What's in the works for the next 12 months at OJR?

This week marks my first anniversary as editor of OJR. I’d like to think that we’ve brought you a fair number of innovations and improvements during the year, but I’m not writing today about the past. Instead, I’d like to focus on the next 12 months at OJR.

Transparency helps nurture the relationship between a publication and its readers. So I would like to use the occasion of this anniversary to kick around some ideas for OJR, to get both your feedback, and, I hope, your help in developing them.

When I interviewed for this job, I shared my vision of OJR not simply as a publication, but as a community, where newsroom journalists, freelance writers and independent Web publishers could gather to learn from each other how best to report and write news online. For eight years, I’ve been soliciting content from my Web sites’ readers. In Internet terms, that makes me a hoary codger who’s too darn old to change his ways now. So get used to being asked to write, as well as read, around here. Consider today’s article our first effort in “open source” journalism.

Publishing technology

Let’s start with technology. In the past year, we’ve completely rewritten OJR’s publishing system, and we did it in-house. That gives us the flexibility to create and experiment with new publishing formats, such as the invitation-only wiki Mark Glaser used over three days a few weeks ago to create his industry discussion on video journalists.

I’d love to make OJR your guinea pig for online publishing innovations. Having worked in large, corporate newsrooms, I know that newspaper dot-commers need solid data to make the case for their organizations to adopt such tech improvements. And, also having worked as a solo publisher, I know that many lone eagles don’t want to waste their limited time on something that isn’t going to work. So what tech ideas are out there that you’d like to see us cover… or implement? Video wikis? OPML feeds?

I’m hoping that OJR will debut podcasts later this fall, after students return to USC’s Annenberg School of Journalism for the upcoming academic year. We’ll have a fresh supply of students writing original reports for our news blog, and I’m expecting a few of them to try crafting audio reports and interviews that we’ll podcast through OJR’s RSS feeds.

Susannah Gardner just wrote us an informative look at various blogging tools. In the next few weeks, we’ll be converting her article into a wiki, so that you, our readers, can help us keep the information in that article up to date. I would also like to have a similar article soon on larger online content management systems, so OJR can serve as a starting point for making technology decisions about how you can publish your information online. Let me know what we need to do to make that happen.

Story ideas

Can online journalism be a distributed process?

Many online journalism pioneers are developing grassroots journalism sites based on the model of readers as correspondents, reporting and writing full takes of stories. But, in my experience, the number of readers who are willing to contribute content to any site is inversely proportional to the amount of work that site asks them in order to do to make that contribution.

Plenty of readers will blog about their personal lives. Many will send in a short note about a newsworthy event they’ve witnessed. But only a tiny fraction will show the initiative to do a journalist’s work – to routinely conceive, report, organize and write news stories. And those that do are often motivated by evangelizing an ideology, instead of uncovering facts. Many newspaper dot-com veterans can recall the enthusiasm with which many of us embraced “community publishing” in the late 1990s, only to see those sites die as few community groups stepped forward to maintain them.

Does that mean that these grassroots journalism initiatives are doomed? Hardly. A site doesn’t need hundreds of correspondents to succeed – just a handful can provide informative coverage. But this does suggest there’s great potential in harvesting the power of even larger numbers of readers as reporters in a more distributed process.

Many publications and online writers have developed ways to use their readers as sources. (Heck, OJR wrote more than three years ago about some guy doing that to cover theme park accidents.) But what the industry needs is a model that enables online journalists to gather and manage large reader/source networks with minimal technological expertise. We need something that does for distributed news reporting what Blogger did for online journals. Few of us have the time or expertise to build a new database and Web front-end for every story we want to cover.

Who’s talking about this flavor of online journalism? Who’s doing tech work that could be applied to this? Am I totally full of it with this idea?

Mathematical journalism

The world’s grown too complex for journalists to cover using only literary skills. A generation ago, forward-thinking journalists developed computer-assisted reporting techniques, uncovering stories from public databases, including crime reports, school test scores and census data.

Unfortunately, CARR has remained a specialty within journalism, rather than a core skill. Part of this can be attributed to journalists’ collective hostility toward math and science. I’ve been training journalists in basic math for a decade, and in my experience, it is far easier to teach someone with high math aptitude how to report and write a journalism story than it is to teach a typical journalist math.

Why not, then, try to recruit more math-savvy students into journalism? Perhaps we could, if the typical j-school or newsroom were not so openly hostile to them. The industry’s made commendable progress during the past generation to improve its diversity in race, gender and ethnicity. But we continue to wisecrack about our collective inability to use math or basic scientific research principles in our reporting, helping to drive away young people with those skills who might help us. Even when we keep our mouths shut, traditional journalism curricula include few courses to challenge a math-savvy student who wishes to develop his or her skills.

