Zombie Journalism

Dispatches from the living amongst journalism's walking dead

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Journalists should fight for the rights of bloggers

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On October 5, 2009

In Industry News & Notes

That’s right, put that in your pipe and smoke it.

Lots of journalists, bloggers and others who work to uncover the truth have been excited at the prospect of Congress finally passing a federal shield bill to prevent reporters from being forced to testify as to the identities of confidential sources. When it came out last week that the Senate version of the federal shield bill would exclude unpaid bloggers and citizen journalists, the enthusiasm was dampened (for some of us).

The Senate version of the bill limits the law’s protection to a very strict definition of a journalist. It would only apply to paid employees or contractors who work for publishers of various media and wire services. The House version, in contract, only limits the law to those who gather news “for a substantial portion of [their] livelihood or for substantial financial gain”.

The good folks at the Citizen Media Law Project suggest this exclusion is due to most senators’ unfamiliarity with citizen journalists. I daresay it also has to do with the fact that citizen journalists and bloggers are not going to get the backing of the big journalism organizations pushing the law in the first place. A lot of big media, I’d expect, would love to have exclusive protections to prevent bloggers and citizen journalists from scooping them on whistleblower-type stories.

In my opinion, the change seems to go against the entire premise for the law in the first place – and we should all be upset about it. To hell with competition from bloggers and unpaid journalists – we need all the watchdogs we can get as the numbers of professional journalists deplete.

Moreover, any professional journalist who agrees that the change should exclude unpaid bloggers should consider that most of us are one layoff away from becoming “unpaid journalists” ourselves. Consider those ex-newspaper employees out there starting their own operations from scratch…don’t your former colleagues deserve the same protection? Doesn’t anyone who’s uncovering the truth?

Aside from the limits of the protection, the White House is trying to push through changes that would make it so the shield does not apply in cases where the confidential source leaks information pertaining to national security. Stay tuned on that front – it just might have legs (or kill the bill altogether).

Who got a say in WaPo’s social media policy?

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On October 2, 2009

In Industry News & Notes, Social Media

Even aside from the Washington Post’s social media policy itself, the method of its distribution and construction is cause for concern.

As Steve Buttry notes, the organization shouldn’t have started with a closed policy decree, it should have started with internal conversations with staff about social media. The senior editor has been working on the policy without input from the newsroom or digital staff since May – and only told them about it the same day it was released.

Was there any talk with tenured Twitterati about the benefits they have of using Twitter in sourcing and story development? Did anyone consult with the ombudsman about the possibilities of using social media to address reader complaints and questions? Did anyone in the WaPo newsroom ever even get training or guidance of any kind on this issue in the months preceding the policy’s release? It doesn’t seem like it.

At my paper, The Cincinnati Enquirer, we have been lucky enough to have several open staff conversations about social media ethics and legalities. Our lawyer even came in for a session on the legal implications of using the likes of Twitter and Facebook, which was a huge help for those of us who train staffers in using the technology (yeah, that’s right, we have training).  Our editor is very open about his feelings on the technology (he’s in love with it) and encourages its use amongst reporters. We don’t have a policy, per se, but at least everyone talks about it.

WaPo, of all places, needs a lesson in transparency

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On October 2, 2009

In Industry News & Notes, Social Media

Last Friday, the Washington Post internally released a social media policy for its staff that has had the news world buzzing. While it isn’t big news to release such a policy (many other papers have them too), for a paper with a reputation like that of the WaPo, you’d expect something a little less down on social networking. The policy applies to personal and professional accounts and has more than enough eyebrow-raising ‘dont’s’ that are sure to scare any staffer away from the social web. It already has.

To be fair, a great deal of the policy does focus on ethical issues most news staffs should have cleared up, such as remembering you’re always a journalist online and must follow the ethics of the profession even in social media and that anything online is public, even if you think it isn’t. The problem is, it also features a lot of warnings that seem to go against the very reason most journalists sign up in the first place.

Take the following gem:

Post journalists should not be involved in any social networks related to advocacy or a special interest regarding topics they cover, unless specifically permitted by a supervising editor for reporting and so long as other standards of transparency are maintained while doing any such reporting.

The very first thing I ever encourage reporters to do when they join Facebook or Twitter is to follow or friend the groups and individual sources they cover. They should be seeing what their sources are putting out there and use that medium to further interact as reporters. That’s the whole point – conversation, right? The policy does say they can do this with special permission and all that, but if WaPo reporters are anything like the nice people I work with every day, they’re going to drop all of their sourcing associations online immediately.

