Josh Marshall at TalkingPointsMemo.com has used his readership to compile and track congresscritters' positions on such issues as Social Security privatization, 'Net neutrality and the so-called DeLay rule (Do indicted 'critters have to give up leadership positions until charges are resolved?). With his large, national readership, it's a natural fit. At the local level, we're still struggling to find a way to do this. Leading a group of nonprofessionals in an investigative project for the N&R AND participants' respective blogs is my dream gig at this point.

Posted by: Lex at June 17, 2006 1:57 PM | Permalink

If I'm reading you right, some of this is starting to happen. Little of it is truly open source, and none of it can get around digital divide issues, but, in addition to WikiNews, there's OrangePolitics, which is seeking to move the Chapel Hill-Carrboro, N.C., region along, and Advance Internet (disclaimer: I work for them) is testing a new project that hopefully will roll out to all their sites. It seems to be pretty popular at the Massachusetts affiliate.

Posted by: Josh Shear at June 17, 2006 4:01 PM | Permalink

I worry that Josh Marshall's methodology mentioned above is an example of 'sweatshop journalism', an online version of the unpaid internship by which many media organisations get their hands dirty.

I think the operative word in the phrase 'citizen journalist' should be the former, not the latter. The citizen journalist can provide highly location specific, niche news, that the professionals do not have the time (or the readership/viewing figures) to cover for their print articles or TV shows. Does it matter if your readership is only 1000, 100, or one? If information from elsewhere stregthens family, community relations, or local business operations, then you've been a proactive citizen.

Posted by: Robert at June 17, 2006 4:02 PM | Permalink

This is a wonderful idea, and so preferable to the endless, barking blogs which only rehash MSM news, much like rabble rousers. The citation of Josh Marshall is a good one, as his kind of reporting, using the energies of his readers, led to squashing the social security "privitization" nonsense, in my opinion.

Also, do I detect a little "dig" at the YearlyKos convention crowd when you say there won't be panels and speeches? That sounds like a genuine democracy, and I applaude it. Wish I were a young geek with access to information. I'd be right there, with you!

Posted by: margaret at June 17, 2006 6:10 PM | Permalink

Jay,

What do you mean by "break news with it"? If you mean "citizen journalism finding its way into the mainstream media", then from where I sit, its been happening for at least two years now -- to both good and ill effect. But it wasn't happening six years ago.

I'm talking about, of course, my pet project "The AWOL Project". When I published my first piece in the series, I mentioned it at Salon.com's "Tabletalk" group devoted to the subject of Bush's military service. This was noted by blogger Dave Niewart at Orcinus. Professor Michael Froomkin of the University of Miami, who reads Niewart's blog, wrote about it on his own blog, Discourse.net. Froomkin, as it turns out, is the brother of WP blogger extraordinaire, Dan Froomkin, who wrote about it in his blog. Eric Alterman at MSNBC.com subsequently picked it up as well (once Froomkin wrote about it, it was picked up by the major "liberal" bloggers like Drum and Marshall, so I don't know where Alterman saw it first.)

That's major media penetration, IMHO, and it happened slightly over two years ago. As I continued to publish, I began to receive calls/emails from other media outlets. It never became a "huge" story for two reasons -- first, the "media" in general thought the whole "AWOL" story was over, second was my refusal to promote the work in a personal fashion. While I was willing to explain what I had written to journalists, I was unwilling to be quoted about it. My position was that I am "just some guy from Philadelphia" who did some digging and came up with some facts -- I presented those facts, and wanted them reported as facts, and not as the theories of "some guy in Philadelphia". (For instance, I turned down an offer to appear on Alan Colmes radio show.)

Most reporters are so stuck in the he said/she said narrative that they seem unable to do what I wanted them to do -- verify the accuracy of the facts I had dug up, and then write about it themselves. Without the he said/she said framework, most journalists seem at a loss for what to do with facts.

If there is are lessons to be learned from my experience, they are these

1) Co-operative research work. During the research phase of my work, one of my correspondents was Col. Jerry Lechliter. While Jerry and I differ on some of the details of our conclusions, our correspondence sharpened both our understanding of the documents and their relationship to contemporaneous law and military regulation. Lechliter published his own analysis, wrote an op-ed piece in the New York Times, and was extensively quoted by the LA Times (and, IIRC, US News) in articles on Bush's military service.

2) "Celebrity" matters. When this question was raised by Glen Greenwald at (I think) YKos, someone answered that Greenwald had to accept and promote his status as a "expert" and "celebrity" -- and be willing to promote himself as vigorously as he worked on his extremely insightful analyses of national security issues.

3) Simplify, Simplify, Simplify. Slogging through my writing was hard work -- I'm a lousy writer to begin with, and I tried to make the presentation of facts as accurate and precise as possible so I used the specific military "jargon", while simultaneously "pre-rebutting" counter-arguments. The result was prose that is practically unreadable, and that requires a great deal of commitment to get through. That guy at Little Green Footballs sat down at a typewriter, created a document that looked similar to the Killian memos, told a few lies (like proportionate spacing was unavailable on typewriters in 1972) and screamed "FORGERY!" -- and the media picked up the story almost immediately.

I guess what I'm saying here is that, while my "exposure" in the "mainstream" media may simply have been the result of a happy accident (the Froomkin relationship), in the past two years the expansion of the blogosphere, and its "connectedness" and "viral" nature, has made it possible if not inevitable that "newsworthy" information will get noticed, and written about -- and that when the mainstream media ignores a story about which the blogosphere is buzzing, they will hear from blog readers. (e.g. the Downing Street Memo story -- it wasn't "broken" by the blogs, but the mainstream media ignored it at first, under the bloggers and their readers started screaming about it.

Posted by: plukasiak at June 17, 2006 8:12 PM | Permalink

correction... the above should read "That guy at Little Green Footballs sat down at a computer," not "typewriter"....

although most of you doubtless read it the way it was intended ;)

Posted by: plukasiak at June 17, 2006 8:17 PM | Permalink

While the concept of developing stories via a distributed knowledge base is appealing and even romantic, I'm not sure how it can be used to break a story. Part of the impact of breaking news is its immediacy and exclusivity. But once an investigative project is put on line in an open forum (in order to exploit the knowledge of a broad community), the story is also revealed and can be either usurped by other "reporters" or pre-debunked by partisan opponents. My concern boils down to: How do you author a breaking story if anyone and everyone has access to your research and notes while the story is still being developed?

Posted by: Mark Howard @ News Corpse at June 18, 2006 1:57 AM | Permalink

As a practicioner I find I identify with so little of what's written about "distributed journalism," perhaps because the scale of the place I write about is too small -- 30k people in four square miles -- to really make distributed journalism neccessary. The whole place can be walked about in an afternoon, like that planet the protagonist discovers in The Little Prince. I'm starting to get weird, itchy, expansionist feelings about the town next door, maybe a prelude to a little blog imperialism.

I have this idea -- maybe false -- about how newsrooms work. Around ten in the morning reporters and editors caffeine levels rise enough to allow them to begin ambling around and discussing Story Ideas, and eventually one of these solidifies into an Assignment.

I have no story ideas, and I have no assignments. I certainly have no Assignment Desk, unless Asking Really Nicely qualifies.

The internal organization of H2otown isn't like the inside of (my imagined) newsroom. It's a lot more like the inside of an ice-fishing shack (also imagined). A bunch of us are sitting in a structure that no one will confuse with either a commercial business or a pillar of the community doing something that's easy to satirize. We've got some lines down through a hole in the ice. For a long time, nothing happens. Every once in awhile, we catch a fish. Then we go back to shooting the shit.

