Carinival: My thoughts for 2009

Sorry to have been away for a while, but grading for three lab courses is, well, a bear. (However, do have a look at what some of my students have done. Modest but promising for our pre-capstone course, I think.)

For this month's Carnival of Journalism, David Cohn has asked us to tackle "positive new media predictions for 2009." Hey, I'm game. After all, that's part of what we do in the ivy halls, right, make predictions that are worth what you (don't) pay for them. (We also have a tendency to come up on a battlefield where everyone is dead or dying and utter such bon mots as "There's been a war," but pointing out the painfully obvious is just part of what we do.)

I have pointedly not looked at my fellow carnivalers' predictions, so you may see some duplication here. Rest assured, groupthink is as much at work in the blogland as it is in the MSM. And I don't guarantee you will find all of these positive.

1. We will begin to see an evolution in mobile that roughly approximates Moore's law. We've been saying this in one way or another at Newsplex for eight years or so, but it's only in the past year or so that people have really been listening. Restated a bit, it's that once TV converts to digital, the power and capability of that thing on your hip you now call a cell phone or iPhone or Blackberry will roughly double every 18 months. We are about to enter the age of mobile, always-on computing that's been predicted for years. Consider: Your local TV station becomes a big mother Wi-Fi antenna (it's not going to use all its bandwidth to send you pretty pictures). The cell phone system is the uplink (since upside data transfer is much smaller). People swear by (and occasionally at) their iPhones. You ain't seen nuthin' yet.
2. As a result, media without a clear mobile strategy will be left (even more) behind. Forget the 10 a.m.-4 p.m. spike in your online traffic. Some of it may still be there, but with powerful computing available at the flick of a "cell-phone" cover, the demands for information bits will extend over a much longer range. And that's going to pose continuing challenges for operations that by their very cultural and corporate DNA are tied to a few deadlines. Oh sure, you can talk information center to me all you want, but I have yet to see an operation that really has that in its bone marrow except for the wire service. And your mobile strategy is going to have to be more than just throwing up a feed of links and headlines.
1. E-paper will be more about extending the capabilities of these mobile devices than creating some Kindle on steroids. A bit of detritus still floats to the surface occasionally predicting that newsreaders are coming over the hill just like the cavalry. Yeah, yeah. Wake me when the revolution's over. I kind of like the electronic edition of my local paper, looking like the paper and all that. But you know what, I only like it for a pedagogical reason - it provides a nice current boundary for my students when it comes to those dreaded current affairs tests (wouldn't be fair, after all, to throw the entire Web open to them and say "guess what I'm going to ask.") The newspaper and its layout are wonderful studies in semiotics, but they are also of an era of limits. Somehow these e-papers never seem to find a way to let you really go explore the Web. Maybe they will, but I'm not sure they scale down as well as we might think to a portable screen.
2. Battery technology will continue to be one of the limits, but significant advances will be made in portable power. (OK, maybe not till 2010 or 2011, but it is coming.) But that's another predictions list ...
3. Community papers, which have been a tad smug in their outlook, will suddenly discover they'd better pay attention to digital, especially mobile. Look, your audience isn't getting any younger. And take a look at the youngsters in your market area. What's that hanging off their belts or in their pockets or purses? Hint: It's not your paper.
1. Same goes for college papers, which are community papers by just another name.
2. In a weird way, those community papers that have invested little or nothing in a Web site, but develop a good mobile strategy, might have an advantage. Web sites in their own way are becoming legacy media. We put so much into them, yet, if I am right and mobile is ascending, people will come to them less and less. Update: See John Duncan's well-explained take on the second-mover advantage.
   
4. One of the real problems will be the pricing system we have created for digital communications. Take all your communications bills and total them. How much are you spending a month? I mean all of it - phone, papers, Internet, cable, papers, magazines, online subscriptions (including anything for storage, etc.). Add it all up. You could probably make the monthly payments on a small car with it. Much has been written about how far behind the rest of the world the U.S. is when it comes to broadband speed and pricing. I've seen only one report on this - a Louisville group that said about a year ago that high telecommunications costs were contributing to housing foreclosures. But I'm betting it's not isolated. In 2009, I think we will see higher speeds, but not lower prices. In the mobile space, digital plans will still be too expensive. Some things, like "white space" devices will help, but that will be 2010 at the earliest.
   
5. If you're digital in any form you'd better have the kahunas to link to other folks, including your competition. This is soooo 2002, but let's repeat it: It's called the "web" for a reason. It's nice to see more places getting this message, but many still don't.
6. Out of all that laid-off brainpower will come some really smart sites/products/stories/multimedia, etc. A lot of smart people have been shown the exit door from newsrooms and media operations. And despite how it sometimes can come across when listening to the echo chamber of the digiterati, not all are luddites or curmudgeons or whiners and piners.
1. Someone will begin figuring out how to do "smart" aggregation in a digital age. In other words, something other than just the pure mechanical Google News or the human-assisted Digg or Newsvine. If a thousand (news) flowers bloom from my main prediction here, someone is going to have to help the Dougs of this world find and navigate the really good stuff. (I'm running into serious info overload these days, and I spend a whole lot more time working at it than my neighbors, for instance.) Smart aggregation combines the best of the mechanical with the public assist with the professional augmentation -- including original product, some of which may build on what the other two systems do -- that can produce smart, useful info packages. Yeah, "news you can use," but in a much different way from how the TV types have sliced and diced it. (Feel free in the comments to tell me how your site already is the latest and greatest, but I've looked at a lot of them and haven't seen it yet.)
2. Some media house is going to just blow it up and refashion itself into a social media site. (Actually, someone probably has, but I don't know about it. Toss something in the comments if you do.) I find myself more and more intrigued by how Facebook (and to some extend Linked-in) serves as an aggregator and wire service, as well as a meeting place and a sort of online 411. (I've used it, for instance, to track down contacts to get copies of academic papers or to substitute for e-mail when I needed to reach someone and had forgotten to put them in my address book.) In other words, it's become an information utility. But isn't that what the modern media house wants to be in its community? So ...
   
7. Publishers and editors will learn that online is a dynamic medium requiring constant tending and attention to what your users are telling you. Unlike that behemoth, multimillion-dollar press, it is not a turnkey system that you make everything else fit to. Ok, nah. But there's always hope.
8. Publishers will blow up the sales bullpen as much as they are blowing up the newsroom. I think this is actually the large untold story of why MSM continues to struggle like large lizards caught in a tar pit. That pit is the old-line sales mentality still prevalent at too many media - the one that grew from becoming largely order takers. I still hear a steady stream of stories about compensation structures that favor print and sales people woefully ill-equipped with the tools needed to sell online. That includes having the capability "back at the office" to produce innovative solutions quickly and flexibly (see No. 6)). Paul Conley talks a bit about this in the context of B2B publications.
   
