Only 1 out of 16 students said that it was UNethical to “download a photo from the Web server of a blogger, upload it to your server, using it on your site along with credit to the original creator.”

I’m dying to talk with them about this on Thursday to hear more about their rationale. Maybe it says something about how they see bloggers. Maybe it says something about the way they see ownership of content.

What do you think?

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Fail fast, fail cheap. Isn’t that what they say? Well, today I did it. My first attempt to live blog a class discussion didn’t work out. But neither did my first attempt to … well, do just about anything…

No matter. Here’s what I learned… 1. If you have a network of professional journalists they WILL follow you if you live blog a class, but …

2. They won’t say anything unless you have prompts for them. Prompts should be prepared in advanced so that you can simply hit a “send” button at the same moment you move the class discussion to that question, but…

3. That only creates a “simulcast” of the discussion — two parallel chats, one happening in person and one happening online. What you really need to do is have your TA in the class with you, as the producer of the chat. This is the same way it worked at washingtonpost.com — there is a host, a guest and a producer. The producer keeps the flow going, adds relevant links in real time, and cleans up typos.

Why is this important? Not just because it’s an effort to connect students in North Carolina with experienced professionals around the world, but because it has implications for the increasing number of people who are pondering and proposing the creation of news places — cafes and other physical locations in which the audience can come to participate in the creation and collective consumption of news and community information. It’s an interesting idea, but one that won’t work without an effective way to integrate meatspace conversation with online conversation.

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This semester, the 18 students in the class will be divided among four partners:

• the North Carolina Center for Voter Education, a non-profit funded largely by foundation money and private donations;
• OrangePolitics.org, a liberal blog about local politics run part-time by a single “citizen jouranlist”;
• N.C. DataNet, a newsletter of from UNC-Chapel Hill’s Program on Public Life, edited by a former News & Observer reporter and opinion editor;
• a public broadcast outlet here in North Carolina.

If any of these sources will be part of the reconstruction of American journalism, the students in the class will help determine how it’s reconstructed. At the very least, the students will be able to report back to the rest of us more details about what they find in these laboratories of post-newspaper news.

Stay tuned… and add your suggested reading for the class via the Delicious bookmark tag JOMC491-examples-s10.

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2. Innovative Student Journalism in the Works
3. Len Downie’s Rules for Good Journalism

The statement picks up on a session I led at last summer’s N.C. Press Association’s Newspaper Academy. In a time of tight budgets, news organizations must be focused on delivering their core product, service or experience. Everything they do must be justified — including having a Web site. Unless a news organization can clearly state why they have an online presence, they should drop it.

The students’ responses focused on the Web as a platform for competing on breaking news and for reaching audiences — especially young people — where they are. My goal for the semester is to help them see that online journalism is a wonderful tool for telling more memorable and relevant news stories, and not just about 24/7 distribution.

Make your anonymous argument after the jump — can you articulate a clear, rational, viable reason that your news organization should be online? Or make your public comment for attribution here.

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2. A Lab for ‘The Reconstruction of American Journalism’
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The bottom line is this: most of this student work was very good, and it’s important to show industry and other journalism students how we’re preparing the next generation to lead change in newsrooms. Students are young and therefore their work is not perfect, but it can be awfully good. Here are three examples, and the reason that each gives me hope for the future of journalism.
Splash! makes waves in school language programs
By Anika Anand and Kellen Moore