Blog = fish caught+stories told while not catching fish.

Most citizen journalists I know whose beat is a geographical area depend heavily on publically available resources, like the lake under the fishermen. Public documents, local access cable, local blogs, police scanners, Just Walking Around. Better = more lines in the water in more places + increased knowledge about where to drop lines in the water.

Posted by: Lisa Williams at June 18, 2006 2:11 AM | Permalink

Generally speaking, what we're discussing here are projects that can be broken down into little pieces where lots and lots of people can ask one question, or look at one document, or solve on piece of a big puzzle. Then the results are aggregated, parsed and reassembled into a coherent whole. It'll almost always require some folks at the center. We used to call them editors.

Reading all the laws is a great project, but I think it's too big to chew on except as a long-term goal. I'd suggest paring it down to something smaller and much more essential: The next time Congress gets ready to pass an appropriations bill of any sort, we need an army of lawyers and others who understand legislative language to parse it *before* it's passed.

This may not be possible, of course, given the leadership's increasing tendency to force members to vote on bills they haven't had time to read, and after injecting last-second stuff that no one except a few staffers and lawmakers knows about.

The way to experiment with this is to take it down a level, to the state legislature. Pick a state that's relatively uncorrupt and do roughly the same thing. The project will be more manageable, though you'll probably find less, if much at all, of the material that turns into headlines.

Last fall, by the way, I proposed that major media organizations bring in the citizens for a project on the Katrina reconstruction. No takers, unfortunately, but I still think it was a good idea. (One organization is still thinking about doing this but hasn't acted.)

I also, more recently, suggested that the Wall Street Journal expand its brilliant coverage of the stock-options scandal and do a thorough, citizen-driven database of how widely (or not) this sleaze has spread. Stay tuned on this one.

As to the question of whether it's a good idea to tell your competition what you're working on, this depends on what you want to accomplish and whether it matters if the thing is done in full view in the first place. Is the goal to do good journalism, to serve the public? Or is it a professional scoop? Wouldn't someone "stealing" the idea be seen as a thief, if he/she used the material gathered under your wing without credit? And aren't there many kinds of investigations where it's just fine to let the targets know they're being investigated?

I don't expect Seymour Hersh to tell us ahead of time precisely what he's working on. But many, many kinds of investigations are better done in the sunlight. Some -- like the ones we're talking about here, where there's no way to do them without massive help from the community -- should be done that way.

Posted by: Dan Gillmor at June 18, 2006 6:44 AM | Permalink

My concern boils down to: How do you author a breaking story if anyone and everyone has access to your research and notes while the story is still being developed?

I think the pursuit of the "Jeff Gannon" story is instructive here. Gannon caught the attention of the liberal blogosphere when he lobbed an ideologically biased softball question during a Bush press conference. A couple of people at DKos started looking into the mysterious, and pseudononymous, Mr Gannon and his employer, Talon News. As they found out more and more about Talon and who was involved in it, and published their info in Daily Kos diaries, more people got involved in doing research -- and as Dan suggests, an ad hoc organization was created with someone functioning as an "editor" keeping track of who was investigating what aspect of the story.

The story "broke" when someone discovered pictures of "Gannon" promoting himself as a male prostitute. While the mainstream media paid no attention to real story (How did someone with no background in journalism, working for a "Potemkin" news service, gain access to the White House?), it couldn't ignore the "scandal" of a male prostitute with easy and frequent White House access.

(It should be noted that, once the effort became organized, not all "knowledge" was available to the general public. You had to sign up with the ad hoc organization to gain access to their resources.)

So, in this case, you "break" a story by finding a titillating tidbit that can't be ignored.

I think that Mark's concern is misplaced -- people involved in this kind of "citizens journalism" are not looking for a by-line on a scoop, they are looking for exposure of information. These "citizen-journalists" are first, and foremost "citizens". The people involved in the Gannon investigation would have been delighted if some major media organization had "stolen" what they had dug up about Talon news and its political connections and used it as the basis for a story. You can't "steal" what people are trying to give away.

*************
aside: This was posted on the bloggercon website on Wednesday by Dave Winer...

The webcast has always been the hardest part of BloggerCon, it's an expensive proposition to do right, we thought we had it covered this time, but I found out late this afternoon that we don't.

We need some organization to provide the webcast transmission for us (we will provide the production and engineering), or find $8000 to pay a vendor to do it for us. We're only doing audio, not video.

If you want to make a contribution, you can use the PayPal account, or contact me directly. For donations of over $1000, we will find an appropriate way to thank you during the conference.

Basically, if we don't raise the money, there won't be a webcast.

...and, imho, needs wider exposure if there is to be a webcast. (I hope I'm not violating any rules by using the comments section to post a plea for money/resources jay. And I wouldn't have done it were it not directly related to the topic at hand.)

Posted by: plukasiak at June 18, 2006 7:59 AM | Permalink

[[I worry that Josh Marshall's methodology mentioned above is an example of 'sweatshop journalism', an online version of the unpaid internship by which many media organisations get their hands dirty.]]

I could be wrong, but I don't think so. Josh is basically a self-employed blogger who enlists other bloggers to do reporting that the national media should do but won't.

My own organization has been accused of the same thing, and my response has been: No, we're not asking people to do for free the stories we otherwise would have to pay someone to do. We're asking people to do for free the stories that otherwise, because of a lack of resources on our part, we couldn't do at all.

In both cases, the dynamic is not the news organization getting something for free that it otherwise would have to pay for. The dynamic is news consumers getting news they otherwise simply wouldn't get.

(And we pay our interns, by the way.)

Posted by: Lex at June 18, 2006 9:23 AM | Permalink

This topic is of great interest to me, but I think to accomplish your goals, Jay, we're going to have to step back even further. I find that defining terms is absolutely necessary to have this kind of intellectually creative conversation, for one's concept of "citizen journalism" is very often different than another's. Even the use of the term "story" is problematic in this discussion, and perhaps we need to be thinking about another term for the output of such a decentralized and collaborate effort.

In our world, we end up on "sides," because, well, there really are (at least) two sides to every story. It's often written that the victor in war gets to write the history, and anybody who's ever been through a divorce knows well and good that there are two sides in that "story." So I think that we have to get past this in order to truly come to a place where the wisdom of the crowd is presented. Frankly, if we accomplished nothing more than this, it would be better than what we have today.

I'm quite excited about the possibility of telling the nation what’s really in its laws, but along with that, I think the nation needs to know who makes the laws and how those laws usually help the status quo within which the lawMAKERS exist. And while we're at it, the nation also needs to know that "case law" was never a part of the separation of powers, and that the citizenry has little control over those who make this kind of law.

We have terrible problems in the West, and it's going to take all of us working together to fix them. Modernism and its institutions have failed. What comes next?

See you all Friday.

Posted by: Terry Heaton at June 18, 2006 9:34 AM | Permalink

Maybe we don't need "to figure out how we can use the Net to actually do readers-know-more-than-we-do reporting (also known as open source journalism) and break news with it" -- maybe we just need to encourage more use of the Net -- period! -- for original and enterprise reporting. I blogged today about a Reporter's Notebook item in the NYT that describes how journalists are using the online work of unaffiliated observers who monitor a variety of terrorist Web sites and publish translations, etc., online.

Journalists don't need to sit around waiting for readers to throw them a bone or e-mail a tip. The readers are already posting their tips on blogs and Web sites outside the traditional news channels.