Another scary point of the policy is that it specifically says staff should tweet or otherwise communicate about internal newsroom issues or its company’s business decisions and they are forbidden from addressing any criticism of the organization. As Paid Content points out, that sort of policy would have prevented the mini-scandal over the WaPo’s paid schmooze events proposed by its publisher earlier this year – and it essentially makes transparency of the organization a punishable offense.

It’s transparency that is really what has been outlawed here – and that should concern journalists and consumers alike. In the age of social media, transparency is the new objectivity in a lot of ways (maybe eventually in entirety) – so why shut down the main avenue reporters have to show their work?

As the Posts’s tech writer Rob Pegoraro notes, reporters don’t just use Twitter to look cool, they use it as a public notebook to benefit readers and the organization at large. Without social media, he can’t easily answer a reader’s question in a public manner, provide links to related content or give readers a sense of who he is as a reporter in order to earn their trust.

I hope the WaPo eases up on this policy in the wake of the internal and external backlash. It’s really for the good of the entire industry following their lead that they sit down and consider how much they stand to lose from closing their doors to the outside world.

Recommended reading on the mysterious future

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On September 3, 2009

In Industry News & Notes, Recommended Links

These are my recommended links for August 28th through September 3rd:

Roundup: Social media innovations and business models

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On August 20, 2009

In Industry News & Notes, Online Revenue Models, Recommended Links, Social Media, Twitter

Check it -it’s a rundown of news and notes on social media innovations, more pay model plans and why you shouldn’t look silly on the internets.

Take Note

  • According to the internets, More Employers Use Facebook To Vet New Hires Than LinkedIn, hence why I keep stressing why you should A. Be on these networks and B. Be doing it well enough to not look dumb.
  • And not that it should be news to anyone here, but Twitter is The New Way Mainstream Media Breaks News. I can’t preach it enough around my paper – let’s break news on Twitter first, then worry about the links. We do this at my paper every day – and sometimes I won’t even bother tweeting a headline if we aren’t first in our market or it isn’t original. The traffic from Twitter isn’t much anyway – so it’s better to be first than first with a link. Of course, we still want to be factual, too (that one’s for you, Bruce).

Keeping News Alive

  • The Online Journalism blog asks if the (UK) Times’ Culture subscriptions is a potential model for charging for online newspapers. Why? It’s more than just a newspaper subscription – it’s a membership with incentives like ticket deals, exclusive access and more. It’s just one way to make a pay wall worth it if this kind of model would move to the web.
  • Speaking of paying for news, a CUNY project sought to find New business models for journalism to answer, “What happens to journalism in a top-25 metro market if a newspaper fades away. Can journalism be sustained? And how?” There are four total – some of which have been panned and a couple of others that have real legs (though none are really earth-shattering).

Innovations in Social Media

  • Mashable reports that our friends at TweetMeme are working on Retweetable Comments. Huh? You’ve seen on several blogs and articles where you can tweet article from a button, but this would allow people to tweet individual comments on those blogs. A very cool way to get comments to go viral (and encourage commenting in the first place).
  • Speaking of Twitter, Patrick Thornton has been hard at work at Bringing engagement to an old, one-way medium. His marketing plan for a new novel is exactly what social media marketing should be – fun, creative and original. While his exact approach doesn’t exactly work for a news entities’ needs, using social media as a customer service platform is a must. Why else even be on Twitter if you can’t answer questions?
  • If you haven’t checked it out yet, the Huffington Post has embraced the  age of “My” news with a new Facebook Connect hookup that allows interaction between Facebook profiles and user activity on their sites.  The sync is  a no-brainer for an operation of their kind – and a lot to live up to. Something like this takes a lot of work, but it would be great to see more news orgs (and yes, smaller ones) jumping into a forward-thinking arrangement like this.

Recommended reading this week

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On August 14, 2009

In Industry News & Notes, Recommended Links, Social Media, Twitter

The Big Must-Reads
  • You have to read Five Key Reasons Why Newspapers Are Failing from Bill Wyman at Splice Today. It’s an excellent analysis of How We Got Here from someone with perspective both inside and outside the news business. A lot of it we newspaper types know already – but a lot of it we don’t want to acknowledge is part of the problem.
  • Part Two: On how the monopolistic mindset, terrible web design and a rejection of new technology contributed to the fall.
  • Newspaper war raises a question: Who keeps the tweeps? – Once a reporter builds a base in social media – who owns that base? If a newspaper gets claim to/responsibility for a reporters’ tweets (which seems to be the case), do they also own those followers? In this case, at least, I say yes. but not always. Likely not the last we’ll see from this debate.

How-Tos and Ideas:

More Social Media News

What’s the reasoning behind a pay wall, anyway?

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On August 11, 2009

In Industry News & Notes

Besides all of the questions we should be asking ourselves before we put up a pay wall, it’s worth a look to examine the underlying reason for it. This morning, I stumbled across a comment on a blog that perfectly underscores the very questions I have been asking about the push for pay walls.

