Verification in the Age of Twitter

Between a hoax about Scrubs star Zach Braff committing suicide and a staged “arrest” of a University of Memphis professor during a lecture on Internet piracy,  it was a bad day for false news on Twitter.

But I’d say that at least from my little corner of the world, it was a good day for journalism.

We can’t stop the noise, the rumors and the lies anymore than we can stop the sun from rising. But journalists trained to view information with a skeptical eye and to verify everything they see or hear are vital in helping us to know what we can believe.

At least two of the 15 students in my reporting class were on Twitter when pictures  surfaced of the professor being led away in handcuffs by the police. (I’ll leave aside for the moment that this is certainly a quite, er, dramatic way to put the fear in  people re: downloading songs). I’m quite pleased to see them using Twitter as one tool to keep up with what is going on around campus and that they had the good news sense to know a story when they saw one. But I am much more proud of how they responded.

Beth Spencer and Jessica Grammer didn’t simply immediately retweet. Both of them asked other students questions about what happened via Twitter, and both sent messages to the Commercial Appeal, our metro daily, letting them know that it was just a hoax.  Grammer even asked a student “how do you know that?”

[UPDATE: Spencer was also manning the student newspaper's Twitter feed at the time.  She did retweet some photos of the professor in handcuffs, but was immediately working on verifying and clarifying the story via her personal account, and then corrected the info via Helmsman feed. I think this still showed overall good journalistic judgment.  In the web world, verification ideally occurs before publication, but it is also an ongoing process that new communication tools makes better and faster.]

A small and parochial victory no doubt, but I see it as a tiny battle in a bigger war.

I think that verifying information and, critically, being transparent with readers about that process, is crucial to the survival of journalism. It is even more important than ever in our age of always-on microblogging.

It is not something reserved only for professionals; “citizens” can verify information as well. However, I do think it pays to have some training or experience in journalism to become a good verifier. My experience from two years of teaching is that it is not inherently natural to most young people to double check things or to refuse to take information at face value.   “Get it right” seems intuitive, but until a professor points out that your  name and your integrity (and your grade) are on the line and gives you some tools to do it well, I think you have a tendency to a little bit more gullible about things you see and hear.

Some may bemoan that rumors can now spread so far and fast, but to me, when they can be corrected just as quickly a more open and participatory culture is  still a net gain.

My “Dare to Dream” Journalism Curriculum

Here at the journalism department at the University of Memphis, we are about to brave yet another assault on mount curriculum change.

I’ve observed this process now at more than one university, and I can tell you it’s the epitome of Groundhog Day.

It’s not that there isn’t a general acknowledgment of the need to change. The problem is that change inevitably means giving some things you are currently doing up (unless you plan on making students take 150 journalism credits to graduate and you have a veritable army of faculty to teach them). And giving things up that you’ve grown comfortable doing or that you’ve come to see as non-discussable is more difficult than just adding shiny new things on.

I’ve already posted a list of skills and knowledge I think all journalism students need (and it got some great comments; check them out!).  So here’s a rough draft of my dream curriculum.

Couple of introductory notes: We are hoping to ultimately “converge” the curriculum (a term I no longer hear outside the academy.) We still have sequences in broadcast, newspaper/magazine, and Internet journalism (yes, we realize that making distinctions between the latter two are patently ridiculous), and we’d like to turn all of those into one “news” major, perhaps with different areas of emphasis.

My personal view (not shared by many other academics I know, I’ll confess) is that the key is to give students choice. Trying to fit them into obsolete boxes doesn’t make sense anymore. For example, is having the ability to do traditional print layout and design still useful for many? Sure. But does every single student have to take it? I’d say no (I have three degrees in journalism from three journalism schools and I never did).  I say limit the number of required courses and let students mix and match and take classes they are interested in. We have good advising here, too, so we can guide them along the way. If they gravitate toward certain courses, offer more of them. While students may not “know what’s good for them” yet, they also tend to be more motivated and open to learning when they perceive that they have a choice in the matter.