Reporters need to learn how to find and monitor those sources.

Posted by: Mindy McAdams at June 18, 2006 10:50 AM | Permalink

Thanks to all for some really good comments.

Just to clarify: In this session (and this post) I am not talking about "citizen journalism" in some general way. I welcome the idea that amateurs and independents have a lot to contribute, and it's true they are doing just that in a variety of ways today.

At BloggerCon we're going to focus only on one kind of citizen journalism, one idea for how to tap its potential. It's the distributed knowledge and collective effort part. Dan Gillmor put it well: "Projects that can be broken down into little pieces where lots and lots of people can ask one question, or look at one document, or solve on piece of a big puzzle. Then the results are aggregated, parsed and reassembled into a coherent whole."

That's what I call users-know-more-than-we-do journalism. Lisa is right that it isn't needed at the scale she is working on. She might have added that it doesn't apply to all stories, and often can't be done without money, or professional expertise being involved somehow.

Paul's personal labors in the AWOL project are not an example, but the DailyKos investigation of Jeff Gannon is.

Mark Howard asked: "How do you author a breaking story if anyone and everyone has access to your research and notes while the story is still being developed?" This is one of the most common objections I have heard to "open source" reporting projects.

Dan, Lex and Paul had, I thought, good answers, especially: "You can't 'steal' what people are trying to give away." But the Howard question is going to keep coming up.

It's interesting that when I disuss these ideas with professional journalists, one of the things they keep stumbling over is their mistrust of amateurs who clearly have political commitments or strong feelings about an issue. They are convinced that TPM users and redstate.com users alike would cook the books, and so if you ask them to do some knowledge collection the knowledge you get back will be unreliable.

Posted by: Jay Rosen at June 18, 2006 1:37 PM | Permalink

Jay,
I'm focusing on collaborative film editing with The Echo Chamber Project, and there are some interesting insights that can be applied to other large-scale open source journalism projects.

I detailed the biggest points in these two recent posts: Iterative Media: Treating Collaborative Media Like Open Source Code & Building a Theory of Collaborative Sensemaking

As far as tools, I demonstrated a prototype for my collaborative film editing workflow in the second half of my Vloggercon presentation last week. Here's a quicktime & flash version of the 9-minute presentation.

In a nutshell, I'm segmenting interview source material with experts into sound bites, matching it up with the transcript, assigning them to a unique URL within Drupal so that users can collectively rate the quality, declare whether they agree or disagree with the substance, categorize it with tags, and then playlist into sequences.

I'm essentially combining:
* The collaborative filtering of digg.com
* The collaborative tagging of del.icio.us
* The idealogical declarations of essembly.com
* The collaborative playlisting of webjay.com

All of this user contributed metadata is adding context and meaning to the source material towards the goal of collectively editing a documentary film. It is also helping create links and associations between the facts and helping bring order to the complexity of the interview material -- which is focusing on the pre-war performance of the mainstream media.

I think that this type of methodology can be applied to other open source journalism projects in a scalable way.

Posted by: Kent Bye at June 18, 2006 3:09 PM | Permalink

It's interesting that when I disuss these ideas with professional journalists, one of the things they keep stumbling over is their mistrust of amateurs who clearly have political commitments or strong feelings about an issue. They are convinced that TPM users and redstate.com users alike would cook the books, and so if you ask them to do some knowledge collection the knowledge you get back will be unreliable.

This sounds to be like a red herring -- the answer is that you don't trust it, as a professional journalist you treat it as a credible rumor, and verify it and (if it is true) write about it. Currently, Josh Marshall is using his readers to determine the position of each Senator on the "net neutrality" bill. A jounalist working on that story can go to Marshall's website, see which Senators are listed as taking which positions, and call their offices to verify the information.

**************

I think there are two separate and distinct issues here...the first is how do you do "distributive knowledge jounalism" (i.e. distinct from "citizens journalism" which would include the kind of stuff I did which is outside the subject), the second is "how do you get the results of distributive knowledge journalism widely distributed."

To the first issue, there appears to be three models...

1) The "ad hoc" effort (e.g. the Gannon story)

2) The "leader" effort (e.g. Marshall's involvement of his readers)

3) the "pre-organized" effort (what Dan is proposing, and what it sounds like Lex is doing.) This category should be broken down further into "internet based" (basically, a "wiki" approach to investigative journalism) and "traditional media based" (Dan's proposal)

All three efforts have their advantages and disadvantages, and IMHO should all be considered acceptable "models" for distributive knowledge journalism"

The second question is, for me, more intriguing? How do you "break" a story in a way that will have an impact?

The right wing seems to have this one solved --- a "network" that includes mainstream media types that will tranmit the results of citizen's "journalism" to a wider audience (via right wing talk radio, Fox News, etc.) to the point where the "traditional media" can't ignore the story. (e.g. the Killian memos thing.)

So to me, the real question is "How do people excluded from the right-wing network get their efforts noticed by the traditional media"?

Posted by: plukasiak at June 18, 2006 3:44 PM | Permalink

I have a hunch that there is great promise in Gillmor's concept of "projects that can be broken down into little pieces where lots and lots of people can ask one question, or look at one document, or solve on piece of a big puzzle. Then the results are aggregated, parsed and reassembled into a coherent whole."

But I also have no idea how it would play out in practice.

Consider this: In the spring of 1989, Don Barlett and Jim Steele, then of the Philadelphia Inquirer, were awarded the Pulitzer prize for national reporting for their 15-month investigation of "rifle shot" provisions in the Tax Reform Act of 1986. The series essentially exposed the "reform" act as just one more giveaway to politically connected individuals and businesses, and it aroused such widespread public outcry that Congress ended up remanding most of the sweetheart tax breaks.

That happened because Barlett and Steele were the only two reporters in the land who were willing to undertake the drudgery of actually reading the 900 pages of footnotes and appendixes to the falsely-named "tax reform" act. And then they went out and tracked down the recipients of each and every special tax treatment, one by one by one.

That is tedious, tedious detail work, and that is why it took all of 15 months for two reporters and a researcher to compile the whole sordid story.

I'm trying to imagine what would unfold if, Josh Marshall-style, 900, or 90, or even 9 citizen journalists had been set loose on the same task. Would they have come up with the same incriminating data ? If they had, would they have had the patience to hold their fire until they had the whole jigsaw puzzle put together ?

Or would they have offered up the evidence piecemeal, laying out individual cases for the mainstream media to pursue -- or to not pursue ? And how would that have played out ?

I have no idea what the answers to those questions might be.

But I'm real interested to find out.

Posted by: Steve Lovelady at June 18, 2006 9:24 PM | Permalink

pluk...

You might try focusing on a story idea that hasn't been done to death already, has some relevance or timeliness, and doesn't rely on false postulates, such as the one that holds that an absence must be an AWOL.

Troops are absent from drills all the time, for a variety of reasons. If they clear it with the chain of command ahead of time, or if there's a legit reason (generally beyond the soldiers' or airman's control), there's no AWOL. More specifically, there's no UA.

Furthermore, units generally don't document reasons. I just have the First Sergeant code the guy "Absent" on the 1379 and have done with it.

If there were a problem, then it's up to the unit commander to pursue an Article 15 under the TCMJ. No article 15, no problem.

You've been jousting at that windmill for a long time. We get it. We just don't care, outside of a few fringebats.

I think the reporters are smart enough to recognize you as a fringebat. Hence the lack of interest.

