“Sometime two people can seem to be disagreeing about something when they really don’t,” I told her. “The only disagreement they’re really having is over vocabulary.”

As I mentioned in my top mistakes pice last month, publishers and advertisers can mislead each other by using confusing terminology for measuring a website’s traffic. Newspaper website staff can lose newsroom managers they are trying to build a relationship with when they start dropping terms like “open source” and “sock puppetry” in their conversations. And let’s not even get back into the once-raging debate over the definition of the word “blog.”

So, in an effort to define a common vocabulary for those of us in the news business, I’m taking the advice I gave that student and starting an OJR wiki for an online news glossary.

Here’s the link: http://www.www.ojr.org/ojr/wiki/glossary/.

As with all OJR wikis, any registered OJR reader may add to or edit the page. So if there’s a term I’ve missed that you’d like to see added to the glossary, please do it. And if you’ve got a better way of defining some of these terms, go ahead and make the change.

Thanks, in advance, to those who take a few moments to add to the wiki. And, to everyone else reading, I hope that you find this glossary useful in improving your communication with others in the news business.

Goodbye 2006.  The tenth anniversary year of the start of many Web-based news sites was the occasion for reflection about how far (or not) we’ve come and speculation on how best to proceed forward.  Here we are in 2007 and it’s time to do a measured look at where we are right now.

For the past ten years the features on news websites have evolved and expanded.  Thanks to software developments like SoundSlides audio slideshows have proliferated on news sites, expanding experimentation with ”multimedia.”  The “We Media” mantra has given rise to collaborative community reported news both within and outside mainstream news organizations. RSS feeds have changed the notion of mass product distribution to personalized news channel delivery.  The aggregation of news stories on a given topic coupled with additional information (along the lines of Seattle P-I’s Transportation page or Lawrence Journal-World’s Legislation page) is moving news websites away from “your daily newspaper on the computer screen” to a valuable aggregation of community information.

Experimentation with individual story forms continues.  The slideshow is getting a remake with the “flipbook” style of choreographed image display set to music (as with the MSNBC “Iraqi Kurdistan” video.)  The packaging of series stories with multiple media elements is getting cleaner and more elegantly designed (the Orphans & Angels piece from Florida Today is a good example.)  Flash and Google maps interfaces are being used to navigate the user through data and information (take a look at AZ Star’s Sealing Our Border interactive map and the Boston Globe campaign contributions map.)

How the success of these experimentations and evolutions are being measured is still an issue.  Page views, time spent on the page, where people enter in from and where they go after can all be measured.  But what do we know about how these news features and forms change attitude toward the news product, or how effective the form is at informing, or if a new design is a more effective way to get people to engage fully with the carefully constructed package?

Research into story design effectiveness is happening in newsrooms and universities.  In the case of newsroom research, the findings are regarded as competitive intelligence and not readily shared with the industry.  In universities, the findings are written in academese and not readily understood by the industry.

In this column, we will ferret out the research and findings about story form effectiveness and profile the people and places who are trying to understand current practices and guide more informed design decisions.  Creating stories that engage, inform, and get people to come back for more must be part of the media’s mix of offerings.  We hope, in the coming months, to engage and inform you about story design research.

(Special thanks to Interactive Narratives for consistently shining a light on story innovation.)

Journalists should be excited by the Internet. On the Web, words, pictures, video and audio can be woven together in ways that tell stories more effectively than is possible with any of these mediums alone. But in order to weave exceptional, rich, carefully planned online stories, you have to become proficient at a lot of techniques, skills and technologies, many of which you probably thought you were avoiding when you chose journalism as a career.

To help you learn some of these skills and start experimenting with online journalism, we’ve assembled a list of sites and programs that will help you quickly and easily begin using multimedia and the internet to advance your reporting and your storytelling. All of these applications are low-cost. Most are free, though some ask you to pay to access advanced functionality. All are free of spyware and adware, as far as we know (though it is always good to do an Internet search on anything you download and install to be sure). And each should make the work of creating great journalism online at least a little easier.

Our list of easy online publishing tools is a wiki, so please feel free to add links to tools that you’ve used, which fit our criteria, and that are likely to be of great use to other online journalists as well.

About nine months ago, I decided to free myself from the shackles of submission editors and paper-based journalism and join the legions of writers who publish online.

I dabbled in journalism in college at my school newspaper while earning a computer science degree, but left it behind for a career in computers. After six years of managing and implementing systems integrations, serving off and on as a systems administrator and cringing as I saw America get less and less well-informed, though, I decided to return to journalism and see if I couldn’t be of some help.

I am convinced that systems to better manage reporting and reporters are essential to the future of news, as important as reporters putting boot to pavement and talking to people, face to face. I have had trouble convincing editors of this, however, and so I decided to become a blogger.

As a blogger, my mom can read my work whenever she wants. I can publish articles on conspiracy theories and journalism technology, even when I can’t find anyone who thinks people will be interested. And as I blog, I’ll also be gaining the kind of down-and-dirty knowledge of Web publishing software I need to make some of my ideas a reality. It’s going to be great.

Finding a blog tool

I looked into hosting packages as well as sites like blogger.com and typepad.com and tried to answer some basic questions. Will I need to be able to serve more than one site, for instance – one for weightier work and one for food writing and pictures of pigeons and the microscopic dogs people carry in their purses here in New York? Do I need to be able to customize CSS or to allow guests to write on my site? I even studied the hardware requirements and features of various blogging programs and considered building a server myself.

After careful consideration, I decided on a professional account at typepad.com for its good balance between ease of use, features I thought I needed – multiple blogs with pictures of rats on subway tracks are in, and so are guest bloggers – and the ability to customize. The available templates are pretty obviously pre-built, but you at least can choose from many layouts and tweak the CSS. Best of all, I don’t have to worry about operating system updates or patching databases or Web servers.

My first blog site is named sideways_reporting, implying that journalists need to collaborate more with each other – between publications, across great distances, etc. And if you haven’t heard of it, it’s because I haven’t posted a word to it in the nine months I have been paying for the account. I am still keeping Mom and the rest of the world waiting.

After weeks spent finding the perfect mix of features and flexibility for all the things I hoped to do, when push came to shove and I actually looked at what it would actually take to get my blog up and running, the solution I chose ended up being too complicated for what I had the time and desire to do.