1. The successful ones will be those that see ad agencies as their competition. Sorry, but this is business and the gloves are off. The Internet destroys middlemen, and ad agencies are middlemen. A well-structured media house will have many if not most of the same capabilities itself. Now, much of a media company can be seen as a middleman, too. But if it's a matter of survival, those convivial relations have got to go. See, that ad agency can now be a publisher too .... 'Nuf said?
2. There will be growing realization that even if you aggregate an audience, online it is not a mass audience. It's a bunch of little revenue streams. From this will come more innovation into targeted advertising instead of banners, which are an artifact of a mass mentality. (See also No. 7: If you combine the idea of flexibility and attention to audience with the idea that an audience is no longer a mass, this might become easier to understand.)
9. The Detroit newspapers' cutback on delivery experiment will falter, as did the Tampa Trib's earlier foray into a single-section paper. In Detroit, the News will be the one that comes up short without a Sunday edition, unless it is going to turn one of the other editions into a faux-Sunday. We'll see how it works out, but I think this is going to come across to many readers as being partly pregnant -- you can't be partly a newspaper. Now, this is different than, say, doing the Web all week and then putting out a kick-ass, magazine-like Sunday edition or a TMC that takes the best of the Web and wraps up the week with some probing, trenchant analysis. That's a different strategy with a different product. But what I've read so far comes across as "we'll sorta be a paper two or three days a week." If the paper does not significantly change and you force your audience to the Web, it's not likely to come back.
10. Journalism schools will become increasingly irrelevant - and important. Heck of an oxymoronic thought, huh? Bear with me. It's no longer just enough to be a whiz with a pad and pencil, a gift of gab, a good ear, and a turn of phrase. For many journalists, the future is going to be -- them. Not a job with some large, established company, but treating themselves as a brand. Or maybe with a small startup where you still are, essentially, a freelancer. It's no longer enough to know a little about a lot. You're going to have to know the business and the technology, how to make a buck, and how to harness it all to your advantage.
    
1. Journalism schools that can figure out how to package all this and stay relevant in an an ever-changing society will become more important. But there will be fewer of them. Academe is no different than newspapers in that it is under intense financial pressure. Just like newspapers, much of academe doesn't "make" anything. It advances knowledge, and for that, just like newspapers and broadcasters, it relies on third-party funding. In business we call them advertisers. In academe we call them the state, the feds and foundations handing out grants. With dwindling state support, the feds focusing more on the hard sciences, and foundation endowments taking a hit -- well, you do the math. Journalism, by its nature, needs a low faculty-teacher ratio to be taught well. It also needs, these days, the ability to create and reshape courses and curricula to stay ahead of, not just respond to, this tidal wave of change. But such things do not come quickly in the academy. Given the financial pressures, as well as those of prestige and the inexorable push toward Ph.D.s and funded research, what dean or provost in his or her right mind would not be looking at the relevance of j-schools to the future of the academy?
   
2. An increasing number of journalism schools will be j-schools in name only, and we'll start seeing this shift speed up in the economic malaise of 2009. It may say "journalism" on the building, but increasingly behind the doors will be "communications" schools. If you're going for that NSF or NIH grant, you don't put "journalism" down as one of the components. You put down "risk communications" or "science communications," "public relations" or "visual communications." Journalism - the process of finding out what is happening, why it is happening and what it means to people's lives -- doesn't get much funding. Never has. Blame the industry largely for that -- R & D have never been big in the publishers' offices. But communications schools allow for larger classes, more prestigious research, etc. In many ways, the broader perspective is a good thing in a multichannel, multimedia, always-on world. But journalism tends to get marginalized in the process. And I am remain amazed, as 2009 dawns, at the number of schools that still have "mass" communications in their name, even as the world around them atomizes.

Want a few more predictions, see Folio's list, Paul Conley's and those by Businessweek's Jon Fine. You probably can find a dozen more without much trouble.

May you all have happy holidays and a healthy and happy New Year.

Journalism: Learning from Obama

Adam Tinworth is hosting this month's Carnival of Journalism, with the question on the table: What can the news media learn from the Obama multimedia campaign?

Contributors so far have some excellent points on how to use the lessons to reach audience and to incorporate your audience into your journalism.

But I want to take a little different tack, to suggest that from the reporting side there are some other lessons to be learned, too, the most important of which is that reporting may never be the same.

Not to overstate the case, but the government, in all its forms, has been building a technological capacity far greater than the news media's for at least a decade. Obama's crew, I think, will finally understand how to use that technology to effectively bypass journalists and journalism. (Think of how that much-vaunted e-mail and text-messaging list could be used to effectively blunt the impact of any negative news. Start by simply releasing the news using these channels while the journos are tied up in the news conference.)

The additional potential dark side is that in this age when information is being vaporized into bits and bytes, it's a lot easier to have things get lost in the digital soup.

Journalists, and newsrooms, for all their vaunted video, audio and multimedia technology, remain largely in a paper-and-pencil age when it comes to news development and gathering. In some respects, this may not change -- journalism in many cases ultimately will come down to one journalist's relationship with one source.

But in other respects, it must, if journalists are going to be able to pluck the valuable out of that digital soup.

Why am I concerned? Because as I have gone around making a presentation on how to use new digital tools to stay connected, the response in some newsrooms and at conferences has been tepid at best in many cases and downright hostile in others (along the lines of how am I supposed to do my job with all this, to which I often have wanted to respond, this is going to be your job, dammit). Sure, there are many good examples of digitally savvy journalists -- and several projects designed to help, such as Spot.us, newassignment.net and the controversial proposal by the New York Times and ProPublica for $1 million of Knight money to put thousands of "foundation documents" online. But there also are too many reactions like the above. So some suggestions:

• Learn what crowdsourcing is, how to manage it and how to use it. Understand Twitter and how it is a newsgathering as well as a distribution tool. It will be critical in coming years to have multiple sets of eyeballs -- and brains -- helping you out and tipping you off. Learn how to harness the power. (In other words, see social networks not just as a place to sell your wares, but as a vital place to help find the information you need.)
  
