For those not now following the strip, Redfern, a long-time WaPo veteran in Trudeau’s world, was laid off earlier this autumn and is now launching his own blog, a scenario not uncommon among many “real world” journalists. Fishing for tips, he chooses to launch the blog with an anecdote about Barack Obama playing basketball with U.S. troops in the Middle East.

Subsequent gags play to old lines against bloggers: their content is trivial; bigwigs don’t want to return their calls; their professional status is less than traditional media writers. Still, Redfern lands Obama on the phone; he gets his first inbound link. Ultimately, Redfern declares:

“It’s tough to leverage a byline in a media environment where anyone who can type gets a byline! I’m competing for eyeballs with millions of narcissists… almost none of whom expect to actually get paid!”

The series wraps up with a final gag about Redfern’s slacker ex-CIA son… who has his own blog.

Just as in Trudeau’s alternate universe, competition’s tougher today online than it was in print a generation ago. Redfern’s spot on – it’s tough to leverage a byline these days. But it can be done. (If Redfern supposedly was in part inspired by Bob Woodward, I am awaiting Trudeau’s version of Joshua Micah Marshall.)

The beauty of fiction is what it can tell us about our real lives. Here are three things Trudeau’s Rick Redfern did wrong in launching his blog, keeping him from better immediate success online (or, from losing his gig with the WaPo in the first place):

1) Start your blog before you leave the paper

As I’ve written before, building an economically viable audience can take months, if not years. Start the clock toward building that readership before you need it.

The real-world WaPo has taken one of the newspaper industry’s most aggressive approaches to staff blogging and chatting. If Redfern had worked at the real WaPo, he undoubtedly would have had the opportunity to start a blog long before he faced a buyout. He could have developed his blogging voice, as well as an online following, with the help of one of the newspaper industry’s top dot-com staffs.

That would have made a real Rick Redfern a far more valuable asset to the Post, perhaps helping him save his job. And even if it didn’t, he’d have a far easier time getting a base of existing online fans to follow him to a personal blog than he now faces building that base from scratch.

Reporters who don’t work for an outfit as aggressive as the WaPo ought to start blogging, too. Look at Curt Cavin’s OJR piece from last week, where wrote how he took a simple Q&A concept and built it into the most popular feature on his paper’s website.

2) Don’t change your game

If competition has made leveraging a byline online difficult, changing what that byline represents makes the task impossible. Redfern, an investigative reporter, should not have fallen into the trap stereotype that says blog entries must be short and superficial. If anything, going online allows Redfern the opportunity to write for a more engaged audience that craves greater detail.

I loved this e-mail that my wife received from a fan after she published a 5,360-word interview with violinist Rachel Barton Pine on her blog: “That RBP interview was just awesome. Isn’t it ironic that so many dead tree news sources are trying to imitate ‘Teh Internets’, and slashing article length, making them McInfoBites, and thus worthless, whilst here you do such a looooong lovely interview that would NEVER get printed in full in other print sources.”

Time spent on site has become the new fashionable metric for website success. What causes people to spend more time on a website? Longer articles.

Leave the short hoops anecdotes for Deadspin. Stay on your beat, and instead launch your blog with some solid evergreen pieces that explain, in plain, simple language, the players and issues on that beat. Take questions from readers, to discover what they want to know. Then assume, because you are now writing for a niche medium, that you can go long, in depth and intelligent and not lose any readers in the process.

Yes, your longer, in-depth pieces must offer real substance and engage your audience. But you are a professional reporter, right? If you can’t do that, you don’t deserve to beat the competition online.

3) It’s the “net” – so network

You can’t wait for inbound links to promote your blog. You must solicit them. Redfern should have gotten his son to link to his new blog, and he should be working his contacts back at the Post.

Let your fellow blogging journalists – at newspapers and independent – know when you have a scoop. Ask for links, and do not hesitate to link them when they post a fresh item. Ask other bloggers to make guest appearances on your blog, as you’d have guest “talking heads” on a TV news show. They’ll soon return the favor.

The real-world Washington Post has a voracious appetite for chat guests. Surely a real Rick Redfern could swing an invite from his former colleagues, drawing attention to his new blog in the process.

