With that said, too few journalists have a solid understanding of guns and gun violence. Here are three major things the media gets wrong.

1. Semi-automatic rifles are not battlefield weapons or machine guns.

Failing to understand the difference between semi-automatic and fully automatic weapons is probably the most common and most amateur mistake journalists have made when reporting on guns.

CNN’s Piers Morgan has been one of the most vocal media personalities advocating for more gun control, and has not let his apparent trouble with grasping this distinction get in the way of his crusade.

The following is from Piers’ July 23, 2012 broadcast (shortly after the Aurora shooting), in which gun rights advocate and author John Lott, Jr. explained what a semi-automatic rifle is:

LOTT: OK. You said a civilian version of the gun. OK. Basically what that means is it’s the same as any other hunting rifle or any other rifle in terms of inside guts. One trigger, one bullet goes out. It’s not the same weapon that militaries would go and use.

MORGAN: How did he fire off so many rounds then?

LOTT: Because he pulled the trigger many times.

The excerpt below is from Piers this month, talking to Fordham University law professor Nicholas Johnson, still confused about the capability of a semi-automatic civilian model AR-15 rifle:

MORGAN: Right. Because AR-15 with 100 bullets in a minute and somebody like the shooter in Aurora, Holmes, used a magazine with 100 bullets and an AR-15, they are effectively machine guns. Are they? I mean —

JOHNSON: No, they are not.

The difference between semi-automatic and fully automatic is one of those things best explained visually, and this video does a great job of it (in under two minutes). I’d recommend it for anyone covering gun policy who is still unclear as to the distinction between the two.

As a semi-automatic rifle such as the civilian AR-15 and its derivatives can only fire one round per trigger pull, Morgan’s “100 bullets in a minute” math doesn’t seem to be physically feasible, even with a rare 100-round drum that would require no pauses to swap magazines. (Magazines holding 30 rounds are the most common among AR-15 owners, although in California capacity is restricted to 10.)

Fully automatic weapons like machine guns, which actually can fire 100 rounds per minute, have been (with extremely rare and complicated exception) illegal for civilians to own since the passage of the National Firearms Act in 1934.

2. Assault weapon bans target guns based on appearance, and not on any higher destructive potential or disproportionate influence on gun violence.

Because, as pointed out above, semi-automatic military-style rifles are functionally the same as semi-automatic hunting-style rifles, assault weapons legislation restricts guns based on their outfits and not on their outputs. To wit, the following language in the California Penal Code was part of its currently active Assault Weapons Control Act of 1989:

(a)Notwithstanding Section 12276, “assault weapon” shall also mean any of the following:

(1)A semiautomatic, centerfire rifle that has the capacity to accept a detachable magazine and any one of the following:

(A)A pistol grip that protrudes conspicuously beneath the action of the weapon.

(B)A thumbhole stock.

(C)A folding or telescoping stock.

(D)A grenade launcher or flare launcher.

(E)A flash suppressor.

(F)A forward pistol grip.

The only one of these features that actually impacts the destructive capability of the weapon is the grenade launcher, but explosive grenades have been banned since the same law restricting machine guns went into effect almost 80 years ago. Everything else is essentially cosmetic.

The expired Federal Assault Weapons Ban, which President Obama would like to see reinstated in an updated form, had largely the same classifications. New York’s recently passed gun bill, which goes the furthest of any state with a seven-round magazine limit, also bans any semi-automatic pistol or rifle with a “military-style feature.” This is all a ban on assault weapons is — a glorified dress code.

Vice President Biden, who is heading the president’s task force on guns, acknowledges most shooting deaths are tied to handguns, but even among spree shooters, assault rifles have hardly been a uniquely dangerous presence. The deadliest school shooting in American history, Virginia Tech, was committed with handguns. The D.C. sniper used a bolt-action hunting rifle.

3. States with higher rates of gun ownership do tend to have higher rates of gun violence, but it’s important not to confuse this correlation with causation.

The Washington Post’s Ezra Klein pointed out the South’s relatively high murder rate in a piece published shortly after Sandy Hook. The South is also the region where gun ownership is most widespread.

Klein cited work from Duke University sociologist Kieran Healy in making that point, and provided a link to more of Healy’s charts, including this one comparing historical rates of assault death across states.

Louisiana, Alabama and Arkansas have high rates of gun ownership and high rates of gun violence. However, drawing a connection between hunters in the Ozarks and gang crime in Little Rock is tenuous at best. Alabama has a lot of guns because it has hunters and a long history of gun culture. This is not necessarily why it has a lot of gun violence.

Richard Florida of The Atlantic dug deep into data two years ago and found a strong correlation between poverty and homicide rate when comparing states. I found the same when comparing countries last year. Florida’s analysis did reveal a somewhat weaker negative correlation between an assault weapons ban and gun crime, but as only four states — all of which skew wealthy — have such bans, only so much should be read into that data point.

Utah and Minnesota have high rates of gun ownership but among the lowest homicide rates in the country. Illinois is 44^th in gun ownership and 10^th in assault deaths, with its main city of Chicago notorious for its high murder rate. In these exceptions to the general trend, poverty and the relative strength of social institutions seem to be more of a predictor of gun violence than gun ownership.