Posted by: Jason Van Steenwyk at June 18, 2006 9:26 PM | Permalink

Jason....

Insofar as Jay has already stated that my experience as a "citizen journalist" is not relevant to the topic, I'm not sure what purpose your little screed serves here. But insofar as any explanation will be even more off-topic, please don't make the effort to explain. Thanx.

*****************

Posted by: plukasiak at June 18, 2006 10:13 PM | Permalink

Thanks, Paul.

Steve: In my imagination of it, the "projects that can be broken down into little pieces" approach has the most promise, not as an alternative means of doing what Bartlett and Steele do, but as a way to get done stories that just weren't doable before.

I don't see "users know more than we do" journalism as a replacement method, but a new game entirely.

What's more likely to be the breakthrough method is some young team of Bartlett and Steeles working closely with a gang of motivated citizen journalists to find stuff that could never be found by two reporters, no matter how good they are.

Posted by: Jay Rosen at June 18, 2006 10:19 PM | Permalink

One thing sorely lacking in MSM reports is subject matter knowledge. Reporters appear to have zero knowledge of scientific facts, the methodology of science, engineering, medicine, epidemiology, statistics and for that matter the difference between science and engineering (as an engineer, I get really tired of constant reports that "scientists developed..." when engineers, not scientists, are the people who normally develop things).

There are lots and lots of people out in blog land who have this knowledge, in as much depth as one could desire. But we end up criticizing, after the fact, the appallingly bad reporting on subjects involving these areas - whether it is "global warming," the association between and , or the latest report on "bird flu".

On military subjects, reporters, who seem to be proud of their total lack of knowledge of all the related subjects, could easily tap the net for answers (although they might not like what they learn).

This, by the way, was one of the biggest problems with the pathetic reporting on personal military history of the presidential candidates in 2004. Based on the results, the MSM lacked even the most rudimentary understanding of how our military operates (the clear bias is a separate damning characteristic).

I don't know if this fits into "projects that can be broken down..." but there is certainly a horribly large gap between what reporters and editors know about almost everything, and what is known by the vast and diverse community of bloggers.

Posted by: John Moore at June 18, 2006 11:56 PM | Permalink

Jay,
You ask: “How much innovation has there been in the news business in the art of telling complex stories?”

I asked you a number of complex questions during my interview with you, and told me afterwards, "I'm not sure how you're going to edit this." And to be honest, I wasn't completely sure how I was going edit it either.

I was trying to show how the media failed to handle complexity leading up to the Iraq war, and so it has been a process of trying to figure out the best way to communicate these uncovered complexities. Needless to say, I quickly ran into the limitations of the linear storytelling paradigm after realizing that many of the answers that I was receiving from you and others indeed cannot fit within the constraints of a 90-minute film or traditional news story.

This is what drove me towards investigating collaborative post-production possibilities that could engage the audience with these complexities in a more interactive way. And since the build-up to the war in Iraq is a controversial topic, I also wanted to tap into the collective wisdom of a diverse group of collaborators in order to incorporate and account for many different perspectives and interpretations of the source material. So I had to not only figure out how to collect such a body of data from participants, but also think about out how to digest, synthesize and make sense of this type of feedback.

Here's a dilemma to think about: I believe that innovations around telling complex stories requires a number of paradigm shifts that can't be fully comprehended until a working proof of concept of them exist.

I think that I have a potential solution that I've been trying to describe and communicate for a while now, but it hasn't been until I have a prototype demonstration that people are now just starting to really intuitively understand how rating, tagging and playlisting can be combined to break complex problems into component parts and to start connecting the dots between them.

And I don't expect people to really understand it until they can participate and see it working firsthand, which I hope to have ready within the next month or two.

But my approach can go beyond collaborative film editing and can be expanded to collaboratively implement intelligence analysis techniques such as Richards Heuer's Analysis of Competing Hypotheses. So methodologies exist for handling complexity, but they first need to be implemented with tools that have an intuitive and self-explanatory user interface. And then there needs to be compelling complex content that creates a desire for people to want to participate.

Posted by: Kent Bye at June 19, 2006 12:58 AM | Permalink

Did some more thinking about this today.

One thing to consider is that the end product of distributed journalism might not end up looking like anything anyone might recognize as "journalism."

For instance:

Problem: It's very difficult to know whether or not the things we buy or eat contain things we don't want, or are produced in ways we find objectionable, or support causes we disagree with. Individual examples of this phenomenon have been the cause of gazillions of news stories, from fundamentalist Christians threatening to boycott Disneyland over "Gay Days," to stories about factory farming and prisoner labor. But these individual stories are such a patchwork that what shoppers take into stores is little more than wallet-based superstitions whose expression have little market or political power.

What would be nice: If your cellphone could scan the barcode and match it with a profile you've created of everything from your dietary needs to your values. The accuracy standard of the underlying data would be like that of Wikipedia -- that is, not written on stone tablets, and not from the producers of the goods.

Why it hasn't been done: It's a massive data challenge -- perhaps a problem that could *only* be solved by hundreds of thousands of people.

Is that journalism? Is Chicagocrime.org journalism? No, not really: it's a substrate for journalism. Revealing the data would inevitably reveal trends and create trends.

How will journalism help annotate the planet?

Posted by: Lisa Williams at June 19, 2006 2:03 AM | Permalink

Oh.

A box score for Congress.

How the data is presented matters.

The fact is, Ye Average Jane and Joe take in plenty of complex data when we consider that they read box scores, play fantasy baseball, and maybe have a 401k.

Another thing:

People fail to appreciate complexity in simple ways.

Frequently the ways involve passage of time, scale of place, and large numbers.

There's a good, if depressingly titled book by a guy named Dorner called The Logic of Failure. It contains case studies of big, human-error disasters like Chernobyl.

He does an experiment: he leads people into a walk-in freezer that's been allowed to rise to a temperature of 60 degrees. He tells them, "the point is to lower the temperature to 45 degrees and keep it at 45 for two minutes. The first person to do it wins." Every subject of the experiment -- except one -- failed in the exact same way. They cranked the temperature down to freezing and then yoyoed up and down over and under 45 degrees for many minutes. The one who won lowered the temperature gauge to 45 and did nothing but wait.

People misjudge even simple phenomena that change over time.

Maybe the journalists of the future should be animators, to show us things like How Social Security Gets Funded, or How Death Tolls Change In The War. (I'm just a bill/here on Capitol Hill...)

Posted by: Lisa Williams at June 19, 2006 2:12 AM | Permalink

OK. Clearly there are projects that lend themselves well to the collaborative journalism model. The Jeff Gannon affair is a good example of one that does. But Steve Lovelady's example of the Tax Reform Act story is one that possibly would have been harmed by this model.

Dan Gillmor and Plukasiak both raised good points in response to my concern about ongoing investigations being public, saying that the payoff is not having a scoop, but serving the public interest via good journalism. But that only addressed half of my concern which also included the fact that the subject of a story would have access to it as well.

Jay, your point that many journalists would be worried about the reliability of the contributed data is key. In Josh Marshall's project to put House members on the record re: the DeLay rule change, if Josh had to verify the accuracy of every citizen-supplied answer, would there have been any benefit at all to having outsourced the work to citizens?

Perhaps a solution would be to have a hierarchical structure with a citizen populated first tier, an appointed group of trusted citizen editors/fact checkers on the second tier, and the project's author/administrator on top.

Whether or not collaborative journalism is a good idea, collaborative discussions about it (like the one in this thread) are awesome. I want to thank Kent Bye whose Echo Chamber Project looks fascinating. I plan to take a closer look in the next few days. All the ideas discussed here truly represent a new frontier in media.

