The project is called Sustainable Business Models for Journalism. What did we find? First, bad news: there’s no single, easy solution or amazing new business model that solves all the problems that traditional publishing models have.

But looking through some of the very grassroots operations around the globe, you find some similarities among the sites. Probably the most comforting lesson from these young and old entrepreneurs is the fact that there’s probably no need for an amazing new business model. Journalism is just going through a transformative period from a monopolistic, high-revenue and low competition model to a highly competitive global marketplace. And the ideas and advice we got from these entrepreneurs was not that much different from the advice you find in traditional business literature, startup manuals or even biographies of successful companies.

Here are some general conclusions from the 69 startups we interviewed.

Find your niche. Whatever you do, don’t do the same things as the others do. Or if you do, make sure you do it better in one way or another. Be faster. Or broader. Or more in-depth. Slower. Whatever you do, do it somehow differently than the others. As Ken Fisher from ArsTechnica.com says, don’t try to be 30 seconds faster with the same bloggy content that’s going to be on five other sites in 10 minutes.

Be passionate. Running a website is hard work and you can’t do it with a 9-to-5 attitude. If you truly love what you do, it makes the long hours more tolerable and gives you a competitive edge: you’re willing to work an extra hour. My personal guess is that the readers can smell the passion as well. Especially in France and, surprisingly, in Japan, the divide between “us” — the free journalists — and “them” — the established media — seems to be a strong driver.

Keep it small and agile. The old model of publishing was to design a publication and then hire people to do it. The new model is to have one or two people and see what kind of publication they are able to create.

You are the brain of your own business. Many of the journalists interviewed for our study said they hoped that someone else would do the business side of things for them: contacting possible advertisers, selling the ads and doing all the planning and calculation. David Boraks from DavidsonNews.net said it well: if you are starting a small business and you have a vision how to do it, you can’t turn it over to somebody else and expect it to happen the way you want it to.

Ask for support (aka money). If you know you’re doing a good thing, don’t be afraid to ask for support. Advertisers, especially local or niche ones, might actually like what you do. If they are passionate about candles and think your site about candles is worth reading, they are probably more willing to advertise on your site. If your readers can’t live another day without your passionate and unique candle reviews, they probably are willing to somehow give you money. “People are just looking for a way to support you,” says Doug McLennan from Artsjournal.com

These are just a few notes from our complete report, which you can read or download here. The website Submojour.net has all the case studies.

Pekka Pekkala is a visiting scholar at USC Annenberg. He is working on a book titled “How to Keep Journalism Profitable” with a two-year grant from the Helsingin Sanomat Foundation. Folow him on Twitter at @pekkapekkala.

That conversation started me thinking about the need for a program in the style of AmeriCorps — or Teach for America or Peace Corps — for journalism in under-reported and diverse communities. Call it Reporter Corps. The service-learning model would train young adults in journalism and teach them how their government works, pair them with a local publication in need of reporters, get them some quality mentors, provide a stipend, and set them loose for six months or a year reporting on their own community.

Just about a year after my conversation with Emma, I am very pleased that the first class of six Reporter Corps members started this month at Alhambra Source, with support from USC Annenberg and the McCormick Foundation.

Broadly speaking, the Reporter Corps goals are not that different from AmeriCorps, the national service-learning umbrella program that supports 80,000 people annually:

• Get things done
• Strengthen communities
• Encourage responsibility
• Expand opportunity

But unlike AmeriCorps, which addresses education, environment, health, and public-safety needs, Reporter Corps focuses on news and information needs. If journalism is a public service crucial to democracy, the demand for such a program is clear: Local news coverage — despite a recent flourishing of online community sites — has been in decline for years.

Reporter Corps members tour the Alhambra Police Department. From left, Captain Cliff Mar, Albert Lu, Esmee Xavier, Alfred Dicioco, Irma Uc, Jane Fernandez, Javier Cabral.

In many immigrant communities and less affluent areas, the result has been that mainstream reporting has all but disappeared or been reduced to sensationalism. Alhambra, an independent city of about 85,000, lost its local newspaper decades ago. More recently, the Los Angeles Times and other regional papers have slashed their coverage of the area. Local television rolls into town when there is a murder or the mayor’s massage-parlor-owning girlfriend flings dumplings at him in a late-night squabble (yes, that happened). The Chinese-language press is active, but very few decision-makers can read it. All of this, in turn, has contributed to a population with low levels of civic engagement.

Despite, or perhaps due to, the lack of quality news coverage, I found a ready supply of young Alhambra residents interested in reporting opportunities. Students navigating a depleted community college system or recent college grads un- or underemployed and facing the lowest employment rate for 18- to 24-year-olds in 60 years came to the Alhambra Source eager to contribute. Although they had limited journalism experience, in many ways they have proven to be natural reporters for a multiethnic community. They are all immigrants or children of immigrants, speaking Arabic, Cantonese, Spanish, Tagalog and more. As a result, they can cross ethnic and linguistic lines better than many reporters. They also often have a deeper understanding of what stories matter to fellow residents, from the challenges of not being able to communicate with your parents because you’re not fluent in the same language to the need for a local dog park.