Tech should serve content, not the other way around

In focusing on features and technical specs, I ignored what I think is the single most important factor in choosing software (or choosing a car, creating a budget, planning reporting for an article, designing software, etc.): before you do anything else, you need to step back, take stock at a basic level of how much time, money and skill you have to dedicate to online publishing, then decide how you want to use your resources.

Many people who publish online want to learn more about the technologies involved in blogging and publishing on the Web, especially given journalism’s employment insecurity, the value of computer skills in the job market and the sex-appeal of the hacker archetype (like the guy in the laptop commercial who walks into a cafe where a panic-stricken businessman is staring at a smoking laptop, closes the computer, places a new one down in its place, and walks out without saying a word – that is hard core).

Learning about technology is a great goal, and journalists must become more technologically literate, even beyond the career advantage it offers. The better journalists understand technology, the more chance there is that they can use it to inform better reporting and presentation of the news.

But time is valuable, and technology can soak up any and all time you have to give, if you let it. If you are reading this, chances are you are a journalist and not an IT worker. Before you even begin to look for Web publishing software, be brutally honest about what you want to accomplish online. If it involves writing and reporting, don’t let the siren song of technical knowledge or advanced features trick you into making decisions that will keep you from reporting news.

Regardless of your technical skill, it is easy to under-estimate the amount of your time managing your publishing software will take, and increased technical skill complicates things. You can do more, but you become tempted to take on work that you can manage if all goes well, but that can become overwhelming if things go wrong.

Should you decide, for instance, that you really want to learn about the technology involved in Internet publishing (or save on hosting), you might look at hosting your blog or website on your own server.

Hosting your own

Hosting your own website can be a great way to save money on hosting fees. You have the opportunity to learn about installing, configuring, securing, and using a range of technologies, from relational databases to Web servers to scripting languages. You get full control over configuration, implementation details and an imposing array of acronyms. If you are a mad genius trying to push the bounds of Internet news, you’ll never be limited by someone else’s rules.

You’d learn a lot this way, but you will be doing all of the operating system and application updates, all of the installing and configuring and all of the maintenance on your site yourself, just you and either the Unix shell prompt or the blank stare of a Windows desktop.

And you really must keep your software up-to-date. A minor security hole in one program could allow a hacker to exploit other bugs that deliver control of your whole server, and once a hacker gets that kind of access to your system, about the only way to guarantee that it is clean is to erase the hard drive and install everything from scratch. No program is too little to ignore.

Securing and configuring everything also can become a challenge as you update software. The new version of one program you need might not work with an older version of another essential program. You can try to reconfigure the connection between the two (which can range from easy to infuriating) but if you can’t get them to work together, you might be forced to decide between using older, less secure versions of programs or making up a new way of implementing whole sections of your site.

This strategy requires a considerable amount of work when all goes well (and even then it will create frustration), and things will not always go well.

Eventually you will suffer a hack attempt or a hardware failure and you will learn a great many things the hard way, in a very short amount of time. There’s no glamor here. Your site could be down for days, or could be lost entirely if you don’t have a good backup strategy (which you should – at least back up to a USB hard drive once a week). Your marriage, relationships, friendships, etc. will suffer. You will disappear from the Web and be unable to tell anyone why, even as the struggle to figure out which piece of hardware or software is causing the problem, what Web server patch you forgot to apply, slowly turns you into a desperate poster to tech forums and open source FAQs.

Hosting your own server can be done by a journalist, and you definitely would learn from the experience, but as you can see, it demands much non-journalism work and requires figuring out how to deal with a broad range of problems, most unforeseen.

Get someone else to host

Don’t worry if that sounds like a little too much for you. There is a reason many of the IT professionals you see walking around are pale and haunted looking, sometimes with a nervous twitch. I am a little haunted myself (I rarely admit to knowing anything about computers in polite conversation, and when someone figures it out, I cringe, waiting to hear something like “While I’ve got you, I’ve got this problem with my AOL email…”)

Maintaining creative control over your website without taking on all the responsibility for keeping a server up and secure is still possible, through different hosting plans. Hosts offer services ranging from housing a server that you have configured and continue to manage, to allowing you to use a server whose software is installed and maintained by the host.

When you sign on with a host, you usually pick between packages that let you decide how much the host manages and how much data you are allowed to serve out. As the host manages more of the software installed on your server, your cost increases and you sacrifice some control. Your money should include technical support, though, and while it feels good to know you installed and configured every piece of software you use, it can also be nice to have someone you can call at any time if you notice problems or have a question, and letting someone else worry about software updates and security gives you time to do other things.

Forget the hosting, and just blog

You also can throw in the technical towel, as I have for now, and get an account at a blog hosting site like blogger.com or typepad.com . They worry about keeping the server running, allowing you to focus on becoming comfortable with Internet publishing at a high level, first, and reporting news.

You won’t have exceptional flexibility or control, but you can still change your site’s basic layout and choose between different color schemes, and you can use blog sites to make some pretty substantial Web news destinations. Don’t let the generally accepted definition of a blog fool you. This is powerful, flexible publishing software and it can host a variety of content, not just short, sometimes poorly written and underreported opinion pieces.

In the end, regardless of the strategy you choose for publishing on the Web, keep the following in mind:

• Your best-case estimate of how much time you’ll have to spend dealing with technology is probably too optimistic (unless you have an account at a blog site);
• The worst case can take up a whole lot of time and might involve your site being offline for some time;
• And it is better to over-estimate the cost of maintaining a certain strategy than to be overly optimistic.

Also remember that while this is an important decision, it isn’t exactly life or death. If you err on the simple side and end up feeling limited by the constraints of your myspace page or friendster blog, you can always switch to another hosting strategy, and take your content too (though pulling off the migration can be a challenge). And if you find the opposite is true and your solution is too technical, don’t be too proud to ratchet down your expectations and find a simpler way to get your stuff online.

In the process of writing this article, I once again logged in to my typepad account to see if it could be simple enough to let me get started blogging while I planned my next move. I considered other options, even myspace and friendster pages if that was what I needed to start writing. I finally decided I could get a very basic typepad configuration implemented in a couple of weeks that will require minimal maintenance and let me write while I plan my next move.

I want to start reporting repositories where journalists can access not only the 20% of reporting that makes it into a finished article, but also all the other stuff, information that might lead them in a different direction or help them to angle the story differently so that it can be more accessible to an audience they want to reach.

