Standing in the outfield of a giant baseball stadium under the glow of more than 40 video walls and monitors, the lead singer of the rock group U2 aimed his remote up at the screens and flipped from station to station while tens of thousands of concert-goers screamed and cheered. It was the fall of 1992. CNN had just made history with the first live video coverage of a war, and somewhere in a computer lab at the University of Illinois – in a town that could have comfortably fit its entire population in the sports stadium – researchers were about six months away from launching the first graphical Web browser.

The hundreds of channels on cable TV were about to be dwarfed by millions of Web pages. The mass media that was able to send one message to an entire planet all at the same time and had defined a shared American experience for more than a half century was about to be replaced by communication technology that would blend the telephone with the television and the postal service and the printing press to form a decentralized network of news and information that would allow every – or everyone with a computer and Internet access – to talk to everyone else all at the same time.

The online news audience doesn’t spend an average of 35 minutes every day because they need another glowing box. News organizations that aren’t committed to giving their audience something fundamentally different should quit throwing money at their Web site and start re-investing in legacy media.

They didn’t come all the way out here to watch TV. Stop giving them a news product. Let them visit news experience. They’ll pay for that.

Online journalism is fundamentally different from other forms of media. The technology that forms its backbone is different. The time, manner and place that people use it is different. And its capabilities to make stories more relevant and more memorable to your audience are different.

Part of the power of the Internet is its ability to cheaply distribute text, audio and images to millions of people all at the same time. Relative to the cost of setting up your own television station, posting a video to the Internet is incredibly cheap — even when you take in to account the costs of the video camera, the editing software, the computer and the Internet access. And relative to the cost of printing all the newspapers you might need to make your story available to everyone in your town, the cost of reaching each additional reader online is almost nothing.

Those innovations alone give online journalism the potential to revolutionize the world, but they aren’t the most significant differences between the Internet and traditional media like television and newspapers.

As an online journalist, you can take advantage of three techniques that were impossible in older media. These three things make reporting, producing and distributing your stories via the Internet fundamentally different from all other forms of media:

1.    Multimedia. Journalists have more choices about how to combine different storytelling techniques to convey different elements of a single story.
2.    Interactivity. Sources, journalists and members of the audience all take part in the creation of a common story.
3.    On-Demand Delivery. The audience has unprecedented control over the time, place and subject matter of the news they consume.

These are the three pillars of online journalism.

The good news? Each pillar directly supports a traditional news value — prominence, impact, proximity, currency, magnitude, conflict, oddity, emotional impact — and each matches up with the five news elements — who, what, when, where, why and how.

Journalists have the task of picking the right technique for the story, and not using the Twitter or Facebook or Flash or blog hammer to smack every story like a box of undifferentiated nails.

Put together, these pillars create an experience, not just a good or a service. In their book, “The Experience Economy,” Joseph Pine and James Gilmore, write that an experience is engaging. It’s value is realized over time because it is memorable. And it personal — it changes and affects each visitor differently.

So, stop debating whether you should charge people to read your newspaper online. The only sensible thing to do is charge for it or stop putting it online. Then start thinking about how you can take your legacy news product and sell it as part of the news experience you create on the Web. And then you can charge for your Web site. Or not. Heck if I know…

Related posts:

1. It’s a Battle of Style, Not Media
2. How to Plan an Online News Project
3. Lecture: The Online News Audience

As a preamble, I’m re-running two blog posts (…hmm, I wonder if “the long tail” is going to make the word re-run go the way of the turntable…anyway…) that highlight the challenge and two potential answers:

• Open Letter to The Washington Post: Keep the Frontier Open (Jan. 9)
• Newsroom-Classroom Panel at ONA: A Bridge to Nowhere? (Sep. 13, 2008)

After the jump, I’m looking for where we might be most likely to find the fertile failures and experimentors that journalism needs.

Question 1: Who Drives the Vision?