For the first class of Reporter Corps, we selected six high school graduates — four in local community colleges, and two recent college graduates — based on their connection to the area, growth potential, and passion to improve their community. In the spring we plan on expanding the project to work with another USC community news site, Intersections South LA.

The approach appears to fall into a larger trend in youth media initiatives to work increasingly with high school graduates rather than solely younger students.

“Within the youth media groups we’re hearing more and more a thirst that involves the grads. The job market in many of the neighborhoods these groups are active in is really abysmal. Some go to community college, some don’t,” said Mark Hallett, the senior program officer for the journalism program at the McCormick Foundation. “Neighborhoods aren’t finding coverage.”

Across the country, local news sites are working in diverse ways to put this population to work. Many have small internship programs. In an example similar in spirit to Reporter Corps, New American Media has teamed up with the California Endowment to work with 16- to 24-year-olds in California communities such as Fresno, Coachella, and Long Beach for youth-led media efforts.

The Endowment also funds some successful high school journalism programs, such as Boyle Heights Beat in East L.A. (which is also affiliated with USC Annenberg), but Senior Program Manager Mary Lou Fulton notes, “it requires a greater investment in teaching, mentoring and support.”

Unlike high school students, who tend to be busy and sometimes lack maturity or real-life experience, grads often have an excess of time and more advanced critical-thinking skills. “For these youth, this work is a part or full-time job, meaning they are able to spend more sustained time on reporting and develop deeper community relationships to inform their reporting,” Fulton told me via e-mail, noting that all of the students in their programs also receive either an hourly wage or stipend. “All of this increases the chances that the content they create will be more timely and have greater depth.”

What if we united efforts like this on an even larger scale — with the vision that Teach for America applied to failing schools in the 1990s — and adapt it to local journalism? Would the nation see a boost in engaged citizens, more young people at work, new jobs, and — we can dream — even new models for how local news outlets can make money? We see Reporter Corps as a step in that direction, with a focus less on taking smart, highly achieving young people and placing them in at-need communities, and more on training young people to report on their own communities. Whether or not participants go on to become professionals, they will be exposed to new opportunities in the government, legal, education, and social service sectors. In the process, local news, often considered a dying art form, might just be reinvented and reinvigorated by their energy.

Alhambra Source and Intersections South LA are cornerstone projects of the new Civic Engagement and Journalism Initiative at USC Annenberg, which aims to link communication research and journalism to engage diverse, under-served Los Angeles communities. USC Annenberg professors Sandra Ball-Rokeach and Michael Parks spearhead the Alhambra Project, and Professor Willa Seidenberg directs Intersections South LA. Daniela Gerson heads the initiative and edits Alhambra Source.

1. Investigate your community’s news and information needs before you launch.
While few news organizations are likely to have a dedicated team of researchers and scholars at their disposal, they can — and should — identify community information needs to guide the development of their site. On the simplest level, that means a reporter should know his or her beat well and do some investigating before launch.

As a journalist in Alhambra, for example, I witnessed firsthand the civic participation gaps and the barriers between ethnic and linguistic groups that our researchers had identified. The lack of civic participation was made evident in 2010 when five incumbents ran unchallenged, prompting officials to cancel the elections.

The need to cross language lines became clear when school and government officials, police officers and other community leaders all told me that they could not understand the most active press coverage of Alhambra: the Chinese-language newspapers. These newspapers target about a third of the city’s population, and yet city leaders had no idea what was being reported. Identifying basic communication needs such as these can help define the goals of a local news source and also establish a baseline that can later be used to demonstrate the site’s impact to funders or other supporters.

2. To effectively build a community contributor team, hold regular meetings, play to contributor strengths, and remember they are volunteers.
We work with community contributors — in our case that means Alhambra residents who volunteer and tend not to have professional journalism experience. Initially, I set about recruiting Alhambrans to report stories that might interest them or their neighbors. I searched for people already producing content online, talked to leaders of community organizations, and spread the word about our new site. Once we launched the site, we featured our contributors prominently with a call for others to get involved.

Monthly meetings in our office space have been crucial to the strength and expansion of our team. They are part newsroom story meeting, part community advocacy, and part social gathering (we always include a potluck dinner). After the first few meetings and the site launch, I no longer had to actively recruit contributors — at least one new candidate would contact me each month. As our reputation grows, so has our team. That doesn’t mean everyone sticks around: like any volunteer community, we have to work to keep people engaged and interested in giving their time. But enough new people come to keep up the site’s content and energy, while a regular base of contributors provide a core continuum.

3. When it comes to community contributions, a personal perspective is often crucial to a story.
Community contributors often want to report because they have an agenda they want heard. Obscuring that under a veil of objectivity just does not work on a community level. I’ve found community contributors are great for insight stories and features, sometimes providing our most creative articles, ranging from a critique of the local food rating system (“A=American, B=Better, C=Chinese”) to a call for new bike laws to a visit to the local psychic “Mrs. Lin.”

