Welcome to the the Weekly Illumination, a JTM newsletter offering a quick look at the week in journalism with a focus on what’s working in today’s news ecology. In this week’s Illumination we’ll look at upcoming news endeavors, explore revenue models, and examine the practice of sending reporters on paid trips.

Correspondent Confidential, an animated series about reporters

When Carrie Ching, a journalist who worked as a senior multimedia producer for six years at the Center for Investigative Reporting, looked for a way to tell the heartbreaking story of a young girl with severe mental retardation who was raped in a Northern California facility she found animation the best way to deliver the story with the sensitivity it demanded. Now Ching has launched an animated series for Vice about the personal stories of investigative reporters, reports Johana Bhuiyan for Capital New York.

The first episode of Correspondent Confidential tells the story of Mimi Chakarova who went undercover as a prostitute in Eastern Europe to document human trafficking.

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In the building that once held Al Gore’s Current TV a group of people from Al Jazeera, which purchased Gore’s network to create Al Jazeera America, are creating a new internet network entirely separate from the new television network. Janko Roettgers had a chance to get a sneak peak of AJ+ and filed a report about the new project for GigaOm.

Keep calm and carry on

This week the Illumination’s blog reports on a talk at the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism between James Risen, a New York Times reporter who is facing prison for refusing to reveal his sources, and professor and investigative reporter Lowell Bergman.

“The best way to cope with it — to fight back against the government really — is just to not let it get to you anymore,” said Risen. “What can you do about it except surrender or fight? And I’m not going to surrender.”

 Why self-publishing e-books makes sense

Anthony Hayward’s seminal book on John Pilger’s documentary work is more than twelve years old, but when he suggested writing an update his publisher wasn’t interested. So Hayward decided to publish his own ebook and explained in a column for the Guardian why he’s happy with his choice.

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The historic Wells Inn in Sistersville, West Virginia is starting a new publication and is looking to hire a reporter who’s willing to perform double duty by staffing the front desk. Although Romenesko reports the Inn explicitly states that it doesn’t intend to compete with the other papers in the area, the upcoming newsletter may be able to outlast its peers thanks to money from the Inn.

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The New York Times is about to roll out three new premium products as part of its Paywalls 2.0 initiative, reports Ken Doctor for Nieman Lab. The new initiatives include a food & dining app, a product focused on aggregation, and an opinion site that Doctor thinks will have the hardest time convincing people to fork over their money.

A look toward the future

When a News Corp. executive spoke of the top nine challenges facing journalism at an event last month in West Virginia, the final challenge he outlined is the fact that advertisers themselves have become the conduit for their messaging. Newspapers and advertising once depended on the other to succeed, but advertisers are now decreasingly dependent on media companies to deliver theirs ads to an audience.

“We have to start thinking, how do we engage with these brands, how do we help them do this,” said News Corp. Senior Vice President and Deputy Head of Strategy Raju Narisetti at a talk covered by Maryanne Reed for PBS Mediashift.

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In an interview for Fortune magazine, Ted Turner told Patricia Sellers that “Standalone print is dead. But print in conjunction with audio and video, I believe has a future.” Although the complete interview is behind a paywall Romenesko has shared some highlights he received from the magazine.

For a different perspective on where the news business is headed, check out this interview by PBS Mediashift’s Mark Glaser with George Brock, a writer and editor at the Times of London, about his new book “Out of Print.”

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In our last edition of the Weekly Illumination we linked to a story about how the news media in Flint, Michigan never stumbled onto the past felony convictions of two candidates until after they were elected. This revelation prompted futurist Steve Outing to ask: Have we hit rock bottom with local news yet?

Outing then lays out a list of ways that local news could potentially reinvent itself to reclaim its role in keeping its citizens aware of the important issues in their communities.

Should news organizations accept paid trips for their reporters?

