Far from the cozy classrooms of American journalism schools, students are venturing to remote and often dangerous parts of the world to learn how to dig up a scoop. The Ryerson Review of Journalism reports on one program that embedded students with soldiers in Iraq. Another school sent students to electronic waste dumps in Ghana, India, and China, potentially exposing them to toxic chemicals and roving bandits.

One student have hailed her out-of-the-classroom experience as “probably one of the best experiences I’ve had in journalism.” The programs have horrified others, including Klaus Pohle of Carleton University, who called the Iraqi embed trip “terribly irresponsible.”

What do you think? Should journalism students visit dangerous parts around the world? Or should war zones be left to the professionals?

Source: Ryerson Review of Journalism 

There's a rather inspiring look at Kickstarter over at Poynter:

As journalists face pay cuts and are asked to do more with fewer resources, it has become increasingly difficult for them to find the time and money to pursue large-scale enterprise stories or personal projects.

But some journalists are finding a way to make it work. In recent months, they have raised thousands of dollars on Kickstarter, the crowd-funding journalism site, but it isn't limited to journalists.

Launching projects on the site, journalists say, has given them the opportunity to pursue passions, think entrepreneurially about their work and find new ways of interacting with audiences, not only after completing a project, but while they're working on it.

"The truth is, you can get better results if you tap the collective brain power of a big group of people" on the front end, said Robin Sloan, who has raised about $7,000 more than the $3,500 he set out to raise since launching his book project on the site at the end of August. 

There is hope, friends. Now get out there and ask for some money!

Source: Poynter  

The New York Times has found a new source of funding for journalism: Isaac Mizrahi-designed raingear. In a memo to the company, New York Times president Scott Heekin-Canedy called the $99 coat and umbrella combo, “a summer sensation for The Times Store,” according to the Nieman Journalism Lab’s Zachary M. Seward. The New York Times has also tried creating a wine club as a way to cure their budget woes.

It’s easy to poke fun at the Times for the coat and the wine club, but Seward writes that this kind of merchandizing is “likely to play a significant role as news organizations scramble to replace print advertising revenue.”

The efforts are “a double edged sword” according to Megan Garber of the Columbia Journalism Review. Newspapers often engage in community building, and events like wine clubs—which USA Today and The Wall Street Journal are also trying—could be seen as an extension of that. And it’s not a big deal if the New York Times sells coats, as long as they use that money to fund cutting-edge journalism. On the other hand, Garber says, “it’s unfortunate that it’s not, strictly speaking, journalism.”

Both the coats and the wine club could also be seen as a replacement for the classified sections of newspapers, a revenue source that has been gutted by free services such as Craigslist. Classified ads, like the coats, had very little to do with journalism beyond funding the newspaper.

The real problem, however, is that media outlets haven’t yet figured out a way to fund their work using journalism. According to Garber, “I don’t know that we’ve proven that people aren’t willing to pay” for news. Newspapers simply haven’t figured out how to do it effectively, so far.

Sources:  Nieman Journalism Lab ,  Columbia Journalism Review  

Image from  the New York Times store . 

Leaving journalism? Let the good people at Time Out New York be your career counselors. After surveying experts in fields like public relations, philanthropy, they've come up with a list of possible next steps for any burned out or burned up journalists. Pick from publicist, editorial strategist, grant writer, project manager, or, my personal favorite (it's always good to have a backup plan): private eye. Is it as easy all over the country as it is in New York City to make that particular leap? Just a 2-hour walk-up test and $400!

This is no laughing matter of course. We want and need journalists to stay journalists—the good ones at least. 

(Thanks, Romenesko.)

Source:  Time Out New York  

Image by  ankarino , licensed under  Creative Commons .

Google and other internet companies base their businesses on giving things away for free. Chris Anderson, the editor in chief of Wired, has stepped up as the primary cheerleader for this kind of business model. For newspapers, however, this model doesn’t work so well. In an interview with the German newspaper Spiegel, Anderson admits, “In the past, the media was a full-time job. But maybe the media is going to be a part time job. Maybe media won't be a job at all, but will instead be a hobby.”

This doesn’t worry Anderson too much, however. He says, “If something has happened in the world that's important, I'll hear about it. I heard about the protests in Iran before it was in the papers because the people who I subscribe to on Twitter care about those things.”

Source: Spiegel 

Image by Daquella manera, licensed under Creative Commons.

Newspapers are being written off by scores of pundits like Clay Shirky, but author, McSweeney’s publisher, and Utne Visionary Dave Eggers is standing up for them. In an interview with Salon, Eggers says the young people he teaches in his 826 Valencia writing program give him hope:

“I think there’s a future where the Web and print coexist and they each do things uniquely and complement each other, and we have what could be the ultimate and best-yet array of journalistic venues. I think right now everyone’s assuming it’s a zero-sum situation, and I just don’t see it that way.

“Our students at 826 Valencia still have a newspaper class, where we print an actual newspaper, and we do magazine classes and anthologies where they’re all printed on paper. That’s the main way we get them motivated, that they know it’s going to be in print. It’s much harder for us to motivate the students when they think it’s only going to be on the Web.

  “The vast majority of students we work with read newspapers and books, more so than I did at their age. And I don’t see that dropping off. If anything the lack of faith comes from people our age, where we just assume that it’s dead or dying. I think we’ve given up a little too soon.”

(Thanks, Romenesko.)

Image by Erik Charlton, licensed under Creative Commons.