A surface-level understanding of gun culture and data without context do not combine to make a strong argument. Any journalist seeking to properly cover this complicated issue would be wise to follow a version of the Fourth Law of Gun Safety: keep your finger off the trigger until you know what it is you’re targeting.

Equally important, social media and the virtual communities that websites are capable of forming can help to overcome a major barrier to the public’s understanding of risk perception: The tendency of citizens to conform their own beliefs about societal risks from climate change to those that predominate among their peers. This derails rational deliberation, and the herd instinct creates an opening for persuasion — if not deliberate disinformation — by the fossil fuel industry. Online communities can provide a counter-voice to corporations. They are populated by diverse and credible thought leaders who can influence peers to not just accept ideas but to seek out confirming evidence and then take action. Because social networks enable the rapid discovery, highlighting and sharing of information, they can generate instant grassroots activist movements and crowd-sourced demonstrations.

Studies show that a major cause of public skepticism over climate stems from ignorance of the reliability of climate models. Beyond their susceptibility to garbage in, garbage out, algorithms on which models are based have long lacked the transparency needed to promote public trust in computer decisions systems. The complexity and politicization of climate science models have made it difficult for the public and decision makers to put faith in them. But studies also show that the media plays a big role in why the public tends to be skeptical of models. An article in the September issue of Nature Climate Change written by Karen Akerlof et al slammed the media for failing to address the science of models and their relevance to political debate:

Little information on climate models has appeared in US newspapers over more than a decade. Indeed, we show it is declining relative to climate change. When models do appear, it is often within sceptic discourses. Using a media index from 2007, we find that model projections were frequently portrayed as likely to be inaccurate. Political opinion outlets provided more explanation than many news sources.

In other words, blogs and science websites have done a better job of explaining climate science than traditional media, as visitors to RealClimate.org, SkepticalScience.org and other science blogs can attest. But the reach of these sites and their impact on the broader public are debatable. Websites such as the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Science have a trove of information on climate modeling but, with the exception of NASA’s laboratories, most government sites on science make little effective use of data visualization. This void offers mainstream journalists an opportunity to be powerful agents in the climate learning process, to tell dramatic multimedia stories about how weather forecasts can literally save our lives and, by extension, why climate forecasts can be trusted.

Two recent events can be thought of as whetting the public’s appetite for stories about computer-generated versions of reality. The prediction that Hurricane Sandy would eventually turn hard left out in the Atlantic and pound the northeastern shore of the United States was made almost a week in advance by weather forecasters.

This technology-driven prediction no doubt saved countless lives. In addition, some media coverage of Hurricane Sandy did much to enable non-scientists to understand why it is tricky to attribute specific storms to climate change but still gave the public the big picture of how warmer ocean waters provide storms with more moisture and therefore make them bigger and more damaging.

Simultaneously, in a different domain but using the same tools of analysis and prediction, Nate Silver’s FiveThirtyEight computer model, results of which were published in his blog at The New York Times, out-performed traditional political experts by nailing the November national election outcomes. How did he pull that off? A story about his statistical methods, complete with graphics, could reveal how risk analysts create spaces between the real world and theory to calculate probabilities. This would help the public to become familiar with models as a source of knowledge.

Some reporters have produced text stories on climate models that are examples of clarity. Andrew Revkin, while as an environment writer for The New York Times and now as the author of his Dot Earth blog at nytimes.com’s opinion section, has for many years covered how climate models relate to a large body of science, including a posting on Oct. 30 that placed Hurricane Sandy in the context of superstorms of the past.

David A. Fahrenthold at The Washington Post wrote how “Scientists’ use of computer models to predict climate change is under attack,” which opens with a baseball statistics analogy and keeps the reader going. Holger Dambeck at SpiegelOnline did a thorough assessment of climate model accuracy in non-science language, “Modeling the Future: The Difficulties of Predicting Climate Change.” But these stories are rare and often one-dimensional.

Effort is now being spent on making scientists into better communicators, but more might be accomplished if mainstream journalists, including those who publish on news websites with heavy traffic, made themselves better acquainted with satellite technology and its impact on science. Information specialist Paul Edwards explains in his book, “A Vast Machine: Computer Models, Climate Data and the Politics of Global Warming,” how climate modeling, far from being purely theoretical, is a method that combines theory with data to meet “practical here-and-now needs.” Computer models operate within a logical framework that uses many approximations from data that — unlike weather models — can be “conspicuously sparse” but still constituting sound science, much as a reliable statistical sample can be drawn from a large population. How statistics guide risk analysis requires better explanation for a public that must make judgments but is seldom provided context by news stories. The debate over cap-and-trade policy might be Exhibit A.

Depicting model-data symbiosis in such diverse fields as baseball performance, hurricane forecasts and long-range warming predictions would be ideally suited to web technology. Not only can climate models be reproduced on PCs and laptops, showing atmospheric changes over the past and into the future, but also the models’ variables can be made accessible to the web user, who could then take control of the model and game the display by practicing “what ifs” — how many degrees of heat by year 2100 could be avoided by a selected energy policy, how many people would be forced into migrations if this amount of food supplies were lost, how big would a tidal barrier need to be to protect New York City from another Sandy disaster? (If this sounds a bit like SimCity, the new version of the game due in 2013 includes climate change as part of the simulated experience.)

