SC legslators suggest Wikipedia will do over those expensive databases

(Update: 1:40 p.m. 3/26: Ron Aiken of The Nerve says the language was stricken in conference committee last night but that the sponsor, Rep. Leon Stavrinakis, D-Charleston, says he'll bring it up again next session.)

S.C.'s State Library apparently is up in arms about some legislative budget engineering that would put some requirements and restrictions on the statewide DISCUS system, the free digital library available to everyone in the state and probably one of the state's best (if somewhat hidden) resources.

First there was a House budget proviso that would have prohibited the library from licensing electronic sources "where the same information is easily found in free online products such as Wikipedia." (Oh, there's a reliable source, eh?) It also would have prohibited licensing databases of articles "from mainstream newspapers and magazines, as these can almost always be accessed free online and are easily discovered through Internet search engines."

That same proviso also would have prohibited the inclusion of scholarly articles as not "intellectually accessible to the general population," but that was stricken -- as was the whole proviso.

But now the House has amended the Senate version to insert a new proviso that says no database DISCUS buys can have more than 20% of material freely available online.

There also are a bunch of technical requirements, such as that all databases must have responsive design that allows them to be viewable "down to the smallest smartphone size" and that there be an extensive geolocation service for all users. Video would also have to be delivered as H.264, MPEG-4 AVC format.

So in theory the responsive design requirement is a good one -- but will that put valuable databases/info off limits?

If you are out of state (or even on the border and your cell signal is being picked up by a tower in Georgia or NC) does that mean no access?

Sure, H.264 AVC is the advanced standard now, but things don't change much in tech, do they? So how quickly, if this is specified in state law, will it become outdated?

Generally, the success of legislating specific technology requirements has not gone well through the years.

To see the State Library's take on all this and the source docs:

http://scdiscus.org/provisio-amendment

Newspapers' digital archives pose ethical challenges

Interesting story in the Chronicle of Higher Education (free area) this week on how college alumni, including former student journalists are trying to rewrite history by asking that embarrassing material -- including stories they have written -- be taken down from college publication Web sites.

So time for a little self-promotion here.

Larry Timbs, Will Atkinson and I did some of the first exploration two years ago into the ethical and operational issues raised by newspaper Web sites and the digitization of newspaper archives. We asked newspaper editors a wide range of questions, including some relating to four possible situations in which someone might ask that their picture or a story naming them be taken down.

You can find How America's newspapers handle (or don't handle) their 'digital attics': An investigation into ethical, legal and privacy issues emerging from publications' Web archives at the Grassroots Editor Web site. (The paper was presented at the 13th Newspapers and Community Building symposium.)

If you want the direct link to the PDF, here it is.

More moves to overseas

When the Miami Herald's story about the McClatchy cutbacks came out last week, I didn't see this initially.

About 40 newsroom personnel are slated to take voluntary buyouts or be laid off.

Those include 12 newsroom supervisors, five in the International Edition, two copy editors, three reporters, four designers and layout specialists, two on the state desk, two critics, two photographers and six in archiving and calendar.

Archiving, calendar and the International Edition will be outsourced to workers in India. The company is also exploring transferring its radio operations to a third-party company, but the services to public radio station WLRN will remain the same.

Interesting the mix of jobs going to India. Someone correct me if I'm wrong, but it sounds as though those International Edition positions were largely repackaging/process, the kind of jobs ripe for outsourcing. Still, it's another breach in the wall. Given that some execs have expressed views of copyeditors as not much more than comma processors ...

Liz Donovan, the former Herald librarian behind Infomaniac has more observations, and she points to a good post by Derek Willis on the future of news libraries, an often overlooked but important part of all this in a digital age.

A day of upheaval (Updated)

In this post:

• McClatchy cutbacks
• Online Journalism Review shuts down
• Elegy to copy editors

If you are in, related to or just breathe the air around anyone in the newspaper business, it is unlikely you haven't heard today about the large numbers of layoffs coming at McClatchy -- 1,400 jobs or about 10 percent of the company's work force. But there was a bit more to drink another pint about, as you can see from the list above.

Let's start with McClatchy, however:

• E&P's story
• Charlotte's
• Columbia's
• Raleigh's
  
• The McClatchy Watch blog with a numbers breakdown and links to stories around the country.
  

The numbers are stark, just another drumbeat. But it was this, buried in the Raleigh story (with similar wording in Charlotte) stories, that I found more interesting: The newspaper will begin a closer relationship with The Charlotte Observer, also owned by McClatchy. The two newspapers will combine their political, sports and research departments. The features departments also will produce sections jointly.

Watch that space, because it is the shape of thing to come. Yes, Media News' Dean Singleton has been slashing and consolidating -- especially copy editing jobs (more from John McIntyre) -- at his papers around San Francisco and the San Jose Mercury News. But except for the Merc, there wasn't a lot of meat left on those bones to start with.

