In 2011, Fancher, the retired executive editor of The Seattle Times, partnered with the Knight Foundation and The Aspen Institute to publish Re-Imagining Journalism: Local News for a Networked World. Two years later, Grubisich caught up with Fancher to ask how things have changed.
The old paradigm of professional journalism was mostly limited to gathering, processing and distributing news. The essence of journalism for a networked world is experimentation, collaboration and public engagement. It involves:
• Public, private and non-profit media networking together.
• Established and emerging news organizations cooperating and co-creating content.
• Journalism being done outside traditional places, including within civic organizations and institutions such as libraries and universities.
• Partnerships between journalists and the people they are meant to serve.
I don’t see those actions happening nearly as fast as they need to.
***
The old mission paradigm of journalism was giving people the information they need. I think the new mission paradigm is about helping them have, use and act on the information that will enhance their personal and civic lives.
I’m on the board of Journalism That Matters, and we call this journalism of, by and for the people. “For” is still necessary and vital, but journalists can do a lot to support the “of” and “by,” as well. My own drive is, “If someone wants to create or contribute journalism, how can I help?”
Welcome to the first issue of 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. The Illumination is a curated collection of stories about journalism innovation, notable job opportunities, grants and updates about Journalism that Matters.
The newsletter is distributed to e-mail subscribers, through the JTM Google Group, and posted to the Illuminations blog. In this week’s Illumination we’ll explore the future of journalism education, social media and the effectiveness of paywalls.
Get Civilized, Online Comment Reform
In a previous column I wrote about how a San Francisco Alt-Weekly turned off its comments for a week. That experiment is now over and the sea of frothy comments has returned to the San Francisco Bay Guardian following its completion. In that column I spoke to how anonymous comments create an often-hostile environment where users show little restraint.
That phenomena is detailed in a new article by Mark Manson, a popular blogger and self-help author. In his essay, Manson points to four elements of online communication that warp our perception and drive people to act in ways they never would in person.
“We need to evolve a platform to meet the needs of the grown-up internet,” said Arianna Huffington at Hubspot’s Inbound 2013 conference. “Trolls are just getting more and more aggressive and uglier and I just came from London where there are rape and death threats.”
Social Media Gets Stickier
Facebook and Twitter may already be ubiquitous on the internet, but their reach across the Web continues to grow. It’s been possible to embed individual tweets for a while, but now anyone can embed public Facebook posts as well. This means that stories can now include the posts themselves, which will increase the company’s visibility outside of Facebook’s domain.
The New York Times has launched a one-off experiment to identify excerpts that readers can automatically share on Twitter, reports Poynter. Throughout the article, Dave Itzkoff’s The God of ‘SNL’ Will See You Now, there are sentences marked by a subtle gray highlight and the familiar Twitter logo. When someone clicks on these highlighted sentences a tweet is automatically prepared with that text and a link to the article that users can share with their followers. Although the New York Times has no plans to roll out these Twitter highlights to more of its stories, the newspaper does have a redesign planned next year.
There is even an app that will turn on these Twitter highlights across the entire Web. When the plug-in is enabled, clicking on a sentence on any web page will turn it into a tweet automatically. It’s called Save Publishing, and although I haven’t had a chance to test out the software, which is still in alpha-testing, it does seem like an interesting idea.
More than 80% of the world isn’t on Facebook. For some of us that’s a personal decision, but for the millions of people around the world without internet access it just isn’t possible to take part in the virtual world that Mark Zuckerberg created. But on Wednesday the company announced its plans to bring the social network to the rest of the world by “drastically cutting the cost of delivering basic Internet services on mobile phones,” according to the New York Times.
“If we were just focused on making money, the first billion people that we’ve connected have way more money than the rest of the next six billion combined. It’s not fair but it’s the way that it is,” Zuckerberg told CNN in a story about internet.org, the initiative he formed in partnership with six other tech companies. “We just believe that everyone deserves to be connected and on the internet.”
Tear Down this Wall
While recent reports show that pay walls are working to generate more revenue for sites like The New York Times, The San Francisco Chronicle has decided to terminate its experiment of charging to access content online. Unlike the semi-permeable Times site, which permits users a limited number of articles they can read each month (and an unlimited amount if reached by search engine), the Chronicle created a new site at SFChronicle.com to house its original reporting.
Although a new report shows that more than a quarter of recent journalism grads wish they’d studied something else in school, the same report shows that more graduates are landing full-time work after graduation. In 2009, only 56% of graduates found employment within eight months of graduating; that number is now at 66% for 2012 grads.
