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McClatchy Washington bureau shines as bright example for online journalism

Robert Niles — Fri, 13 Jun 2008 18:29:43 +0000

The past decade has brought the journalism industry some of its darkest moments. On the business side, management teams that grew used to local monopolies could not react swiftly enough to protect their market share as thousands of online competitors emerged. Revenue tanked, readership declined and layoffs became a seasonal task at many newspapers.

On the editorial side, many newsrooms blew or missed one major story after another, from the Whitewater “scandal,” hitting the snooze button on the global warming alarm, the emergence of al Qaeda before 9/11, the Bush administration’s phony case for war in Iraq, to the abandonment of mortgage lending standards that inflated a housing bubble.

But not every news organization blew it. Indeed, as journalism has suffered some of its darkest moments over the past decade, a few news organizations stand apart for their bright triumphs. On the Washington beat, perhaps no single news organization so often has gotten the story right as the McClatchy Washington bureau.

From providing one of the few domestic voices to consistently challenge the Bush administration’s bogus claims before the Iraq War (The New Yorker being another), to dogging the administration over the politicalization of the U.S. Justice Department, the bureau, and its website, www.mcclatchydc.com have become the must-click destination for readers thirsty for clear, accurate, spin-free reporting. The bureau will publish this weekend an in-depth investigation of the situation at Guantanamo Bay, where the United States has been holding alleged terrorists, in violation of due process rights, according to a Supreme Court ruling this week.

I spoke with McClatchy Washington Bureau Web editor Jim Van Nostrand by phone this week, and asked him why McClatchy’s had such success, and why the bureau took the unusual step of launching its own, stand-alone website. An edited transcript of our conversations follows:

Robert Niles: Why a standalone website for the bureau? Why not just stick with the traditional role of providing copy for member papers and their websites?

Jim Van Nostrand: I launched the bureau’s first website back in 2000, back when it was Knight Ridder. They never had a website before that. It started out in that they had a dilemma that their content had no home. Let’s say you were a national reporter and you interviewed Colin Powell, and Colin Powell turned around and said, “Well where can I read this story tomorrow?” You had to say, “Well, you might try the Philadelphia Inquirer or you might try the San Jose Mercury News. You never could predict where or how your stories were gonna land, so you really were in a conundrum.

The first goal was just to give their stuff a home so that you could hand Colin Powell a business card that had KR Washington on it, and say, “Hey, read it here tomorrow.”

The reporters here are competing in the national space against the New York Times and the Washington Post and the L.A. Times, and CNN and MSNBC. For a news organization such as ours, they found out very quickly that the Web helped them extend their brand beyond their local markets. Even if you were, say, a reader in Aberdeen, South Dakota or in Miami, Florida, where we had newspapers, and they may know that their newspaper is a McClatchy paper, all of a sudden with the Web, they’re reaching readers who don’t read their newspapers. We were finding, with columnists like Joe Galloway, and with the reporting team on the Iraq war and the lead-up to the Iraq war and that sort of thing, that they found the Web was a very powerful tool for building the brand.

Niles: How has having the standalone site affected the work done by reporters in the bureau?

Van Nostrand: The bureau’s reporting and the things that it’s known for – the pre-war Iraq reporting and that sort of thing, the whole truth-to-power stuff – aligns very well with McClatchy’s commitment to public service journalism. The two mesh pretty well. The ideals are the same.

Frankly, what you saw during the pre-war reporting leading up to that, some of our [Knight Ridder] newspapers didn’t run our reporting. It varied widely in the play that it got. Not only were you competing with the big brands of the New York Times and the Washington Post and trying to get noticed, quite frankly, you had editors that wouldn’t run some of these stories because they were too hard-hitting.

We’re a small bureau. We can’t tackle everything. The places where we’ve planted our flag or where we stake our claim, they’re finding that this national platform helps increase [the bureau's] visibility, because our traffic is growing.

We’re now getting a million unique visitors a month, up from just more than half a million in January. With that growth in traffic and attention means that they’re getting noticed more than they used to be.

Niles: Which websites do you see reporters at the bureau reading on a regular basis?

Van Nostrand: Well they have to read the Times and the Post because those are their big competitors. We run into the same thing here that, say, Salon did on the Walter Reed story. We will break news, but until it gets reported in the other outlets, nobody notices it. Salon had the Walter Reed story two years before the Post did, but the Post reports it and all of a sudden things start happening.

In the new media world, there are new competitors. For example, on the U.S. Attorney story, Marisa Taylor led the pack all the way through that reporting. Neck-and-neck with her was Josh Marshall’s Talking Points Memo. Depending on the story, it’s not who you think it might be anymore. You have the usual suspects, but there’s a whole new crop of competitors on these beats.

Niles: What do you see as being the biggest challenge facing Washington beat reporters these days?