The formerly sacrosanct separation between editorial and advertising is slowly crumbling as the bottom drops out of media budgets. What was once referred to as a wall is now more like a fence, Natalie Pompilio reports for the American Journalism Review. And that fence has a front door, and some holes in it.

“While many experts agree the beleaguered news industry has to change its ways in order to survive,” Pompilio writes, “the question is how to do so while maintaining credibility and standards.”

Source: American Journalism Review 

Journalists are burying their heads in the sand, as newspapers spin their wheels in the dune, not realizing that the axles are already broken.

No wait.

Journalists are choking in a sea of turbulent media, struggling and gasping for air, as newspapers—that look less and less like lifeboats—navigate perilously close to a rocky shore.

One more try:

The ivory castle of journalism is being raided by a marauding hoard of bloggers and citizen journalists who are hell-bent on scorching the earth of the media, and then salting it so nothing will ever grow again.

Writers have come up with plenty of metaphors to describe the death of their own industry and, like the over-crowded media landscape they lament, there’s plenty of quantity just not a lot of quality. Beth Macy, writing for the American Journalism Review included some old saws and a couple of new ones in a recent article on journalists who have decided: “If the ship's sinking, she's going down with it.”

Here are a few:

"Some days you feel like you're slowly being buried up to your neck, but you're still there, still breathing."

"We're the ones left in the lifeboat. We made it off the ship, and we're out in the big ocean. But we're alive, and we're together, and one way or another, we are going to get to shore."

“It's not just about Budweiser any more. There are lots of microbreweries and, while the microbreweries might not pay as well, sometimes they are more rewarding."

"Just like with the economy, I think it's going to get worse, and then eventually something beautiful is going to grow up from the ashes."

And my favorite:

"I feel like I live in Middle Earth, and the dark cloud has covered the land.”

Image by Katherine Oneill,  licensed under  Creative Commons .

Source: American Journalism Review 

You can—but should you? In 2007 the global ecotourism industry ferried 55 million U.S. vacationers around the world on better, greener holidays. And every one of them should have been asking themselves that question. The editor in chief of Women’s Adventure, Michelle Theall, eloquently broaches ecotourism’s ethical dilemma in a candid, even haunting editorial.

“The polar bear alongside the boat makes a low chuffing sound,” Theall writes. “He dives to escape us. Each time he surfaces, he moves farther into open water, farther from land. A few passengers ask our guide, Wally, if we’re stressing the bear. I don’t hear his answer. I’m too busy kneeling low on the deck with my Canon. I stretch out one hand. The bear swims just beneath it, and he’s magnificent. . . .Only after I’ve clicked off about 100 images does it occur to me that Wally might be chasing this bear because of me. I’m with a travel magazine. I’m worse than global warming. I’m a journalist.”

 “Guilt’s a heavy souvenir,” writes Theall, who last saw the polar bear, confused and agitated, swimming out toward open water. Although Wally later reassures her that the bear most likely made it back to land, she finds a sobering ecotourism parable in the experience—what is legal is not always what is right.

Source: Women’s Adventure

Image by suneko, licensed under Creative Commons.

Reading Tom Zoellner’s book Uranium: War, Energy, and the Rock That Shaped the World (Viking) is a great way to wrap your head around many of the technical, geographical, and ethical issues surrounding nuclear power and nuclear weapons. By learning exactly how we came to turn an odd yellow rock into an agent of phenomenal promise and danger, you’ll be better informed to decide the wisdom of reviving nuclear power and letting nuclear weapons proliferate.

One of the book’s most memorable sections is about William L. Laurence, the public relations man who hyped the atomic bomb for the U.S. government. Laurence was a science writer for the New York Times who became so enthralled by nuclear weapons that he became their paid P.R. man while covering the science beat, a brazen conflict of interest that was kept secret until the day after the bombing of Hiroshima.

Zoellner chronicles Laurence’s almost spiritual conversion to the religion of the atom and unsparingly critiques his writing style, which was so over the top that the White House once sent back a press release draft for being too exaggerated:

Laurence never met a classical allusion that he didn’t like, or attempt to employ. ... Uranium was to Laurence, at various points, ‘a cosmic treasure house’ and a ‘philosopher’s stone’ or a ‘Goose that laid Golden Eggs,’ which ‘brought a new kind of fire that lead to ‘the fabled seven golden cities of Cibola.’ These messianic word-pictures of a life to come, though wildly overoptimistic , helped to create in the American public a generally positive and hopeful feeling about the dawn of the new atomic age.

Laurence, known as “Atomic Bill” to some, won a Pulitzer Prize for his Times series about the making of the atomic bomb—a prize that journalists Amy Goodman and David Goodman have said should be rescinded. Not only was Laurence on the War Department’s payroll, they contend; he also wrote stories that debunked the deadly effects of gamma ray radiation even as Japanese bomb victims lay dying.

Fairly, Zoellner notes that Laurence himself had misgivings about the “great forebodings” of the nuclear age, and once characterized the human race’s dilemma in his typically dramatic style: “Today we are standing at a major crossroads,” he wrote. “One fork of the road has a signpost inscribed with the word Paradise, the other fork has a signpost bearing the word Doomsday.”

It might have been as close to the truth as he ever got.

Sources: Viking/Penguin, Common Dreams 

In newspapers, if it bleeds, it leads. Thai newspapers take that axiom to an extreme, putting gory photos of death and human misery on front pages nearly every day. According to Global Post’s Patrick Winn, a recent newspaper front page featured, “a meth dealer splayed dead beside a toilet, a married couple shot dead and slumped in their pick-up truck—and for comic relief, photos exposing a con artist who donned flight uniforms to deceive shopkeepers and women.”