As UK blogger Adam Westbrook cheered on Rupert Murdoch’s decision to enact pay walls on his sites, commenter Dani Bora said what’s largely been missing from the debate (unless you read here, which, obviously, you do):

…we’ll need to gauge what are the media orgs’ motives to charge for their content: is it to actually make journalism better — more journos, more pro imagery, new delivery options, etc…— or is it only to prop up ailing print operations and shrinking profits?

That’s the real question, isn’t it? Judging from the people who are always banging the drum for pay walls, I think I know the answer. I don’t believe the proposals are made to prop up print, per se, but rather to prop up an old ideal that all journalism has monetary value to somebody because, darnit, it does to us.

We don’t want to have to consider that maybe our online content just isn’t worth as much as we think it should be to our readers. I know from experience that the last people you want to talk to about charging for online content are the reporters and editors who put in the work to get it there. To many, it isn’t even a matter of ‘if” when it comes to charging for online content – it’s “when”.

I suggest a quick read over this excellent post from the Knight Digital Media Center about the sort of questions a news org should consider before charging for content. While all of the questions are important, two of the five are potentially quite difficult for a journalist to stomach: “Do I have content worth paying for?” and “What are my readers willing to pay for my work?”

Only after you get out and talk to the readers in your market can you really determine if a pay model is the right answer – or if you’re doing it for the right reasons in the first place.

WaPo v. Gawker: Battle in the Blogs

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On August 7, 2009

In Industry News & Notes

This week, for some reason, Gawker is suddenly Public Enemy #1 to the online media world. It seems to be because they’re doing pretty well when it comes to online revenue and they do it largely by blogging about the news researched by other sources.

The reason it’s suddenly a big deal is that a writer at the Washington Post, Ian Shapira, finally decided to throw a (well-written) snit about Gawker blogging about one of their pieces. Shapira charges that Gawker infringed on the copyright of his work because so much of their post was derived from his story.

Gawker’s post quoted heavily from the source’s quotes in the Post story  in fact, slightly more than half of their very short post was from the WaPo story. The Nieman Journalism Lab took a look at what was used and asked it’s readers if they thought Gawker violated Fair Use or fell well within its guidelines.  The comments are well worth a full read, as they really put the heart of the debate right out there:

1. The Gawker post clearly qualifies as Fair Use. Commenter Justin reminds us that the code states that content use “for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching (including multiple copies for classroom use), scholarship, or research, is not an infringement of copyright.” Comment and criticism – what else is Gawker if not that?

2. Despite Shapira’s claims to the contrary, the Post did get credit. Sure, Gawker could have said it came from the post before the end – but they gave them something far more valuable. They linked to the original story – several times in fact. As commenter (and excellent young blogger) Cody Brown says, in the online world, that’s the best credit you can get.

3. Was the Post damaged by it? Hardly. Shapira noted that Gawker was the #2 referrer on the web to his story and likely contributed quite a few new readers to an otherwise mundane story that may not have had a lot of legs online otherwise.

4. Who owns the quotes from the source anyway? If Gawker should cut the post a check for quoting their piece and selling ads around it (which the WaPo writer suggests in jest), what does the Post owe their original source for selling ads around her quotes? (And furthermore, does reporting count as aggregation, too?)

5. Would the Post be complaining if it wasn’t Gawker? That’s debatable. As the commenter notes (and I say all of the time) other newspapers, broadcast and wire services do this quite a bit too – why isn’t there any more outrage about that?

I really question why Shapira’s editor even let him write that follow-up charging that Gawker stole from his work. Does Shapira really have a background that makes him knowledgeable enough about these sticky issues of fair use and media law that he can make claims that even experienced media lawyers aren’t altogether clear on? Also, how many of the Post’s online readers even care about this issue? You know who cares to hear about how much work Shapira put into this everyday story only to have it “ripped off” by big, bad blogs? Journalists. That’s about it.

How much of this whole debate – not just the WaPo v. Gawker, but the whole blogs/aggregators vs. old media – is based in old-fashioned jealousy? Chris Krewson, editor of the Philadelphia Enquirer, said this to me on Twitter: “Aren’t we at least a little annoyed that Gawker and the aggies are faring well, ad-wise?”

Yes, I think we are. Gawker’s media sales have shot up this year. Ad revenues are up 45% year-over-year for the first six months of 2009 – and their production costs fall way below that of a newspaper. But isn’t that just good competition?

Maybe we just need to be better.