Newspaper bloggers should not hesitate to link former colleagues and competitors. If newspapers are going to sack loyal, hard-working reporters with multiple rounds of layoffs each year, journalists need to shift their loyalty from their publisher to their fellow reporters. After all, they’ll need the link help from those colleagues when they face the chop.

Anyone can start a blog, for free and in minutes, using established and popular services such as Blogger and WordPress.com. What would entice a reader to avoid those options in favor of maintaining their blog on your website?

The answer is one word: community.

Most readers, like professional writers, want an audience for their work. Putting a blog online isn’t like putting a magazine on the rack at Borders. Starting a blog on Blogger, while technically simple, does little to put a writer’s word in front of a potential audience. Promoting the new blog remains the writer’s responsibility, and many fall short of the challenge.

Launching a new blog within an established website community, however, gives a new blogger a head start on promoting his or her work. Within the community, bloggers become the audience for their fellow bloggers’ work. And if the blogging community is part of a larger content-driven website, such as an online newspaper, non-writing readers can more easily find and become fans of a new blog.

Newspapers are embracing reader blogging as a way to both attract user-generated content (and increased page views) for a website, as well as to build loyalty among readers. USA Today has built ambitious social media initiative within its website, and other Gannett papers now are inviting their readers to blog with them.

But… if you are launching a new blog community, how do you get the bloggers you need to make that community an alluring place for would-be bloggers to launch?

Chicken, meet egg.

Here are five steps that your news website can take to avoid that classic dilemma, and to build an active and engaging online blogging community among your readers.

1. Make it easy

I don’t want to make this article an analysis of individual software tools that could power your blogging service, but it is important that whatever tool you choose, it be easy for readers to set-up and to use. You will find it difficult to build a critical mass of bloggers if readers must wait for your staff to manually approve each new account, for example.

Registration and initial set-up must be as swift and automatic as setting up an account on one of the other free services, such as Blogger and WordPress.com. (If you are worried about abuse, make sure your tools includes a way for staff to close accounts and delete improper content easily.)

Readers should have an easy-to-remember, search-engine friendly URL for the home pages of their blogs, too. No one wants to tell their friends about their new blog at blogs.newspaper.com/users/front.asp?id=4231 when they could opt for theirname.blogspot.com instead.

Your tool ought to support automated services to promote your readers’ blogs, as well, including automatic RSS feeds, as well as pings to Technorati and Google Blogs when readers post.

2. Don’t hide your bloggers

Readers’ blogs should be easy to find on the website, and not hidden deep within a subsection of some subsection. Follow a basic search engine optimization rule and link your reader blog home page from your site’s home page. Link individual reader bloggers (or, at least the best ones – see point below) from that page, so that they will not be more than two links from your home page. That will provide them a powerful PageRank boost in Google, as well as the ability to be found and indexed quickly in other search engines.

3. Reward readers for blogging well

Reward them with prominence. Create a process through which either your staff or readers themselves can designate outstanding posts for the blog front page, or even the front page of the parent website. Once you get to the point where you have too many bloggers to link individually on your blog front page, reward your best bloggers with those links (and their search engine value).

4. Establish topic-driven communities

With the first three steps taken, you have established a strong framework for your blogging community. But you still need readers to move in. For that, you need to inspire their muse by asking them to write about something that animates their daily lives.

The problem with inviting readers to “blog here” is the same one that confronts diners opening a 20-page menu. What to choose? Too many choices can inspire mental gridlock.

And if you want high-quality content, you need bloggers who are writing uninformed opinion, but about the rich detail of something interesting in their personal lives. Certain topics, therefore, better lend themselves to robust blogging communities.

A personal example: The blogging section on my wife’s violin website has attracted several dozen regular bloggers, while blogs on my theme park website drew few writers. (We used the same publishing tool on both sites.) Playing the violin is a daily activity, one that becomes a significant part of people’s identity. Most people visit a theme park just once or twice a year. It isn’t something that defines most people interested in the topic. So it wasn’t as attractive a topic for personal blogging as the violin site provided. That’s why we shuttered the blogs on the theme park site and the violin blogs continue to prosper.