A Free Market Competiton Between News Organizations: One argument is that news organizations themselves are in the best position to drive vision and are the most likely to take calculated risks. In an industry that has historically favored competition over collaboration, the argument is that companies will implement new storytelling and delivery techniques and seek new revenue streams based on their calculation of how they can gain advantage over their competitors. But the challenge of driving innovation in a mature industry has been well documented. As Phil Meyer says in The Vanishing Newspaper, it’s only logical for most news companies to continue harvesting the golden goose.

Startups: With much to gain and less to loose, perhaps small companies will be the most innovative and experimental. The only problem — the founders of startups often take as much personal risk to do a small-scale startup as a large scale. So they favor going big too quickly, before they’ve experimented and failed enough on a small scale. They seek big rewards to mitigate big risks. Entreprenuers meet the requirement of failing fast, but it doesn’t make sense for them to fail cheap.

The Community: A lot of the best things — such as Wordpress and many of the plugins I use on this blog — are free, built by a community for the benefit of all. The motivations for this behavior are many and diverse. But the one thing that I find most open source projects lacking is neutral-party hypothesizing, testing and evaluation. In short, communities are innovative but not experimental.

Large Nonprofits: Large nonprofits — especially the Knight Foundation — has been seeking to foster innovation and mitigate risk for news innovation, especially innovation around the riskiest type of journalism — investigative and explanatory public affairs journalism. I have an idea I need to think about more carefully, but my hunch is that grants and awards tend to encourage applicants toward unbridled optimism rather than the more valuable skepticism. Skepticism is a pre-requisit for experimentation and fertile failure.

Industry Groups and Consulting Companies: Some of the most comprehensive and current research is coming from news industry trade groups and consulting firms. But their reports often focus on market predictions and ad sales. And, for the most part, their best stuff costs so much money that the research cannot be either publicly scrutinized or widely disseminated.

Research Universities: The best thing about the academic environment is also its greatest weakness — speed, or lack thereof. We’re slow. Now, that means we maintain standards in the face of fads and it means that our research is usually rock solid. The down side is that peer-reviewed research is often too incremental or too slow to be relevant. And while we watch the world carefully, we miss opportunities for leadership. Where we do get out on the cutting edge, our efforts are often funded by large foundation grants that (see above), I think, reward optimism over skepticism.

A Proposal

Each of the players mentioned above has a role to play in driving experimentation and fertile failure. Here’s a quick inventory of what we need from each:

1. Relevant questions and hypothesis — industry, community, entrepreneurs. But these questions can’t be limited to the transformation of content to revenue. They need to help us understand which, if any, innovations can help us hold powerful people accountable, shine light in dark places, give voice to the voiceless and explain an increasingly complex world. How do we get the right information to the right people at the right time so we can increase participation and improve individual decisions in a democracy and free market economy?
2. Experimental Design — universities. We don’t teach these grad school seminars for nothing. Academics are very good at making sure these big questions can actually be measured and tested in some way.
3. Data — industry organizations, consulting groups. Privacy and the competitive value of information I think has made it difficult for journalism programs to get their hands on the kind of massive data sets that can help separate variables and increase validity. If there’s going to be collusion in the news biz, it shouldn’t be over charging for content. It should be over finding a solution to these valid concerns about privacy and proprietary information.
4. Risk Mitigation — industry, government, foundations. Large companies will be in the best position to put experimental findings in to practice. They need to foot a big part of the bill. Good journalism — like public health and a basic education — is a public good. Government can fund research without getting in to the business of favoring solutions. Foundations are already playing the biggest role, but could use the failure form to begin encouraging skepticism rather than optimism from their grant applicants and award winners.

Epilogue: Leadership

None of this can happen without leadership from people who are in a position to influence each of these institutions. Perhaps the first thing to do is open the floor for nominations to be the first Czar of Fertile Failure.

You work on coming up with the names. I’ll work on designing the funny hat.

Related posts:

1. J-Schools: Breeding Ground for Fertile Failure
2. The One Tool Your Newsroom Needs Right Now: A Failure Form
3. Innovation Isn’t Enough

But a failure is not always a mistake, especially in the context of an experiment that fails to prove a widely held belief. Experiments that fail often lead to entirely new lines of inquiry and new understanding about the world. To enjoy this kind of fertile failure that yields innovation, you have to pursue success in the right way. Fertile failure is most likely when you tackle a very specific, very big question with small experiments that are conducted as quickly and cheaply as possible.

