future-of-journalism

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The fall and rise of libraries

By Amanda Korman, Berkshire Eagle Staff
Updated: 01/01/2011 10:46:48 PM EST
Click photo to enlarge

Lenox resident Dick Macht uses a computer at the Lenox Library, where there was nearly a 5 percent increase in materials circulated in fiscal 2010. But library circulation has been meager compared to the 1970s, forcing the facilities to entice readers via modern-day means.

Sunday January 2, 2011

PITTSFIELD, Mass.

Reeling over budget cuts, a dip in the city's population and shifting reading habits, the director of the Berkshire Athenaeum pondered how to continue tois institution relevant. He said he planned to investigate circulating audio cassettes and, perhaps, compact discs. It was 1985, and the Pittsfield athenaeum had watched circulation of library materials decline 28 percent over the previous five years.

"Perhaps the public library may become less and less a source of books to be checked out and taken home by patrons, and more an information and referral center," then-director John Fuchs told The Eagle in October 1985.

Twenty-five years later, book circulation has dropped another 40 percent, but foot traffic has been increasing steadily for the past five years. While circulation of all materials is up slightly at some sites, the biggest reason for optimism can be found at 8:45 each morning at the athenaeum entrances, where huddles of patrons wait to fill their minds with information in the modern world. "Every day there are people waiting in the foyer for that door to open, and they go right to the Internet work stations," library director Ronald Latham said.

These days, access to technology has become an expectation rather than a luxury -- although it often is still priced as the latter, a tab the libraries must pick up in a time of slim budgets and tenuous fiscal futures. "Computers in particular are expensive. It has made the cost of doing business as a library more expensive, and yet, it's more vital than ever to be connected," said Sharon Hawkes, executive director of the Lenox Library. "What's actually happened, since the age of the Internet, is library use across the country has gone up, not down."

"I would say that libraries everywhere are busier than ever," said Kathy Adams, director of the Lanesborough Library. "The only cloud on the horizon would be state and local budget cuts." Even though the amount of items being taken out of libraries is meager compared to the circulation heyday of the 1970s, libraries' resurgence is visible in the many people utilizing services within their walls.

Computers and WiFi are still the biggest tech draws, but Berkshire County libraries are beginning their foray into e-book readers such as Amazon's Kindle and Sony's Reader. The Berkshire Athenaeum purchased three e-book readers from different providers, and the Lenox Library recently held an e-book reader demonstration for the public and is considering purchasing some e-book readers of its own.

The relative novelty of the e-book readers underscores the financial risk that lurks within new technologies. Because the readers are still beset with kinks -- including the delay between page turns and the fact that not all works can be read in digital format -- there is a sense that they're not necessarily worth bankrolling fully.

Madeline Kelly, the Berkshire Athenaeum's reference services supervisor, quoted a recent New York Times column which suggested that, in five years, people will look at the current e-book readers the way they now view the Commodore 64, a computer designed in the early ÿÿ80s for home use. "The scary thing for us is it's expensive to make the step," Latham said. "We invested over 600 bucks [total] in the three different readers, and it's not going to be that long before those are totally obsolete."

The Central-Western Massachusetts Regional Library System (CW-MARS), an umbrella organization for libraries in the region, has allowed patrons to "borrow" downloadable books and audiobooks for several years through Overdrive Digital Library Reserve, but those e-books aren't compatible with the Kindle.

"The unfortunate thing about the way e-books are being made available is it doesn't really tie into the public library model," Latham said.

The problem of machines being made obsolete by newer iterations crops up with the popular public-access computers, as well. The ones in use in Pittsfield nowadays were purchased during 2008 renovations, and as they approach age 3, Latham said, they'll start breaking down. A full-sweep fleet replacement likely won't happen, he added, and so the aging machines will be sent to pasture only as the library can afford to trickle in new ones. Amid the persistent financial worries inherent in the technological flux, however, there was a bit of bright news in Pittsfield when the City Council restored $50,000 in cut funding to the library's budget in June.

"Do I feel secure? No," Latham said. "Do I recognize that the city of Pittsfield, like most municipalities across the state, is facing some very difficult financial choices? Yes, they are, but one of my proudest moments was this past year when Council said, ÿÿWe're not going to accept the mayor's recommendation; we don't think this is an appropriate budget for our library.' "

The success of the City Council's override came in a year when the athenaeum was more popular with city residents. The increased foot traffic over the past five years included a significant hike in fiscal 2010: 245,707 people visited the library from July 2009 to June 2010, an increase of about 12,000 from the previous 12-month period.

The athenaeum also notched a 1.5 percent increase in materials circulated, going from 260,315 to 264,255. The Lenox Library reported a 4.6 percent rise, rom 74,311 to 77,758. More than half of that total was from books. Book circulation also has been buoyed in recent years by the interlibrary loan, which allows patrons to order books from any library in CW-MARS.