One story type that I have found community contributors can consistently produce better than outside reporters is a first-person piece incorporating a wider perspective. The stories that have received some of the highest traffic on our site and met our research metrics of increased civic engagement have tended to be of this type. Some examples include a story on the challenges of inter-generational communication for a child of immigrants, one about growing up Arab or Muslim in a mostly Asian and Latino community, and one about why a church community organizer takes issue with a city ordinance.

Finally—and this is important—keep in mind that these are not professional reporters. Everyone needs an editor, and working with community contributors often means multiple drafts and intensive fact checking. Many times it would have been easier for me to have done the story myself, so it is important to match volunteer reporters with pieces to which they can add value.

4. Crossing language and ethnic divides cannot be achieved through multilingual content alone.
Before we launched, we intended to be a site in the three languages most spoken by our readers — English, Chinese, and Spanish. We quickly discovered that we lacked the resources. And as it turns out, such a plan might not have been worth the effort.

About a quarter of Alhambra residents live in households where no adults speak fluent English. There is a clear need for foreign language media, particularly in the ethnic Chinese community. But that does not mean that the community would be interested if we created a multilingual website. From anecdotal interviewing, we found that these residents are satisfied getting their news from ethnic publications and are less likely to go to a website.

Instead, we found many other important ways to bridge the language divide. Here are four:

• Building a multilingual team, which helps expand the range of stories we can cover and the types of people we can interview
• Translating local foreign-language coverage into English
• Translating selections of our own original content into Spanish and Chinese (through two means: high-quality human translations for select articles and Google Translate function across the entire site)
• Establishing relationships with ethnic press so they print versions of our articles in their newspapers.

5. Use feedback loops as engagement and learning tools.
We use polls and surveys extensively on the site to engage residents, create a link between them and city officials, and improve our coverage. Some of our most successful surveys have ranged from where to find the best local burger or boba to whether the city should ban fireworks sales to which supermarket should come to Main Street.

We often incorporate the findings from these informal polls into stories. It enables more residents to participate on the site in a simpler way than writing a story, and in public policy issues, it offers a means for us to share community feedback with the government. For example, when the city council recently acted to limit pay-for-recycling, less than a handful of people from the public came to the meeting (like most days). But on our site more than 100 people voted to express their opinions, the vast majority against the ban. The city council then decided to grant a reprieve to one market.

We also use the polls to gauge our impact and to see on which topics residents would like more coverage. We have surveyed residents about what stories they would like to see, research questions they would like answered, and even improvements we could make to our website. Engaging the community this way enables us to better respond to their needs. After all, a community news site, like a city itself, is a work in progress.

Alhambra Source is the pilot project of a new Civic Engagement and Journalism Initiative at USC Annenberg. The project aims to link Communication research and Journalism to engage diverse, under-served Los Angeles communities. The Metamorphosis Project is the primary researcher, and Intersections South LA is another project site. This is the first in a series of articles on the topic of creating and evaluating local news websites that strive to increase civic engagement.

Of course, on the flip side, trolls and know-it-alls can make reading the comments on a website a visit to virtual hell. So when some of your readers begin to tick you off – either for what they do, or what they don’t – here are 10 things to remember… after you’ve taken a deep breath.

You can’t force readers to care

No matter how much work you put into a piece, no matter how much news you thought you broke in it, no matter well you think told the story, you simply cannot force readers to care. The best you can do is to think about your readers’ needs and interests and then craft an engaging narrative or presentation that rewards whomever pays attention. But even then, some readers are just going to say “meh” and click over to the dancing cat videos. Even if you produce a dancing cat video, somebody’s still going to say “meh” and click to someone else’s dancing cat video. Don’t let it upset you.

See what’s keeping people from participating

While you shouldn’t get upset by a lack of engagement, don’t dismiss it, either. Always be curious about your site, and how people are – or are not – interacting with it. Create a new dummy account every few weeks, just to make sure your registration process is working the way you want. Ask friends to create accounts and jump in now and then, to get fresh perspectives on how newcomers react to your online community. Is there a tech problem that’s keeping people from registering, commenting, blogging, or submitting or embedding photos or video? Are new users getting private message spam from lurkers on the site? Are new users having a hard time tracking the conversations they want to follow? Find the barriers that your site’s putting up, and work to take them down.

Engage on social media – don’t promote

Twitter and Facebook are great media for pushing new stories to your followers. But if that’s all you are using those services for, you’re likely leaving your readers cold. So don’t get upset when your story links fail to elicit a slew of RTs and Shares. Try some new ways to engage your followers, instead. Post “wild art” photos. Ask questions about favorite places to eat, visit, etc. RT and Share the competition, too. Show your readers that you’re not some uptight, Fortune 500 media conglomerate, but an accessible neighbor they can talk with.

Remember that readers – together – know more than you do, even if you know a lot

So even if one or two readers really make you mad, remember than you need the rest of them. Therefore…

Don’t blow up at your readers

Stand up and move away from your desk, go offline for a few moments – always have a plan for what you will do when someone really enrages you, a distraction that gives you the time you need to calm down before you reply in way you’ll almost certainly come to regret.