There’s nothing keeping a general interest site, such as an online newspaper, from creating multiple blog communities around several different topics. Just because your site covers multiple beats does not mean that you must stick with a single, generic reader blog community.

5. Provide an example

We’ve written this many times before on OJR, but we’ll say it again: You cannot just build a user-generated content tool, and expect that people will come and provide great content. You must provide leadership. You must provide an example that readers can model. So you must have someone on staff blogging, using the same tool as readers, in the same content community.

Staff bloggers using a separate platform won’t have the same leadership effect on their site’s reader blogs as they would if they used the same tool as readers. That’ll just send readers the message that they are second-class citizens, and even being disrespected somewhat.

Of course staff writers ought to be producing better quality content, and ought to be given more prominence within the blogging community as a result. (One suggestion: Staffers get automatic promotion to the higher prominence slots described in step 2.) If a community is to prosper, readers need to a see connection between themselves and their community’s leaders. Writing on the same platform can do that simply and effectively.

Leadership also should include clear and consistent posted guidelines that can help prevent misunderstandings about what is fair game in the blogs, including rules about appropriate language and conduct. Don’t make all the guidelines negative, either. Guidelines can also suggest tips and tricks to help readers improve their observation skills, enable basic reporting and enliven their writing.

Reader bloggers can help deepen a publication’s coverage, with additional personal vignettes and original perspectives that staff writers wouldn’t be able to collect using traditional reporting methods and the same number of hours in the day. But a few moments of advance thought can help determine whether a new blogging tool will enable a vibrant community, or open yet another empty forum.

Welcome to the agora of the 21st century: 10 Questions is a people-powered platform for presidential politics created by Andrew Rasiej and Micah L. Sifry of techPresident and high school physics teacher David Colarusso, who also runs a site called Community Counts. Anyone can upload a video question for the candidates. The public votes on the questions it wants to see answered, and the candidates respond to the top 10 questions.

Will such a forum bring the democracy of the Internet to politics? OJR spoke on the phone with 10 Questions co-creator and self-described “technical guy” for the site, David Colarusso. An edited transcript follows.

OJR: 10 Questions is based on the technology of your site, Community Counts. How did Community Counts get its start?

Colarusso: Back in the beginning of this year, YouTube began spotlighting individual candidates on its page by posting a video of the candidate asking the community a question. YouTube users were then invited to submit video responses. Lastly, the candidate responded to these responses. For example, the first question was by Mitt Romney: “What do you believe is America’s single greatest challenge?”. I submitted a response, and luckily, the first two candidates replied to my videos.

It became obvious to us users after a while that there wasn’t a good mechanism for the candidates to understand what the community valued. We thought the community should have some say as to what they wanted to see the candidate respond to. So we said, why don’t we just survey everyone? That turned into Community Counts.

When the YouTube/CNN debate came along, I had the tools necessary for people to vote on those questions. We got a good deal of press coverage. We had a lot of users: 30,000 votes by 6,000 voters. That got the attention of the people of techPresident.

After the debate was over, we thought about what we wanted to see happen, and that turned into 10 Questions.

OJR: How is 10 Questions different from the YouTube/CNN debates?

Colarusso: There are some rather profound differences. The primary one is that we’re doing this as a people-powered forum, not a debate. It’s a discussion with the candidates. The YouTube debate allowed people to ask questions, but CNN had the ultimate say in choosing the final videos. YouTube also took away the features that let users see their peers’ most popular videos. Community Counts allowed the users to vote on the questions themselves, to prioritize them. We pose the question: Do you think this should be asked of the candidates? Community Counts shows that when you ask that you get serious stuff.

Another difference is that we offer the ability for the community to comment on the candidates’ replies and to rate whether the question was answered.

OJR: As of this morning, 10 Questions had about 76,000 votes and 160 videos. What is the traffic like? How do you add traffic to the site? What do you expect in the final week?

Colarusso: We’ll probably get about 100,000 votes by November 14. The videos come in spurts as different groups get interested.