For now, however, I am going to use my blog to post longer reported pieces, put the reporting I can easily put in a digital format online, write shorter analytical pieces that expand on and emphasize select points from each article and then see how readers react.

It won’t necessarily be the future of journalism, but you’ve got to start somewhere and it is a first step.

And that first step is key. The features you select in online publishing software are important, and it is a great idea to pick a hosting strategy or software that will help you to learn more about Internet publishing technology and take advantage of technical skills. But remember not to lose sight of why you are trying to get on the Internet in the first place – reporting and writing.

As a Web journalist, you need to figure out how much you want to allow technology to keep you from gathering and sharing information and always keep this tradeoff in mind as you choose how to put your journalism on the Web.

For more in-depth information on choosing a Web host, check out the following sites:

• How to Choose a Web Host (thesitewizard.com ) – Written by Christopher Heng, this is a simple overview of things to consider when choosing a Web host by someone who understands the tradeoffs inherent in the choice.
• How to Choose a Web Hosting Service (ISP) for your Business Web Pages (wilsonweb.com) – This is an article from a Web marketing group that offers a little more detail on some of the points in the first web page, but that is still at a high enough level to be accessible.
• General Web Hosting Articles (thewhir.com) – Articles and a glossary from the Web Hosting Industry Review. I poked around this site, and if you are looking for in-depth information, this looks like a good choice. It is not only for people looking for a host, but also for hosts themselves, so some articles might be too technical for the casual Web journalist. But don’t let that scare you away. From what I read, these people know what they are doing and seem fair and accurate, as much as I would ask of any journalist.

This is definitely a short list, and I am sure I haven’t found all of the best resources on Web hosting. If you decide to go with hosting and come across other good sources of information, please let me know so we can check them out and pass them along.

Online Journalism Review: How did you get started on Seahawks Insider?

Mike Sando: Mark Briggs, our online editor, asked me to do a blog for the 2005 NFL Draft. It seemed like a good idea. Seahawks-related stories were often the most popular on the site, and the draft allowed plenty of time for analysis between picks. We were pleasantly surprised when the blog generated around 16,000 page views during the draft without any marketing. We literally had decided to do the blog ONE day before the draft. I have no idea how people found it that first day, but the fact that they did told us there was a lot of demand out there.

OJR: How much of your time is spent on the blog versus the paper? How much cross-over is there?

Sando: That is the question I hear most, generally from reporters fearful of increased workloads. I honestly can’t say how much time I spend specifically on the blog. There is a ton of crossover. Efficiency is the key. Blog entries are meant to be short, sweet and filled with helpful links. I’m pretty adept at keeping abreast of what’s out there online and turning it around quickly on the blog in a manner relevant to the Seahawks. If I work 12 hours in a day, maybe two of those hours are spent only on the blog.

OJR: Do you modify your voice when writing for the blog? And if so, how hard is it for a newspaper reporter to adapt to blogging?

Sando: The transition might be very difficult for reporters who are not Web-oriented. I’m online a lot of the time even when I’m not working, which allows me to monitor the blog as desired. Beyond that, the first thing reporters need to do is lighten up and realize that the blog is not the newspaper. If a columnist somewhere makes an off-the-wall proposal that has people talking, or if you want to throw out some analysis on the topic of the day, the blog is the place to do it. In that sense I have definitely modified my voice for the blog. That was a little tough to do initially, but after running the blog for a while, I’m figuring out what works and where I want to go with things. I used the word “analysis” and not “opinion” because it’s important for me to remain true to my identity as a journalist (that probably sounds higher-minded that I’d prefer, but hopefully the point holds up).

OJR: What reporting and information do you put in the blog that you can’t or won’t put in your newspaper stories?

Sando: Here’s a recent example: The Flint, Mich., paper published a story about former Seahawks receiver Daryl Turner, who enjoyed some productive years in the 1980s before disappearing in a haze of drugs and alcohol. It wasn’t something we needed to chase for the paper, but I turned it into a quick blog item. There are numerous other examples. The blog allows more room to discuss (and sometimes debunk) rumors, too.

OJR: Is there a difference in the feedback that you get for what you do on the blog versus what you do for the paper?

Sando: I get way more feedback about the blog. In years past, I might answer 15 emails asking the same thing. Now I address the matter once on the blog and that’s it; my time spent answering emails has almost disappeared. Along the same lines, having your own blog is sort of like hosting a radio show. It’s more about the host, whereas people don’t pay much attention to non-columnist bylines in the paper. For years I have written 350-500 stories per year for the paper, only to have people recognize me as the guy who spends 30 minutes a week during the NFL season as a guest on a sports-radio show. It’s not that the radio station had more listeners than we had readers; rather, it’s that the listeners were listing to me, whereas the newspaper readers were merely reading my stories. This is an important distinction. Blogs make reporters more relevant as individuals. This would seem to be good for reporters, long term.

OJR: What is the editing process for your blog, if any?

Sando: I post directly to the Internet. A blog with filters is not much of a blog, in my view. Immediacy is very important. The News Tribune trusts my ethics and my judgment. The paper also realizes, shrewdly, that online standards differ from print standards. This doesn’t mean that anything goes in a blog. Basic journalism values still apply and management has a responsibility to enforce them wherever its name appears. It’s just that reporters have more freedom on a blog.

OJR: What do you see as the potential risks for a newspaper reporting in blogging? What have you done to try to overcome them?

Sando: I think a blog will expose a poor reporter more quickly, while allowing a good reporter to flourish more demonstrably. Also, the comments section of a blog will test a reporter’s restraint. I’ve spent a fair amount of time maintaining the comments section by discouraging crassness, hot-temperedness and overall idiocy.

OJR: How have you done that?

Sando: In some cases I simply delete the unwanted comment. Some people thrive on stirring up trouble. It’s best not to engage them beyond issuing reminders as to the kind of comments we want on the blog: informational or inquisitive ones. I do not want the comments section to become a place where everyone with an opinion shares his; rather I would like people to bring information (in the form of relevant links, etc) or questions that might interest others. There will always be fluff in the comments section. The No. 1 complaint we get is that my comments do not appear different visually from the other comments (some people only want to ready my comments). We are taking steps to make my comments easier to recognize. Once that happens, I’ll be less concerned with what other people might be saying there.

OJR: Who are your role models and influences for your blogging, if anyone?

Sando: Mark Briggs, editor of thenewstribune.com, has been and remains a resource for me. He has helped me “get” what blogging is about.