• Have some alacrity with Excel or another spreadsheet program. Know how to extract data from PDFs (a common tactic in some government agencies these days in an attempt to lock up the data so it can't be analyzed). If you are a bit more adventurous, learn how databases are constructed and how to get data out of them.
  
• But more important, know what to ask for. Think digitally, not ink on paper. (That mode of thinking is one of the best lessons journalists can take away from the Obama campaign.)
• Understand what the semantic Web is and why it is important to you. (Hint: If everything is machine readable and linkable then someday you are going to find yourself needing to use these tools to track down information.)
• Learn a bit about mapping and geocoding, not so much to present information but to learn how to get it. Again, much good information is in government files of this type, and even more so will be in the future.
• And, of course, learn how to use RSS feeds and feed readers and similar resources to save yourself time and extend your reach.

Now, all we have to do in journalism schools is figure out how to teach all this.

Ledger Live

The Newark Star-Ledger becomes the latest newsroom on Monday to enter the video newscast sweepstakes.

Read about it -- and watch some good videos on fellow Carnival of Journalism blogger (and Star-Ledger deputy managing editor) John Hassell's "The Exploding Newsroom" blog. As he puts it, it's an attempt to "find new ways to bring the people formerly known as the audience (thanks to Jay Rosen for that phrase) into the process of making what was formerly known as television."

From what I've seen so far, I like the guy they have anchoring. This isn't TV. It isn't even what was formerly known as TV (sorry, John, but I've been there and TV is a different beast; this is online video, in whatever form). But if you are going to do any kind of newscast, the anchor is critical.

Brian Donohue, who's doing the anchoring, has just enough "Hey, Dude" personality without going over the top.

Good luck to all.

Is the law an arse? (July Carnival of Journalism)

Once a month, some of us who blog regularly about journalism, get together to, well, write about journalism in what we call a blog carnival. That's right, step right up ladies and gents, all the latest tonics, laxatives, patent medicines and other helpful prescriptions in one place for your convenience!

And so I come to hosting the July Carnival of Journalism.

Actually, as long as we don't take ourselves too seriously, we do try to be about serious business in these monthly gatherings that bring together some really insightful thinkers (myself excluded) about what is happening in journalism and digital media in hopes we might figure out where this is going.

Lately, we've been trying to tackle one question a month, which adds some form to the mob, though bloggers may go off any which way they want if they find something more important.

For this month, I posed this question:
What changes will need to be made in national and international legal systems to help the digital age, and especially journalism in the digital age, flourish? We talk a lot about hyper-local journalism, innovation, the journalism entrepreneur, etc. But we don't often talk much about the legal issues still hanging in the background out there as highlighted a bit by the Drudge Retort/AP case.

Here is what I wrote to a correspondent recently and have touched on disjointedly in my blog from time to time:
1) I think we need establishment of a national digital small claims court of diverse jurisdiction. That way, if I'm in South Carolina and you're in California, and I find something you've done offensive to my legal rights, I can bring an action. However, unlike now, where you immediately would file to have it removed to California, and we'd both have to spend a lot of money prosecuting it there, the matter would be handled electronically so that we could remain where we were. Lord knows we have the technology to do that. And though some legal fees would be incurred, as with all small claims courts, the bias would be in favor of not needing to lawyer up.
2) I'd also like to see a realistic threshold on damages high enough so that many of these small copyright issues would fall under that court. Basically, I'd suggest the law be amended to presume damages of less than $5,000 or $10,000 unless the plaintiff could prove otherwise before the case could be removed to a higher jurisdiction.
3) Amendment to the DMCA or other applicable laws to recognize the unique aspect that visual journalism plays in today's society so to allow for fair comment not only on technique but on content in a way that does not propagate a usable copy of the photo. Something similar to the rule that you can show paper money only if it is so small, so large, or so distorted that it cannot be copied.

I'm hoping this topic will really highlight the international nature of these carnivals (and in the process highlight how digitized information's disrespect for national borders highlights some knotty legal problems, too).

But let's check in on what out other carnivalistas think. (And do check back. We'll be adding to this oh, through Tuesday, if necessary. After all, it's July, and it's the South, and we're wiling to take a longer view of deadlines under such circumstances.):

Jack Lail, in Done In by Reform, takes a different tack and aims at the Sarbane-Oxley Act that arose in the U.S. after a series of headline-grabbing corporate scandals. Lail's rail is against the busywork reports and corporate bureaucracies that have grown as a result. But where is the journalism issue in this six-year-old law? Guess what, companies are laying off in newsrooms, not in audit departments. And the IT knowledge and skills that ought to be focused on making media companies more technically adept and gazelle-like, are taking inventory and doing compliance reports.

David Cohn has some of the same frustrations, finding that bureaucracy sucks and stifles innovation. He sees a future in the Creative Commons license and says more journalism should be licensed that way. Just as the Creative Commons has built the legal framework through which people can be creative - we need a legal framework where groups of people can be creative together without being stifled.

In the "malleable, changing entity" of media ethics, Wendy Withers sees a future where laws will relax when it comes to posting other people’s work on the internet. ... The days when publications (now think blogs and websites) take the words of other people and dump them on their own pages are back, and we should accept this. But Bolm does have one caveat -- the "dump" would have to have our names and URLs attached.

Andy Dickinson takes on the subject of contempt of court, especially how it plays out in the UK, but more importantly bringing in that international factor I mentioned: On a global platform, how do you protect yourself when you report what is going on in another part of the world? ... Time was a journalist could find themselves in contempt because they where the only ones who could. They where the only ones who could publish. Now that anyone can publish everyone is, or should be, equally at risk.

In a physical world, news becomes a destination, an end point often tied to a time and place, like the morning newspaper. ... In an online world, news is part of a distributed and networked ecosystem of information - a journey, Alfred Hermida reminds us. He's wondering how a legal system grounded in products and places adapts to digital media that respect no borders, and he highlights conflicting rulings internationally on deep linking as an example.

All Ryan Sholin asks is that the law keeps its hands off the Internet.

But Charlie Beckett, with his perspective in the UK, says that seems unlikely. Regulators' appetites already are whetted, he says. There is no appetite here for an Internet First Amendment. Frankly, I am surprised at how much of a desire there is for control of the Web.

Adrian Monck observes: The real legal barrier to the digital age is international governance itself. There is no international legislature established under the representative terms that we understand to confer legitimacy.

And Bryan Murley worries about the concept of free expression embedded in the U.S. Constitution if we create global standards. As intellectual property law has been more or less standardized among developed nations, the result has been a benefit for those with monetary interests in tighter controls, not greater freedom for the average citizens. It would seem that a similar scenario would play out in the arena of free expression were we to attempt such a standardization of free expression across the globe.