The idea of leveraging the wisdom of the crowds – that a group of people together can make better decisions – works when the crowd is diverse. The two ways we try to get diversity is to make the audience very large and to reach out to different populations. We have a collection of 40 cross-partisan “sponsors,” such as the Huffington Post, Hugh Hewitt, DailyKos, BET. There is no financial relationship. The sponsors let their readers and viewers know what’s going on over here. We have a nice mix of left and right voters.

OJR: How can you tell the political leaning of your visitors?

Colarusso: We can only say where they’re coming from – our main referring sites (our sponsors) have a nice mix.

As for traffic, there are different drivers. Up to today, we’ve seen three major spikes. (We can tell by looking at the history for each of the videos – the top two videos would show these spikes.)

The first spike was our initial launch. In terms of unique individual visitors to the site, we had about 5,000. There was a peak of 7,000 visitors per day during the launch period.

The second spike in traffic, with a peak of about 11,000 individual visitors to the site, was on October 29, during Barack Obama’s MySpace/MTV dialogue. We had worked it out so that the top ten questions on our site at the time would be asked. MoveOn.org sent an e-mail to their users telling them to vote on videos. It generated a lot of attention and traffic. The result was that a question on net neutrality shot up to number one, and it’s still currently the top video. The following week there were discussions on the legitimacy of MoveOn.org. They were accused of “astroturfing”. We don’t think it’s the right characterization. Sending out an e-mail asking people to vote doesn’t guarantee that everyone will vote.

We do have safeguards on our site – only one vote per IP address allowed. At the end of round one [on November 14, when the top ten questions will be submitted to the candidates], we’ll start an auditing process to further refine those safeguards.

This last weekend, there was another spike of about 6,400 unique visitors, resulting in the question, “Is America unofficially a theocracy?” climbing into the current number two spot. A blogger had posted an entry asking his readers to vote on two questions on religion and politics. It took off like crazy after someone dugg the blog entry. It got a couple thousand diggs, and generated a lot of traffic. So in the course of the weekend, it pushed these questions right up to the top 10. Certainly this is not astroturfing. This is not an organized e-mail list. People came and stayed around to vote on other questions.

We’re big on being transparent. We’ve been blogging each day about the traffic. As of today, we’ve had about 65,000 unique visitors total since the site started. We’re pretty happy that these individual people came to vote, and then stayed around to vote on other videos. On average people voted on about three videos. That’s promising.

In the last peak, there were fewer unique voters but more voting. It’s interesting to see how these numbers are correlated. This is the mystery of the Web – how people participate.

OJR: Have you any idea which campaign is more Web-organized than others, in terms of submitting videos to the site or getting their supporters to vote?

Colarusso: It’s a tricky question. You see, you might have a small group that’s good at mobilizing its members – but it has few members. I can tell you that over the life of the site, we’ve got in the top ten list of referring sites (in rough order): digg, blogspot [both from last week's spike], Crooks&Liars, MSNBC, Hugh Hewitt at Townhall, TalkingPointsMemo, HotAir, and Conservative Grapevine.

OJR: One of the hot topics surrounding the democracy of Internet-based forums is: Are the questions better? Smarter? More original? More relevant? What are your thoughts?

Colarusso: I think they’re definitely diverse, and that’s one of the main things we’re trying to get at – a sense of what our community, our visitors think are questions that should be asked. So it’s hard not to succeed with that rubric [laughs].

It’s interesting to note that these questions are different from the normal questions. I think that means they’re adding something. Policy-specific questions, such as net neutrality, or questions about whether America is unofficially a theocracy are obviously what this community feels strongly about.

OJR: What can journalists learn from this public forum?

Colarusso: An interesting question, but hard to answer at the moment. This is something that has to run its course. There could be another spike tomorrow and everything could change. This will work best when we have the most number of users participating. That’s when we’ll have the most diverse sample. The lesson might just be that there is a desire on people’s part to have this access to candidates. We see a lot of student voices, students asking questions. We see the participation of people who might not normally feel like they have access. It’s entirely egalitarian. We’re not promoting any one viewpoint. We’re just letting people decide. I think people very much appreciate that feeling that what you get is the will of the community.

