Two excellent business journalism events next week

If you happen to be in the Columbia area next week, we have two excellent business journalism events lined up as part of the University of South Carolina journalism school's I-Comm Week.

Both are in the new Ernest Hollings program room at the Thomas Cooper library on campus. They are free and open to the public. (And if anyone in the Columbia media wants to cover Leder, I will arrange some face time afterward.)

Thursday, Oct. 7 12:30-2p
Michele Leder, founder and editor of footnoted.com gives the inaugural Baldwin Business Journalism Lecture. Footnoted takes a closer look at the fine print in all those SEC and related filings and finds some amazing nuggets buried in the small type.

Friday, Oct. 8 noon-2 p.m.
A panel on today's business journalism, "Inform, Investigate or Advocate: Today's Approach to Reporting" sponsored by the Society of American Business Editors and Writers. Panelists: Bob Bouyea, Columbia Regional Business Report; Beth Hunt, American City Business Journals; David Millstead, freelance financial journalist; and Andy Shain,  The (Columbia) State.

Candy Crowley, Rita Cosby and Jamie McIntyre are among the others slated for events during the week. See the link above for the full schedule.

English R.I.P

Being perpetually behind in my reading, I just now caught up with this Sept. 19 column by Gene Weingarten on the untimely passing of the English language.

A moment of silence please.

I'd laugh, if I weren't crying so hard.

Actually, I was laughing after this sendup video about usage by the Guardian's David Mitchell. (Mentioned by one of the commenters to the Weingarten column.)

S.C.'s higher ed kerfuffle: Questioning the numbers

South Carolina's governor and its colleges and universities are jousting about rising tuition, building projects, etc.

(Disclosure, if you hadn't  noticed, I am employed by the University of South Carolina, but nothing here should be construed as having anything to do with its views, policies, etc. If it did, I would be very suspect of my sanity as a journalist and journalism professor. This is written as a teaching lesson for young journalists, nothing more.)

Some state legislators and Gov. Mark Sanford have defined the issue as one linking tuition increases to new buildings. It's a perfect political straw man because a) parents and students are rightly annoyed, angry even, about rising tuition (I know, I just finished putting two through college) and b) the state's colleges always are in various stages of construction and repair, so it's easy to point to things like a $14,000 fountain repair and go "Ah ha! Told you so."

Futher, it allows the pols to argue for a largely symbolic victory (even if the schools agree to limit tuition, it is not directly linked to construction), and it paints the schools into a corner because now they are forced to argue a negative - that construction and tuition are not linked and that the reality is that large cuts in state support are responsible for tuition increases. As anyone in PR will tell you, having to argue a negative is not generally a winning hand.

(Again, a note - I am not endorsing USC's argument. Take it with a grain of salt as you would Sanford et al.'s, evaluate and come to your own conclusions.)

Sanford has now maneuvered school officials into having to appear at a statewide "higher education summit" this coming week. It should be interesting theater all around.

Lies, damned lies and ...
In advance of that, Sanford has turned "mythbuster," and in his latest release there is a lesson for journalists to not only do the math themselves but consider on their own what story the numbers tell.

Sanford's position, roughly summarized (and for expediency let's just take the numbers he presents at face value with no research, though as a journalist I would be trying to check them were I covering this) is that each out-of-state student costs the university $9,000 in subsidy to educate ($31,000 cost less $22,000 tuition) while, somehow, the state-funded subsidy for in-state students is only $10,000. Let me let his press office lay it out for you:

Out-of-state enrollment at USC between 1999 and 2008 increased 105 percent while in-state enrollment grew less than nine percent. Looking statewide, the out-of-state student population grew from 24.6 percent in 1999 to 28.2 percent in 2008, while states like Florida have cut their out-of-state populations almost in half over that same time frame.

• In 2008, Clemson and USC spent on average $31,000 on out-of-state student’s [should be students' or each .... student's, but who's copy editing, right?] education annually, but out-of-state tuition as these two schools only averaged close to $22,000. South Carolina taxpayers were forced to make up the difference.
• At USC and Clemson in 2008, South Carolina taxpayers subsidized out-of-state students to the tune of around $9,000 per year, per student - meaning that South Carolina taxpayers are effectively handing out-of-state students a $40,000 check for their South Carolina education. 
• In 2008, USC and Clemson had a combined out-of-state enrollment of 10,778 students. Given the $9,000 annual subsidy for out-of-state students, that means South Carolina taxpayers shell out $97 million every year to help non-South Carolinians attend South Carolina schools.
• South Carolina’s in-state tuition at its largest public universities remains 145 percent higher than Florida, 80 percent higher than North Carolina and 60 percent higher than Georgia.