Ever since the regional system allowed patrons to search for books at all locations, the number of items received from or lent to other libraries has burgeoned considerably -- the library brought in more than 32,000 volumes and sent out more than 19,000 in fiscal 2010. And while a snowy day like Monday starts to make e-books look enticing, no librarian is tolling a death knell for the paper book just yet. "I tend to doubt that [the e-book] is going to overwhelm physical books, certainly not anytime soon," Hawkes said. "You don't want to take your e-reader into the bathtub or the beach, for example, and many people are still saying there's just something about the experience of holding the physical book in your hand that they still find attractive."

To reach Amanda Korman:
akorman@berkshireeagle.com
(413) 496-6243

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TRANSCRIPT OF EXCERPTS OF REMARKS BY

CRAIG NEWMARK
founder, CRAIG.S LIST

At the New Media Public Lecture Series

Presented by the Western Knight Center for Specialized Journalism and the
Graduate School of Journalism, UC Berkeley

March 22, 2005, Berkeley, Calif.

VIDEO STREAM AT: http://journalism.berkeley.edu/events/details.php?ID=214

(transcribed by Bill Densmore)

Sometimes we look at the big news and we try to figure out who should we trust what should we trust about issues like Anwar drilling or maybe this Weapons of Mass Destruction thing. How do we know what to trust, who to trust or something like that? And it has occurred to me personally that this is a big issue for our times because it affects our lives in a huge way. So my mind has drifted into this, into these areas where journalism and news are changing. And this is a big deal . . . .

. . . . Also as a matter of conscience, we do know that Craig's List is affecting the classified revenue that newspapers get and we're trying to understand this. And you might correct me in a number of ways. For example, I've read some reports which says the kind of classifieds we get are normally the ones that would never go to a newspaper. I don't know . . . I hear both sides of that.

I do tell people that my instincts tell me that the problem has more to do with loss of trust. People talk about it, people of multiple political stripes, they say that they know the whole Iraq thing. People know that something went on, apparently a scam, and yet people didn't cover that . . . .

. . . . A good example of citizen journalism is Ohmy News out of Korea. They were the folks who broke the best the story of apparently Connie Rice perjuring herself in front of the 911 Commission. I haven't seen peep out of that in the American press, but these people drilled down pretty hard and did a good job. There was even I think Congressman Waxman has recommended a congressional inquiry which hasn't gone anywhere. It wasn't reported . . . .

. . . So I have a feeling this trust issues are a big thing. What's gonna. matter is things are evolving, we are seeing a for real, you choose your term, a transition to new means of delivering the news, to writing it, to new means of filtering and fact checking.

I don't really know what I'm talking about. I'm a full-time customer service rep. But I've enlisted the aide of people who, let's say, are noted in this area, and am talking to them and trying to get some help. Personally I want to do something to help the people who are getting seriously involved in that. That's me speaking personally. I can do some promotion, I might do a little funding in tiny amounts. And then I'll have to decide if I want to drag Craig's List into it . . . .

. . . It's incumbent on me to maybe help people [in journalism] who are doing the real heavy hitting . . . .

. . . The technology's changing. People are demanding more in terms of news, oh, some of the news that is normally not covered. People are also requesting that news be much better fact checked. Stuff like that. I don't know where it's going to happen, but I feel things are going to get a lot better for news producers, editors, that role will expand, and there will be editors who are news filters, aggregators, more. And we're going to see new kinds of newspapers and magazines delivered over the net. The publishers, though, the one's that are not starting to change, like today, may be screwed. I don't
know.

QUESTION: Have you thought much about what aspect of "citizens journalism" interest you the most?

Remember, I acknowledge my ignorance and I'm also lazy. So what I'm doing is I'm getting other people to look at that kind of thing, because maybe we shouldn't get into it. Maybe we should find one or more of the places where people are doing that kind of thing and then say, hey, this is good. Maybe personally I'll say hey, here is a story I'm personally concerned with and FactCheck.org has taken a look at it and they think it is for real and let's proceed with that . . . fact check is really good because it is very clear they are non-partisan . . . .

QUESTION: The currency you seem to trade in is trust and not money.

. . . . I don't know if I'm any of those things. Basically, I'm one very persistent nerd. I have I guess an obligation to the community I've built up. I'm going to keep the faith. I'm not an activist or anything like that. I just feel things should be better. And I don't want to be pious about any of that stuff. That's what I'm working on. It's fairly gratifying . . . I don't care too much about a lot of politics, but one of my roles is to fight scams, and I don't care whether they are economic or political scams.

QUESTION: On the one hand, deliberately or not, had you have helped to push journalism to this very crucial inflection point, because you're broken up our business model. So what do you hear when we make the comment about community journalism? What do you envision that being?

I'm not sure about what community journalism will be. I do think professional and amateur journalism, it's all going to blur together. Fact checking might become a job that lots of people do. I think editors and journalists are going to be paid directly by people in the community. If you find someone whose news you can rely on and trust and action on, you may wind up being paid for that. There's going to be some kind of new role that is going to merge editor and critic and fact checker filter. Because even the job of a theater critic is to filter out all that and tell you want you want to see. Same thing with the TV critic or a movie critic. I think this is all going to merge together. I think people are going to be paying sometimes for content. And I think we may end up, eventually, paying people for their magazines of sorts, of content that we might want to see and for that matter content that comes out at random that we don't know we want to see but it might be enterta!
ining.