OJR: Will the informal style of Internet home videos put an end to the sound-bite-driven style of politics on TV?

Colarusso: One of our goals is to provide a forum to allow politicians to move away from sound bites. It has to do with what we’re looking for. With all these debates on TV, candidates say they don’t get the chance to give nuanced answers. We’re giving them a month to submit answers. They’ll actually have to live up to that.

Additionally, having the community rate their answers lets the candidate know that they have an engaged community. And we hope that that will also provide an impetus for a more substantive answer.

As far as the informality of the questions, I think the main benefit is to put a human face on people who ask the questions, to make people feel more engaged when they are watching someone that looks more like them.

OJR: Is anyone analyzing or tabulating all the questions you’ve gotten?

Colarusso: We’re keeping tabs on it – trying to give commentary as we go. We’re providing data on votes and history. I’m definitely interested in seeing what the final tally looks like. There’s a lot to glean there.

Pronouncing the situation “dire,” USC biological sciences professor Michael Quick declared right off the bat, “We need a revolution… a whole sea change… nobody is going to solve this overnight by writing a better article about biotechnology or the environment.”

Why is the state of science reporting so deplorable? Are the problems systemic? How will the field evolve with the advent of new media technologies?

The problem is everybody

The general populace, though overall showing more interest in science than in sports, has quite a poor understanding of science, according to author and USC journalism professor K.C. Cole.

Many simply regard the field as “a form of magic,” Quick quipped.

The media isn’t doing its job to educate the public – most journalists have little to no background in science and statistics, either.

“Every beat I’ve ever had, I haven’t had a clue when I started,” said Reuters biotechnology reporter Lisa Baertlein.

Furthermore, due to traditional media’s budget considerations, a science reporter is often responsible for several scientific disciplines, and that inevitably leads to a lack of intelligent, dependable coverage, or worse, over-coverage of wacky, pseudoscientific studies such as Jessica Alba’s score in an index of female desirability.

On the other hand, many scientists cannot talk in layman’s terms about what they do. Neither are they trained to do so.

“No effort has been made to help us reach out or learn to talk to the media and to the public,” Quick said, admitting that scientists as a group are “very bad” at communicating.

What’s “news” in science?

To approach science reporting with a traditional journalistic judgment of newsworthiness and objectivity is fundamentally incompatible with how science works, according to the panelists.

As it stands, an overwhelming number of science pieces are outgrowths of PR memos detailing the latest discoveries or “eureka!” moments of studies published in reputable journals. NASA has particularly well-oiled machine and that leads directly to more media coverage, said Cole.

But without proper framing and context, an article whose sole premise is “An important study was published today…” is just parroted PR.

At the point of publication, most individual papers have “had almost no impact on thinking,” said Scientific American Editor in Chief and discussion moderator John Rennie. Many papers are later proven wrong.

“Science is the field of qualifications,” Quick noted, and that “doesn’t come through in the reporting.”

In certain fields, especially the environment, a high proportion of studies are controversial and industry-funded, according to author and environmental journalist Marla Cone, making for “very tricky” reporting.

But journalism loves the conflict and drama of topics such as global warming, intelligent design, and stem cell research, and editors are biased in favor of interesting stories.

“Instead of reporting what is true, people report sides,” said Cole.

So why doesn’t the media build a new model of reporting that focuses less on discrete observations and more on the “bodies of work taking shape” in various fields?, Rennie asked.

Scientists are blogging. Why aren’t journalists listening?

Journalism may very well be on the cusp of a momentous change whereby it redefines the paradigm within which it approaches science reporting.

The proliferation of blogs written by scientists (biology blogs being the most popular, followed by physics and climatology) means that the scientific discourse that used to take place behind lab doors is now open to everyone.

The blogs present an opportunity for journalists to bring scientists into the story writing process much earlier on. Everyone agreed that this is necessary, but are journalists using science blogs to immerse themselves in the scientific community – as a resource to hear directly what scientists are talking about and as an opportunity to talk directly to scientists?

“Most of it is too much ‘inside baseball,’” Cone said. For inexperienced science reporters, reading just one scientist’s blog “can easily lead them in the wrong direction.”

