Howard Owens

Horace Greeley to "Friend Fletcher" in April, 1830:

Begin with a clear conception that the subject of deepest interest to an average human being is himself; next to that he is most concerned about his neighbors. Asia and the Tongo Islands stand a long way after these in his regard.... Do not let a new church be organized, or new members be added to one alrea! dy existing, a farm be sold, a new house raised, a mill set in motion, a store opened, nor anything of interest to a dozen families occur, without having the fact duly, though briefly, chronicled in your columns. If a farmer cuts a big tree, or grows a mammoth beet, or harvests a bounteous yield of wheat or corn, set forth the fact as concisely and unexceptionally as possible.

Is there a better description of what we now call hyperlocal journalism?

When, as a journalist, you possess information that will have some impact on society, will effect people's lives, or otherwise rises to some level of salient import, do you have an obligation to publish or broadcast that information immediately, or is it OK to hold it to serve the business needs of your newspaper or network?

I'm ruminating on this question in light of the past week's dribbling of the Katie Couric interviews with Sarah Palin.

Couric interviewed Palin prior to Sept. 24. The first two segments can be viewed and read here. I didn't think much about the two-part interview last week. After all, a TV news show has limited time. As much as I believe in web-first publishing, I could give a pass to CBS for holding the interviews for prime-time viewing first.

Then rumors began to circulate that there was more material not yet released. First, that Palin had not been able to name a Supreme Court case besides Roe vs. Wade. Then, yesterday, the video came out of Palin's inability to name a single newspaper -- not the Anchorage Daily News nor her hometown Mat-Su Valley Frontiersman.

Thus, we learned that CBS had withheld newsworthy quotes from the public.

Ethically, is that acceptable?

I doubt a single reader would disagree with these two assertions: That Palin's answers to Couric were news, and that the answers could have an impact on both on the election and on public perceptions of Thursday night's VP debate.

So let's consider the consequences of how CBS handled these answers.

If CBS had released the full interview, either in broadcast or on the intertubes, on the first day the impact might have been:

• The shock of all the stupidity coming out at at once could have even more quickly torpedo people's opinions of Palin, McCain and the GOP; or,
• It would have given both sides more time to dissect what it all means prior to the Thursday night debates, thereby giving voters more time to draw more nuanced conclusions (if that's even possible in this case).

But the most important factor in a decision to hold the full interview or not is the impact it has on the politically important expectations game.

Experienced political observers know how it works: Lower expectations so that a candidate can rise to the occasion and look better than people believed he or she could. It's a tried, true and infallible political tactic.

But in dribbling segments of the interview, CBS is able to incrementally lower the expectation that Palin is anything other than a dimwit who is neither engaged nor informed enough to serve as VP.

Loyal GOP partisans, of course, will believe that CBS has handled the interview as it has merely to more broadly and deeply embarrass the governor.

Experienced journalists know that it is unlikely that CBS executives have any political motivation whatsoever. The decision to incrementally release the interview has only one motivation: Ratings.

Which brings us back to the central question: Is it OK for a journalist or a news organization to make decisions about newsworthy events based on business concerns?

Again, clearly, the Palin interview is full of information people need to know.  Is it OK to withhold that information for any reason other than a journalisticly sound reason?

Let's be clear: I'm not being inconsistent with things I've said in the past. The modern journalist cannot be completely divorced from concerns about ratings and readership, but that has more to do with story selection and presentation than what facts a reporter or editor chooses to release when.  My question is very narrow: When you know something to be true, what is your journalistic, ethical obligation to inform the public of that information?  Is it immediate, or can you hold it?

In a Twitter discussion about this topic today, Howard Weaver raised a challenging question about newspapers holding investigative packages for Sunday publication. In 140 chacters, what I think Howard was getting at, is it a business decision to hold for Sunday?

I guess it could be, but Sunday is also the day the most people take the most time with the printed word. If you have a significant issue that you want people to time with and think about, Sunday publication makes a lot of sense. It may be the ethically superior publication day for big-package stories (not so much on the web, though -- newspaper.com site traffic plunges on weekends).  You're also talking about a package that is designed to revolve around a coherent thesis.  The Palin interviews were chalk full of individual news nuggets. There was nothing investigative about it. It was good, probing questions by Katie Couric, but it produced news, not a deep and broad policy review.

Regular readers know, I believe in web-first publishing. I've always advocating web-first as an audience growth strategy, but it also has a journalistic component. Journalists should not withhold information from the public based on artificial deadlines.  When you know a fact that is newsworthy, you should tell people. To withhold the information is to rob readers and viewers of time to act on or ruminate over the news.

In the days prior today's bailout vote, you could surf through Google news and find any number of stories that told us that the U.S. economy is in a crisis, and that spending $700 billion to bail out Wall Street bankers was unavoidable.

Or you could turn on the television and watch just about any news show and hear the same thing.

What you rarely found or heard was any serious questioning of whether the crisis was anywhere near the proportion George W. Bush said it was, or if the bailout was really necessary, or if the bailout would work, or if, maybe, the bailout might make things actually worse.

All of these are legitimate, skeptical questions that at a time when the nation's attention was nearly focused solely on questions around the economy, the mass of mainstream media failed to cast a doubtful eye on anything government officials and elected representatives were telling them.

Oh, occasionally, Ron Paul got a little air time, but for the most part, if you wanted to find any commentary or reporting that was anything other than an Amen Chorus for Bush and Paulson, you had know where and how to look.

Pulitzer-Prize winning journalist David Cay Johnston put it this way:

Journalists, and specially Washington journalists, are generally behaving like lapdogs and generally only asking detail questions around the central premise. This should concern us all. This is the same kind of behavior that we saw during the run up to the War in Iraq, when there was no shortage of critical facts and skeptical sources, but only the usual stalwarts in journalism reported skeptically.

Johnston went on to note that when Tom Brokaw opened the previous Sunday's Meet the Press with, "Our issues this Sunday: The American financial system in deep crisis."  Not, "The president says," but rather a bald statement of fact.

Why, at a time of great decision -- just like the run up to the invasion in Iraq -- when America needs more, not fewer, skeptical voices, did U.S. journalism lap up whatever gruel they were fed?

I blame Walter Lippmann.

In the 1920s, Lippmann sought to weed out of journalism some of the excesses of jingoist reporting that he witnessed during World War I.  He elevated objectivity to a professional moral code, that reporting and writing should be neutral. It was not the role of the reporter to interpret.  He should merely regurgitate the facts as observed or offered up by official sources.  Lippmann did not trust a singular human to exercise critical thinking about complex issues.

His objectivity code smacks of a certain elitism -- that first, only official sources should be allowed to speak, and only specially trained professional journalists could be trusted to transmute their words and deeds to an easily led (or misled) public ("manufactured consent").

While Lippmann's formulation of objective journalism has not completely quashed advocacy journalism, or watchdog reporting, it has become the standard practice of the work-a-day reporter.

