For example, his retort in the early 1980s that unemployed rioters should ‘get on their bikes’ as his father did and look for work made him a hate figure on the Left. (Admittedly this did not take much effort, given the poisonous atmosphere of UK politics at the time.) He has spoken out against the European Union and even suggested that traditional Conservative voters should instead support the Euro-sceptic UK Independence Party, infuriating many in his own party.

In addition, some of his comments on race and multiculturalism have been equally controversial, though he has also denounced the neo-fascist British National Party. This abrasive, uninhibited approach earned him the nickname of ‘semi-house-trained polecat’ via the late Michael Foot, but also cemented his reputation as a hardman of the British mainstream right.

Despite this, he is also doing something very interesting on his blog, hosted by the web site of the London-based Daily Telegraph newspaper. Namely, he replies to comments made by reader in the main body of his blog posts, structuring them as if taking part in an informal discussion:

I think “dirlada” was right. Any one in any walk of life may make honest mistakes, even sensible mistakes, but in that recent incest case it was over 100 people from 28 different agencies, all making some pretty obvious mistakes which was the worry. And right again, “Bionic Raspberry”. What about the offenders and the extended family too?

Oh, “crownarmourer”, what a temptation! Me as Lord Protector. No, I do not think so. I sussed out how power corrupted him when I was a 15-year-old history student.

Again, I must tell “incensed” that I simply am not Mr Tebbit. I lost that title. I don’t mind Tebbit, Norman or, as cabbies usually address me, “Norm” but I am not “Mr”. And I hope that you still might see the difference between the EU and the USSR. Millions of Poles, Czechs, Slovaks and others who have experienced both can do so. Oh, and just a thought: were not the progenitors of the BNP ready to sell out to Hitler?

Whereas other columnists may occasionally reply to comments as commenters themselves, Tebbit seems unwilling to maintain such a barrier between blog and response. Instead he selects what he believes are either the most interesting posts made, or the ones that he believes require the most refutation. This is curiously inventive, cementing as it does, a direct connection between him and his readers. If we consider that online journalism’s strength is that it allows such a two-way conversation, even in a textual medium, then Tebbit is unusual in that he treats this as an essential part of the process, but also leaves aside the traditional aloofness of the journalist in doing so. He blogs, they read, they comment, he reads in turn and comments in turn. It is both cyclical and personable, but also an acceptance that what the reader says and thinks is at least as worthy of consideration as what the author writes, within some parameters – Tebbit still chooses what to reply to, whereas the reader still chooses what to comment on.

Tebbit also refers to each commentator by name, or at least, screen name. Again, this implies a greater intimacy between reader and author, but also a shared subjectivity – Tebbit picks comments, not all of which he agrees with, but answers them in a personalised and informal fashion:

As for “john the bear” I am just sorry that he has so little faith in his country. He fears that if the UK left the EU our former partners would set out to destroy us. They are not that stupid. They export more to us than we to them. They would be the bigger losers. And they would be in breach of the GATT…

…I should apologise to “blustering colonel” for ignoring his kind invitation to visit Singapore. I have been there many times, the first of them in 1954, so I am not unaware of the immense achievements of Lee Kwan Yu and the people of Singapore. Indeed I only wish that we had had more leaders like him here.

We might have been as successful as Singapore, but we only had one, and she was not leader for long enough.

Whilst Tebbit’s politics may not be seen as always desirable by either this author or many OJR readers, to dismiss them or how Tebbit articulates them is to ignore how he has developed a currently unique relationship with his readers. The closest equivalent may be the ‘ombudsman’ employed by some US news organisations, who uses his or her column to respond to reader/viewer queries and complaints. The main difference between these however is that the ombudsman still retains his or her distance from the reader – he is an emissary of the ‘writer’, embodied in this case by the hierarchy of the newsroom – and responds to missives from otherwise passive readers, but only on his or her terms and in an official – or even officious – capacity.

Tebbit meanwhile does choose what to reply to, but beyond that is an openness to a variety of comments. Tebbit may not necessarily agree with some commenters but still lists some of their more notable comments and responds to them accordingly:

I noticed amongst those posting comments on this site a number of contributors, john the bear cub, Matthew Gris, mark999, frederik and others telling me the EU is a done deal, a good thing, and that I should shut up and learn to love it. Oddly enough, as mickeypee and rapscallion pointed out, none of them explain why we should put up with a government we did not elect and cannot change compelling us to do things which are clearly not in our interest.

Oliver was not convinced by my explanation of why the main parties are pro EU and asked me why Cameron is so, too. Well, I simply do not know. He has not told me.

I thought basset was a bit grumpy. He forgets that I stood down from the Cabinet and refused invitations to go back. And to suggest that I have more influence over voters than David Cameron is a bit unrealistic. If it were true, then perhaps Camp Cameron would ask themselves why.

The views exhibited are in fact varied, despite the political bias one might assume of a blogger who as a rule tends to delete or ignore posts that are not in line with his own views. Steven Duncombe’s fears in 1997 that the World Wide Web would simply facilitate a myriad of ‘virtual ghettos’ or echo chambers* have often been realised many times, yet Tebbit’s blog has become an unlikely alternative – there may be no agreement, but nor is disagreement dismissed out of hand or shouted down. Tebbit allows commenters to disagree with him, and simply disagrees in turn.

How best to contextualise this? Conservative media figures, primarily in the United States, have always demonstrated a strong rapport with their audiences, as demonstrated by the success of right-wing ‘shock jocks’ such as Rush Limbaugh and latterly Glen Beck. Yet this does not take into account, for example, the considerable differences that exist between American and British schools of conservatism.

Equally, it does not acknowledge that right wing broadcast media is precisely that: a powerful figure speaks to a mute but appreciative audience – and it is this authoritativeness as opposed to Tebbit’s openness with his audience that defines this sub-genre. Of course, many ‘shock jocks’ reply to e-mails and letters on their shows, but again this is more akin to the traditional ‘postbag’ section in both print and broadcast media, whereas – as said – Tebbit is much more willing to interact with his readers, without prompting. It is obvious from the tone and the ease that he undertakes this that it is through choice. The writer has become the listener.

It is what Nicholas Carr refers to as ‘Conservative Innovation’, wherein the innovative is combined with the old and established in order to create something genuinely new and promising. Carr did of course refer to this in the context of industrial production, but given its technological nature, it can also be applied to Tebbit’s blog. He combines the conservative with the electronic, the journalistic with the informal, and in doing so, creates a new kind of conversation between him and his audience.