QUESTION: Isn't it hard to discern trust online?

In terms of trust and all that, I haven't thought about that in depth except the idea of being continually engaged with people. I'd just say keep engaged with people and treat them like you want to be treated and in terms of you're writing style, don't sound like you're a corporate business person. Just sound like you're a person . . . .We're all pretty smart consumers. And the kids these day with their instant messaging and rock music, the kids are becoming even smarter and smarter about consuming media and they are probably not so much cynical as just experienced.

QUESTION: So, what I'm hearing is that somebody is going to have to start paying people to run fact-check programs. The media is broadening. Somebody is oing to have to start pay for these people's salaries. Where is this going to come from? Are the consumers going to start paying more money?

I'm not sure. My guess is that, yea, there will be a lot of people who will possibly be glad to pay more money for more reliable news as they perceive it. This will be mixed in a lot with entertainment and so on. I know I'd be willing to and whenever I talk about it, people are willing to do that. It is starting to work in Korea. We'll just have to see how it goes otherwise. I may be very wrong. The thing is we do know some kind of change is occurring. The effect we are probably having in terms of classified revenue we're probably accelerating the change and again for me it is very important that people whose job this relies on, at least people hear about this a lot and try to figure out where this is trying to take you. So people can start to prepare now for the kind of change that is happening and this will be a big deal. I think I put up a link, in terms of stories today, I think the Annenberg [Center] is starting to put up information about how citizen journalists are s!
tarting to train themselves.

QUESTION: The notion of fact checkers seems so establishment. How do you see those things bubbling up?

I have a different opinion. Everyone I talk to from possibly the producer or consumer side, they want fact checking. We want something they can trust, which means someone has to go over the details. And that sounds good to me.

QUESTION: So that's the old model, sort of?

Maybe so. But, see, I don't care if it is old or new or whatever. I want something I can trust. Which means fact checking, usually someone else doing it.

QUESTION: Are you worried about people taking away your market share?

We do consider that. Efforts in the U.S. have failed because it was pretty clear they weren.t dedicated to customer service and they were just trying to make a lot of money fast. In Europe, there are a number of sites in the native languages which are doing fine . . . .

QUESTION: So it is the trust that everybody is working in?

Trust. Well, that's pretty much how we run our lives. Our lives are pretty much who you know, which is another way of saying, who do you trust? Applause.

-- END OF TALK ---

The unanswered question posed by this essay: What if newspapers had insisted in charging for their content in 1995 or so, instead of responding to the threat of Microsoft's Sidewalk by making everything free? Is it too late now for the industry to coalesce around a line in the sand that content isn't free when it's produced by professionals, and that professional efforts are worth funding?

ORIGINAL URL:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/01/18/AR2008011802874.html

By David Simon
Sunday, January 20, 2008; B01

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David Simon, a Baltimore Sun reporter from 1983-95, is executive producer of
HBO's "The Wire." The final season of the drama depicts the struggles of a
present-day newspaper.
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Is there a separate elegy to be written for that generation of newspapermen and women who came of age after Vietnam, after the Pentagon Papers and Watergate? For us starry-eyed acolytes of a glorious new church, all of us secular and cynical and dedicated to the notion that though we would still be stained with ink, we were no longer quite wretches? Where is our special requiem?

Bright and shiny we were in the late 1970s, packed into our bursting journalism schools, dog-eared paperback copies of "All the President's Men" and "The Powers That Be" atop our Associated Press stylebooks. No business school called to us, no engineering lab, no information-age computer degree -- we had seen a future of substance in bylines and column inches. Immortality lay in a five-part series with sidebars in the Tribune, the Sun, the Register, the Post, the Express.

What the hell happened?

I mean, I understand the economic pressures on newspapers. At this point, along with the rest of the wood-pulp Luddites, I've grasped that what was on the Internet wasn't merely advertising for journalism, but the journalism itself. And though I fled the profession a decade ago for the fleshpots of television, I've heard tell of the horrors of department-store consolidation and the decline in advertising, of Craigslist and Google and Yahoo. I understand the vagaries of Wall Street, the fealty to the media-chain stockholders, the primacy of the price-per-share.

What I don't understand is this:

Isn't the news itself still valuable to anyone? In any format, through any medium -- isn't an understanding of the events of the day still a salable commodity? Or were we kidding ourselves? Was a newspaper a viable entity only so long as it had classifieds, comics and the latest sports scores? It's hard to say that, even harder to think it. By that premise, what all of us pretended to regard as a viable commodity -- indeed, as the source of all that was purposeful and heroic -- was, in fact, an intellectual vanity.

Newsprint itself is an anachronism. But was there a moment before the deluge of the Internet when news organizations might have better protected themselves and their product? When they might have -- as one, industry-wide -- declared that their online advertising would be profitable, that their Web sites would, in fact, charge for providing a rare and worthy service?