Here are more related posts about the whole Gawker debate you may find interesting:

  • Journalism’s Problem Isn’t Gawker. It’s Advertising. – The Atlantic Politics Channel – Atlantic’s followup analysis to the Nieman Lab post. Gawker isn’t the issue here, they insist, online advertising is the real issue – so maybe all of these people wringing their hands about Gawker and the like should focus on the task at hand. (amen)
  • Gawker’s Link Etiquette (or Lack Thereof) : CJR – An interesting look at Gawker’s linking habits. As the CJR notes, what they do falls within existing Fair Use guidelines and they DO link to the original piece – just way, way down in the story. I don’t agree with the practice, but I also don’t think we need a law that makes Gawker link to the original higher in the story.

Recommended reading for June 22-25

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On June 25, 2009

In Recommended Links, Social Media, Twitter

These are my recommended links for June 22nd through June 25th:

Recommended reading for June 16th – 17th

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On June 17, 2009

In Recommended Links

These are my recommended links for June 15th through June 17th:

Recommended reading for June 10th-12th

By

On June 15, 2009

In Recommended Links, Twitter

These are my recommended links for June 10th through June 12th:

  • 5 Twitter Tools to Help You Manage Unfollowers | WebProNews – I can’t recommend Qwitter to anyone – it simply doesn’t work. Try these other services to keep an eye on who is unfollowing you – and possibly why.
  • Paid Twitter Streams Are Here: Super Chirp – Is this the end of the world as we know it? Maybe. I’m not ruling out that a good Twitter stream is worth paying for – I just haven’t seen it yet.
  • A new Colonel Tribune? – Daniel Honigman, the voice and creator of Colonel Tribune, is no longer with the Tribune. While I give him big congrats for getting out of the business on his talents in social media, I don’t think Colonel Tribune can really be the same with a new voice. We see this on a smaller scale when we change voices behind @cincienquirer – anyone can see the difference.
  • The ‘branding’ of the journalist – Editors Weblog – I’m always bugging the reporters at my paper to market themselves as brands – particularly in the current job climate.
  • Facebook | Recession Survivors – You’ll need to log into Facebook to see it, but this project is an excellent example of how news outlets can use the crowdsourcing tools built into Facebook to involve the community in a story. Click on the videos tab to see the fan videos that Facebook users have contributed to this project.
  • To Tweet? To Twitter? The Final Word On Proper Twitter Lingo – The AP Stylebook has officially added Twitter and it’s words for usage (“to tweet” “to Twitter”). Who says we’re behind?
  • Lead, Follow or Block: When to Use Twitter’s Block Function – A reporter today asked me about Twitter’s block function – when it should be used and what exactly it does. I found this post to be helpful in explaining the issue (the comments also add some insight).
  • Twitter Dividends | Knight Digital Media Center Weblog – This was an interesting discussion amongst alums of the Knight Digital Media Center’s fellowship workshops about what sort of gains news organizations can or should expect from Twitter. Yours truly is part of this discussion – and I suggest the answer doesn’t lie in analytics.

Recommended reading for May 28th-June 2nd

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On June 4, 2009

In Recommended Links

These are my recommended links for May 28th through June 2nd:

  • 10 Must-Haves for Your Social Media Policy – As always, Mashable pulls together the tips that can help us all – individuals or businesses and news orgs – better develop our social media strategies.
  • Keyword Streamgraphs on Twitter – This site creates a visualization of the last 1000 tweets on a certain keyword. It doesn’t really make anything useful data-wise, but it is a great little thing you can link to out of your coverage of an issue or to track your buzz on an ongoing story. Mine is made for mapping who mentions “Reds” – but you can change the link to be any keyword.
  • How to Mine Twitter for Information – Great tips on getting data from Twitter to track buzzwords and trends over time.
  • Collaborative Reporting Tools | Publish2 – This new offering from Publish2 – which is a great tool if you haven’t used it – can be used in a lot of ways. It can be used to gather news tips, crowdsource stories and allow multiple people to contribute to reporting.
  • JournoTwit – The twitter client that’s not just for journalists… – This tool is still in development, but it has great potential. It is similar too, though not as good as, Tweetdeck – only online-based. If you could make the columns customizable, I’d be switching today.
  • Journalism.co.uk : BBC double-checks journalists’ ‘professional’ tweets – I guarantee there are reporters and editor that read this and think, “What a great idea!” No, it isn’t. Twitter is “right now” – not “ten minutes from now.” If you need an editor to make sure your tweets don’t have libel, spelling or factual error, you shouldn’t be tweeting. Period.
  • Commentary: Why Twitter won’t save journalism or kill it | McClatchy – A fairly honest overview of Twitter from someone who isn’t “in the tank” like me. While I think it is short-sighted to say Twitter won’t revolutionize journalism (maybe not Twitter – but something like it can and will), it’s at least giving the service a shot.

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