(Interestingly enough, "On the Media" this week has another aspect of the Internet's legal Rubik's Cube -- the defense in an online pornography case that a community's standards should be determined by its online searches. There are some interesting comments at the end about reality vs. fantasy and the law's floundering on the concepts in the digital age.)

And though David Lee had to sit out this month's particular question because of other commitments, still, take a look at the student journalism project he's helped put together in New Zealand http://www.newswire.co.nz/ -- and his look behind the scenes of how it came together.

Of hyper-local journalism and future journalists

The Carnival of Journalism question for this month is a deceptively simple, yet deviously complex nut. Thanks a bunch to June's host, Andy Dickinson, for posting it (it gives me an excuse to get a Scotch, several, perhaps).

Let's break this in two: 1) is there value to be had in hyper-local journalism, if so what is it and who will do it and 2) what about that journalist of the future, what will he or she be like?

As to the first, I confess, I don't know. I do know -- or at least think pretty strongly -- that any news outlet focused solely on geographic community in the digital age is limiting its growth prospects, if not flirting with suicide. Every geographic community has dozens of sub-communities, many spanning geographic boundaries, and to which the participants may be more closely tied. To ignore those as sources of news (and, as important, revenue) is foolish.

Yet, I still maintain geographic ties and have a need for geographic-based information. I want to know about changes in my trash pickup; I need to know about road closings and similar information; I'm interested in the latest secret land deal the local school district has made for what it portends for growth, my home value and my taxes; I like to hear about the neighbor's children in sports; and I want to know what the county council is doing to my tax rate. Some of that information is hyper-local, but some is, literally, "across the dam" 10 miles away. I need an entity with some sense of geographic community to understand the relative importance of some of those things and bring them to my attention.

The full-service newsroom (some will use the term newspaper, but I prefer not to confound the issue) used to be the agency for that and, as it turns out, not a very good one past a certain size (though I'm not sure exactly what the point is where things start to break down and the newsroom loses its sense of community). Some atomization is occurring. However, I don't see it going as far as some commentators do because.

• I don't think our readers/users/viewers have all that time or desire to click around cyberspace. Some form of aggregation, though not necessarily as we know it now, is likely. It may well be an amalgam of a feed site with a recommendation engine with some original reporting. It certainly will have to have multiple layers of customization.
• News aggregators -- we now call them newspapers and broadcasters -- serve a legal/social function as well. As I've written before, they centralize liability, a critical socio-legal function in modern and post-modern society. Eventually, the legal system may evolve (warning, fellow carnivalistas, that may be next month's question when I play host), but currently it is set up to work on the idea of consolidated liability (read, deep pockets).
  
• In return, the aggregator provides the journalists who belong to it a legal umbrella.
  This is not insignificant. We really have not started plumbing the depths to which the legal system may expose individual digital journalists. (I wonder how many fellow carnival members carry professional liability/defamation insurance.) Just the discussions over AP's broadside at the Drudge Retort should begin to suggest the ramifications.
• The aggregator also provides legal muscle. We may develop some specialized investigative reporting operations, but the very nature of those is likely to be on a regional, national or international scale. But who is willing to go to court to challenge the local school board when it tries to hide its actions by funneling them through its law firm? Yes, perhaps we'll see the development of some kind of foundation support and nonprofit action groups, but by and large it takes some concentration of economic resources to be able to mount an effective legal challenge.

We have found through Hartsville Today, and my colleagues at Missouri have noted something similar through their efforts, that all the rhetoric about how all this would open up democracy and a horde of folks would start scrutinizing the school board, well, it just generally ain't so. Oh, yes, we get many good "stories" on HVTD, important ones, ones the newspaper wouldn't necessarily get to. But one thing you definitely see missing is that "dedicated" hyper-local journalist spending hours sitting through city council or the school board or sifting through the records and asking the really challenging questions. That's big-J "journalism," and in the hundreds of conversations I've had in relation to HVTD and other sites, people still generally expect "us" to do it (even using the term "journalism" to distinguish it from what they see themselves doing).

So, where am I going with this? Well:

1. I think hyper-local journalism has value and is an integral part of our future, but
1. It will be uneven across communities
2. It requires evangelists to make it work well
3. It is never a "build it and they will come" proposition
   
2. In most cases it will benefit from some kind of aggregation and other related services
3. It will have to recognize geographic as well as social and ethnographic communities
4. Realizing any value from it will require aggregating small streams of revenue into larger pools. This is not to say it must be done for revenue, for there will be dedicated individuals for whom it will be a calling. They may be of independent means, find foundation funding or scrape out just enough revenue to cover their marginal costs.
5. Any full-service newsroom that does not 1) start figuring out what its community's communities are, 2) learn to tap into those communities and 3) set up its digital assets so that members of those communities are valuable parts of the journalism (be it contributing, ranking, whatever) should start setting up plans to close.

In all this, I rather like Dave Lee's thoughts on a NewsHub. I don't think he's gotten to it all, yet, because the legal and economic realities (psychological ones, too, I can tell you having been an AP news editor and having had to deal with sharing issues) are vastly more complicated. I also think Wendy Withers has hit on one of the verities -- The problem with digital reporting on the web is newspapers still don’t know what’s going to work. And, when they try to come up with ways to involve readers in the process, they don’t go out of their way to really understand their readers; they look to see what others are doing and then emulate it. Even worse, some newsrooms still think of their readers as “those cute little readers who have to be saved by their base desire to read stories about puppies and celebrities.”

She's also spot on in noting that digital stories require more: If you’re going to stick to local stories, make sure they’re local stories people want to read. Keep sports coverage, but the old “get in, get out, get a couple of quotes and pictures” style of reporting isn’t going to cut it any more. This is true with all stories. One of the biggest problems with modern journalism is stories are stripped away until there are no compelling elements. Find them. Write them. Add your own style and flair, because the old school journalism we’ve been told to stick by is failing.

A Jack Lail has some excellent thoughts on how to make local sites work.

Now, as for No. 2 -- that future journalist. That's actually the easy one. That good journalist in 2013 is going to be a lot like the good journalist of today and a lot like the good journalist of 1913. Journalism itself changes little. It remains one of the true cottage industries, one-on-one piecework, my relationship to my source, my desire to find out things and to tell you about them, and maybe a little outrage or desire to change the world mixed in. (The "my" is the universal "my" -- rest assured I am not saying I am a good journalist.)