No where is it more insidious than inside the beltway.

Think back to the run-up to the Iraq invasion. Any number of White House and Pentagon officials could be found quoted -- often anonymously -- in the leading publications on the tactics, strategy, necessity and urgency of the war, but few contrarian voices were heard.  The arguments against the war were left to anti-war celebrities on television shout shows, lefty blogs and scattered protesters.  There was nothing like an expert calling bullshit on most administration assertions in mass media reporting.

Whether you supported the war or not, the complete lack of alternate voices in much of the reporting of America's newspapers should cause you concern.

Many critics of the war before and since have referred to Bush's push for invasion as "the rush to war."

That phrase echoed through my mind much the past week as Bush and Congressional Democrats hastily set to work on a $700 billion bailout of New York's financial institutions.  It is no stretch to call it a "rush to bailout."

The original proposal was a three-page document; Democrats had doubts, so they (working with likeminded Republicans) tried to fashion more complete legislation, but did so through secret meetings (some) and not a single public hearing. No expert witnesses were called, and no outside voices who distrusted the "rush to bailout" were called to testify.

Yes, the press just lapped it up.  In fact, you risked being labeled a crank if you even questioned the necessity of the bailout.

It smelled -- it smelled of politicians eagerly doing favors for some of their biggest donors, and for the elite press corps protecting their elite patrons.

Just as prior to the Iraq war, there were some lonely voices raising alternate view points. The McClatchy News Service did one story -- but only one, that I can find -- mildly doubtful of the Bush narrative.

"It's more hype than real risk," said James K. Galbraith, a University of Texas economist and son of the late economic historian John Kenneth Galbraith. "A nasty recession is possible, but the bailout will not cure that. So it's mainly relevant to the financial industry."

Unless you were either smart enough or engaged enough to seek out alternative versions of reality, you wouldn't know that economists such as Galbraith had serious doubts about the extent of the crisis, or that some experts doubted a bailout was necessary, or that a bailout would work, or that the bailout rush was smart (yes, that is a WaPo link, bless their souls -- one somewhat skeptical story), or that the bailout would profoundly change the role of government and private capital, or that the bailout might make matters worse.

You would think that a press corps that believed itself badly burned by Bush on Iraq would be a little more skeptical of the president now. It might demonstrate just how firmly entrenched Lippmann's brand of official source journalism is in most reporters' minds.

It should be asked, even, whether the dearth of skeptical reporting helped feed a sense of hysteria, even to the point of propelling today's 777-point DOW drop?

And has the reporting so far helped Americans better understand how the current financial conditions might directly effect them? I've had friends, closer to retirement than I am, express fear about losing value in their 401(k)s without a hint of recognition that the bailout may actually have caused those assets to lose more money and result in a slower recovery.

It could be argued that the American people, who pressured representatives to reject the bailout, saw through the clamor and clouds, but if you spend time reading comments on newspaper web sites, angry constituents reacted more viscerally than logically.  If you support the reform, you should be concerned that the lack of depth in news coverage also failed to clearly communicate why the bailout was necessary and wise.

Lippmann may have done the republic and a journalism a service by offering an antidote to the excesses of yellow journalism, but maybe its time for editors to recognize that their reporters are smart enough (or should be) and readers perceptive enough to allow those gathering the facts and doing the writing to provide context and meaning to events and what officials claim. That may not be objective, but it will lead to a better informed, more responsive public.

Reporters who own their jobs with an entrepreneurial spirit and energy will also own each story they do. What does story ownership mean?

• You generate your own story ideas.
• You decide the angle, who to talk to, where to gather information and what you do with it.
• As you gather information, you find and save any relevant links.
• You decide what other assets the story needs -- video? a map? a pdf? a database? a graphic? pictures? You then either create or get created those assets.
• When you write the story, you include appropriate links (to names, locations, documents, previous stories, blogs and previous coverage).
• You gather all of the assets, publish the story in draft form and let an editor know it's ready (with the expectation that the story will be live on the web within 10 minutes).
• When the story is published, you socially bookmark the story as appropriate; you send the link to bloggers you know who might be interested; you e-mail the link to sources or readers you know would be interested.
• After the story is published, you follow and participate as appropriate in the online conversation, either via comments on the story or on other sites (blogs and forums).
• You take everything you've learned and repurpose the story for print.
• If the conversation brings to light any new significant information, you plan a new story and the process starts over.

Editors, are you writing this into your job descriptions?

Which of these stories would you rather read?

After Fleeing Psychiatric Unit, Ex-Officer Is Killed in a Gunfight With Police

Carrying two handguns and a Bible, a retired city police officer was killed in a gunfight early Tuesday on a residential street in Staten Island by former colleagues who returned his fire, the authorities said.

When the shooting ended, the officer, Jason Aiello, 36, was slumped at the wheel of a cousin’s truck on the street in front of his home in the Rosebank neighborhood, with his wife, Rachel, sitting next to him, officials said. His three young children were in another family car across the street.

Or:

Unhinged ex-sergeant holding bible and gun is slain by cops in front of family

Suspected of setting up his best friend for a mob hit, a retired NYPD sergeant armed with a gun and a Bible went berserk Tuesday before cops killed him in front of his wife and kids.

The death of Jason Aiello in a blizzard of two dozen bullets capped a dramatic chain of events that began with a "crazed" visit to FBI headquarters and ended with his escape from a Staten Island psych ward.

The 36-year-old father of three apparently suffered an epic mental meltdown in which he spouted Scripture, tried to abduct his pajama-clad kids and then fired on police, authorities said. He fired eight shots; cops fired 19.

Both stories are factual an unbiased. One is just much easier and engaging to read. The first is the New York Times, the second, the Daily News. While the Daily News posted a decline in the latest Fas-Fax, it had been a steady climber prior to that. The Times has been on a down hill slide for some time.

Not all of the readership loss of newspapers can be blamed on the Internet (especially considering that the declines started before there was a commercial Web). Isn't it fair to ask that some of the problem might be the journalism itself?

Doug Fisher covers similar territory this morning.

The Ventura County Star's Scott Hadly is reporting from Iraq.  I haven't been following his coverage, but I met none of it matches the intimacy and immediacy of this letter he wrote to a fellow reporter.

In one short letter, I got a better idea of what's going on in Iraq from 1,000 New York Times stories.

This is how you write for the modern reader.  Journalists need to learn the lesson.

I'm not saying profanity is required, but if you're writing about something like what Scott went through and some profanity doesn't at least cross your mind, then you're probably not putting enough of yourself into the story.

FWIW: I don't know Scott. He joined the staff after I left Ventura.

There continues to be lots of chatter about the closing of Online Journalism Review.

I used to work with Robert Niles at E.W. Scripps.  He's a fine person and did an admirable job with OJR given the resources he was given.  So no slight intended here ...