And which, exactly, is the proper epitaph for the generation that entered newspapering at the very moment when the big-city dailies -- the fat morning papers, those that survived the shakeout of afternoon tabloids and other weak sisters -- seemed impervious, essential and ascendant? Were we the last craftsmen prepared for a horse-and-buggy world soon to prostrate itself before the god of internal combustion? Or were we assembly-line victims of the inert monopolists of early 1970s Detroit, who thought that Pacers and Gremlins and Chevy Vegas were response enough to Japanese and European automaking superiority?

My own experience is anecdotal, I admit. I was hired out of college by the Baltimore Sun in 1983 and worked there until the third round of newsroom buyouts 12 years later. When I came to Baltimore, the Sun was a dour gray lady, but one of unquestioned substance, and there were two competing evening papers. When I left in 1995, we were the last game in town, and the newsbeat-by-newsbeat attrition of veteran talent was well underway. City to city, paper to paper, your mileage may vary. But I'm willing to trust in the Baltimore story enough to offer it up as an argument for the Detroit analogy.

Here's Baltimore in the mid-1980s:

The family-run A.S. Abell Co. owns the Sun and its sister publication, the Evening Sun -- an afternoon edition that is in direct competition with the dying Hearst paper, the News-American. In terms of circulation and advertising, the morning Sun is ascendant, as all morning papers seem to be, and it's clear that the publishers are holding on to the evening edition just long enough to drive the last nails into the Hearst coffin. Sure enough, once the News-American folds, the Sun undertakes to lure as much circulation as possible to its evening edition before combining the two news staffs and making the Evening Sun merely a late edition of the morning paper.

Similarly, the Sun spends the 1980s publishing, in every surrounding county, a "zoned" tabloid -- a locally oriented insert largely devoid of hard news or sophisticated storytelling, but filled with the hope that more people will subscribe to a newspaper that manages now and then to run a photo of someone's kid at the county fair.The "tab" inserts are the last piece of the monopoly puzzle -- an effort to mitigate against the growth of smaller county papers, and ultimately, when they don't achieve all they should, the Sun simply sets about buying up smaller papers in Baltimore, Howard and Harford counties.

At the apogee of its power and influence, the Baltimore Sun, with the Evening Sun and the tabloid Suns, employs close to 500 newsroom personnel. It is a massive operation, and as the monopoly is consolidated, it is profitable.

So there we sat.

Then came the key moment in the early 1990s, when the Sun junked its tabloids and merged the evening and morning staffs, and the prevailing wisdom became that the newsroom of the remaining morning edition was now too large, that attrition was the order of the day. And so it began -- a buyout of newsroom veterans, then a second buyout of older editors, then a third buyout of more veterans.

It was, I will argue, the precise moment when the post-Watergate future of newspapers -- the one that so many of us had sold ourselves -- was made a lie. When I was in J-school, the argument was that the siren-chasing would be ceded to television, but newspapers, to thrive, would become magazines -- thoughtful, stylish, comprehensive. And magazines? To compete with newspapers they were going to be recruiting literary and investigative giants.

Better was the watchword. Chevrolets would become Buicks, and Buicks were soon to be Cadillacs. And all of them were going to be well-built, well-tuned automobiles, offering readers more each day. In order to provide something more than the simple immediacy of television, newspapers would become organs of sophisticated, unique storytelling. They would need to deliver a complex world, to explain that world, challenge and contend with it. That's what they told us in the Introduction to Journalism lectures, anyway.

Yet here were the veterans -- the labor reporter, the courthouse maven, the poverty-beat specialist, the second medical beat guy and the prisons and corrections aficionado -- damned if they weren't walking out the door forever. There would be fresh hires, and some serious players would remain, of course. But no longer would it be practical to argue that newspapers were going to become more comprehensive, and better written -- the product of experienced and committed people for whom print journalism was a life's calling.

At the moment when the Internet was about to arrive, most big-city newspapers -- having survived the arrival of television and confident in their advertising base -- were neither hungry, nor worried, nor ambitious. They were merely assets to their newspaper chains. Profits were taken, and coverage did not expand in scope and complexity.

In my newsroom, I lived through the trend of zoning (give the people what's happening in their neighborhood), the trend of brevity (never mind the details, people don't read past the jump) and ultimately, the trend of organized, clinical prize-groveling (we don't know what people want, but if we can win something, that's validation enough), not to mention several graphic redesigns of the newspaper.

I did not encounter a sustained period in which anyone endeavored to spend what it would actually cost to make the Baltimore Sun the most essential and deep-thinking and well-written account of life in central Maryland. The people you needed to gather for that kind of storytelling were ushered out the door, buyout after buyout.

So in a city where half the adult black males are unemployed, where the unions have been busted, and crime and poverty have overwhelmed one neighborhood after the next, the daily newspaper no longer maintains a poverty beat or a labor beat. The city courthouse went uncovered for almost a year at one point. The last time a reporter was assigned to monitor a burgeoning prison system, I was a kid working the night desk.

Soon enough, when technology arrived to test the loyalty of longtime readers and the interest of new ones, the newspaper would be offering to cover not more of the world and its issues, but less of both -- and to do so with younger, cheaper employees, many of them newspaper-chain transplants with no organic sense of the city's history. In place of comprehensive, complex and idiosyncratic coverage, readers of even the most serious newspapers were offered celebrity and scandal, humor and light provocation -- the very currency of the Internet itself.