Posted by: Mark Howard @ News Corpse at June 19, 2006 3:06 AM | Permalink

I think Lisa is right that some of the fruits of this kind of work would not necessarily look like "journalism." But they would be useful public information, and that's what counts.

Kent: I think you are doing heroic work by plunging into the details of linearity, complexity and collaborative editing. I don't always understand it fully, but I understand the questions you are asking very well.

I want to make one distinction. There is value in citizen participation in media, and I am all for it. I have spent much of my career arguing with journalists about that. However, here I am concerned not with the good of citizen (amateur) involvement per se, but only with those cases where a distributed, open source, wisdom of the crowd approach is better, and more likely to bring results than traditional reporting methods. The real gains are going to be in stories that weren't even doable before the Net.

Mark: I had an answer to those professional journalists would be worried about the reliability of the contributed data. It's in my post, Some Bloggers Meet the Bosses from Big Media:

...They insisted that Josh's callers would be less reliable than journalists. Blog readers wouldn't know when they were being fed a line. Because they're partisans suspicious of DeLay, they would hear only what they wanted to hear. Dan Gillmor tried to inform them that Talking Points Memo was widely read on Capital Hill. Staffers for a Republican Congressman would know if Marshall had screwed up. They'd fire off an e-mail right away to correct the record. This information made no visible dent. Big Media was adamant. One could not trust information gathered by amateurs.

Point is, Marshall had a way to verify (and correct) the information. Therefore he didn't have to verify the bona fides of every contributor. Of course, Marshall doesn't care that much if his chart is wrong for half a day and he gets a call from Congressman Schmutz's office correcting him. He's still met his goal. The New York Times cares very much about being wrong for part of the day.

Posted by: Jay Rosen at June 19, 2006 8:36 AM | Permalink

On the washingtonpost.com today, I have a piece about ten years of the Net disrupting journalism: Web Users Open the Gates. Here's how it ends:

On the day the Indian Ocean tsunami struck, Reuters had 2,300 journalists and 1,000 stringers positioned around the world, according to the firm's chief executive, Tom Glocer. But none of them were on the beaches to witness the disaster, he told the Online Publishing Association.

The amateurs were there and they were prepared. "So for the first 24 hours the best and the only photos and video came from tourists armed with 1.3 megapixel portable telephones, digital cameras and camcorders. And if you didn't have those pictures you weren't on the story," Glocer said. Reuters, a wire service, had to recognize there are more people in the press zone now -- and integrate their material into its report. That should make us better, he said, but "you have to be open to both amateur and professional to tell the story completely."

Exactly: To survive you have to be open. That's where disruption in the news business looks a lot like renewal.

There's also A Brief History of washingtonpost.com, part of the same package celebrating the Post site's ten year mark.

Posted by: Jay Rosen at June 19, 2006 9:37 AM | Permalink

Marshall doesn't care that much if his chart is wrong for half a day...The New York Times cares very much about being wrong for part of the day.

You've put me in the uncomfortable position of defending the NYT. If the standard for citizen journalism is that it is only wrong for relatively short periods of time, that doesn't exactly build confidence in it.

I still like my idea that uses pre-screened citizen editors. The nature of the Internet makes it possible to have a couple hundred of them and still be manageable.

As for Big Media's assertion that, "One could not trust information gathered by amateurs..." I would simply add: "...any more (or less) than they trust professionals." The pro's work still has to be reviewed by editors and the amateurs could go through the same process.

Posted by: Mark Howard @ News Corpse at June 19, 2006 12:20 PM | Permalink

My main comment is this: the idea of an "opposition press" is hardly new or a product of the internet. In many countries, an opposition press has long been the standard model. This was cetainly the case in New Zealand, where I lived for a number of years in the 1980s and early 90s. There, the press (print, radio, and television) prides itself on being an irreverent gadfly to whatever government is in power.

Posted by: Roald Euller at June 19, 2006 12:37 PM | Permalink

As a Systems Analyst designing reporting systems the question of simplyfing complex activities is very important.

In the Business Intelligence community we have solved this by classifying our customers into different Business User Profiles. These profiles (Explorers, Miners, Tourists, Operators and farmers). Each profile has different needs for information and are comforable in accessing in different ways.

In the world of Users-Know-More-than-We-Do Journalism an Explorer or Miner Profile does not care whether the information is wrong for 6 hours because they would rather have the incomplete information first to verify (Web Blog, user input, etc). On the other hand, a Operator or Farmer would rather have complete accurate information that it be wrong too early(Newspaper).

One mode of information delivery does not adequately cover all the different User Profiles.

This has led us to the problem of who get to see what when. Certain groups need to see the preliminary information to make more educated decisions. However, other groups, expecially outside groups such as governments and other regulators can only be shown information that have been verified by management.

Posted by: Tim at June 19, 2006 1:15 PM | Permalink

Jay asks: What are "the cases where a distributed, open source, wisdom of the crowd approach is better, and more likely to bring results than traditional reporting methods?"

* Stories that involve combing through the public record
* Controversial stories that cannot be resolved when written from a single perspective
* Stories that gain legitimacy when a diverse set of participants have an interest in participating in an intellectually honest collaborative process.

Award-winning investigative journalist Jonathan Landay says that, "A lot of the most important stories I've done haven't relied on secret sources or leaked documents. There's a lot out there in the public domain that merely needs to be scrubbed and read over."

Landay has proven that dots can be connected without secret sources or official statements, and there is already an overload of official information that needs to be put into context and honestly evaluated by an equally representative group.

So is there an Open Question that could be answered if only a bipartisan group of participants were willing to comb through the public record? Phase II of the Senate Intelligence Committee's investigation is supposed to be looking into "whether public statements and reports and testimony regarding Iraq by U.S. Government officials made between the Gulf War period and the commencement of Operation Iraqi Freedom were substantiated by intelligence information."

There have been already been a number of independent efforts to answer this question by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Congressman Henry Waxman's Commitee on Government Reform, and National Security Researcher John Prados.

There is classified information involved, but the above investigations indicate that most of what is needed to answer this question may already be declassified into the public record. But these independent investigations never gained broader traction within the political dialogue because they were never endorsed or vetted by the Republican party. So they became one-day stories and quickly forgotten.

Mainstream journalists have shown that they have neither the time nor resources to adequately or convincingly investigate and answer this type of question. They see that official Congressional investigations the only possible that it could be answered -- maybe because they've learned that such a news story would fail to "bring results" either politically or to their bottom line.

If this is true, then what if Pat Roberts keeps delaying the official investigation and it never happens?

What if a bipartisan group of citizen journalists decided to take on this question, then what would it take for their results to be peer reviewed and legitimized by a mainstream news organization?

Or what if the results didn't serve the interests of either the Republicans or Democrats, then would they have the power to delegitimize the results by either ignoring them or attacking the process?

Posted by: Kent Bye at June 19, 2006 1:39 PM | Permalink

From your WAPO commentary...

The charges made against Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry by Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, claiming that his medals were undeserved, could have been held out of circulation by newsroom gatekeepers, pre-Internet. By 2004, it was impossible to keep such a story quiet, and editors knew it.

This, of course, didn't prevent them from trying.

The SVPT press conference was held on May 4, 2004 and their message was the recipient of a near-universal MSM blackout. In fact, it wasn't until th WAPO Michael Dobbs felt compelled to address the particulars (which you linked to) that MSM was dragged, kicking and screaming, to the, in hindsight, momentous issue.