I've been an OJR reader long enough to remember what it was like under the stewardship of my friends Matt Welch and Ken Layne.  Now there's an era of OJR that is bygone and worth lamenting. (Lots of history in this Google search link.)

Too bad Annenberg couldn't stomach an online journalism review that was lively and provocative.

I just had to say that because in all the hoopla about OJR closing, the great work of Welch, Layne and the other writers of that era seem sadly to have been forgotten.  It's an angle in Mark Glaser's piece that seems to be missing.  If OJR is worth saving, it's worth remembering what it was like in the Welch-Layne era and maybe trying to recapture that spirit.  Online journalism could use some free-spirited iconoclasts now more than ever.

I don't think Niles was ever given the opportunity or the resources to continue on in the tradition of Layne and Welch, which makes it all the more vital to remember the golden era of OJR if there's going to be any talk of bringing back.

I'm seriously behind in my gmail inbox ... can't sleep tonight for some reason, so thought I would try to widdle the pile down a bit ...

Found an e-mail from John Solomon, who wrote to say he was inspired by the wired journalist MBO post, which led him to start a blog, In Case of Emergency Blog.

While John said he's completed 7 of the 10 objectives, he said he was just wired enough prior to the post that he doesn't qualify for the gift card.

But here's the interesting thing -- to me at least -- there is a direct connection, I think, from this post of mine to this post of his.  Let's just say, it's nice to see the Department of Homeland Security have such a keen interest in blogs.

I'm with Yelvington and Sholin on this one.

Christopher Wink sends this e-mail:

What is the line with all of these online networking devices? I read with interest through my Google reader your post on increasing one's searchability online , which was exactly why I started my Web site back in December. I have a Flickr account and Youtube and, as you know, LinkedIn and some others, use my actual name and use these products, all with links to my Web site, pushing all traffic to one place, so I can control what potential employers or others interested see and know about me.

But I never had a Facebook account or MySpace page. I dismissed them as slop and wastes of time. But I also know they can definitely direct traffic to my site. ...But do I want these readers? ...Do I sign up for Vimeo, and Twitter and a Tumblr - I understand their purposes, but don't think they serve me - though, I'm sure, they all, in their own way, would bring traffic to my site. So, do I set these accounts up and let them sit - knowing I won't really use them - just so I can have the opportunity to push to my site, or not? ...Should I pick and choose, or truly optimize and control my name search?

In a slightly related topic that I would be interested to hear your thoughts and could provide good blog fodder - when it comes to Google name searches, any advice about name variations? Howard Owens is fairly straightforward, but my byline is Christopher Wink, plenty of people call me Chris Wink - which happens to be the name of a founder of the Blue Man Group, and a pesky competitor for name recognition. People with names like James, John and Jack, and certainly names beyond the Christian tradition change form with popular nicknames. That is pesky for branding.

Do you think it's best to pick one name and run with it, or should I try to compete with Christopher and Chris Wink for example.

Just some thoughts. Discard or ignore any or all of them, but I would be interested to hear your thoughts and thought they might be good for your blog, too.

This is a good topic to cover because while I believe it's an ironclad rule that every journalist should own his or her name -- his identity, his brand --  in search, the are variations and nuances that I don't think are as important, but maybe others do.

You could drive yourself crazy trying to join all of the thousands of social networking sites out there.  Just joining and creating a basic profile helps, but there's also value that comes from participation and you lose some of that by over extending yourself.  There are only a handful of sites you need to join to get sufficient SEO juice, especially if you're blogging, because that is naturally going to generate links to your site.

As for owning variations of your name -- it's fine if you can do it, but I think most editors are going to understand if you don't own Chris when you go by Christopher, especially when there is a prominent person using the variation.  Anybody searching for you specifically, will probably default to the brand you've established for yourself.

One of the rules of branding is being consistent. If your brand is going to be Christopher Wink, you should always be Christopher Wink.  I'm always Howard Owens.  I'm never Howie Owens (though this post just gave me an idea -- not a bad idea to own the domain name variations of your name if you can get them, and I was amazed to find nobody had ever registered howieowens.com, so I just did; I already own howard-owens.com).

Anybody have any thoughts? How deep do you have to dive?  And in the future, will you need to dive deeper to stay competitive?

So this bit on Romenesko caught my eye today:

SPJ's Neil Ralston says: "I encourage media executives who are looking for the next wave of high-quality journalists to pay attention to the winners. ...These young men and women represent some of the best that journalism programs have to offer."

Being a media executive, I was curious -- do these students represent the future of the news business?

The best way to find out is to Google them -- what can Google tell us about their online life? Do they have their own web sites? Their own blogs?

Any active online person is going to own his or her own name on Google ... and if you're not active online under your real name, you're not living up to the journalistic ideals of transparency and honesty.

So, I Googled these winners.

Here's what I found:

• Meaghan Peters -- Several Meaghan Peters in Google. Not clear if any of them are the journalist Meaghan Peters.
• Camden Swita -- Shows up as a blogger on Washington.edu. Has a MySpace page (warning -- auto play music). Also, several bylines on various sites.
• Claire St. Amant -- May have her own web site, but hard to tell. There's nothing there. Lots of online bylines, but little evidence of blogging. Demerit points should be given for letting the best SEO for your own name go to a Frat Boy News blog (site not work safe in some environments).
• Ryan Kost -- Some bylines in Google, but no personal blog I could find. He did blog -- if you can call it that (the writing being stiff, traditional reportorial writing) while an intern (that's a guess) for the Oregonian. If that's the same Ryan Kost. UPDATE: See note from Ryan at the bottom of the post.
• Jessica Sondgeroth -- Again, some bylines. She has what we would think would be a unique name, but I'm not sure the Jessica Sondgeroth on Facebook, who is from Arizona, is the same Jessica Sondgeroth.
• Katherine Harmon -- Fairly common name. Not much here for this Katherine Harmon.
• Jeremy Herb -- This might be a Jeremy Herb blog. And Jeremy is apparently involved with this news blog.
• Alex Stawinski -- Some bylines in Google.
• Sarah Neff --This looks like her blog, and it's a good one.
• Jared Fields -- Not much in Google to tie any thing this Jared Fields.
• CJ Moore -- Common name. No evidence of this CJ Moore.
• Mark Viera -- Ditto
• Bill Oram -- Ditto
• Aaron Zundel -- Is at least on LinkedIn. Plenty of online bylines, but no evidence of blogging.
• Petra Hendrickson -- Lots of Google hits. Apparently, no blog.
• Phil Hands -- Nothing obvious here. Oops. Big mistake on my part. Here's his site. See his comments below.
• Samuel Ayres -- Hire this guy. He owns his name.
• Philip Cannon -- Ummmm ...
• Jenna Lo Castro -- Folks, we have a blogger. First Google result, too. There are not many entries, but, hey, look at the competition.
• Imani Jackson -- One byline on the first page of results.
• T.J. Tranchell -- This is good, an entirely personal blog. We'll forgive the fascination with crappy '80s metal. Lots of hits on his byline, too.
• Brandon Scheller -- Is this Brandon? We're not sure.
• Mark Dent -- College byline first hit, then not much.
• Dylan Farmer -- This might be Dylan on FB.