“This massive influx of out-of-state students does not, as some would argue, lower costs for South Carolina students to attend South Carolina colleges,” Gov. Mark Sanford. “Instead, it forces South Carolina taxpayers to actually subsidize out-of-state students’ education, while in many cases making it that much harder for South Carolina families to send their children to South Carolina schools, even if their parents and grandparents are alumni. This is simply unfair, unfortunate and frankly unknown by many taxpayers across South Carolina.”

“Compare this roughly $40,000 subsidy South Carolina taxpayers give to out-of-state students to the much-heralded HOPE scholarships - roughly $2,500 annually - meant to help South Carolina students get a college education in-state. HOPE scholarships provide around $10,000 in aid to in-state students over the average collegiate career - only one-fourth of the taxpayer subsidy lavished on out-of-state students.

“This raises the question: why would South Carolina taxpayers be subsidizing out-of-state students’ education to a greater degree than South Carolina’s own students?

Every numerical argument relies on an assumption. That's a key point that journalists too often miss. What is the assumption here? It's that it costs $31,000 to educate an out-of-state student but, apparently, something less to educate an in-state student. Now stop and ask yourself - does that make sense?

I'd contend it does not. So, if an out-of-state student is paying about $25,000 a year in tuition (that's the actual USC figure - making the subsidy using Sanford's cost figures about $6,000 not $9,000 at that school), and an in-state student pays about $9,400, isn't the effective "subsidy" for the in-state student $31,000-$9,400, or $21,600? Add to that the $2,500 Hope scholarship the governor touts, and wouldn't the effective state subsidy for an in-state student be more than $24,000 for the first year, versus $6,000 for the out-of-state student, and $21,600 after that? (The Hope is available only to first-year students (PDF), so, presumably unless the student got some other kind of state-funded aid after that, he or she would pay the $2,500 additional in the sophomore through senior years).

Now, there are some assumptions of my own here, of course. Most notable is that state support makes up the full deficit for each student. Look at the state subsidy for higher ed, however, and it would seem that other sources are needed. And clearly many students get financial aid that does not come from the state. But I see nothing to indicate those other sources are skewed more toward either classification of student.

So, if the reality is that both are loss leaders, but out-of-state students are actually less so, doesn't enrolling more out-of-state students actually help keep the subsidies down?

At that point, this doesn't turn into a numbers argument, but a political and philosophical one, and journalists should see it for what it is because it raises questions different from whose numbers are right:

• If in-state and out-of-state students both incur "losses" for the institution, what is the right balance of in-state and out-of-state students?
• Is there some kind of underlying philosophical assumption that out-of-state students should cover all their costs? Is that realistic when compared with other states? When compared with higher ed as we generally have practiced it in this country? And if not, is it time for that  change? (Never rule out the benefits and pitfalls of such change - just recognize, as journalists, what they are and explain them to readers.)
• Are some of the politicians angry because parents have complained that Bubba and Bubbette couldn't get into USC or Clemson (what I have heard some students actually declare were their "safe" schools)?
• What should be the true relationship between state support, tuition and enrollment?
• And if out-of-state students coming to South Carolina are a problem, shouldn't we then be honest and declare all S.C. students going out of state to be leeches, too? In fact, if you want to put it in stark economic terms, as Sanford does, and having reworked those numbers, would it not actually benefit the state to get as many students going to other states' schools as possible and get as many in-state students here? 

But those are tough questions - much tougher than throwing around some suspect numbers. They require everyone - politicians, education leaders, students, parents, journalists and the rest of  us - to actually sit down and have some hard, deep thought.

When I started writing this, USC did not have a point-by-point response. It now does. Unfortunately, it does not address the true cost of education per student and whether there is a significant difference between in-state and out-of-state students. And if there isn't, it really doesn't matter much what the figure is (unless out-of-state students actually make the U money) because we are talking orders of magnitude here.