Update: Anand’s blog post on her final project experience, from Dec. 24

• The article was well written and free of grammar, style and structural errors. It demonstrated good news judgment. It was full of details that are best suited for text. It placed a story in a statewide context and clearly showed a substantial research effort to discover facts beyond the surface. It wasn’t investigative journalism by any means, but a good and full explanation of the subject.
• The content of the videos were appropriate for that medium. Anand and Moore used personal anecdotes that complimented the hard facts in the text. The subjects for the video were central to the story.
• The execution of the videos was very good, but probably had the most noticeable flaws of the project. I liked very much the consistency of visual style — the lower-thirds and the angle from which the videos were shot. Whether intentional or accidental, the effect of shooting up at the subjects and having the subjects look farther up still (and off the angle of the camera) made their comments seems “loftier.” Of course, you have to be careful of unintentional editorializing, but I found the message that was communicated visually here consistent with the content of the subjects’ words. The videos could have been shot tighter, I think. Especially in the one video where there are some distracting cords in the lower right corner of the frame. The audio on the video seemed hollow, which may have been a result of microphone equipment, placement or compression.
• The story included two videos that the students posted to YouTube. Using that method of getting video on site has weaknesses, but it also has two strengths. First, it’s easy. Second,  it serves as an additional distribution outlet for your journalism and a way to tease people back to the full story. A few things to remember when using YouTube to drive people to your site — be sure to include on the YouTube video a description of the story and and link back to your site. Also, consider grouping all other related videos together. The file names appear both on YouTube and on the site into which the videos are embedded, so be sure that the file names are descriptive. In this case, the titles were not descriptive enough to be helpful to searchers and scanners.
• All the videos were embedded in appropriate places in the story. Working with a designer would have improved the look of the package. But Anand and Moore did an excellent job with the tools they were given, and no editor or audience member could ask for more than that. By intent or accident, the alternating placement of the video subjects on the left and right provided a pleasant visual effect.
• Excellent work breaking up the story and anchor linking.
• The students on this project really demonstrated their ability to look for the “next-best” solutio — and that’s an underrated skill in deadline-driven journalism. When they weren’t able to embed their Google Map because of a problem inside the CMS, they solved the problem on their own by using  a screen grab. They had to do their own research to figure out how to grab a good still frame from the video to illustrate the piece. (The only improvement I’d make would be to make a link out of the map image as well as the map caption text. I wanted to click on that durn map.)
• Excellent and appropriate use of Google Maps to convey the *where* element of the story. Anand and Moore wisely used different colored markers to convey information. (Although I almost missed the key. Remember that when presenting tools like this, many people — especially people who are very comfortable with computers — will simply start clicking before they read. If they start clicking and don’t quickly “get it” then they will humph loudly and be on their way. The best tools rely on as little CHA (”Click here asshole!”) as possible.

Out-of-state students receive support from campus group
by Rachel Scall, Jeff Woodall and Tristan Long

Each piece of this project was executed well and the package as a whole made sense.

• The choice to do a photo gallery in video format was wise. The video editing application was the tool that these students knew the best and with which they felt the most comfortable. The content did not suffer at all because of their tool choice. The audio was well-matched to the images. They had multiple sources. The title on YouTube looked good, too.
• The map on this project was a knockout. It was nicely embedded into the story and it wisely provided two navigational techniques. The details were excellent and required a lot of reporting. I enjoyed spending a lot of time with it just clicking around, and that is the hallmark of a good online news package.
• The story was nicely done. It could have stood alone well, but it was appropriately enhanced by the other elements. Its links were appropriately placed and sent readers to appropriate destinations.
• I really like the smart way that Scall, Woodall and Long linked between each of the three elements of the story, allowing people to navigate horizontally. Each element stood on its own and had its own editorial reason for being.

Feeding hungry children one backpack at a time
By Elizabeth Lilly & Heather Mandelkehr

Overall, this is a good project. It went beyond the minimum requirements in terms of text length and presentation of the Google Map. The gallery was nicely organized from start to finish. There were a few things that kept it from being an excellent project, but it was overall well done.