So here we go! Feedback and ideas always welcome, of course.

All Students Take:

• Intro to Journalism and Mass Communication: Read Elements of Journalism and learn the core enduring values that apply regardless of medium; introduction to current issues affecting journalism, advertising, and PR
• Ethics
• Media Writing The basic intro to writing and reporting news that all journalism schools have
• Reporting –  Reporting techniques in all media, including video and social media, are emphasized.
• Computer Assisted Reporting – University of Memphis currently requires this of all majors, which I think sets us apart.
• Basic Web Programming – Basics of how to create a Web site. Students should come out of this class with a portfolio Web site/professional blog.
• Visual Journalism – emphasis on all forms, still, video, and graphics
• Advanced news practices - More advanced writing and reporting and editing, using all media but especially honing writing skills
• Entrepreneurship/freelancing /business class – ideally in partnership with business school.
• Capstone – Our new multimedia course in which students take on a meaty, real-world project. Taught “real-world newsroom” style, not just another class.

Everything else is an elective. And there are plenty of electives covering a wide array of skills in journalism.

Emphases would be voluntary, which would mean students could either a)get an emphasis OR b)mix and match and end up with just a degree in “news”

For example:

Broadcast Emphasis would include various TV courses e.g. TV Producing, TV writing, etc.

Web emphasis would include advanced courses in programming, etc.

News (NOT “newspaper/magazine,”  gah!) would include courses like reporting public issues, layout, etc.

Small Newspapers, Watch out! The Web is Coming

I keep hearing over and over again from some fellow journalism professors and others that we need to remind our students about the lesser-heralded positive news for newspapers. Small newspapers, I’m assured, are doing just fine, aside from some temporary recession pain. Newspaper Research Journal, which is housed here at the University of Memphis, is developing an upcoming issue on the 1400 newspapers that are NOT in financial trouble.

And it’s true that, according to the Associated Press, dailies with circulations of 15,000 or less saw their classified ad revenues rise by an average of 23 percent (!!) in the past five years, their circulations grow, and their staff sizes remain level even as the big metro papers struggle to stay afloat.

Now, I’m a sucker for good news right about now as much as anybody and I can’t quibble with these impressive numbers, but I have to say that I’m worried. Here’s why.

Rural markets (population less than 10,000) have the fastest growing broadband penetration rates in the country, according to MediaPost. And the online classifieds blockbuster Craigslist is expanding to 140 new cities – many of them relatively small.

How are small newspapers preparing to meet this juggernaut? Well, when Brad Stone of the New York Times Bits blog called the advertising director of The Daily Free Press in Elko, Nevada, one of the cities getting this huge new classifieds competitor, his response was: “Boy, that’s news to me. I don’t really see it impacting us.”

Yikes. To me, focusing too much on smaller papers as good news breeds complacency in the industry. And if we aren’t careful, it allows us in journalism schools to tell ourselves that radical changes aren’t necessary since a lot of fresh-out-of-j-schoolers get jobs at smaller papers, just like I did back when.

In interviews with top newspaper leaders in editorial and advertising at a metro daily for my dissertation work, I heard over and over again: If only we’d been more aggressive and more innovative when we had the chance. If only we would have retrained our ad sales staff for an entirely new way of thinking about online ads as more than just an add on, an afterthought.  If only we had experimented with new ad models , perhaps offering a bare-bones free listing to small local businesses but then selling more sophisticated upgrades or help designing their own Web sites or similar. If only.

Well, small papers, your “if only” moment is heading your way. Watch out.

As frequent Editor & Publisher contributor and journalism consultant Steve Outing noted on Twitter the other day in regards to the comment from the Elko, NV ad director, “Had same conversation w/ad director 8 yrs ago.”  Let’s just say that if you don’t start innovating now and looking to hire new grads with new media chops, then you may live to regret it years later, like the big guys do now.