We seem to have forgotten that in this modern age. Yes, it may take a village to put out a newspaper or a Web site (though, as shown time and time again as tools improve, that is less and less so). But that comes after the journalism. Never confuse presentation with journalism.

I fear we have done that - and in the process confounded our young journalists, too. I run a small survey in my classes and once again this year, "finding stuff out and telling people about it" was one of the last reasons any of my students chose journalism, even though it should be one of the first. "I like to write," "I'm good with people," "I like the excitement" and similar things all get the bulk of the votes. But all the writing, being good with people and getting excited doesn't mean squat if you don't have the information in your notebook - digital or otherwise.

Yes, our new-age reporter will have to learn how to use various digital assets (many of which probably don't exist yet), and he or she will certainly need a different mindset, one that recognizes the journalist as just one node in much larger intersecting communities. (But then again, didn't we have to learn to use the telegraph, and phones, and faxes, etc.) But I also think that great journalists of 2013 will look back and read the work of Ida Tarbell or Lincoln Steffens and smile a little. They'll recognize a lot of what they are doing in the future in what great journalists have done in the past.

Anderson conflicted

I've actually had a chance this morning to read almost all this month's Carnival of Journalism blog posts at Ryan Sholin's place, and when I got to Jack Lail's from Knoxville/Scripps-Howard, it occurred to me that if you want an example of today's conflicted thinking over newsrooms, contrasting the collection of "carnival" posts and what is happening in Anderson, S.C., might be a place to start.

This casts no aspersions on the Independent-Mail, which is trying hard to reinvent itself. But contrasting that with some of the other practitioners and thinkers, I just come away with the feeling that again the game afoot in many newsrooms is too much about trying new things in old ways.

Anderson, the "Electric City," is one of those small metro areas that grew up in the Industrial Age and especially after World War II. They're scattered all over Ohio, Indiana and Pennsylvania, for instance. Places like Marion and Muncie, Newark and Zanesville. In most cases , they were one-industry towns, and that industry is long since gone (or mostly gone). In Anderson's case, it was textiles. The nickname comes partly from the city's having the first electrically powered cotton gin (1897).

The city is in South Carolina's northwest corner. Clemson University is nearby, as are the mountains and the recreation afforded by the upper lakes of the Savannah River. The city hasn't been able to capitalize on that too much, however. Clemsonites really shudder when you mention Anderson in the same breath, for instance, and the population went from about 26,300 in 1998 to 25,800 in 2003 (the last figure on the city's Web site), having dropped as low as 25,500 during the 2000 economic bust. But the county grew by a little more than 7 percent from 1999 to 2006. Its per-capita income ($18,365 in 1999) and median household income ($36,807) were about middle of the pack. The paper's circulation, which includes several other counties, including over the line in Georgia, at last report (SC Press Association) was a little over 35,000 daily and about 40,000 Sunday.

In other words, things are just kind of plugging along up in Anderson, and the growth, such as it is, is in the outlying areas, which are more expensive to serve, especially with energy costs trending as they are.

Editor Don Kausler, in his contribution to Lail's post, recounts the following:

• His paper has jettisoned its seven-day Lifestyle section in favor of a Thursday entertainment tab, "a handful of" faith and values pages on Saturday and a section called Vibe on Sunday. Other traditional features such as comics, puzzles, etc., continue through the week.
  
• It now has a dedicated online reporter 6 a.m.-3 p.m.
• In our shrinking newsroom, we no longer have enough reporters to cover traditional beats such as government, education, business, health, etc. Now all of the reporters on our content staff are general assignment reporters. They are assigned to geographic regions, and they cover government, education, business, etc., in that region (or they wrangle content from freelancers)
• The paper also has converted to a tall tab.
  

That first one probably would get a thumbs up from almost all the "carnival" posters and many more writing these days about newsroom "innovation." It's a bold step in a business that too often continues to think it has to be all things to all people. The jury is out on the tab, though it is generally considered more reader-friendly.

But let's look at the other two:

• The dedicated Web reporter. Contrast that with Pat Thornton's thoughts as part of the "carnival": Why have two staffs to produce editorial content, when most employees could be creating content that works on multiple platforms? That’s what I mean by rethinking staff resources. ... Duplication of work is a great way to stifle innovation, because most news organizations are under a tremendous budget crunch and can’t afford to waste resources like that.
• Kausler also writes: We reverse publish some of his material, but nothing goes in the newspaper unless it already has been on the Web site. The question from the other side might well be: Why isn't that the case with all your reporters? (Maybe it is, but his response does not indicate so.)
• Consider this from Adam Tinworth: You break it on the web, you break it as soon as you have it, and you develop it online. And then, and only then, do you analyse, contextualise and develop it on paper. And you hope and pray that you've done a good enough job developing it on the web that your readers will trust you enough, and value your judgement enough, to shell out for a paper product to enjoy at their leisure. Paper is a vehicle for analysis, for depth, for a sit-back-and-think experience. The internet is for news.
• The conversion of all reporters into geographic-based general assignment. How often have we heard just the opposite -- that breaking news is the Web's province and that the future of the newspaper is to develop expertise that can pull numerous threads together to provide expert analysis? Contrast Kausler's with reporter and blogger Matt King: The bias against specialization in media companies is self-defeating and then some. It’s fostered newsrooms full of haggard reporters who aren’t nearly the stars they could be because they’re spread so thin. And it’s a huge factor in newspapers’ dwindling readership and influence because reporters are not given the chance to become experts in the communities they cover, or experts in education policy, or experts in government finance, or really great writers or videographers or whatever. ... Overwork and unreasonable expectations = stenography.
• I find myself wondering who is going to keep an eye out so that things that might be seemingly isolated or random among geographic areas don't get overlooked as pointing to a larger pattern. This, it seems to be, puts additional pressure on the editors to see that 10,000-foot view. But even if they do, will the GA reporter thrown in to do the story have the time to develop the expertise.
• (Some additional thoughts from Charlie Beckett: Firstly, we lose newspapers and TV newsrooms. ... New ones will appear. ... The new ones will not duplicate their rivals content. They will invest in difference. You can see this happening already in the UK newspaper markets as each title emphasises its particular character.)

Finally, one other thought. Anderson tried and then dumped Scripps' online community site YourHub awhile back. Travis Henry, YourHub's former editor, said during the ACES meeting in March that some papers never fully realized that YourHub and other attempts to create online community cannot be "turnkey" -- they require resources and nurturing. But the reigning meme is that newspapers need to look at ways to create online community. For now, Anderson is going with the usual handful of staff and community bloggers and by now pretty much standard solicitation for calendar and news items from the community.

