The Future of News

Next semester, I’m leading a group of students in a service-learning class at UNC-Chapel Hill that be using online reporting and publishing techniques to dig in to the story of North Carolina’s rising high school dropout rate. As part of this experiment, we’re working with news outlets in the state on a collaboration that will live both on their individual sites and on a centralized site at UNC. If you’re interested in participating, please take a look at our draft plan of attack here .

I’m speaking today at two seminars at UNC-Chapel Hill’s School of Journalism and Mass Communication: the Chuck Stone Program for Diversity in Education and Media and the Institute for Midcareer Copy Editors. For a white guy who can’t spell, this is an intimidating day.

Thinking about what to say to these groups, I began to think about how important it is for each journalist who lives in a world of accuracy and accountability to personally venture in to the uncertain waters of online social networks and user-generated content. Among other things, it is a journalist’s job to give voice to the voiceless and to hold powerful people accountable. Wikipedia and Facebook are two places where the voiceless are stretching their vocal chords and where accountability is taking on new methods. If a journalist is to perform his or her job above a minimum standard of competence, it’s important to dive in to these worlds and understand how they work.

(more…)

Here’s an update to an earlier report about Chi-Town Daily News Editor Geoff Dougherty. He reports on the Media Shift blog that posting a story by an amateur “citizen journalism” on his site will likely cost him “between $90 and $125″ in recruiting, training and other overhead costs. The amateur reporter doesn’t get anything.

Dougherty says a freelance story costs him “between $160 and $200.” to get up on the site. Of that cost, the reporter gets “$125 or more per story.” That’s probably consistent with the per-story pay of an entry-level salaried reporter at a traditional paper who has a five-story-per-week quota (and let’s not even get in to the damaging impact of story quotas.)

But here’s the most important part of Dougherty’s post — he says that he doesn’t just spend less on amateur reporting; he argues that he gets MORE for less.

“Each one of the 60 or so citizen journalists working for us is an advocate for our site. They tell their friends and family about what we do, which helps drive traffic and recruit other volunteers.”

And this reminded me of a conversation I had last week with the staff of The Star-News in Wilmington, N.C.. One staffer who had a lot of experience engaging with her readers online said that sometimes she felt “like a pimp” when telling folks that she has just posted a new story in which they might be interested.

Rather than go in to my whole shpiel about how journalists need to learn from political campaigns, I tried to follow her analogy and explain that there was a difference between pimping and paying for dinner, and that the difference is sincerity.

Sharing thoughts and information with people for the purpose of building a long-term relationship with them is not pimping. Pimping is hawking services purely for transactional purposes, with no relationship implied or encouraged. Most folks can inherently tell when a human relationship is sincere and when it’s fabricated.

Which leaves me wondering this: Why are journalists not better public advocates for their own work? Why does Dougherty think that his freelancers don’t do the kind of advocacy work that his amateurs do?

After all, most journalists I know are rapid advocates for their own work when it comes to pitching stories to editors. Why, then, do they become such shrinking violets after the story is published?

In comments on techPresident last night, Jay Rosen summarized nicely the reason that the discussions about “who is a journalist” and “what is journalism” are red herrings.

“Today, the press is shared territory. It has pro and amateur zones. This is appropriate because press freedom is shared territory.”

Press freedom is shared territory.

Warts and all, press freedom is shared territory. If we can start our conversations from that point, they will more constructive.

Press freedom is shared territory, and that’s territory I want far more Americans to settle.

This post is a written version of comments I presented yesterday at the Future of Journalism conference sponsored by The Carnegie-Knight Task Force on the Future of Journalism Education and organized by the Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy.

(more…)

Rocky Mount, split by a railroad line between the white world of Nash County and the black world of Edgecomb County, was the first stop on this year’s Tar Heel Bus Tour. For me, it was a fitting first stop because it was one of the first towns in “the real North Carolina” to which I was introduced as an undergrad.

The stop reminded me that, even in an era of international, on-demand connections, so much — if not most — of what we know about the world comes from the people we call friends.

Social media is not a new concept.

(more…)

In 13 (or so) Easy Steps

(This advice from Chi-Town Daily News Editor Geoff Dougherty in an article he wrote for Poynter.)

(more…)