McClatchy is a different beast, however, not so easily dismissed. The McClatchy announcement does not talk about centralized copy desks, but believe me the rumors in the Carolinas are there and have been for more than a year. With seven papers (Raleigh, Charlotte, Rock Hill, Myrtle Beach, Columbia, Beaufort and Hilton Head) clustered even more tightly than McClatchy's original California operations, staffers at all the papers are waiting for the other shoe to drop. Beaufort/Hilton Head, though a special case (two smaller papers in the same county with one printing plans) have effectively -- if not in absolute fact -- combined many operations already.

But let's not dwell on copy editing and it challenges, which I've written about extensively. More intriguing to me, and more significant, is the move to combine sports, research and political coverage, and some features. Let's examine each one:

• Research: Well, with the digital age's shifting of most research to reporters' and editors' desks and the withering of news libraries, you had to see this one coming. In fact, I'm surprised several papers in an area, even from different chains, don't get together and create virtual reference centers and split the cost. It might even be a cost-effective way to extend higher-quality services to smaller papers. But there are questions: If we push more and more to hyperlocal, what is the working model? Can a shared research system reach down and provide news people with the local information they need? Maybe the digital assets are refined enough that it can. But the realist in me says there are gaps, because I seem them all the time. So does the new model become that the researchers, such as they are, handle the "big-picture" stuff, but the local research continues to be pushed farther down to the desks? OK, you librarians who read this blog (and I know there are some), weigh in. Are we missing anything? How could this work?
• Sports: The best way for this to play out would be for coverage of those big, but largely staged, events (Carolina Panthers, major college football, NBA, NASCAR, PGA, etc.) and more smartly put the remaining local resources into covering local sports. But, boy, could this be a tough sell. I can think of no other area of a newsroom where a caste system/pecking order is more in evidence. Suggest to some sports reporters that they cover high school sports and you will produce spasms of uncontrollable shaking. Sure, they likely did it at one time, but that was part of their due to get to the "bigs." Trust me, there's not much worse than some hacked off, hackneyed sport reporter sent back down from the bigs (or who saw his or her door close) going through the motions of covering local sports. I've seen it here and elsewhere. And it's going to require some interesting reprogramming of those young sports reporters coming out of college -- I'll make a broad-brush statement that will certainly miss the bull's eye but won't be too far off the total target: Most don't have local sports as their goal. How do you sell it. Again, more details would be useful --any McClatchy folks out there who can fill in the blanks, please comment.
• Political: Things are abuzz on the Association of Capital Reporters and Editors listserv about this one. And I've got to say, this is the one that concerns me the most. The digital age seems to be giving us a barbell shape for news -- the big national stuff on one end, the hyperlocal stuff on the other, and in-between? But in between is where the state capitals lie.
  
• A decade ago, American Journalism Review documented the sad state of staffing statehouse press rooms. (Parts 2 and 3). It has continued unabated. And all this has come at a time when administrations -- Democratic and Republican -- have devolved more responsibility onto the states and as state legislatures (and courts and agencies) increasingly have been diving into the social issues pool (think same-sex marriage, creationism/evolution debates, abortion regulations, etc.), not to mention the pivotal role those legislatures play in health and economic well-being (tax policy, insurance issues, etc.)
  
• We need more reporters at the Capitol, not fewer. Yet editors seem to cling to the idea that no one cares about the Statehouse (no one, that is, until their ox is gored by some zoning twist that required state OK or an additional huge fee tacked onto a speeding ticket or an incompetent professional who nevertheless was licensed). Not only are there cutbacks, but too many papers see the "news" as just being when the legislature is in session, when the reality is that most of the governing is done outside of those spectacles and in the bowels of the bureaucracy.
• We need more people covering the states' "shadow government." Yet, for instance, Zane Wilson, Myrtle Beach's longtime and respected S.C. Statehouse reporter is leaving and does not expect to be replaced. It's likely The (Columbia) State's stories will simply be more widely spread. (The State hasn't exactly wowed with depth coverage either, especially in the off-season, though it does occasionally field a good one, such as exposing S.C. House Speaker Bobby Harrell's efforts on behalf of a health insurer that is likely to buy its generic drugs from his company.) Will it be the same in Raleigh? And then there is this confounding of "politics" with state government coverage. They certainly overlap, but I fear too many editors define it that way, effectively limiting statehouse reporters. Again, more details would be nice, but I think ACRE members have a right to be concerned.

UPDATE: Fiona Morgan at Indy Week out of Durham has some details (and my comments):

• A single capital bureau for state government reporting will combine five N&O and two Observer reporters, and be edited by current N&O staff and based in Raleigh. (Good news for now in that there do not seem to be any cutbacks. Seven people perhaps can be used more efficiently to extend coverage, though it means a little less competition.)
  
• 
  
• The sports departments will merge and be edited by a Charlotte-based editor. (As noted above, the jury's out on this. This has the same problem as having overseas copy editors handle stories -- how is that editor going to know the nuances of those local schools, the kinds of things that can get people really riled? The ultimate result is usually a blanding of copy so as not to offend people.)
  
• 
  
• The news research departments will merge and be headed by an N&O staffer. (Probably not too bad, though you again question whether local nuances will be missed.)
  