The most popular science blogs are admittedly peppered with politics.

“I wouldn’t trust them for reporting,” Cone said. Blogs should be used to gather background, as “a tip in the right direction.”

Ironically, scientists are the ones eager to reach out to reluctant journalists, who tend to “lurk” and “watch” science blogs from the shadows, according to USC astronomy and physics professor Clifford Johnson (his blog on physics and life is at Asymptotia.com).

Very few science bloggers know that their writing is being read. “The older generation who read blogs don’t say so,” said Johnson. “I usually end up talking to journalists for some other reason when it becomes apparent that they’ve read the blog.”

Every time a blog get cited in mainstream media, Johnson said, the science blogger community feels more legitimized.

“I would hope that editors and journalists would seize this opportunity to help guide the bloggers and help bring out a little bit the quality of writing,” Johnson said. “There are an awful lot of people doing great work out there. Feedback might help.”

We found the answer, of course, online. Lenders had abandoned traditional guidelines for mortgage lending, creating interest-only, negative amortization, no-money-down and “teaser rate” loans, which allowed people to get into homes far more expensive than a traditional fixed-rate mortgage with hefty down payment would have allowed them to buy.

When all this easy money poured into the market, the predictable price inflation allowed lenders to justify expanding the market to sub-prime buyers — anyone with a pulse, really — since inflating home values would allow any buyer, even one not even paying the accumulating interest on their loan, to build thousands of dollars in new equity each year.

For the past three years, Ben Jones’ Housing Bubble Blog has provided an online home for skeptics who knew that this bubble could not last. Several times a day, Jones posts from his northern Arizona home a round-up of real estate news from newspaper and television websites, to which a virtual army of loyal readers responds with comments and observations about their local real estate markets.

Jones’ blog provides another point of evidence for the assertion that there is a blog well covering every issue online. Readers of Jones’ blog saw the crash coming, before it happened. Many have posted emotional “thank you”s to the blog, detailing how reading the blog convinced them not to buy, while friends and family members took on option ARMs and other non-traditional loans, only to face foreclosure and bankruptcy today.

Like many successful blogs, the HBB includes reader comments that might make traditional news editors uncomfortable. One can find plenty of racism, xenophobia, vindictiveness and gloating within HBB readers’ posts. But one also can find hard data and well-documented research that skewers the frequently unchallenged quotes from sources in newspapers’ real estate reports. Above all, an HBB reader encounters passion — raw emotion that is too often missing from dry, robotic real estate reporting in the traditional press.

I swapped e-mails with Jones last week, asking him about his blog and what it lessons other news reporters could learn from it.

OJR: Please describe the Housing Bubble Blog and tell us when — and why — you started it.

Jones: It is a blog where I aggregate housing bubble news and edit it for context. I first put together posts on the housing bubble in November 2004. I started my first blog dedicated to the subject in December 2004. I did that because I didn’t feel the press was giving the matter the attention it deserved, considering the risks involved.

The comments from readership are a major part of this blog. Many return frequently and we all have gotten to know a lot about each other. Posters bring their individual perspective and knowledge to the group, making it a very rich and interesting view of the subject at hand. I use, or make a place for, a good deal of reader-generated subject matter, which has become as popular as any material I find and post.

OJR: How many people read the blog on a typical day?

Jones: On a weekday, the software tells me 40-50,000 unique viewers.

OJR: How did you build that audience?

Jones: With years of hard work, consistency and attention to the needs of a potential poster at any point in the day. Plus most are returning to interact with the group itself, so I get out of their way and let them at it.

OJR: Much of the content on HBB comes from reader comments. Are you happy with the quantity and quality of comments you get on HBB? (If not, what would you like to do about that?)

Jones: It has really grown in the past two years. Comments are two- to ten-times my word counts on any given thread. I couldn’t be happier with the folks that hang out on my blogs. Obviously, they are a bright group and they attract similar posters and lurkers.

Sometimes, when the number of comments gets up over three hundred, it loses a bit of readability, but that’s alright because by then I have something new up, usually.

OJR: What would you tell other bloggers and online publishers to do to help build robust and useful comment sections on their sites?