OJR: Taking yourself out of consideration here, who do you think is doing the best job of blogging about sports?

Sando: Mike Reiss of the Boston Globe. His New England Patriots blog is solid. He understands what it means to feed the beast. In other words, it’s not a blog if you’re providing updates every five days.

OJR: What advice would you have for a journalist thinking about writing a blog for his or her paper’s website?

Sando: One thing to remember is that the absence of space limitations online should NOT be viewed as an invitation to ramble on about things. People want the blog to move along already. Keep the items short and keep them coming. Provide helpful links when you can, then get out of the way. Another thing to remember is to break news on the blog. Forget the notion that it’s better to break a story in the paper. It’s usually not. We’ll still hold something if it’s a project we’ve been working on, but we take the day-to-day Seahawks stuff to the blog first.

But a small network of writers at scienceblogs.com are trying to broaden scientific discourse by editorializing about everything from gay actors playing Christian characters to the embryo-worshipping antics of one Senator Fetus Fondler, more commonly known as Rick Santorum, Republican of Pennsylvania.

“Science doesn’t get a lot of comments,” said PZ Myers, a biologist and professor who runs the popular Pharyngula blog. “No, it’s the occasional post on atheism that gets people riled up.”

Scienceblogs.com was launched last January by Seed Media Group, publishers of SEED magazine. Seed recruited 15 of the best known independent science bloggers, offered to compensate them based on traffic, and set them loose to blog about whatever they wanted.

The result has been an idiosyncratic glimpse at our culture through the eyes of one philosopher, one physicist, a few writers and biologists, a former Senate staffer, a computer scientist, and various and sundry academics and science-minded lay people.

“[Seed] got the idea that blogs can’t work with restrictions,” said Myers, who is known for his humorous vilification of creationists, conservatives, and anyone who traffics in blatant idiocies. “There hasn’t been a peep from the editorial desk.”

Since its inception, the network has since grown to 19 bloggers.

Science + Religion + Politics = Controversy

There’s no shortage of pure science content on ScienceBlogs — comments on the disease vector Aedes aegypti and its role in the spread of the Chikungunya arbovirus, anyone? And there are several blogs, such as Afarensis and Gene Expression, that tend to stay away from cultural and political commentary altogether.

But a brief review of recent posts on some blogs reveals titles like “Science guy harshes creationists’ mellow,” “Your morning dose of unintentional creationist humor,” and “Keep your Prayers to Yourself!”

A first-time visitor to scienceblogs.com might assume the network was a bastion of liberal-only, anti-religion commentary, where the bloggers preach to their choir. But the bloggers, for their part, say there are a few conservatives who visit every now and then.

Ed Brayton, who writes Dispatches from the Culture Wars, said that his blog gets more conservative readers than other ScienceBlog destinations.

“I am a libertarian, which essentially means that conservatives think I’m a liberal and liberals think I’m a conservative, and they’re both wrong,” he said.

Tim Lambert, who writes the Deltoid blog, said his posts about the war in Iraq, especially, incite arguments. “When you have people disagreeing with you vehemently in comments, you sure don’t feel like you are preaching to the choir,” he said.

Tara Smith, who posts to the Aetiology blog, said anything that she writes about AIDS draws a wide range of dissenters, including people who deny the disease’s existence. She said the best she can hope for is that people learn from what she’s writing, whether they agree with her or not.

The conversation and arguments the bloggers generate seem to be working. The network is garnering anywhere from one to three million page views per month, according to editor Christopher Mims, who manages the blogs from the Seed offices in Manhattan.

The Benefits of Networking

More traffic means more money for the bloggers. But while the compensation can be a useful supplement, it’s certainly not enough to make a living on.

“It paid my cable bill,” said Smith, who works full-time as an assistant professor of epidemiology at the University of Iowa.

“The draw wasn’t the money,” said Brayton, who also founded Michigan Citizens for Science and the popular science forum Panda’s Thumb. “Whether I make a nickel on it I’m still going to do what I do.”

Brayton said he was attracted to the blogging network because Seed takes care of the technical details. Prior to joining ScienceBlogs, he maintained his own site and server.

Brayton was concerned, however, about the editorial policy. He spent a few days negotiating his contract to ensure he had editorial carte blanche.

Smith and Myers also had concerns about editorial control, but were assured that Seed wouldn’t interfere with their posts. Both were attracted to the idea of Seed managing the technical aspects of blogging.

Another benefit of networking: increased visibility.

“I think the collective nature of this project improves traffic,” said Brayton, who said he’s seen the number of visitors steadily climb to about 4,500 hits per day.

Lambert said his traffic has increased 50 percent since he began blogging for scienceblogs.com. He ascribes that increase to the quality of all the blogs combined.

The network effects extend beyond the sites themselves. Many of the bloggers knew each other, either professionally or through blogging, before starting to write for scienceblogs.com.

Long-term view

Whatever success the bloggers have had so far, they’ve managed it without a big marketing or advertising push from Seed, which has allowed word to spread via the Web. Seed has run a few house ads in the magazine, and they took advantage of an ad exchange with the journal Nature to promote the blogs.

“We’ve seen a very positive response from the advertising community,” said Michael Tive, general manager of Seed Digital Networks. “We’ve seen a willingness to understand and explore blogs as a subset of digital media.”

Seed also operates a news aggregator called phylotaxis.com and the magazine site, seedmagazine.com. They sell ad space on all three sites.

Currently scienceblogs.com is running Harper Collins ads, and has run ads from other large companies, such as Subaru. Tive said the blog format attracts young, educated readers who can be a very appealing audience for advertisers.

Seed expects to hire a full-time blog editor soon, and they’re considering a redesign of the pages.

As for the bloggers, they say they plan to continue blogging at scienceblogs.com for as long as the domain is active, and as long as it doesn’t become too much like work.

They credit scienceblogs.com with helping to make science more accessible to a wider community. Blogging, they say, hasn’t penetrated the scientific community to the same degree that it has technology and politics. But blogging at professional journals and magazines, such as Nature and Scientific American, is helping to legitimize the practice among scientists.

“In the scientific community, blogging is growing. It’s still kind of a fringe activity, still associated with teenagers and not really regarded as a professional pursuit,” said Smith.

“But it’s getting attention.”

Well, if the initial response is simply “don’t hire bloggers,” newspaper.coms will miss an enormous opportunity.