I grew up in an small WI town (unicorporated, no less!), and I’m pretty confident in saying that while community news remains as vitally important as ever, small town folks aren’t somehow so “backwards” that they won’t eventually begin to embrace the same new methods of delivery that have moved into other areas faster. And to my thinking, widespread adoption of Web news habits will only accelerate as the Web becomes more seamlessly integrated into all of our lives, as cell phones get better and better and it becomes part and parcel of how we watch television.

And with this new delivery method will come the huge disruptions in advertising, profits, and the model of bundling all of the news and ads together for a fixed price.

I’ve been on this private bandwagon for awhile now, talking the ear off my husband, so I was gloating to hear none other than Clay Shirky say “I think assuming long-term profitability of smaller papers is whistling past a pretty big graveyard.” He gives a number of reasons here.

I Fed The Trolls: Trying (and Failing) to Elevate the Dialogue

Don’t feed the trolls!

That’s what everybody tells me. There’s no point, and next thing you know, they’ll be in front of your house with an AK-47. And I know they are right. But I leave comments on stories anyway, sometimes, even when I know that I’m not going to change any minds.  Why do I bother?

Newspapers have, by and large, let story comments turn into ghettos where hate and personal attacks thrive.  But smart folks like the ones at Xark and Patrick Thornton, writing here for Poynter, have any number of creative ideas on how to elevate the dialogue. Respond. Create ratings systems. Elevate good comments to prominent positions and perhaps even dedicate a blog post or story to expanding on them. Cultivate a community around your site. Although it’s nigh impossible to guarantee people are using their real names, encourage them to do so.

Comments are a rich source of story ideas, can help reporters verify stories or add critical context and background, and they are especially crucial in a time when studies show that readers come to Web sites expecting greater interactivity.

Even more importantly, one of the core principles of journalism, as noted by Kovach and Rosenstiel,  is that it must provide a forum for discussion on issues of critical public importance.

Let me share a brief quote from them:  “The news media are the common carriers of public discussion, and this responsibility forms a basis for our special privileges. This discussion serves society best when it is informed by facts rather than prejudice and supposition. It also should strive to fairly represent the varied viewpoints and interests in society, and to place them in context rather than highlight only the conflicting fringes of debate.”

So despite my knowledge that trying to change individuals is more than futile, I sometimes jump into the fray with this principle in mind, hoping that over the long haul, being willing to participate will elevate dialogue. And I figure that if journalists don’t have the courage to stand up to knee-jerk charges of political bias, then at least professors probably should step up to the plate and be willing to, for example, say something is false when it is demonstrably false.

A couple of days ago,  one of my professors when I was at Mizzou, Charles Davis, published a column in the Columbia Daily Tribune in which he argued that journalists have not done a good enough job covering the outpouring of hate raging across the nation. In his view as a First Amendment near-absolutist, the more we expose hate for what it really is, covering it openly and rigorously,  as journalists once did in the days of the civil rights movement, the more likely it is to shrivel up and go away.

As you might expect, the comments described Davis as a Nazi and similar, as well as predictably trying to assert that calling for civility and for exposing hate for what it is – is  somehow politically liberal?

So I left a comment. And as always, I left my real name. I always do. And I challenged the other commenters to do the same.

I will admit I probably could have been more diplomatic myself, but the comments I made were,  I thought, fairly benign. One thing I do know for sure is that they weren’t political in nature. You can read them yourself at the end of the article – my name is signed at the end and my handle appearing above the comments is my Twitter name, brizzyc.

Personal attacks rolled predictably in. I was called “smug” and “self-righteous,” among other nice things.

And a woman named Ellie Funke of the Columbia/Jefferson City, MO area took it upon herself to email my boss and one of my colleagues with a link to the article and the following comment: “Not sure if you have seen the articles and ramblings your assistant professor contributes.  She and her colleages (sic) are not someone my (sic) will study with”

Sigh. So what is the lesson here? I don’t know, you tell me. Clearly, as one of my colleagues noted, mud wrestling with a pig leaves you both filthy and the pig will enjoy it. But I hate to refuse to participate in public dialogue out of fear.