(Having looked at USC's site, I'm not sure it does itself any favors with how things are presented. For instance, there is this:

USC Columbia's total state appropriations were $188,308,819 in 2008.  Total fall 2007 headcount enrollment, was 27,272. Of that enrollment 19,288 were resident South Carolinians. This would indicate that for each resident student, USC received $9,763 in state funding.  If the state were in fact writing a check to USC for the non-resident enrollments, the appropriation would be an additional $71,856,000.

 That, of course, requires one to assume state money goes only to subsidize state students. Now, one might fairly conclude that is Sanford's argument, but I'm not sure it totally is. And even if it were, the university should clearly state that is the assumption on which it is operating. It also assumes that the higher figure, when the math is done only on in-state residents, would remain the effective state subsidy. But the actual state subsidy, taking all students into account, is about $6,905, and nothing says that wouldn't be the figure the university would end up with, even if it enrolled nothing but in-state students. By the way, I get $77.9 million, not $71.9 million, when I do the math [27272-19288]*9763, or 7894*9763. There's also that 2007 vs. 2008 anomaly, which the school could make clearer by explaining that "2008" apparently refers to fiscal 2008, which ran from July 1 2007, to June 30, 2008. But, of course, if you read it closely, there are lots of code and assumptions here, leading one to believe this site really isn't for "the public." It's for policy makers who already know this stuff.)


The danger for journalists is that they get caught up in the fog of numbers and fail to cut through that fog and recognize the issues for what they are.

Numbers rarely actually lie unless we let them. Instead, they tell a story about who is issuing them, and the journalist's true job is to figure out those stories and tell them for what they are.

Watching state government - striking a 'Nerve'

Yes, The Nerve sometimes wears its ideology and prosecutorial attitude on its sleeve.

And many times its stories could use a good editor.

But it also deserves kudos for what is becoming a consistently good job of reporting on state government in South Carolina even as the various newspapers reduce their coverage.

The stories have become a must-read for me, a former statehouse reporter in several states, mostly through the S.C. News Exchange.

Among The Nerve's recent fascinating stories:

• That a tax-study commission is considering a minimum filing fee for all S.C. taxpayers. (That has the potential to become an explosive issued, but I don't recall reading about it in any of the S.C. papers I follow.)
• That "other" fees in the state budget are ballooning far beyond what the Legislature appropriated. This includes tuition, which looks to be a big stalking horse in the 2011 General Assembly.
• That outgoing Lt. Gov. Andre Bauer has rehired two key aides at tidy little salaries to help his transition out of office. (Disclosure: I consider one of them, Frank Adams, to be a friend I often see at the local media club.)

Critics will dismiss some of these as much adoo about nothing. And they and others may point to the Nerve's affiliation with the S.C. Policy Council as evidence of partisan bias. (The council goes to great pains to stress it is a nonpartisan organization and doesn't lobby, but it's also one of the more conservative you'll find, a fact not lost on S.C. politicians who have been known to cite Policy Council positions as heavily influencing their thinking.)

That misses the point: The professional journalists at The Nerve (all hired from other publications) are doing the kind of junk yard dog reporting that seems to have gone out of fashion at too many other outlets. It's good to see a little outrage now and then in a state where too many good stories die on the altar of indifference (equally shared by the public and some of its news media).

For that, they deserve some recognition.

WOWO - the day the earth stood still

Long ago, I worked for one of the rockingest-ever news organizations, Group W News (the old Westinghouse Broadcasting). Part of that included a stint at 50,000-watt WOWO in Fort Wayne. There's a great history site for the station historyofwowo.com that brings back those great radio days.

There are photos of station mementos and lots of airchecks, including a couple with yours truly. (I've mentioned the site before, but Webmaster Randy Meyer, who is doing this out of a love for the station, has put up a tremendous amount of new stuff in recent months.

And Nick McCormac now has sent me this great other site about a legendary day in WOWO's history - the day the Emergency Broadcast System went haywire and WOWO had three states thinking there might be a nuclear attack under way.

And why do they call me "Darling Doug Fisher"? You've gotta listen to find out. (MP3)

Good times. Not to be too over-the-top nostalgic, but those really were fun days in radio - even if we did occasionally scare the beejezus out of people.

New York Times link fail

OK, a basic tenet of publishing in the digital age is that if you refer to a website that might be useful to your readers, you should link to it.