Charge for that kind of product? Who would dare?

Is there still high-end journalism? Of course. A lot of fine journalists are still laboring in the vineyard, some of them in Baltimore. But at even the more serious newspapers in most markets, high-end journalism doesn't take the form of consistent and sophisticated coverage of issues, but of special projects and five-part series on selected topics -- a distraction designed not to convince readers that a newspaper aggressively brings the world to them each day, but to convince a prize committee that someone, somewhere, deserves a plaque.

And so here we are.

In Baltimore, the newspaper now has 300 newsroom staffers, and it is run by some fellows in Chicago who think that number sufficient to the task. And the locally run company that was once willing to pay for a 500-reporter newsroom, to moderate its own profits in some basic regard and put money back into the product? Turns out it wasn't willing to do so to build a great newspaper, but merely to clear the field of rivals, to make Baltimore safe for Gremlins and Pacers. And at no point in the transition from one to the other did anyone seriously consider the true cost of building something comprehensive, essential and great.

And now, no profits. No advertising. No new readers. Now, the great gray ladies are reduced to throwing what's left of their best stuff out there on the Web, unable to charge enough for online advertising, or anything at all for the journalism itself.

Perhaps it was all inevitable. Perhaps the Internet is so profound a change in the delivery model that every newspaper -- even the best of the best -- is destined to face retrenchment and loss. Perhaps all of this was written in stone long before I was ever wandering around a student newspaper office with a pica ruler sticking out my back pocket. Perhaps everything written above is merely Talmudic commentary.

Well, what do I know? I have a general studies degree, I didn't even meet the J-school requirements, and this HBO gig I've got now doesn't exactly qualify me for a grad program at the Wharton School of Business.

But one thing I do know:

A great newspaper is a great newspaper. And a good newspaper isn't great. And a Chevy Vega by any other name is, well, a Chevy Vega.

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The article above is copyrighted material, the use of which may not have specifically authorized by the copyright owner. The material is made available in an effort to advance understanding of political, economic, democracy, First Amendment, technology, journalism, community and justice issues, etc. We believe this constitutes a 'fair use' as provided by Section 107 of U.S. Copyright Law. In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Chapter 1, Section 107, the material above is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. If you wish to use copyrighted material from this blog for purposes beyond fair use, you must obtain permission from the copyright owner.

ORIGINAL URL:
http://strange.corante.com/archives/2007/11/23/newspapers_can_break_news_again.php
(GO TO ORIGINAL URL FOR EMBEDDED LINKS TO USEFUL RESOURCES)

November 23, 2007

ORIGINAL HEADLINE: Newspapers can break news again

Posted by Kevin Anderson (mini-bio below)

Steve Outing highlighted on Poynter's E-Media Tidbits how useful Twitter can be during breaking news. Sending out short burst updates during a breaking news event can keep journalists in the field and close to the story while quickly filing updates that can easily be pulled via RSS into your site. He wrote: In the not-so-distant past, I would have urged you to create a breaking-news blog for your news site if any big story like those hit in your backyard. ...That's so 2004! You can still do it, and probably should. But the breaking-news blog is about to be supplanted (or perhaps supplemented is a better word) by the Twitter breaking-news feed.

I don't think it's an either/or proposition. Twitter can be a good resource to reach your audience via SMS and even desktop alerts if you encourage your subscribers to follow breaking news 'tweets' via applications like Twitterific. But you can easily pull that into a blog via an RSS feed, and really, in the age of networked journalism, it's about your site being a hub in the network to disseminate news. Journalists back at base can tap into the network for leads, pictures and first person reports.

I'll give you an example from last week when we looked out our window here on the fifth floor of the Guardian and saw black smoke billowing from somewhere in east London. Journalism.co.uk noted the pace of updates across several different sites and services, including Twitter, Flickr and the Guardian's Newsblog: The first tweet Journalism.co.uk saw on the fire came from the Guardians head of blogging Kevin Anderson shortly before 12:30pm. Anderson has also posted pictures to Flickr and at 12:45pm posted an entry on the events to his Guardian blog.

I also did a quick post here on Strange Attractor. A commenter from Washington DC found the post and said: Greetings from Washington D.C. Getting reports here that it is an industrial site. Stock futures markets moving up after intial shock. Looks ugly but, industrial chemical fires usually are. Yours was the first blog I came across that had the story. Who needs cables news? Will be watching to see how story develops. Thanks for posting BCP -- http://beercanpolitics.blogspot..com

I was able to post faster and with more pictures and information than Sky and the BBC, which we were watching in the office. Flickr users noted that they were seeing more pictures on the site than on traditional news sites and TV channels. I also used Technorati to find video posted to YouTube before Sky had its helicopter on the scene. People were also posting links in the comments on the Guardian Newsblog.