Van Nostrand: The biggest challenge from my perspective is the polarization of the audience. You have an audience that’s used to now listening to only those news organizations that cater to their points of view. The whole Fox News thing, the whole right-wing blogosphere, the whole left-wing blogosphere. When you do hard-hitting reporting like we like to do, you have a large set of your audience that’s either going to dismiss what you’re going to say or agree with it out of hand based on their own personal belief sets. If you raise tough questions, regardless of orientation, people are assuming that you’re bias one way or the other. That’s not unique to us. That’s unique to everybody. That’s probably the biggest challenge we have at the moment, especially involved in a two-and-a-half-year long presidential campaign. We’ve spent a good deal of our resources planting our flag in the political coverage for the size bureau that we are.

Niles: How can, or do, you address that challenge?

Van Nostrand: You sort of have to be deaf to it almost, because if you think about it too much it will almost consume you, and you just can’t let it. You just have to trust your sense of smell, and go where the story is, and just sort of disregard the consequences. This Guantanamo package coming out Sunday is an excellent example of that. You’re going to have a segment of your audience that’s going to look at pictures of people with beards and turbans and say, “They’re all terrorists.” They’re not gonna read past the third graph, you know? You’re gonna have others that are gonna read every word of it. I fully expect a very heated response to this series, but it’s the kind of thing that you just have to pursue no matter where it takes you.

Niles: Tell me a little bit about what you would like to be able to do to address or provide a forum for that heated response.

Van Nostrand: We moderate after the fact. We let comments go live, and we have somebody looking at them. The time spent on that is significant for a small operation. There are things we’d like to be doing with crowdsourcing, with wikis. Putting those into practice has been problematic because you’ve still got to be able to produce multimedia and push breaking news to the Web.

One of our biggest pushes has been to incorporate good stories from around the McClatchy network of newspapers onto our site. You know the old argument between national and local sites is they want to keep the traffic, because local sites have their own traffic and revenue goals. We did a small experiment to work around that, where we will pick up a story from one of our sites. We’ll run the headline in the first three graphs on our site, and then link to a local site for the remainder.

It’s worked out fine as a compromise because we tend to get good traffic on the good stories from our local sites, and they get more traffic that they never would have had.

Niles: What if anything do you think that the McClatchy Bureau is doing, or Knight Ridder in the past has done, differently from others in covering this particular administration in Washington?

Van Nostrand: I can tell you from working with these folks that what they do differently is based on necessity. The term that John Walcott, our bureau chief, likes to use is that we’re the “skunk at the garden party.” We don’t have the access that the big shots from the Times or the Post have. We’re not on the first-call list. We’re not invited to some of the inner-circle type of things. When the Bush administration came in, that got even worse. We just didn’t have access to the high level.

So what happened in the pre-war reporting, for example, is that folks like Warren Strobel and Jonathan Landay and John Walcott, they were talking to the rank-and-file folks at the respective agencies, the folks who actually did the work; the folks who were actually preparing the reports and reviewing the intelligence. They weren’t talking to the political hacks at the highest level. Those folks were telling them, giving them a different picture than was being fed to the national outlets. By virtue of having to do their reporting at the grassroots level, they weren’t getting the sanitized picture that other folks were getting. That made a big difference. We were consistently saying that there were no weapons of mass destruction, and the intelligence was saying that there were no weapons of mass destruction. But yet our competitors were saying breathlessly, taking the administration line, that there were. It’s a matter of perspective; who were you talking to.

Niles: I’m gonna wrap up by asking what are the lessons, from your perspective, that online journalists need to know in order to cover Washington truthfully, based on your experience with the bureau?

Van Nostrand: Well, the lessons are the same as they would be for any non-online journalist. If your mother says she loves you, check it out. Move quickly. Look for what is unique and interesting about a particular story. One advantage we have online is that we cam move quickly on a story without getting bogged down in background, like in other media, because we can link to that background information.

Ultimately, the same intellectual curiosity that drove us into journalism in the first place applies. We don’t want to be stuck doing the same thing everyday.

Taking a closer look at gender gaps in education

richard whitmire — Fri, 23 May 2008 11:05:10 +0000

Richard Whitmire is an editorial writer for USA Today.

As the President of the National Education Writers Association, I have the annual privilege of handing over top awards won by education reporters from around the country. Now I’m thinking that privilege bears some responsibility, such as fessing up about times when education coverage dips below award-winning levels.

That happened Tuesday morning when I opened The New York Times and saw an article that did little more than regurgitate the American Association of University Women report making the dubious case that the “boy troubles,” as in boys falling behind in school and graduating from college at lower rates than girls, are a myth. Odd, I thought, a rare fumble by the Times.

Then I picked up The Washington Post, and there on page one was an article that did the same. At least this article had a dissenting view, but that’s not the point. Somehow, the AAUW had managed to pass off its advocacy report as research, not just to the Times and Post but the Wall Street Journal and other publications as well. (E-mail queries to the Times and Post reporters sent Thursday were unanswered as of this posting on Friday.)