Unharnessed from daily print routine, can you build a more relevant site?

Christian Science Monitor Editor John Yemma speaks to AEJMC attendees

Christian Science Monitor editor John Yemma said that’s been the case at his paper since its print publication cycle was reduced from daily to weekly in March of this year. (Apologies for crappy iPhone photo.)

Speaking to journalism professors at the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication conference in Boston two weeks ago, Yemma said that the paper’s Web site was seeing 25 percent more traffic than a year ago.

Academic research on journalism has long shown that routines – the processes surrounding the production of the proverbial daily miracle on your doorstep each morning – have a profound impact on the kind of news produced.

The need to get a predictable flow of news on deadline helps explain, for example, the preponderance of official or institutional sources in the news despite most journalist’s espoused commitment to stay connected with “regular folks.” These sources are often easily accessible via consistent means (e.g. police reports) on deadline.

My own research has found that even in newsrooms committed to change, print routines get in the way of innovation and give people a sense they are struggling to serve two masters — but are largely necessary to maintain as long as the paper comes out each morning.

Yemma said that instead of spending each day focused primarily on moving along what the editors believe are the best stories to completion, the Monitor can now be more nimble and flexible, breaking short items of news and being attentive to the kinds of topics that are currently getting a lot of buzz on the Web.

Often, these tend to be stories more focused on conflict or controversy, he added, and sometimes some of the editing process occurs post-publication.

In the meantime, the weekly print edition gives staff more time to develop on weighty, in-depth stories.

Bill Mitchell of Poynter also wrote about Yemma’s talk. Read it here.

Teaching Journalism Students to Be Entrepreneurs

Picked up a few good tips at AEJMC in Boston last week from some smart folks on how to better prepare journalism students to be entrepreneurs.

This is something we in the academy are increasingly (or should be) interested in.  Journalism students should be prepared not only to launch their own enterprises, but also to have a more entrepreneurial mindset even in traditional news organizations, as my last post explained.

Web developer and founder of Placeblogger.com Lisa Williams discussed the importance of learning to pitch your idea over Indian food with some  Web-interested professors one night. If you can’t pitch your idea, not only are you unlikely to get others interested, you also may not have enough clarity yourself about your core purpose.

Your pitch must be concise, compelling, and clear.  If you can’t get them in under 30 seconds, you won’t be able to get them in an hour. Practice it over and over, get honest feedback, and keep cutting the fat.

She added more specific classroom ideas via Twitter:  One way to start – and I plan on doing this – is having students practice pitching their stories (which should have the added benefit of improving leads & nut grafs). Ask the class if the pitch is clear, and ask them to paraphrase it to test.  Then ask:  Is it compelling? Why would someone both reading/paying attention to this?

For example, here’s Williams’ pitch for her site Placeblogger:  “Placeblogger is the largest searchable index of local weblogs.”

Also, never pitch unless asked, Williams says. Nothing worse than irritating the people you need to impress.

Dan Gillmor, author of the well-known book We The Media and the director of the Knight Center for Digital Media Entrepreneurship at Arizona State, also spoke at a panel on student entrepreneurship.  Gillmor co-teaches a hands-on course that guides students through the process of online media development, entrepreneurship and business. Here’s the syllabus.

Gillmor said emphatically that “I have an idea for a Web site!” is not going to fly in his course.  Instead, students must first identify a need or a void in the community they could fill. This is an important and, I think, often overlooked aspect of building a successful site or tool; researchers Esther Thorson and Margaret Duffy of the University of Missouri have developed a model for helping news organizations identify needs prior to building fancy features.

Gillmor also said that he teaches his students not to fear failure.  Their course projects are not a chin-stroking academic thought exercise – this is about “demos not memos” (not sure who to credit that phrase to, but I love it).  Not everything is going to work, and even a project that ultimately fails may be worthy of an A – the value lies in being willing to experiment. It is important to own both the process and the outcomes.