Since the advent of radio and television, newspapers have been pushed out of the breaking news business. News is frozen at the time you have to go to press. Web-first has only slowly been embraced by newspapers and newspaper journalists. I do sometimes find that newspaper journalists suddenly pushed into the 24/7 news cycle can feel that quality suffers as one daily deadline becomes a rolling deadline. But the internet does both immediacy as well as depth as Paul Bradshaw recently highlighted in the first of his 21st Century Journalism series of posts. The strengths of the online medium are essentially twofold, and contradictory: speed, and depth. And Paul's 'News Diamond' shows how a story passes from speed to user control. It's a great series of posts, and Paul's thinking has brought together some brilliant ideas. Ideas that I'll use the next time I'm blogging breaking news.

I was sitting in the office, which is a role for a networked journalist to play pulling together a news organisation's own coverage while also aggregating the best of crowdsourced content. But I think there is also a role for field journalists to use Twitter, blogging software or other forms of flexible field filing to break news. Blogging was liberating for me as a journalist if for no other reason as a field journalist, it gave me a much easier way to file than using traditional content management systems that are made to work in the office but are unusable in the field. Until traditional CMSes provide that kind of flexibility, they will have significant drawbacks when compared to blogging platforms. But that's another post for later.

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Kevin Anderson has been an online journalist since 1996, designing, editing and writing websites for both broadcast and print media. In 1998, he joined the BBC and became their first online journalist based outside of the UK, covering the US for its award winning news website. After coming to the UK in 2005, he developed a blogging strategy for BBC news, helped launch a programme on the BBC's 5Live covering weblogs and podcasts and was on the team that launched the interactive radio programme World Have Your Say on the BBC World Service. Kevin is now the Blogs Editor for The Guardian, where he is responsible for management, strategy and 'leading by doing' for Guardian Unlimited blogs.
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The article above is copyrighted material, the use of which may not have specifically authorized by the copyright owner. The material is made available in an effort to advance understanding of political, economic, democracy, First Amendment, technology, journalism, community and justice issues, etc. We believe this constitutes a 'fair use' as provided by Section 107 of U.S. Copyright Law. In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Chapter 1, Section 107, the material above is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. If you wish to use copyrighted material from this blog for purposes beyond fair use, you must obtain permission from the copyright owner.

ORIGINAL URL:

http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/news/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1003646835
Published: September 26, 2007 1:45 PM ET

Klurfeld of 'Newsday' to Head News Literacy Center

By Joe Strupp
Editor & Publisher Online

NEW YORK -- Editorial Page Editor Jim Klurfeld of Newsday in Melville, N.Y., will serve as interim director of what is being touted as the nation's first News Literacy Center at Stony Brook University in Stony Brook, N,Y.

In a release Wednesday, the university announced the formation of the new center "designed to educate current and future news consumers on how to judge the credibility and reliability of news." The project is being funded in part from a $200,000 grant of the Ford Foundation.

"The Center will act as a resource center for universities across the U.S., develop curriculum for high school instruction and secondary teacher training programs, and design conferences, seminars, lectures, and workshops that will bring together scholars and journalists to explore issues related to the reliability of news from print, broadcast, and the web," the release added. "Last year, with a $1.7 million grant from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, Stony Brook created one of the nation's first courses in News Literacy that the University expects to teach to 10,000 students over the next four years."

Klurfeld, who is joining the School of Journalism as a visiting professor, has been named interim director, said Stony Brook University President Shirley Strum Kenny. "Jim Klurfeld is just the right person to lead this new Center," Kenny said. "His commitment to truth and accuracy was the hallmark of his outstanding career in journalism. Under his leadership, this unique effort will have a lasting impact on students, teachers, and the public."

Adds Howard Schneider, Dean of the School of Journalism, who will serve as Executive Director of the new center: "The goal is to equip the next generation of news consumers with the ability to judge for themselves what information they can trust and what information is suspect," said. "We want to create more informed citizens and sustain quality journalism at the same time."

The center will "develop a pilot program for the public, act as a clearinghouse for 'best practices,' design and develop a center web site, and extend the News Literacy program to high school students," the release stated. "We are going through a media revolution and it's critical that students are equipped to deal with that revolution," Klurfeld said in a statement. "I'm excited about the challenge of starting Stony Brook.s Center for News Literacy and believe we can make it into a resource for educators not just on Long Island but throughout the country."

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Joe Strupp (jstrupp@editorandpublisher.com) is a senior editor at E&P.

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http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-newsblogs9oct09,1,3678198.story
POSTED: October 9, 2007
From the Los Angeles Times

HEADLINE: Newspapers, bloggers now on same page
Journalistic websites see amateur scribes as partners, not rivals. They
increase coverage and may share revenue.

By Alana Semuels (alana.semuels@latimes.com)
Los Angeles Times Staff Writer

Once upon a time, newspapers wanted nothing to do with bloggers, those amateurs who opined on anything that caught their fancy, whether it was interesting, or accurate, or not.

That was then. Now newspaper websites, desperate for readers and revenue, are increasingly in cahoots with bloggers, posting and plugging them and even sharing advertising revenue. Purists may sniff at these online liaisons but, as the print newspaper industry shrinks, they may be inevitable.

"Any new information source is a potential competitor to a local newspaper. Smart newspapers are figuring out they don't have to fight with those competitors -- they can make alliances with them," said Robert Niles, editor of the Online Journalism Review, which is published by the USC Annenberg School for Communication.