Even at the leading network for sports news, decreasing revenues are requiring managers to do more with less. But did ESPN FC, the company’s soccer network, cross a line when it sent Phil Ball to cover Qatar’s bid for the 2022 World Cup on an all-expense-paid trip, courtesy of the Qatari government?

The story Ball reported casts a glowing picture and suggests that dwelling on the systematic abuse of workers’ rights “obscuring the potential advantages and disadvantages that this event might spawn.”

“Why bribe the officials if you know your sales pitch is the best?” said Ball in his article. “One thing is a new futuristic concept, another is to see through the entire process ethically. It’s not as easy as it looks, and  Qatar is hardly the only country with these problems. It’s just more under the spotlight.”

Matt Yoder suggests that the network broke “nearly every code of journalistic ethics.” But Ty Duffy writing for USA Today’s thebiglead drew a different conclusion.

“The salient issue is not that a writer took an expenses-paid trip, which is noted at the beginning of the piece. It’s that the reasoning and conclusions reached are, at best, dumb and, at worst, heartless,” said Duffy. “No reader was misled about the nature of the reporting.”

As the backlash worked its way through the blogosphere Friday morning, ESPN FC took down the story leaving behind only a tweet.

“Carefully re-evaluated our recent Qatar story and decided to remove it. It did not meet our journalistic standards,” said @ESPNFC, the network’s official Twitter account. “We apologize.”

Should news organizations send reporters on these sorts of trips or should companies only send people to far-flung places if it can cover the costs? And when a publication decides that an article it has published is a problem, is it better to remove the article altogether or to affix a correction to the story and leave it online like an all-but-forgotten open wound?

Odds and ends & odd ends

• Although foreign correspondents may face far more dangers than their domestic counterparts, these safety tips compiled by Poynter’s Al Tompkins are helpful for any reporter.
• WARNING: When domain names are allowed to expire spamblogs are born, as PoynterOnline.org now reveals.
• What happens when the news business is decoupled from the corporate board room? StreetFight’s Tom Grubisch reveals that eight of the top 12 highest-grossing community news sites are run by women.
• Start-up publisher Medium explains how they’ve forged one metric to rule them all: Total Time Reading.

Job(s) of the week

The Asian American Journalist Association is hiring a reporter in Nebraska to tell stories around issues faced by minority and LGBT communities in the state.

JTM is looking for freelancers to write about successful journalism initiatives and is paying up to $250 per story.

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The Illumination is a curated collection of stories about journalism innovation, notable job opportunities, grants and updates about Journalism that Matters. It is distributed to e-mail subscribers, through the JTM Google Group, and posted to the Illuminations blog.

When faced with daunting subpoenas and the threat of jail time, journalist James Risen did the only thing he could: ignore the uncertain future and keep reporting.

Risen, a Pulitzer Prize-winning national security reporter for the New York Times who is fighting for the right to protect his sources, spoke with Lowell Bergman at an event Thursday hosted by the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism. Bergman is an investigative journalist and reporter for Frontline who heads up the investigative program at the journalism school.

“It’s just kind’ve become background noise in my life,” said Risen. “Actually its helpful. People now know that I’ll protect my sources and so I’ve had people come up to me and say, ‘I’ll talk to you because I know you’ll protect me.’

It’s been almost four years since the federal government first subpoenaed Risen and ordered him to reveal a source he used for his book State of War. After being subpoenaed in January of 2008, Risen filed a motion to quash it on the grounds that he is protected under the reporter’s privilege.

The reporter’s privilege is a principle similar to the one that allows lawyers and priests to avoid testifying in certain situations. It is recognized in some way by almost every state in the country — through either legislation or case law — but there is no federal law to protect reporters from having to testify. In some cases federal judges have recognized the privilege and in others they have said no such protections exist. The Supreme Court has not visited the issue in more than 40 years.

Risen’s efforts to toss out the subpoena initially proved successful, but the government appealed the judge’s ruling and the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals reinstated it. Now Risen is preparing to appeal that decision to the US Supreme Court. Its decision could create new protections for press freedoms, but it could also have the opposite effect and actually further erode the rights of reporters.