When the surprise wore off, I had to smile: kudos to the public relations geniuses at the AAUW. Consider the odds behind their achievement. To succeed, the AAUW had to convince reporters that:

Gender gaps lie only between white and black, poor and non-poor and not within those groups. AAUW researchers had to know that with a simple check reporters would find huge gender differences, for example, among African Americans. How hard is it discover that black women graduate from college at twice the rate of black men? The gaps even extend to upper-class whites. Check out the research done by the Wilmette schools [2.6 MB PDF file] outside Chicago, one of the wealthiest and highest performing districts in the country.

Tests show that boys and girls score roughly the same. That conclusion is possible only by cherry-picking national survey data, which risks the possibility reporters might check state testing data where all students are tested. Those tests often show stark gender gaps, in many cases with girls swamping boys in verbal skills and at times edging them in math.

There are virtually no gender differences in the rate high school graduates enroll in college. Wow, so the boy troubles must truly be a myth! In that case, those pesky campus gender gaps must arise from benign causes such as older women more likely to return to college than older men. Truly a heart-warming story. Who doesn’t know of someone’s mom returning to college for a survey course in world culture? Problem is, a simple check of National Center for Education Statistics data reveals a 400,000-student gender gap among 18-19 year-old students. So much for the little-old-lady theory. (Even the professional education publications fell for that one.)

The AAUW provides unbiased research in the area of how boys perform in school. (Wait, does their mission statement even say anything about boys? Why are they dabbling in this?) Here, the group had to count on reporters being unable to recall the shaky “call out” research from its 1992 report, where girls were supposedly being shortchanged in school in part because teachers paid more attention to aggressive boys calling out in the classroom. With the benefit of hindsight, we know that entire report was riddled with problems. Here’s an interesting analysis of the AAUW’s track record as neutral researchers. (Full disclosure: At the time, I gave that report a full ride absent a single critical perspective. Hey, I thought I was doing my young daughters a favor).

So, the AAUW pulled it off again. Reporters had forgotten about that 1992 report. No data were offered to dispute the notion that the boy troubles are really a race issue. No challenge to the college-going data. Everything, a clean sweep. I hadn’t planned on writing about the report, but when my editors saw the blowout coverage the report received they asked me to blog a debate editorial on the issue.

At this point I have to declare my own bias. I’ve been writing about the boy troubles for years and I’m convinced they’re real, not only in the United States but in scores of countries around the world. You can view this as either making me prejudiced or informed enough to acknowledge a reporting fumble. Your call. From my perspective, this matters because the ideological chaff thrown up by groups such as the AAUW stands in the way of educators taking a serious at what’s happening to boys. Economists say the changing economy means men and women today (unlike in the past) get exactly the same benefits from a college degree and therefore should be graduating at the same rate. Only they aren’t. By 2015 women will earn, on average, 60% of all bachelor’s degrees awarded. Something’s not right here; that’s a lot of men not even getting to the economic starting line with that all-important diploma.

My final take the AAUW’s coup: short-term victory, long term repercussions.

Readers really will check everything

Noah Barron — Wed, 27 Feb 2008 19:43:06 +0000

Medill senior David Spett, 22, has rocketed to the center of journalism ethics discussions at j-schools nationwide following his column on Medill Dean John Levine’s use of three anonymous student quotes complimenting an advertising course in last Spring’s Northwestern University alumni magazine. Spett, writing that “Nearly every guide to journalism ethics says anonymous quotes should be avoided,” went ahead and did some digging. He called all 29 students in the 2007 course and asked if the quotation Levine attributed to an unnamed classmember was theirs. Despite being promised total privacy by Spett, none claimed the words as their own.

Since Spett’s column, the story has enjoyed retellings by on the Washington Post and Chicago Tribune websites, as well as coverage in Editor&Publisher, Poynter’s Romanesko blog and more. Spett was later interviewed by Michele Norris on NPR. The story and its popularity among media professionals was derided on a Gawker.com post as “inane,” and Spett was called “a cockstrong young j-school student,” though most of the criticism was directed at the journalism community for not letting the issue die.

Since then, 18 Medill faculty have signed a letter asking for Dean Levine to be held accountable and produce his notes. Many did not. A week ago, the Dean issued a mea culpa to faculty and students apologizing for his lack of transparency.

On February 27th, Eric Zorn on the Chicago Tribune’s web edition reported that Spett’s investigative reporting professor David Protess phoned all 29 students and confirmed Spett’s reporting. It took more than two weeks for anyone to do the followup vetting. “It takes initiative,” said Spett on a phone call with OJR. “If you’re on my side and it turns out I made a mistake, you’re in a tough position. If you support the dean and my reporting checks out, what position are you in then?”

As the media response to his story unfolded, Spett has been posting clippings from newspaper websites and blogs on his Facebook page mini feed, to provide his Facebook friends “a place where they can find it all. I don’t mean to be self-aggrandizing. They don’t have to click on it.”

[Disclosure: I worked with David Spett in South Africa when we were both interns at the Cape Times. When the dust settled, I decided to contact Spett and ask him about his experiences as a young reporter experiencing his first media circus.]

“Most people talking about me are journalists talking about me as a journalist,” he said. “A lot of people do think that this is relevant beyond Medill. Medill is where we are training the future people who will be talking about issues of incredible importance.”