Universities, where failure leads both to the creation of new ideas as well as the ability to shed old ideas, should be ideal partners for risk-averse news organizations. Here are a few ideas about how journalism schools can be breeding grounds for fertile failure.

1. A university could hold in trust a huge database of aggregated site usage statistics from news Web sites, conducting research on the data for the data center’s member news organizations without violating the trust of users or the proprietary secrets of the individual news organizations. The value to members would be their ability to control more variables and come to broader conclusions about usage behaviors. Student and faculty researchers would benefit by having easy access to the kind of large dataset for the pursuit of their own research agendas. This would result in faster testing of hypotheses about the future of news, with the costs being shared across a broad group of industry and academy.
2. Funded with industry grants, a university could conduct ongoing usability studies that would populate a database of use-cases. This database would reduce the cost of site design by allowing media organizations to study mistakes made by a broad group of sites.
3. Undergraduates’ lack of technical skills and disposable income make them natural rapid prototypers. A news organization interested in testing an idea could “hire” a class of undergrads to come up with 15-30 “good enough” prototypes to be tested on real news consumers.
4. Campus news organizations should also be a natural place for professional news organizations to test crazy ideas that run the risk of damaging their brand. Not that campus news organizations are all dying to damage their brands, but their transitory audience makes small failures much less costly over the long run — failure artifacts don’t aggregate at campus news organizations the way they aggregate at professional news organizations.
5. Don’t want to have editors waste their time trying to assess in-house experiments in your newsroom? Hire some faculty and grad students who are trained at research methods and analysis. Does registration really improve the quality of comments on your Web site? Sounds like a great research project to me.

Of course, both newsrooms and classroom are going to have to make some changes in order to work better together. In order for research to be relevant, it cannot wait for peer review before publication. There would need to be a switch to post-publication peer assessment and critique. And news companies would have to actually be willing to invest in R&D — a tough decision in times when newspapers are shutting their doors.

Related Posts:

• The One Tool Your Newsroom Needs Right Now: A Failure Form
• Innovation Isn’t Enough

Related posts:

1. The One Tool Your Newsroom Needs Right Now: A Failure Form
2. Rerun Posts: Who Drives the Vision? Who Takes the Risk?
3. Innovation Isn’t Enough

• Download The Failure Form as a PDF

It’s called the Failure Form because the questions it poses requires your staff to articulate the value of a project even if it fails miserably. It could just as easily be called a risk mitigation assessment tool, because good experiments ensure that even if everything goes wrong, the organization will at least be able to glean some value from the experience.

It also mitigates risk in another way. When we seek “innovation,” the pitches are ambitious and often overpromise and underdeliver. Innovative projects are going to be SO awesome! Sometimes SOOOO awesome that they are technically infeasible.

The final way it mitigates risk is by defining an end point to the project. Like line items in the federal appropriations, newsroom projects are often easier to start than they are to kill. Experiments have a definite end, which means that the failure will be limited to the shortest period of time needed to acquire some meaningful data.

Of course, the results of the experiment need to be shared with the rest of the newsroom. Unless you have an ongoing partnership with a research university, my suggestion is to use editing positions to create a team of people to assess the experiments and publish the results. Better yet, every news organization would have some sandbox for experimentation, where failures wouldn’t hurt the core brand.

So, which projects should a newsroom fund? The ones that are completed the quickest, cost the least and teach the most.

So, without further ado, the “Failure Form“:

1. What specific questions about the content, style, production, delivery, use or consumption of news will your project attempt to answer?
2. Describe your project. What will you do in an attempt to answer the questions you described above?
3. After the end of your project, what new information will we have about the future of news?
4. At the end of your project, what two things will you compare in order to determine the answer to your question?
5. What changes might other journalists consider making based on the discoveries you will make during your grant?
6. How long will it take to conduct your experiment?
7. What resources will you need? If this project is funded, what tasks will you stop doing during the course of the experiment?