Jones: Like most of these questions, this is addressed more completely in the book I am working on and hope to have published next year. I consider facilitating comment flow to be the single most important thing I do. A lot goes into that, from subject matter, timing, software and the manual moderation effort.

I also adopted a sort of hands off approach early on. I do the posts, they do the comments. I treat the posters as adults, and I prefer to let them sort out their own differences. Sometimes this causes a thread to turn into a train-wreck, but overall it has served me well.

OJR: What is your “day job”? How much income does HBB bring in, relative to your other income?

Jones: I am a full-time blogger. It pays my bills and obviously I continue to do it because I want to. But I could be making more money doing other things, so it is a labor of love.

OJR: How long do you see yourself running HBB?

Jones: I feel a responsibility to the readership to see this thing through to a logical end. I look forward to the day when housing prices aren’t a big issue anymore.

OJR: Do you think that HBB can become a long-running, self-supporting publishing business?

Jones: I think it already has.

OJR: What do you think of the job that journalists working for major newspapers and TV have done covering real estate over the past decade?

Jones: Like many of the checks and balances surrounding the housing price boom, the media failed the public to a large degree. Having done some writing, I am well aware that journalist don’t have a final say on what gets covered and how. And having done many interviews, I can say that most journalists I have interacted with are very level-headed and practical about economic matters in private.

In my opinion, the biggest failure of the press regarding the housing bubble in 2004-2006 was a lack of objectivity and ‘professional skepticism,’ as we called it in my auditing classes. Over and over, the print or Web media would turn to a trade group for analysis of some new statistic.

This was often the case when this same organization provided the data. These people are paid to provide a slant to the news, yet they were interviewed as an unbiased observer, and their answers were rarely challenged in those years.

For example, in the spring of 2005, the Realtors’ trade group reported some very high percentages of speculative and second-home purchases for the year 2004. At first they were a little taken aback. But within a few days they had regrouped and created several new theories to explain this disturbing data. We were told; baby boomers were going to own many homes, and people are speculating because it is a new investment class. Also there was the ongoing ‘shortage of land’ mantra the industry made up. And we were told, that September 11th had made the nation feel differently about housing; some sort of comfort aid.

All new paradigm stuff and all made up after the fact to explain away some trends that we now know to be the source of many industry ills.

If I could see this from my humble desk in Arizona, why didn’t the media pick up on it? They weren’t skeptical enough when it counted. And this is just one example of hundreds.

OJR: Given your experience with HBB, what advice would you give these “mainstream” journalists on how better to cover real estate?

Jones: As the bubble was topping out, I often saw reporters mention seeing a glass half-empty or half-full. I don’t think that has a place in financial journalism. And being objective means being skeptical, in my opinion. When someone says, ‘I think the market will turn around this spring,’ it should be followed up with, ‘what is the basis for that prediction?’ And saying, ‘because it always has’ isn’t good enough. As the last two springs have demonstrated, sometimes it doesn’t.

I hear the frustration behind the comment. You bust your rear to get stories in the paper, then watch bloggers grab traffic talking about your work. All the while your bosses are laying off other reporters, citing circulation declines, as analysts talk about newspapers losing audience to the Web. It’s not hard to understand why many newspaper journalists would come to view blogs as parasites, sucking the life from their newsrooms.

Still, the charge riles me every time I hear it. To me, it’s a poorly informed insult of many hard-working Web publishers who are doing fresh, informative and original work. And by dismissing blogs as “parasitic,” newspaper journalists make themselves blind to the opportunities that blogging, as well as independent Web publishing in general, offer to both the newspaper industry and newspaper journalists.

I wanted to hear what other Web professionals I respect thought. So I e-mailed several bloggers, academics and newspaper editors. No one who I’ve heard make the charge responded. But others replied with insightful remarks.

“People who say blogs are ‘parasitic’ are referring, really, to only a subset of blogs — those that refer to, and comment on, matters of public interest that are typically covered by mainstream media,” Rich Gordon, Associate Professor and Director of Digital Technology in Education at Northwestern’s Medill School of Journalism, responded.