The Times seems to stumble over this concept more than it should. For instance, today in a story on lawsuits challenging the use of Flash cookies for commercial purposes is this paragraph:

 The company provides an online tool on its Web site to erase Flash cookies and manage Flash player settings. At least one suit, however, claims that the controls are not easy to reach and are not obvious to most Web users.

 So dos the Times make them any easier to reach or obvious to its users - thus perhaps adding more value to its content?

I think you know the answer.

Doing ethics: A nice summary of the pressures we face

Poynter's Steve Myers' lengthy piece about how several media organizations were led astray by a joke photo posted on Twitter nicely summarizes the pressures we face these days.

I was especially struck by this:

"When it comes to something like the tornado," Adrian Chen, who posted the photo on Gawker, told me via e-mail, "you've got to have something up quickly, and you're pressed hard by the knowledge that thousands of people are tweeting about it, basically 'scooping' you in real time. So you have to use pictures from Twitter. "

Unfortunately, I think Chen's "everyone's doing it, we gotta to it" reasoning leaves out the reality that he -- and others manning news desks -- have an even greater responsibility to vet these things. As Chen noted later in the piece:

"Next time, I'll do a bit more digging around Twitter to verify the authenticity of a photo I find there, maybe by contacting the person who posted it, or seeing if others had posted similar pictures," Chen told me. "And I imagine I'll opt for a more plausible -- if less dramatic -- photo."

Uh, yeah. Alex Howard got it right in a follow-up Tweet:

Is Gmail at fault if users FWD flawed stories? Or AT&T if false MMS spread? Wrong msg on semaphore? People duped, not medium

Myers outlines some common-sense ways that Craig Kanalley, traffic and trends editor at Huffington Post, became suspicious about the photo.

Robert Hernandez has more at OJR - some excellent thoughts on speed vs. responsiblity (but also the well-placed admonition against wanting to deprecate social media and its place in the news ecology).

One of the things I find tough as a teacher is creating the true pressure atmosphere I think is needed to teach these things. We can use something like this as a case study, for instance, but often the raw, real-time material needed to make this very real isn't there or goes away (the jokester, for instance, has now put his Twitter account on protected status). How are others approaching that? I don't think the standard case study adequately produces the kinds of escalated pressures reflected in Chen's statement.

Ideas?

Weintraub roundup on photos and the law

Colleague David Weintraub has a good roundup of the legal challenges facing photographers, including the use of eavesdropping laws by police against those who videotape arrests.

Here is his earlier part 1 that runs down numerous cases of photographers in public places being hassled by police.

Worth reading: Why NewsTilt failed

Paul Biggar's lengthy dissection of why his NewsTilt failed is worth reading for journalists to become familiar with some of the issues of online news-tech startups. (If you need some background, here is the original Tech Cruunch story on NT's launch.)

Certainly, NewsTilt had its own problems unique to its idea, but Biggar points out larger issues too:

• Tech must be rolled out and updated quickly
• You have to know your audience, both externally and internally (The fact that we didn’t know anything about our readers’ demographics underscores another problem: I don’t understand news readers. I certainly wasn’t one, and I didn’t know many people who really were. My customer development had largely consisted of talking to journalists and figuring out what they wanted. I never really–despite good intentions on lots of occasions–talked to people who loved news about why they loved it. So I was unable to say what was going wrong and why people weren’t sticking around.)
• Spend lots of time thinking about your staff and contributors. (He says NT hired journalists that were too good and not motivated enough to continue supplying content: All the problems the journalists faced, not writing enough, their distrust of Facebook, their unwillingness to socially promote their work, were really problems of motivation. If they had been the sort of people who gave up everything to succeed at their dreams, these could have been blown past. But as established successes in their field, expecting them to make large changes like that is unreasonable.)
• Be brutally honest about the challenges (We never made it clear how hard it was going to be to create an online presence, and so when articles went nowhere, there was little motivation to continue. Building a brand online is akin to doing a startup – it’ll take five years.)
•  Design is important - one of the things I've been trying to get across to an MSM partner on one of the original J-lab funded sites we run that still limps along after a crash wiped out the original design. (Journalists felt that they were writing for us, instead of writing for themselves, for their own brands. How could they feel anything else, since that’s the impression we gave them by the design of newstilt.com),

Come to think of it, those are the same problems many startups and experiments in the mainstream media have suffered from over the years. As I said, well worth reading and thinking about.