* Stephen Duncombe, Notes From Underground ‘Zines And The Politics Of Alternative Culture (New York: Verso, 1997), p.72

Sunlight Labs has been digitizing a variety of federal disclosure data and making that available online via application programming interfaces [APIs]. Current projects include a widget that pop-ups a hyperlinked profile of a member of Congress when someone mouses over his or her name on your webpage and a Google Map mash-up pinpointing the geographic location of almost all earmarks from last year’s Labor, Health and Human Services appropriations bill.

But it was the Labs’ newest project that Allison demonstrated in an early-morning break-out session at the conference. “Influence Explorer,” still under development and not yet released to the public, will allow readers “one-click disclosure” of a lawmaker’s earmarks, contributions, expenses and trips.

All the data that Influence Explorer will access is available now to the public, through a variety of services, including many of those listed on the foundation’s Insanely Useful Web Sites page. But tracking a lawmaker’s disclosures through multiple sites and databases can consume hours. What Sunlight Labs wants to do, Allison said, is to consolidate search requests and return multiple results from a single click.

“Why should you have to go to 15 different places to see what your congressperson is doing,” Allison asked.

Allison demonstrated how Influence Explorer’s “data chewer” could help a reporter use a press release to get useful background about a Congressional earmark, for example.

[A lesson in Government 101, for those not familiar with the term: An "earmark" is money that Congress assigns to a specific projects, outside the executive branch departments' normal allocation procedures. It's how members of Congress funnel money to their districts. Here is the Office of Management and Budget's definition.]

Allison pasted a snippet of text from a press release about a Congressional appropriation for a new project. Influence Explorer used text analysis of the snippet to find common phrases and names with other releases and entries in its associated databases. It then returned a wealth of context for a journalist reporting the story.

Other earmarks from the same representative. Top contributors to the representative. Campaign contributions from employees of the company receiving the earmark. Expenses filed. Trips taken.

All the juicy details that helped take a ho-hum story about a grant and turn it into a far more interesting tale about a firm that suddenly started giving thousands of dollars to a member of Congress, then received millions on federal funding soon after.

Allison said that the core technology behind Influence Explorer is not new, and that corporate lawyers have been using “data chewers” like this to perform textual analysis to cross-reference documents for some time. Putting this technology in journalists’, and the public’s, hands would help level the field, Allison said.

The downside? It ain’t ready yet. Allison wouldn’t give an ETA for the project’s public release. Still, the foundation does have many other tools available. Allison invited conference attendees to work with the Sunlight Foundation to find access to data and data analysis tools that could help improve and inform their coverage of Washington politics. Allison and others at the foundation can be contacted through the foundation’s website, at http://www.sunlightlabs.org/contact/contact.php.

For notes from other sessions at NewsTools 2008, please visit the NewsTools website.

Non-profit news startups are similarly testing the waters, but without all that ink, paper and, er, personnel to worry about. The model evolves with each new project, but the formula for success looks to be a healthy balance of guerilla and traditional; loose and tight. Launched in January, D.C.-based The Washington Independent is the new kid on the block.

With a collective editorial resume that lists The New Republic, Talking Points Memo and Financial Times, The Independent reigns in the ground-up-meets-top-down model that Marc Cooper talked to us about a few months ago with HuffPo’s Off The Bus project.

A Center for Independent Media site, its siblings include non-profit news staples The Iowa Independent, The Minnesota Monitor and The Colorado Confidential. And what The Washington Independent lacks in alliteration it makes up for with a hearty balance of investigative features, well-researched commentary and bloggy news analysis. It’s a versatile news trough for those who take their in-depth clean coal reports with a side of quick-hit caucus commentary.

We swapped emails with Washington Independent Editor Allison Silver to learn more about the new endeavor and its meaning for non-profit journalism.

–

OJR: So, you just launched a few weeks ago. How is traffic looking so far? Where are the readers coming from and how are you getting your name out there?

Allison Silver: I am delighted to have this opportunity to talk with you about my brand-new site, The Washington Independent. And it is brand new. We had a semi-hard launch on Jan. 28, and we are still in Beta as we work out some of the kinks. For less than two weeks, I think we are doing quite well. We are currently listed on both The Huffington Post and Talking Points Memo. Josh Marshall had a nice post about us on TPM, and now MetaFilter has posted an item about us. We are planning some other things as we go about raising our profile, and the quality of our content should also draw some attention.

OJR: Can you talk a bit about your relationship with the Center for Independent Media?

AS: The Center for Independent is our umbrella organization, our parent. David Bennahum, our president and CEO, had four state sites up and running—in Colorado, Minnesota, Michigan and Iowa. He hired Jefferson Morley from The Washington Post, as the center’s editorial director and they decided to launch a Washington site, covering national issues. Jeff contacted me, since he felt this was something I would be interested in. He was right.

OJR: If I get one thing from your mission statement, it’s “in-depth, accurate and, most importantly, fast.” What sort of staff does it take to pull that off, and to what extent do you accept freelance submissions?

AS: We have an extremely nimble and saavy young staff, including Spencer Ackerman, covering national security (who was at The New Republic and TPM), Holly Yeager, covering the presidential campaign (who was at Financial Times) and Mike Lillis, covering Congress (who was at Inside Washington).

I am also featuring a robust commentary element. The pieces are written by well-known scholars and experts. For example, we had Robert Dallek, the historian who has examined the lives of Johnson and Kennedy and FDR, write about the role of a former president, pegged to Bill Clinton’s travels on the campaign trail for his wife.

We would be interested in seeing freelance submissions. We are looking for smart reported pieces or strong commentary.

OJR: Your sister sites feel a little more bloggy than yours. How did the professional/citizen journalism balance you hope to achieve factor into your page design?

AS: We are still in the process of working out our page design. But one way of looking at your question is that the Net is about democracy and we want our users to be fully engaged in the writing we post. Already, one informed reader contacted Spencer after his waterboarding piece was posted, and now Spencer is working on a piece involving that comment.

OJR: We talked to The Huffington Post about an election spinoff project that strives for the same balance; ground-up content steeped in the values of traditional journalism. What other similar sites have you seen, and how do you think yours is different?

AS: There are many other strong sites out there like The Huffington Post—including TPM and Slate and Salon. But I think the Net is not about competition, or limitations. It’s indeed like democracy—because it’s about making the pie bigger.