Is Anderson trying? Yes. Is it really doing anything new for the Web? No. Is it typical? I'm afraid that's too so, and it's worth thinking about as we go about offering advice.
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Update

Ryan Sholin, who was this month's carnival-master, has picked up on this post and in the process points to a really good one from Michelle McClellan of the Knight Digital Media Center, who points out that a substantial part of our problem in newsrooms comes from the tendency toward perfectionism -- which impedes innovation and gives us a place to hide.

Digest this - ways to find more time

This month at the Carnival of Journalism, hosted by Ryan Sholin, we're tackling the oft-heard complaint that in this digital age there simply isn't enough time to do all the "extra" things that have been added to simply outputting that 800-word opus by deadline.

(Speaking of deadlines, yes, this was supposed to have been done this weekend. But it became blog, or do the bushes that even Indiana Jones would have had trouble hacking through. The bushes won -- or lost, depending on your view -- and I was tired enough at night that thinking clearly was not an option. so pardon the lateness. Today being a holiday we don't really do here in South Carolina (Memorial Day), I'm in the office with some time to gather my thoughts.)

This issue of where to find the time has come up often as I have consulted with smaller papers. Let's forget, as Will Sullivan aptly notes, that this stuff isn't "extra" anymore -- it's part of surviving and thriving in a digital age. One thing I keep coming back to, as sophomoric as it sounds, is the newsroom budget (or digest, whatever you call it).

Your results may differ, but too many I have seen are simply lifeless laundry lists of too-long summaries with little focus and almost no sense of integration of the various story elements.

I come back to the digest time after time because the wire services (I spent 18 years at AP) have largely perfected the form. No, not the list of stories sent to newsrooms several times each day, but the culture surrounding the document. Simply put, the digest is the raison d'etre for most wire service reporters' existence. Even in these days when the AP is stressing more enterprise, to not be on the digest as a wire service reporter is to be, well, dead.

Things have changed a bit since I left AP in 2001, now that the wire service has gone to continual updates. But even now, the pressure is to make the upcoming update as soon as possible.

For copyright reasons I can't really share with you an AP digest. But if you haven't been in a newsroom and seen one, imagine a tightly focused list of stories where, in two sentences, three max, the story becomes clear. All the related elements (photos, graphics, media, sidebars) are quickly summarized and added as the day progresses. Now, if you are in a newsroom, take a look at your digest. Does it look like something that was just kind of thrown together?Is is bloated, meandering? Can you get a sense of the story flow in less than two minutes? If not, you might want to retool what you are doing.

I said the digest was the raison d'etre for a wire service reporter. Here is what that meant and what it communicated as part of the culture:
-- The focus was on getting on that digest, which normally moved between 11 a.m. and 1 p.m. (again, AP has gone to more continual updates, but I don't think that changes things much; even when I was there, we had started a 9:30 a.m. update).
-- That meant digest lines had to be to the desk early in the news cycle. It didn't matter if that news conference was happening at 10:30 a.m. -- hit the phones, find out what was likely to happen, and get a line into the desk (sometimes it actually meant the reporter worked on the story the day before). Update it later, if needed. And if the story were going nationally, the lines had to be in even earlier.
-- That meant you had to focus in on the story quickly, get the relevant background, decide on the basic way to tell the story (were there going to be photos, were you going to have to feed broadcast, etc.). Sure, things changed -- and we updated. But because we had a focus to start with, we could find a new focus quickly. And it meant the reporter had to be thinking about this while covering the story -- if the focus changed, identify and communicate it right away. That also does amazing things for the reporting.
-- It also did away with the bloviated summary. No one had time to write a novella when a couple of sentences would do.
-- And those had to be good sentences. Remember, the AP wasn't publishing itself (again, something that has changed a bit), but had to sell these stories to editors who had limited space. There was no sale if your pitch wasn't crisp.

What was the result (and what are the potential benefits in a traditional newsroom):
-- You find the story focus quickly. You also, just by the nature of things, provide the grist for that first online summary. You could take many of those digest lines and use them as your first shot online. Tighten up the digest in your newsroom and you should find people eventually in the mode of getting the story out more quickly.
-- It's easier to update because, as noted above, once you have focus it's easier to find new focus.
-- Fewer meetings: If everyone knows they have to meet the deadlines for various digest updates, the focus is on getting the work out, not talking it to death. This doesn't mean doing away with all meetings, but it does mean a lot of what had been done in meetings simply can be done on the digest and through one-on-one conversation or IM'ing. (Example: The AP had a morning national meeting just to get a sense of the day. But after that, you didn't "meet" with the national editor. You shot him or her a digest line and had one or more short phone conversations or IMs. If you were doing your job, the line gave the desk all it needed and the story followed that.)
-- By thinking "story" earlier, you also are forced to think about all the ways to tell the story -- not just in print.
-- If you really make the digest the backbone of the day - starting when reporters and editors walk in the door -- and you make it a practice that most updates and communication about it should be online, you might also develop a culture more willing to use some of the free or low-cost online collaboration tools, such as Google Docs. If the result is fewer meetings, you've just freed up some more time.

In many newsrooms, this will require a culture change. Sure, you may be having multiple news meetings/updates throughout the day, but in too many cases the underlying process is still flaccid, at least from what I've seen.

Finally, if you need some set deadlines -- and let's face it, most newsrooms do -- adopt the "Dr Pepper method" - digest updates are due at 10, 2 and 4. Scrap that obligatory 3 or 4 or 5 p.m. news meeting (you should be on a continuous cycle anyhow). If you're the editor or managing editor, tell folks you'll call one sometime after 4 to go over only any rough spots in the digest. If you really must have one, skip the round-robin from each desk going over its laundry list. Keep it to just the rough spots, make your front-page and section-front decisions, and get out. If your digest is really doing the work it should, most of those old-fashioned meetings can be scrapped. (Oh, and have it in the newsroom, not in some tucked-away conference room somewhere.)

The State newspaper in Columbia has another take on it that I like a lot: Each digest line should identify who is likely to be affected by the story and who is likely to care about it. Thinking about your audience is never a bad thing.

The AP has now adopted a 1-2-3 filing method:
1) File a short "alert."
2) File a short story (130 words) that can be used online, in print and on broadcast
3) Fill out the story, if needed, using multiple media. The "if needed" is important. Sometimes once you've done No. 2, you'll see that's all that needs doing.