This constant barrage of violent images may be corrupting young children, needlessly shaming victims, and violating good taste, according to many in the country. Winn reports that a group of academics have started a campaign urging restraint.

The problem faced by these academics is that the violent newspaper industry in Thailand continues to thrive, unlike the newspaper business in the United States. In fact, the violent Thai newspapers continue to do better than their more modest alternatives. Still, the academics continue to be reminded of the importance of their cause nearly every morning. One doctoral student told Global Post, “I don’t like the criminal pictures. To have breakfast in the morning and see that? Ugh.”

Image by  Colin and Sarah , licensed under  Creative Commons .

Source: Global Post 

The world of science isn’t immune to sensational reporting. Jason Rosenhouse, a writer for Panda’s Thumb, takes science publications, especially New Scientist magazine, to task for making mountains out of scientific molehills. In a recent New Scientist article concerning disproval of Darwin’s theory of evolution, Rosenhouse writes, “[n]ever have you seen a science writer try so hard to make so big a deal from such meager materials.”

The editors made it the lead story (“Darwin Was Wrong,” the cover trumpets), yet the breakthrough is really just a small adjustment to previous theories, Rosenhouse writes, something already familiar to many who are up-to-date on Darwinism. Rosenhouse contends that this is the problem plaguing much of scientific journalism, where the predilection is to “sensationalize every small advance into a worldview shattering revolution.”

Image by simiezzz, licensed under Creative Commons.

Before the media imploded, journalists were allowed to spend months researching in-depth stories and exposés. Today, that style of journalism is “seen as taking too long and costing too much,” former managing editor of the Chicago Tribune James Warren writes for the Atlantic. The parasitic internet is to blame, according to Warren, where “attitude and attack are often valued more than precision and truth” and content is given away for free.

The problem that Warren doesn’t focus on is that newspapers, which still “serve as daily tip sheets for other media outlets,” were caught unprepared for the rise of the internet. It’s not as though they didn’t have time to adjust, back when they were still flush with cash. Here’s a video from 1981, when downloading a paper took more than 2 hours, and cost $5.00 per hour.

For those who’d call current sports journalism fluff: Gary Andrew Poole agrees with you. In an essay for the Columbia Journalism Review, though, he muses that it needn’t be. The shortcomings he bemoans—an emphasis on sensational stories, a move away from longer narrative work—aren't specific to sports writing, and neither are the market pressures he observes: the growing importance of web reporting, the increasingly rapid turnover of news items.

But Poole argues that sports writers are uniquely positioned to resist these trends. After all, fans can probably live without to-the-second updates on batting averages and shoulder injuries. A renewed focus on thoughtful analysis and creative storytelling might remind us why sports matter in the big picture, by exploring how they reflect our cultural values and imagination. Take a look at the article to hear Poole elaborate and to catch some insightful comments from readers, or consider other reasons why sportswriting has lost its game. 

Image courtesy of Kevin Klöcker, licensed under Creative Commons.

Amid a blizzard of headlines detailing the demise of quality journalism, there’s at least one spot of sunshine poking through the clouds: The New York Times is intensifying its environmental coverage with "a new, crack environmental reporting unit that will pull in eight specialized reporters from the Science, National, Metro, Foreign, and Business desks in a bid for richer, more prominent coverage," reports the Columbia Journalism Review.

The Times’ fortified environmental unit debuts in contrast to depleted environmental teams elsewhere. The L.A. Times significantly reduced its unit last year, and CNN went even further, axing its environment, science, and technology reporting staff altogether just over a month ago.

What kind of added depth can you expect from the Times’ new environmental all-stars? According to CJR:

One of the primary goals is to get more interesting, “big-thought” environment articles onto the front page, according to assistant managing editor Glenn Kramon, to whom [the unit’s editor, Erica] Goode will report. That means more investigative work, he added, and sifting through reporting and storytelling approaches that resonate with readers. “My goal is to make 'em angry enough to do something,” Kramon said.

Image by ReservasdeCoches.com, licensed under Creative Commons.

The National Conference of Editorial Writers recently released a list of their most-hated journalistic clichés, the mushy euphemisms and trendy phrases that they think ought to be banned. The St. Louis Post-Dispatch excerpted the survey, along with some of the editorialists’ biting commentary:

• Issues and challenges: “No one has problems any more. We have ‘issues.’ Likewise, we have ‘challenges.’…Why isn’t that a ‘problem’?”
• Faith-based: “Almost 100 percent of the time this phrase is used, the user means ‘religious,’ and they should just suck it up and use the real term.”
• Declined comment: “We’re not inviting people to tea parties here. We’re asking questions....They didn’t ‘decline comment.’ They ‘would not comment.’”
• Closure: “An appalling word that crept out from the woodwork of psychobabble where it squats, poisoning the language, above all in journalism.”

 (Thanks, Get Religion.)

Everyone makes mistakes, and journalists are no different. Some, however, go beyond the occasional typo and into the truly astounding. The website Regret the Error compiles all the best corrections from journalistic organizations, and every year gives awards for the most notable screw-ups. Among the 2008 winners was this gem from Reuters:

Celebrity chef Antony Worrall Thompson has apologized after accidentally recommending a potentially deadly plant in organic salads.