Want more? How 'bout the reticence of the NY Times to even provide a review of a 6 week best-seller that had topped their own list for some 3 weeks?

Jay, any true student of journalism needs to acknowledge and understand the MSM treatment of the Swift Boat Vets story as a watershed moment in the evolution of the "new journalism". You will, after all, be teaching it before the decade is out.

Posted by: Bingo at June 19, 2006 1:41 PM | Permalink

"And of course tell the nation what’s really in its laws. No news organization has ever done it."

Well, Bartlett and Steele did it for the Inquirer some time ago, a multi-part, massive presentation over several days that explained in entertaining style how the odd language used in some laws ("subsidy shall apply only to maritime corporations with gross tonnage of xxxx operating from any port of 36 berths", for instance) really meant that ABC Shipping of Galveston, and only ABC Shipping of Galveston, got a special tax break on its new hulls. And that it got that break because it made a key contribution, or outright bribe, to the right member of Congress.
It was a wonderful series.

But the did it by connecting more dots over more time than anyone else in the world had time to do.

Sometimes takes a massive amount of plain old hard work to dependably generate an accurate story that will stand up to challenges. Is that possible in these new models?

Posted by: Bill Watson at June 19, 2006 1:49 PM | Permalink

Bill: I meant no news organization had ever tried to read and decipher all the legislation and proposed legislation in a given year of a U.S. Congress. Others have tried to tell the nation what's in its laws, of course.

Bingo: If I included the Swift Boat Vets in my overview of ten years of Net disruptions in journalism (Web Users Open the Gates, June 19th) you can be pretty confident that I see it as a seminal event. Of course my view of what happened in that episode would be different from yours, but for purposes of my Post piece that does not matter.

There, I tried to describe what happened from what Wikipedia calls a "neutral point of view." Here, my interest in re-fighting the facts of that case is zero. I did write about it once: Swift Boat Story a Sad Chord.

Kent: I think many journalists and others would be surprised how much could be "discovered" just by working with the public record-- available facts that no one has ever run down, totalled up and put together. Massive comb-throughs and collating operations that try to answer big questions might just work.

On Chris Lyndon's Open Source last week, I suggested that the big national news organizations should try to take on some of the big controversial questions hanging over the Bush years, and dig into them so that they can come out with an answer: Yes, we were misled into war. No, we weren't. (For example.) Or... Okay, who had responsibility for the screw ups in Katrina and after? How much (in percent, but also via a narrative) for the feds, how much for the state, how much for the city, and how much to the gods of fate.

I said they should come to some conclusions, and take the heat for them (since someone will be pissed off...) Rather than abandon balance, they could practice "serial" balance by publishing rebuttals to their reports a few days later, where warranted. Even better (I didn't mention this on air) they could publish a few weeks later a corrected and clarified version taking into account what was learned after publication, including from critics of the work.

By not trying to take on more difficult feats of truthtelling with bigger payoffs for the public record, the national press is hurting its reputation for category leadership. Where's the innovation?

Program note: I get my first taste of Washington Post Radio tommorow, with Michael Moss and Jim Brady, 9:10 or so. I will be curious to find out what it's like.

Posted by: Jay Rosen at June 19, 2006 2:49 PM | Permalink

Regarding Bartlett & Steele, they were great investigators, but Gene Roberts also fought for them to be isolated to work on such long projects. It's a matter of allocating resources. (Not to say that any 2 journalist could spend two years on a story and produce similar work.) At smaller papers, reporters -- from my past experience -- are cranking out more than a story a day. There is no time to work on a longer weekend story, much less something on the Bartlett and Steele level.

Open Source journalism can be a great collaborative resource, if someone can figure out how to harness the power of readers, (hence Jay's session at BloggerConIV.)

We've seen open source software, such as Linux, arguably a better operating system, but Windows still dominates. Software may not be a good analogy for journalism, but people seem to trust an inferior product that is more known and paid for, rather than a superior product that's free.

Posted by: Hue at June 19, 2006 3:21 PM | Permalink

Hue says, "Open Source journalism can be a great collaborative resource, if someone can figure out how to harness the power of readers."

The way that traditional open source projects are structured is that they have submitters and committers. The submitters provide small patches and add-on modules, while the committers evaluate the patches within the larger context of the core project.

So for journalism, I think that the goal is to create a system that allows citizens to drop by and participate for 5 to 10-minute intervals, and still be able to productively contribute to the collective wisdom of the overall project. There also needs to be a core team who is interpretting and analyzing all of the user contributed metadata, and helping draw the bigger-picture conclusions.

So there needs to be a broad spectrum of activities that people can do to participate -- the higher the threshold of participation, then the more context and meaning that is added to the ecosystem.

Ross Mayfield describes this spectrum as the Power Law of Participation, and for my approach it includes the following activities: observing, declaring favorite, rating relevance and credibility, commenting, tagging and playlisting.

For my collaborative film, participants are adding their metadata to sound bites and visual clips for the goal of creating edited sequences. For journalism projects, users would be adding their feedback on facts for the goal of evaluating them in the context of a hypothesis or theory that adequately explains the set of facts.

More open source parallels are detailed here. My collaborative workflow is demonstrated in the second half of this video.

Posted by: Kent Bye at June 19, 2006 4:15 PM | Permalink

"Regarding Bartlett & Steele, they were great investigators, but Gene Roberts also fought for them to be isolated to work on such long projects. It's a matter of allocating resources. (Not to say that any 2 journalist could spend two years on a story and produce similar work.) At smaller papers, reporters -- from my past experience -- are cranking out more than a story a day. There is no time to work on a longer weekend story, much less something on the Bartlett and Steele level."-- Hue

It's a question of wanting to do it. Here's one reporter, two years:

http://www.poconorecord.com/apps/pbcs.dll/section?Category=NEWS0920

And this is a little newspaper by anyone's standards.

Here's the thing, though: Who else cares enough about something like this to spend the time sifting through intentionally confusing public records, reconciling conflicting accounts from dozens of participants, and trying to sort out this kind of mess? It has enormous local implications -- try refinancing your home when you can't legally describe what you own -- but there were no dispasionate third parties here except the newspaper, which took on this project as part of its contract with readers to figure out how this part of the world works and explain it. Everyone else is either culpable for the mess and eager to point the finger elsewhere, or else a victim in search of revenge or some other commodity. Not quite sure how this gets handled in any new model.

Posted by: Bill Watson at June 19, 2006 4:45 PM | Permalink

Are unpaid amateurs and citizen volunteers willing to slog through what reporters slog through is not the right question, I would argue. And I don't believe, Bill, that there necessarily is a "new model" way of handling those things that professional journalists are doing now in investigative reporting. Most of the time, there probably isn't, and people employed as reporters are going to continue to be needed for that reason.

But that leaves a lot of other stuff that isn't being done, and interconnected smart mobs might be capable of investigations that are impossible for even the most dedicated reporters.

Posted by: Jay Rosen at June 19, 2006 5:10 PM | Permalink

Bill, that's a great story, and in my current field.
I'll have to read it more closely later when I have time, but that issue should have been uncovered during the title search in the loan process. Mortgage companies don't lend without a clear title, and without a long-term land lease. Hopefully, those people had owners' title policies.

Posted by: jaw at June 19, 2006 5:13 PM | Permalink

Sorry that last post was mine. I'm using my real name instead of that pseudonym.