The Post deserves credit for courting readers through blogging technology more aggressively than perhaps any other U.S. newspaper. When the New York Times put its op-ed content behind a subscription wall, the Post took the opposite approach, not only soliciting links to its still-free content from bloggers, but returning the favor through linkbacks generated with technology from blog search engine Technorati. The Post has demonstrated an understanding that Web publishing ought to reflect a conversation, unlike traditional, one-way print publishing.

Newspaper.coms that are beginning that conversation shouldn’t fear bloggers dropping gigabytes of criticism their way. If bloggers are complaining, that means they’re still reading. Publishers should fear, instead, the calm silence of an apathetic Web that doesn’t read your site anymore.

Ben Domenech was a lousy hire. Not because he was a blogger, not because he was opinionated. He was a lousy hire because his history of work online revealed a dishonest, shallow writer who added bluster, rather than insight, to his pages. His shrill parting shot at the readers who exposed his plagiarism only further demonstrated his immature self-importance.

Fortunately, Ben Domenech is as representative of online writers as Janet Cooke or Jack Kelley are of newspaper reporters. But, in my experience, too many newspaper reporters and editors continue to assume that most bloggers are just partisan media critics. Such views of the blogosphere ignore the wonderful variety of blogs and independent sites online, some even published by former print and broadcast journalists.

The lure of the voice

Blogs are attracting readers in not insignificant amounts. BoingBoing serves two million readers a day, according to one of its writers. DailyKos serves hundreds of thousands of daily visitors. People want information. They want it presented in an engaging and comforting voice. And they want the writers presenting that information to believe in it.

That’s why newspaper readers love great columnists. People respond to a friendly, authoritative voice. Even Domenech’s blustery RedState delivers its “news” with uncompromising certainty. That isn’t to say that writers shouldn’t put out something they’re unsure about. But they do need to be honest and transparent about what they do — and do not — know.

Popular bloggers speak with an authoritative voice, but not a disembodied institutional voice. Good bloggers engage their readers, becoming a real person whom a reader wants to have a conversation with. And the best bloggers know their topic, and deliver and analyzing information that a generalist can’t.

Newspapers don’t need to hire partisans from the blogosphere to find such voices. Newsrooms and journalism schools have been producing them for generations. And that ought to be the lesson from the Domenech incident. The journalism industry doesn’t need more partisan blowhards. It does not need to turn publications over to right-wingers to hold on to its audience. It does need, however, to better connect with readers who are overwhelmed with media choices.

In addition to encouraging new voices that will draw and maintain readership, newspaper.coms should consider a different style of journalistic writing. Why keep making your writers turn out third-person, inverted-pyramid, “Journalism 101″ articles if the public responds so well to different formats? Journalism developed its publishing conventions in large part to support the technical needs of print and broadcast media. With the Internet those needs no longer always apply.

Ultimately, we’re in the communication business, not the 15-inch-four-source-article business. Why not try new formats in an effort to better communicate? Don’t stick to the established online formats, either. The biggest winners in business are those who don’t copy the competition, but who find something new.

In search of the truth

Of course, writing format is just one of the problems here. A larger issue, one that is potentially more troublesome, is politics. Ben Domenech is a conservative, and many conservatives complain long and loud about the Washington Post. To the extent that conservatives point out errors of fact and unsupported assumptions in news coverage, their views should be heard and the subject of their complaints corrected. But if conservatives — or moderates or liberals for that matter — don’t like the outcome of truthful news reporting or well-researched and argued commentary … tough.

As someone who trained in social and lab science research long before taking a journalism course, it drives me nuts the way this industry misapplies the term “objectivity.” True scientific objectivity doesn’t mean promoting all views, no matter how poorly supported. Nor does it mean refusing to take a stand, no matter how compelling the evidence.

News readers want the truth. They always have. Indeed, with so many media choices now available, they crave someone to do the hard work of sifting through this information and to tell them what can be believed. So, instead of turning over their webpages to partisans spewing the latest talking points, newspaper website editors ought to build their audience by doing what the partisan sites will not — sharp reporting. At the same time, they ought to let their writers deliver that reporting in freshest, most engaging and conversational formats possible. Even if that ticks off readers from one party or the other.

With millions of publishers now reaching the global audience, someone’s going to deliver that kind of coverage. Newspaper publishers will have to decide whether theirs will be among the sites that succeed at that new game.

The question now: What is a blog?

Capturing the blogging beast is no small matter, not when everybody from the lonely scribe in Paducah to me-too mass media in Manhattan is trying to get arms and minds around the virtual blob now encroaching online. Nor is the act of definition without consequences, as individuals and corporations make plans (and even multimillion dollar acquisitions) based upon the momentum behind something they can no more easily define than a Rorschach splotch.

“I don’t care,” e-mails Jeff Jarvis, the veteran print journalist and prominent blogger behind BuzzMachine. “There is no need to define ‘blog.’ I doubt there ever was such a call to define ‘newspaper’ or ‘television’ or ‘radio’ or ‘book’ — or, for that matter, ‘telephone’ or ‘instant messenger.’ A blog is merely a tool that lets you do anything from change the world to share your shopping list. People will use it however they wish. And it is way too soon in the invention of uses for this tool to limit it with a set definition. That’s why I resist even calling it a medium; it is a means of sharing information and also of interacting: It’s more about conversation than content … so far. I think it is equally tiresome and useless to argue about whether blogs are journalism, for journalism is not limited by the tool or medium or person used in the act. Blogs are whatever they want to be. Blogs are whatever we make them. Defining ‘blog’ is a fool’s errand.”

If so, what fools we mortals be.

Defining blogs is neither the first nor the last act in the ongoing attempt to understand the particulars of the latest online eruption. With apologies to Jeff Jarvis, the only other choice is ignorance. If blogs encompass everything online — if they are truly indefinable — then they won’t add up to much of anything. To glean the DNA of blogs, in contrast, is the first step toward exploiting their essence.

“When you look up blogs,” says Tiffany Shlain, founder and chairperson of the Webby Awards, “they really grew out of personal websites that were very common at the beginning of the Web. It’s not a startling new thing but deep-rooted in the Web. Go back in the history and Justin Hall had one of the first personal blogs.”

Weblogics Inc. co-founder and chief executive officer Jason Calcanis also agrees that all blogging trails lead back to Justin Hall.

“Justin Hall was really the first online blogger — his home page — there was actually a ‘Home Page’ documentary film about him in 1994-1995,” Calcanis says.