I think our mix of reported longer pieces and reported blog, to tell a longer narrative, and our extremely informed commentary is the next step for the Net. Well, we should say, one next step. The Net is many, many things.

OJR: Can you talk a bit about working for a non-profit versus an advertising-based news publication? How do you compare and contrast the two from an editorial standpoint?

AS: As for working on a non-profit, I am sure you know that part of all informed discussion about the future of journalism involves the non-profit model. This is one reason why so many people are interested in what happens with Poynter and the St. Petersberg paper.

OJR: It must be tough to veer from politics these days, but what other types of reports can we expect to see at the Independent in the near future?

AS: Politics is so exciting right now. This campaign is all those hyphenated words—jaw-dropping, breath-taking.

But there is so much else going on. As I said earlier, Spencer Ackerman is reporting on national security issues, and we have already had commentary on this subject from James Bamford, who wrote two important books on the NSA, and Milt Bearden, the former director of clandestine services at the CIA. We have strong economic and financial coverage. Mary Kane, who was formerly with Newhouse papers, is doing great work about the brick-and-mortar reality of the subprime crisis.

And we have solid environmental coverage—look at our current piece that examines just how green an airline could be—and science reporting.

The Huffington Post has spawned just that with a new election-season special, Off The Bus, a mash-up digest of feature articles, opinion pieces, polls and videos solicited from a gamut of trad-pub newsies, grassroots bloggers and distributive data journalists. Since its September launch, Off The Bus has been among the most comprehensive pools of election fodder available on the Web, sifting hundreds of daily submissions for insightful “ground-level coverage,” as they describe it, of the 2008 campaign season.

It’s much more than an aggregator, and this side project has a few notable spin-offs of its own. The Polling Project digs behind the numbers blindly guiding our spoon-fed MSM election coverage, encouraging pollees to spill the beans on that dinnertime courtesy call. Also on deck: an interactive map plotting campaign contributions by race and zip code, and an insider exit-poll forum hoping to woo staffers of losing campaigns.

We sat down with Off The Bus editorial coordinator and USC Annenberg professor Marc Cooper to learn more about those projects, and how the offshoot has panned out since its launch.

OJR: How did you envision Off The Bus and these side projects working when they started out a few months ago?

Marc Cooper: Well, it was originally envisioned by Jay Rosen at New York University. He formed a partnership with Ariana Huffington to create Off The Bus. So Off The Bus is hosted at Huffington Post, and it’s called HuffPost’s Off The Bus, but it’s actually a non-profit organization, newassignment.net, that’s legally based at NYU. It started in September, and I think the idea of it was to see what kind of ideas you could have. That is, it didn’t have a rigid and dogmatic formula. The idea was, how could you use the net and what’s been learned so far about online journalism to further the notion of citizen journalism as applied to campaign ’08.

And that meant a couple things: We knew that we wanted to create a publishing platform that would be, in a sense, an online journal of reporting about the campaign, in which there would be space for individual voices to emerge; reporting done by people who weren’t on the campaign bus. Which is a very broad category, because only a few people are on the bus. So it’s almost everybody else available. And that also meant to explore to what degree we could utilize these emerging methods of distributive reporting, or as some people like to call it, posse journalism. And those of us who are on staff really went into this with an open mind to see what that meant. We still don’t know. We’re still experimenting every day. And we’re learning a lot.

OJR: What have you learned so far?

MC: What we’ve learned is that in order to create this new type of citizen journalism, to make it work, you really have to combine the best of the old and new media. They overlap. At Off The Bus, unlike certain blogs, we believe in the traditional standards of journalism that are taught, for example, at Annenberg. But we also believe in the empowerment of individuals and select groups that the Net provides. So I think, modestly, we’ve been fairly successful in our first couple months in achieving some of that balance.

OJR: But it’s not an open forum.

MC: No, it is absolutely not an open forum.

OJR: How do you get the word out there about Off The Bus and encourage people to submit?

MC: Well that’s easy, because we’re connected to the Huffington Post. So whenever we want, Arianna can put a call out on the front page of the Huffington Post and hundreds of thousands of people will read it. So when the first call was put out, we got something like 1500 people who said “I want to do something.”

Now, what happens is implicit in your question. A lot of people assume, “well, you can just blog.” Well, you can go to Blogger.com if you just want to start a blog. Starting a blog is something you can do in 10 minutes. So we’re not an open forum. We are a hybrid of the the traditional editorial hierarchies with the bottom-up element of the new media.

OJR: So how do you screen the submissions?

MC: There’s really a few categories of people. There’s individuals who emerge from that initial stew of 15 hundred people who are either undiscovered; they’re just people who do not make their living from writing but who have always kind of wanted to be journalists, and are out doing journalism, simply put. Not many. Because journalism is a lot harder than it looks. So a lot of people would like to do it, but they don’t know how. And they can’t learn.

The most common submission we get are kind of bloggy opinion pieces. There’s nothing wrong with that, it’s just not what we do. I mean, we do run pieces that are opinionated, and we do run some pieces that are really kind of opinion pieces, but high quality. But the most common reflex among most people is, “oh yeah, I know how to do this. I’ll just sit down and write a long screed about why I love this candidate or hate another.”

OJR: And those, by and large, are from the people who have no professional journalistic affiliations?

MC: No, they’re not professional writers. Those are not of great interest to us. But there’s a handful of individuals who have emerged out of nowhere who have turned out to be great citizen reporters. I’ll refer you to one you can look up: Mayhill Fowler. I don’t know Mayhill personally. I believe she has aspirations of being a fiction writer, but she’s not a journalist. But she’s a good citizen journalist. Her individual reporting has been great.

Then there’s a sub-category of folks who know how to write, but they’re not journalists. They may be professors or lawyers, and they’re kind of experts in their fields and have been able to apply their expertise as kind of analysts of what’s happening politically, with some reporting.

The next category of people that we’ve recruited as individuals comes from the realization that while we’re a project of citizen journalism, we didn’t invent that. Citizen journalism in some form has been around for about 10 years now, along with the Internet. So we learned early on that it would be good to recruit people who were already doing this, but weren’t getting much notice. So we’ve had some success in that realm. Very specific cases out of Iowa and New Hampshire; people who already have their own websites.

They come from diverse backgrounds. One of them is actually a former journalist. Some of them I have no idea what they do, but they do these political blogs, and we’ve kind of adopted them. And we’re either cross-posting with them or they’re writing for us. That’s the second category, and that’s been very interesting.