Another outstanding contender was this unfortunate mistake from the New York Times:

A picture last Sunday with an essay about a crack house in Fort Greene, Brooklyn, was published in error. The three houses in the picture are on the same street as the crack house, but none of the three figured in the essay.

How embarrassing.

When my mom arrived at work in Chicago on Tuesday morning to news about Illinois governor Rod Blagojevich’s arrest, she immediately picked up the phone and called her sister in Springfield to gush. Finally! The dirty governor was going down. They crossed their fingers that the story would get national play.

Boy has it ever. A good political scandal doesn’t have to work too hard to capture public attention, and in this case, the connection to president-elect Barack Obama gave Blagojevich’s take-down extra currency.

Not surprisingly, the governor’s attempt to auction off Obama’s Senate seat emerged as the dominant storyline in news about his arrest. What has received less attention is a brewing journalistic scandal in the laundry list of complaints against Blagojevich. For anyone concerned with media ethics, it can’t be overlooked.

Clint Hendler at the Columbia Journalism Review has a nice, detailed account of what we know so far about discussions between Blagojevich’s chief of staff, John Harris, and an unknown “financial advisor” to Chicago Tribune owner Sam Zell. The talks in question involve the governor’s request that the paper fire members of its editorial board and editorial page staff, who have published unflattering pieces about him, in exchange for state aid in selling the Chicago Cubs and Wrigley Field, which are owned by the Tribune Company.

Charges against the governor disturbingly indicate that the paper was “very sensitive to the message.” As CJR points out, Zell has a lot of questions to answer if he intends to salvage a smidgeon of his fledgling news organization’s reputation. For instance, “Did the financial advisor make the deal that Harris implied he did?” And a couple of months ago, when the paper almost ran a story about the Blagojevich wiretaps, was Zell involved in its decision not to?

Washington Post columnist Kathleen Parker sums up the disgrace of it all nicely:

Apparently, the caveat that one should never do battle with someone who buys ink by the barrel has been rendered meaningless by “financial advisers” in the Tribune Tower, where Zell's yearlong reign of error is leading one of the nation's greatest newspaper companies to ruin.

Image by theogeo, licensed under Creative Commons.

“Overload!”, the Columbia Journalism Review’s current cover story, is every bit as overwhelming as its subject.

In a lengthy, thorough explication, Bree Nordenson lays out the results of a study commissioned by the Associated Press to track the news consumption of young adults around the world. The gist of the findings is grim, but hardly surprising: There’s more information out there than ever before, and this is not a good thing. “The American public is no better informed now than it has been during less information-rich times,” Nordenson writes.

Or, in numerical terms: “Two hundred and ten billion e-mails are sent each day. Say goodbye to the gigabyte and hello to the exabyte, five of which are worth 37,000 Libraries of Congress. In 2006 alone, the world produced 161 exabytes of digital data, the equivalent of three million times the information contained in all the books ever written.”

The way information, particularly news, is disseminated has been revolutionized, for better and worse, by the internet. Context has disappeared; data usually travels in a chaotic tsunami and arrives “unbundled” and often indecipherable. “These days, news comes at us in a flood of unrelated snippets,” Nordenson writes.

The rest of the article examines a number of different trends affecting the current state of news consumption: the limits of human attention, the role of media in democracy, and the new role of journalism. The piece does end on a relatively optimistic note, however; the final section, titled “Why Journalism Won’t Disappear,” contains this easier-said-than-done prescription: "If news organizations decide to rethink their role and give consumers the context and coherence they want and need in an age of overload, they may just achieve the financial stability they’ve been scrambling for, even as they recapture their public-service mission before it slips away." 

The field of institutions and public figures endorsing Barack Obama is getting really crowded, and it’s a motley assortment. Some fairly unlikely personalities are in the tank, including Christopher Buckley, Christopher Hitchens and Colin Powell, as well as conservative publications like the Record.

Spend a few minutes perusing the Wikipedia page listing Obama’s endorsements, and you might visualize a rowdy cocktail party whose guest list includes editors from nearly every major U.S. newspaper (including the Chicago Tribune, marking its first endorsement of a Democratic presidential candidate in its 161-year history); hundreds of current and former governors, mayors, and legislators; CEOs, actors, rock stars, and authors; and even the plumbers’ union (presumably Joe the Plumber was not consulted since, well, he’s not a plumber).

The New Yorker provided a characteristically thorough endorsement of Obama. The New York Times argues for the relevance of newspaper endorsements. And there’s a nifty map illustrating the distribution of this year’s newspaper endorsements and comparing it with 2004’s. 

Several cast members of HBO's The Wire are stumping for Obama. (Gbenga Akinnagbe, if he’s half as terrifying as the drug lieutenant he played on the series, will make a very compelling canvasser). An absolutely fabulous coterie of fashion designers has pledged allegiance. And ostensibly apolitical publications have weighed in, most recently the science magazine Seed.

Leading the ironic-endorsement pack is onetime McCain campaign advisor Charles Fried, whose decision to back Obama is partially due to McCain’s “choice of Sarah Palin at a time of deep national crisis” (via Talking Points Memo).

All of which begs the question: Who’s in poor old John McCain’s corner? The list of newspapers endorsing him is considerably shorter than Obama’s. There’s Steve Forbes, of course. And then there’s the small faction of Hollywood conservatives (say it ain’t so, Gary Sinise!).

Image courtesy of Philip (Flip) Kromer, licensed under Creative Commons.