Heds: Did they really not take a second look at this?

You can't make this stuff up. Thanks to World Wide Words for the pointer.

Join the Carolina Reporter on Facebook

The senior practicum newsroom where I am a senior instructor, The Carolina Reporter, now has its Facebook page up and running:

http://www.facebook.com/pages/Carolina-Reporter/158183630860167

Come visit.

Also, please check out the website, Dateline Carolina, http://www.datelinecarolina.org.

Usage: Trooping along

Over at World Wide Words, a thread has developed about the use of "troop" and "troops" as the generic term for any kind of service member. Not surprisingly, it began with someone objecting to it.

But as Michael Quinion notes, the use is long-established.

So the question turns to the singular "troop." In his e-mail edition this week (it won't be on the website for several days; you really should have a free e-mail subscription), Quinion quotes one gentleman noting that inside the military, at least, troop has long been used across services as a generic term (the military needs something, as fliers and sailors, for instance, tend to bristle at being called soldiers). Whether we want to adopt that in the media remains open for debate - while "troops" sounds fairly natural, "troop," I suspect, still sounds tinny to more people than not.

Another correspondent, one Katharine Holden who says she does editing for the Defense Department, says she is now under orders to use the term "warfighter." Supposedly it has superseded "servicemember."

That's one I think we can safely avoid for now.

(A BBC producer commented that "troop/troops" seems to be an Americanism that is just now crossing the pond, but that at the BBC "we ae trying to beat it back." The BBC uses "service personnel" or "members of the armed forces." Of course, that is the BBC after all.)

Words: A real BFF wouldn't let me invest in that zombie bank

The New Oxford American Dictionary has released a partial list of the new words and phrases it has incorporated. Among them some "old" favorites like BFF (best friend forever), hashtag, LMAO, hockey mom, truthiness, etc.

And there are some reltively new ones: vuvuzela, zombie bank, unfriend, etc.

The New Oxford is not one of the "Big Three" (Merriam-Webster, American Heritage, Webster's New World), but it's still worth noting.

In fact, as I look at the list, I'm stuck that so many of these are so common already, you begin to wonder what took them so long. Yeah, yeah, I know how dictionaries work and you don't just toss terms in. But it's an illustration of how the digital age has so sped the changes in language that what's "new" sometimes seems so old.

How to take things out of context

At Save the News, there is a lengthy rant about AP's guidelines for members on what stories to share. The author rants against "the AP’s editorial submission guidelines [that] are doomed to produce mind-numbing, paranoia-inducing stories that are neither informed nor newsworthy."

AP, as you might expect, tells members it wants major crashes, major public figures and meetings where major decisions are made, etc. It does not want the all-to-common inner-city murder but wants the ones from the hustings where murders are not common.

OK, that last one, from the Ohio guidelines, is written a bit insensitively. But overall the rant is misguided.

The writer rants:

Read: no news coverage of low-income people and people of color being killed in urban areas. Tough luck if your brother/mother/son/daughter gets murdered in the city. Bor-ing. And pay no attention to those city council meetings – you know, where decisions are made about our communities; they’re not worth the column inches.
It’s no secret that the news – especially local news -- often leaves something to be desired. We rarely see coverage of stories that truly matter to our communities, or in-depth reporting that gets to the bottom of an issue, instead of just skimming the surface. And these AP guidelines offer an alarming glimpse into the mentality of our media system. 

 No they don't. They offer a glimpse into the reality of a worldwide news service with limited resources that has to prioritize. As an AP news editor, the first question I had to ask myself in the morning was has anything happened here that people in Stockholm would care about? Ok, how about folks in Toledo? OK, how about folks in the neighboring states? Finally, how about folks in cities outside of this one in this state.

AP is not in the business of covering city council meetings unless they produce news that is actually news outside that community. Those murders, well, yes, it is true that AP is reinforcing the stereotype often expressed in the label "quiet community," which is code for white and middle-class. And there are times I think AP needed to rethink some of its knee-jerk decisions in those cases - as does the entire news industry. But AP does not have the resources to cover every murder, every council and sewer commission meeting, etc., even if freelancers or papers sent the copy.

And, guess what, many states now have news-sharing systems among papers that could easily dump such stories on their version of the wire. But they don't, or if they do, other papers don't run them. What does that tell you?