In recent years, many journalism schools have modeled themselves after teaching hospitals. Rather then spending time lecturing about the basic principles of journalism, more and more schools are having their students start reporting immediately. The faculty at these schools will often act as editors of online publications to create an environment similar to the traditional on-the-job training that introduced so many cub reporters to newspaper reporting.
But researchers David Ryfe and Donica Mensing of the University of Nevada’s Reynolds School of Journalism have authored a new paper that suggests journalism schools should instead adopt an entrepreneurial model for education, reports Nieman Lab. One example of an entrepreneurial model for education is Stanford’s D.school, a multi-disciplinary graduate program focused on using radical collaboration to tackle real problems. Corey Ford, the CEO of Matter.VC, used to teach at the d.school and is now employing a similar process to help launch media start-ups through his accelerator.
Entrepreneurship may offer the best chance for journalists — and journalism — to succeed, but for many students an internship can be a solid rung toward reaching a successful career. For DiAnelea Millar, who just wrapped up an internship at the Los Angeles Times, the experience gave her hope for the future. As she explains, her internship the previous summer at the Times-Picayune wasn’t quite as inspiring.
For anyone about to start a Fall internship, Alex Laughlin, the influence director for the University of Georgia’s Online News Association Student Group, has prepared a list of five things any intern can do to help make a good impression. Although Laughlin’s advice is mostly common sense, the post does a good job of emphasizing how important it is for interns to wow their new colleagues. After all, when dozens of people are jockeying for the same job those connections can lead to interviews that might not otherwise happen.
Job(s) of the Week
Each week, The Illumination will include links to jobs, grants and fellowship opportunities. If you are hiring or know someone who is, send me an e-mail and I’ll gladly list it here. If you’re looking for a job, let me know what kind of work you are looking for and I’ll try to post anything I come across that could be a good fit.
Meanwhile, if you happen to live around Morristown, New Jersey or are looking to move to the Garden State, the Aggregation Reporter is looking for an “Internet Sleuth with Journalism Background.” The job itself appears to be a typical general assignment position, but who wouldn’t want to see their employer print “Internet Sleuth” on a business card.
Hangout Sept. 12 to Discuss Future of JTM
For over a decade JTM has hosted unconferences around the country. We are now looking toward how we can grow as an organization.
Should we continue to focus on hosting physical gatherings? Should we move into online gatherings? Or should we take our energy and nonprofit status and launch a whole new initiative?
Please join us, Thursday Sept. 12 at 1PM Pacific Time (4PM Eastern) for a Hangout discussion on the future of JTM.
Coming Up: Disclosure
On Monday, the Illuminations blog will examine the topic of disclosure. Does transparency trump objectivity? What should journalists disclose and when is it not necessary?
If you have thoughts on this issue or any of the other topics covered in this issue of The Illumination then please feel free to leave a comment or to send me an e-mail.
But I want to know what’s working for you and to share it here so that we can collaboratively sketch out what’s effective and assess why some approaches succeed while others falter.
What new tool or process adopted at your work environment over the past year could you not imagine living without?
What most excites you about how sources of news are changing?
“We’re trying to create more and better journalism,” said Mike Fancher, a JTM Board member and retired editor of The Seattle Times. “What would make people want to participate? Who knows something that I don’t know? And what do I know that they would want to know?”What most excites you about how sources of news are changing?
On behalf of Journalism that Matters, I invite you to join in a conversation about these questions. You can either leave a comment or you can post your response as a blog entry on Journalism that Matters.
The Senate Judiciary Committee is poised to place a federal shield law before the full Senate, but some senators disagree about who should qualify for its protections.
A shield law establishes a reporter’s privilege against testifying about their sources and unpublished materials. Nearly every state in the country has some sort of shield protections, but there is no federal shield law and very limited protections for journalists in federal court.
On May 16, Sen. Charles Schumer (D-NY) introduced The Free Flow of Information Act of 2013. The bill is very similar to the previous failed attempts to establish a federal reporter’s privilege, but unlike the Free Flow of Information Acts of 2007, or 2009, or 2011, this time the bill would protect journalism by the people as well as that of the mainstream media. Schumer’s bill covers anyone “with the primary intent to investigate events and procure material in order to disseminate to the public news or information concerning local, national, or international events or other matters of public interest, regularly gathers, prepares, collects, photographs, records, writes, edits, reports, or publishes on such matters.”