Always be kind

No matter what tone a reader takes with you personally, if someone emails or messages you directly, try to always respond, and with kindness. Sometimes a person’s heat in a message just shows that they have passion for what you’re covering, and they can’t yet direct it. So it spews out at you. A calm, thoughtful response sometimes can redirect a hostile critic into a passionate advocate for your work, and for your community.

Keep your readers interested in the topic, not in you

Sorry to make this sound so rough, but, ultimately, nobody cares about you. Or your “brand.” They care about what you cover, and maybe even about what you experience in covering it. But any time or words you spend trying to get people to care about you is better spent keeping people interested and even excited about the topic (or community) you’re covering. Remember, a professional writes and reports to address your readers’ needs, not your own.

And I’m not trying to be snobbish about “professionalism” here. I mean this literally. The people who make money doing this stuff (by definition, the professionals) are the one who write for their readers’ needs, not for their own.

If they do get interested in you, don’t let go to your head

That said, if you do your job well, it’s likely that some readers will conflate you with what you’re covering and become fans. Just as you shouldn’t get too upset by trolls, don’t allow your head to get too big when people compliment you, either. Thank them graciously, then move on.

Know when to stay out, versus when to jump in

Sometimes you have to act like a parent, which means that there comes a point when you need to let your kids tie their own shoes. In this case, there will come a point when you ought to let the community take up its own causes and extinguish its own flame wars. You don’t always have to have the last word. Sure, there’ll be times when you will need to answer direct questions, and model the type of behavior you want from readers. But don’t forget to back off when your community is ready to walk on its own. Don’t get upset if they fall down a time or two before they get the hang of it. Every parent’s been there.

Ask yourself if the audience you get is really the audience you want

If your bad feelings about the audience you’ve cultivated ever become too much, even after taking time outs and trying to lead responsibly, you might need to face the tough question: Is the audience you’ve attracted really the one you want? If it isn’t, it’s okay to shut things down and start over. On the flip side, maybe you anticipated attracting a certain type of reader, but found instead that your work resonated with others. If you’re okay with that, embrace the change. Go where your work is needed, and appreciated.

Whichever path you choose, an effective online community leader needs to feel some peace with his or her audience. You can’t do this job if you’re always angry, frustrated or disconnected with the people you’re supposed to serve.

Endorsements.

My first full-time job in newspapers was writing editorials, so I’ve spent a fair number of days interviewing local politicians who shuffled through our offices in pursuit of an endorsement. We told ourselves that our endorsements helped educate local voters and led to more enlightened decisions at the ballot box.

I soon learned that the folks in the newsroom didn’t always share that view. (/understatement)

So I decided to email many of the editors I know who are running independent local news websites, to see what their plans were, and what they thought about the tradition of news endorsements.

Not one of the editors replied that he or she was planning to endorse this election season. Not only that, I got a “No!”, a “NO” and an “absolutely not” among the responses, so some editors appeared to, uh, feel strongly that endorsements were a bad idea.

The most common reason I heard why local news websites wouldn’t endorse was that they could not. They had organized as non-profits, so they are barred from endorsing political candidates due to tax law. That point should help illustrate how decisions about business models affect editorial operations down the line. If you’re considering starting a news website, and making endorsements is important to you, then you’ll need to consider how important they are before thinking about taking the non-profit route.

Non-profit or for-profit, though, the editors I contacted were unanimous in opting out of endorsing.

“It is rather pompous of a news organization to try to tell people who they should vote for,” wrote Tracy Record of the West Seattle Blog. “What makes our opinion any more important than yours? Our job is to bring you information, not our opinion.”

Polly Kreisman of theLoop echoed that thought. “Why on Earth would a local publication that readers trust for news and curation of information put its own political opinions on the line? This is not the New York Times.”

The Sacramento Press‘ Ben Ifeld challenged the old editorial pages ideal that endorsements were an effective form of voter education.

“I’m also not convinced it is a good way to educate the public and engage them in healthy debate. I would much prefer covering everything we can and empowering our community to write editorials and have lively debate in person and on our site.”

While these start-up editors rejected the idea of endorsements, they were nearly unanimous in embracing a responsibility to help inform and engage potential voters in the weeks leading up to an election, with Oakland Local‘s Susan Mernit calling this role “critical.”

Tim Jackson of New River Voice and Lindsey Chester of Cary Citizen both cited question-and-answer features they ran as examples of how local sites can help educate voters without endorsing. Each publication sent candidates for an office identical questionnaires, and the sites ran the candidates’ responses online.

“We felt it gave everyone an equal chance to connect with our readers, and gave our readers a chance to compare and contrast the candidates’ styles in their own unedited words,” Chester wrote.

While I enjoyed my time interviewing candidates in the weeks leading up to our endorsements when I worked in print, I was often bothered that many of these races were for boards and councils the paper rarely covered otherwise. I felt like we were parachuting in every two to four years with a hastily reported endorsement (which was often colored by the editor’s personal partisanship). But with an entire metropolitan area to cover, and a limited amount of news hole each day, this was the reality of newsroom budgeting.