This year, the Washington Post added a sponsored blog roll to its website, a directory of links to blogs that specialize in travel, technology, health and more. If the Post sells an ad on the blog roll's main page, the bloggers split the money with the newspaper. So far, about 100 bloggers have signed up.

To Caroline Little, the chief executive of Washingtonpost Newsweek Interactive, the ad network is good business. Most ad buyers don't want to take the time to buy space on dozens of different blogs, she said, and the staff-driven side of the website often doesn't have enough stories about technology, business or health for advertisers looking to place ads near that content. With the blog roll, the Post can grab ad revenue that might have gone elsewhere. "It's about figuring out how to monetize other people's content," Little said.

The partnership has boosted ad revenue, she said, although the money made from selling blog roll ads isn't a significant part of online income, at least not yet. A spokeswoman for Adify, a San Bruno, Calif., company that supplies ad network technology to the Post, said the blog roll had increased the site's audience by more than 50%. Little couldn't confirm that.

Britain's Guardian newspaper and Hoy, a Spanish-language daily in Los Angeles (owned by Times parent Tribune Co.), have also set up networks that sell ads on smaller sites and share ad income with blogs.

Other papers are expanding coverage -- and, they hope, drawing traffic -- by posting the work of local bloggers. The Houston Chronicle, for one, has recruited 50 reader-bloggers whose commentary appears its website. A note at the top of the readers' blog page reads: "Our members are responsible for this content, which is not edited by the Chronicle." Among the recent blog headlines: "Breastfeeding is obscene?"

Scott Clark, vice president and editor of Chron.com, said readers' blogs had expanded coverage. "Many of our readers have specialized knowledge and passions," he said. "By adding them to our site, we tremendously expand the scope of information that we're able to provide."

The blurred lines make many uneasy. "There's a lot of uninformed opinion on the Internet and not a lot of solid reporting," said Fred Brown, vice chairman of the Society of Professional Journalists' ethics committee and a columnist at the Denver Post. A professional journalist "respects the truth and lives up to standards of ethics. Certainly that isn't the case in the blogosphere."

Newspapers should make a clear distinction between staff-written and blogger-generated material as a service to their readers, said David Ardia, director of the Citizen Media Law Project at Harvard Law School's Berkman Center for Internet & Society. But what if a blogger gets a fact wrong or makes a defamatory comment about someone?

Newspapers have to be careful, but federal law generally protects a website owner from postings by its users. As long as employees of a newspaper site have nothing to do with a blogger's work, Ardia said, the newspaper is probably protected, because it is simply posting content produced by an outsider.

At the same time, the law allows newspapers to act as good Samaritans to protect their readers, and Kinsey Wilson, executive editor of USA Today, said his paper had been doing just that. It removes from its website "anything brought to our attention that violates our terms of use, including personal attacks, hate speech, obscenities, plagiarism, as well as potentially libelous or defamatory material," Wilson wrote in an e-mail.

The USA Today site has run excerpts from such blogs as College Football Resource and A Socialite's Life, the latter a gossip site that discusses and mocks fashion, celebrities and the media. Wilson said in an interview that the industry wasn't adopting blogs in place of traditional reporting but in addition to it. In any event, he said, newspapers can't afford to think about distributing information the way they used to. "The walled garden is dead. We're living in an era of distributed content," he said. One important role of a newspaper nowadays is to sift through rafts of information online, he said, and help readers use it.

Some popular blogs have been "absorbed," to use the New York Times' term, into mainstream media sites. Freakonomics, a blog about economic thinking in everyday situations, runs on the New York Times site, and its authors share the ad revenue. Stephen J. Dubner, a Freakonomics coauthor, said the partnership provided an opportunity to be featured on one of the most prominent newspaper sites in the world "with all the readership and support that comes along with it." The blog gets more traffic on the Times site than it did when it was accessible only at Freakonomics.com, he said. Unlike before, now it can make money. With the funds, the Freakonomics authors are sprucing up the blog, adding a full-time editor and filmmaker.

Most bloggers are paid little, if anything, for the thousands of words they type. Teaming up with a newspaper is a way to establish credibility, said Dave Panos, the CEO of Pluck, which distributes blog content to a handful of newspaper sites, including USA Today's, through a service called BlogBurst. "Being picked up by the mainstream media," he said, "is the highest form of flattery."

Copyright 2007 Los Angeles Times
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The article above is copyrighted material, the use of which may not have specifically authorized by the copyright owner. The material is made available in an effort to advance understanding of political, economic, democracy, First Amendment, technology, journalism, community and justice issues, etc. We believe this constitutes a 'fair use' as provided by Section 107 of U.S. Copyright Law. In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Chapter 1, Section 107, the material above is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. If you wish to use copyrighted material from this blog for purposes beyond fair use, you must obtain permission from the copyright owner.

http://www.thejakartapost.com/detailfeatures.asp?fileid=20070930.E10&irec=10

OPINION: Oh my! The future of news -- by a WSJ Asia reporter
SOURCE: The Jakarta Post - The Journal of Indonesia Today (fwd)
DATE: Sunday, Sept. 30, 2007 -- Features Section

By Jeremy Wagstaff

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Jeremy Wagstaff writes a weekly technology column for The Wall Street Journal Asia. His guide to technology, Loose Wire, is available in bookshops or on Amazon. He can be found online at www.loosewireblog.com or via e-mail at jeremy@loose-wire.com.
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I was asked the other day to address a room full of media types about
changes in consumer behavior; where, they wanted to know, are people looking for news in this new digital world?

