Readers with hunting experience are blowing a hole (I know, really bad pun) in newspaper reports that Cheney stood 30 feet to 30 yards away from the victim when the vice president shot him. Based on the reported number of pellet strikes, the hit pattern and the number of pellets in a shell, readers are concluding that the victim may have been shot at close to point-blank range.

Another administration cover-up? Whatever the case, this incident may yet provide another example of how the Internet can connect thousands of sharp readers who, collectively, can find flaws in stories that a small handful of traditional reporters might miss.

I was looking for a specific L.A. Times story on Yahoo News this morning. And on Yahoo’s L.A. Times headlines page I found the following link five stories down:

“Major Quake Jolts San Fernando Valley
Thu Feb 9, 7:55 AM ET”

What the heck?!? I didn’t feel a quake, and I’m in nearby Pasadena. Did I sleep through it? What’s going on?

I click the link in about 3 microseconds, only to find a story with the overhead “TIMES PAST: FEB. 9, 1971.”

Nope, I didn’t sleep through that quake. In fact, I remember it well. But it ain’t exactly news anymore. So why scare readers by including it in a daily news feed?

(Hiltzik’s column appeared in today’s LA Times, and in another sign that Hiltzik is one of the more Web-savvy journalists in the newspaper world, he’s also posted it to his blog, where you don’t need to register with latimes.com to read it.)

He continues:

“As for the Internet, as a breeding ground of new entertainment talent, so far it’s largely barren. Companies from iFilm to Amazon.com have tried to make a commercial mark with Web-only film clips, but it wouldn’t be surprising to learn that the most popular downloaded moving pictures on the Web (outside of pornography) are snippets from ‘The Daily Show’ or ‘Saturday Night Live.’”

Harsh words, but I’d suggest taking a step or two to the side and looking from a different angle. No, there’s not enough *mass market* entertainment to support a sixth broadcast network, or even to densely populate another mass-market Web video portal.

But services like iTunes, and iFilm, can operate as both mass marketplaces and niche delivery systems. Look beneath the “top downloads” lists on such services and one can find compelling entertainment that appeals only to limited audiences. Music fans can find podcasts of genres rarely heard in most broadcast radio markets. Film fans can find intriguing student and independent work that would never find its way on screens in the average American city. But the limited appeal of such work, even when of top quality, assures that it rarely will show up on “top download” lists.

The Internet’s never going to generate enough mass market entertainment talent to support new mass market networks and studios because the Internet’s greatest strength is as an *alternative* to the mass market. This is where artists can go to distribute works that won’t generate enough money or buzz to get a major studio or network deal.

I’m awaiting the day that a “Freeks and Geeks” — any top-quality, quirky, low-rated broadcast TV show — gets the ax, but instead of shutting production, its producers start selling new episodes for a buck each on the Web.

Most TV shows fail miserably. But the lure of hitting it big keeps thousands of artists working on pilots every year. Perhaps, with the demise of one more network raising those odds, a few more professional artists might instead try to bypass the networks and reach out to their potential audience directly, via the Internet.

The blow-up on the Washington Post website was not the fault of its readers. It was the fault of the Washington Post.

It was the Post’s fault for publishing an erroneous report. It was the Post’s fault for not moving immediately to correct it, once readers pointed it out. It was the Post’s fault for disrespecting its readers but shutting down all the blog’s comments, instead of pruning ones containing obscenities and threats. And if the Post couldn’t handle the volume of pruning that needed to be done, it was the Post’s fault for not having a better comment management system in place.

So let’s quit blaming the readers. (And let’s especially quit looking at these sorts of incidents as right vs. left. In journalism, we ought to deal with correct vs. incorrect. If that means we consistently offend some political group if it is consistently wrong, then tough.)

The proper thing for any news publisher to do in this sort of case is *not* to get defensive. Own up to the mistakes and work to do better next time, instead. Post ombudsman Deborah Howell wrote some encouraging words to that effect in her latest column. Watch OJR tomorrow for an article with additional suggestions on how news websites ought to better manage readers comments, too.

Krishna Bharat announced the move on Google’s Blog.

The latest enhancement is a personalized news recommendation engine, which uses Google’s personalized search technology to suggest news stories based, in part, on other stories that a reader has clicked on.

Bharat writes:

“All of this is done automatically using algorithms. For example, we might recommend news stories to you that many other users have read, especially when you and they have read similar stories in the past. We’ve also added a section to show you the most popular stories in the Google News edition you are viewing (e.g., U.S.). Now you can see the top stories being published by editors across the web, as well as other stories popular with readers, plus topics that you track or are interested in — all on one page.”

The mess started when ombudsman Deborah Howell wrote, in her Jan. 15 column about the U.S. government scandal revolving around lobbyist Jack Abramoff, that “a number of Democrats, including Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (Nev.) and Sen. Byron Dorgan (N.D.), have gotten Abramoff campaign money.”

That wasn’t true. All of Abramoff’s direct contributions went to Republicans. And readers used the comment function on the Post editors’ blog to point that out. Howell later clarified her remarks, writing that “a better way to have said it would be that Abramoff ‘directed’ contributions to both parties.”

But the avalanche of responses against Howell’s column prompted the Post to shut down the comments function on the editor’s blog. (Comments remain enabled on the Post’s many other blogs.) Washingpost.com Executive Editor Jim Brady wrote that “a significant number of folks who have posted in this blog have refused to follow” rules against “personal attacks, the use of profanity and hate speech” in justifying the decision. But some bloggers disputed whether the comments went over the line.

Managing a discussion community requires much more than turning on a comment function and hoping for the best. The uproar over Howell’s error exposes the deep anger felt by many Americans toward its current government leadership and what those Americans perceive to be the press’s failure to cover the government with appropriate skepticism.