The press has finally had enough of the McCain campaign’s decision to cloister Sarah Palin away from interviews and press conferences. Reporters cried foul yesterday in a widely publicized blowup over who would be allowed to witness Palin’s meetings with world leaders in New York City. As Ta-Nehisi Coates predicted on the Atlantic blogs, “even the meekest, most bespectacled, nerdiest kid has a breaking point.” 

The McCain campaign has been garnering headlines lately by attacking the press, pointing out how reporters are “in the tank” for Obama and criticizing them for being too hard on Palin. The problem is, Jeffery Goldberg writes for the Atlantic blogs, “If Sarah Palin becomes vice president, she will presumably have meetings with people who are scarier than Michael Cooper, the Times reporter who seems to have the misfortune of covering her today.”

Even conservatives have begun to wonder about the McCain-Palin game of hide-the-candidate. Rod Dreher, who blogs as Crunchy Con, writes, “If she can't answer questions like any normal politician, what business does she have on the ticket?” Daniel Larison writes on the American Conservative that the strategy “confirms not only that Palin is not ready for the VP spot but that the presidential nominee himself regards his running mate as little more than window dressing.”

McCain may view her as “window dressing.” He may also view her as “a delicate flower that will wilt at any moment," which is how Campbell Brown described Palin’s treatment on CNN (video below). Brown eloquently attacked the McCain campaign from a feminist perspective, calling on them to “free Sarah Palin,” and allow her to talk to reporters. “You claim she is ready to be one heart beat away from the presidency,” Brown declared. “If that is the case, then end this chauvinistic treatment of her now.”

Vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin’s now-public emails could fundamentally change internet and free speech laws in the United States. Last week, Palin’s Yahoo email account was broken into and many of the emails were posted on Wikileaks, a website designed to publicize leaked government documents, the media gossip blog Gawker, and other websites. The McCain campaign has called the incident a “shocking invasion of the governor's privacy and a violation of the law.” Writing for the conservative blog Powerline, John Hinderacher cited the crime as, “Just another reminder that there is no sense of decency on the Left.” The issue has been widely covered in the mainstream media, but the real implications of the event may not be felt for years to come.

“I predict that some day we will look back on this breach as a watershed event in the history of statutory Internet privacy,” Paul Ohm writes for the law blog Concurring Opinions. The leak of Palin’s emails could motivate Congress to pass strict privacy laws, but also to punish websites like Gawker and Wikileaks, possibly igniting, “a fierce First Amendment debate.”

Under current laws, Gawker and Wikileaks are likely protected from prosecution, but that hasn’t stopped readers from sending various threatening emails. One of the few inoffensive messages read, “Get a good lawyer, in fact get at least a dozen… you are going to need them when the Secret Service and the FBI come to visit. Jerks!” Orin Kerr, a professor at the George Washington University Law School, disagrees. Kerr writes for the Volokh Conspiracy: “While it's unseemly and perhaps rather nasty to post it, it's normally not a crime to post evidence that was obtained as a fruit of crime”

That didn’t prevent justice officials from trying to intimidate journalistic organizations. The Associated Press, one of the many organizations that has reported on the incident, reports that “Secret Service contacted the Associated Press on Wednesday and asked for copies of the leaked emails, which circulated widely on the Internet. The AP did not comply.” Kurt Opsahl writes on the Electronic Frontier Foundation blog Deeplinks that the Associated Press and Gawker are likely not in any legal trouble, for now: “While the individuals who broke into Gov. Palin's personal email account have likely broken the law, news media… are entitled under the First Amendment to republish any newsworthy email messages.”

The incident has dredged up a fair amount of animosity toward the press, in spite of the legality of posting the emails. Andrew Grossman writes for the conservative Heritage Foundation, “just because it’s legal doesn’t mean it’s right.” On his show for Fox News, Bill O’Reilly said, “I’d like to see the website [Gawker] prosecuted.”

“Congress often enacts privacy protecting legislation only in the wake of salient, sensationalized, harmful privacy breaches.” Ohm write for Concurring Opinions. This could be one such incident. Should Congress decide to attack websites that post leaked documents, it runs the risk of infringing on the right to free speech and fundamentally changing the internet for the worse. The chances of this happening are even higher should the McCain-Palin campaign win the 2008 election. If that is the case, the true victims of this crime are still unknown.

 Image by  Matthew Reichbach , licensed under Creative Commons.

My name is Jake and I am addicted to addiction memoirs. So of course I am caught up in the sordid web of David Carr’s harrowing, sprawling, unsentimental, booze- and drug-addled, New-York-Times-best-selling, luridly compelling addiction memoir, The Night of the Gun.

It’s more than simply an addiction memoir, however, and Carr takes great pains to assure himself as much as his readers that he is not simply throwing another perversely boastful drug confessional into a literary market already glutted with the genre. He is primarily concerned about the accuracy of his memory, warped as it is by time and chemicals, and the questions of subjective versus objective truth that both plague and compel writers of nonfiction—issues which seem academic until they arise, perennially, amidst scandals involving fabricated memoirs.

Because he is a reporter—an award-winning writer for the New York Times—Carr gathers as much hard evidence as he can about the hard living he did in the 1970s and 80s while working as a journalist in Minneapolis. He pores over police and court records and interviews friends and witnesses from the era, but suspects even before he’s done that his project will most likely remain incomplete.