With more and more stories being generated by freelance reporters and concerned citizens, Schumer’s bill recognizes that if it is to protect the changing news ecology it must be inclusive of those engaging in journalism whether they are working on salary, freelancing, or self-publishing on the Web.
But during a Senate Judiciary Meeting earlier this month, three senators on the committee proposed revisions that would radically change when the law would apply.
On Sept. 12, the Judiciary Committee will consider 37 amendments to the Free Flow of Information Act, 27 of which were introduced by Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-AL). Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX) introduced eight amendments, and Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) introduced two. All three senators seek to change who would be covered under the law.
Feinstein seeks to not only narrow the definition of who would qualify for protection, but to explicitly define those people as journalists — Schumer’s bill uses the term “covered person.” Under Feinstein’s amendment, a “journalist” is “a person who is, or on the relevant date, was, a salaried employee, independent contractor, or agent of an entity that disseminates news or information by means of…”
In other words, unless you are on salary, you’re not doing journalism until you have a contract in hand.
In the same proposed amendment, Feinstein goes on to also define a journalist as a:
(i) a person who — at the inception of the process of gathering the news or information sought, had the primary intent to investigate issues or events and procure material in order to disseminate to the public news or information concerning local, national, or international events or other matters of public interest, and regularly conducted interviews, reviewed documents, captured images of events, or directly observed events;
(ii) obtained the news or information sought in order to disseminate it by means of an entity set out in subparagraph (A)(i) of this section; and
(iii) either— (I) would have been included in the definition in subparagraph (A) of this section for any continuous three-month period within the two years prior to the relevant date; (II) had substantially contributed, as an author, editor, photographer, or producer, to a significant number of articles, stories, programs, or publications by an entity set out in subparagraph (A)(i) of this section within two years prior to the relevant date; or (III) was a student participating in a journalistic publication at an institution of higher education (as defined in section 102 of the Higher Education Act of 1965 (20 U.S.C. 6 1002)) on the relevant date;
If I’m parsing this language correctly, even if you meet the first requirement, you still don’t qualify unless you would have met that criterion for a continuous three-month period at some point over the last two years, otherwise you’re not a journalist — legally speaking at least.
In a recent interview with Amazon, President Barack Obama acknowledged that the nature of all occupations, including journalism, has changed.
“We have increasingly resigned ourselves to a ‘winner-take-all’ economy — again, driven a lot by technology and globalization, where folks at the very top are doing very well and the broad middle class of people, people trying to get into the middle class, are having a tougher and tougher time,” said President Obama. “It used to be there were local newspapers everywhere. If you wanted to be a journalist, you could really make a good living working for your hometown paper. Now you have a few newspapers that make a profit because they’re national brands, and journalists are having to scramble to piece together a living, in some cases as freelancers and without the same benefits that they had in a regular job for a paper.”
Feinstein’s amendment does makes some allowance for a reporter who has “substantially contributed” to a “significant number of articles,” but doesn’t define what comprises a “significant number.”
It is encouraging to see that Feinstein’s proposed amendment includes student journalists within its protections. Last year I spoke at the Berlin Freedom of Expression hosted by the Institute for Cultural Diplomacy on why protections for the press should include student journalists and independent reporters. It’s nice to see some of the issues I raised resonating, but such a complex equation to determine who should be covered does nothing to insure that the journalists protected are the responsible ones.
Sen. Sessions more than two dozen amendments would drastically reduce the scope of the shield law. Not only would Sessions version of the bill no longer require the courts to exhaust all alternative sources for information before subpoenaing a journalist, his version would also exclude the reporter’s privilege in cases involving classified information, grand jury leaks, crimes involving violence and several other scenarios. Although his version of the shield law might still protect journalists in cases involving civil suits between private parties, the scope of its protections would be otherwise quite limited. It would not have covered any of the recent cases where journalists were facing contempt citations in federal court.
Most of Sen. Cornyn’s amendments involve minor language changes, but one of his amendments would exclude journalists from invoking the reporter’s privilege to protect the identity of a government official who has released personal information about a private citizen. Another of Cornyn’s amendments would rely on the court’s interpretation of the First Amendment alone to determine who would and would not qualify for its protections.
In California — where I live — the reporter’s privilege is now part of the state constitution. It offers robust protection for journalists no matter the medium, with an exception in criminal cases where the reporter’s privilege must be balanced against the defendant’s right to a fair trial.