• The choice to use a photo slide show instead of video was a smart one because they students were confident in their photo reporting and editing skills than their video production skills. To me, knowing your strengths and weaknesses shows a lot of maturity. Also, the subject didn’t need video. The order of the photos had a clear narrative arc that took us through the distribution process and it had a nice mix of faces and things.
• The audio of the slides sounded a little hollow, but that’s a technical problem that improves with experience. The bigger issue for me was an editorial one — the story of the audio I don’t think fit the photos as well as it could have. A better — and more difficult — audio would have been done with multiple voices of the volunteers talking about the program and walking the audience through the weekly process. Finally, I would have hid the captions as the default. I kept wanting to read them while looking at the photos and listening to the audio. Since I couldn’t do all three at once, I found myself getting distracted from the audio and stopping and restarting. If there’s good info in both the audio and the text, you don’t want your audience to miss either.
• The text was probably the weakest component of this project. There were some grammar and style issues, some passive sentences and imprecise wordings.  Also, I would have liked to read more about money, volume of food and quantitative descriptions of the program or its impact — and less about changes in procedure.
• The map was very well done and appropriately used for the information in the story. Good caption on the map and on each item’s window.
• Lilly and Mandelkehr  also showed an excellent ability to find the “best available” solution to problems. They were smart to insert a JPG of the map and also very smart to link the JPG as well as the text caption. And they demonstrated resourcefulness in your ability to embed the Soundslides. More than any technical proficiency, these problem-solving skills are important in all forms of journalism.

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“What I see a lot of today is the realization of ideas that were being tried unsuccessfully in 1999,” Thornburg said. “A lot of the ideas we see as trends today were dismissed as flops 10 years ago.”

Among the trends to look for in information and news, Thornburg said, will be the rise of content targeted to a user’s location at a given moment, via ubiquitous high-speed Internet access. Other possibilities include new markets for buying and selling small pieces of information, and a divide between high-quality information that people pay for and free lower-end news – often focused on social and political points of view, entertainment or sports.

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Amateur journalists with blogs may help fill gaps in information about some news stories, but my experience being in the middle of this public health story is leading me to further believe that there is just no way a crowd of self-motivated but distracted citizens will replace a few well-paid and focused professionals when it comes to holding powerful people accountable. As Pulitzer Prize-winning author and newspaper editor Eugene Roberts said, many important stories don’t break, they ooze. And only professionals have the economic incentive to provide the kind of sustained expertise — and now the kind of reader-source organization and leadership — that’s needed to cover the stories that ooze rather than break.

In the story about Miami’s Legionnaires’ outbreak, there’s a role for all of the key players in the flow of information in a free-market democracy — professional journalists, the government, private business, business clients and the general public. The way that each of these key players acted as news broke provides some focused insight about the roles — sometimes interchangeable, sometimes unique –  these institutions play in an increasingly convoluted media world.

I found out about the story for two reasons — first, a professional journalist broke it and then a colleague of mine sent it to me. As a guest of the hotel two days before it was evacuated, this story couldn’t have been more relevant to me. But I relied first on an impersonal, professional reporter and then on a personal contact to get the news to me.

Jose Pagliery wrote the first story about the outbreak for The Miami Herald. He was the only reporter on duty last Saturday, when he got word that another reporter for the paper had been tipped off to the story from sources at the hotel, Pagliery said. With that information, he was able to call the county health department and get enough information to write up a quick story. Without that reporter’s ear to the ground and without a professional journalist to call the health department, Pagliery said he suspects the story would have been come out much later, if ever.

I had been in Miami for a meeting with the Knight Foundation. Another person who was there just happened to hear the tail end of a television story about the outbreak while she was on a trip to Grenada later that same weekend. Her curiosity piqued, she searched the Web for keywords she had heard in the TV report and discovered the CBS4 story that confirmed that both she, I and perhaps a dozen other people at our meeting had been staying at the hotel that was the suspected source of a deadly disease. She immediately sent us all an e-mail with a link to the article. That’s the kind of concierge information service that probably can’t scale to a large media organization, but that would have incredible value to readers if mass customization of news story selection ever comes about. For those of us who already have organic online social networks, we get the concierge service for no cost other than being engaged with people who are curious and alert about the world around them.