This narrative approach to news, including personal diaries and anecdotes of everyday lived experience, is what Richard Sambrook, former director of BBC Global News and now a journalism professor at Cardiff University, has termed “360 degree storytelling.” Mike Hulme, a professor of climate change at East Anglia University, provides this description of the new public stance toward science in his book, “Why We Disagree About Climate Change”:

Citizens, far from being passive receivers of expert science, now have the capability through media communication “to actively challenge and reshape science, or even to constitute the very process of scientific communication through mass participation in simulation experiments such as ‘climateprediction.net’. New media developments are fragmenting audiences and diluting the authority of the traditional institutions of science and politics, creating many new spaces in the twenty-first century ‘agora’ … where disputation and disagreement are aired.”

Today’s media is about participation and argumentation. A new rhetoric of visualization is making science more comprehensible in our daily lives. What goes around, comes around. One of the pioneer online journalism experiments in making the public aware of how technology, risk assessment and human fallibility can cross over was a project by MSNBC.com known as the “baggage screening game.” Players could look into a simulated radar screen and control the speed of a conveyor line of airline passenger baggage — some of which harbored lethal weapons. Assuming you were at the controls, the program would monitor your speed and accuracy in detection and keep score, later making you painfully aware of missed knives and bombs. Adding to your misery was a soundtrack of passengers standing in line and complaining about your excessive scrutinizing, with calls of “Come on! Get this thing moving! We’re late!” It was hard to be impatient with the TSA scanners after that.

Someone surfing the net comes face to face with a Wikipedia article — about himself. Or about her own work.

There’s erroneous information that needs to be fixed, but Wikipedia’s 10-year-old tangle of editing policies stands in the way, and its boisterous editing community can be fearsome.

If a person can put the error into the public spotlight, then publicly shaming Wikipedia’s volunteers into action can do the trick. But not without some pain.

The most recent episode?

The case of Pulitzer Prize winning fiction writer Philip Roth.

His bestselling novel “The Human Stain” tells the story of fictional character Coleman Silk, an African-American professor who presents himself as having a Jewish background and the trials he faces after leaving his university job in disgrace. Widely read and highly acclaimed, the book was reviewed or referenced by many famous writers, such as Michiko Kakutani and Janet Maslin of the New York Times and the noted Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr. [1] [2] [3]

The Broyard Theory

But there was a standing mystery about the novel.

After the book’s release in 2000, Roth had not elaborated on the inspiration for the professor Silk character . Over the years, it had become the subject of speculation, with most of the literary world pointing to Anatole Broyard, a famous writer and NY Times critic who “passed” in white circles without explicitly acknowledging his African American roots.

In 2000, Salon.com’s Charles Taylor wrote about Roth’s new book:

The thrill of gossip become literature hovers over “The Human Stain”: There’s no way Roth could have tackled this subject without thinking of Anatole Broyard, the late literary critic who passed as white for many years.

Brent Staples’ 2003 piece in The New York Times wrote that the story of Silk as a “character who jettisons his black family to live as white was strongly reminiscent of Mr. Broyard.”

Janet Maslin wrote the book was “seemingly prompted by the Broyard story.”

It was such a widely held notion, the Broyard connection was incorporated into the Wikipedia article on “The Human Stain.”

An early 2005 version of the Wikipedia entry cited Henry Louis Gates Jr., and by March 2008, it relayed the theory from Charles Taylor’s Salon.com review.

The view was so pervasive, a list of over a dozen notable citations from prominent writers and publications were found by Wikipedia editors.

Wikipedians researching the topic came across articles as secondary sources that drew parallels between Silk and Anatole Broyard. The references were verifiable, linkable prose from notable writers and respected publications. The core policies of Wikipedia — verifiability, using reliable sources and not undertaking original research — were upheld by using reputable content as the basis for the conclusions.

Roth Explains It All

However, information from Roth in 2008 changed things.

Bloomberg News did an interview with the author about his new book at the time, “Indignation.” Towards the end of the interview, he was asked a casual question about “The Human Stain:”

Hilferty: Is Coleman Silk, the black man who willfully passes as white in “The Human Stain,” based on anyone you knew?

Roth: No. There was much talk at the time that he was based on a journalist and writer named Anatole Broyard. I knew Anatole slightly, and I didn’t know he was black. Eventually there was a New Yorker article describing Anatole’s life written months and months after I had begun my book. So, no connection.

It might have been the first time Roth went on the record saying there was no connection between the fictional Silk and real-life writer Broyard. It seems to be the earliest record on the Internet of this fact.

Fast forward to 2012, and according to Roth, he read the Wikipedia article for [[The Human Stain]] for the first time, and found the erroneous assertions about Anatole Broyard as a template for his main character. In August 2012, Roth’s biographer, Blake Bailey, became an interlocutor who tried to change the Wikipedia entry to remove the false information. It became an unexpected tussle with Wikipedia’s volunteer editors.

Unfortunately for Roth, by the rules of Wikipedia, first-hand information from the mouth of the author does not immediately change Wikipedia. The policies of verifiability and forbidding original research prevent a direct email or a phone call to Wikpedia’s governing foundation or its volunteers from being the final word.