Spett is ambivalent about seeing his name in print–as a subject of a story rather than a byline. “It’s exciting, it’s scary, I’m glad people care about the issues. Part of me is shy wants to be an ordinary person that’s not in the Chicago Tribune and the Washington Post.” He said the affair has boosted his interest in doing investigative journalism in the future.

“It feels really strange. I’m not really used to it. My feelings are very complicated. Proud, also shy. I’m a little awkward socially, so it’s kinda scary when people recognize my face and say “You’re the kid that wrote that story’. If I ever break a story this big again–Gawker said I wouldn’t–I have a taste of what the follow-up might be.”

He has not responded to the many blog posts about his story but said that some of the more personal attacks against him were hurtful. “One professor attacked me and said that I have a history of publishing my dislikes of professors. In fact, I criticized a class once as a Freshman. Part of me is a little bit hurt, I am angered by that. These are the things that happen when you break a story like this. I’m not going to start attacking these people.”

Spett, who writes for the Daily Northwestern as an opinion columnist, has been careful to avoid appearing biased about the dean’s use of the unnamed sources and has stated several times in interviews that it is his goal to present the facts and let readers decide for themselves. “I’m a very opinionated guy,” he said. “This has been very good practice in keeping my opinions away from the facts. It’s my first real experience writing a story that has gotten this big.”

Despite getting the kind of attention most journalism students lust after, Spett is unsure whether it has helped his career. While some professors at Medill have urged him to pursue investigative reporting as a career, he stated simply, “I hope I get a job in journalism. I hope this helps.”

How, and where, to hyperlink within a news story

Robert Niles — Fri, 15 Feb 2008 13:51:39 +0000

Late last year, I urged OJR readers not to forget the value of hyperlinking, to look for opportunities to link their stories to supporting information elsewhere on the Web. Today, I’d like to continue with that topic and write a bit about the thought process behind link content, that is, the decision about which text within an article to link, and to where.

Let me start by writing that I am not going to address issues about the design of contextual hyperlinks — issues such as whether to underline a link, what color to make it, etc. For those questions, I direct you to Jakob’s Nielsen’s outstanding Guidelines for Visualizing Links, which includes his usability guidelines for showing textual links.

How to decide what to link? At many news organizations these days, the decision is punted to a computer algorithm, which inserts links automatically into a story wherever it encounters a noun in the publishing system’s database of keywords or phrases. My wife passed me one such example which recently annoyed her.

It came from a Feb. 3 story in the Washington Post: “Sleepless in Amsterdam (And Munich),” about the orchestra conductor Mariss Jansons.

The offending link came at the end of the story, in a paragraph referencing the Pittsburgh Symphony’s final concerts with Jansons, in Carnegie Hall.

The hyperlink does not link to a review of these concerts, as the context of the sentence might imply. Nor does it link to Carnegie Hall’s website. Instead, it links to an automatically generated page of content about Carnegie Hall, from the Post’s site and elsewhere.

And that page is woefully thin, claiming, for example, “No results” for Carnegie Hall video or audio on the Web.

Oh, really?

The Post is hardly alone in relying upon an automated solution for hyperlinking. Indeed, this method is often used by webmasters to build massive numbers of inbound links to their pages on specific keywords, in attempt to vault those pages to the top of Google’s search engine results pages for those words and phrases. But littering your article pages with hyperlinks for search engine optimization purposes can cost a site audience share if it leaves its readers frustrated after they follow worthless links.

If you’re going to opt for automatically inserted links, you must revisit your algorithm from time to time, instead of adopting a Ron Popeil “set it and forget it” approach. Otherwise, you end up with a system like Yahoo’s, which today linked the first reference to the country “China” in a story about the upcoming Beijing Olympics to… a page listing China’s medal count from the most recent Olympics, in 2006. In Turin, Italy.

The three principle reasons for hyperlinking within an article are to cite an attribution, to provide context for an article, and to reward readers with an “easter egg.”

1. Attribution

Examples of this type of hyperlinking would be the court records I referenced in my Sept. 2007 piece for OJR, Don’t forget the value of hyperlinking, as well as research papers, census databases and other pages on the Web. (Like how I just linked my previous OJR story.)

Attribution hyperlinks provide readers with the opportunity to delve into original source information, at a deeper level than the writer provided in his or her article. That not only rewards the curious reader, it helps a writer and his or her news organization build credibility with a skeptical audience.

2. Context

Ideally, a news story will provide within its copy the context that a reader needs to understand the piece. But some stories are so complex that an author will not want to risk testing the patience of loyal readers by rehashing basic info they already know. In these cases, a link to background information can help bring new readers up to speed, while allowing more informed visitors to read ahead without distraction. (This is how Wikipedia’s built a ton of inbound links over the years, and why news organizations ought to consider more frequent use of standing reference articles on their websites.)

Contextual hyperlinks can links to the definition of an unfamiliar term (see, for some readers, the “easter egg” link above). They also can help explain gags that the author attempted but that some readers might not immediately get (see, for many *more* readers, the “set it and forget it” joke above).