What emerges instead is an absorbing tale of addiction and recovery that does dwell a bit too long on Carr's countless bad decisions, recounting war stories long after the reader has gotten the point: he was a miserable asshole. Carr also veers dangerously close to the clichéd narrative perils of ruin and redemption that so often befall memoirs, but always manages to pull away before it’s too late. The second half of the book, tracing his slow recovery, is intriguing for its discussions of the paradoxes of substance abuse and cultural attitudes toward addiction.

Ultimately, The Night of the Gun isn’t so much about drugs and addiction as it is about something more universal: our relationship to our own histories, and how our memories are altered and ablated by time’s inexorable, unsympathetic progression.

User-generated news projects continue to flourish and compete directly with mainstream media. Recent developments in the world of citizen journalism underscore both the promise and the pitfalls of this emerging field.

The global news site Allvoices (“the first open media site where anyone can report from anywhere,” according to their banner) is upping the ante by offering cash incentives for popular news stories. Allvoices users who submit articles gathering 100,000 page views over six months will receive $1,000, and a million page views in the same period will net the author $100,000.

Meanwhile, Mediabistro reports that CNN’s three-year-old citizen journalism offshoot iReport is gaining traction, with “85,000 people registered as ‘reporters.’” The site’s “watershed moment” came in April 2007 when it ran a cell-phone video of the Virginia Tech shootings.

Finally, Global Voices passes along news of YouTube’s citizen journalism contest, which is soliciting three-minute videos “about someone in your community you believe should be known by the rest of the world.”

I’m all for the proliferation of diverse alternatives to the mainstream media, and citizen journalism looks like it’s here to stay, for better or worse. iReport provides a repository for eyewitness news and user videos, and YouTube’s video contest is an intriguing experiment. But the flaw in Allvoices’ incentive model seems obvious: To what lengths will people go in order to rack up page views for that cash reward? How will Allvoices ensure the credibility of its stories? If a winning story is revealed to be false, but the page views still add up, does the author still get the money? The scheme is reminiscent of Gawker Media’s business model, which also raises ethical questions.

Even when tenacious amateur journalists with good intentions place themselves on the front lines of an event—rather than, say, snarking from afar à la Gawker—they can’t always be counted upon to produce accurate stories. At Open Democracy, Evgeny Morozov provides a thorough commentary on citizen journalists’ coverage of the Russia-Georgia conflict. While mainstream news organizations scrambled to get reporters to the Caucasus in the conflict’s first days, native bloggers began filing regular dispatches. But problems quickly emerged, Morozov argues. The first was trust: News reports have appeared on blogs with little or no credibility or previous reporting history. Furthermore, internet access and technological resources are scarce in the region, and average citizens lack the budget necessary to capture quality video footage.

None of these shortcomings are likely to spell the end of citizen journalism, however, and that’s a good thing. In the coming years, methods of amateur reporting will no doubt be refined, the kinks ironed out, sound practices developed. Cash incentives like the ones offered by Allvoices are probably not a good idea, but that conflict of interest is not unique to amateur journalism—it’s no secret that the corporate media world is full of people placing profit ahead of journalistic integrity. Yes, there are problems created by such a huge and diverse range of enterprises in citizen media, but the cream will rise to the top, as user-driven media hubs like the Sunlight Foundation and the Center for Citizen Media have already demonstrated.

Image courtesy of sskennel, licensed under Creative Commons.

Last week, Vin Crosbie, an outspoken critic of the so-called “digital revolution,” predicted that more than half of the nearly 1,500 daily newspapers in the United States “won't exist in print, e-paper, or Web site formats by the end of the next decade.”

As blogs take over print columns and advertisers study up on their HTML, the bricks and mortar of the physical newsroom are left in awkward limbo. Office work takes up less space than it did even 10 years ago, with computers that can slide through cracks in the sidewalk and rolodexes that amount to nothing more than pixels. Those lucky small-publications writers who haven’t yet been laid off are increasingly working from home, leaving behind decorated cubicles and monthly office birthday parties.

The Mother Jones website features graphic designer Martin Gee’s glimpse at one such dying newsroom, the San Jose Mercury News. Gee's photographs document a fluorescently lit ghost town, from its ever-blinking voicemail alerts to a graveyard of unplugged monitors. He captured the detritus of a shrinking staff from April to June 2008, when he was caught in a round of layoffs and left the paper. (View his entire "Reduction in Force" collection here.)

One must wonder how much hollow air our skyscrapers contain behind their mirrored windows, and if, in our age of continuous development, we might look toward existing space to get the job done.

Images courtesy of Martin Gee.

Over at Slate, Jack Shafer wonders why news outlets are sending 15,000 reporters to this year’s Republican and Democratic conventions. “[T]hese political gatherings tend to produce very little real news,” Shafer writes. “Yet the networks, the newspapers, the magazines, and the Web sites continue to insist on sending battalions of reporters to sift for itsy specks of information.”

It’d be one thing if that were, say, 15,000 news outlets each sending one reporter. But it’s not. Even Slate, Shafer says, is sending eight reporters to Denver and six to St. Paul.

In a year of blistering cost-cutting and layoffs, and with remaining reporters spread ever more thinly, is this really the best use of newspapers’ dollars? Might many of those 15,000 reporters not be better utilized to, say, cover local news during the two weeks of the conventions?

“As news organizations dwindle,” writes Jeff Jarvis at BuzzMachine, “this is an irresponsible use of resources and it only shows how the industry’s leaders are tied to doing things the way they always did them. That’s what will be the death of journalism.”