Related Posts:

• Innovation Isn’t Enough
• J-Schools: Breeding Ground for Fertile Failure
  

Related posts:

1. J-Schools: Breeding Ground for Fertile Failure
2. Newsroom-Classroom Panel at ONA: A Bridge to Nowhere?
3. Innovation Isn’t Enough

What’s the difference between innovation and experimentation? Innovation only values success. Experimentation also values failure.

Innovation is about creativity alone. Nothing wrong with that. You can’t have experimentation without it. I’ve promoted a lot of ideas at news organizations simply because they were different or because nobody else was doing them. Innovation is fun. Probably hundreds of online journalists — those that have even an ounce of self-awareness anyway –  have uttered the words “I really like building stuff. Then ‘they’ can maintain it once we have it up and running.” Too often innovation in newsrooms is not about throwing spaghetti at the wall and seeing what sticks, and never wondering why it sticks. Is it the wall that’s sticky or the sauce or the noodles?

If we stop at innovation, the only thing we will ever learn is that under certain conditions something can be done. You can stream video over the Internet. You can create an interactive NCAA basketball bracket contest. You can use Ruby on Rails to develop a microblogging social network. You can fly nonstop across the Atlantic. You can climb Mount Everest. You can put a man on the moon. Cool… but can *I* do it? And if so, why should I?

Those are the questions that experimentation answers.

“For an experiment to be useful, you should know in advance the criteria for success or failure,” said Phil Meyer, the author of Precision Journalism. “Even better, you should have action standards in mind, e.g. if it works, what would you do differently because of that knowledge?

I want to highlight two things that he said:

1. You should know *in advance* the standards for success or failure.

2. The outcome of the experiment should cause you to behave differently.

Let me tell you two personal stories about how innovations in which I’ve been involved have stopped short of experimentation, and why they would have been better if they had not. The first story is about the now common “most popular stories” feature on news Web sites. The second is about multimedia.

Several years ago, innovative news Web sites began to post lists of the “most read” articles on their homepages. Cool. First, that’s just technically interesting and that instant and automated audience feedback loop to itself is something you just can’t do in print or broadcast. Second, it just feels democratic and — to me anyway — socially groovy.

When I started having conversations with folks in my newsroom at the time about whether we should do this, it began as a religious battle — one sect arguing for the autonomy of the editor over the tyranny of the masses, and the other arguing for reader empowerment and innovation. The smartest folks in the newsroom often argued both sides with equal skill.

First experimental opportunity missed: Is posting “most read stories” to your homepage more democratic in some way? Do readers perceive it as a value, either by their behavior or their opinion? Under what circumstances will the editor-driven headlines and the reader driven headlines be different?

A pretty quick scan of site logs led most folks in the newsroom to agree with the hypothesis that there were some pretty interesting differences between the editor-driven and reader-driven headlines. But I still don’t think we really know very much at all about what those differences might be.

The next debate was about how to define “most popular”? How often should we sample? And when we did sample, what should we measure? Cumulative popularity or the change between two different sampling periods? Page views or unique visitors?

Second missed opportunity: Looking for differences in what those different measuring techniques would yield. And if they did yield a difference, how would we behave differently?

The most interesting debate we had before launching was the most interesting to me — the idea that it rewarding the “most emailed” articles would be closer to our editorial mission that rewarding the “most viewed.” In the age of online journalism, I suspect that the greatest fear of newspaper journalists is that they don’t become their own perception of television journalism — a ratings driven popularity contest that favors crime and cats because that’s what is “most viewed.”

There was a notion among many people — and I was in this camp — that it was “better” to reward our more engaged and influential readers by posting the articles that had been emailed the most. This was sort of the digital version of promoting the “watercooler stories” — the pieces that readers would discuss around the watercooler at work.

Of course, we knew that we could only count the people who emailed stories using our site’s button to “email this article” and we knew that most of us didn’t use that feature ourselves, favoring instead the simple act of cutting and pasting a link in to a separate email application that already had the addresses of all our contacts. But we didn’t know how many “votes” we might be discarding and we didn’t know whether that difference was significant in any way.