Enter The New Yorker

Frustrated with the process, Roth wrote a long article for the New Yorker, detailing his Wikipedia conundrum. He provided an exhaustive description of the actual inspiration for the professor Silk character: his friend and Princeton professor, Melvin Tumin.

“The Human Stain” was inspired, rather, by an unhappy event in the life of my late friend Melvin Tumin, professor of sociology at Princeton for some thirty years.

And it is this that inspired me to write “The Human Stain”: not something that may or may not have happened in the Manhattan life of the cosmopolitan literary figure Anatole Broyard but what actually did happen in the life of Professor Melvin Tumin, sixty miles south of Manhattan in the college town of Princeton, New Jersey, where I had met Mel, his wife, Sylvia, and his two sons when I was Princeton’s writer-in-residence in the early nineteen-sixties.

Good enough. But the problem arose when Roth attempted to correct the information in Wikipedia with the help of Bailey, his biographer. He wrote:

Yet when, through an official interlocutor, I recently petitioned Wikipedia to delete this misstatement, along with two others, my interlocutor was told by the “English Wikipedia Administrator”—in a letter dated August 25th and addressed to my interlocutor—that I, Roth, was not a credible source: “I understand your point that the author is the greatest authority on their own work,” writes the Wikipedia Administrator—“but we require secondary sources.”

Thus was created the occasion for this open letter. After failing to get a change made through the usual channels, I don’t know how else to proceed.

The frustration is understandable. That someone’s first-hand knowledge about their own work could be rejected in this manner seems inane. But it’s a fundamental working process of Wikipedia, which depends on reliable (secondary) sources to vet and vouch for the information.

Because of this, Wikipedia is fundamentally a curated tertiary source — when it works, it’s a researched and verified work that points to references both original and secondary, but mostly the latter.

It’s garbage in, garbage out. It’s only as good as the verifiable sources and references it can link to.

But it is also this policy that infuriates many Wikipedia outsiders.

During the debate over Roth’s edits, one Wikipedia administrator (an experienced editor in the volunteer community) cited Wikipedia’s famous refrain:

Verifiability, not truth, is the burden.
- ChrisGualtieri (talk) 15:53, 8 September 2012 (UTC)

By design, Wikipedia’s community couldn’t use an email from an original source as the final word. Wikipedia depends on information from a reliable source in a tangible form, and the verification it provides.

Reliable sources perform the gatekeeping function familiar in academic publishing, where peer review guarantees a level of rigor and fact checking from those with established track records.

But even with rigorous references, verifiability can be hard.

Consider Roth’s New Yorker piece, where he says:

“The Human Stain” was inspired, rather, by an unhappy event in the life of my late friend Melvin Tumin, professor of sociology at Princeton for some thirty years.

Compare that to the 2008 interview, when asked, “Is Coleman Silk, the black man who willfully passes as white in “The Human Stain,” based on anyone you knew?” Roth said, “No.”

This would seem to contradict the New Yorker article. This doesn’t make Roth dishonest. Rather, Roth likely interpreted the question differently in a spoken interview as to whether he knew anyone who “passed” in real life, as Silk did in the novel.

The point of all this?

Truth via verification is not easy or obvious.

Even with multiple reliable sources — a direct transcript from an interview or the words from the author himself — ferreting out the truth requires standards and deliberation.

As of this writing, Roth’s explanation about the Coleman Silk character has become the dominant one in the Wikipedia article, as it should be.

However, the erroneous speculation about Anatole Broyard was so prevalent and widely held in the years before Roth’s clarification, that it still has a significant mention in the article for historical purposes. There’s still debate how prominent this should be in the entry, given that it’s been flatly denied by Roth.

Lessons

Roth’s New Yorker article caused the article to be fixed, but getting such a prominent soapbox is not a solution that scales for everyone who has a problem with Wikipedia.

After a decade of Wikipedia’s existence as the chaotic encyclopedia that “anyone can edit,” its ironic that its stringent standards for verifiability and moving slowly and deliberately with information now make those qualities a target for criticism.

Wikipedia has been portrayed as being too loose (“Anyone can edit Wikipedia? How can I trust it?”) and too strict (“Wikipedia doesn’t consider Roth a credible source about himself? How can I trust it?”). The fact is, on balance, this yin-yang relationship serves Wikipedia well the vast majority of the time by being responsive and thorough — by being quick by nature, yet slow by design.

It continues to be one of the most visited web properties in the world (fifth according to ComScore), by refining its policies to observe the reputation of living persons and to enforce accuracy in fast-changing articles. Most outsiders would be surprised to see how conscientious and pedantic Wikipedia’s editors are to get things right, despite a mercurial volunteer community in need of a decorum upgrade and the occasional standoff with award-winning novelists.

Andrew Lih is an associate professor at the University of Southern California’s Annenberg School of Communication and Journalism where he directs the new media program. He is the author of The Wikipedia Revolution: How a bunch of nobodies created the world’s greatest encyclopedia, (Hyperion 2009, Aurum UK 2009) and is a noted expert on online collaboration and participatory journalism. This story also appeared on his personal blog.

