need to find the right working relationship. We don’t want them to turn into television reporters, obviously. I don’t want to produce that type of video and we want to give them the time that they need to do newspaper reporting. But we want to be able to leverage their expertise into the video.

I would say the direction we are headed in is that I will continue to do my own video reporting, but at the same time probably become more integrated with the newsroom–both the dotcom and Post newsrooms are becoming more integrated.

I did a piece in Azerbaijan with Philip Kennicott, a Post reporter, that was nominated for an Emmy. That’s an example a successful collaboration. We didn’t actually work together ever– even our trips didn’t overlap to Azerbaijan–but we compared notes and we shared the reporting. He went first then I went second. He wrote the script and I voiced the script and then I fed him my reporting and he fed me his reporting and we came up with something. So to me that’s the kind of collaborative effort I am talking about.

OJR: Are there compelling pieces like that that you decide not to cover? Not because of time, not because of budget, not because of the topic itself, but that a new media treatment just won’t be compelling.

Fox: No, I think there is always a compelling way to cover a story. But I don’t think that that means in video. Certain stories are visual and good for video. Katrina, the tsunami, they are good in video and photographs. Certain stories are better in video but not so good in still pictures. And some stories are tough to do in either medium. For example, in Lebanon we did a series on Hezbollah during the war and this wasn’t war action stuff, this is more of a behind the scenes of Hezbollah as an organization. I think in video it worked out really well because you get a sense of the characters and how the organization works. But in still photographs that would not be a very compelling photo essay. In southern Lebanon I was working with print reporters and photographers and it was really interesting to see where the focus of each of the group lied. I chose to go do video somewhere in the middle between the print reporters and still photographers.

A story about the new budget on Capital Hill would probably be tough to do in either stills or a video. That would be more of a print story or a Flash graphics story.

OJR: The Azerbaijan piece, did it appear on Web only?

Fox: Online and it also appeared on television on PBS’s “Foreign Exchange with Fareed Zakaria”, it’s on the podcast, it appeared as an article in the newspaper. This is convergence. We are leveraging this over multiple platforms.
We said that in some ways we are functioning like a production company. We are producing videos for the Website, for our podcast. We were also selling them to television.

So this is an example where we sold it to television, which is not only a very good money maker, it essentially pays for the expense of going abroad and covering the stories which aren’t cheap. It is also a way to market our content to a lot of different audiences. Something like ten times the people that saw it on PBS saw it on the Website and at the end of the show Zakaria said something like “for more of this video go to washingtonpost.com.”

OJR: Collaboration in the newsroom is more of a journalistic change. What impact do you expect from technical changes?

Fox: What’s really going to be exciting is the Internet as a delivery means not as an end media. For us to really compete with television, we have to get our videos to your living room television screen. Because no matter how good it is on the computer it’s never going to be as good as when it’s on your TV or when it’s on your high-definition plasma screen, right?

So I think in the next five years–or even sooner than that–we are going to see the Internet used as a means of delivery to compete with cable TV. We are already seeing that it’s technically possible. Getting Internet content delivered to your television–either through your TiVo or through the new Apple set-top box that is going to come out or through whatever box–and watching it on television in the same high definition quality as cable television, that is exciting. So think about that when you are setting your TiVo or whatever box you are going to be using in the future, you select a Survivor episode, news reports and the latest Washington Post documentary. And the next day, when you sit down to watch them, they will all look the same but one of them came through the Internet and two of them came through cable TV. But for the user it won’t matter.

I think a glimpse of that is through our video podcast that’s on iTunes. That’s kind of the first glimpse–it’s a small screen but it’s essentially the on-demand television that we need to get to. We sell the advertising against that. So we reap the benefits of that and we put it up and users download it and do whatever. But you know as soon as we make the jump onto your television, that’s really when things are going to get exciting. The industry is excited about Web video not because it’s good content or unusual content or it’s better than television, but because of the advertising. Advertising on television in general is lucrative and to be able to capture that type of lucrative advertising by bypassing the juggernaut of cable or broadcast is very exciting.

It’s not just for me or for newspaper sites, it’s for people running their blogs. You can now essentially be your own broadcast station. It’s another one of those milestones that we are crossing on the Internet.

Sandeep Junnarkar is an associate professor at the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism (The City University of New York). He has reported for @times, the New York Times’ first presence on the Web, as well as News.com. If there is a new media journalist who you would like to see featured in a Q&A, email Sandeep here.