It’s probably fair to say that what happens inside convention walls is thoroughly rehearsed, uninspiring, and un-newsworthy. But what’s surprising about that? Most reporters worth their salt know that, as with any well-orchestrated media circus, the good stories lie well beyond convention parameters. Minnesota Public Radio’s Bob Collins urges journalists to take a few detours: “Look for a better location to learn the real stories behind the script from which the Dems and Republicans want the media to read.” 

(Thanks, Romenesko.)

It’s not often that someone is awarded for resigning, but that's precisely why Glen Mabie received this year's Ethics in Journalism Award from the Society of Professional Journalists (SPJ). Mabie, the former news director of a TV station in Eau Claire, Wisconsin, stepped down in January after the station made a deal with Sacred Heart Hospital to run specific stories about the facility’s employees and services.

The Association of Health Care Journalists and the SPJ warn that these stories violate media ethics and unfairly influence the public, writes Trudy Lieberman for the Columbia Journalism Review. People are “unaware that the five o’clock news story on the latest imaging device used on patients at a local hospital—perhaps reported by the TV anchor—is really an ad in disguise.” There is no objectivity: when a facility is paying for the coverage, no alternative viewpoints are allowed.

Lieberman’s rundown of similar incidents in the media shows that they are more common than one would think or hope. She also points out that biased health reporting perpetuates the health care industry’s obsession with obtaining expensive equipment instead of focusing on patient education and care.

The Columbia Journalism Review recently inaugurated “Parting Thoughts,” an ongoing series of letters from former journalists writing on the biz and its future. In the handful of letters published thus far, there are a lot of wise words—and surprisingly few embittered ones.

Some write about their path to an entirely new career, like Tracy Gordon Fox’s elegant letter describing her shift from crime reporter to nursing student, and John Biemer’s explaining why he chose med school over the Chicago Tribune. Others share their thoughts on the downfall of newspapers, and most offer some form of advice (encouraging, terrifying, or some combination of the two) to all the would-be journalists out there. Here’s former Wall Street Journal editor Winston Wood:

If you’re interested in journalism, even now, give it a shot. It’s a great way to learn about the world, develop communication and analytical skills, and provide a public service. But over the long haul, there’s more stability and better money to be made panhandling.

For the latest episode of the UtneCast, I sat down with film director Robert Greenwald during the 2008 National Conference for Media Reform to talk about the blurring line between advocacy and journalism.

Greenwald rose to fame with his fiery polemics against Fox News in his 2004 documentary OutFoxed, and private contractors in Iraq in his 2006 documentary Iraq for Sale. Celebrated by many on the left, and reviled by many on the right, Greenwald’s production company, Brave New Films, has focused on the internet in recent months, releasing short films attacking John McCain and his allies.

For more information on the 2008 National Conference for Media Reform, visit the Utne.com media archives from June.

Listen Now:

Writers and bloggers are blurring the already thin line between advocacy and journalism. In a workshop at the National Conference for Media Reform today called “How Independent Media Creates Change,” Jane Hamsher, the founder of the popular blog Firedoglake, spoke about her work as “somewhere between activism and journalism.” She set out to “keep journalists honest” in her acclaimed work during the Scooter Libby trial. Speaking on the same panel, Jefferson Morley of the Center for Independent Media drew a sharp distinction between the two camps, putting himself squarely on the side of journalism.

The question is: Where’s the line? I spoke with Tracy Van Slyke, director of the Media Consortium, and she said that the blurring of advocacy and journalism could be a good thing. She said the mix hearkens back to the original intent of journalism, which is to “inform and to activate” people. At the same time, she stressed that journalists should be transparent about their biases and affiliations. Van Slyke, who directs a network that includes outlets such as In These Times, Air America Radio, and Grist.org, aims to “build the echo” within the progressive media.

There is, however, a danger in building a left-wing echo chamber that Van Slyke acknowledges. As the Democrats begin to take power in Washington, the progressive media can’t sacrifice its role as a watchdog of people in power, regardless of party affiliation. This is where the mix could become problematic, when a journalist’s role as an advocate strains journalistic integrity.

For more on the National Conference for Media Reform, click here.

Should journalists vote? The debate may be “one of the most tedious subjects in journalism,” writes Politico editor John Harris, but it’s one he recently hashed out with two of his colleagues anyway. Mike Allen, the newspaper’s chief political correspondent and a non-voter, kicks things off:

I’m part of a minority school of thought among journalists that we owe it to the people we cover, and to our readers, to remain agnostic about elections, even in private. I figure that if the news media serve as an (imperfect) umpire, neither team wants us taking a few swings.

Harris, an unashamed exerciser of his franchise, responds by disentangling the sacred ideal of journalistic objectivity from everyday fairness.

A journalist can cast votes and have opinions, even strong ones, and still be fair. We do it by letting people have their say, by not putting our thumb on the scale with loaded language, and by having the modesty as reporters to admit that information is always fragmentary and it is our role to tell stories but not to pretend that we are society’s High Court of Truth.

—Lisa Gulya

Image by billaday, licensed under Creative Commons.

Finally, a social networking site aimed at the cranky old-school reporters who were forever bitching about “those Internets,” until they realized they were on the verge of losing their jobs to a bunch of 20-somethings with Facebook accounts who are willing to work for a Jimmy John’s sandwich and a free Internet connection. Ryan Sholin, of blogosphere renown, took pity on them and created Wired Journalists.com to help them learn about The Google. And judging from the turnout on the message board, it’s working. Onward, crusty journalists!

