Mobile journalists, or “mojos,” in training. (Credit: Allissa Richardson/Flickr/Creative Commons License

On April 19 to 20, more than 300 journalists from around the world descended on Austin for a sold-out conference on online journalism. The International Symposium of Online Journalism, hosted by the Knight Center for Journalism in the Americas at the University of Texas at Austin, featured a host of new media gurus discussing everything from “mojos” to data visualization. A selection of takeaways:

Don’t focus on building your own online community; insert your site into already established communities.

Deseret News, a Mormon owned news brand “for faith and family oriented audiences in Utah and around the world,” has grown its social media presence and views exponentially in recent years. The secret, according to Clark Gable, president and CEO of Deseret Publishing Company, was “finding the conversation people were already having” and then inserting their content into the flow.

The first step to being able to do that, Gables said, is to determine your publication’s unique niche (in the case of Deseret News, family values are high on the list). He emphasized that, in an online realm, it should be about what you are best at not only in your own community, but also in the world, since your audience is not limited by geography. “If you don’t know what you’re going to be good at,” he said, “you don’t know what the conversation is going to be.”

Gables provided Forbes and The Atlantic as two brands that have excelled at identifying what they are best at and then inserting their brand into existing conversations.

Data teams are on the rise, as is the demand for people who know how to manipulate and visualize data.

Data was hot at the symposium, just as it was at the Online News Association’s conference last fall.  Jennifer Carroll, senior editor and VP for content at Gannett, said her organization is expanding its data staff. Investigative News Network, in partnership with Investigative Reporters and Editors, is also hiring a data reporter.

At the Texas Tribune, databases — particularly of public employee salaries — have been one of the site’s greatest successes, said John Thornton, the paper’s chairman and founder. In a talk with Latin American journalists, Thornton said that came as a surprise — calling it data “porn.”

Figuring out how to not only manipulate large data sets but also display them visually was another theme. Kim Rees, partner and head of data visualization at Periscopic, shared a stunning and devastating visualization of the number of Americans who have died due to gun violence, along with the corresponding years of lost life.

Screen capture of interactive data visualization produced by Periscopic.

University of Miami Professor Alberto Cairo summed up the value of graphic literacy to digital journalists this way: “Friends don’t let friends use pie charts.”

Engagement is not clicking a “like” button.

NPR’s Andy Carvin opened his talk about online engagement by sharing how social media gets things wrong. He started with his own experience tweeting erroneously about former Congresswoman Gabby Giffords’ death.

“How often do we post reports without a third source, or even a second one, to back it up?” Carvin asked. “How many of us have typed up a tweet for a major news Twitter account and hesitated before hitting the send button, wondering, what if we’ve screwed this up? And how many of us have hit the button anyway?”

The role that journalists can play in social media, Carvin argued, is a two-way street of helping the public “become better consumers and producers of information — and hopefully achieve their full potential as active participants in civil society.” Crucial to that, he said, is being transparent about what we know and what we don’t know, actively addressing rumors that are circulating online, and challenging the public to scrutinize them:

“Why aren’t we engaging the public more directly? I don’t mean engagement like encouraging them to ‘like’ us on Facebook or click the retweet button. That is not engagement. By engagement I mean, why don’t we use these incredibly powerful tools to talk with them, listen to them, and help us all understand the world a little better? Perhaps we can even use social media to do the exact opposite of its reputation – to slow down the news cycle, help us catch our collective breaths and scrutinize what’s happening with greater mindfulness.” Read the full transcript»

The question of how to create meaningful engagement was also the focus of an award-winning academic study, “40 Million Page Views is Not Enough: An Examination of the Christian Science Monitor’s Evolution from SEO to Engagement.” One of the paper’s authors, Jonathan Groves, a professor at Drury University, noted that at the Monitor they were getting high traffic, but not for their award-winning — and expensive — international coverage (Disclaimer: I reported from Spain and Germany for the Monitor). Instead, the uptick tended to come from national coverage and polls. Groves, who authored the paper with Professor Carrie Brown Smith at the University of Memphis, concluded the problem was primarily that the Monitor was conducting a one-way conversation with its readers and needed to find better ways to meaningfully engage them.

“Mojo” is on the rise.

Another focus of some conference presenters was on how to use mobile low-cost tools to train journalism students — and residents — to become “mojos,” or mobile journalists, so they can report their own stories.

Ivo Burum, a former Australian Broadcast Company reporter, has been working with indigenous aborigines and other marginalized communities, training them to report their own stories using mobile video techniques. He said that the equipment costs are under $400 a person, and some participants have gone on to be paid correspondents for broadcasting companies. “At the end of four hours everybody has a video,” Burum said. “They can’t believe it.” An editor from a Danish tabloid newspaper, Ekstra Bladet, was so impressed with the technique that now Burum is training reporters from the newsroom and developing a web television presence with them.

A mobile journalism rig. (Credit: Allissa Richardson/Flickr/Creative Commons License

Alissa Richardson, a professor at Bowie State University, is teaching similar mobile techniques to all of her students and to young people from at-risk backgrounds. She also trains girls abroad in conjunction with Global Girls media.

Forget J-schools as teaching hospitals; think entrepreneurial models.

David Ryfe, a professor at the University of Nevada-Reno, shared findings from a paper he wrote with his colleague Professor Donica Mensing on the concept that journalism students can help fill the void in local reporting. The paper, which also won an award at the symposium, explained that the difference between this model and a teaching hospital is that doctors are “committed to a profession that will reward them when they’re done in terms of prestige and income.” Journalism is not that today. Instead, the “newspaper industry is imploding,” and this model “sends people to fill in the gaps left behind.”

Ryfe urged educators to pivot away from a professional model that no longer exists and to examine new models instead. Students can do work for publication, but it should focus on experimentation rather than transferring the legacy newsroom to the university. Echoing a recurring theme at the conference, he also noted that the skills learned in J-school can be used elsewhere. A good point,, but if you happen to be paying for that journalism education, those are very expensive auxiliary skills.

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.