Chinese blogger and filmmaker Hao Wu isn’t making public statements about the 140 days he spent imprisoned in China. Wu, a Chinese citizen with US permanent residency, was released from prison July 11 after an international campaign by Wu’s sister, his fellow bloggers and human rights activists. Chinese security services officials did not disclose the reasons for Wu’s arrest or the conditions of his release.

Wu’s associates believe that the government was interested in his tapes and notes for a documentary he was making about China’s underground Christian churches. They say those materials were taken from his Beijing apartment shortly after his arrest.

Wu’s reticence is understandable. Reporters Without Borders’ press freedom report on China paints a dire picture of the state of free speech and thought in the world’s most populous nation. According to RSF, in an effort to contain “growing social unrest, the government has chosen to impose a news blackout. The press has been forced into self-censorship, the Internet purged and foreign media kept at a distance.”

RSF says about 50 reporters are currently imprisoned for writing about subjects the government has deemed sensitive. The latest is Zan Aizong, 37, a reporter for a government-controlled newspaper, who was jailed August 1 after he posted reports on the Internet about Chinese Christians who had been arrested after a peaceful protest.

Despite the continuing dangers, some observers were quick to call Wu’s release a victory for bloggers. In a July 25th column for New America Media, Eugenia Chien wrote,

“[Wu's] case is a testament to the power of the blogging community to generate information and gather support. With an estimated 60 million bloggers in China, blogs have become a powerful tool of social support for causes ranging from feminism to freedom of speech.”

Frank Dai, who blogged alongside Wu on the Global Voices website, isn’t so sure. In an email exchange with this writer, he said, “I would rather take Wu’s release as an individual event which is not closely related to blogosphere… However I think those voices help call attention from large organizations such as RSF [Reporters Without Borders] to this matter and thus maybe accelerate this process.”

The use of blogs and Internet websites to disseminate news that the Chinese government would prefer to see repressed reflects a pattern that goes back to the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests, says Jia-yan Mi, assistant professor of English and Modern Languages at The College of New Jersey. China’s economic opening to the West has led to the proliferation of communications technologies that Chinese citizens have increasingly used to tell their stories to the outside world. For almost two decades now, the world has learned about such events and issues as pro-democracy protests, the AIDS, SARS and bird-flu epidemics, cries for religious freedom, and the growing gap between rich and poor from Chinese reporters operating without government sanction.

That paradox is a source of anxiety for many Chinese government leaders, according to Mi and other observers. Government leaders relish the wealth that communications technologies make possible, but fear that allowing public debate about China’s social problems will create a crisis on a par with the bad old days of Mao’s cultural revolution or the breakup of former Soviet Union. Mi also said that some conservatives often suspect that much of what looks like grass-roots expression by Chinese citizens is really the result of manipulation by Western powers. “The government still cannot recognize the benefit of disclosing information to the general public,” says Dai.

As a graduate student at Beijing University, Mi participated in the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests. He remembers how students used fax machines, early cell phones and walkie-talkies to present their demands for political democracy, and how the world was galvanized by the international media’s broadcasts of the massive protests and the brutal government crackdown on June 4 that killed as many as 3,000 and injured hundreds more. “People say the post-modern telecommunications revolution started from the Tiananmen Square incident,” Mi said.

Today, Mi added, Internet cafes, personal computers and cell phones are ubiquitous in China. Government censors’ efforts to block websites are routinely subverted by tech-savvy Chinese Internet users.

Human rights activist Xiao Qiang maintains that the spirit of the Tiananmen protests remains evident in the fact that Chinese citizens continue to express themselves, despite government opposition. In a June, 2006 New America Media interview, Qiang said, “The spirit of Tiananmen is about people speaking freely. Blogging in the broadest term — expressing yourself through the Internet — is ultimately about the same thing.”

In fact, Mi maintains that a visitor to China will have no trouble finding Chinese citizens who are willing to offer critical opinions about the government, economic affairs or a broad range of issues. For the most part, he said, people express their opinions without consequence – unless a government official concludes that the expression is part of an effort to organize some sort of anti-government movement.

But Dai contends that it’s a mistake to see Chinese bloggers as a movement of dissidents:

“The Chinese bloggers are not so different with bloggers from other countries. MySpace kids talk about pre-age love engagement and their Chinese counterparts emulate after them, posting their photos on the blogs. In addition, dissident bloggers exist in everywhere, regardless of its political ideology of that particular country.”

Dai is part of the Social Brain Foundation, organizers of the second annual Chinese bloggers conference scheduled for end of October 28-29, 2006 in Hangzhou, Zheijang Province. Dai said the conference’s agenda is still in the planning stage but the goal is, “simply to provide a space for Chinese bloggers to know each other offline. It’s not so academic and serious.”