One of the great potential strengths of “hyperlocal” news sites is that they can give day-to-day attention to school boards and municipal councils the big metro papers notice only at election time. And every one of the editors I wrote was eager to talk about their local election-related reporting. But we can’t forget that many readers don’t read the news on a daily basis, as we do – whether that’s a big print metro or a hyperlocal website. They “parachute” into the news around election time just like so many editorial writers.

Endorsements were designed to provide an easily accessible way for part-time readers to catch up on what someone who supposedly is paying attention (and is allegedly neutral) has to say about various candidates. If we’re to leave endorsements behind, I think it’s important for hyperlocal publishers to find other features and tools that allow infrequent readers to get up to speed easily, as well. And to keep those links around in a prominent position. Don’t be afraid to repeat Tweets and Facebook page posts to draw attention to your voter guides, candidate Q&As and community forum schedules, either. This work is important, and publishers should be proud of telling people about it – as many times as it takes for them to notice.

But, as with anything you publish, always keep your community’s needs in mind. As important as it is to cover the news that drives election decisions, sometimes readers don’t need more political coverage. The Batavian‘s Howard Owens wrote to me about the backlash he felt from readers over his “saturation coverage” of a nationally-covered special election last May.

“In hindsight, it’s the worst mistake I’ve made as publisher of The Batavian,” he wrote. “Never again will I cover an election with such zeal, or anything approaching it. We received numerous complaints along the lines of ‘I want my old (The) Batavian back.’ Our site traffic fell by more than 30 percent. It took several weeks to get it back. The turnout for the election was abysmal, even in our county, which, in my estimation, had the best coverage available. People simply didn’t care about the election and were actively hostile to the over coverage of it.”

According to Romenesko’s source, Patch is asking its local editors to run additional formula stories (lists, best-of tournaments, etc.) to goose traffic while also implementing employee review procedures that will result in the dismissal of workers who don’t improve their performance (in the eyes of higher-ups) within 30 days.

Sorry, but – yawn.

Any journalist who believes that Patch is doing something here that newspapers never did before the Internet either (a) never worked at a newspaper before the Internet or (b) has developed a convenient case of amnesia about that era. Newsrooms have been creating and running gimmick stories to attract readers since, well, long before I was born. As they should.

If you want readers to develop a habit of reading you, you need to give them content that grabs them, whatever their mood. That means mixing longer, in-depth investigative pieces with shorter stories, news-you-can-use tips and a variety of other features, including comics, lists and yes, even ads and coupons. Online, it can mean shaking up your front page with polls, discussions, lists and infographics, as well as blog posts and links to longer stories. If Patch wants to change focus and go with easy, formula pieces for a while to pump up the traffic, so be it. They wouldn’t be the first site to do so and won’t be the last.

Newspaper managers have been cooking up excuses to ride reporters out of town for decades, too. I’m reminded of the urban legend about sharks that quit swimming will die. Our industry’s version? If a news editor doesn’t can a reporter every few weeks, he or she’s just gonna drop dead at a budget meeting.

Sure, the humor’s dark, but if you don’t want to live under the constant threat of layoffs, you need to either start publishing for yourself or finding another field in which to work. Arbitrary dismissals are now part of corporate journalism’s DNA.

Hey, I’m no fan of Patch. As I’ve written before, Patch’s corporate overhead puts the network as a huge cost disadvantage versus locally owned and operated hyperlocal websites. It wouldn’t surprise me if what Romenesko wrote about this week didn’t turn out to be the first step toward Patch’s inevitable collapse.

But don’t think for a minute that many of those locally-owned and operated hyperlocals Patch competes with aren’t trying many of those same cookie-cutter, gimmick, formula stories in an effort to boost their own traffic. (Full disclosure: I’m running my annual “best theme park attraction” tournament right now.) Heck, like Romenesko, I think that the “what’s happening with the vacant storefront?” feature is a brilliant idea. That’s an excellent example of the type of local news people want to read from their neighborhood.

And the local publishers I know are even tougher than corporate publishers in holding the line on labor costs. I’ve paid for freelancers, but am much more parsimonious about handing out assignments than the newspaper editors I know. You get extra tight with expenses when it’s your money that’s getting spent.

If you want to attack Patch, hit ‘em for attempts to gag their reporters after Romenesko ran his piece. Hit ‘em for the futility of running hyperlocal sites through a top-down, national network. But spare me the “holier than thou” stuff.

Do you want journalism to succeed? Do want to see more money for more investigative reporting? Do you want to see more attention paid to good work from skilled reporters?

Then you’d better get working on building a community of engaged readers – with whatever tools or gimmicks you need. Patch will live or die on its own. If you think you can do better – do it. Then Patch can either step up its game and compete with better content, or die the death that so many of us have predicted for it.

This ruling emerged when Crystal Cox, a blogger, was accused of defaming Obsidian Finance Group and its co-founder Kevin Padrick on her blog. She posted that Padrick acted criminally in a federal bankruptcy case. Padrick sued and the court found that Cox was not protected under the state’s media shield law.

This decision has implications for bloggers around the country.