3. Easter eggs

These, like the easter eggs hidden in DVDs and video games, are there just for the amusement of writer and audience alike. They defy too much explanation and analysis, as their purpose is simply to provide a little humor. Just, please, for the love of all that is holy, do not let it be a yet another Rick Roll.

Ultimately, the addition of useful hyperlinking within an online news story reflects the strong reporting of its author. If a reporter does not know of online pages with extra information relating to the story, he or she cannot link to them. But if you have that information, why not share it with those readers who are eager for it? In a hyper-competitive online news market, writers and their publishers need every advantage they can offer against other websites.

The test: When to link?

Though I promised not to tread on Nielsen’s turf, for clarity’s sake, two or more links should not bump against one another, leading to readers to believe that they are seeing just one link. Nor should linked text make up more than a small fraction of the text on the page. For that reason, online writer do better to link a key word of clause within a sentence, and rarely an entire sentence, when inserting a link.

To conclude, here is my four-question test for online writers to keep in mind as they consider how, and where, to link within their stories:

1. Does the URL to which I am referring the reader reward him or her with additional content that a reader of this story likely did not know, or know how to get easily?
2. Does the text I am selecting to link this text give the reader an obvious clue as to what the hyperlinked page will contain?
3. Am I using the shortest possible amount of text to provide that clue?
4. Would the content of the linked text, or the context surrounding it, reasonably mislead the reader into believing that the linked page contains something other than what it does?

If the answers to these questions are yes, yes, yes and no, you’re good to go with the link.

In defense of Facebook

Robert Niles — Wed, 13 Feb 2008 15:12:41 +0000

One my student editors here at OJR forwarded to me at New York Times piece reporting the latest complaints about Facebook’s policy toward its users who wish to cancel their memberships and delete their profiles.

Facebook does not provide a “one-click” solution for leaving the site. Members may delete content they’ve submitted to the site, one item at a time. For active users, tearing down all that content could take dozens of hours. And even then, Facebook retains much of your basic contact information, making it possible for other members to contact you through the site.

The frustration, even anger, that many such users feel toward Facebook is palpable. The Times quoted several readers who had attempted to delete their information from Facebook, with varying, but never total, success.

Facebook began as a social network for college students, many of who believed that what happens on Facebook, stays on Facebook. But as the social network has opened membership to those without .edu e-mail addresses, it’s become a much broader community, with many professional organizations maintaining groups and contact lists through the site.

Put it this way: Imagine you are a journalism student and you join OJR’s Facebook group in order to connect with editors whom you might be sending your resume and URLs in a year or so. Do you really want those editors on OJR’s Facebook group to be one click away from pictures of you, drunk, at some party last semester?

(Not that I am trying discourage journalism students from joining our Facebook group, of course…. Heck, there are likely a good many photos from various industry conferences that I am sure that those editors would not want one click away from a journalism student’s eyes, either.)

As a website publishers and editor, I’d like to offer a few paragraphs in Facebook’s defense, however. Granted, my defense is not absolute. Facebook has done many things over the years worthy of its member’s criticisms. (Beacon, anyone?) But publishers do have reasons to limit their readers ability to control information published on a website.

Editorial integrity

Not every website that accepts and publishes user-generated content (UGC) is a pure social network with no interest beyond providing registered members a place to chat amongst themselves. Many websites rely upon UGC to power wikis, discussion forums and other collaborative publishing forms that are read by a much larger number of individuals than ever post to the site.

Empowering registrants on such sites to delete all their submitted content with a single click threatens the integrity of those collaborations. How difficult would it be for readers to follow a discussion thread where every fifth response, say, or even the parent post, was deleted? No, this is not a problem on websites where discussion threads have no archival value. But that’s not always the case. Publishers who are attracting fresh traffic, and advertising revenue, based on informative discussion threads have powerful incentives not to allow readers to destroy that content.

I’ve lost count of the number of discussions I’ve had with colleagues in this industry about protecting the quality of interactive content by preventing access by those who would harm it with their contributions. But deletions can cause grave damage to online content as well. (See two past OJR articles on this topic, here and here.)

Deterrent against abuse

Here’s a scenario: You require readers to register in order to contact other registrants through the site. Someone registers, spams selected readers with who-know-what abuse, then immediately deletes his or her membership. It’s the online equivalent of a drive-by shooting.

If the publisher does not retain some of the offender’s information after his or she deletes the account, there might be little hope of ever catching them. Readers can figure that out, and sites that allow verbal drive-bys become far more attractive targets for this sort of behavior.

That’s why a policy of retaining user contact information, under certain circumstances, can help encourage more civil behavior on the site. Such a policy can also help a publisher resolve claims of impersonation and identity theft, since the publisher would have a record of who was behind an account that posted certain information, and when.

Publication is, well, public

All that said, Facebook’s argument in favor its retaining member’s information, that it makes reinstating an account easier, makes a much weaker argument. Members should learn that actions on a website have consequences. Quit, and you lose your profile, your lists, your blog. If you decide to rejoin later, you’ll have to do the grunt work of recreating all that you’d built before.