As Brian Cubbison noted in the comments, the rant ignores that AP writes "big picture" pieces that in the long run may do a lot more good in bringing public attention to the epidemic of inner-city murders, for instance. Or unhealthy workplaces. Or that numerous city and town councils are agitating for immigration changes by taking things into their own hands.

Were I still at AP, however, I'd be much more worried by these Twitter comments from John Robinson, editor in Greensboro, N.C.:

@howardweaver @jayrosen_nyu I don't know AP's guidelines for NC, but the state buro files little stuff of value anyway.

@howardweaver In fact, w/out McClatchy Reg. wire, we'd be SOL for state stories outside our region. (Thx for your tutelage of successors)

 I can attest that the opinion is shared by several S.C. members (who now are served by a consolidated Carolinas operation) and by more than a few in other states with whom I have talked.

Tinny wording - Detroit Fire

So in an AP story about the Detroit fires was this wording:

Wind gusts of up to 50 mph forced flames to jump from house to house, eventually encompassing 85 homes and garages -- many abandoned -- across several neighborhoods.

"Forced flames to jump"? OK, so the wind didn't have a gun at the flames' back, and it is understandable. But it is a bit tinny. Any writing, but especially journalism that is trying to catch and hold harried readers should be more than just understood. It should strive for some elegance.

Substitute "caused" for "forced," and you reduce that tinniness. Eliminate "to jump" so you have "forced flames from house to house" and it's even better. Finally, if you want (since "forced" still has that little connotation of volition), change it to "pushed" or "swept."

Wind gusts of up to 50 mph pushed flames from house to house, eventually encompassing 85 homes and garages -- many abandoned -- across several neighborhoods.

How much 'voice' is too much - two interesting perspectives

One of the things I struggle with - and I think I can say I'm not alone among journalists, academics or journalist-academics (jacademics?) - is how to insert enough of a wedge between the old idea of "objectivity" (disclosure - I don't subscribe to that; I prefer fairness because no one can be really objective) and the idea of putting some voice, some fun, into the news product.

The immediate challenge, of course, is to teach how to do it so that the resulting product does not read like some gross disgorgement of self-indulgence, while at the same time acknowledging that as much as it may be a moving target and to some extent a strawman for other grievances, there remains the shadowy figure of "going too far."

A good example is that debate played out in the past week between the New York Times' new public editor, Arthur Brisbane, and Jonathan Weber, editor in chief of the Bay Citizen, which provides content for some of the Times' West Coast editions. (The column in question was one that Weber did on San Francisco city workers' pensions - hey, anyone who can get a rise out of the audience on pension matters has my respect! Interestingly, Brisbane also cites a NYT article by Ron Lieber on public pensions in Colorado as problematic, though I thought Lieber did a nice job of blending voice and fact until the final five grafs, where he starts coloring outside the lines a bit).

I'd recommend you read both columns. (FWIW, my thought is that Matt Bai's column that Brisbane referred to went a little wide of the turn.)
--------

On another matter, read the San Francisco Weekly's outtake on NPR's new blog network, Argo. Very insightful on how NPR is trying to take "blogging" a bit beyond its current form and into the "hard" news realm. Kind of a reverse of the above, given bloggers' "pajama-wearing" image that ignores the vast range of sophistication and expertise out there.

Rosen's suggestions for young journalsts worth reading

Jay Rosen has posted a speech he gave to incoming journalism students in Paris.

It is well worth reading and letting what he says roll around the crevices of your brain.

There's a lot packed in here, from the usual numbered list of advice points to the larger subtext of journalism and its relationship to the growth and evolution of the public sphere. I agree with Rosen (see the comments) that one of his most telling comments is thus:

Seeing people as masses is the art in which the mass media, and professional media people, specialized during their profitable 150-year run (1850 to 2000). But now we can see that this was actually an interval, a phase, during which the tools for reaching the public were placed in increasingly concentrated hands. Professional journalism, which dates from the 1920s, has lived its entire life during this phase, but let me say it again: this is what your generation has a chance to break free from. The journalists formerly known as the media can make the break by learning to specialize in a different art: seeing people as a public, empowered to make media themselves.