I'll let somebody use Google the non-newspaper writers. Frankly, I've grown too discouraged to continue.

So, who do we blame, the students or the journalism programs?

Any students interested in getting it together online, check out Wired Journalists.

UPDATE: Shortly after my blog was hacked and the site went down for several weeks, Ryan Kost sent along this note:

I came across your blog while I was searching for the SPJ press release about the national awards. I haven't been able to read your entry on the SPJ winners other than the google snippet and the headline. For some reason your site isn't loading at the moment. In any case, I definitely wouldn't consider myself super wired, but if you're interested in editing your blog, I do have a small Web presence. My senior thesis was an online discussion of change (it includes video, soundslides, audio and text) that I created with another student journalist. You can see it here: www,definingchange.net. We haven't been able to make it too google-able because we created it using only Flash. Still, we've been trying to get the word out about it, and any little bit helps! Also, for what it's worth, I had a Web site up (ryankost.com), but I really hated the layout, so I took down while I'm designing another.

So, Ryan gets extra points for ego surfing and reaching out to demonstrate further what he's been doing online. I also heard from T.J. Tranchell.  And note the previous correction on Phil Hands.

Yesterday, I thought about doing a piece on the NYT's link-bait story on the stresses of blogging, but I thought ... "I'm busy today. Why bother?" I knew bloggers would be all over it, and of course they are.

But just now, I read the following quote on Romenesko and it gets me fired up anew. My take on the story is that it demonstrates clearly where big-time Journalism has gone astray, and the quote from Larry Dignan confirms it:

I had doubts about the premise. Yes, blogging is stressful. Yes, it can be insane. But is it any worse than being a corporate lawyer? How many of those folks dropped in the last six months? How about mortgage brokers? Hedge fund traders?

Here's the thing -- the Times could have had a very interesting story about big-name bloggers, and aspiring big-time bloggers, and what some of them go through to achieve and maintain success. The Times could have done that with no sensationalism, no heart attacks, no news peg. The story could have just been interesting and informative. That's news, too.

Instead, the Times tries desperately to pin two deaths to blogging, but then knowing it has over-reached, still tries to weasel out of it.

To be sure, there is no official diagnosis of death by blogging, and the premature demise of two people obviously does not qualify as an epidemic. There is also no certainty that the stress of the work contributed to their deaths. But friends and family of the deceased, and fellow information workers, say those deaths have them thinking about the dangers of their work style.

That's not serious journalism. That's weasel-word journalism. When you have to write a paragraph apologizing for the angle you're taking on the story, there is something ethically wrong with your approach to the story.

The poorly chosen angle reminds me of NYT's botched McCain coverage a few weeks back.

It's shoddy journalism like this that drives people away from newspapers and reminds them of why they distrust us, why they hate us.

Here and now, I'm nominating Matt Richtel and his editors for a Dart.

Congratulations to my friend, Scott Karp, whose fledging business took a big step forward this week.

Today we’re announcing that Publish2 has raised $2.75 million in Series A funding from Velocity Interactive Group — Jonathan Miller and Ross Levinsohn will be joining our board (along with Jeff Jarvis and Luke Beatty, who have been close advisors).

Note that along with Howard Weaver, Jack Lail I'm an advisor to Publish2.

Publish2 has a lot of potential to both help bring to the top of the link pile the best of online journalism, but also give newspaper sites a deeper source of content.

I point to TechCrunch all the time -- both in this blog and in my public presentations -- as an example of a journalistic blog.

It is a blog that breaks news, real news, important news. It is also a blog that is full of opinion. It is also a blog that is winning in the marketplace of readers and revenue.

TechCrunch represents both the present and the future of online journalism, of a reinvented journalism.

Today, Erick Schonfeld, a respected and serious journalist who joined TechCrunch six months ago after his previous employer, the magazine Business 2.0, went out of business, blogs about blogging for TechCrunch.

Working at TechCrunch is a completely different experience. For one thing, I no longer write long-form, narrative journalism. There is not much time for story-telling (except for weekend posts like this one). It is mostly breaking news, reporting facts and providing analysis. At TechCrunch, I am completely focused on blogging, 24/7. With a few exceptions, no single post is very difficult to write (unlike an in-depth magazine article that can require 50 interviews and weeks of travel, for instance). But taken as a whole, blogging is actually harder. That is because the blogging never stops. Just ask my wife and kids, who now mock me by repeating back my new mantra: “I’m almost done, just one more post.”

TechCrunch succeeds because its bloggers do very good journalism -- gathering lots of stories, getting them online quickly (if not first), and because its bloggers know what the hell they're talking about, their commentary is respected.

There is always something else to write about, and not enough time to cover it. But we live or die by how fast we can post after a story breaks, if we can’t break it ourselves. We hardly have time to proofread our posts, as anyone who’s come across one of the frequent typos in TechCrunch knows. Luckily, our readers love to point out our mistakes in comments. They are our copy editors and fact checkers. (We love you guys). Our philosophy is that it is better to get 70 percent of a story up fast and get the basic facts right than to wait another hour (or a day) to get the remaining 30 percent. We can always update the post or do another one as new information comes in. More often than not, putting up partial information is what leads us to the truth—a source contacts us with more details or adds them directly into comments.

Every traditional journalist who reads this post just cringed. I expect angry comments. But this is why traditional journalism is failing -- declining readership, declining revenue, declining trust -- and blogs are succeeding.

Here's something from Mindy McAdams:

What some newsrooms (e.g., The Atlanta Journal-Constitution) have done is turn the workflow around — in a way that makes sense when the number of subscribers to the print product is decreasing and the number of online visitors is increasing: Make “Web first” the rule, in all cases. Produce for online, write for online, shoot for online, design for online.

If you're going to produce for online first, start by thinking and acting like a blogger. If you don't know how to do that, start following TechCrunch. You'll learn.

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Quote: "If we disappeared tomorrow they (the people who call big media journalism dinosaurs) might have to reinvent something that looks like us."

As newspapers struggle through a recession at a time of media tumult, Stowe Boyd writes:

The Big Band era is coming to an end, and while some oldsters are going to keep on listening to Count Basie and Duke Ellington, most of us are moving on to rock and roll. Many of the players will find new gigs, experiment with new musical forms, but some won't. Some will retire, open bars, or find something else to do. Zell and Tierney may have to take their losses and find something else to invest in. David Carr may have to start blogging for the Huffington Post, or run for office.

His comparison with the death of the Big Band era is more apt than he states.

You could say Big Bands were killed by rock and roll, but that would really miss the point (and be at least a decade off the mark). Big Bands were killed as much as anything by hubris, greed and technological efficiency, not to mention changes in society's musical taste and needs.