The third category is real, live distributive journalism, where we have found that while a lot of people can’t really be reporters — they don’t have the time or the skill — distributive research does work. So for the last two months, we’ve done maybe six or eight pieces that were very complicated to do in which 30 or 40 people participated. A couple of those pieces we did in collaboration with WNYC in New York, who helped us put out the call and recruit people out of their audience. We did a story that was kind of a snapshot of the Obama campaign from across the country on one weekend. Twenty-four people participated in it. We did another one that was an analysis of the ground organizing capacity of the Edwards campaign. We did another piece last week that tried to answer whether the fatigue of George Bush would lead to a big wave of voter turnout of Democrats in the caucuses in Iowa. So sometimes we have these teams of people who are analyzing data, and sometimes they’re actually being reporters. They make phone calls and compile their 50 interviews.

Then our process is that the grassroots people, if you will, do the initial work, then it goes to a second level; to people on our staff or contracted individuals who have some higher level of expertise. The kind of collate and edit the material. And then that’s handed off to a writer who has more experience. And those writers are still kind of citizen journalists. In one case, we had a piece written by a young guy who runs a website called the Iowa Independent who’s on some sort of stipend from a foundation to learn this stuff. So he’s doing this kind of daily journalism, even though it’s at a citizen level. We had another piece that was written by a grad journalism student at Yale who is the editor of some publication there.

OJR: And do you recruit those people as well, or do they kind of come forward on their own?

MC: It comes both ways. We’ve had both.

And then for the Polling Project, there’s about a dozen major co-sponsors who are cross-ideological. Some are conservatives, some are liberals. We have the Concord Monitor, we have InstaPundit, which is on the right, Talking Points Memo, which is on the liberal side, et cetera. With their help we put out a coordinated call out into the ether, asking as many people as possible to click on the common form.

OJR: Is that the form that’s on the site now?

MC: Yep. And ask them a half-dozen questions about polling. And I think we had 300,000 hits on the page. We didn’t have 300,000 responses, but I think we got a couple hundred responses. And we’re in the middle of that. We’re going to put out another call in the next week, and then see how much data comes back. On this second call, I think we’re going to look for people who have had specific contact with push polling. We’ve gotten some responses from people who have been push-polled. Now we’re going to try to take it to another level and see if we get more on push polling. And as part of our partnerships with these co-sponsors, we’ve agreed to share the data with them.

OJR: And what do you do with that data once it’s compiled?

MC: To be perfectly frank with you, we haven’t even crossed the bridge yet of what we’re gonna do with the data. I don’t know that Off The Bus will do anything with the data. We may share it with other folks and let them use it the way they want. Or we may turn some stories out of it. We’ll have to see what’s there first. We don’t know what kind of end product we’re gonna end up with; that’s what makes this fun.

OJR: What have you learned so far?

MC: What we’ve learned is that both sides of the debate over old and new media have been right, and you have to find the right hybrid. Anybody who believe that this is just a platform that can be used like any other platform is wrong, because it has its own characteristics. And the distributive aspect works. We’ve seen it. So we know that you can multiply, or amplify, your resources and amplify your power of reporting and researching through the use of the internet in a way that was not possible before it was invented. On the other hand, it is true that you cannot produce good journalism without people who understand reporting and writing and news judgment and editing and all that kid of stuff. So it’s a very interesting

OJR: For the Polling Project, are you going in with some sort of hypothesis?

MC: No. I will tell you straight-up that we have no hypothesis, and we’ve had no preconceptions. We just know that people are being polled, and we assume there are some stories there. We don’t know. We don’t have an agenda.

OJR: So the outcome will determine what you do with the data.

MC: Absolutely. Like when the Federal Contribution Reports came out, we didn’t know what we were gonna find. We put these data teams on it and we found all kinds of things.

OJR: You mentioned that some other Off The Bus projects are in the works?

MC: Yeah, right now we’re working on a story that we’ll call The Color Of Money, which is going to be an ongoing project. We haven’t even built the page for it yet, but we want to do an interactive map that will break down fundraising or contributions by zip code and by race. So you can see really kind of the racial breakdown; from where money is raised and from what zip codes. And that will be an Off The Bus project.

So we have the Polling Project, we have that one, and then there’s actually three stories that are being worked on by distributive teams right now about Iowa. We don’t want to say what they are, but we’re working on them. But at any one moment we have a core group of 25 or 30 people who are always ready. People like it, because it only requires an hour to an hour and a half of their time during the week, and they feel like they’re really contributing something. And they are. Everybody’s putting together a little piece of the puzzle, and it’s kind of fun to see the picture come together.

OJR: When you put the calls out for the Polling Project, are you noticing significant traffic spikes right away?

MC: Yeah, the traffic spiked pretty quickly. Let’s see, it’s been 21 days since we launched it. We got about 100,000 hits in the first week, I think. And it’s still running at about 5 to 8,000 a day.

OJR: Any idea where those hits are coming from?

MC: No, it’s pretty viral. It’s on several sites, so I can’t tell you the number of referrals from each site. But it’s coming from everywhere.

OJR: So you said this next phase of the Polling Project will focus on push polling. Will you alter the survey that’s currently up?

MC: We might. We’re going to figure that out in the next couple days. We might alter the survey a little bit, and the call will also ask for that. We’ll probably have Arianna do the call. She has a big audience. We’re going to do the Polling Project for another week or two. We intended it to run about a month, so it will run until about the middle of January, and then we’ll see where we’re at. But we don’t know, you know? One thing leads to another.

For future projects, we’re also thinking about an “exit page” for next year. Not too long from now—probably about February—we’ll know who the two candidates are. So all the other campaigns will have shut down. So there’s gonna be a lot of laid-off campaign workers. We want to start collecting those stories. We want to give them a place to give the pillow-talk, inside stories.

And we’re also thinking of doing a big national project—like the Polling Project, one with lots of partners—on, whoever the candidates turn out to be, kind of a “did-you-go-to-school-with?” And it will be a little harder to do that, of course. But did you go to school with Hillary Clinton, or whoever the candidate is? You know, “do you know this person, and what can you tell us?” So we’re thinking of doing that, as well.

Not that many years ago, we in journalism schools taught students to be generalists in what they cover, and specialists in how they cover it. We trained reporters to cover multiple beats for a single medium, usually newspapers or TV.

Today, the highly competitive publishing market on the Internet demands that we flip our approach. We need journalists who have devoted the time to develop a specialist’s knowledge on their beat, while covering that beat using multiple media.