Yes, readers who become abusive or profane ought to be cut off. But those who do not ought to be heard, and not cut off with the others.

People need to vent. The Post, and other online news outlets, would do better to let them vent, then to engage those readers to discover the source of their anger and frustration — not to shut off their medium for speaking.

BBC News reports that conclusions drawn about the aesthetic appeal of websites by users who looked at those sites for just 50 milliseconds closely matched those drawn by other users who looked at the sites for longer periods.

“Unless the first impression is favourable, visitors will be out of your site before they even know that you might be offering more than your competitors,” lead researcher Gitte Lindgaard of Canada’s Carleton University, told the BBC.

No pressure there….

The journal Nature this week provides a partial answer. In its investigation, Nature asked leading scientists to examine articles on Wikipedia and in Encyclopaedia Britannica on a variety of science topics. In the 42 articles examined, researchers found 162 errors, omissions or misleading statements in the Wikipedia entries, with 123 in Britannica. Yet the researchers categorized just eight errors as serious – and those were evenly split, with four in Wikipedia and four in Britannica.

The investigation demonstrates, once again, that Wikipedia is not a perfect source of 100-percent accurate information. But neither is Encyclopaedia Britannica. That Wikipedia was able to perform as well as Brittanica in avoid serious errors on difficult scientific content provides a strong endorsement for the concept of getting good information by letting readers collectively write and edit it.

When I arrived at OJR, I was surprised to find that more than half, almost two-thirds, of the site’s traffic was not from human readers, but from robots. Some of that traffic was welcomed, such as robots from major search engines like Google and Yahoo News. But much of it was from rogue spiders — spammers trolling for e-mail addresses, attempts to download the entire site for duplication on various scraper sites, and such. I spent a fair amount of time tweaking OJR’s robots.txt file to ban identified rogue spiders, and OJR’s stats software to filter hits from the rest.

Well, this week WebmasterWorld.com has taken the radical step of banning all spiders from its site. In a post on the site, administrator Brett Tabke reported that despite spending five to eight hours a week fending off rogue spiders, the site was still hit with 12 million unwanted spider page views last week.

The move, presumably, will result in WebmasterWorld disappearing from major search engine results and would eliminate the site from archive searches, as as Archive.org.

WebmasterWorld has established a large and loyal audience. One could argue that the site doesn’t need search engine traffic. But how loyal will its readership turn out to be if members can’t search for the site, or its archives, through Google, et al?

As Brett titled his post announcing the change, “lets try this for a month or three…”

Then we will see.

There’s no need to install sensors all over town. And no wait for a costly phone survey. The Internet enables the USGS to engage a small army of citizen reporters to collect their information. Journalists, of course, can do the same with their reporting projects.

But such efforts run into problems when there’s no single obvious source for grassroots reporters to submit their information. We saw this with the dozens of websites that attempted to compile missing persons lists after Hurricane Katrina. No one publication had a comprehensive list of the missing. And attempts to aggregate the lists required either finger-numbing cutting and pasting, or equally tedious RegEx coding to parse the data from the various websites.

Sure, the USGS managed to establish its website as the place to go to report earthquakes. But, for most stories, readers and journalists face the “Katrina conundrum” — too many sources trying to collect the same information, without coordination.

It doesn’t have to be that way. Of course, some journalists always will want to go their own way, searching for a scoop. But others see the value in cooperation, in working together to best provide comprehensive information for the public. To do that, website publishers need:

• A simple online tool with which to collect fielded information from the public.

• A way to share that information with others collecting similar information, and
• A way for all those information collectors to know when other collectors have gathered fresh information.

Today, I want to propose that OJR lead an initiative to address these three needs.

Right now, to collect information like the USGS, or a Katrina missing persons list, you need to be a coder who can put together an HTML input form and a script to dump that information into a database. What online journalism needs is a free, open-source tool that does for grassroots reporting what Blogger.com did for online journals – making it easy for a non-coder to set up a grassroots reporting input page with no HTML or database experience.

Second, the information that tool collects ought to be recorded in a standard fielded format, so that it can be easily shared with other collection efforts. There’s no need to build a common database or central server to support this. All that’s needed is for each site collecting data to be able to export it as XML, using a common set of fields. Tools can be written, along the lines of RSS aggregators, to collect those XML fields and aggregate them into comprehensive databases.

Personally, I believe that the RSS standard itself does not support nearly enough fields to transmit an entire database of incident reports. We need something more expansive. Dave Winer’s OPML moves in that direction, but I don’t know that it offers the granularity needed for this project. The point is, I think a common XML format is the solution to the problem, but that we need to have some industry discussion as to what that format might be. Obviously, it ought to be flexible enough to accommodate everything from missing persons lists to fraud reports to (my pet project) theme park accidents. Let’s start talking on what that format might look like. (And, rest assured, I don’t want to recreate the overkill of NewsML.)

Third, we need a weblogs.com-type destination site that information collectors can ping to let identically tagged information collection projects know that they’ve been updated.

We could build a development tool that handles issues two and three itself. But I think that it is important that any development tool work with collection efforts that do not use the tool. That’s why the blogosphere works so well. You don’t have to use Blogger, or any other specific individual tool, to link to and aggregate other blogs. Our distributed reporting efforts should work the same way.

So, who’s interested in helping me refine this idea, and build these tools? The development of blogging tools showed us the power that could be unleashed when we liberated online narrative publishing from the HTML coders and opened it to everyone. Let’s do the same with distributed data reporting. E-mail me at rniles@usc.edu, and let’s get started.