“At this point the status quo is so bad for press freedom that I don’t think we can stop fighting,” said Risen.

A shield law riddled with holes

There is a proposed shield law currently working its way through Congress that would extend the reporter’s privilege in some circumstances, but the bill is filled with exceptions for who and what would be covered under the law. One of those exceptions excludes national security reporting from the law’s protections.

“I’d be open to a shield law if you crafted it correctly, but this one is terrible, said Risen. “The media industry have gone along with it because they think it’s the best that they can get.”

Perhaps Risen’s concerns are warranted.

The Free Flow of Information Act of 2013, which is the official name of the proposed law, describes itself as “a bill to maintain the free flow of information to the public by providing conditions for the federally compelled disclosure of information by certain persons connected with the news media.”

“The problem is that in Washington, no one wants to protect national security reporting,” said Risen. Bergman described an exchange he had with a member of a congressional oversight committee that both supports and challenges Risen’s claim.

“The member of congress looked at me and said, ‘While I’m against giving you a national security exemption to protect your sources, at the same time I want to make it clear that we in this watchdog committee really don’t have the resources to keep the national security apparatus in line. We depend on you, the press,’” said Bergman. “He convinced me – while I was a little amazed by this — that there are members of congress who can actually keep two opposing ideas in their head at the same time.”

Risen said he fears the proposed law could be used to make reporting on national security issues more difficult or even illegal, calling the bill “a backdoor Official Secrets Act.” In the United Kingdom, the Official Secrets Act makes it illegal for journalists to publish information obtained from classified government documents.

“I think it’s tough at this point. I don’t think we’ll get a good law and I don’t think we’ll get a good court decision for quite a while,” said Bergman. “And you’re definitely not getting any sympathy whatsoever from the Obama administration.”

Looking at California’s state shield law

But if reporters stand resolute and refuse to sacrifice their principles for their liberty the government will not be able to maintain the status quo forever.

Bergman pointed to what happened in California after Bill Farr, a beloved reporter for the Los Angeles Times refused to tell a judge which lawyer had violated a gag order in the 1972 murder trial of Charles Manson. The judge held Farr in contempt and locked him up for the duration of the trial that stretched on another 46 days. But Farr’s principled stand resonated throughout the state, and in 1980 the California Shield Law became part of the state constitution. Since then the law has grown stronger through the course of many legal challenges over who and what would be included within its protections.

More recently, a 2006 ruling by the state’s 6th District Court of Appeals expanded the California Shield Law to include protections for bloggers and other citizen journalists. That case, which began in 2004, involved an attempt by Apple to compel the owner of a blog to turn over his e-mail records in order to identify the source of a leak within the company. Although a Santa Clara County Superior Court judge found that the Web site’s owner did not qualify as a journalist under the law, the site’s owner filed an appeal along with more than a dozen legal briefs from news publications and journalism organizations and successfully created a new precedent that stands today.

It’s possible the same course of action could eventually yield similar results in the federal system, but constitutional lawyers doubt the current Supreme Court is likely to establish a reporter’s privilege.

The long fight for a reporter’s privilege

The first version of the Free Flow of Information Act was introduced on the congressional floor in February 2005. At the time, New York Times reporter Judith Miller was in contempt of court for refusing to testify before a Grand Jury but had not yet gone to jail. She was one of a dozen reporters who had been threatened in federal court for refusing to reveal information about their sources, said Virginia Congressman Rick Boucher when introducing the bill.

“The ability of news reporters to assure confidentiality to sources is fundamental to their ability to deliver news on highly contentious matters of broad public interest,” said Boucher. “Without the promise of confidentiality, many sources would not provide information to reporters, and the public would suffer from the resulting lack of information.”

If the government sends Risen to jail, he will be the second New York Times reporter to have been jailed for contempt of court in less than a decade.