The musicians strike of the 1940s opened the door to smaller combos filled with non-union musicians. Not only where these combos more nimble, they were playing new kinds of music (such as country and rhythm and blues), driven by better technology for amplifying their music. By the time the strike ended in 1944, the new musical forms had not yet gained in popular demand, but the trajectory was set. Hank Williams would break through in 1947. Louis Jordan dominated R&B charts from the early 1940s through the end of the decade, setting the stage for the birth of Rock and Roll.

Of course, the oldsters who clung to the golden era of Glenn Miller and Benny Goodman saw no value in hick or race music. To them, it was all a fad whose time would pass. These wild sounds weren't polished or sophisticated. This wasn't quality music. The public would return to its senses and soon demand those big band sounds again. Sort of sounds like journalists attitudes toward bloggers, doesn't it? (Interestingly, Goodman made a fine switch to small combo music, and he recorded some of the first jazz to feature lead guitar, employing the pioneer Charlie Christian).

Note that music didn't die with the Big Bands, nor did it really diminish in quality. It fact, some of the greatest music of human history was created in the second half of the 20th Century. The music that came after was, to the discerning ear, no better nor worse than the stuff gathering dust on scratchy 78s. It was just different.

The same will be said of journalism fifty years hence.

For old-time sake, here's Big Band music at its best: Goodman's band playing the Louis Prima-penned, "Sing, Sing, Sing."

[youtube 3mJ4dpNal_k nolink]

UPDATE: Ur, um, is this video really "Sing, Sing, Sing"?  Nobody's called me on it, but upon reflection -- the "Sing, Sing, Sing" melody is not any part of this performance.  What it does have is elements of "Christopher Columbus,"  which was incorporated into Goodman's version of "Sing, Sing, Sing."  But "Sing, Sing, Sing" was eight (studio version) to 12 minutes long (the famous "Live at Carnegie Hall" performance, which is without a doubt the single greatest achievement of recorded music history.  At least, I say so.  More here.

(Boyd link via Jack Lail)

Long, thoughtful, thought-provoking piece from Zac Echola. It's a must read for any journalist with any doubt that the game has changed radically and forever. This isn't a "transition period" for newspapers. It's a whole new game.

See, I'm kind of tired of people talking about how newspapers are going through a "transition." As in, "we just need to get through this transition."

Transitions have beginnings, middles and ends. Transitions eventually stop and you get a chance to take a breath and say, "cool, we survived."

This is no transition, because the changing will never stop. This is no transition because this is a radically different world from the one of mass-produced packages dumped on people's door steps. The fact that there is still news on paper may be a mere echo of history.

It's hard to believe news on paper will ever die. It's also hard to believe news on paper will survive.

We just don't know, but even if print survives, it will only survive because people in our news organizations become adapt at adjusting to constant change.

The print business, if it survives, will never stop feeling the increased pressure of competition, changing lifestyles and evolving audience expectations.

Print revenue is not likely to ever grow again. Digital revenue, at least, has no known ceiling.

If we expect print to survive, then we need to keep those products going while adjusting to change. But we also need to make digital a higher priority, because that's the once chance we have to grow revenue and save, if not create, jobs.
Part of that adjustment is recognizing that digital media is fundamentally and radically different from packaged goods media. It calls for a different kind of journalism, and a different mindset from journalists.

Here's the hard part: For as long as it survives, your print product is largely fine. It could maybe use a nip and tuck, but the people who continue to get the print product like what you do and don't want you to change.

Online, that's a whole different story. You've got to be different, and radically so. You need to write differently, file your copy at different times, make sure to provide appropriate links, include some video or extra photos, make a map or two, respond to reader comments (correcting, amplifying or scolding), participate in blogs related to your coverage area, and you simply must be smarter and better informed about what you cover if you want to retain the respect of your readers.

The hard part is, you must do all this and keep your more traditional print product going in an era of diminishing resources.

I don't have an easy answer, except "just do it." It's really up to each individual to figure out how to reconfigure his or her job to meet the demands of both the print and the online audience. The responsibility for change doesn't rest solely in the publisher's office. It's also the responsibility of every reporter, editor and clerk.

I think it can be done. I see people doing it everyday. My concern is not enough journalists are even trying.

The main point is -- stop calling it a transition. If there was a transition, the inflection point passed four or five years ago. We can't keep calling it a transition hoping someday soon all this turbulance will end. It won't. The fundamentals of the media business are altered radically and forever.

There's an old saying in computers -- I first heard when I was in the Air Force 26 years ago -- "crap in, crap out."

In other words, if you feed a computer gibberish, that's all you're going to get back.

Until artificial intelligence really becomes something, CICO will be true.

The same could be said of blogging.

Blogging is only as good as you make it.

There's a lot of bad bloggers out there. There are bloggers who don't really have anything to say, but say it anyway. There are bloggers who are more noise than substance, and some how manage to get more attention than they deserve. And there are bloggers who are just plain dumb.

Most of the bad bloggers tend to gravitate toward current affairs blogging.

Unfortunately, political blogs are also the kind of blogs most journalists tend to read. So a lot of journalists have a very low opinion of blogging.

Those of us more immersed in blogging, or who have grown beyond merely the current affairs bloggers, know that there is more to blogging than rants and raves.

Crap in, crap out. You only get out of blogging what you put into Word Press, Blogger or Moveable Type.

Naive as it might be, I haven't given up hope. I believe journalists can become good bloggers.
Learning to blog really takes turning one simple switch in your head: This isn't print journalism.

It isn't the journalism of your cranky old city editor or your sainted j-school prof. Neither of those old farts would approve of blogging in any form, even though blogging is now part of the legitimate media mix.

A lot of people like to say, "a blog is just a tool." By that, they mean blogging software is just technology for a web-centric content management system.

While there's some truth to that, the statement also sells blogging short. Blogging is much more than that.

Blogging is a mindset. It's a way of approaching media communications that is different from traditional media.

Traditional media is really mass media. In mass media, the voice of the reporter is authoritative. It's one voice speaking to many people, so there isn't much room for nuance or alternative view points. In fact, you better make sure both the left and the right, the creationist and the evolutionists, the global warmers and the SUV drivers, get heard. You better make sure you get the story right and balanced and present it in a way that says, "this is definitive," even if it's not.

That's why objectivity has been such a strong touch point for journalists over the past hundred years or so. Generally, especially in print, you get one chance to get it right, and your communicating with a blob of an audience, so you better check out whether your mother loves you.

On the web, audiences are more fragmented. People are using personal devices to communicate.

That means, what works best is the conversational voice, a personal point of view, and a mindset that says, "I'm sharing," rather than, "I'm reporting."

So-called objectivity is great for print, not so much online. Some snarkiness and observational prose is appropriate online in a way that is not necessarily so in print. In part, because online, our audience can talk back. We want to encourage that.