It’s also important to develop ideas quickly, launch them before you are fully satisfied, and then fix what is broken. Embrace the chaotic process, he said. It’s okay to be embarrassed when you first launch a site – you will learn from your mistakes.

For Journalists, Entrepreneurship Is Like Chasing the Story

“I don’t think journalism has an entrepreneurial problem, I think it has a psychological problem,”  Eric Newton, vice president of the journalism program at the Knight Foundation told a group of journalism professors at a panel on student entrepreneurs the AEJMC conference last week in Boston.

Journalists, Newton said, have finely honed instincts for chasing a story, doing whatever it takes to nail something down and coming up with clever ways for getting the information they need on deadline.  They are, in other words, full of the kind of entrepreneurial skill and spirit needed to bring an idea to life. The problem lies with thought patterns that limit their ability to exploit that skill set -  they don’t think broadly and apply that same mindset to changes in the business model or the organizational structure.

Journalism students are taught that the story is ALL that matters, but this is not true, Newton said. Stories sustain and are sustained by a whole media ecosystem that must function for the best journalism to thrive. That ecosystem includes factors such as monopoly power, capital, and control. (The last sentence via tweet from Mindy McAdams, @macloo, who took better notes on that part than I did. )

This comment struck me as insightful – although I would note that this is a systemic and not an individual-level problem. For most individual journalists laboring in the trenches,   institutional structure and culture make it difficult to think or behave more entrepreneurally, and this is something that will require full organizational commitment from the very top on down to change.

I’d agree that the days when journalists can separate themselves from all other aspects of the business are long past. Of course there are important ethical considerations and we must continue to keep outside influences out of the news, but the time is certainly now for thinking creatively about ways of organizing work flow, and being willing to experiment with new products or ideas that might fail.

Having written this, not sure if it’s as interesting as it first struck me while at the session – curious to see if others have thoughts to contribute.

This is just one of what I hope will be a series of short posts about what I learned at AEJMC this year. I will also blog about what some of the other members of this panel said.

The Future, it’s in the Data.

Here’s a post I meant to publish earlier this summer before life got crazy…I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again – even a simple, non-traditional wedding takes more time than you’d think to pull off!

Earlier this summer, I read one of the more provocative and unique posts I’ve seen in awhile about the future of journalism in the blog Xark.  It sets out a vision for for how reporters could begin, through their normal day-to-day work, to build detailed databases full of information from their stories – a rich trove that could be mined for future stories to add context and depth, to discover new connections and relationships that lead to great enterprise, and for myriad other to-be-imagined uses.

Instead of simply producing an important but highly perishable commodity, the news story, the reporter is also producing an easily searchable, analyzable, and lasting resource full of information about the community and its institutions and leaders.

In one of our many conversations about journalism that used to be over beer and now, sadly, is more often over email, my friend and fellow journalism professor/Mizzou PhD (almost) Jonathan Groves made an interesting point   – if the future of journalism is about data, then why are so many news organizations laying off their skilled librarians?

He directed me to the manager of the Christian Science Monitor’s library and information center’s Leigh Montgomery, who makes the following point:

“Librarians are precisely who have been leading in managing information and knowledge in the organization, providing technology training and collaborative tools ­ and adding value and context to information to make it accurate, distinctive and unique. Librarians are already doing what the new, leaner, next workforce will have to do more of:  inherently sharing their vast knowledge to help their colleagues, improve the product and grow the business.”

“We know this.  And we know it is like shouting into a hurricane.”

“What astounds me is that many news organizations, beyond the publication date, are not as attentive as they could be to the most valuable thing they have:  their content.  There has been such a fixation on a pay wall or the traditional models of subscribers & advertising or getting as much Google juice as possible that no one seems to be thinking about the many ways this content will live on in other markets.”