Since there is no legal definition for “the press,” this court ruling is one of the first to explicitly say that bloggers are not the media. This comes only a few short months after a federal court ruled that anyone, including bloggers, may legally record public officials, including police officers. The ruling said:

[C]hanges in technology and society have made the lines between private citizen and journalist exceedingly difficult to draw. The proliferation of electronic devices with video-recording capability means that many of our images of current events come from bystanders with a ready cell phone or digital camera rather than a traditional film crew, and news stories are now just as likely to be broken by a blogger at her computer as a reporter at a major newspaper. Such developments make clear why the news-gathering protections of the First Amendment cannot turn on professional credentials or status.
[Page 13 of the Slip Opinion from Glik v. Cuniffe]

While the Glik case was a victory for citizen journalism, the Oregon ruling is a failure to recognize the drastic changes occurring in the journalism world. Current technological advancements have made the line between citizen journalists and mainstream media harder to define. This is beneficial not only to anyone who produces news but also news consumers as well.

Many forget that when a newspaper goes under, it is not only those reporters who have lost their jobs that are affected. And when a local newspaper is forced to downsize their staff and product, there is a gaping hole in their news coverage that the consumer is losing. Entire communities are left without news coverage and left without access to vital information.

Stepping up to fill the void left when a local newspaper cuts back or closes are citizen journalists. They have proven that it no longer takes press credentials or a New York Times business card to break national news. Citizen journalists have captured government scandals and discovered injustice in their state capitols. They do the same job that the “mainstream reporters” are doing without either a pay check or fancy office.

Citizen journalists are providing a valuable service to their communities. They are relentlessly searching for the truth by preserving liberty and democracy. They are doing all of this without the respect that a protected member of the media has.

Instead of penalizing citizen journalists and failing to recognize their value to the changing media world, the courts should grant them journalistic protections. Those who value news should hope that the Oregon ruling is not followed in other states.

Jason Stverak is the President of the Franklin Center for Government and Public Integrity, a leading journalism non-profit organization dedicated to providing investigative reporters and non-profit organizations at the state and local level with training, expertise, and technical support. For more information on the Franklin Center please visit www.FranklinCenterHQ.org.

Here’s my speech presenting this paper, given on Monday, Dec. 12, as part of a panel at the National Press Club titled “Opening Up Journalism: A Culture Change.” The event was hosted by USC Annenberg and moderated by its Director of Journalism and Professor Geneva Overholser. Nikki B. Usher, assistant professor or journalism at George Washington University and recent Annenberg, Ph.d., presented her findings on the growing influence of open-source software thinking in newsrooms.

I’ve modified the opening for this blog post.
***
Today I’m here to talk to you about my online discussion paper called “The Case for Open Journalism Now.”

The only thing I regret about this title is that I didn’t capitalize the word NOW — or perhaps add an exclamation point. I feel a sense of urgency about the need for change that can increase journalism’s connection and relevance in the digital era – and that can help build support for this work as a public good. Open journalism offers an orienting idea for such change.

I’m encouraged by ways this is beginning to happen among new newsrooms and also among some traditional media. Nearly every day I find a new example. For instance, David Brooks of the New York Times wrote a column in late October asking his readers over 70 to share their “life reports.” He began publishing them in November, putting one per day on his blog. This isn’t a traditional role for an esteemed op-ed columnist, yet it made instant sense to thousands of readers who responded. And it’s been wonderful to read.

More examples abound among online only and startup sites and new entities that use information to connect communities. I’ve linked to dozens of examples of open journalism in my web paper. I also put together a hundred other links to arguments, ideas and illustrations of open journalism as a sidebar element. Some of those links connect to blog posts, reports and speeches by a variety of people who have argued in recent times for the need and potential for more open approaches in journalism.

Despite all the recent action, I’m discouraged by how slow journalism has been in seizing the opportunities of two-way communication to improve what we do. I mean improve journalism — not just by using new tools but by forging better relationships between newspeople and those who support and depend on our work – and with others who inform communities.

It’s been 40 years since the internet was developed and 20 since the web came into being. New media are not even new anymore. Yet too much of our energy in journalism has focused on new ways to deliver old ideas instead on fresh approaches to provide what people need today.

We need a conceptual leap now in how we define journalism’s role and how we do its jobs. We need to focus first on the service we’re providing and then on how to deliver it.

I like this idea of service because it applies to both civic and commercial value. That’s important as we’re asking people to support journalism financially in increasing ways through digital subscriptions, donations and philanthropy to fund important coverage. I might pay for the service of someone keeping watch on my local government and telling me when something needs my attention. Specialized information and tailored delivery also are services. People certainly pay to be entertained. Many others support public media because they believe in the mission, not just the format.

Open journalism begins with this notion of service. It recognizes that many people in our society have a stake in quality journalism and can contribute to it. And it applies ideas that have a lot of currency in journalism to the processes of journalism itself.

What are those ideas? Well, let’s start with transparency. Open journalism involves being proactive in telling consumers who we are, what we aim to do and how we operate. How do we know what we report and how can you check our work? With so many competitors providing information and news, consumers need ways to separate credible sources from others. This is one area where journalism providers can do better without new cost.

Open journalism involves responsiveness. If your organization offers an invitation to comment or asks people to follow you on social networks, but you don’t answer questions posted in those spaces, what is your message? Where is the value?