That's not to say in print, or even online, there isn't a place for shoe-leather reporting and traditional modes of storytelling. There is still a place for all the things the blustering managing editors value, because it is still important. It's important for society and for civic engagement. But that doesn't mean it's the only way to do journalism these days.

Too many publishers, or more to the point, the editors and reporters they employ, still see online as just another place to shovel the same journalism they're doing in print or in broadcast.

Online is different, and blogging is the key that unlocks the kingdom of how online is different. If you can get blogging, you can get online.

It would help newspapers.com tremendously if more reporters and editors would not only start blogging, but learn to do it well.

It's a fact, blogs help grow audience. Blogs, however, can also help us produce online products that are different from our print product, giving consumers more choices and maybe, just maybe, a reason to make a habit of both print and online.

I say, it's worth a try, cause the way we're doing things right now ain't working out so well.

In case it's not obvious: There are lots of different kinds of blogging. This post might be an example essay blogging (if I were to be that pompous about it). There's also link blogging, and commentary blogging, and news blogging. The kind of blogging a journalist might do depends on the situation, the purpose and the goals. The purpose of this post is merely to say -- get over your objections to blogging and start exploring how you can use it in your newsroom to grow readership.

For a related post, see Ryan Sholin's list of example blogs. (And yes, it's no coincidence the Ryan and I -- we work together -- are posting nearly simultaneously along such parallel lines. GateHouse Media readers, are you paying attention?)

Some related links from me and elsewhere:

• Journalists should pay attention to successful blogs to understand web journalism
• Journalism has evolved to fit society’s needs and demands
• Scott Karp: Local Link Journalism: Pulling Together The Threads Of Local Blogger Reporting
• Scott Karp: How Link Journalism Could Have Transformed The New York Times Reporting On McCain Ethics

Michael Arrington started TechCrunch in June, 2005. It's now the second most popular blog in the world. According to Compete.com, it is read by at least 900,ooo people per month, but that wouldn't include the reported 500,000 RSS feed subscribers.

As TechCrunch has risen, Business 2.0 has gone out of business, while CNet and Ziff-Davis have hit financial hard times.

Arrington, when asked about blogs taking page views away from traditional news media, had this to say on Charlie Rose the other night:

It’s a very raw, very quick form of journalism. It’s not editing, it’s not balanced, it’s opinionated. A lot of people really want that.

I read TechCrunch everyday. The blog, now a group blog, breaks a lot of tech news. But every news worthy item contains what some might call opinion. I call it informed insight. Arrington and his team know what the hell they're talking about and I value and trust their point of view.

TechCrunch has become popular because it is credible. It's credible to its readers because over time they've learned that TechCrunch gets right more than it gets wrong, and it's never proven itself untruthful, and when they've made mistakes, they've corrected them quickly. TechCrunch readers don't look for fair and balanced. They look for relevance and understanding.

Before TechCrunch became a go-to blog for tech news, it had no brand. Arrington, who was pretty much an unknown outside of small circle of Silicon Valley insiders before starting the blog, made it credible; he made it a brand.

The next time some journalist talks about how important their newspaper brand is, think about TechCrunch, which demonstrates that brand isn't about what you've done over the past 100 years -- it's about what you're doing today.

While talking about journalism and blogging, I need to quote this Romenesko post, because it's lingered in my mind for several days:

Many bloggers see Josh Marshall's Polk Award as vindication of their enterprise, writes Noam Cohen -- "that anyone can assume the mantle of reporting on the pressing issues affecting the nation and the world, with the imprimatur of a mainstream media outlet or not." Marshall says of bloggers: "I think of us as journalists; the medium we work in is blogging. We have kind of broken free of the model of discrete articles that have a beginning and end. Instead, there are an ongoing series of dispatches."

Many times I've written about the need for journalists to blog because I think journalists need to get away from -- at least online -- from just repurposing what they do in print into the new kind of web journalism.

Web journalism is more raw, more conversational and makes immediacy and relevance more important than crafting the perfect, complete package.

Previously: Video can’t win on production quality alone (because of Chris Anderson's quote about relevance vs. quality).

Ask not what your newspaper company can do for you. Ask what you can do for your local media employer.

I've written quite a bit recently about the need to reinvent journalism. Not everybody believes its necessary. I still say, we should listen to our readers more and less to other journalists and our sources.

Here's more fuel to the fire:

Two thirds of Americans - 67% - believe traditional journalism is out of touch with what Americans want from their news, a new We Media/Zogby Interactive poll shows.

The survey also found that while most Americans (70%) think journalism is important to the quality of life in their communities, two thirds (64%) are dissatisfied with the quality of journalism in their communities.

The Zogby survey also said newspaper readership (by that, I think they mean the print edition) is down significantly. While there may be some truth in that, it's important to remember the poll is skewed because it was strictly an online survey. That doesn't change, of coure, that a large percentage of Americans are dissatisfied with the way journalists today practice journalism.

Previously:

• McCain coverage: Is Jayson Blair still working for the NYT?
• Ten things journalists can do to reinvent journalism
• Maybe it’s journalism itself that is the problem
• Six roles, or job duties, of modern journalism
• Reporters and editors should develop a reader satisfaction index
• Journalism has evolved to fit society’s needs and demands
• Review: Discovering the News, by Michael Schudson

There's lots of blather all over the web about the New York Times piece on John McCain.  

I could link to something, but you've all seen it. Here are my own four comments:

First, the priestly class of reporters and editors in America have forever heaped spite on blogs for being cesspools of rumor and innuendo. So what's so different about the Times piece? The opening concentration on McCain's implied sexual affair is nothing but gossip from either unnamed sources or pure speculation. There isn't a shred of direct evidence to support it, and as Dan Kennedy notes, its probably nobody's business.

Second, the priestly class of reporters and editors in America routinely bemoan the dumbing down of journalism because of the innumerable stories about Britney Spears. How is the Times piece any different than celebrity gossip? The next time a guy like Jim O'Shea complains about Britney Spears coverage, just point him to the NYT McCain piece. 

Third, anonymous sources. If there is a more cowardly way of reporting than using anonymous sources to create smear articles, I don't know what it is. If you're going to use anonymous sources, use them for real scandal -- you know, like Watergate.

Fourth, I  chuckled when I read the opening graphs of the story.  The spin reminds me of this piece from the Onion.  You can sensationalize anything if you want a story bad enough.  

Folks, journalism is in serious need of reinvention, if this is what America's finest paper thinks is news.

I wonder how many journalists will get it that it's their own reporting conventions that are being mocked.

Yes, any mundane event can be turned into news if sufficiently hyped.  The only thing required is good writing.

I love how mundane quotes are given more dramatic context:

Ronald Jarrett, a professor of economics at George Washington University who left his office after darkness blanketed the D.C. metro area, summed up the fears of an entire nation, saying, "Look, it's dark outside. I want to go home," and ended the phone interview abruptly.