Yet keeping some of that content on the site, and public, can promote that same lesson, as well. Publication is just that… public. Therefore, people ought to be encouraged to think before they post. Maybe they take the time to adjust their account’s privacy settings, as Facebook allows one to do, to limit the information that people outside their approved social circle may see. Or, maybe, they decide that certain personal information ought not be on the Internet at all.

Of course, this is a lesson that ought to be taught before a person stats posting on a website, and not after that individual decides, “Um… maybe that online rant against my advisor wasn’t such a good idea, after all.”

Online publishers need to do a better job of promoting media literacy in the Web 2.0 world. As Newspapers in Education programs introduced kids to the content available in their local papers, perhaps we need a new program that introduces beginning Internet users to online publishing, to what happens to information that they post online, and what they can and cannot do to control that.

A publisher’s decision

A publisher could decide that he or she will allow readers to have complete control over the information that they publish to a site. Some websites explicitly cede ownership of and copyright over UGC to the users who created it. In those cases, publishers, to be consistent, should stay away from the Facebook model, and instead enable easy, user-controlled deletion of their content.

Whatever approach publishers choose, they can best protect themselves from Facebook-style criticism by taking every opportunity to communicate their policy to their readers, in plain language.

Some readers want an anonymous community that easy to join, and easy to drop. Others desire an online community with thoughtful comment from identified correspondents. There are as many options available online as there are publishers. Let’s just not lead readers to believe that their community lies in a different type of neighborhood than its publisher envisions.

Got something to say? Then say it!

Robert Niles — Tue, 22 Jan 2008 12:56:39 +0000

The skill set for managing an online community lies somewhere between carnival barker and drill sergeant. You’ve get the crowd’s attention, draw ‘em in… then train them and keep them in line once they’ve enlisted.

The job becomes even tougher for journalists, who want to draw traffic and elicit discussion while maintaining journalism fundamentals. It’s easier to open the doors for an anonymous shouting match than it is to craft a well-sourced and enlightening conversation.

Although we at journalism schools teach our students to write in an engaging and conversational manner, journalism is not casual conversation. The work we do to report and source our information tends to lend our words a formality beyond that offered by someone pulling their words from “thin air.” Ideally, we minimize that sense of formality in an effort to earn credibility for our work without intimidating the reader.

In addition, a reporter’s job, ideally, is to answer questions. If you’ve worked in a newsroom, think back to your first editor, or your basic reporting professor. When he or she told you to check out a lead, what would have been the reaction if you’d responded, “Uh, I don’t know”?

1) “Oh, gee, that’s okay.”
2) “Well, find the heck out!”

Journalists are trained from their first day on the job to find answers. That makes it hard for reporters to turn to their readers publicly and declare, “I don’t know. Help me out here.”

All these factors stand in the way of journalists running vibrant online discussion communities, even as our reporting skills and community know-how make us ideal candidates for those gigs.

We’ve offered dozens of articles on OJR over the years with advice on managing online discussion communities. And, as editor, I’ve tried to ensure that we’ve practiced much of what we’ve preached. Which is why I’m here to explain today a change we are making in the way that we are handling comments on the website.

Since I rewrote OJR’s content management system in the fall of 2004, OJR has required that readers register with the website in order to post a comment on the site. Our registration process is two-step, and requires registrants to retrieve a password from their e-mail accounts in order to log into the site.

In my experience, this system offers the best protection against spam bots and flame war trolls. The registration requirement keeps automated agents from exploiting input forms and the e-mail requirement deters anonymous hacks who want to cause trouble without consequence.

It’s not a perfect system; some spammers employ sweatshop labor to manually labor and submit comments to highly-linked websites. And even those who proudly attach their name to their comments can be jerks sometime. (Do I get some Fifth Amendment opportunities here?)

But, on the whole, I’ve found that this system, employed on other websites, helps keep the signal-to-noise ratio quite high, with a minimum of effort from site editors and moderators.

Yet a high signal-to-noise ratio doesn’t help readers that much when that signal remains weak. And in the relatively small world of the news publishing industry, sometimes people do not want their names attached to comments about their company’s vision and practices (or lack thereof.)

So, today we’re implementing a change at OJR: Readers may now submit comments to the site without registering.

That doesn’t mean we’re opening the gates to anything. Comments submitted by unregistered readers will be held for review before being posted to the site. And those comments will be identified by the poster’s IP address, rather than a log-in or reader’s name. (Unregistered readers will be able to include their name within their posts to OJR if they choose, of course.)

I hope that this alternative provides a way to readers to get introduced to commenting on OJR without having to go through the extra steps of creating an account and retrieving an account password. And that it provides a way for newsroom employees to add to the conversation in situations where they fear reprisals if their names were attached to their comments.

Of course, as journalists those of us reading the site will have to decide how much credibility to give to posts that come from unregistered readers versus those submitted by readers who have registered and supplied OJR with a working e-mail address. (You will know the difference because posts from unregistered readers will include an unlinked IP address, rather than a linked author’s name. Hey, at least we’re not slapping on the label “anonymous coward“.)