Jay is right. If open source can work, it would be stories that reporters can't do, grunt work requiring a lot of eyes, the Killian memo and Gannon.

Posted by: Hue at June 19, 2006 5:32 PM | Permalink

Bill, all of those houses should be classified as condos (not townhomes) since the lots were not divided. None of the mortgages were properly recorded, which is odd for the judge to allow foreclosure. Instead of cluttering up the thread, you can send me an email by clicking on my name if you want to discuss that story further. This is a title issue, and the title company would incur all the legal expenses if those homeowners bought owners' policies.

Posted by: Hue at June 19, 2006 6:34 PM | Permalink

God I love this thread.

First, let me amplify something Lisa Williams and others here have touched on: the results of distributed journalism might not look like what we think of as journalism today.

By this I mean: if you ask a 40-something newspaper guy to imagine a positive outcome of a big distributed journalism project, he's likely to describe something that looks like a Sunday 1A package or a three-day series. Dramatic, grabber leads. Killer graphics. Emotive photography. Because that what we DO.

But what if the output of such a project wasn't narrative at all? What if it produced, say, an authoritative, carefully sourced, currated database? Data is cheap. Cleaning data and organizing data is expensive. And besides: Is narrative always the best way of communicating every bit of information? I don't think so: Last year I produced a package on global warming that replaced the idea of a "mainbar" with a comparative grid.

Second, the organizations that might be best at producing these kinds of projects might not look anything like traditional media. Look at our assumptions here: narrative structures; editors; government stories. Nothing wrong with that, per se, but is this what we can expect lots of people to jump up en masse and volunteer to do?

Some time back, Jay wrote about how some of the best blog-based journalism was occurring in those places where people are truly interested in and excited about the subject. I remember that he talked about this in terms of "being in the groove." That stuck with me. Find the grooves.

One form of spontaneous distributed project might be the kinds that form around these grooves. For instance: Millions of people play games like World of Warcraft, but because these communities aren't geographic, traditional media don't cover them. But if somebody started some kind of WoW wiki, you can bet that thousands of people around the world would pitch in to cover their online community and solve problems that interested them.

Third, it's natural for those of us in the business to imagine this as a way of accomplishing things we might not otherwise be able to do. Who else is likely to have the organizing resources necessary to pull off such a project? But is a media-based organization the best way organize distributed projects, or it is just the most likely first step?

I'm inclined to believe the latter. If the core organizing principle of citizen-based, distributed journalism is a sense of common purpose and interest, then it makes sense that the best unit for accomplishing such a task might be the single-issue non-profit. Asking a for-profit entity like a newspaper to organize a voluntary effort is just structurally unsound.

Of course, non-profits produce all sorts of research resources and white paper reports that those of us in the media routinely ignore.

But what if we assumed a different relationship? What if news organizations published transparent and fair quality standards for data collection and invited groups to submit proposals for projects? What if news organizations agreed to partner with interest groups that met those standards? Rather than non-profits desperately pitching their already finished studies to flat-footed editors, groups instead proposed projects to news organizations early in the research process? News organizations wouldn't need to run the investigations, but they could set the standards they would require up front, and groups would be free to accept them or decline them.

Because, to be blunt about it, not every investigative piece pans out. It's hard to spend three months on a promising lead and then pull the plug -- but if you don't, you kill your investigative program. And the same thing needs to be true for distributed projects.

Anyway, sorry to write so long, but it seems to me that if we can: 1. acquire expertise from the people who have it; 2. activate and organize common interests for the goal of better understanding; 3. create transparent standards and methodologies; 4. form multiple relationships between organizations; and 5. employ the media to do the things WE do best (amplifying, clarifying, illustrating, packaging, distributing), then there's great potential here.

Posted by: Daniel Conover at June 19, 2006 6:35 PM | Permalink

That's more like it.

Posted by: Jay Rosen at June 19, 2006 7:04 PM | Permalink

Interesting program.

The process will have to weed out the Not Invented (discovered, broken, scooped) Here syndrome guys.

I expect most readers have the experience of trying to alert the local paper to a story only to be told, one way or another, to go away. My first attempt was zeroed, until the FBI started making arrests--not on my tip, I should say. I happened to be one of those citizens in a position of special knowledge, too.
But it was eff off.

When you break an issue down into a multitude of small parts, how do you assign them? Do you post a list of questions and ask those who feel they are competent to get to work on their favorites?

I think we have discussed media bias, or media predilections, or media tendencies, or whatever the phrase you find most acceptable to an extent that most folks will admit that something exists. The media are not robotic information passers.

The problem comes when the story idea, or issue, which is put out to the distributees has a presumption behind it and the result of input is that the presumption is completely wrong.

We've seen enough examples of excusing rotten journalism, just on this thread, to make the question legitimate. What do you do when the result is, perhaps, exactly the opposite of what you thought when you started?

If it's just a couple of reporters who find this out, nothing more need be said. But if dozens, or perhaps thousands, of citizens have been working on it, you can't very well ignore it until it goes away.

The promoter of such a process is going to have to make a serious commitment.

Posted by: Richard Aubrey at June 19, 2006 7:30 PM | Permalink

Daniel...

Wow. What a teaser post that was. More please.

Kristen

Posted by: Kristen at June 19, 2006 7:32 PM | Permalink

A small injection of old-school cynicism:

Don't forget this: Some of the readers -- more, perhaps, than you might think -- who "know more than I know" are politicians and business tycoons who, most of all, don't want me to know what they know.

Most of enterprise reporting is finding out stuff that some one or another desperately does not want you to find out.

As Jay said at the start, the true question is how do we take "distributed knowledge, social networks, collaborative editing, the wisdom of crowds, citizen journalism, pro-am production, decentralized newsgathering, and turn them into actual investigations, published reports that draw attention because they reveal what was previously unknown— you know, news."

And I'll be damned if I know. That's why "BloggerCon IV" is so intriguing.

Posted by: Steve Lovelady at June 19, 2006 7:53 PM | Permalink

I remember reading years ago that when he was with the Washington Post, William Grieder convinced the paper to devote a page to regular coverage of the federal regulatory process -- which, if you're unfamiliar with it, is where the bulk of the corrupt fixing goes on. I'm told it was a cool piece of journalism, but that it didn't get much interest, and was put to rest with little outcry.

I bring this up as an example because it represents a special class of investigative reporting: Not finding what is hidden in secret, but revealing that which is hidden in plain sight.

Ever since Watergate we've been addicted to the idea of the Smoking Gun. It's the journalistic equivalent of The CSI Effect on juries: today, if a jury doesn't have DNA evidence like they see on TV, they're more likely to have reasonable doubt. Same thing with investigations: If you don't have the president on tape talking about criminal activities, it's as if the rest of the evidence is immaterial.

Journalists do those kinds of high-risk, high-reward investigations, and I don't ever see a distributed team of volunteers replacing them in that function. But in the public watchdog role? Sifting through public records on which the volunteers might have some real expertise? Working cooperatively in conjunction with a news organization, but not under the control of a news organization?

Maybe. I can imagine that.

Posted by: Daniel Conover at June 19, 2006 8:36 PM | Permalink

Citizen journalism (whatever that is) is more likely to evolve than it is to be designed. We have seen that with the Blogosphere, where the phenomenon, once enabled with suitable tools, simple appeared, and all sorts of things are stil going on there.

There are likely to be other technological advances which likewise enable citizens to interact and produce/share/discover information that then becomes widely available. Likewise, systems for quality control have already appeared, and more will come.