But the real crime here is not that we didn’t launch this feature with a mind toward experimentation and discovering a broadly applicable theory that would change our behavior. The real crime is that we still don’t have the answers to these questions. Or at least I don’t. I don’t think we have any idea whether or how this now ubiquitous feature has changed audience behavior, newsroom behavior or advertiser behavior.

Around the same time this debate was happening in newsrooms, another debate was developing. The use of audio, video and user-driven animation to tell stories on news sites had led to an explosion of journalistic creativity. It had brought to newspaper newsrooms people who truly had a different way of looking at journalism. Their presence alone was inherently innovative, and the stories they developed were widely reward by their peers around the globe.

But their stories were often incredibly expensive and often received very limited audiences. The multimedia staff rightly argued that the lack of audience was because they didn’t receive “enough” promotion. At the same time others were calling for managers — both editorial and business — to clearly and publicly describe to the staff how they defined “success” of these projects in which we were investing so heavily at the perceived exclusion of other priorities in the newsroom. In a world of scarce and diminishing resources, their rationale — “innovation” — was not enough. Mostly, it was not fair to the multimedia staff that was being pulled apart by a demand for innovation and a demand for accountability from a variety of angles.

What we needed — and still need — is experimentation. We have no qualitative categorization of multimedia content and we have no quantitative measures of the effects that these different types of content have on the audience, the advertisers and the newsroom. Most newsrooms have no clear defintion of success or failure of the most innovative multimedia projects in their newsrooms. Does that mean they should stop doing them? No.

The Value of Failure

There has been a lot of discussion recently about the value of learning how to “fail fast, and fail cheap.” Unfortunately, most news organizations fail slow and expensive. Not your newsroom, right? Well, ask yourself this — how many staff hours were spent on the last redesign of our site? And does at least 90 percent of the newsroom know and agree on the lessons we learned from the changes we made? And has management provided leadership about changes in direction based on those lessons. If you answer no to any of those questions, then your newsroom is failing in the wrong way.

Banning the word “innovation” from your newsroom and replacing it with a culture of “experimentation,” doesn’t guarantee that you will fail fast and cheap. But it does make it much more likely that you will at least know when you’ve failed and when you’ve succeeded and it will reduce the opportunity cost of failure because — at the very least — you will learn something. You’re more likely to be like Mae West, who when faced with the choice between two evils always picked the one she never tried.

And Mae West was sexxy! You want to be sexxy, don’t you?

Related Posts:

• The One Tool Your Newsroom Needs Right Now: A Failure Form
• J-Schools: A Breeding Ground for Fertile Failure

Related posts:

1. J-Schools: Breeding Ground for Fertile Failure
2. The One Tool Your Newsroom Needs Right Now: A Failure Form
3. Rerun Posts: Who Drives the Vision? Who Takes the Risk?

What did I find? Unable to speak Chinese and woefully ignorant of the subtleties of country’s recent history, I was able to take mental snapshots of China, without knowing the signifance or meaning of those images in my head. But today I sit here writing a blog post that my friends in China probably won’t be able to read. And I find it incredibly ironic that while the Chinese government let me freely wander Tianament Square two weeks ago, today it prevents me from speaking freely with friends — or enemies — who live there. In the interconnected world of social media, I feel the spirit and tension of Tiananmen more today while I’m writing this blog post than I did two weeks ago standing in that concrete pasture 7,000 miles away.

Here are my snapshots of China. I’d like your help thinking about what they will mean to us on the 40th anniversary of Tiananmen and the world in which my daughter will be entering when she turns 21 on June 5, 2029.

Full Screen Slideshow

(Conflict of Interest Disclosure: My airfare to Beijing was paid for by the China Internet Information Center, which is controlled and directly funded in large part by the Information Office of the State Council. I was invited to China for the purpose of speaking with the staff of China.org.cn about online journalism, through an ongoing partnership between that Web site and the School of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.)