Take a look at Barry Ritholtz’ Yeah! The Housing Bottom Is Here! It catalogues six years of compliant reporters dutifully shoveling up quotes from real estate industry sources proclaiming a bottom to the housing market, implicitly urging readers to get out there and buy some real estate right now.

Each article follows the rules of good journalism. They include stories from many of the nation’s leading news organizations. Many articles offers multiple sources, in well-edited narrative. There’s no indication in any of the stories that their reporters misquoted anyone, or misrepresented what their sources were trying to say.

Yet, every article on that page is spectacularly, dangerously, and offensively wrong.

And that illustrates the gravest problem facing journalism today. It’s not competition from the Internet, or even the loss of local advertising monopolies. If journalism as an industry were producing consistently accurate, forward-looking, and unique reports that helped people live better lives, without ending up underwater on a crappy mortgage, competition from inferior news sources – even cheaper or free sources – wouldn’t threaten the industry’s survival.

The gravest problem facing journalism today is its continued adherence to a stenographic model of reporting, one that accepts accurate recitation of quotes and data as truthful reporting, overlooking the very inconvenient fact that people very often lie to reporters.

J-school cliche says “if your mother says she loves you, check it out.” But far too often in news reporting, “checking it out” means simply calling up another source, and presenting their confirmation or denial of mommy’s alleged love in the next grafs of the story.

Ideally, a reporter would check claims by sources not just with other sources but his or her own investigation of relevant, accurate data and other eyewitnesses. Of course, to do that, a reporter needs time (often in short supply in understaffed newsrooms) and expertise. A reporter needs training and experience in the beat he or she is covering so that he or she can select and perform the appropriate analysis for the issue at hand. Not only that, the reporter must be able and willing to perform an accurate analysis that checks regular sources’ accuracy over time, to determine whether a source is trustworthy.

To that end, in 2012, it should be obvious to anyone working in financial journalism that the National Association of Realtors is the “Baghdad Bob” of the business beat. (Heck, that should have been obvious years ago.) If you’re quoting an NAR spokesperson, or NAR-affiliated analyst, in a real estate story, you might as well just label your piece “advertising” and ask the NAR to cut you a check for it. Because it’s likely of no service to your readers, given how often NAR sources have been wrong over the past six years.

Unfortunately, too few reporters do any sophisticated, data-driven source analysis – as evidenced in part by the long list of stories linked above. I suspect that, while lack of time and expertise contribute to that failure, fear of being labeled as biased or partisan drives much of our industry’s reticence in challenging certain financially or politically powerful sources.

As I’ve written before, partisanship and ideology only creates a problem for reporters if it influences their reporting, driving them to ignore or suppress information that contradicts their political beliefs. If accurate reporting leads a journalist to a partisan conclusion, the only problem for journalism is to ignore that conclusion or soften that reporting because you don’t want to look partisan.

Yet we live in an era when just about every issue’s been politicized – from housing prices to birth control to student test scores. Even the weather. Heck, it’s hard to find a beat outside sports and movie reviews where reporters aren’t afraid to take a stand.

We’ve got to change. If traditional news organizations are to survive in the Internet era, they’ve got to make changes that keep them from consistently barfing out stories that mislead their audience and fail to stand the test of time. The ultimate test for journalism doesn’t lie in how a story was reported or presented. It lies in whether the information the story presents is true.

Let’s stop being naive. Accusations of partisanship and bias are being used by people on the wrong side of the facts to bully us into not pointing that out. Let’s quit accommodating them by dumbing down journalism to stenography.

We need to do better. If we’re to win over more readers (which makes our publications more attractive to advertisers) or even to convince some of those readers to pay us for our reporting, we have to be find a away to be right more often. And that means calling out the liars and fools among our sources.

2. We have to be more useful
We’re providing more information and more background, but keeping it to the point. Because users won’t read a long story, we have to be better at determining the most important points, presenting them succinctly and knowing when to stop. We then offer you a choice to delve more deeply, if you want, by including links, PDFs, photo galleries, videos and a whole host of other assets for you to explore or ignore.

3. We’re paying attention to what people want
Online newsmakers can see — in real time — how many people are reading our stories, how important those stories are, and who thinks so. Being a successful journalist means paying attention to those numbers and responding to what people want and need, rather than what we think they want and need or — worse — what we think they should want and need.

4. We’re ditching the “he said, she said”
Inserting a quote in between every paragraph to support the former or upcoming statement is a dead practice. No one was reading what was in between the quotation marks anyway, but skipping over it instead, and now all the supporting quotes are provided after the story has been published — by you, dropping your thoughts into the comments box.

5. We’re getting out from behind our computers
The most important stories take what’s offline and put it online for the first time. The web is flooded with stories, and different versions of stories, that were found online in the first place. Anyone can re-post a YouTube video of a riot, but someone has to film the original. We want to be that person.

6. We’re better writers
SEO will not allow us to write vague headlines or use bad puns, and we only have the attention our audience for about three blinks, so we have to practice all of George Orwell’s 5 Rules for Effective Writing at once.