The personal website or home page, like Hall’s, morphed into the online journal known as a “Web log” — the phrase that begat “blog.” The origin of the word blog is just about the only thing that bloggers new and old can agree upon these days.

“The definition of a blog is a changing,” says Howard Kaushansky, chief executive officer at Umbria Communications, a blogging market research firm in Boulder, Colo. “Originally a blog was defined by the service you used or the host or by the tool you used to create the posting. So if you used [hosts] LiveJournal or Blogger, that was a blog. If you used Moveable Type [software], that was a blog. The reason the definition is changing is that these tools have made it so easy that there are companies who use a blog rather than a website. … So it’s a little bit more challenging today to define a blog.”

Working Definitions

“I can define them for you very easily,” Jason Calcanis says. “There are three main features of a blog: the first is reverse chronological order, the second is unfiltered content — the second somebody filters or edits the author it’s no longer a blog — and the third is comments.” Calcanis’s insistence on a precise definition puts him clearly in a minority of blogging experts who mostly admit they can’t or won’t define exactly what constitutes a blog.

Calcanis might add a fourth condition: hypertext links to the world outside the blog. Not long ago, he wrote disparagingly on his blog of CNET for neglecting links.

“Recently,” Calcanis wrote, “CNET started a blog which was simply their bloggers linking to their own reviews! Hello!??!!? The idea of blogs is to LINK OUT to good things on the Internet. …”

Tthe tendency of bloggers to excerpt chunks of attributed text, sometimes at length, from other sources, could be a fifth defining characteristic of blogs.

A final identifying attribute of the blog might be the flip, informal, ironic tone so common to bloggers, perhaps best exemplified by Wonkette’s Ana Marie Cox on her personal blog: “I am the editor of Wonkette, a guide to DC politics and culture, sort of.”

But there are also blogs that eschew attitude and embrace journalism, like L.A. Observed, the site maintained by Kevin Roderick, a writer and editor at the Los Angeles Times for two decades. “I’m happy for L.A. Observed to be called a blog, a website, a news site, a web publication — anything you like,” Roderick writes on his site.

Roderick has a personal explanation for his lack of attitude: “Unlike many of my favorite bloggers,” he says on the site. “I don’t write L.A. Observed intending to persuade or to provoke discussion. If that’s what you get out of it, fine. It’s just not my concern. If the readers I am aiming for believe L.A. Observed to be informative and useful, and it appears that they do, I’m satisfied.”

Terms Of Engagement

So the elements that define blogs — reverse chronology, unfiltered content, comments, links, an informal attitude, and appropriated text — are not exactly rocket science. Even so, organizations that track, poll and praise bloggers for a living have a hard time defining a blog.

“We don’t have an official definition,” says a spokesperson for Technorati, the blog tracking service. “It’s something that’s created with blog software. I don’t know how to answer that question. We don’t get that question.”

The uncertainty extends further to the Pew Internet & American Life Project. In ongoing research, the project reports that 6 percent of the U.S. adult population (including Internet users and non-users) has created blogs. “That’s one out of every 20 people,” states a project press release. “And 16 percent of all U.S. adults (or one in six people) are blog readers.”

Bloggers might think that kind of data would require Pew to have a crisp definition. Think again.

“The Pew actually allows respondents to decide themselves,” says Pew project director Lee Rainie on the fine art of defining a blog. “I would say absolutely we’re dealing with a term that is not particularly well-defined because blogging is a platform. Blogs can be so many different things to so many different people. The definition needs to be more about structure than content.”

Jonathan Carson of BuzzMetrics, meanwhile, likes to point out on his blog that according to the latest data from Nielsen//NetRatings, almost two-thirds of blog readers don’t even realize they are reading a blog. And the fuzzy logic behind most blog definitions creates additional headaches even for those inarguably in the know.

In summer 2005, Forbes.com’s “Best of The Web” gave their blessing to blogs in 20 categories. One of its top political sites was writer Andrew Sullivan’s AndrewSullivan.com. The site has many blogging characteristics — including reverse chronological order and from-the-hip attitude — but lacks the comments or instantaneous feedback features that Calcanis considers critical to a true blog.

The Drudge Report — not named one of the best by Forbes.com — is perhaps the best example of blogging’s lawless, malleable maw. Considered by many to be a top political blog, the Drudge Report is really nothing more than a set of links with attitude. There’s the occasional “developing” story on the site, presumably unfiltered, but no comments feature at all.

Pictures Tell The Story

As bloggers turn to multiple media — audio, video, photos, Flash — these interactive elements further tweak the definition of “blog.”

Lane Hickenbottom of the Sheridan Press in Wyoming, for example, has been posting photos to a photographic journal called VIEW since March 2002. The pictures are often breathtaking, but textual postings and comments are not at the heart of the site.

Four journalists at the Knoxville News Sentinel have extended the idea to video with Random This. The site defines itself as “a place where we post short movies that reflect our lives and our experiences in East Tennessee. So you’ll find a range of video (updated weekly!), that explores the curios and quirks we see in our lives and surroundings.” Web producers use digital video cameras to shoot then post short movies on their “vlog.” One short showed a producer learning to fire a gun at shooting range. And the site actively encourages viewers to submit their own videos.

Journaling Journalists

Defining “blog” can be especially daunting for a working journalist.

“We’re trying to … come up with a definition, a concept, a philosophy of how we want to do it and the best way to do it,” says Chicago Tribune online editor Ben Estes. “I can’t give you a definition because we’re still figuring it out.”

Consider the split-personality experience of Washingtonpost.com staff writer Robert MacMillan on Random Access.

“I really like reading your blog,” a reader recently wrote to me.

There must be some mistake, I thought. Random Access is a column.

Well, a column or blog is in the eye of the reader. I’ve gotten plenty of praise and scorn for things I’ve written about in this space, but the name for this daily publication tends to vary depending on who’s writing. I have a blog, a column, a daily article, a story. …

To me it’s all the same. Some days this column comments on news that shows up in other publications. On others, all the reporting is my own. Sometimes, like today, I dispense with the reporting and just ramble.

Chicago Tribune columnist and blogger Eric Zorn has been pumping out his blog for two years, long enough to make him downright grizzled in a blogosphere that journalists in general are only beginning to grok.