It's a struggle I still see playing out in newsrooms and the halls of academe - this struggle to break free of all the conventions, traditions and shibboleths of "mass" media - how many schools still have "mass" in their names, for instance? One reason it's difficult is that "mass" is the way money was made and remains how most of it is made (both in business and academe). How do you transition from that when a review of business history shows that we - meaning business generally, and even society - are not that good at transitioning and seem to respond better to disruptive change?

(The evolutionary life cycle of social, political or business change might well be plotted as a series of saw teeth, with disruption or crisis bringing about massive change which then, over time, flattens out as it is interpreted, implemented and modified until it reaches a sort of steady state paralysis until the next disruptive event. One can even look at the recent health care debate and passage of the federal plan through that context. For instance, the GOP already is foreshadowing a repeal effort if it retakes Congress, but those who observe and interpret such things rather widely seem to indicate they expect less success in such radical reversal and more in steady modifications and adjustments to what has been passed.)

Rosen, when challenged in the comments, readily acknowledges he does not know how to economically support journalism. And maybe we are destined for another interregnum of turmoil, economic turmoil being part of that, much as existed after Gutenberg and his printing press, until there was settlement on common forms (the book and newspaper as we generally know it) and social conventions (such as the mere concept of one-to-many distribution and that of the mass audience) surrounding this technology. (One could argue that those conventions were already in place with the coming of radio and TV, and thus the introduction of those media was not as immediately disruptive.)

Rosen, with a depth missing from many such analyses, provides a lot to chew on here. I'd recommend starting with point seven:

Your authority starts with, “I’m there, you’re not, let me tell you about it.” If "anyone" can produce media and share it with the world, what makes the pro journalist special, or worth listening to? Not the press card, not the by-line, not the fact of employment by a major media company. None of that. The most reliable source of authority for a professional journalist will continue to be what James W. Carey called "the idea of a report." That's when you can truthfully say to the users, "I'm there, you're not, let me tell you about it."  Or, "I was at the demonstration, you weren't, let me tell you how the cops behaved." Or, altering my formula slightly, "I interviewed the workers who were on that oil drilling platform when it exploded, you didn't, let me tell you what they said."  Or, "I reviewed those documents, you didn't, let me tell you what I found." Your authority begins when you do the work. If an amateur or a blogger does the work, the same authority is earned. Seeing people as a public means granting that without rancor.

Your authority begins when you do the work. It's not a novel idea, though it may seem so in this day and age.

From the headline hall of fame

This was making the rounds of the "fail" and sports sites the other day. I didn't see it, but a student sent it to me, and you just have to post something like this for the record:

It's come to this?

In a sad but apt statement of the current state of newspapers, two of the three stories in The (Columbia, S.C.) State's Metro section on Labor Day were hardly metro - but were from papers in Myrtle Beach and Charleston. The third was a Q and A by the news columnist.

In fact, taking the front page as well, three of the six lead stories were from other papers, including one about college building projects done by the Greenville News but that should have been easy pickings for the Columbia paper that sits in the shadow of the University of South Carolina.

I'm glad to see S.C. papers sharing and giving light to some good stories that in the past were largely ignored or had to be sanitized by the AP before they were picked up (except for a few years when Columbia and Greenville were going at it, and so Columbia had a content-sharing arrangement with the Spartanburg daily paper, part of the Upstate metro region). But this is still a sad commentary in the state's largest paper.

Commentary on AP-Google deal

Lots of trumpeting last week about AP's new deal with Google in which the search-engine giant gets continued access to AP stories and will host them while paying an undisclosed sum, and, perhaps more important, giving AP lots more data about how its content is accessed and viewed.

But Frederic Filloux, in a Monday note, questions whether AP (and AFP, for which he has consulted) is following the wisest path:

Unable to position itself as a genuine partner to the media sphere, Google tries to fracture it by striking deals left and right. In this divide and conquer respect, the AP agreement is a good one — from a Google standpoint. First, Google buries the hatchet for good with AP, transforming a contentious relationship into a true partnership. Second, this deal is a major departure from the “snippets strategy”,  in which, until now, Google News contented itself by crawling thousands of sources and extracting headlines and short abstracts. Under the the new AP-Google agreement, Google pays an undisclosed amount of money to AP and provides precious traffic data — in exchange of full stories. (To be complete, AFP also has its own deal with Google, although a more modest one). ... Thanks to its deal with the two newswire agencies, Google is now in the self-sustaining news business.
For AP and AFP, these licensing deals with the search engine go against developing their own business to consumer website. Frankly, who will go to their home pages when Google News already hosts the newswires stories, with a better access, and… native search engine optimization?  Why build a website that will compete against a full licensing deal? It doesn’t make sense.