For Dai, Chinese blogs, are a “very intriguing method to enter into the thinking, life style, culture and psychological conflict of modern Chinese people in a fast changing social environment because it helps amplify the voice of ordinary citizens.” Still, Dai says that even the most apolitical of Chinese bloggers writes with the awareness that in a country without the legal infrastructure to protect free speech, even content that is intended to be inoffensive might be seen as violating a taboo. He says,

“Blogging is not totally virtual. The bloggers are real persons in flesh and bone. So I think that the time for bloggers to speak freely would be also the time when speech freedom is protected by the law and institution and regarded as an unalienable right as a human being. Unless the government learns how to deal with its dissenting voices properly in an civilized manner, the free expression will never occur in the blogosphere.”

This month: Angela Morgenstern, Supervising Producer MTV News Overdrive

Angela Morgenstern has the unusual experience of hopping back-and-forth for the past decade between television and online journalism and landing in, perhaps, the best of both worlds.

Now 31-years-old, Morgenstern began her journalism career as a television producer for PBS’s “The Democracy Project” and later for “Livelyhood” where she served as a producer and then managed online projects. At the height of the dot-com boom, she briefly left journalism to work at a political action group which was attempting to harness the Internet for outreach. In less than a year, Morgenstern returned to the newsroom and worked for several years as an on-air reporter and producer for different PBS shows like “Springboard” and “Frontline/World.” She also had a stint with PBS Interactive.

In early 2005, Morgenstern joined MTV Networks and is now the supervising producer for digital products at MTV News. MTV News, however, is not all song and dance. Between coverage of Ashlee Simpson, Outkast and Christina Aguilera, the news division even managed to be nominated for an Interactive Emmy for its broadband coverage of the 2005 Pakistan earthquake. “The path of my career has been going back and forth from TV to online until the point I’m at today which is really a true convergence of the two,” says Morgenstern. “My career reflects this buzzword, convergence, where TV and online are not so separated anymore and you really need to understand multiple mediums to succeed.”

OJR recently spoke to Morgenstern about how to navigate this converged world to produce compelling journalism.

OJR: You’ve been back-and-forth for sometime. How and when did you transition to online journalism?

Morgenstern: I was working in San Francisco as an associate producer for a PBS Television series called “Livelyhood” which at that time was about ordinary and extra-ordinary American working people and of changes in the work place. This was right at the tip of the “dot-com” boom and I just became interested from a content perspective in material that we were not using and in this thing called the “Web.” So frankly, without having a particular expertise, I started to question what we put up and asked if we could put up more–thinking about what parts of stories might make for good web content. It was up to the producers as to how we utilized that space.

As I moved forward in web production, I was fortunate enough to work for a series [Frontline/World] that really understood the importance of original content for the Web. The series combined what I consider to be the best standards in journalism with the opportunity to experiment in new platforms and with the idea that we could bring new voices to public media. I was actually lucky enough to build the Frontline/World site from the ground up and for that we really put an emphasis on this idea that original stories could find a home on the Web and you could break important news and tell stories in an important way online.

OJR: Tell me about where you are now, MTV News Overdrive. What do you know on a daily basis?

Morgenstern: I moved to MTV a year and a half ago where I am now the supervising producer for digital production for MTV news. I helped the staff at MTV launch what would become Overdrive, which is a broadband channel driven by this idea that the audience is getting its information in new ways and MTV wanted to be there. News was a big part of that.

My day-to-day at MTV: I’m overseeing the digital production–the technical and creative production–around programs. There are now two breaking news editions as well as all the MTV News specials that have a corresponding show on air or not. I am interacting a lot with people who are producing other channels for Overdrive.

OJR: What technical skills do you need on the job now and what skills have you acquired in your new role at MTV?

Morgenstern: I think a good way to approach that question is to consider the kind of people we bring on as opposed to me specifically.

I think in my role, the skills are more broad-based. There’s an incredible need to be able to handle a fast paced environment because not only are you dealing with an enormous amount of news daily, but you are seeing the product change constantly. You are seeing the audience’s habits change and you are seeing the technologies and the tools that are available to you change just as quickly.

So it’s really having an understanding of what different technologies can do for your news organization. I have to be able to analyze quickly and be able to work with my team to change on a dime when needed. Another broad skill was my television production background. I’d been in the field and conducted tons of interviews and followed different types of stories so I have an understanding of editorial issues. That makes it more comfortable when dealing with traditional television producers or print reporters because you can talk about the story and then figure out the best way to convey the story online.