Open journalism says that news providers are accountable. Most newsrooms think they are, but I invite you to visit mainstream news sites online and try to quickly find out — I mean in less than 3 clicks — who’s in charge, how to report an error or how to give a news tip.

Open journalism involves dialogue and participation among newspeople, sources and contributors. This happens as part of the journalism rather than as an add-on. It can involve user photos and comments but it isn’t a forgotten corner of the website labeled “user generated content.”

And open journalism works through networked connections. It links out — to source material and to relevant web references. It establishes news people as active participants – in their roles as journalists – in a universe of information sharing.

The ideas of open journalism lend themselves heavily to digital communication but extend to all the ways newspeople can serve communities. It can involve in-person meetings, bringing the community into newsrooms or using text messaging or cross-media partnerships to connect more deeply. It draws on user input as the starting point for some coverage.

I had two main aims with this open journalism paper. First, I wanted to put a name on a cultural shift I see happening around journalism – though it’s happening mostly outside the main flow of news. Second, I’ve laid out a case for moving the open idea to the core of how we think about and practice journalism.

As I said earlier, I feel a sense of urgency about this. Part of that comes from the concern we all feel about how to support and sustain independent, fact-based reporting on public affairs. But I’m also impatient for greater change because of all the opportunities still in front of us. My open journalism idea isn’t about saving what went before. It’s about improving journalism for the years ahead.

My friend Howard Weaver, the former news vice president at McClatchy, thinks the biggest change the Internet brought for journalism wasn’t technology itself. It was the end of the gatekeeper role. Yet even though we know that’s true, and we’ve known it for years, we’re just beginning to develop the other roles that make journalism valuable.

I’ve been inspired by many other thinkers, including Bill Kovach and Tom Rosenstiel. I helped Bill organize a conference at the end of my Nieman fellowship year on how the internet would affect journalism. This was in 1994, and as Nieman curator, Bill was seeing ahead much farther than most people. Bill and Tom later wrote The Elements of Journalism, an essential book on journalism’s responsibilities to the public. Last year they added a book called Blur, which included some fresh ideas about the functions of journalism in the communication age. Those include familiar roles such as investigator and new ones such as smart aggregator.

In describing the need for newspeople to be more nimble and creative in how they serve consumers, Tom said this to me: “We are caught in an ancient confusion between how we do things and what our function is.”

The work of news has just begun to break old patterns that focus on 20th-century, one-way publishing and broadcasting routines. Social media and networked communication offer a fresh chance at effective two-way exchange. By routinely letting people know that we’re interested in what they know, we change the expectation. By simplifying ways for people to contribute, as Jay Rosen and others suggest, we improve the quality of the contributions. By being more transparent about how quality journalism works, and what it takes to produce it, we can build more support and trust for this work as a public good.

The open journalism ideas I’ve outlined are only some of what’s possible. Once you start thinking this way, the prospects seem limitless. But ideas alone won’t do it. We need to figure out how to break down the processes of journalism to begin with function and then turn to form.

The digital-first idea that’s informing a lot of newsroom reorganizations offers some promise for opening up journalism. For instance, my paper cites several examples of open journalism practices among newsrooms that are part of Journal Register, the company whose mantra is Digital First.

But we have to go beyond building production routines that simply replace a printing press cycle with a multiplatform cycle. We need to build relationship and community connection into the processes of newsgathering and into its starting points. This is key to making journalism less insular and more outwardly focused. That’s why open journalism holds so much promise.

One of the great opportunities of networking is collaboration, which has increased in journalism, with much more promise ahead. More significant is the vast jump in knowledge sharing among journalists. The open-source software movement in journalism connects our work with other disciplines such as science, social sciences and technology – and opens up new possibilities for how we can be relevant and valuable in our communities.

I’m looking forward to hearing Nikki Usher’s remarks on the open-source idea in journalism. But before I close, I want to do two things. First, I want to thank Carola Weil, USC’s director of international and strategic partnerships in Washington, for organizing this event.

Second, I want to issue my own invitation – please join the conversation online. My project is a Future of Journalism effort of The Annenberg Innovation Lab and is built to invite comment and host debate. There’s a handout here with the URL and of course you can find the report easily yourself.

Let’s seize this moment to open journalism – NOW!

“Citizen journalism” – the reporting of news events by non-professional reporters – isn’t just a nifty little gadget that we pros can append to our reporting, to make it seem more “social” or interactive online. When circumstances and agencies stand in the way of news reporting, grassroots reporting (my preferred term) becomes an indispensable part of the news-gathering process.

We’ve seen that over the past weeks with the Occupy movement, and especially last night in New York, when city police launched a middle-of-the-night raid on peaceful protesters camped out in a private park in lower Manhattan – then blocked and even arrested news reporters who showed up to cover it.

By now, we should be used to relying on readers and viewers to provide coverage for us in times of natural disasters. Sure, we can drive the trucks to the point where a hurricane is forecast to make landfall, but forecasts aren’t always spot-on. And we get little warning for tornadoes, and none for earthquakes. (Twitter notwithstanding.) Professional journalists have relied upon eyewitness descriptions, photos and videos from people on the scene of calamities, since long before the Internet.