Ideally, from my perspective as editor, folks will try commenting using the anonymous system, decide that they like it, then register and becoming frequently contributing registrants on the site.

Spend more than a few days on the Internet, and you’ll see the whole range of conditions that sites impose on posting: from wide-open input forms without captchas to locked-down systems that require credit-card-verified user accounts.

Ultimately, we want more conversation, and less lecturing, on the site, and I hope that this change will move us toward that goal. And, as with everything on OJR, we reserve the right to change our minds — to make commenting either more or less restrictive than we will have it now.

Wanna share your experiences/frustration/success in running an online discussion. Hit the button and talk to us. Even if you haven’t registered yet.

Thought for the weekend

Robert Niles — Fri, 12 Oct 2007 12:00:08 +0000

I posted this to the Poynter online-news list earlier today, in response to a debate over the value of online tools for managing and searching databases:

Large-scale data analysis will not be a component of journalism in the 21st century, as it was with the CAR speciality in the late 20th. It will be the *core* of journalism.

Journalism, if it is to survive as a relevant force in modern society, must move from being at largely literary endeavor to a becoming a form of social science. Reporting for story is no longer enough. The world now is simply too complex to address with cover with colorful vignettes. This is our Enlightenment. We must report with the scope and accuracy of a social scientist, using the data collection and analysis techniques that those fields have developed over the past decades.

Yes, we must write the results of this research in a manner that the general public can access and comprehend. Our need for good writing skills will not go away. But news organizations darn well better be hiring and training people who understand databases and the principles behind scientific research.

Late 20th century CAR skills are not enough. Today’s journalists must also be able to design online applications that collect and process data in real time, empowering crowd-sourced publications that can allow instantaneous reporting of breaking news events, as well as thoroughly-sourced investigative features.

Don’t make the mistake of seeing database and application development simply as “publishing” or “design” skills. They now are *core reporting* skills, and every bit as essential in a newsroom as the ability to look up court records or conduct a one-on-one interview.

To spur the debate, cast your vote on my comment below, then fire back in the comments, if you’d like:

more at twiigs.com…

Can science blogs save science journalism?

Jean Yung — Tue, 09 Oct 2007 13:52:45 +0000

Journalists and scientists at Monday’s Scientific American sponsored panel discussion, “Does Science Get a Fair Shake in the Media?,” hosted at USC Annenberg, unanimously agreed that while the public is consuming more science reporting now than ever before, mainstream journalism is doing a lousier job of covering the field.

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

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

The problem is everybody

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What’s “news” in science?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Scientists are blogging. Why aren’t journalists listening?

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

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

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

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

The most popular science blogs are admittedly peppered with politics.

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

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

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

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

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

Who speaks for a website?

Robert Niles — Wed, 26 Sep 2007 11:08:26 +0000

Markos Moulitsas at DailyKos this week raised an important issue to which all journalists who cover the Web ought to show greater sensitivity.

Moulitsas complained about a Wall Street Journal article which claimed that Moulitsas’ website held a position on campaign finance reform that is, in fact, the opposite of Moulitsas’ position.

It’s not the first time something like this has happened. This summer, Fox News personality Bill O’Reilly attacked DailyKos over selected comments and diaries that appeared on the site, claiming that the site supported those views, while never noting that those posts were from readers who have no financial or editorial relationship with the site.

With thousands of readers posting diaries on the DailyKos website each week, it’s possible to attribute just about any political position to someone on the website. And there’s the key: the attribution ought to be given to the person on the website, and not to the website itself.

The old newspaper/TV newsroom model no longer applies in Web communities such as DailyKos. If a report appears in the news pages of the Wall Street Journal, a reporters at other papers can (and routinely do) attribute that report to “The Wall Street Journal” — no need to provide the byline of the reporter who wrote the piece. That reporter was assigned by the paper to do the piece, paid by the paper and his or her report edited by paper employees. Therefore, any reasonable person can attribute responsibility, indeed, authorship, of that piece to the paper.

That’s not the way copy gets published on DailyKos, or thousands of other Web communities. On DailyKos, a reader signs up for an account and, after a one week wait, can start posting diaries (i.e., a personal blog) to the website. One of the site’s editors might then read it in consideration for linking to it from the site’s heavily-read front page, but there is no other staff editorial review of the diary. DailyKos doesn’t assign topics to readers and doesn’t pay anyone other than a handful of editors and fellows for diaries, according to the site’s FAQ. Unless a diary contains copyrighted material or otherwise violates the site’s rules for posting, it will remain on the site, even if it conflicts with the owner’s political beliefs.

Attributing a report that appears on a site like DailyKos to the site itself is a bit like attributing a CNN report as “cable television reported today….” Online communities often operate as a news medium, rather than a traditionally staffed news publication. Other news reports about these sites, to be fully accurate, should reflect that fact by citing the individual author of information found on the site, rather than just the site itself.