Filloux also questions whether both agencies can - and should - remain member-owned cooperatives. The piece is aptly titled "The Newswire Quandary."

Hed of of the month club

You just can't make this stuff up:

A tip of the hat to Alex Riley for the pointer.

It's baaaack - all this talk of converged newsrooms

The announced merger of Salt Lake City's Deseret News and sister KSL stations into one newsroom has the blogosphere all atwitter.

There's Ken Doctor over at Nieman Lab with an analysis worth reading.

There's Alan Mutter at Newsosaur wondering if newspaper-TV mergers are the next big thing.

Put me in the less-than-sanguine column for a couple of reasons:

1. Almost all of these that have happened are special circumstances of co-ownership - Media General's Tampa center, Lawrence, Kan. (where the paper actually created the TV outlet). Those situations are still relatively rare, with no immediate indication the FCC and Congress are willing to cave yet on allowing more of them. 
2. Yes, perhaps the economic imperatives are high. But so are the barriers. Every academic study I've seen lays out those barriers, and we've reviewed a lot of them and looked at these operations through Newsplex. While I firmly believe that someday it's all going to come down the same digital pipe, whether it comes from merged newsrooms is an entirely different matter.
3. There's this little thing in the back of my head that says the Founding Fathers had this idea that competition in journalism is a good thing. Oh, how Neanderthal of me, I know. And certainly, from a business perspective as Doctor points out, how probably irrational. But I get all warm and fuzzy when I see two people, not one, working on a story from competing operations because then I have a better sense that all the questions will be asked and the angles examined. And if three or more are on it -- for a moment, let's exclude the "pack" stories -- I get positively jiggly. Now, the argument will be that there's lots of other competition out there - blogs, hyperlocal sites, etc. But study after study (plus my own experience - see the report in red in the right rail - with such a site) shows that's not the case yet. The marketplace of ideas envisioned so long ago is thwarted by the economic marketplace we see today.

And yet there may be no choice eventually. Consider this from Paid Content relaying an analyst's observation that even in the best case, online customers are worth about a quarter of those in print, even when there is a paywall.

Meanwhile, the battle of the teens is shaping up to be who can come up with ways to end-run the Web with other digital distribution platforms. We've finally gotten over the fallacy that the content - most of it anyway - is worth that much (and as noted here many times, even if it is, the cost of capturing the relatively fleeting economic value is too great) and are starting to openly admit it's all about control.

So the industry is focused on mobile, where people are used to paying, and there are projects afoot to "plug the leaks" in the Web by creating alternative distribution systems or those that seek to thwart standard Web protocols tilted toward distribution, not control. (David Sullivan has some further thoughts on all this, and see TechDirt's rebuttal to the current meme that apps will fundamentally change the Web.)

Chew on that along with your cole slaw this holiday weekend.

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I will say that I am fascinated with the description of the Salt Lake City operation on Doctor's post.

The new staff of something more than 200 (Gilbert is being cagey about the number) will be expected to multitask, with remaining staffers increasingly cross-trained and “new employees expected to have those skills.” Do the math. If it took four people to do a story and now it takes only one, you can afford to jettison one of those positions and get more productivity out of the other two.

Step two: “Deepen coverage,” meaning the re-allocating of resources to cover issues most important to the readers. Gilbert says that about half of the remaining news staffers will serve in the “integrated newsroom,” with the remainder staying in more traditional journalistic roles. In that integrated newsroom of roughly a hundred, a third will serve as first responders/rewrite and two-thirds as field reporters. “You’re sandwiching the reporters between first responders [getting to news and getting it out quickly] and rewrite [those taking the reporters work and purposing it for various platforms],” explains Gilbert. Those who first-respond also do rewrite — so that’s going to be a busy staff.

The journalistic question: How do the new stories compare to the old ones?

Converged or not, I suspect they're on to something here as far as how staff resources are likely to be allocated in the future. This follows on the heels of the USA Today realignment which includes putting digital first and throwing everything at a story in the first 30 minutes.