But if that’s all we’re using user-generated content for in our news reports, we’re leaving ourselves too vulnerable to authorities who wish to control our coverage. Organizers and supporters of the Occupy movement have recognized the importance of putting cameras in the hands of participants, to minimize the chance that a newsworthy moment happens without being recorded for the public at large.

That ought to become more journalists’ role, too – not just specifically for Occupy protests, but for all continuing coverage of daily life in our communities. I hope that reporters across the country take into their news meetings a copy of that NY Times blog post I linked earlier in this piece, and say to their colleagues, “we need to find ways to prevent this from happening in our community.”

This isn’t just about just riding your local officials so your community’s voters won’t elect the type of official who orders a press blackout of the news. Good luck with that. It’s about making a press blackout a pointless endeavor, by inspiring, training and enabling as many people in your community to become witnesses for the news, 24/7.

Afraid of cultivating your competition? Don’t be. If you can’t deliver the news, you’ve got no chance of surviving, much less making money, in the information marketplace. We need grassroots reporting.

And don’t forget why you got into this business. Surely it wasn’t for the great pay, the job security or the cushy hours. If you’re like most journalists, you got into this business to raise hell and right some wrongs. There’s nothing wrong with recruiting every ally you can to help.

The First Amendment never belonged to a single industry or its employees anyway. It belongs to everyone. The freedom of the press is a public right (along with the freedom of speech and to peaceably assemble). So let’s encourage our fellow citizens to use their freedom of the press, even when authorities try to say professional journalists can’t.

Especially when authorities try to say we can’t.

What was once a “you can’t yell ‘fire!’ in a crowded theater” exception to First Amendment protections has mutated into “you can protest only in approved zones during approved hours of the day using approved personal belongings and stances.” Don’t link arms. Don’t lie down. Don’t stay overnight.

Rights are like muscles. Use ‘em or lose ‘em. The more citizens we bring into the process of reporting the news, the stronger our freedom of the press will become.

This case emerged from an incident where a private citizen used his personal cell phone to capture alleged police brutality.

Simon Glik could have walked away when he saw two police officers punching a man in the face. Instead, he pulled out his cellphone and started recording it. When Mr. Glik informed the police officers that he was recording audio, the officer arrested him for violating the state’s wiretap law. He also was charged with disturbing the peace and aiding the escape of a prisoner. The charges were dropped eventually because of lack of merit, but Mr. Glik filed a lawsuit claiming his free-speech rights had been violated.

This latest ruling is especially relevant to those who consider themselves citizen journalists. Before the court’s decision, members of the general public did not have the legal protection guaranteed by state shield laws enjoyed by credentialed journalists.

The court decision, in part, reads:

“Changes in technology and society have made the lines between private citizen and journalist exceedingly difficult to draw. The proliferation of electronic devices with video-recording capability means that many of our images of current events come from bystanders with a ready cell phone or digital camera rather than a traditional film crew, and news stories are now just as likely to be broken by a blogger at her computer as a reporter at a major newspaper. Such developments make clear why the news-gathering protections of the First Amendment cannot turn on professional credentials or status.”

Although this decision does not clarify the much-debated discussion on who counts as “the press,” it does state that freedom of the press and speech guaranteed in the First Amendment no longer just apply to salaried reporters.

The decision also acknowledges that current technological advancements have made the line between citizen journalists and the mainstream press more difficult to define. This is beneficial to individuals who produce news, as well as news consumers.

The ruling also makes it clear that those reporters who sit at the top newspapers around the nation do not have different rights then those bloggers who pull out their cell phones to record their stories. It seems that most have forgotten that even well-compensated reporters are in fact, citizen journalists, who receive a paycheck to keep the public informed.

Another object lost on the typical news consumers is that when a newspaper goes under, it is not only those reporters who have lost their jobs who are affected. Entire communities are left without news coverage and without access to vital information. Stepping up to fill the void left when a local newspaper cuts back or closes are citizen journalists. They have proved that it no longer takes press credentials or a New York Times business card to break national news. Citizen journalists have captured their local congressman in scandals and reported on the tax increase a state senator hoped no one would find out about. They do the same job that “mainstream reporters” are doing without either a paycheck or a fancy office.

Citizen journalists are doing their part to keep our government officials accountable to the people. They do this by attending a town-hall meeting and reporting on the events or taking out a cellphone and videotaping what is viewed as injustice by the police. They are preserving democracy and making their hometowns better places for their families and friends. It is a thankless service that our country cannot afford to dismiss.

By allowing citizens the protection to videotape government officials without fear of arrest and prosecution, this ruling is a victory to anyone who supports journalistic freedom. We welcome any and all citizen journalists who feel the need to take action to better their communities.

Jason Stverak is the President of the Franklin Center for Government and Public Integrity, a leading journalism non-profit organization. The Franklin Center is dedicated to providing investigative reporters and non-profit organizations at the state and local level with training, expertise, and technical support. For more information on the Franklin Center please visit www.FranklinCenterHQ.org.