To be fair, I must disclose that this issue is personal to me, because my wife and I have seen this happen to our websites as well. Doing a Google search last week, I found a professional violinist who was promoting his concert tour with a pull quote from a review attributed to my wife’s violin website.

Except that my neither my wife, nor one of the two other paid writers who work for her, wrote the review. It came from a blog that one registered user wrote on the site.

The potential for abuse is, of course, huge. What’s keeping a violinist from posting a blog to the site, reviewing one’s own show, then promoting that show with a favorable review from the site? Or keeping a candidate from claiming an endorsement from DailyKos based on the diaries of campaign workers and other supporters?

That’s why Moulitsas has declared “no one speaks for Daily Kos other than me. Period.”

Journalists ought to respect that, and sharpen their procedures for attributing information from online communities that allow publication from readers, as well as paid staff. Readers have a right to know the source of the information in your story, which demands that you not overlook, or withhold, relevant context about the identity of that source.

Here’s the checklist I propose:

1) When you find information you wish to cite online, note both the author of the information as well as the website upon which it originally appeared.
2) Make a good faith effort to determine the author’s relationship to the site. Read the author’s profile (often linked from the byline), or the “about us” or FAQ section of the site to see if the author of the information is the publisher, editor or other paid representative of the site.
3) If the author is not, the citation of the author’s information should be to “[the author], writing on [the site].” If the author is a paid representative of the site, then the citation should note that relationship, i.e. to “[the author], [the relationship] of [the site].”

Don't forget the value of hyperlinking

Robert Niles — Fri, 21 Sep 2007 10:51:03 +0000

Online journalism educators pay much appropriate attention to innovations such as wikis, blogs and crowdsourcing. But let’s not forget the journalism value of might have been the original Web innovation — the hyperlink.

Hyperlinks not only can help provide informative context to information within a story, they also can help keep a story alive long after its original publication.

Consider one example raised in Elizabeth Zwerling’s recent OJR story, Rewriting history: Should editor delete or alter online content?. Zwerling quoted Craig Whitney, standards editor for the New York Times, about reader requests for updates to old crime beat stories.

“A source will call saying the paper reported an arrest, then didn’t report the dismissal of the case,” Whitney said. “We can’t go re-report the who (sometimes 20-year-old) story and we can’t just take their word for it: ‘The judge threw out the case.’ ‘Where’s the judge?’ ‘He’s dead.’ ‘Where’s the record of the case?’ ‘In some archive in Fort Dix.’ We recognize it’s frustrating. We can’t do anything.

Hyperlinking provides journalists two new ways to help readers access the resolution of cases — ways that do not require altering old stories.

Why not assign the court’s case number as metadata to each article written about that case? Many online publishing systems build “related stories” links into each article, giving readers the ability to click to all other stories in publication’s archive with the same metadata tags. (We are doing that now on OJR — see the links at bottom of this article for an example.)

If reporters at your publication routinely assigned case numbers to crime or legal beat stories, then readers could click a link from that page and access all the publication’s other stories on that case. The publishing system, or your internal meta tagging procedure, might need to be modified to make the link reader-friendly. (Who’s going to know what’s behind a link that simply says “CA-192837465,” for example?) But such a system could help users follow the “thread” of a case far more easily.

Today, many jurisdictions post case files online, too. And that provides a way for readers to learn the resolution of cases that reporters might drop, as in the example cited above. Depending upon the jurisdiction, you might be able to “deep link” into your community’s court records for an individual case, using the case number. A savvy Web team might even be able to build that function into its Web story template, so that any story with a case number as metadata would automatically include a deep link into the court’s original documents for that case. (Again, to cite OJR as an example, this would be a similar process to how we deep link to Technorati and Google Blog Search on all OJR stories so that you can see who’s linking to them.)

Even if you can’t deep link into original court records, including the case number, or even just the case’s title, in your story empowers the readers to do that research on his or her own. The San Francisco Chronicle is one major news organization that’s now doing just that. Bob Egelko of the Chronicle wrote to me about his paper’s policy.

“Our policy, which is sort of a work in progress, has been to put case names and numbers at the end of stories on Supreme Court rulings, either state or federal… Lately, at my editor’s request, I’ve also been posting URLs for links to opinions of note, for state Court of Appeal decisions as well as Supreme Court rulings…. The legal papers, such as the Daily Journal and the Recorder, put the case information in the text of their stories, but I think they belong at the end of the text in a general-circulation newspaper, so the readers know where to find them.”

Sandy Johnson, Washington bureau chief for the Associated Press, told me that the AP began adding Supreme Court case citations in the mid-1980s, in response to the availability of commercial information databases, such as Lexis-Nexis. “The theory was that perhaps people would look up the case docs,” she wrote, via e-mail.

Today, with the Internet, readers have access to the largest database ever assembled. That access is undermining journalists’ traditional role as gatekeeper to community information. But if we are no longer to be the gatekeeper of the world’s information, we can become great guides to it. Why not serve our readers by showing them the connections from the data we collect to other, related useful information that exists on the Web?

Let’s not forget to hyperlink.