7. We’re everywhere at once
Thanks to Wifi and 4G, we’re posting updates and pictures directly from the field, while still on scene talking to officials and community members. In fact, if you’re quick enough, you could send us an email or tweet a question and we can try to answers while we’re reporting. There you have it: news on demand.

8. We’re held accountable — immediately
Is there an error in the story we just published? We’ll know about it in… oh, let’s say 30 seconds after we tweet it.

9. We’ve got to be better than the competition
Anyone with an email address can publish information and most are doing it for free. We’ve got to be quicker, better, clearer and more reliable than everyone else on the Internet.

10. We’re providing a service that is more valuable than it has ever been
We’re Internet users too, and know that the only cure for information overload is intelligent curation and efficient navigation. We’re grateful to those who do it well, and strive to be of service likewise. At the same time, we’re also playing our part in trying to figure out how this whole industry is going to work and who’s going to pay for it — and to do that we have to adhere to everything listed above.

Agree? Disagree? I’ll see you in the comment stream below.

What was this practice? It was conducting national job searches to fill local reporting positions.

When I began my journalism career, J-school advisers told us to expect to start out at a smaller paper in a national chain, then try to work our way up to larger newsrooms, bigger cities, and more desirable places to live. You had to “pay your dues” in some small town before you could move up to a major metro.

The model was that of an assembly line, where you started by proving yourself on low-risk tasks that weren’t particularly critical to the overall operation, before moving up to higher-speed, higher-pressure jobs with national visibility. (By broadening the candidate pool for every local reporting job, this helped chains keep labor costs down, too.)

But while the smallest papers in a chain might be next to invisible to the suits in corporate HR, they were real, and important, to the people living in the communities they served. Most of those readers weren’t trying to “move up” to some bigger city. They were home, and happy there.

The old newsroom hiring model saw the nation’s communities as interchangeable rungs on a corporate ladder. But, despite the billion-dollar efforts of companies such as Walmart, Target, McDonald’s, and Applebee’s, people in those cities and towns continue to resist their commoditization. Sure, they shop at Walmart and eat at Applebee’s, but only because they’re cheaper than alternatives. (Which often were run out of business by big-chain outlets operating at a loss until they killed off that competition.) Cookie-cutter newspapers could hold onto their local customers only so long as they offered the cheapest way to get information, too.

When online competitors such as Craigslist and Yahoo! News gave readers a cheaper alternative for classified ads and national news headlines, they bailed. And understandably so. It’s hard to appeal to readers’ sense of loyalty to local voices when those voices are recent college grads who’ve only lived in the community for a couple years and who flee the state whenever they get three or more consecutive days off. Those new hires didn’t grow up in the community. They barely know anyone outside the newsroom and the official sources they encounter on their beats. And frankly, they don’t care, either. They’re looking to “move up,” and get out of town.

If you’re a local, you might as well get your local news from a discussion board. At least the people posting there actually know the town, send their kids to school there, and are planning to stick around a while.

My first full-time job in the news industry was in Omaha, Nebraska – a community I’d never stepped foot in before my job interview at the paper. To my surprise, the paper offered me a gig, and with my first student loan payment looming, I took it. I had no business writing for anyone in Omaha, or the states of Nebraska or Iowa. Hey, I tried my best, but I didn’t know the names, the places, the people or the unique issues that mattered to anyone who’d grown up in that state. So I took the hint when the paper tried to run me out of town and eventually rented a truck to move to a city my wife and I knew and loved – her hometown, Denver.

(I worked there for nearly four years until I got recruited to a job in my hometown, Los Angeles, where I continue to live today.)

So as we look for new companies to emerge and redefine the journalism industry online, let’s hope those new leaders won’t make this same mistake, too. Readers deserve writers who are as invested in the community as they are.

And if that expression of idealism does nothing for you as a cold-hearted capitalist, allow me to frame the issue another way: You can’t collect a premium price for a bargain-basement product.

If you’re producing product in the cheapest way possible, you’ll only hold your market share so long as you offer the lowest price available. (Walmart’s learning this the hard way as its bargain-hunting customer base begins to abandon it for dollar stores.) Trust me, even if you think that the cheapest way to run a newsroom is with fresh college grads desperate for a job, they’re still more expensive than outsourcing to writers in Bangalore watching Web cams. Or script kiddies in Eastern Europe writing scraper algorithms. If you want to publish using actual live, local journalists writing your publication, you’ll never be able to operate at lower costs than your online competition. To survive as a business, you’ll need the higher income that only a premium product can command.

So your local writers better really be local writers, people are from – and of – that community. This goes for niche topic sites, too, and not just for geographically focused publications. Writers for niche sites must be insiders of the community they cover, as well – individuals with passion for and personal experience in the topic they cover.

What does this mean? If you’re a manager at a national news chain, it’s time to zero out the relocation budget, if you haven’t already. Make local publications hire exclusively from candidates in their local markets. It’s time to reconnect with those communities. Promote from within at your titles, too. If “outsiders” really want to work at one of your publications, insist that they move to that community on their own, first.

For journalists, it’s time to make an investment in your future by relocating to the community where you want to live and work, if you’re not there already. Then start blogging as soon as you arrive. Build the audience that you will leverage into either your own publishing business or a job at an established local publication.