No. 2 is a bit controversial. It's drawn some criticism from copy editors, for instance, who say the copy is riddled with holes, organization problems, etc. It harks back to earlier in this decade when the holy grail was to find a writing style that would work across media. We've generally come to our senses and realized there is unlikely to be such a thing because each medium has its own strengths and our readers/viewers/users use each one quite differently.

Even AP realizes it has to keep changing its culture. If your newsroom is still stuck on the "there's not enough time" model, your story budget and meeting practices could be a good place to start.

(Also worth your reading is a summary of AP's anthropological study of young news consumers. Two key points: They don't consume news via routine, and they see it as a form of social currency.)

Maybe they missed the session on anonymous sources?

I find myself disturbed today as I finally get around to reading an otherwise good Washington Post profile of Ben Scott, "Net Neutrality's Quiet Crusader."

Right there, 10 grafs down in Cecilia Kang's article, is this graf:

Free Press's critics -- who spoke on condition of anonymity because discussions on net neutrality policy are ongoing -- say the group often oversimplifies complex technical issues, dismissing the importance of some network management practices that block spam and pornography, for example. Free Press is also not the populist group it makes itself out to be, critics noted, partnering with corporate interests when it suits its goals, as it did with Google on net neutrality. Also, they said the group is not as boot-strapped as it may appear, with donors such as billionaire George Soros and singer Barbra Streisand.


Let's accept the argument, for a second, that absolutely no one -- not a one -- of anyone who is on the other side of this debate would go on the record. Still, whatever happened to the idea that you don't use anonymous sources for ad hominem attacks. You may use them for hard information. You may use them to explain their side's position (sometimes, though we overdo that). But you don't use them to launch brickbats at the other side.

That's Journalism 101.

Don't give me the "balance" argument -- that's he said-she said journalism. Doing so anonymously lets the scoundrels off the hook. (And besides, Kang essentially parroted the funding stuff in the next graf, though pointing out that its lobbying budget is far less than the budgets of its opponents.)

So if Kang *really* *wasn't* *able* in this large nation to find anyone who would go on the record on a topic that has had life for some time now, then maybe the only sentence in that story should have been:

None of the Free Press's critics would go on the record with their criticism.

Sometimes, it's actually journalism to say to the other side -- especially when the other side is no babe in the woods when it comes to working the system: You want your voice heard, then speak up on the record.

(For the record, nothing here is ideological. I'd write the same thing were it Scott anonymously taking a shot at the other side.)

(This is also my monthly Carnival of Journalism entry; the Carnival this month is hosted by Will Sullivan at Journerdism.)

From the mouths of students (Carnival of Journalism)

We're into another carnival of journalism weekend (Bryan Murley hosting this round), which (along with a rather vigorous recent faculty meeting dealing the same issues of j-education and its future) set me off thinking about some of the recent posts on blogs created by journalism classes around the country.

I love reading these for the insight -- sometimes delightful and sometimes dreadfully scary -- they give about the students we teach. There has been a good discussion going at one of our class-related blogs, River City Times, in reaction to Jay Rosen's statement that was part of a thought-provoking post at Mark Glaser's Mediashift about helping journalism students learn entrepreneurship.

"It seems to me that for a great many journalists, the old model will continue. That is, there will still be jobs with Big Media companies that do not really require the journalist to think entrepreneurially but simply to “do the job.” The economic survival of the franchise will continue to be someone else’s concern, primarily. However, this will be a smaller percentage of the total and those journalists will have less exciting work.

What’s different today is not that every journalist has to be an entrepreneur or think about striking out on her own; to say that would be hype, an overreaction and inaccurate. Rather, it’s that some of the best opportunities lie in that direction. And for young people there is less of a need to wait for your shot at glory and high achievement. So for those who are extremely talented, ambitious and focused on succeeding in journalism, you “have” to be entrepreneurial in the sense that you would be foolish not to think that way."

What follows are all heartfelt, serious responses. None should be open to ridicule, but some should give us pause (I've highlighted the first few words of each so that you can read the whole thing, if you want. I've commented on a few of them):

• But the bigger issue here, I think, is that upcoming journalists need to change their expectations about where they are going to work. Everyone wants to work for the big papers or news outlets, but the reality is that there are only a few positions in those kind of places, especially for young journalists. We, the newcomers to this business need to recognize that we should expect to work for a small, probably very specialized news organization.
• However, working for a newspaper, for an editor, is an experience that cannot be taught in a classroom, despite what some professors may think. Deadlines in school are not taken seriously, and most editors do not hand back corrections; they publish your content the way they want to. I wish I could have my own blog and write the stories I choose, but, let’s be realistic here, who would read it? ... The problem with writing a successful blog (meaning you could live off of its profits) is that it takes time and experience, something most students would admit to not having. ... [With Google ads] Google pays the blogger every time a user clicks a link. In order to make a sustainable amount of money, though, a blog or website must have upwards of 200-300 pages at a minimum.
  
• [I wonder if we are giving students an adequate grasp of niche media, what their place in it might be, and the idea of starting early to build audience and credibility. A dose of Chris Anderson's long tail would help, too, as would clarifying some of the misconceptions that a blog must have 200+ "pages" to be successful. I assume the student means posts, and as we know, it is fairly easy to get to that level just by doing a handful a week. And all it takes is one solid post to draw traffic and links. I fear many students still do not have a good idea of Web dynamics. The use of URLs in some posts without turning them into live links is more evidence of that.]
• I think the entrepreneurial state of mind that captivates many young journalists is taking away from their focus on the common good. Instead, we get "rock star" journalists like Anderson Cooper whose names are bigger draws than their headlines. Instead, we get the junkyard dog (not watchdog) media that buys into McCarthy's proposal that big stories are on page A1 and retractions are on page B7. Entrepreneurship invites -- no -- requires self-promotion, which can only get in the way of truth, a journalist's preferred ideal. If Rosen is right, the best way to prepare students for such an environment is to create and foster ambitious student media. ...
• [I couldn't agree more with that last sentence. (The poster also goes on -- "Require some sort of practical experience for graduation, such as an internship or freelancing, student media experience or a senior semester-type program."), but the first part concerns me. Some of the most respected journalists over the decades have been entrepreneurs: I.F. Stone comes to mind. Jack Anderson. Even Lincoln Steffens and Ida Tarbell, though they had jobs with McClure's Magazine and later formed American Magazine,were largely entrepreneurs in the sense of going her own way, breaking new journalistic ground and advancing the craft (while making some money at it). They might take umbrage at the idea that entrepreneurship "can only get in the way of truth." I'm reading among these posts what I think are views shaped by a conflating of entertainment (which really is code for TV) and journalism. Maybe that's not all bad if the public evaluates us that way, but it gives me pause if journalism students are having trouble distinguishing.]
• Colleges need to not just encourage us to be tech savvy but should require us to be so. ... It’s not enough these days to just be good at your job. You have to be good in everything if not at least have a hand in all aspects of the newsroom. With the Internet at our disposal, we have limitless options almost to be as creative as we want. It should be the schools’ job to show us how to do that.
• But as every field is more and more segmented and specialized, I think journalism students also need to learn specific knowledge in a particular field where they want to report in the future. ... Having said that, I think J-school needs to provide more flexible curriculum in which journalism students can more freely choose courses according to their career path.
• [Boy, doesn't that summarize the conundrum almost every j-school faculty faces these days? Be flexibly specialized. Hmmmm....]