* * *

In my commentary on the closure of Steve Outing’s grassroots media company, the Enthusiast Group, I cited two examples of individual journalists’ online start-ups that worked commercially: Talking Points Memo and DailyKos. The fact that both these sites cover U.S. government and politics is not spurious. Glenn Greenwald this week published a damning report that illustrates why so many readers are looking for an alternative to the political coverage they find in mainstream news publications.

And it’s not a desire for partisanship. It’s a desire to see someone, anyone, call B.S. on people who are demonstrably full of it. That same desire’s fueling the success of The Daily Show and the Colbert Report, too (IMHO, of course).

Makes me wonder if some newspaper publishers won’t decide to release the hounds, rather than continue to sit idly while their market share crumbles. If your reporting points you to take someone or something down… do it. And without diluting the piece with out-of-proportion qualifiers like the New York Times did with its attempted dress-down of the Rudy Giuliani campaign this morning.

Fairness and balance are appropriate goals for journalists. But being fair to sources and providing balance among them should not outweigh the need to be fair to the readers, and to the facts. And balance should not be reduced to giving various points of view equal time or space in a story. It ought to mean that truth gets treated like truth and lies get treated like lies.

If you’re going to lose audience anyway, why not take a stand for something on the way down? Maybe that’ll inspire some more readers to stick around, too. Or even to take a fresh look at their local paper again.

* * *

History provides the context for our reporting. I just finished Edward J. Larson’s insightful history of the 1800 U.S. Presidential campaign, “A Magnificent Catastrophe.” I think that other reporters, and journalism students, would find Larson’s work valuable as they try to make sense of this year’s campaign.

One more thought, inspired by Larson: Many folks in our industry like to think that the Founding Fathers wanted to protect objective news reporting with the First Amendment. But Larson’s history illustrates the partisan newspapers of Jefferson’s time looked a lot more like today’s DailyKos than today’s Washington Post. So maybe a more aggressive, even partisan, press isn’t such a radical idea, after all.

(And before anyone accuses me of longing for more organizations like Fox News, let me be clear that I think people ought to let their discovery of the truth drive their partisanship — and not, as Fox News does, let their partisanship drive their discovery for the truth.)

* * *

Last year, I asked Anthony Moor, then of the Orlando Sentinel and now with the Dallas Morning News, to write a piece for us urging j-students to take classes and get experience in online journalism. Yet every year, I get more calls and e-mails from hiring editors in dot-coms seeking online journalism students than we have students to refer them. Why is it that students will devote so many of their free hours to Facebook, MMORPGs, blogs, iTunes and YouTube, but cleave to “old media” print and broadcast production classes when it’s time to declare a specialty? How many more high-paying, big-city jobs do we have to offer to get more students to switch to our side? Are other online journalism educators seeing the same thing at their schools?

* * *

I just bought my kids a laptop from One Laptop per Child (OLPC) for a Christmas present. These are the “$100 laptops” (actually $199) for Third World students about which you might have read. Through Dec. 31, OLPC is selling the laptops to people at U.S. and Canadian addresses under the following deal: You pay $399 for two laptops — one goes to you, and the other goes to OLPC for distribution in the Third World.

I’ve been looking for a good, inexpensive, reliable laptop for my kids to do homework and play with, and folks whose tech expertise I respect greatly have recommended the OLPC’s XO laptop. It’s based on the Linux OS and includes a Web browser, text, music, photo and video composition and editing applications — even an introduction to Python coding. The only problem I foresee with the machine is that my kids might not be able to pry it away from me.

Take a look. If you don’t know kid who could use one, I’ll bet you a local public school would.

* * *

So… what’s on your mind this Friday?

Pakistan President Pervez Musharraf has implemented some censorship to complement his state-of-emergency declaration. With the lines cut on several of Pakistan’s independent news outlets, many citizens have only the state-controlled media to keep them current on the increasingly tenuous resistance unfolding on their streets. And outside Pakistan’s borders, the communication pipelines feeding Western audiences are often muddled by the U.S.’s ambiguous allegiance to Musharraf.

As it did in Myanmar, Web journalism here fills an important void. Bloggers’ as-of-yet unregulated capacity to disseminate alternate perspectives and additional reporting offers hope for greater comprehension of the situation on the ground in Pakistan.

Sure, The Los Angeles Times had the story on Musharraf/Bhutto rival Nawaz Sharif’s return to Pakistan yesterday. But no mention of the neo-Taliban suicide bombs that took 30 lives in Rawalpindi, the third such attack in as many months. And good luck grasping the ever-tangling nuances of Pakistan’s election landscape from quick reports on cable news channels.

For those angles, Pakistani citizens, international journalists and foreign politicians alike have bookmarked sites such as The Pakistan Policy Blog for reliable, all-things-Pakistan dispatches. OJR caught up with PPB editor Arif Rafiq for his take on covering Pakistan and the role of non-MSM outlets in the fray.

Online Journalism Review: Can you start by telling me a little about your site, The Pakistan Policy Blog? How long have you been live, and what was your founding vision for the site?

Arif Rafiq: The Pakistan Policy Blog went live in August 2007. The site serves as a dedicated source of analysis and commentary on Pakistan’s politics and in doing so, it fills a major void.

I came to the understanding in August that Pakistan would be going through a critical period of change into at least January 2008. These changes would not only shape Pakistan’s future immensely, but they would also be of great interest to Western—particularly American—observers. It would serve the interests of publics and policy communities in the U.S. and Pakistan to have a more informed and engaged discourse. And that’s what I seek to do with the site.

OJR: Who are your readers, and how has site traffic behaved since Musharraf’s “state-of-emergency” declaration?

AR: Our readers seem to come from four major segments: 1) Educated and concerned Pakistani expatriates living in the the West or Gulf; 2) Government officials in Pakistan, the United States and other Western countries, and India; 3) Western journalists covering Pakistan or U.S. foreign policy; 4) Foreign policy bloggers.

Site traffic has increased considerably since Musharraf’s declaration of a state of emergency and has remained relatively high.

OJR: What cultural and political background is missing from the coverage the Western audience gets from the U.S. mainstream media? Where can they find it? Who is covering it well?

AR: Most U.S. MSM journalists covering Pakistan don’t have the requisite language skills, i.e. they can’t speak and understand Urdu, and they also haven’t covered Pakistan for long. That puts a greater burden on their local stringers and sources. Coverage of Pakistan has been traditionally weak, but due to the sustained focus on the country in recent weeks, that weakness has declined considerably. The requisite skepticism and knowledge of Pakistan’s cyclical political history seems to have been achieved by many of them.