“I look at it as a hybrid medium somewhere between broadcast and print,” Zorn says. “It strives for the immediacy of broadcast, with the elegance and accessibility of print. It’s very difficult for print people to get their minds around the idea of something with high standards but not as high as print. It’s OK to put something up on the Web with a typo — and that’s not nearly the disaster if you do in print because you can go back and change it. Blogs also allow closer to real-time information commentary. There’s a debate going on out there about whether it’s a new medium or the old medium repackaged. At some point, all forms of communication come from the same stump in the ground.”

Print journalists have a particular problem with blogging: the loss of control — embodied in multiple editing layers — at the heart of serious journalism. So some journalists have moved cautiously in opening their blogs to unfiltered commentary. After two years of blogging, Zorn just began taking comments that he checks before they go online.

The “NBC Nightly News with Brian Williams” goes behind-the-scenes with its The Daily Nightly blog, but eschews posts from the public entirely — there is no comment function.

In contrast, the editorial board at The Spokesman-Review in Spokane, Wash., founded its Ask the Editors blog specifically with the intent to “answer readers’ questions about The Spokesman-Review’s editorial decisions and operations.” E-mailed reader comments and editors’ answers comprise the blog, in a Q-and-A format.

Then some sites, like Free Republic are specifically devoted to comments and dedicated not to any individual blogger but to the proliferation of politcal philosophy. “Free Republic is the premier online gathering place for independent, grass-roots conservatism on the web,” according to the blog.

Beat Blogs

Blogs will continue to morph as the ease and immediacy of blogging tools all but eradicate the barrier to entry. Corporate blogs are legion now, and marketers have realized blogging is becoming a power tool. There are companies like Weblogics Inc. and Gawker Media that are gathering variegated blogs together under one roof, the better to create critical mass and to attract advertisers.

But the heart and soul of blogging is the individual and/or the group of individuals opining on the fly and responding post-haste to one and all. In what might be the most lasting permutation for journalists, that focus has thrown blogging into beat coverage by an individual, a pair, or a team of reporters.

On Austin360.com, part of Statesman.com, the Austin American-Statesman Bevo Beat is devoted to “news and notes on all things burnt orange from our [University of Texas] Longhorn beat writers.” The St. Petersburg Times puts food coverage under the Stir Crazy blog written by food editor Janet K. Keeler and Times restaurant critic Chris Sherman. In the United Kingdom, Guardian Unlimited is focusing coverage around beat blogs as well.

The Image of Blogs

Because of the level of activity and creativity, the negative image of blogging in the mainstream media seems to be fading away as blogging becomes more popular.

“It’s definitely shifted,” says Bruce Koon, Knight-Ridder Digital’s executive news editor, about the negative image of blogs in newsrooms.

“There was skepticism at first. I approached my editor and editor in chief because they weren’t really up on it,” says the Chicago Tribune’s Eric Zorn. “This was two and a half years ago. They wanted to know what blogs were and how I could use them. They had to be convinced.”

Now, Zorn says, “I don’t hear negativity from colleagues.”

Tribune editor Estes is intrigued by the intersection of blogging and journalism — how each one can make the other one better under the right circumstances.

“One of the things we took a look at was what happened on the day of London bombings,” Estes says. “How organizations responded with blogging — with readers on the Underground submitting their photos, constantly updating that event. I’ve heard that in the same way [the terrorist attacks of] 9/11 solidified Web news coverage, that did the same thing for blogging — it really showed the promise of what you can do when you do it right. You have to figure out how to explore all the angles, and let your readers help you cover your own event, even when your own journalists are also covering the event.”

Lex Alexander, the citizen journalist coordinator at The News-Record in Greensboro, N.C., sees the melding of newsroom and community as having a profound long-term effect on both.

“We’re transforming from the traditional newspaper with an online component to a more cooperative newsgathering partnership between professionals on our staff and members of our community,” says Alexander. “Blogs are an important tool but part of a larger mission. … I think in the big picture, when the framers of the Constitution put in freedom of the press, blogs was what they had in mind. They understood freedom of the press not so much as a literal press but as a means of communication. Freedom of speech is the freedom to convey ideas by other means. Blogs are an individualized mechanism to do that.”

Jeff Jarvis illustrates his BuzzMachine blog with a mammoth newspaper printing press. Even in blogging, a picture is worth a thousand words.

Transparency helps nurture the relationship between a publication and its readers. So I would like to use the occasion of this anniversary to kick around some ideas for OJR, to get both your feedback, and, I hope, your help in developing them.

When I interviewed for this job, I shared my vision of OJR not simply as a publication, but as a community, where newsroom journalists, freelance writers and independent Web publishers could gather to learn from each other how best to report and write news online. For eight years, I’ve been soliciting content from my Web sites’ readers. In Internet terms, that makes me a hoary codger who’s too darn old to change his ways now. So get used to being asked to write, as well as read, around here. Consider today’s article our first effort in “open source” journalism.

Publishing technology

Let’s start with technology. In the past year, we’ve completely rewritten OJR’s publishing system, and we did it in-house. That gives us the flexibility to create and experiment with new publishing formats, such as the invitation-only wiki Mark Glaser used over three days a few weeks ago to create his industry discussion on video journalists.

I’d love to make OJR your guinea pig for online publishing innovations. Having worked in large, corporate newsrooms, I know that newspaper dot-commers need solid data to make the case for their organizations to adopt such tech improvements. And, also having worked as a solo publisher, I know that many lone eagles don’t want to waste their limited time on something that isn’t going to work. So what tech ideas are out there that you’d like to see us cover… or implement? Video wikis? OPML feeds?

I’m hoping that OJR will debut podcasts later this fall, after students return to USC’s Annenberg School of Journalism for the upcoming academic year. We’ll have a fresh supply of students writing original reports for our news blog, and I’m expecting a few of them to try crafting audio reports and interviews that we’ll podcast through OJR’s RSS feeds.

Susannah Gardner just wrote us an informative look at various blogging tools. In the next few weeks, we’ll be converting her article into a wiki, so that you, our readers, can help us keep the information in that article up to date. I would also like to have a similar article soon on larger online content management systems, so OJR can serve as a starting point for making technology decisions about how you can publish your information online. Let me know what we need to do to make that happen.

Story ideas

Can online journalism be a distributed process?

Many online journalism pioneers are developing grassroots journalism sites based on the model of readers as correspondents, reporting and writing full takes of stories. But, in my experience, the number of readers who are willing to contribute content to any site is inversely proportional to the amount of work that site asks them in order to do to make that contribution.