—Morgan Winters

Image by monoglot, licensed under Creative Commons.

A job posting at Gawker, the notorious Manhattan media and gossip blog, has attracted more than 11,000 page views since it went up on November 30. That puts it a few thousand page views behind “The Broadcast Media React to Jamie Lynn Spears’ Unexpected Knocking-Up,” but well ahead of most other posts on the site.

Why does this matter? Because Gawker recently started paying its writers based on the number of times posts are viewed. I wonder if whoever published the job post will see a little boost in his or her next paycheck.

The new pay-per-page-view system ticked off at least one of Gawker’s editors, Emily Gould, who quit at the end of November.  “It really gets in your head in this weird way because you're getting so conscious of how many people are reading what,” she told the New York Times. “You get focused on being sensational and even more brain candyish than Gawker was to start with.”

Gould’s departure coincided with that of two other editors, and Gawker’s staffing overhaul is inspiring some major changes. Here's a clip from the much-viewed job posting I mentioned above:

  It's no longer enough to take stories from the New York Times, and add a dash of snark. Gawker needs to break and develop more stories. And the new managing editor will need to hire and manage reporters, as well as bloggers. . . . Think of Gawker less as a blog than as a full-blown news site. The right candidate will oversee Gawker's evolution.

Hold up. “Breaking and developing stories”?  “Reporters”? “Full-blown news site”? This coming from a site that pays writers per page view?

This is a far cry from what I learned in journalism school. Of course journalists are supposed to get paid, but there’s a higher goal too: Informing the public. Journalists are supposed to write truthful information that the public needs to know, even if it’s not necessarily what they are most interested in reading. But by paying writers per page view, Gawker is encouraging its “reporters” to write sensational headlines that shock rather than stories that are important or take thought and time to read. 

As long as it’s paying per page view, Gawker should just stick to what it’s good at: being an entertaining distraction from my workday.

—Sarah Pumroy

For fun background reading on the history of Gawker, check out these articles at n+1 and New York Magazine.

Before the Santa Ana winds abated and slowed the pace of the wildfires in Southern California, anyone near a newspaper or television got a glimpse of how grave this last fire really was. For a region that lives every day with the peril of natural disaster, this one struck an even deeper chord of helplessness for residents.

The region's alt weeklies have churned out some really impressive wildfire reporting. To echo the San Diego CityBeat's own admission, their coverage might not have the facts and figures of the exhaustive dailies, but the alt weeklies' focus on individuals and narratives has set its articles apart. CityBeat’s Eric Wolff, for example, chronicled the conversion of San Diego’s Qualcomm Stadium into a camp for evacuees, and Pat Sherman followed horse owners as they rushed to remove their animals from the fire’s path.

Check out some of the best alt weekly reporting here:

“The World on Fire,” by Judith Lewis, L.A. Weekly

“Extreme Makeover: Spending the night at an evacuation site means a lesson in organization,” By Eric Wolff, San Diego CityBeat

“Four-legged Evacuees: Horse owners scramble to find emergency boarding space,” by Pat Sherman, San Diego CityBeat

An index to the San Diego CityBeat articles on the wildfires.

 Also check out:

A roundup of the ethnic media’s wildfire coverage at New America Media. 

—Eric Kelsey

At a forum I attended this weekend, everyone generally agreed that the internet is the most effective mass-communication tool in the history of mankind. Now it’s up to journalists (including citizen journalists) to figure out how to use it. The event, called “Life After Newspapers,” was organized the Twin Cities Media Alliance and attended by the media reform organization Free Press and was held in the Minneapolis downtown public library.*

Most of the people agreed that it’s currently possible to bring more worthwhile stories and voices to more people than ever before. Janis Lane-Ewart, executive director of the excellent community radio station KFAI, talked about bringing women and minorities into the media landscape. Her work seems like an uphill battle, but she spoke of a coming generation of media savvy voices, poised to change the face of news.

Not everyone was as optimistic about the power of young people to save the media. Nora Paul, director of the Institute for New Media Studies at the University of Minnesota, spoke about the lack of skepticism displayed by many of her students. She said she was struck by how many people passively swallow the information they find on the internet without asking the important questions: Who is writing this, what are they telling me, and why do they know what they know? Great journalism isn’t going to stop well-funded spin experts from sending out lies and half-truths over the internet, and without a healthy dose of skepticism, that information can be dangerous.

With everyone talking about where great journalism will to come from, Steve Perry of the blog the Daily Mole, posed a hypothetical: Maybe it won’t come at all. With a heaping mound of cynicism, Perry suggested that good journalism might simply cease to be.

Robert McChesney, the keynote speaker and one of the nation’s premier media experts, struck a middle ground between the optimism and the pessimism surrounding the state of the media. McChesney walked a fine line between realizing the threats to the media and telling people that the threats can be overcome.  Local blogger Paul Schmeltzer has posted an interview with McChesney over at the Minnesota Monitor.

McChesney’s point is basically this: There are huge threats to free speech, independent media, and information in general. But that doesn’t mean people should give up. The organization he founded, Free Press, has won significant battles for independent media lately. McChesney said he sincerely believes that independent media is winning and will win the fight for net neutrality. Concerned citizens simply need to step up and make their voices heard.

—Bennett Gordon

For more on the fight for media reform, read Keith Goetzman’s piece Big Media Meets Its Match from the July / August issue of Utne Reader.

* Correction: The event was organized by the Twin Cities Media Alliance, not the Free Press as originally reported.