“The best way to cope with it — to fight back against the government really — is just to not let it get to you anymore,” said Risen. “What can you do about it except surrender or fight? And I’m not going to surrender.”

Disclosure: I graduated from the Berkeley School of Journalism and participated in Bergman’s class. I also spent several months in a federal detention center after I invoked the reporter’s privilege after being subpoenaed for a Federal Grand Jury, and I was interviewed by Bergman about the experience for the Frontline mini-series News Wars.

Welcome to the the Weekly Illumination, a JTM newsletter offering a quick look at the week in journalism with a focus on what’s working in today’s news ecology. In this week’s Illumination we’ll look at the news about Twitter outside of the IPO, mark the end of yet another print publication, and explore what the future of journalism may hold.

Community media starts with community

This week, the Illuminations Blog looks at Silicon Valley De-Bug, a community organization founded by Raj Jayadev more than 10 years ago. One De-Bug project helps community members who are facing jail or prison by creating short biographical documentaries for use in the courtroom. These five-minute videos help the families of the accused to tell their stories with the context and impact that simply isn’t possible through traditional testimony or a letter to the judge, he said.

Reflections on the changing news ecology

With Jeff Bezos the sole owner of the Washington Post, Ralph Nader wants to know whose views the Post’s editorials will represent. In an open letter, Nader calls for the paper to restore its ombudsman position and requests Bezos’ assurance that he won’t influence any copy in paper without disclosing his involvement.

But if Jay Rosen’s predictions ring true, the objective-reporting model embraced by the Post and other traditional news outlets may eventually be replaced by a more collaborative news model.

“They can see the advantages in personal voice and persuasive power that accrues to the Glenn Greenwalds and other practitioners of the personal franchise model in news. They understand that the people formerly known as the audience want to participate more in the news and that the insiders are less trusted than ever,” said Rosen.

The newsrooms at newspapers across the country have been uprooted and transplanted to smaller, more affordable locales. Although the moves are obviously driven by money, today’s news rooms better serve the needs of digital-first publications, reports Nikki Usher for Nieman Journalism Lab.

“The written word will be less relevant” -Tina Brown

Now that Tina Brown is no longer in publishing, she had no reason to stand up for the industry in her talk at the THinK festival. Brown said that “TV is dead” and that she thinks people “can have more satisfaction from live conversations.”

In vaguely related news The Onion announced that it will no longer publish a print edition.

So what can local publishers do to ensure their survival? Look to the success of Starbucks, says Brian Ostrovsky in an article for Street Fight.

News organizations Tweet like teenagers

Even though research shows that almost half of Twitter news consumers are between the ages of 18 and 29 years old, it doesn’t mean that news outlets need to Tweet with the voice of a star-struck child.

An article in the New York Observer points out a litany of embarrassing tweets that have sputtered out of accounts belonging to the New York Daily News and even Mother Jones.

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Apparently those Tweet buttons that make it super easy to share your content on Twitter aren’t as necessary as they once were, reports Joshua Benton at Nieman Journalism Lab.

Odds and ends & odd ends

• The Orange County Register will no longer refer to the Washington Redskins by that name.
• AP Photographer is the only one on Instagram in North Korea. Check out his photos of the rarely photographed country.
• If newspapers don’t vet political candidates who will? Flint voters only learned they elected two convicted felons to the city council after the election.

Job(s) of the week

BloomReach, a big-data marketing company, is looking to hire someone to tell the company’s story and is encouraging journalists to apply.

JTM is looking for freelancers to write about successful journalism initiatives and is paying up to $250 per story.

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The Illumination is a curated collection of stories about journalism innovation, notable job opportunities, grants and updates about Journalism that Matters. It is distributed to e-mail subscribers, through the JTM Google Group, and posted to the Illuminations blog.

While young tech millionaires dominate people’s perception of the Silicon Valley, the area South of San Francisco remains diverse with many working class families whose lives are only tenuously connected to the tech industry.