For journalism students, do the same. Start your career right by going to the best J-school you can get into in the city (or state) where you want to live and work. If your goal is to work in niche-topic publications, rather than covering a geographic community, go ahead and look at big national J-schools. But select the one that also has the best available program in the field you want to cover, too. Either way, immerse yourself in the community you’ll be covering. Only by being in and of the community you want to cover can you make yourself an attractive candidate to the smart publishers who recognize the need to remain connected to their communities.

The market is speaking to us. It wants the era of clueless, disconnected, outsider coverage in journalism to be over. And thank goodness for that. Let’s make it happen.

It’s like watching an actor psyche himself out before going on stage, or a golfer giving herself a harsh set of the yips when approaching the green. Journalists I’ve met and worked with too often talk themselves out of their natural state and familiar skills when they start thinking about online interactivity. And those fears of failure quickly become self-fulfilling.

Here’s a success story story for you to consider, instead. Not to get all hokey on you, but I do believe that if you’re thinking about success when you interact with your readers, you’re putting yourself in a better place than if you go into conversations with negative thoughts. The key take-away from this success story is that it happened by using good, old-fashioned, print-era, j-school techniques for doing interviews. No special “online” skills required.

Here we go: Last week, I decided to get more active on Twitter by hosting an afternoon “Twitter chat” each weekday. (Okay, I hear people freaking out now. “You said this didn’t require any special online skills, Robert!” Chill. Stay with me.)

I got the idea after stumbling into a couple fun back-and-forth chats with a few of my followers in recent weeks. One time I threw a question out there, and another I responded to someone else’s. In both cases, others joined in with their answers and we had a nice conversation for the better part of an hour.

While I love Twitter as an RSS replacement – a handy way to push headline feeds out to willing readers – the medium’s also a perfect one for this type of focused, real-time conversation. You don’t need a pay for some special chat tool, and the 140-character limit forces everyone to get to a point efficiently.

So I figured, why wait for these moments just to happen? Why not schedule some conversations, and let my readers know when to expect them? The trouble with these types of planned events, of course, is that they too often come across as too planned. It’s like going to a party where the host has overscripted every element of the event. Who wants to be told when the fun starts?

This isn’t some network broadcast interview, where advance work has squeezed all potential for spontaneity from the conversation. Instead of coming to each Twitter chat with a list of canned questions to ask, I kicked it off with a single question, then let the conversation evolve from there.

Listen, then react. Probe. Direct. Test. Challenge.

Ask.

Eventually, something will click. C’mon – we’re all confident when doing an interview with a source. Don’t let a lack of comfort with Twitter or any other online medium rob you of that confidence. Interviewing is interviewing. If you can elicit insight, passion, and emotion from a source offline, you can do it online, too. And those reactions will help your conversation connect with a broader audience.

The interaction never starts right away. I’ve needed at least four tweets to get the conversation going. And more times than not, my original topic dies in just as many tweets after that. So what? Find what makes your interviewees come alive. Then go there. You’ve done this before.

By the third day of my Tweet chats, we trended nationwide in the United States.

Sure, it was silly. A conversation about travel planning mutated into a bunch of gags about theme park attraction names. But it was a perfect diversion for a late Friday afternoon, and the audience was looking for fun, so I helped a few leaders in the conversation steer it there. Yet it wouldn’t have happened if I’d stubbornly restricted the event to a pre-planned script. Or if I’d been too inexperienced with interviewing to pick up on the potential in what looked like a mistake from a reader with only a dozen or so followers. But it was there. And when we followed it, dozens of lurkers jumped in, brought their followers, and we were trending 20 minutes later. (Search for #disneybudgetcuts for the whole thing, if you must.)

Of course, the trend list shouldn’t be every publication’s goal. But better engagement should be. I’ve long said that journalists have the unique set of skills to succeed in social media. Engagement and communication are our business. So don’t let a change in medium psych you out. Try a regularly scheduled Twitter chat with your followers and let your interviewing skills shine. Talk about whatever. Just use it as an excuse to get together with your followers, and talk.

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.

“What if I don’t feel qualified to decide who’s telling the truth?”

If you’ve ever asked yourself that question, give yourself a well-earned point for honesty. The best journalists remain ever skeptical, not just of their data and sources, but of their own biases, roles and decision-making in reporting a story. But even as journalists challenge themselves, they must be able to meet those challenges.

Stenography isn’t journalism. “He said, she said” isn’t journalism. Throwing your reporting at the page and hoping that the reader figures it all out isn’t journalism. Journalism demands judgment – decisions whether a story is newsworthy, and judgments about the truth of information included within that story.

So, yeah, if you’re going to do this job effectively, you’ve got to be able to tell who’s telling the truth – and have the confidence in that decision to make it public in your reports.

Why is this even an issue? Why would journalists be working on beats where they didn’t have the deep knowledge and experience they’d need to be able to make consistent calls on the truthfulness of the information they collect?

As usual, the answer is “money.”

For more than a generation, newspapers have been going cheap on newsroom talent – laying off experienced (and relatively expensive) reporters in favor of inexpensive rookies to keep profit margins fat. And it’s not like many newsrooms have been bringing in people with law degrees to cover the courts or physicians to cover health, either. That’d cost money, of course.