In terms of specific skills, we have a smart team of people who are doing digital production for the news department. Almost everyone knows HTML, and is familiar with publishing in a database environment. Photoshop is an absolute must. In most cases they’re familiar with other Web languages. On the video side, they are familiar with as with non-linear video editing. In the beginning they might have familiarity with Final Cut or Adobe Premiere but eventually Avid Editing. That knowledge usually extends into audio editing and other things. So really specific skills are required, but what’s more important is sort of a propensity for new technologies and the ability to pick up new tools with very little training.

OJR: You went from an organization with a smaller budget to one with greater resources. Are you able to present content now that you weren’t able to before?

Morgenstern: Being part of a big structure is helpful. But I found that some of the entrepreneurial skills that we picked up because of need when you are working on a public television show or documentary are just as valuable in a big environment–like finding ways to optimize your pages for a search engines, or finding creative ways to recruit people to help you on a project or story. Those are similar regardless of whether you are in a big environment with lots of resources or sort of entrepreneurial smaller environment.

At MTV we are charged with the same mission as you would be at any smaller organization, like figuring out what you are going to do about podcasting, RSS feeds, wireless phones, and broadband.

OJR: Going back to the idea of limited budgets, how do you decide which news story will get the full Web treatment? Or is that now something that’s become part of covering stories: we are going to use video, audio, and send it on a cell phone?

Morgenstern: I think that figuring out the right formula for making those decisions is the holy grail of online journalism–or journalism in general. I don’t think that anyone has quite figured that out. When I was at KQED one of the executives there had a fantastic matrix that helped evaluate decisions about whether to do a particular program on particular platforms. I think that those formulas are still being worked out but can at least lead you to the right conversations.

At MTV, where we have weekly meetings in addition to the daily meetings where we decide what we are covering with cameras as opposed to sending a journalists with a note book. And at those meetings, we are conscious about what medium we are going to try to hit. Will this also be a broadcast? Is this something that will go into daily news on your phone? Is Video-On-Demand going to want this? Is International going to want this and all those things are considered at the outset.

Regardless of where I’ve worked, I have had to strike a balance as a new media producer between the new media newsroom and the traditional newsroom. You want to be an advocate for new media and get reporters enthusiastic about using new media to get to tell their story. So, if you do your job right, what happens is that you end up with a lot of people with a lot of ideas for new media. Then you have to ask how do you strike the balance between that enthusiasm where you want to do everything, use all your material that you didn’t use in one medium and where you want to make smart decisions and really be strategic about which element of the story you tell where and why and how you toss from one medium to another.

OJR: So you are not just using material off the cutting room floor for MTV’s Website? Is the content that is going on the Web simply material that hadn’t found a home in broadcast or print or has that practice and attitude changed?

Morgenstern: I think it has changed tremendously. We are more sophisticated about how we think about what we put online. I like to think of the unique attributes of each medium. It’s no longer a place where you place things off the cutting room floor. It’s now more about thinking about the particulars of the medium. I like to think of the unique attributes of each medium, as all of us in this industry do when we are planning projects. I tend to think of television or video as an emotional medium. Radio can be a very intimate medium and text is a great way to convey factual information. So what’s the online extension of that or the multimedia extension of that? In some context, it can be the right combination of those elements. In another context it might be the ability to give users choice and shape their own experience.

OJR: There is still resistance in some newsroom against harnessing the Web beyond shoveling print to the site. What advice do you have to get more support for new media coverage?

Morgenstern: I think that if you are in an organization that’s running up against some legitimate resistance–like a lack of resources or a lack of understanding about the possibilities– the first thing that online journalists or new media journalists can do… and this sounds obvious… is to understand how traditional reporters work. Understand the process and what the pressures are in the field and back in the newsroom when a reporter returns. With that understanding, you can really see the smart places to insert yourself or your team into that process. There are sometimes better places for the new media team to get involved. Sometimes it’s at the conception of the story or further along when ideas are honed to begin the discussion about what makes sense for new media.

When you are working with journalists it makes more sense to talk about the story and the goals of that story than it does it talk about specific technologies. You use the technologies later to illustrate what you want to convey creatively.

Another thing is providing examples of the kind of journalism you’re talking about even if they’re examples from other organizations. This can really help garner support from the people you need for support of your project. Once you have that support, you can try new things.

MTV is a big organization but in my limited experience, I have seen that a lot of projects are the results of groups of people who went out on a limb and experimented with ideas that they had and then presented later what they meant by those ideas.

OJR: Thank you Angela.

Suggest a new media journalist whose Q&A you would like to read. Email me at sandeep [at] livesinfocus.org.