More than 10 years ago Raj Jayadev helped create Silicon Valley De-Bug to provide a platform for these voices that would otherwise be drowning in a sea of techsploitation. At the time he was one of the many young temp workers who had a job on the assembly line producing computer equipment. De-Bug began as a sort of zine that Jayadev wrote and printed with a handful of his colleagues.

“What we’d do is we’d hand out the magazine ourselves. We’d go to lunch trucks during shift breaks,” said Jayadev. “It was the first time that they were seeing themselves reflected in the media.”

When people would offer ideas for the magazine, the crew would invite them to tell their own story in De-Bug. Each week the growing number of contributors would gather at a Pho restaurant in downtown San Jose where they not only discussed editorial issues but also came together as a community.

“The De-Bug umbrella became the touchstone for anyone that wanted to find community. … People that wanted to define themselves by their own terms,” said Jayadev. “The writing was just a by-product.”

Today, those manufacturing jobs that catalyzed the creation of Silicon Valley De-Bug are gone, but the organization and its community remain strong and resilient. The nonprofit organization has five full-time staff members, three part-time employees and a team of about 30 regular volunteers.

“There’s this image of Silicon Valley being a place of innovation and entrepreneurial spirit, but that’s not just true of the techies,” said Jaydev. “The organizing needed to be innovative too. We had to make innovations in how we fight for voice for people. … Just like a tech company would have to be innovative to survive we’ve had to innovate to survive as a social justice organization… That spirit of ingenuity and innovation persists — not just in an Apple commercial.”

One of those innovations is the Albert Cobarrubias Justice Project, the organization’s initiative to translate community organizing methods to the criminal justice system. Cobarrubias was a De-Bug volunteer who was gunned down in the San Jose neighborhood where he grew up. The 31-year-old had recently graduated from San Jose State University and planned to become a lawyer.

The program grew out of work De-Bug was doing to support young people who felt that they were being unfairly targeted by police. As the group began looking into these arrests they learned that San Jose was making more arrests for public intoxication than any other locale. The majority of those arrested were hispanic.

Although Jayadev and his colleagues had experience doing community organizing around police issues and had experience coordinating rallies and press conferences, when it came time for court the group felt compelled to defer to the lawyers. Jayadev said they realized they were “relinquishing control and power at possibly the most important time,” but “the courtrooms are for lawyers.”

That all changed when a former public defender who was working with De-Bug told them that they should reach out to the defense attorneys to ask questions and explained that they have a right to attend court proceedings.

“It struck us like a lightning bolt,” said Jayadev. “Initially a lot of the attorneys were just sort of curious about us. They didn’t know how to handle us. We were just sort of a new animal in the courtroom.”

Now the public defenders and court-appointed attorneys assigned to indigent clients are the ones coming to them, he said.

The Project has pioneered the use of short biographical documentaries in the courtroom to help people facing jail or prison. These five-minute videos help the families of the accused to tell their stories with the context and impact that simply isn’t possible through traditional testimony or a letter to the judge, he said.

“We’re actually not making a judgement call on innocence or guilt,” said Jayadev. “What we do with video is we can actually visually show you these hardships. … It’s up to the judge and prosecutor to decide the authenticity and the value of the story.”

In the four years since the project’s launch, the organization has helped dozens of people facing hundreds of years in jail or prison.

Now Silicon Valley-Debug is trying to seed these videos in other communities. They’ll be giving a presentation this week at the National Legal Aid & Defender Association’s annual conference in LA this week and have a talk scheduled in Atlanta later this year.

“What we’ve found when we’ve talked to groups nationally is that there isn’t a sense that families who are facing charges can have a direct impact on their case,” said Jayadev. “I do think that this is hopefully something that can help balance the scale.”

On November 19, the Northern California chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists will award Jayadev the Silver Heart award “for his extraordinary dedication to helping empower marginalized members of society.”