“In all the ink and pixels spilled over the future of journalism I have not heard one mention of this.  And whether you have been in business for a century or part of a new startup, that information is valuable, and it needs structure ­ keywording & taxonomy added to it so it can be accessed, and repurposed. All this is then repackaged and sold and accessed by students, researchers, professionals, in databases or on other platforms where the user depends on relevant, fact-checked, objective content.”

Brilliantly said, Leigh, and I think this is something news organizations need to start thinking a lot harder about.

Cronkite’s Spirit Still Lives

Don’t get me wrong. I’m as disgusted as the next person that the big TV honchos have lost their way, sending obsequious emails to Sanford promising to let the governor “frame the conversation as you really wanted” (not even bothering to be subtle, eh, Gregory?), and giving a black eye to journalists everywhere by refusing to call a lie a lie for little other reason than fear of being accused of false bias.

But I just wanted to pause for a minute in our “they don’t make ‘em like they used to” lament and say a quick word to honor those journalists who are still, right NOW,  laboring in the trenches doing good work, despite challenges that I think even the likes of Cronkite and Halberstam might have struggled with.

Like others in our current economy, they’ve seen friends and mentors laid off or take buyouts; they’ve had to adapt to an increasing workload and declining morale. But they still love a good story. They’d rather quit than sell their integrity to an advertiser or a crooked pol. They care about what they do. They double-check facts – and wake up in a sweat in the middle of the night if they think they got something – even a small thing – wrong (do you know how many times I’ve heard that anecdote?)

I can tell you first-hand that the vast majority of what I’ll call “real journalists” – often not the famous ones in the glamorous, big market jobs – are thoughtful, passionate, and work hard  because they truly believe that it is important to their communities and to democracy itself.

I’m not just rhapsodizing away here – I’ve done the reporting. I  spent three years traveling to newsrooms all over the country between 2002 and 2005 for the Committee of Concerned Journalists. I don’t have the numbers on hand at the moment, but I can tell you from crunching the numbers myself from the surveys we conducted that the majority of them told us they got into journalism to do good or serve the public. It sure as heck wasn’t for the money.

Our workshops were full of passionate discussions about the struggle to get it right. They didn’t view bias or objectivity in a simplistic way as many assume, but a nuanced one, and they worried and strategized about things like trying to cover all races and classes in their community better, or how to better engage the public on important issues.

My current academic research  involves in-depth interviews with newspaper journalists from all departments – from online to the features design team – and all levels, from executive editors to the fresh-out-of-school reporters. These folks do not resist change in the way many new media pundits think.  While they may fear change (don’t most of us?), they have thought hard about how their jobs could intelligently evolve in an online era. They know what their core values are, and they want to find ways to carry these into the future. Indeed, the obstacles to change come less from the individual recalcitrance that is often blamed, than the power of routines and broader systemic factors (I’ll write more about this later).

And then there are my students, whose eyes gleam when they get a good story, when they realize that they can hold school administrators’ feet to the fire, when they know they have a scoop.

Browse the Investigative Reporters and Editors (IRE) Web site. Look at some of the Pulitzer Prize winners.  Check out the Center for Public Integrity.   The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel has an impressive watchdog team. Media Storm is making hard-hitting, long-form multimedia work. And that’s just scratching the surface. Good journalism is everywhere – if you bother to read or watch it.

Anyway. I’m not trying to say journalism doesn’t have problems and failures (and we sure do flagellate ourselves about those, don’t we?). And YES, there are bad journalists, just as their are bad doctors and lawyers and yadda yadda. Unfortunately, far too many of them seem to work in the highest profile jobs on television.

I believe that citizen journalists, bloggers, etc. do and will contribute importantly to the work of watchdogging and telling important stories, so I’m not just toot tooting for the MSM here, either.