Fortunately, Pakistan is not like Iraq and so you don’t the equivalent of American journalists writing from the Green Zone or embedded with coalition forces. They are largely free to move and benefit from the sizable English-speaking population there (as stringers, sources, etc.

Television coverage in the U.S. has been weak. That’s probably due to the nature of the medium. American television is one of the last places, I believe, where one should look for an accurate and informative outlook on the world.

OJR: To what extent are you in touch with the Pakistani media outlets? Bloggers and citizen journalists? Any prominent bloggers doing a particularly good job of disseminating information outside Pakistan’s borders?

AR: I haven’t had considerable interaction with Pakistani media outlets, bloggers or citizen journalists. Many sites have come out as a result of the emergency rule, but I would say the better ones (such as All Things Pakistan) have been around before that. There are many blogs made by young Pakistanis, such as The Emergency Times, that provide an important on-the-ground perspective. Their emergence reflects the sort of spontaneous rising of Pakistani civil society immediately after the imposition of emergency rule; but I would say Pakistanis would also be served well by more standardized or ‘professional’ blogs.

Another site, Pkpolitics.com, is particularly notable as it has been providing video of Pakistani public affairs TV programs. Its utility has declined however since Musharraf pulled the plug on the two leading private news channels.

OJR: Any sense of how they’re dealing with Musharraf’s independent-media crackdown on the ground there?

AR: Bloggers haven’t been targeted by the media crackdown, but it is conceivable that the government could begin banning certain websites. At this point, the government’s major focus as been the private print and television media. A major target has been the Jang Group, which operates two leading newspapers (The News in English and Jang in Urdu) and a television network, including GEO.

OJR: You link to live Pakistani TV from stations Aaj TV, TV One and Hum TV. Why those particular stations? How have the media restrictions in Pakistan affected traffic to that section? Any particular reason you went with JumpTV for that feature?

AR: I link to those stations because, at the time, they were among the few channels that were provided for free over the Internet legally. JumpTV was their chosen provider. One of the channels, AAJ, isn’t available via cable or satellite in North America. And I found its public affairs programming more appealing than some of the other Pakistani channels. Unfortunately, after governmental pressure, AAJ has suspended those programs (Live with Talat and Bolta Pakistan).

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.

This week, CQ launched CQPolitics.com, a free website aimed at broadening CQ’s reach beyond the Capitol Hill community that has sustained the subscription-only CQ.com. The new site offers a mix of blogs, columns and strategic analysis, along with selected stories from CQ and the Associated Press’ Washington wire.

OJR swapped e-mails with Sands to find out more about the new site.

OJR: What are the editorial, readership and business model differences between CQPolitics and the established CQ.com?

Sands: I’m still new here, so I’m learning a lot about existing CQ practices. But I see three fundamental differences:

First, the existing CQ audience primarily consists of inside-the-Beltway professionals and CQPolitics is reaching out beyond that to public and policy professional outside the Beltway and political enthusiasts.

Second, the business model has been to charge premium rates for high-end, proprietary information that professionals use to do their jobs. The CQPolitics site is a free site supported solely by advertising. This is a key difference. Unlike virtually any other mainstream media company, CQ has made a majority of its revenue from subscriptions to its online products. We’re excited about adding a consumer-oriented product supported by advertising.

Third, since its founding in 1945 by Nelson Poynter, CQ has been profoundly non-partisan. The print daily and the magazine don’t have opinion pages. It’s stunning to me that something like 85 percent of the members of Congress can agree on anything. But they do seem to agree that CQ is worth the subscription price. We don’t expect that to change. What is changing, however, is the addition of opinion bloggers to CQPolitics. Well-known left-of-center blogger David Corn has joined the CQ family as an independent blogger, as has self-described “conservative maverick” Richard Whalen. It will be interesting to see how the CQPolitics blog network grows, and how the CQ newsroom will react to the cultural change.

OJR: Why a new website? Why not build CQPolitics’s features and functionality into the existing CQ.com?

Sands: The existing CQ.com site primarily is a paid-content site. CQPolitics is free. I wasn’t here for the initial planning for the site, but believe they wanted to keep a clear separation.

So an entirely new department was created. Consumer Publishing General Manager Bruce Drake reports directly to CQ President & Editor-in-Chief Bob Merry. Bruce, along with Executive Editor Peggy Girshman are in charge of the new site.

Since I came in August, however, it became clear that significant resources from the editorial department were needed to build the site and to operate the site post-launch. So half a dozen people from the CQ Innovation department and several people from the IT department have been working nearly full-time to get the site going. It’s an exciting time at CQ and everyone’s glad to pitch in.

OJR: What what into building and launching the new site?

Sands: It’s quite complicated. I think Bruce Drake has the hardest job at CQ right now. The site launched on his six-month anniversary at CQ. An amazing amount of work took place in that six months, from hiring staff, to negotiating a contract with a vendor to help build the site, to building and executing a content plan.

What you see today at CQPolitics.com is just the beginning. Perhaps as soon as next week we’ll have an interactive electoral map, highlighting every Congressional district in the United States.

We have a staff of three designer/developers working full-time to brainstorm and implement cool new features to add the site in the coming months.

OJR: What are your goals with the new site, both editorial and business?

Sands: The company’s goals are pretty clear: to become one of the most-influential political sites on the web and to generate significant advertising revenue from the traffic that comes to the site. That’s very ambitious. The New York Times, the Washington Post, USA Today, MSNBC, CNN, realclearpolitics.com, politico.com, wonkette.com and the Huffington Post are some of the traditional and non-traditional sites that already are well-established.

We have to figure out a way to differentiate our site from every other site. The media landscape is pretty full right now. The last thing anyone needs is just one more site to watch. But I’m excited about the possibility of helping to build something that will stand out. Bruce and Peggy and I already have been brainstorming with the development team about some pretty cool stuff. We’re not ready to talk about anything yet, because it’s too early in the development process and we don’t want to tip off the competitors.