Previously: Ten things journalists can do to reinvent journalism, and also see the CEO story at the end of Maybe it’s journalism itself that is the problem.

This is a follow up post to Maybe it’s journalism itself that is the problem. It's another thought exercise in trying to figure out how to discover what journalism should be to better serve today's society.

• Stop writing for the front page. Too many journalists -- and I was this way as a reporter, too -- think that getting a story on the front page is the only viable confirmation of their worth as a journalist. On the web, of course, there is no front page -- only time stamps. It's better to get the story right than worry about where your editor is going to place it in print.
• Stop treating journalism like a competition. It's fun to beat the other news outlets, but that shouldn't be the only reason to pursue a story. Treating every story like a scoop leads to errors, both in reporting and thought process about how to handle the story. The economic value of beating the competition these days is arguably nil. The value of being a trusted source of a timely, reliable, steady stream of information is significant. These are not contradictory points, if you think them through.
• Stop submitting your stories to reporting and writing competitions. This only encourages you to write for other journalists, not for your readers.
• Listen more closely to your readers. Cherish every scrap of unsolicited praise. If it's in a letter or postcard, pin it to your bulletin board; if it's in an e-mail, print it out and pin it there, too. Make unsolicited reader praise your daily goal. Stop automatically writing off the criticism of the cranks who complain about everything your newspaper does.
• Put more people in your stories and fewer titles. I'm going to make up this rule of thumb, but ... for every title in your story, you should reference two people without titles. So, if you cover the city council and quote the mayor and a city council member, you need in your story four non-titled, real people, as well. Put the emphasis on how real people are affected, not just what talking heads say about an issue or event. See how many city council stories you can write in a month that never even mention an elected or appointed official.
• Don't cover process. Cover real stories. Real stories have real people in them, with real things to say about how real things effect their real lives.
• Be a subject-matter expert. You should know your beat better than any of your sources. This will help you avoid he-said, she-said stories, allowing you to write stories with real depth, and give you the confidence to add perspective. You will also uncover more and better stories.
• Forget the false-promise of objectivity. Instead, aim to be fair, honest, impartial and accurate.
• Be accurate. Always. Being accurate is more than just getting your facts right. It encompasses your entire approach to a story. Part of being accurate means you never sensationalize. Never. You never play up conflict for the sake of making a better page 1 story. You never trim a quote to make it more dramatic, or add modifiers to emphasize a point.
• Cover your community like it is your hometown -- and hopefully it is -- be invested in your community and care about its people. While reality may intrude, and you may have to move some day, at least for the time your covering a particular community, develop a mindset that says you're going to spend the rest of your life covering this town, or this beat, or this topic.

The issues facing journalism today are not a technology problem, but an audience problem.

Declining readership did not begin in 1994, when the web began to take hold.

Household penetration began to drop in the 1930s. Serious readership declines accelerated in the 1970s.

There is no one reason why newspaper dominance of media started its decline 7o years ago. There was the advent of broadcast media, and changes in society (more working women, depressions and wars, new societal attitudes, changing class structures and commute patterns), but during that same time, literacy and education levels rose, women entered professional and educated life, the leisure time available for citizens to get involved with their communities increased, and soaring revenue for newspaper publishers allowed them to greatly expand staffs during most of the 20th Century (it's one of the paradoxes of newspaper publishing that while readership declined, ad rates and linage went up).

In other words, one could reasonably conclude that newspapers should have benefited from circulation increases during the very time they were losing market share (for most of the 20th Century, actual subscriber numbers increased, while household penetration decreased at a faster pace).

From the 1970s through the close of the century, there were more newspaper journalists employed at all levels, and because of the explosion of journalism schools in the later half of the century, they were better trained than ever. And because of the likes of Woodward and Berntein, they were substantially motivated and inspired to do great, important work.

Yet, real readership declined.

Why?

Could it be, that journalism itself is at fault?

In the 1930s that the likes of of Walter Lippman began to agitate for a more professional journalism class, and journalism schools began to proliferate. Up until journalism became a profession rather than a trade, entrepreneurial publishers determined the tone and style of the journalism they published. Publishers paid attention to readers needs and wants, and hired and trained editors and reporters accordingly; whereas the professional journalist hues to a higher standard of story selection and presentation with considerations far removed from what readers might prefer.

We could debate which model is "better" in the academic sense, but my only real concern here is what's better in the business, real-world sense. Being academically correct when it comes to marketplace competition doesn't put food on the table. All of the high-minded ideals in the world don't mean a thing if nobody reads your stories.

Previously, I said the issue for newspaper journalism is not a technology problem, but an audience problem.

Technology does play a role, however. It is the accelerator, the starter fluid that is putting both heat and light on the short comings of present-day journalism.

Consider again that while readership declined, newspaper revenue growth could only be slowed by recessions. Every decline or stagnation of revenue growth was merely a cyclical nuisance, not a harbinger of death. But up until the start of the current recession, newspaper revenue in recent years, especially in classified categories, was under constant downward pressure, while the overall economy continued to grow. That was a historical first.

The only way to save journalism, then, is to figure out how to spark audience growth.

My humble proposal, then, is that individual journalists start paying attention to what readers want. That was the point behind my reader satisfaction post. The goal is to find some meaningful measure of reader satisfaction and fashion a new journalism that meets reader needs.

I'm not saying I have the answer, just saying -- we need to find measurements that help us discover a path forward.

A point to stress, however: This is not a puppie dogs vs. Iraq debate (see video of Sam Zell in Orlando), or a Britney Spears vs. election coverage argument (see Jim O'Shea's farewell address). The focus on specific content subjects misses the larger point. The straw man of such supposed pandering evades the key issue.

The issue is, the current way important news is gathered, reported and written isn't working. It hasn't been working for several decades. It's only now becoming a crisis, thanks to the likes of Craig Newmark, Realtor.com, AutoTrader.com and Monster.com.

As we examine what journalism should look like in the 21st Century, we should also look hard at just how professional supposed professional journalism is. Today I heard a CEO of a large insurance firm talk about the day his company eliminated 200 jobs -- 200 out of 40,000. He talked about how he prepared his employees for the media onslaught he knew was coming, with anchors bellowing and headlines screaming about the downturn of the company's fortunes. These weren't even layoffs, but merely the elimination of unfilled positions.

There is something wrong with a journalism that can't honestly put the context of events in an accurate light, but must play up the most sensational angle. We all know the CEO's story is not an isolated incident, and it isn't merely a TV-journalism condition, but something endemic to present-day journalism, print and broadcast.

If our readers so easily recognize that what we do isn't trustworthy for its accuracy both in fact and spirit, then how can we expect to retain them as readers?

Something needs to change.

Discovering a journalism that does what journalism should do -- match the needs of society rather than dictate to society what people should want from journalism -- will be real hard work, and it will challenge assumptions and afflict comfortable mind sets.