But if we fail to honor the good stuff we DO have in the pursuit of an ideal that may or may not have been as bright as we think (would Cronkite had been the same competing against the cable networks in a 24-7 news environment? In the middle of a massive economic cluster!@%? I hope so, but who’s to say for sure?), I think we will ultimately ensure the demise of good journalism rather than continue to improve it.

Moving On

We talk, and we talk, and we talk,  and we reinvent the wheel again, and again, and again.

Some days, I want to cry uncle.

If you know me, you are probably rolling your eyes right now because you’ve heard this rant I’m about to launch into before. For years.  Let us ALL hope we can stop talking about this, and start focusing on concrete ideas for the future.

Back in 1997, Bill Kovach,  Tom Rosentiel and the Committee of Concerned Journalists  convened a series of forums throughout the nation, bringing together no fewer than 3000 journalists, academics, First Amendment scholars, and regular folks to identify and discuss the core values of journalism.  [Yes, they were my bosses for three years in a  fantastic job I had with CCJ. Maybe I'm just biased. But read on.]

They also partnered with a team of university researchers who conducted more than 100 three-and-a-half hour interviews with journalists. They conducted two national surveys. They did 12 content analyses of news coverage.  And finally, they did their own extensive lit review of the history of journalism.

They compiled the results in a little book called The Elements of Journalism. Here’s the cheat sheet. This book is not, as I’ve heard some academics refer to it, “the Kovach and Rosentiel view” of journalism. As the previous methodologies described attest, these core principles are widely agreed upon, and indeed, they are at the very core of the professional identities of every good journalist I know.   Truth, accuracy, a discpline of verificaiton, transparency,  independence from faction, watchdogging the powerful, committment to conscience, and more. Each individual journalist/news organization might apply them somewhat differently in a particular situation, but these principles honor and respect that.

I refer to the book, only slightly in jest, as the Bible of Journalism to my students.

These are our values. Anything out there that follows these values is journalism. Anything that does not is something else. I’d even go so far as to argue that the “something else” isn’t per se bad. But it IS different.

So WHEW, now that we’ve figured that out, let’s take these values and carry them into the future. How can we make them come to life in new media? How can we help audiences to understand these principles that guide us? How can we build community and actively engage our audience in becoming partners with us in carrying these principles out?

Ah, but yet.

Still.  Still I have to try to convince a small group of academic colleagues that “the blogs” are actually just a content management system, just as newsprint is also a vessel for the National Enquirer.  Are bloggers journalists? Ah, but that fraught question has such a simple answer. If a blogger follows these principles, why indeed, she is. If a blogger opines in his pajamas without any basis in fact, he may be adding quite productivley to the cacophony of voices that makes free speech and democracy great, but nope, not a journalist. Can a “citizen” BE a journalist?  Sure they can, if they follow these principles – although I’m among those that certainly believe that healthy democracy still depends on people who can actually make a living wage doing this.  But I digress.

Today I “attended” virtually a symposium sponsored by the Reynolds Journalism Institute at my alma mater, Mizzou. One of the fellows, Mike Fancher, formerly of the Seattle Times, did a year-long project on modernizing the “journalist’s creed.”  He pointed out the importance of conscience, a discipline of verification, and “telling the readers how we know what we know” which Kovach and Rosentiel call transparency. Now, I agreed with every word that Mike said.  It was an intelligent and thoughtful presentation, and it was only five minutes long, so I’m sure he was barely able to scratch the surface of his work.  But I couldn’t help but be struck that we’ve been here before.   Do we need to continue re-doing the same research that produced Elements – or should we move on to figuring out, in the concrete sense, how to bring them to life online?

This is the focus of my own research, which I hope to start blogging about more now that the semester is over.

If anything, the Internet is the best thing to happen to journalism, as Steve Rhodes smartly argues. Yes, we need a new business model (Fine folks at RevenueTwoPointZero have brilliant, concrete ideas on that.)  But let’s move forward and quit getting distracted by the same debates.  I don’t have all the answers, but I’m excited as heck to try and find them.  After all, democracy depends on journalism. Let’s do it.