When I found out about the story, my old reporting instincts went in to full gear. Mostly, I wanted to know why the hotel had told me and other guests two days before the evacuation not to drink the water without alerting us to any potential health risk. Two of the most fundamental questions for reporters whose job is to hold powerful people accountable are “Who knew about this? And when did they know it?” I wondered if the hotel had known about the risk much earlier than it had disclosed to its guests — a decision that might have prioritized their money over my health.

These details were missing from the stories in The Miami Herald and on the CBS4 Web site. So on Sunday I quickly e-mailed the reporters as well as the public relations department at Kimpton Hotels, the parent company of the Epic Hotel. Amid the hustle to church, a visit from my mother-in-law, plans to host a party at our house that night, and caring for our two young kids I posted a call out to other potential guests on Twitter and made plans to write a blog post about the additional information.

That was Sunday. Today is Thursday. I’m just now getting around to writing the post.

This story directly affected me. I was trained as a journalist, worked as a journalist and now I teach journalism. And a four-day turnaround time is the best I could do? Yes. Because I had other things to do that only I could do. In the short run, the opportunity cost for me of not grading finals, not attending a faculty meeting, and not writing my book was greater than me not reporting on this story. Over the last few days I did talk to a representative of the hotel, an epidemiologist from the health department, a TV news producer, a newspaper reporter and several other guests at the hotel. I wanted to share what information I had with them, but what I really wanted is for them to do the hard work of reporting and delivering the news so I could get back to my day job.

If I had not been personally invested in the answers, would I — as a mere “citizen” — have bothered to contact all these people? I can tell you I’ve not bothered to pursue any of Miami’s previous 19 cases of Legionnaires’ it reported in 2009 — even though, as I later found out, the city saw more than twice the number of cases than in any of the previous four years, according to the Miami-Dade County Health Department Monthly Disease Report. And I’ve not been able to find a single other one of my fellow 400 hotel guests who has been blogging or Tweeting about the story.

Two Epic Hotel guests from Denmark did contact a personal injury law firm to determine whether they might have legal action in the case. Driven by the private interests of the two men, the firm would have no doubt become a great source of expert reporting on the issue. But unless the case had gone to trial, much of the most important information would never have become part of the public debate about whether powerful people made the right decisions to protect lives.

So, with the hotel cleared as the source of the bacteria and with no symptoms of the pneumonia that can turn Legionnaires’ fatal, my attention to this story is just about gone. Even if the county hadn’t given the hotel a clean bill of health yesterday, my reporting still probably would have been done. And it would have left many important questions that I would not attempt to answer. My personal interest in reporting the story might have eventually added elements to the news as it broke. But with that interest now almost totally gone, it will be up to someone else to cover what may be a more important story — the one that oozes.

The public health story that still affects anyone visiting or living in Miami is the dramatic increase in the number of Legionnaires’ cases there this year. If I were a resident or frequent visitor I’d be even more terrified that the source can’t be traced back to a single luxury hotel. I might still prefer my chances with the county’s water to my chances with the county’s roads and highways, but something is causing a jump in a deadly bacteria and the cause might be preventable. In an ideal world with limitless resources, someone would test chlorine levels in water throughout the county, compare them to the levels found at the Epic Hotel and deliver those findings to the county’s residents. In an ideal world, someone would follow up on the Herald’s reporting that people in the health department have concerns about “inefficient international communication channels” that prevented it from searching the hotel earlier. That reporting, too, would make its way to anyone drinking county water.

And even though the hotel was cleared, I’d still like to know why the hotel wasn’t more upfront with its guests about potential health risks in the water. And whether or not any other hotels at which I might be staying are using powerful filters that make the water yummy but may leave it susceptible to deadly bacteria.