Censorship and Surveillance in China

I have to admit that one of the sights I was most looking forward to seeing in Beijing was the “Great Firewall of China.” While I worked at washingtonpost.com, our coverage of controversial stories in China often coincided with reports that the site was not available there, so I was looking forward to seeing this first hand. What I found instead was an Internet that was relatively open to controversial subjects, compared to my experiences in other countries such as Dubai. I think the only two sites I couldn’t access were a Time.com blog about China… and this blog. But that was easily overcome by asking friends in the U.S. to cut and past the text of specific stories in to emails.

Of course, the picture of censorship on the anniversary of Tiananmen Square looks much different today. The whole cat and mouse game seems like a sad waste of everyone’s time. It’s tough to create a visual of Internet censorship, but this video from Australia 7 News via Yahoo does a nice dramatic interpretation I think.

The futility in that video is hilarious. Not so funny, though, when the dance between pro-democracy and anti-democracy forces looks more like the final — but often forgotten — final seconds of the video of this famous scene from 1989.

We often see the still image from that sequence as passive resistance in the face of overwhelming odds. But the events at the end — the man climbing up on the tank and looking for the damn door — is a great metaphor for efforts to create online discourse about political freedoms in China: “Come on out, we just want to talk.”

It is important that we try to keep the doors open and respect a two-way free flow of information and opinions. As much as I want the Chinese government to remove any walls that prevent me from speaking directly to my friends and former students there, I also sincerely want to hear the government’s view of the world. You don’t like something reported on washingtonpost.com? Don’t block it, link to it and tell me why not. I’d welcome much more a partisan view of the Tiananmen Square events than a pointless effort to pretend it didn’t happen.

Oddly enough, the kind of censorship I saw most often today was the anachronistic efforts to make lemonade out of lemons in print media. The one-year anniversary of the devastating earthquake in Sichuan province that crushed school buildings and the children in them. Several American reports have raised serious questions about whether shoddy construction led to unnecessary deaths. And a year later, according to the New York Times, victims of the earthquake are seeking detailed information about the numbers, names, places and causes of thousands of deaths. An American journalist in China with first hand knowledge of the situation told me that residents in the area are still secretly trying to get information about school construction in to the hands of journalists.

But there was no mention of this controversy in China Daily. What did it name it’s special section commemorating the tragedy? “Sichuan … Marching On: Icons and Images” — the images predominantly consisting of smiling children and heroic first-responders.

(On a bizarre side note, the same day’s paper reported that New York Times columnist Paul Krugman was greeted in Beijing by a “wall-size poster” of “his smiling visage” and the words “‘the great prophet is coming!’” Reportedly, people paid between USD $850 and $8,500 to hear him speak at Peking University.)

But censorship in China doesn’t come only under the “put-on-a-happy-face” brand. When I showed some folks the JibJab cartoon from the 2004 U.S. presidential campaign, one said “If we did that in China, we’d be executed.” It may have been hyperbole, but considering the number of unarmed people shot in back by the Chinese military only 20 years earlier on streets not more than a mile from our conversation, I took the comment as sincere.

The Spirit of the People

Most Americans, I suspect, can hardly imagine what it must be like to live under such a restrictive environment. Speaking only for myself, I’d imagined it would be a country filled with people living daily life with either resigned depression or displaced fear and anger. I didn’t find either. The people whom I met there were joyful for the most part — people who were able to giggle as we discussed the subtle differences between the English words “transgender” and “transvestite.” They were able to debate the finer points of the current season of American Idol. One Sunday morning, I saw hundreds of older and middle-aged men and women playing games in a park.

But the topic of Tiananmen didn’t come up. I’m embarrased that I never asked anyone about it directly. In 1989, many of the people I met must have been about the same age of the students in the square. Many more of the people I met were recent university grads themselves. What snapshots of the events did they have in their minds? What did they mean? Were they anything like the memories I have of seeing the streets of L.A. after the 1992 riots or the smell of the burned-out Pentagon as I drove by it in September and October 2001?

What controversial topics did we discuss? Well, I remember talking about corruption among real estate developers in Beijing. I remember a cross-generational and cross-gender conversation about family planning that surprised me very much. I remember someone asking me why Americans who visited Beijing always said they felt they “needed” to learn Chinese and never said they “wanted” to learn Chinese. I had an interesting conversation about what it meant for a young Chinese person to wear hipster t-shirts with images of old revolutionary posters on them…. we agreed that it didn’t have the same irony I intended with the Mao Zedong wristwatch I purchased at his mausoleum in Tiananmen Square.