It's always a bad idea to get me to talk in public, especially on this subject, since I think it's the wrong one. Or at least, the wrong way of looking at the subject. I gave them two reasons:

First, there are no consumers of news anymore. In fact, you've probably heard this said a lot, here and elsewhere that, in the era of MySpace, Wikipedia, OhmyNews and citizen journalism, everyone is a journalist, and therefore a producer, of news. No one is just a consumer. Second, there is no news. Or at least there is no longer a traditional, established and establishment definition of what is news. Instead we have information. Some of it moving very fast, so it looks like news. But still information.

A commuter taking a photo of a policeman extracting bribes from drivers and then posting the picture on his blog? It's not news, but it's not just information either. It could be news to the policeman, and if he's busted because of it could be good news to drivers in that town.

We journalists have been schooled in a kind of journalism that goes back to the days when a German called Paul Julius Reuter was delivering it by pigeon. His problem was a simple one: getting new information quickly from A to B. It could be stock prices; it could be the assassination of Abraham Lincoln.

That definition of news has remained with us until today. A lot of the time it remains a good one. When terrorists hit, we'd rather know sooner than later. If stocks in our portfolio are losing their value in a crash, we'd prefer to get that information now. When Buddhist monks hit the streets of towns in Myanmar we look to AFP, Reuters and AP to get the news out.

But the Internet has changed a lot of this. First off, everyone is connected. By connected I mean they can look up anything they like so long as they're near an Internet-connected computer. Which for a lot of people now means a 3G phone. Even if you don't have one, the chances are you'll be in spitting range of a computer that is connected to the Internet. Or you could get you information by SMS -- from news sites, from colleagues, from family members. It's not that we're not far from a gadget. We're not far from information. This has a critical impact on the idea of news.

Because we're informed, news doesn't hit us in the same way it used to when we didn't. True, if someone hits a tall building with an airliner, that's news to all of us. The U.S. invades or leaves Iraq; that's news. But the rest of the time, news is a slippery beast that means different things to different people. That's because there's another kind of news we're all interested in.

It's hyperlocal news. It's what is around us. In our neighborhood. Since moving house I'm much less interested in gubernatorial elections and much more in anything that anybody says about en bloc sales and house prices. That is hyperlocal news, and it's where most people spend their day. No nuclear weapons being fired? No terrorist attacks? No meltdown in the financial markets? OK, so tell me more about en bloc sales. Actually, this is just part of hyperlocal news.

If you've used Facebook, you'll know there's another kind of addictive local news: your friends' status updates. A status update, for those of you who haven't tried Facebook, is basically a short message that accompanies your profile indicating what you're up to at that point. I think of it a wire feed by real people. Of course it's not news as we'd think of it, but news as in an answer to the questions "What's up?" "What's new?""What's happening?" "What's new with you?" In that sense it's news. I call it hyper-hyperlocal news. Even though those people are spread all over the world, they're all part of my friends network, and that means for me they're local.

So news isn't always what we think of as news. News has always meant something slightly different to the nonmedia person; our obsession with prioritizing stories in a summary, the most important item first (How many dead? What color was their skin? Any Americans involved?) has been exposed as something only we tend to obsess over. Don't believe me? Look at the BBC website. While the editors were putting up stories about Musharraf, North Korea and Japan, the users were swapping stories about Britney Spears splitting with her manager, the dangers of spotty face, and the admittedly important news that the Sex Pistols might be getting back together.

Of course, I'm not saying journalists are from Mars and readers are from Venus. It just looks that way. What we're really seeing is that now that people have access to information, they are showing us what they're interested in. Unsurprisingly, they're interested in different stuff. What we call audience fragmentation -- niche audiences for specialized interests -- is actually what things have always been about.

If we're a geek we go for our news to Slashdot. We want gossip? We go to Gawker. We want to change the world? We go to WorldChangingOnline.org The Internet makes the Long Tail of all those niche audiences and interests possible, and possibly profitable. What we're seeing with the Internet is not a revolution against the values of old media; a revolution against the notion that it's only us who can dictate what is news.

What we're seeing is that people get their news from whoever can help them answer the question they're asking. We want the headlines, we go to CNN. But the rest of the time, "news" is for us just part of a much bigger search for information, to stay informed.

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The article above is copyrighted material, the use of which may not have specifically authorized by the copyright owner. The material is made available in an effort to advance understanding of political, economic, democracy, First Amendment, technology, journalism, community and justice issues, etc. We believe this constitutes a 'fair use' as provided by Section 107 of U.S. Copyright Law. In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Chapter 1, Section 107, the material above is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. If you wish to use copyrighted material from this blog for purposes beyond fair use, you must obtain permission from the copyright owner.