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I was in the middle of reading for all that when an e-mail came pointing out that Robert Niles, editor of Online Journalism Review, had announced that OJR was suspending publication after a decade.

This is deeply disturbing. The all-online OJR, based at the University of Southern California, consistently has been one of the best publications in the field, both for professionals and for academics who have much to add to the professional discussion (as opposed to publishing in a refereed journal). It's to be hoped that USC will keep the archives around for a long time. The tutorials, for instance, are worth a ton.

It's not easy to tell from Niles' post whether he had "editorial" differences or there is a funding problem:

One of OJR's goals over the years has been to help mid-career journalists make a successful transition from other media to online reporting and production. I'm pleased to say that USC Annenberg will continue to provide support in that area, through the Knight Digital Media Center. I encourage OJR readers to click over to the KDMC website and its blogs, if you are not already a regular reader there.

I am hopeful that OJR will continue to live at the KDMC, and that the publication might be revived under the KDMC's blogs.

Meanwhile, Niles has left USC and set up shop at SensibleTalk.com, where you can find lots of good stuff, including links to all his great math tips for journalist. You also can find them and more at the original Robertniles.com.

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So much to write about, including the latest blow-up between the AP and bloggers.
But let's finish on a sweet-sour note, todays' elegy to copy editors by Lawrence Downes in the New York Times.

Downes, lamenting the lack of any recognition of copy editors at the Newseum (though my boss says the museum does have exhibits of bad heds and other errors over its urinals), writes:

Copy editors are the last set of eyes before yours. They are more powerful than proofreaders. They untangle twisted prose. They are surgeons, removing growths of error and irrelevance; they are minimalist chefs, straining fat. Their goal is to make sure that the day’s work of a newspaper staff becomes an object of lasting beauty and excellence once it hits the presses.

Yeah. Presses. It has probably already struck you how irrelevant many of these skills may seem in the endlessly shifting, eternal glow of the Web.

The copy editor’s job, to the extent possible under deadline, is to slow down, think things through, do the math and ask the irritating question.

That is inexorably being changed in a digital age that values speed over perfection, he writes. True, and things will have to change. But it's nice to see at least an understanding of why copy editors continue to be important.

David Sullivan has a nice commentary on the issue.

Copy-editing jobs

While I was gone, a couple of developments on the future of copy-editing jobs beat:

• The Allentown Morning Call announced a major restructuring, including further conversion to a universal desk that will also, as I read the memo, have greater responsibilities for posting online. The paper also hopes to install a Tansa spelling- and usage-check system. Tansa is a system sold as several steps above spellcheck, allowing more customization and looking at copy in context to detect problems.
  
• The key point from publisher Ardith Hilliard's memo: Tansa would save editing time for the copy desk, allowing us to more effectively operate a universal desk with fewer editors.
• That brought a quick response from Lucas Grindley: Picture a world rife with budget cuts that obliterate the copy desk by replacing people with computers, and leaving the "hard stuff" for desk editors. (Grindley is operations manager at the Sarasota Herald-Tribune.)
  
• Tansa President Robert Lanzio quickly responded on Grindley's blog that Tansa has not been "the direct cause of any job losses in the USA." Grindley countered: Regardless of whether you all built Tansa to replace copy editors, don't you agree that if a large copy desk becomes more efficient, then it could be reduced in size?" Leaving Lanzio with the tepid response: " To date, the statement I made is true."

Tansa was discussed back on this blog in November 2005. At the time, those commenting said it was not that great at detecting even some of the harder language problems. I don't know whether it has been improved since then. The danger here is that copy editor jobs are too easily equated with spell-check. If the system really is used to free them from routine so that they can look more closely at the substance of stories in the context of the reader, great.

But the reality may be instead that as copy desks are reduced, line editors are given more of this responsibility. Bad move. Line eds are too busy already. They also are too invested in the stories -- and I want them to be, because they need to be effective salesmen and saleswomen for their reporters. But that makes them exactly the wrong people to stand in for the readers.

As my friend Brian Murley commented on Grindley's blog: Tansa is more likely the victim of the law of unintended consequences. Still, it's easy to see how it could become the "indirect" cause of the loss of copy editing jobs. Heck, if people seem willing to ship such jobs to India, why wouldn't a software system help them achieve that goal?

(The Call also is eliminating a news librarian, another step in a sad trend.)

• The Miami Herald had a dalliance with outsourcing design and editing of a neighborhood section to India. Fortunately, cooler heads and common sense prevailed. As Executive Editor Anders Gyllenhaal wrote: "The more we looked at the prospects of editing and layout from outside the newsroom, the more it was clear these skills involving news judgment and experience are not likely to work well from afar." However, ad production and monitoring of Web site comments will continue from overseas.
  

33 reasons for librarians

I am a huge fan of librarians -- especially news librarians who have made my job easier, even enjoyable, more than a few times over the years. (And it doesn't hurt to be married to a wonderful lady who also is a library assistant.)

I fear, despite our protestations that they are more important than ever in the digital age, that they will continue to be cut from newsroom budgets.

While not dealing directly with news librarians, this 33 reasons why libraries and librarians are still extrmely important is good fodder for the debate.