I am not going to do that reporting. I doubt a volunteer cadre of Miami residents or business travelers will take it upon themselves either. I don’t trust the health department or the Kimpton Hotel company to do it, because their interests conflict with my own. Who is going to do it? For public health stories and other news that oozes, I want to hire professionals whose job it is to not amuse me but to give me the information I need to make my own decisions about how to best protect myself, my family and my friends from anyone or anything who would do us harm. Just tell me where to send my check so I can get back to my daily life.

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I’m writing for college students a book about online journalism. The book connects the traditional elements and values of journalism with new ways of telling stories and engaging audiences. It will start with a discussion of online news values and elements and the unique characteristics of the online news audience. Then it’ll take readers through the gamut of digital media skills and tools, and wrap up with a section that talks about how to make sensible use of the tools to create journalism that’s more engaging and relevant.

But… what should I call it? Please vote below and then leave any comments here.

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In France, according to The New York Times, only 10 percent of those aged 15 to 24 read a paid-for newspaper daily in 2007, down from 20 percent a decade earlier. But that’s a meaningless statistic. How many young people read ANY newspaper? How many are getting news for free… on TV… from freely distributed papers… on the Internet … at libraries? It is obvious that nobody is going to pay for something they can get for free.

In the U.S., according to Pew, a third of people 18-24 got NO news from ANY source yesterday. This is not a problem that free newspapers would solve.

The decline in newspaper readership pre-dates the current economic slump. Newspaper readership is not declining because people can’t afford them.

Free content on the Internet may be causing newspaper declines, but young people have become even more disinterested in news since the advent of online news. The percentage of 18-24 year-olds who get no news has INCREASED 9 points in the last 10 years — faster than any other age group.

The problem is so much bigger than newspapers. Young people have either a dangerous lack of interest in public affairs or are getting information about the world around them via some channel that they do not identify as “news.”

Ironically, the people for whom this is going to be the biggest problem are the 18-24 year olds. They are the ones who need to step up and propose solutions to the problems of their peer group. So why not hand out a couple million dollars in grants every year to recent college grads who want to try to solve the problem? And not the problem of declining newspaper readership, but the problem of the declining news readership in any medium.

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Chagrined, I told him I thought my disappearance provided a good anecdote about the potential future of news — many people will start blogs because it is easy to do. But few will provide the day-after-day reliable coverage that societies need to remain informed and that media businesses need to remain viable.

Perhaps professional journalists will be a bit like firefighters. Citizens may not pay much attention to them most of the time, but we’ll need to find a way to pay them just in case disaster strikes.

The reason I had gone on hiatus for so long was that writing a blog takes time, and I had developed other priorities. These other priorities have been providing steady and immediate income, and the blog does not.

So, yes, volunteer citizen journalists may start covering city council meetings. And they may write their own reports about high school sports and neighborhood issues. And many will do an adequate or even excellent job, because being a journalist is about having an inquisitive mind and not about a having a particular degree or license. But people get sick. They move. Their attention gets diverted to other endeavors.

And then what happens to the audience that relies on the citizen journalist for news? First, there would be a dangerous gap in coverage of public affairs. Perhaps other amateurs would fill the gap, but the audience would have to invest time getting to know another “brand.” What are the author’s political leanings? Does the author know what he or she is talking about? Are they going to be more reliable than the previous volunteer on the beat?

That’s a lot of wasted civic energy. And the more effort it takes people to consume the news, they less they will do it. Overall news consumption among 18-24 year olds has dropped about 20 percent in the last 10 years — the same time that their choices have increased.

Now, some amateur journalist will become professionals. It has already happened and it will happen a lot more. But one of three things will be true about the majority of bloggers — the ones who won’t publish regular, reliable accounts of public affairs, business and community:

1. They will go away. They will determine that their hobby is not worth the opportunity cost.

2. They will be partisans. Motivated not by financial reward, but by political power, they will continue to write for free.

3. They will be unusual patriots and humanitarians who continue to do good work for the good of the community for little or no reward.

Whatever the future of media economics may be, it’s likely going to have to be one in which a regular and reliable news report is going to be supported by people who regularly ignore it.

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