Have any j-schools developed courses involving post-calculus instruction? What might a curriculum in mathematical journalism look like? I’ll propose that online instructors ought to take the lead in developing such courses. Not only do online folks tend to be more tech-savvy, online provides a more creative (and less hostile) environment for young CARR-savvy journalists in which to work.

What can we do at OJR to lead an effort to create industry standards for an online-based mathematical journalism degree? Should we even try?

Does truth derive from observation or ideology?

This might seem far too philosophical a question for a journalism review. But it reflects a core issue that divides America politically and that fuels much media criticism today.

Daily journalism provides little opportunity to dig into philosophical conflicts that reveal themselves in headlines, especially in cash-strapped newsrooms where managers value double-digit profit margins over insightful news. Journalism reviews, however, can create that opportunity.

One obvious way that this particular question plays out in the United States is in skirmishes between certain religious faiths and science. Millions of Americans reject evolution, global warming and other scientific observations due to their faith in a particular religion or political ideology. And millions of other Americans cannot comprehend why those Americans trust their faith over a scientist’s observations. Bloggers on both sides then attack journalists for real and imagined slights to their point of view.

But don’t get fooled into seeing this philosophical battle only in terms of religion. The question of observation vs. ideology fuels other conflicts over the practice of our craft. How should we report news stories? Should we employ something like the scientific method and start with a declared null hypothesis, which we test through observation? Or should we start with a blank slate, assuming no truth, and gather anecdotes from representatives of the ideologies that our ideology leads us to consider relevant, leaving the reader to draw a conclusion?

OJR can’t resolve this or any other fundamental philosophical question to the satisfaction of all readers. But OJR can illustrate how these divisions are fueling disputes within our industry, so that our readers can better understand them.

Who’d like to start?

And furthermore…

The popularity of online news is driving many legislatures to reconsider open-records and other sunshine laws. At the same time, online writers are seeking protection under shield laws written decades before Tim Berners-Lee thought up this whole Web thing. Who’s got our back here? And who’s trying to stab it?

Some independent Web publishers are enjoying immense market influence as grassroots consumer sites attract millions of readers. Who’s trying to buy influence among them and who’s already sold out? Who’s saying no and putting the interest of readers ahead of sources?

Those are a few of the ideas bouncing around in my head. My e-mail inbox remains open for your story suggestions, too. You can send me a private message via my personal page on OJR.

Writers wanted

If any of these ideas, or another you’ve thought of while reading this piece, interests you, please drop me a note. I am always looking for freelance writers to cover issues of interest to OJR readers. (And, no, I don’t yet have anyone specific in mind for the story ideas I’ve written about today.) Our standard rate for articles is $500 and our writers need to sign an independent contractor’s agreement with the University of Southern California, which publishes OJR. Writers from other countries are welcomed, though USC cuts checks only in U.S. dollars.

Money wanted, too

USC Annenberg has graciously supported this publication for years and the university’s support for the publication remains strong. But let’s face it, the news business ain’t charity. At some point, even journals have to demonstrate tangible market support by bringing in a few bucks.

We’ll be experimenting this year with responsible ways to bring in extra revenue to help pay for those freelance articles we’ll commission. (And, of course, the more we bring in, the more we can increase our standard rate for freelance articles and original research.) Nothing’s been decided yet, but don’t be surprised if you see ads or sponsorships on some pages of the site in the upcoming year as I look for new sources of revenue to preserve and expand OJR. I promise, in whatever we do, to build and respect the “wall.” If we run advertising, we’ll outsource its sales and delivery to another company, so people editing the site will have nothing to do with those ad sales or placement.

Ultimately, I would like to see OJR establish a foundation or endowment to support this site on an ongoing basis. Soon, you’ll see links on OJR article pages inviting you to contribute to ensuring OJR’s continued presence online. I know that some of our readers have managed to make more than a few bucks publishing online, too. If any of those readers (and you know who you are) would like to establish a personal legacy in support of high-quality online journalism, USC and OJR would welcome your financial support.

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So that’s what’s on my mind today, as I look forward to the next 12 months at OJR. What do you think? As always, just click on the button below to leave a public comment or click over to my personal page to send a private response.

Thanks for reading,
Robert

About Robert Niles

Robert Niles is the former editor of OJR, and no longer associated with the site. You may find him now at http://www.sensibletalk.com.

Comments

  1. Dan Richardson says:

    Thanks for writing to us…I

  2. Ultinately, what I think this debate reveals is that too much of the news is written by people who have little clue what the heck they’re writing about. They can’t provide that kinds of intellectually challenging context, because they don’t have it. So they collect quotes, one from Ideological Column A, one from Ideological Column B, spell-check, turn it in and move on.

    That’s a lazy and, ultimately, dishonest way of reporting. But news business managers accept it, because it is cheap and, at least superficially, fair.