I would like to think that journalists who entered this career with high minded ideals are up to the challenge.

UPDATE: Josh Korr is doing some ruminating on this top. Click here for some interesting reading (and follow the links).

When I read things like the following quote from Paul Conley, I despair for the future of our industry.

A few months ago I sat on a panel with two recruiters from mid-sized newspaper chains. They were both lovely people. But I think it's safe to say that they didn't share my beliefs about how to recruit or what to look for in a new hire.

One of them was asked "what would make you throw out a resume?" And she replied that she wouldn't hire anyone with a resume that said "multimedia reporter." She went on to say that she was looking for "newspaper people." But then, a few minutes later, she mentioned that the reporters at her chain were now being trained to carry video cameras.

The other woman, when asked about how she looks through applications, said she doesn't look at electronic resumes and won't follow links to Web stories, multimedia packages or other online examples of work. The reason? She said she didn't have the time, and preferred to look at things on paper.

Need I say more?

Sad, isn't it?

There was a time when I considered CNet the go-to place for technology news.

It's been three years at least since CNet was a habit.

And I'm not alone in concluding that CNet is now largely irrelevant.

"There are other sites now where you can get serious technology news," says CNET user Alan Wilensky, a San Mateo, Calif., analyst who advises companies on their Internet strategies. He used to read CNET.com daily but is now more likely to go to rival tech sites such as TechCrunch and Engadget. "I've gone totally cold on CNET," says Mr. Wilensky, who has no link with CNET or the dissident investors.

What's killing CNet: Blogs.

You could even make the case that blogs killed Business 2.0 (link to historical artifact -- note no updates since October, decades ago in Internet years).

The tech sector was the first media sector where we saw blogging really take hold -- in pre 9/11 days, which spurred political blogging. Since then, we've seen an explosion in blog growth, both in shear numbers and in the large volume of quality blogs covering a wide range of topics.

Local blogging has been growing. Some of it is very good.

Journalists shouldn't be too quick to conclude that blogs are not a threat to their local newspaper monopolies.

Yet, we continue to hear from MSM journalists who dismiss blogging, such as this from a reader calling himself Tito:

A blog is no more than an online journal or column, if you want to use an industry term. A blog doesn’t make me a better journalist nor does a blog make you a journalist and blogging is certainly not where the industry is headed.

Such a narrow view of blogs is to completely fail to understand blogs.

And to so easily dismiss blogs as a competitive threat is to fall on the wrong sword in the name of "quality journalism" (whatever you may mean by that).

And as the WSJ link above notes, more and more bloggers are figuring out how to generate handsome revenue to off set their low overhead.

If you don't know Dan Kennedy, you should.  He's a former media critic and current journalism professor in the Boston area.

He runs a great blog called Media Nation.  Mostly, he blogs about New England politics and civic affairs, but he also covers local media.

Today, he did a post about a GateHouse Media reporter, Cathryn Keefe O'Hare.

He tagged along with this modern journalist as she covered an MLK-day event. She took notes, shot video and stills with her Casio, and posted story and video to her site.

Dan writes about the process.

Is it a great video? No. Does it help get names and faces online? Yes.  Does it help provide some context to the story? Of course. In other words, it does its job.

Dan's concludes:

"The thing that remains true, whether it's in print journalism or the Internet or video, you have to tell a story," says O'Hare. "And you have to tell it as true as you can make it. And you have to try to speak for those people who can't tell their story."

The modern journalist just gets the job done.

And, most importantly, learns along the way.

In the era of Packaged Goods Media, the journalist played a command-and-control role. He or she determined the news of the day (news judgment), organized it around his or her own sense of importance (news value) and published it to a compliant audience.

The role was linear and uncomplicated.

In the era of distributed media, the relationship between journalist and audience is asymmetrical.

As "audience" transmutes to "community," and the level of communication and information increases exponentially, as news becomes less ecclesiastical and more egalitarian, the role of the professional journalist is changing.

Fortunately, there is still a role.

Here are six roles the modern journalist should serve:

• The Ethical Role. Yes, journalists get bashed about because of real and imagined lapses in ethics, but the challenge now is to raise the bar on professional ethics, and then provide ethical guidence to today's participatory audience. We should deal more swiftly and transparently with ethical errors within the profession, but we should also provide teaching tools on information ethics, what ethics means and why it's important, and how to spot compromised ethics.
• The Guide/Filter Role. Editors and reporters should assume some responsibility for providing their audiences with pointers to the best stuff on the web, be it the best-reported of the important news or the most interesting and entertaining articles and videos. In a command-and-control environment, we cared only about directing people to what we ourselves did. Now our role is to help audiences sift through the glut of information assaulting them daily by providing pointers. This is the value-add role, and if done right it can help overcome the digital-age tendency for people to focus too narrowly on their own interests. If done well, it will bring more people to your site or publication.
• The Understanding and Context Role. Why should the best bloggers get to have all the fun? The best journalists should become the best bloggers. I know many really, really smart reporters and editors. These people should have blogs, and they should serve readers better by taking the news of the day and putting it in context, combing articles for the tidbits that need to be weaved together to make a bigger whole, and explaining what it all means.
• The Conversation Leader Role. Already, our news reports start a lot of conversations with our without our consent. The conversation-starter role should become explicit in our job descriptions. Once started, we should guide it. We should thank and encourage the good contributors, and depreciate the bad contributors We should highlight the smartest things people say. We should provide our own insights and supplemental knowledge to any conversation we find. We should be full participants, not just the lurking overlords of top-down media.
• The Aggregator Role. We should aggressively gather data related to the communities we serve. We should make sure that anything that is knowable about a community we serve is findable through resources we provide. While in the Guide/Filter Role we might provide pointers, in the Aggregator Role, we make data available and let people find it for themselves. This is a role that serves the long tail of information, because we never know what other individuals might find useful, important or necessary.
• The Straight News Role. We cannot, even if we wanted to, and should not, cede our professional responsibilities to uncover news. We must know about everything important going on in the communities that we serve, and we should strive to be the first to tell our communities about the important news of the moment (note: no longer of the day, but of the moment). We must still be out in our communities gathering facts and organizing them in a way that is relevant and useful and then reporting the most important facts to our communities.

Previously: Journalism has evolved to fit society’s needs and demands

It's pretty cool to see so many people jumping on board with Wired Journalists.

There's a positive energy behind it that gets beyond any worries about a dying industry, the struggle to keep up or hand wringing about who is or isn't doing what?  The people signing up seem real eager to learn or to help others.

I like what Zac Echola said about the site in his post:

We’re done talking doom and gloom. We’re done making lists of what we should do to better serve our audiences. We’re going to start checking off items. We will better serve our audiences.
We want you to join us.

Like I said, a positive energy.

WiredJournalists.com is starting to feel like a petition drive -- people joining together to say, "I believe in the future of journalism, and I believe that future is wired."

Come join the fun.