Anyhow, just a sampling. What surprised me was the amount of what I'll call, for lack of a better term, "hardness" in many of the posts. Make people "sink or swim"; force people to take internships or work on campus media; make us take the tech courses we need.

What I'm hearing -- and not just here but on other student blogs I read -- is that they are as confused as most j-schools and newsrooms are right now. But they are expecting us to lead them. Are we ready? Do they need to embrace the idea of becoming more educational entrepreneurs? What do you see here? What do you think?

Back in the saddle (Carnival of Journalism 2)

Well, just back from the "2007-08 New Grandson Tour" and into the crucible of the first day of classes, so I have not had a chance to think many deep -- or shallow, for that matter -- thoughts, but a few things ran through my mind as I was on the road, trying to crib Internet access where I could:

• I wonder if sometimes what we're doing online forgets what it's like for those without high-speed access. Sure, the figures tell us more and more people have it, but there remain significant pockets - demographic and geographic -- that don't. In my case, it was a situation of son and daughter-in-law having moved into a new house and not having it yet and other relatives who will never have it. Between "borrowing" high-speed from a few unprotected sites and spending hours on dial-up, I was pretty much able to keep up with e-mail. But RSS? Too much of a hassle. Many of my favorite news Web sites? Big, omnivorous time sinks.
• This comes to mind because while I was near Louisville, its Metropolitan Housing Coalition released a report about high rates of home foreclosures, and buried in it (page 25 - click on Read More and you'll get a PDF) is this about one of the causes:

High expense or debt levels - extraordinary transportation costs – driving vehicles with low gasoline mileage and/or substantial maintenance needs, jobs requiring extensive non-reimbursed driving or commuting, having a number of cars in the household; high utility costs due to poorly insulated home or energy inefficient elements or systems; extensive deferred maintenance needs or a household disaster such as a fire; high communications related expenses – cell phones, internet, cable television; little or no savings and high levels of debt; financially naive or lacking money management skills; excessive credit card bills; and using equity in home to pay ongoing monthly expenses. (Emphasis mine.)


Now, let's not overplay this, but it's one of the first times I've seen telecommunications expenses listed as an explicit factor leading to financial distress. But maybe, as a generation of journalists on the cusp of an era when we may no longer control our own "printing press" (not necessarily a bad thing -- but that's for another post), it's time we took some serious notice of this. The more I though about it, and tallied my telcom bills, the more I wondered if we are heading into a period even more unsettling than we have foreseen so far -- as more and more efforts shift to digital, will our audiences be able to afford us?

• Feedblitz rocks! The ability to take RSS feeds, turn them into e-mail digests, then download those e-mails for offline reading was a godsend. (I use an online, not an onboard, RSS reader, and even had I used an onboard one, the online time to do the RSS downloads still would have been questionable.)
• Putting Wi-Fi into its restaurants may be one of the smarter moves McDonald's has done. The price is generally reasonable (and some restaurants are free, especially overseas), and although I didn't use it on this trip (other things intervened), knowing a reliable, almost high-speed connection is widely available should attract business (see also). Right now, Mickey D's is a bit balkanized among service providers, but if it could swing a national deal at a set price, I could see news organizations negotiating in bulk and telling reporters that if they have to file, head to the nearest arches. (Maybe they already do, and I'd like to hear about it, if that's the case.) If MickeyD's picks up a Coke or two in the process, it becomes very lucrative. Think about how many "road warriors" in all forms of business this could attract (yeah, there are technologies like Wi-Max, too, but the arches are a lot more ubiquitous right now, even more so than Starbucks and its Wi-Fi).
• Enough already with the Facebook widgets! Sure, a fair number are fun, but if I get one more vampire or werewolf or Scrabble or news quiz invite ...
  
• A lot of the stories I read about the potential breakup of Landmark concentrated on the Weather Channel. They missed or glossed over the 800-pound (or $850 million) gorilla, Dominion Enterprises. People I've talked with inside and outside the company say the classified publications could surprise in the price they fetch. And don't underestimate Landmark's community newspapers division, based in Shelbyville, Ky. It not only has a good number of highly profitable newspaper titles, but its stable also includes real estate magazines (probably hurting a little now, but likely to rebound) and some highly trafficked sports Web sites in partnership with Rivals. In fact, the nine larger papers may well be the consolation prize. This will be a very interesting breakup to watch, if it happens.

(Now, back to the baby pics. Chrs.)

Adrian Monck is hosting this month's Carnival of Journalism.

Must see multimedia

We're involved in a journalism blog carnival this week, and I thought I'd take time to point out this multimedia project, "13 Seconds in August," by the Minneapolis Star Tribune about the victims of the Interstate 35 bridge collapse. I stumbled onto it, and all I can say is "Wow."

The project allows you, through a tagged aerial view of the bridge, to click on any vehicle and read about or, where video is available, hear from the victims. But another aspect is terribly important, in my mind, and that is that the paper makes clear it is a "living document" and is soliciting information from users who may know something about others involved in the collapse for whom there is little or no detail.

The paper does by asking you to e-mail one of two people. The first problem is that if you click on those links, you get a 404 page error (at least I did in Seamonkey). It appears the links are directing to a page, not to a "mailto:" link.

I think an e-mail form would probably be the better solution, and I would like to see a moderated comment link. It would be enlightening to see what others had to say.

The e-mail glitch is not minor -- annoying users and readers, especially in the instant-gratification age, is not good. But it should not detract from what overall is a fantastic project that should be used as an example of what the new medium allows us to do.