The state shield law has successfully protected both traditional reporters as well as bloggers against contempt. In 2006, the California Courts of Appeal found that the publisher of Think Secret, a now-defunct Apple rumors site, qualified for protections as a journalist under the California Shield Law. Since Apple chose not to appeal that ruling to the state supreme court, it is now a commonly held belief that bloggers and other citizen journalists can successfully invoke the state shield law in California.
Every state’s laws will approach the issue of who is covered differently, but The Reporter’s Committee for Freedom of the Press has compiled detailed information about the status of the privilege in all 50 states. Only a few states have established whether unpaid contributors and self-publishing bloggers are protected through case law, and even fewer address the issue legislatively.
When the Senate Judiciary Committee introduces a shield law to the full senate following next months meeting, that law — if successfully passed — will likely serve as a guide point to the state courts and legislators as to how their own shield laws should be interpreted or amended.
We do not yet know what the future of journalism will look like or who will be its practitioners. But we do know that more and more journalism is being produced by people who would qualify for protections under the language that Sen. Schumer has proposed.
But some of these journalists would not maintain that protection if the language Feinstein has proposed is adopted, and if Sen. Sessions gets his way the bill would be a shield law in name only.
A robust and inclusive federal shield law is on the horizon, but the decision to keep it that way will come down to the 18 people on the Senate Judiciary Committee. Starting Monday, I plan to call the offices of all 18 senators. I encourage you to do the same.
Disclosure: I spent 226 days in a federal prison for refusing to comply with a grand jury subpoena relating to my work as a journalist. If Sen. Schumer’s bill had been law at the time, it is likely I would not have been found in contempt of court.
Instead, readers were invited to attend a community meeting that the Guardian hosted on Wednesday, which I reported on for a companion piece to this column. The newspaper has also directed its readers to Tweet at them or to comment on its Facebook page “where it’s tougher to troll anonymously,” said Editor Steve Jones in a Guardian blog post.
Anonymous comments have been a problem for almost every newspaper, but the issue is magnified at the Guardian, a 47-year old institution that was sold by its founder last year. Long-time editor Tim Redmond was pushed out in June, and the city itself is under a tumultuous change that some say dwarfs the transformation the city experienced during the last dot-com boom.
Some online publications have chosen to rely on Facebook to handle their comments, but such a move would surely trigger a backlash from some Guardian readers. At Wednesday’s meeting one woman criticized the Bay Guardian for sending people to Facebook to RSVP for the meeting, and Jones said that the company has significant privacy concerns that he himself has reported on in the past. The role that Facebook and other Silicon Valley companies have played in driving up housing prices and spurring on massive construction projects while transforming the demographics of the city doesn’t help either.
The community forum seems like a great step forward in creating a real conversation with its readers and the people of San Francisco, but the one-off meeting was attended almost exclusively by those who already love and cherish the Guardian. I’d love to see the forum expanded into a monthly event, though I don’t think regular meetings would do anything to bring the newspaper’s critics into the conversation. Free food might do the trick though.
Another substitute that someone suggested at the meeting was to increase the number of letters published in each edition of the paper. Jones seemed enthusiastic about the idea and had previously posted a call for letters on the Guardian’s blog. But letters to the editor are closer to public comment at a government meeting than they are to real conversation. Typically the editor rarely prints a reply to the comment, and I’ve never heard of a newspaper publishing a reader’s response to a response.
While there are plenty of reasons why anonymity is crucial to journalism, it’s unclear why it’s necessary for online commenters to be anonymous, at least in the U.S. The first commenting systems were not anonymous because it was better. They were anonymous because it was much easier to avoid building the tools that would be necessary to verify the identity of a user. Until a few years ago, it wasn’t really feasible to build this sort of online commenting system.
Disqus is one of the most popular 3rd-party commenting platforms, and it allows someone to sign in directly through Disqus or through either their Google, Facebook or Twitter accounts. But the Disqus software also tracks what pages its users are visiting on the Web, and raises just as many privacy concerns as Facebook.
How can the SF Bay Guardian, and other sites, quell trolling commenters without devoting hours to moderating all incoming comments or relying on a 3rd party company that may use the data gathered in an unsavory way?
In the absence of an answer, the Guardian has temporarily unplugged their comments and called on their readers to speak to them directly. When the experiment is over I’ll ask Jones what they’ve learned through this experiment; I plan to share those findings in a future column.