20 Years From Now

One of the great blessing of my life has been my ability to meet people who were once sworn enemies of each other. I’ve met Americans who fought in World War II, Jewish survivors of Nazi concentration camps, a German man whose father carried a gun for the Nazis and fled as a child from the atrocities of the invading Russian army.

I’ve stayed at an ultra-luxury hotel feet from where President Reagan urged Gorbachev to “tear down this wall.” I’ve been to a bar in the gutted building that once housed the communist parliament of Easy Germany.

Will my children meet the children of students who were killed in Tiananmen Square and also meet the children of the soldiers who drove the tanks? And, more importantly, will they share a narrative of different perspectives based on a set of common facts?

I’m going to do what I can to make sure they will. I will continue to build personal friendships as well as professional relationships with my own Chinese friends. Maybe not today, but someday, they will read this post and they will comment. They will tell me they disagree.

And one day, all of our children may read the dialog because we did not let another 20 years pass without remembering and discussing and recording together the first rough draft of our shared human history.

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In a world where anyone can publish a blog, professional journalists need to emphasize accuracy and credibility even more. But the reductions in staff at almost all newsrooms in America is putting a squeeze on quality control.

This story from last week’s News & Observer provides an interesting case study. The piece quoted me, but mistakenly said I had worked for USA Today. When I saw the error, I emailed the reporter and used the article’s comments section to quickly post my own correction.

In the last week, though, I never heard back from the reporter. It turns out he was on furlough. He sent an apologetic note once he got back. That said, the fact error remains online.

So, let’s walk through what’s wrong (and right) with this picture:

1. Error gets in the news article. Yes, this is an automatic F in my introductory newswriting classes, but it’s certainly not the end of the world. Many people would wisely artgue that these kinds of pernicous little errors are going to become more common, though, as reporters take on the work of departed colleagues and stories get fewer reads by editors before they go to press.

2. Vigilant sources can use comments to correct errors in the article. This is incredibly empowering and could go a long way to increasing trust in journalism. You often hear sources say they spot errors in reporting but never bother to ask for a correction because they figure the reporters and editors won’t care anyway. For the most part I think that’s the opposite of true. But it also doesn’t matter now — sources have the ability, and even the obligation, to correct errors of fact. To not do so is to complictly accept and tolerate inaccuracy.

3. Someone at the N&O should have been monitoring these comments and alerting the appropriate editors to corrections. The primary reason the comments section on newspaper articles are so low-brow is because the (already thinly spread) staff is not participating in them. Which leads us back to the old sentiment among sources and readers — that newspaper editors just don’t care about what I have to say.

This example highlights the two key components to success in the future of news — high levels of accuracy and engagement. Journalists who don’t pursue both are in danger of becoming quickly irrelevant.

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1. Leaders — Political and Editorial — Need to Work the Network

As Ferreri notes in the story, I think there’s a significant difference between using technology and understanding its social, political and economic implications — just like there’s a difference between driving a car and being able to repair its engine. (This is why it’s still important to teach students HTML.)

The challenge for educators is to get students to begin to reflect in both positive and normative terms about how they communicate in different media environments.

Reflection is a key component in service learning, but it’s also critical to add a level of consciousness to any field that has developed informally and organically. Journalism students don’t need classroom education to BE in the world — they can acquire skills more efficiently just by doing internships. But they do need classroom education in order to EXPLAIN the world and to LEAD it.

Our role as journalism professors in a world where anyone can publish a blog is to develop leadership, not merely train practitioners.

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You can read my notes about their work at http://www.ncdropout.org/node/415
or visit the site’s homepage at http://www.ncdropout.org.

Among the pieces I’ve enjoyed the most are the online journalism tutorials that the students themselves created based on their own experiences hashing through their first efforts and multimedia, interactive, on-demand news story telling. You can see their tutorials here.

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Facebook groups are ripe for the harvesting

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