“There are many, many blogs that address topics that aren’t covered by mainstream media at all. Those who write these blogs do original reporting, at least based on what they see around them. So even to the degree this criticism has a basis in fact, it refers only to a fraction of all blogs.”

Let’s not forget, either, that even “parasitic” blogs provide value beyond the original news reports they cite. Blogs animate the news for readers that newspapers alone don’t always reach.

“I find some of these parasitic-ish blogs particularly useful – because they spotlight things I might miss,” wrote Columbia Graduate School of Journalism Professor Sree Sreenivasan. “A great example is Romenesko. It’s my first visit every day. Lots of old-school journos, who don’t like blogs, read it religiously, without knowing it’s a blog!”

Gordon reminded that bloggers are not alone in referencing reporter’s work.

“There is a long tradition *within journalism* of publishing and broadcasting the work of people whose primary contribution to discourse is opinion and analysis. Bloggers fall squarely within this tradition. They are parasitic only if your definition of journalism consists only of original reporting.”

Lisa Stone, co-founder of BlogHer.org, made that point even more bluntly.

“Baloney,” she wrote in response to my question. “An opinion editorialist doesn’t have to break news herself to provide amazing, fresh perspective on world events — whether she’s published on the New York Times Op-Ed page or on her own blog. Sounds like these folks are less interested in the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution and the public discourse upon which American democracy is based than they are with Machiavellian divine right.”

Neil Budde, Vice President and Editor in Chief of Yahoo! News, wrote that newspapers’ own websites and partners could have been called parasites, at least by one definition of the term.

“In my days at WSJ.com, I’m sure some in the print newsroom considered us parasites. Now working for a search engine/portal like Yahoo!, I wouldn’t be surprised to hear this definition attached to our role. But at Yahoo! News we’re working with publishers and broadcasters to ensure that we co-exist over a prolonged period of time with them and that their lifetime is not shortened by it.”

Original reporting

“Many blogs exist without ever quoting or referring to other news items and contain original content,” Brett Tabke, editor of Webmaster World wrote. “There is such a wide range of blog types today; such an all encompassing statement is suspect.”

“Most bloggers started blogging because they had something to say,” Gordon wrote. “They would not go mute just because there was less MSM [mainstream media] content available.”

Cory Doctorow, co-editor of BoingBoing, agreed.

“If MSM didn’t exist, we’d just invent ‘em (as metrobloggers have done) — we’d go out and take pictures and write about stuff as it happened.

“That’s already happening with governmental material — I can summarize C-SPAN just as well as NBC’s hacks.”

Stone cited examples of independent websites that provide original reporting.

“If anyone is looking for sites where bloggers use blogs to break news, I recommend Global Voices Online, Sunlight Foundation and BlogHer.”

Finally, Gordon suggested that blogs actually bring readers and income to newspaper and TV websites:

“If you’re associated with [traditional media] and think bloggers are parasitic, let me suggest you check your site’s metrics system to see how much traffic comes your way now because of blog links. If the number is low, you have nothing to worry about. If it’s high, your site is earning income because of these parasites. The relevant scientific term is (or, at least, should be) ‘symbiotic,’ not “parasitic.’”

I like Gordon’s reference to referrer logs, but for another reason. Too often, newspaper journalists’ familiarity with blogs and other independent websites extend only to those sites that link to their work. Of course, then, those journalists would believe blogs to be parasitic.

But, as Gordon wrote before, there exist thousands of blogs and websites devoted to topics that so-called “mainstream” media fails to cover. By dismissing all blogs as derivative of their own coverage, newspaper journalists reaffirm the cultural myopia that has caused them to miss issues and passions that are of deeply felt interest to so many former, or potential, newspaper readers.

That’s why the “parasite” charge bothers me so much. It perpetuates a bad attitude toward readers that led so many of those readers to the blogosphere in the first place. If some blogs are parasitic, sucking value from others’ work and offering little insight or knowledge in return, so too are many newspaper columnists, editorial pages and television talking heads.

Instead of dismissing the blogs and websites to which their former readers and viewers are flocking, newspaper and TV journalists ought to be asking themselves what those blogs are doing that *they* could be doing to get those readers back.