Back in the mid-1850s, the English philosopher John Stuart Mill argued that a citizenry could not, would not, flourish unless it was nourished by the full spectrum of voices that exist among the people:

It is, however, obvious that law and authority have no business with restraining either [side or sides of the debate], while opinion ought, in every instance, to determine its verdict by the circumstances of the individual case, condemning every one, on whichever side of the argument he places himself, in whose mode of advocacy either want of candour, or malignity, bigotry, or intolerance of feeling manifest themselves; but not inferring these vices from the side which a person takes, though it be the contrary side of the question to our own; and giving merited honour to every one, whatever opinion he may hold, who has calmness to see and honesty to state what his opponents and their opinions really are, exaggerating nothing to their discredit, keeping nothing back which tells, or can be supposed to tell in their favour. This is the real morality of public discussion.

Well over one hundred years later, the blogosphere came into our lives, allowing us, in the words of Jerome Armstrong and Markos Moulitsas Zúniga, to “hear voices that had been shut out of the corporate media outlets.”

These old “corporate media outlets,” refusing to fade away, have held their ground. According to William Dietrich, a writer with the Seattle Times Sunday magazine, the sacred purpose of the newspaper reporter “is to fulfill an essential function of our democracy not just by disseminating information but also by analyzing it, detecting patterns, spotting trends, and increasing societal understanding.” Indeed, bloggers may generate a more democratic Public Square, but can they facilitate a more comprehensive understanding of how political events are most likely to evolve, the Old Guard worries and wonders. In other words, Mill might not be enough.

To contribute to this Great Debate, I decided to conduct a content analysis of how blogs and newspapers covered the Iraq War during one week in late March 2007. By looking at how the two media have sourced their news stories, I hoped to offer insights into what exactly the American public “hears” from newspapers and blogs.

More specifically, my research, by examining five major newspapers and six popular political blogs, sought to answer three questions:

• Which media platform uses more sources?
• Which offers a more diverse range of sources?
• And which types of sources are more prevalent in each platform?

Findings

Overall, the data showed that blogs included a higher number of total sources and a slightly wider range of sources.

Blogs included an average number of nine sources per blog posting, compared to an average of just six for newspapers stories.

The gap between newspapers and blogs was considerably narrower when evaluating the types of sourcing. Still, blogs were slightly more diverse in their sourcing, with four sources per posting compared to an average of three in newspaper stories.

Digging deeper, which types of sources were the two media most likely to use?

Both blogs and newspapers were likely to include traditional Washington sources, both political and intellectual.

But blogs and newspapers did diverge in several key ways. Compared to newspapers, blogs were considerably less likely than newspapers to include official Iraqi sources.

And perhaps as a tell-tale sign of what the mainstream press really thinks of the blogosphere, just two percent of newspaper stories used a blog as a source. Not surprisingly, bloggers used other bloggers as sources at almost the same frequency as they used the mainstream press.

Sourcing in Blogs

Seven in ten (69%) blog postings included a mainstream media outlet (e.g. Washington Post, AP, The New York Times) as a source and 64% used other bloggers as sources.

Political Washington was well represented. Thirty percent of all stories had a source from a Democratic politician or party strategist, 28% included one from a Republican or GOP operative, and 23% included a source from the White House.

Meanwhile, a quarter (25%) included sources from the Pentagon, a soldier fighting in Iraq, or an immediate member of a soldier’s family. Ten percent of all blog postings had a source from other government officials, such as analysts from the State Department or the American embassy in Iraq. Furthermore, 16% of all postings included a government document as a source, such as a hyperlink to a PDF of a legislative bill or the complete voting results for a particular bill from the Office of the Clerk at the U.S. House of Representatives.

Considerably fewer blog postings, however, included sources from Iraqi government officials (11%), such as local police and security forces and hospital administrators, and an even smaller number offered sources from Sunni or Shiite politicians (five percent). And only two percent of all postings included a source from the Iraqi insurgency.

Five percent of posts included sources from Iraqi civilians, and eight percent had sources from U.S. civilians.

Finally, a quarter (25%) offered a source from a non-partisan, non-governmental entity, such as a think tank, polling organization, or university.

Sourcing in Newspapers

Turning to newspapers, the most frequent source was a U.S. military official or family member. Over half (53%) of all newspaper stories included a source from this cohort—more than double the percentage in blogs.

The second most common source was a Democratic one; more than three in ten stories (32%) offered a Democratic source.

A quarter (24%) included a source from the Bush Administration, and another 16% had a source from other Republican politicians or strategists.

Another 22% included a source from other government officials outside the halls of Congress, the White House or the Pentagon.

Newspapers were also likely to offer an Iraqi point of view. Thirty-one percent of all stories included sources from the Iraqi authorities. Two in ten (20%) stories included sources from either Shiite or Sunni politicians. An additional seven percent was from sources coded as insurgents.

At the non-political level, newspapers were more likely to quote an Iraqi civilian, with ten percent of all stories offering this point of view. Half that percentage (five percent) included sources from U.S. civilians who were not family members of an American solider fighting in Iraq.

Twenty-three percent used a poll, statement from a non-partisan think tank, or academic as a source.

Finally, eight percent of stories used a mainstream media outlet as a source, and just two percent included blogs.

Conclusion

Much of the current debate in journalism that centers around how sourcing is used in blogs concerns the issues of verification of information not reported in the mainstream press. But for now, this doesn’t appear to be their raison d’etre. The function of blogs may be an equally important one, however, offering a more nuanced, synthesized perspective not found anywhere else on the Web.

Perhaps what’s most at stake for blogs is to evaluate which voices are being synthesized. According to the data for this study, an admittedly limited one, bloggers may be missing perhaps the most important piece of the political puzzle when we acknowledge the realpolitik of Iraq.

Both the American and Iraqi people are growing increasingly weary of the American military presence in Iraq, according to public opinion polls in both countries. If there is one point Democrats and Republicans can agree on it is that Iraq’s future success rests on the further strengthening of Iraq’s political institutions.

Right now, it may be that the traditional press—represented by newspapers here-has picked up on this better than blogs. The data shows that roughly four times as many stories in newspapers included sources from leading Sunni and Shiite politicians as did blogs. Where blogs excelled, with more bloggers, media sources and original texts as sources, is perhaps more easily to duplicate for newspapers on their websites. What cannot be mimicked so easily is the ability to discern which way the political winds are blowing in Baghdad and Washington.

One might dismiss this conclusion as an elitist, Lippmanian one. Regardless, it begs the question of whether or not the public most benefits from a traditional journalist sensibility that, despite its flaws and declining commitment to foreign affairs, can still be found at the country’s best newspapers. Perhaps all those years of having boots on the ground overseas still colors, positively, newspaper coverage.