But readers can find those experts online now – people with advanced degrees and years of professional experience reporting on their fields. Think that people lose their “objectivity” if they report upon a field in which they’ve trained and worked? Well, ask yourself how “objective” it is to be played by a source because you didn’t know any better. In readers’ eyes, experts beat stenographers, every time.

Sure, it’s tough to write a story with the detail that will satisfy fellow experts and the simplicity that will engage a broader audience. But it’s the news industry’s failure to do that consistently over the years that left the market open for many start-up blogs and online communities to exploit.

So now the industry’s years of going cheap on newsroom recruitment and retention comes back to haunt it. Not only don’t we have enough experts in newsrooms, we’ve developed an industry culture where we’re second-guessing when, or even whether, journalists ought to be making expert judgments.

I can’t lay this on journalism educators. I’ve taught in a j-school, and have seen first-hand how students sculpt their school experience in anticipation of what they believe future employers will want. If they see employers demanding deep knowledge and experience in specific subject areas, trust me, students will respond. But even if every journalism student loaded up with a second major and relevant work experience, the more they see other employers paying more for that same education and experience, the fewer of them will choose life in a newsroom.

Of course news organizations need to stay in the black. That’s why online start-ups without multiple layers of middle management and corporate profit requirements will continue to enjoy cost advantages over the major newspaper chains. If newspaper chains are to get leaner, they can’t continue to try doing that at the cost of newsroom expertise. That decision just drives away readers, as they look elsewhere for the truth vigilantes who can help them make sense of their daily information overload.

The days of general assignment reporters and rotating beats are over. The level of competition online simply won’t allow them anymore. Journalism is no longer a field unto itself, practiced by people who have no substantial experience in other fields. Journalism is now a skill practiced by experts in many fields, for the benefit of readers throughout their community and around the world. The news business that understand that change, and adapt to it, will be the ones that survive and profit in the years to come.

The answer to that question might seem obvious, but I warn you that too many news publishers approach this question from the wrong direction – and could be hurting their businesses as a result.

The obvious answer to the website traffic question appears to be… to look at what’s getting the most page views on your site, and to write more articles like those.

Don’t do that.

Why? Chasing traffic by trying to duplicate your most successful content ultimately narrows the focus of your website, as you try to focus on specific topics, features and tone that’s drawn visitors in the past, to the exclusion of other stories and styles. It leaves you (or your staff) feeling cynical, coming to believe that your coverage is being driving by chasing traffic instead of chasing the news. Trying to duplicate past success is reactive instead of proactive – and over the long run that too often leads to a dispirited staff producing formulaic, sterile, mechanical work that runs the risk of turning off readers and advertisers.

So how can traffic data help you to create a more popular website?

Instead of looking at what’s attracting eyeballs, flip your analysis around. Focus not on what’s working, but what isn’t.

Use your traffic data to show you what coverage to dump, and not what to duplicate. Why waste precious reporting and writing time on articles that no one’s reading, no one’s linking to and no one’s engaging with? Stop publishing content that your market’s rejected and use the resources you’d spent creating that to do something else instead.

Be careful when making those cuts, though, to be certain that you’re not eliminating something valuable due to bad analysis of your traffic data. It’s not enough to look at raw page view numbers over a limited time period. Some very valuable articles show few initial impressions, but continue to build traffic to your site over years. It’s worth the staff time to report and create those “evergreen” articles. Other types of articles might suffer due to the time of day that they’re posted on the site. Certain feature pieces that hit your homepage in the early evening due to production habits, only to disappear from the home page before the next morning’s traffic rush might draw more attention if you moved their online publication times to mid-afternoon, for example.

So be sure to take a long view when analyzing traffic data when making decisions about cuts and reassignments on your website. And consider what other factors, in addition to topic popularity, might be influencing unpopular articles and pages on your site. Are the pages consistently hitting the site at an unpopular time of day? Are the headlines not engaging? Could you put a different writer onto that beat who would command more respect, attention and engagement? Should does the audience for content want to see it in a different medium, such as a podcast or video blog instead?

You might not choose to walk away from a content topic altogether, but your focus should remain on the bottom of your traffic analytics. If something’s not hitting with the audience, work to change that. And if changing publication times, formatting or voice isn’t drawing more traffic to an area of the site, don’t be afraid to shift the focus of your reporting to something that your audience finds more important to their everyday lives. (Here’s my piece on the five most important beats for a local news website, to encourage some creative thought on what your beat mix should be.)

Like a gardener pruning the flower beds, cutting away withered elements of your publication can help encourage more growth elsewhere on the website. That’s a healthier way to pursue new traffic than endless trying to clone what’s worked best in the past. And it allows you, or your staff, to remain creative in trying to find new ways to lead your community by showing them fresh news and insight that they didn’t have but will embrace, instead of always feeling like you are reacting to that community, pandering to what was popular in the past.

Traffic data tells you what your community thinks of the work you’ve done on the past. You should respect your audience by paying attention to what they’re trying to tell you. Great news publishers lead – they don’t pander – but you can’t be a leader if no one follows you. Use your traffic data to cut what’s not working on your website, then spend those resources trying to find better ways to connect with your audience instead.