Plenty of readers will blog about their personal lives. Many will send in a short note about a newsworthy event they’ve witnessed. But only a tiny fraction will show the initiative to do a journalist’s work – to routinely conceive, report, organize and write news stories. And those that do are often motivated by evangelizing an ideology, instead of uncovering facts. Many newspaper dot-com veterans can recall the enthusiasm with which many of us embraced “community publishing” in the late 1990s, only to see those sites die as few community groups stepped forward to maintain them.

Does that mean that these grassroots journalism initiatives are doomed? Hardly. A site doesn’t need hundreds of correspondents to succeed – just a handful can provide informative coverage. But this does suggest there’s great potential in harvesting the power of even larger numbers of readers as reporters in a more distributed process.

Many publications and online writers have developed ways to use their readers as sources. (Heck, OJR wrote more than three years ago about some guy doing that to cover theme park accidents.) But what the industry needs is a model that enables online journalists to gather and manage large reader/source networks with minimal technological expertise. We need something that does for distributed news reporting what Blogger did for online journals. Few of us have the time or expertise to build a new database and Web front-end for every story we want to cover.

Who’s talking about this flavor of online journalism? Who’s doing tech work that could be applied to this? Am I totally full of it with this idea?

Mathematical journalism

The world’s grown too complex for journalists to cover using only literary skills. A generation ago, forward-thinking journalists developed computer-assisted reporting techniques, uncovering stories from public databases, including crime reports, school test scores and census data.

Unfortunately, CARR has remained a specialty within journalism, rather than a core skill. Part of this can be attributed to journalists’ collective hostility toward math and science. I’ve been training journalists in basic math for a decade, and in my experience, it is far easier to teach someone with high math aptitude how to report and write a journalism story than it is to teach a typical journalist math.

Why not, then, try to recruit more math-savvy students into journalism? Perhaps we could, if the typical j-school or newsroom were not so openly hostile to them. The industry’s made commendable progress during the past generation to improve its diversity in race, gender and ethnicity. But we continue to wisecrack about our collective inability to use math or basic scientific research principles in our reporting, helping to drive away young people with those skills who might help us. Even when we keep our mouths shut, traditional journalism curricula include few courses to challenge a math-savvy student who wishes to develop his or her skills.

Have any j-schools developed courses involving post-calculus instruction? What might a curriculum in mathematical journalism look like? I’ll propose that online instructors ought to take the lead in developing such courses. Not only do online folks tend to be more tech-savvy, online provides a more creative (and less hostile) environment for young CARR-savvy journalists in which to work.

What can we do at OJR to lead an effort to create industry standards for an online-based mathematical journalism degree? Should we even try?

Does truth derive from observation or ideology?

This might seem far too philosophical a question for a journalism review. But it reflects a core issue that divides America politically and that fuels much media criticism today.

Daily journalism provides little opportunity to dig into philosophical conflicts that reveal themselves in headlines, especially in cash-strapped newsrooms where managers value double-digit profit margins over insightful news. Journalism reviews, however, can create that opportunity.

One obvious way that this particular question plays out in the United States is in skirmishes between certain religious faiths and science. Millions of Americans reject evolution, global warming and other scientific observations due to their faith in a particular religion or political ideology. And millions of other Americans cannot comprehend why those Americans trust their faith over a scientist’s observations. Bloggers on both sides then attack journalists for real and imagined slights to their point of view.

But don’t get fooled into seeing this philosophical battle only in terms of religion. The question of observation vs. ideology fuels other conflicts over the practice of our craft. How should we report news stories? Should we employ something like the scientific method and start with a declared null hypothesis, which we test through observation? Or should we start with a blank slate, assuming no truth, and gather anecdotes from representatives of the ideologies that our ideology leads us to consider relevant, leaving the reader to draw a conclusion?

OJR can’t resolve this or any other fundamental philosophical question to the satisfaction of all readers. But OJR can illustrate how these divisions are fueling disputes within our industry, so that our readers can better understand them.

Who’d like to start?

And furthermore…

The popularity of online news is driving many legislatures to reconsider open-records and other sunshine laws. At the same time, online writers are seeking protection under shield laws written decades before Tim Berners-Lee thought up this whole Web thing. Who’s got our back here? And who’s trying to stab it?

Some independent Web publishers are enjoying immense market influence as grassroots consumer sites attract millions of readers. Who’s trying to buy influence among them and who’s already sold out? Who’s saying no and putting the interest of readers ahead of sources?

Those are a few of the ideas bouncing around in my head. My e-mail inbox remains open for your story suggestions, too. You can send me a private message via my personal page on OJR.

Writers wanted

If any of these ideas, or another you’ve thought of while reading this piece, interests you, please drop me a note. I am always looking for freelance writers to cover issues of interest to OJR readers. (And, no, I don’t yet have anyone specific in mind for the story ideas I’ve written about today.) Our standard rate for articles is $500 and our writers need to sign an independent contractor’s agreement with the University of Southern California, which publishes OJR. Writers from other countries are welcomed, though USC cuts checks only in U.S. dollars.

Money wanted, too

USC Annenberg has graciously supported this publication for years and the university’s support for the publication remains strong. But let’s face it, the news business ain’t charity. At some point, even journals have to demonstrate tangible market support by bringing in a few bucks.

We’ll be experimenting this year with responsible ways to bring in extra revenue to help pay for those freelance articles we’ll commission. (And, of course, the more we bring in, the more we can increase our standard rate for freelance articles and original research.) Nothing’s been decided yet, but don’t be surprised if you see ads or sponsorships on some pages of the site in the upcoming year as I look for new sources of revenue to preserve and expand OJR. I promise, in whatever we do, to build and respect the “wall.” If we run advertising, we’ll outsource its sales and delivery to another company, so people editing the site will have nothing to do with those ad sales or placement.

Ultimately, I would like to see OJR establish a foundation or endowment to support this site on an ongoing basis. Soon, you’ll see links on OJR article pages inviting you to contribute to ensuring OJR’s continued presence online. I know that some of our readers have managed to make more than a few bucks publishing online, too. If any of those readers (and you know who you are) would like to establish a personal legacy in support of high-quality online journalism, USC and OJR would welcome your financial support.

* * *

So that’s what’s on my mind today, as I look forward to the next 12 months at OJR. What do you think? As always, just click on the button below to leave a public comment or click over to my personal page to send a private response.

Thanks for reading,
Robert