However, one should keep in mind that only a third (34%) of all bloggers considers their blog a form of journalism, according to a study from the Pew Internet & American Life Project. So my insights may be a case of trying to fit a round peg into a square hole. Furthermore, until the mainstream press can better understand that media consumption and production are increasingly conversational, collaborative activities—where bloggers and citizens talk to each other—perhaps the best advice I can give is to take the time to read a newspaper and a blog or two.

About the Study

For this study, I counted the number of sources over seven days in late March 2007 (March 23-March 29). Only stories with the war in Iraq as the dominant story (50% or more of the story) were coded. Overall, 172 newspaper stories and blog postings–the units of analysis–were coded.

Sources did not have to be original. For example, a blog that quoted an interview from Senator John McCain that originally appeared in the Washington Post would be counted as a source, even though the actual reporting was not done by the blogger. Original sources, though in small numbers, could be found in blogs, most notably in Greg Sargent’s postings on Talking Points Memo.

First, I looked at five major newspapers: Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, The New York Times, USA Today, and the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. Wire stories that appeared in newspapers were included. A total of 111 newspaper stories were coded.

Second, I conducted an analysis of three major blogs from the left and three from the right. They included: Talking Points Memo, Political Animal (the Washington Monthly blog), Daily Kos, Michelle Malkin, Powerline, and Hugh Hewitt. A total of 61 blog postings were analyzed for the research.

For blogs, a source was defined as those that were available either on the homepage posting or those on secondary pages within one mouse click from the original blog posting. Then, sources within these secondary pages were coded as well (e.g. links to other news sources, bloggers, and government documents). This methodology was employed in order to measure—as much as possible—the total available number of sources that are consumed by the typical blog reader, and not just those that appear in the original blog posting. Sources within tertiary pages (and beyond) were not coded because I felt that only a small number of blog readers would actually read this deep into a blog posting. Nevertheless, these tertiary (and beyond) pages theoretically expand the number of potential sources and should be kept in mind before forming any firm conclusions about the nature of sourcing in blogs.

I fess up — I’d planned a feature on TPM’s pursuit of this story as well. But since CJR, Eric Alterman and the LA Times have beat me to that reporting, I will leave you those links, and proceed with the conclusions I’ve drawn from Marshall’s example.

Other journalists are your allies, not your enemies

Marshall and his staff broke quite a few “scoops” in their months-long investigation into the firings, which was reported on TPM and its sister site TPMMuckraker.com. But they shed much light on the emerging scandal by stitching together reporting from local journalists as well.

TPM Media reporters gathered information by working phones, swapping e-mails and searching documents as well as following reporting from San Diego’s Union-Tribune and North County Times, the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette and McClatchy’s Washington bureau covering the firings of respected local U.S. Attorneys and their replacement with Bush administration loyalists.

Years of publishing as near-monopolies have left U.S. newsrooms isolated, looking within for resources to report stories. Work by others covering the same beat is viewed with suspicion, and rarely credited. Now, the Internet has enabled countless new competitors to move in on those beats. For many journalists, the gut reaction is to retreat farther, to decry “bloggers” and distrust anything they write.

But Marshall and those like him reveal the irony of online news competition. Success lies not in fighting competing voices, but in embracing them. With more voices reporting, journalists now can reveal a more complete and accurate truth for their readers.

Important stories need clear narratives

Bouncing a political story around the “A” section from day to day keeps all but the hardest political junkies from following it. Newspapers do a reasonable job of formatting stories into topical sections and anchoring a few recurring features to the same position in the paper on a regular basis. But ongoing daily stories often bounce from page to page within their section, presented under an ever-changing variety of heads and with few design elements to tie the stories together, helping sustain the narrative from day to day.

Reading Marshall’s TPM reminds me not so much of reading the New York Times, but of listening to a frill-free network newscast. You’ve got your trusted voice (Marshall) leading you through a linear narrative of the day’s most important work from his company’s staff (plus other sources, see point above). With effective use of voice and hyperlinking, Marshall is able to draw new readers into the story, allowing them to catch up, while keeping the narrative moving for long-time followers.

Newspapers do a lousy of job of sustaining narratives. Broadcast’s always whipped print on that front, and now blogs such as TPM can combine the best of both worlds, providing print’s depth with broadcast’s voice and narrative.

Get people talking about your story, to keep it alive

TPM has long linked to other bloggers from its home page. It publishes RSS feeds. Marshall created a companion site, TPM Cafe, to provide a social gathering place for readers to share news and opinion with one another, building reader loyalty to the site. Marshall has worked hard over the years to develop respect, and incoming links, from other popular liberal and center-left bloggers. TPM even has a Facebook group for its fans.

All these actions helped make TPM part of a larger online community, which paid off with links to and discussions of its content, creating the echo chamber that helps sustain TPM’s narratives. Other news organizations can do the same. Link to other writers whom you respect. Converse with them, through your pages. Create online social networking opportunities for your readers, so they’ll stay longer on your site, and spread the word when they click elsewhere. Couple those efforts with the clearer narratives that the blog format enables, and you can keep your reporting in the front of readers’ minds longer, giving it the chance to catch fire.

If you break a scandal, and nobody reads it, is your story really news? The local papers that TPM cited faced that problem. Without an echo chamber to repeat and amplify the story, even the toughest original reporting has a hard time getting widespread public attention. Decades of operating as near monopolies have atrophied many newspapers’ ability to build buzz. Bloggers, with no brand names to rest upon, simply work harder at it.

Forget “balance.” Go find the truth

Don’t insult your readers by balancing factual reporting with “cover your rear” lies. If someone in the government is abusing his power, stand up for the public and call out the offender with your reporting. And don’t let a bunch of smug, insider “know-it-alls” knock you down.

Time magazine’s Washington bureau chief, Jay Carney, mocked TPM’s reporting as a partisan conspiracy theory. The L.A. Times editorial page, which these days reads more and more like a reprint of the right-leaning Reason magazine, also pooh-poohed the emerging scandal, in a Jan. 26 editorial. (To his credit, Carney’s backtracked and recently lauded TPM’s work.)

Marshall’s crew is a throwback to an earlier age, when columnists on the Washington beat worked harder at reporting than at spin. Which makes ironic the main site’s name, “Talking Points Memo” — a D.C. insider term for papers circulated to help officials and lobbyists better spin the news their way. The sister site’s name, TPM Muckraker, better reflects the work Marshall’s team does.

It’s bad in the White House

But that’s the perfect time to go rake some muck. Why should Josh Marshall’s crew be the only ones?