But citizen journalism is more likely to be correcting the MSM or bypassing its blindspots than contributing to it. The MSM has a firehose to fill with information - one that is continuously demanding more input, and an open source project isn't likely to help in that case.

Likewise, the MSM has its own rather narrow (and very visible) echo chamber biases, while the citizen world is evolving its own echo chambers, with some intersection of the sets (the effect of internet-enabled echo chambers on reducing dialog between factions and increasing divisions could itself be a major topic).

Today, the MSM digs up (or is handed) information, published it, and then the blogosphere exploits it - analyzing, criticizing, adding to it from personal experience or knowledge. This *IS* citizen journalism. The NYT can no longer frame the issues and define the narratives - thank goodness.

Likewise, expert knowledge can enhance reporting. For example, the MSM provides some informatino about the pending North Korean missile launch. Blogger with military, technology and spook backgrounds can and do provide much more information about this subject, and also correct erroneous MSM reports.

The national MSM seems highly focused on politics and controversy, while the citizen journalists can go beyond that - if you want to know everything about the abortion controversy, there are lots of citizen journalists providing facts - along with their biases. A bit of careful blog reading will provide a much greater depth of knowledge than any amount of ingestion of NYT or WSJ or ABC.

Citizen journalism will also provide depth to coverage. Today, I am interested in a forest fire near Sedona, AZ - a favorite place of mine. If the fire continues, citizens will create blogs and websites that will give us real information (maps, for exanmple) that the MSM doesn't consider important. In other words, blogs or web sites can excell in delivering facts at a level the MSM is not interested in.

It will be interesting to see what sort, if any, more formal cooperation develops between MSM and "citizen journalists," and how much citizen journalism simply replaces or bypasses the MSM.

Posted by: John Moore at June 19, 2006 8:56 PM | Permalink

first a minor point -
I'm not sure this post's title ("Users-Know-More-Than-We-Do Journalism") is apt, since what we seem to be addressing is more "Users have more eyes than we do" journalism, i.e. swarm or hive journalism; "everyone, ask your rep. how s/he voted" doesn't require that readers have any special knowledge.

But I agree with Daniel C., I really like this post - it's refreshing to see a practical "well, how _can_ we do it?" post rather than the more typical descriptive or an idealistic-prescriptive ones.

What I'd like to see:

I'd like to see "labor unions" of cit-j practitioners - in the sense that although an individual can be scorned or ignored, banded together we have the power to take on the powers-that-be. For example, attempts I've made to get specifics on syndicated columnist disclosure requirements and job descriptions have been countered with PR-speak assurances and stonewalls, whereas if I were one of a 50-member group seeking the same info, the results would likely be different.
To quote Scott Rosenberg: "The value journalists continue to provide in a 'disintermediated,' Net-enabled world -- when they are doing their jobs right, of course -- is to continue to ask public figures the uncomfortable questions that they won't choose to answer on their own."
It'd be nice if swarm journalism had the weight to accomplish this too.

I'd like to see a Metafilter-equivalent, that could be the go-to site for cit-j discussions (like this one) and alerts (to interesting cit-j reports - right now, HTH do we find them?) and solicitations for help (e.g. "I need someone to write a script that can analyze data in order to quantify Factor X") and suggestions for possible research topics.
(One such suggestion, if you journos can avoid rolling your eyes while running screaming for just one moment: an automated(?) newspaper bias-ometer, to view/quantify patterns of divergence between original AP articles' headlines and the ones that a newspaper used (over same articles). (Note to red-herring flingers - this would be informative whether or not AP=0)

I'd like for there to be a resource that Cit-J practitioners -or groups - could go to for advice - if you're inexperienced, and sifting through public records, and the parties involved are telling you that you're completely and/or libelously off base, how do you evaluate whether they're right?

And whatever the swarm-j site is, please make it low-tech for the Luddites, the vision-impaired and the security-conscious; when the advice du jour is "to prevent being infected by the latest exploit, disable javascript", it's cruel to _require_ javascript for visitors to use your site.

Also transparency of process; when I send in a contribution, and get no feedback that it was received, I'd like to know whether the absence of response means that it _wasn't_ received.

(wish I'd known about this BloggerCon session; I'd have signed up, back when there was room...)

Posted by: Anna Haynes at June 19, 2006 9:30 PM | Permalink

A cit-j example ( via http://www.metafilter.com/mefi/44364 ) last August, on toll roads in Colorado, at http://www.unbossed.com/index.php?itemid=318
("Local governments in Colorado have agreed to deliberately impede traffic on existing highways near a toll road in order to protect the toll roads' investors")

"how we got the story" at http://www.unbossed.com/index.php?itemid=336&catid=36

Posted by: Anna Haynes at June 19, 2006 9:48 PM | Permalink

Okay, throw some imaginary specifics into the mix. Though I think John is right that open source journalism is more likely to evolve than it is to be designed, design we must to jolt our minds into awareness.

Let's say one day that Wal Mart caves in to political pressure and agrees to end employment practices bordering on the inhumane, and by a certain date. Big publicity moment for the company. Activists celebrate. The Huffington Post crows.

How does anyone know they're actually doing what they said they would do at thousands of Wal Mart and affiliated stores? You need people (or a team of people) who can find out by going into every store in the country and asking a few simple questions about changes in practice.

What might motivate them to do a good and careful job? Well, it's making Wal Mart answer for the changes it said it would make. Also, this kind of project is trying to be a "complete" survey (every store) and it's using citizen volunteers from the store's local customer base.

There are lots of people around New Paltz, NY who know the store in New Paltz, NY well (better than "we" do) and they may not be online, or coming to your experiment, but someone who knows some of those people is.

Citizens are told to use all their knowledge to answer the questions, and tell the rest of the story as they see it. When you start to put it all together it's going to be uneven, a mess. That's where editors come in.

But then as you give the teams more time you find they learn from other's methods of getting "inside" the store and finding out. This is after all not a group of atomized inquirers but a network. If we have the right tools, they communicate horizontally with ease and pool their knowledge effectively.

If checking up on Wal Mart (the distributed way) works, you can probably tell a story about the company the company itself does not know. It's a successul outcome if the company is keeping its word, and the journalism shows it. It's a successful outcome if the company is lagging or lying ... and the journalism shows it.

But remember: open source journalism is more likely to evolve than it is to spring from someone's design.

Posted by: Jay Rosen at June 19, 2006 10:30 PM | Permalink

I'd like to commend Lisa's, Dan's, and Richard's very cogent and relevant observations. Richard raises an interesting (if possibly tangential) question when he writes:

If it's just a couple of reporters who find this out, nothing more need be said. But if dozens, or perhaps thousands, of citizens have been working on it, you can't very well ignore it until it goes away.

what happens when a "distributive knowledge network" that is working on a story finds out there is no story?

*************

on a personal note... I'm planning on redoing The AWOL Project, and although I'm not sure to what extent this thread has inspired me to take this approach, this time I'm going to be reaching out to the wider blogosphere for help on it -- in other words, in six months, The AWOL Project might become retroactively relevant to this discussion ;)

Posted by: plukasiak at June 19, 2006 10:31 PM | Permalink

Daniel Conover says: "But what if the output of such a project wasn't narrative at all? What if it produced, say, an authoritative, carefully sourced, currated database?"

Exactly! And I also think you need both a linear overview for mass consumption, but also a more interactive component that allows people to dive into the long tail complexities of an issue.

Douglas Rushkoff's 2004 PopTech! speech emphasizes that this new media landscape is much better suited to find links and associations between granular pieces of data rather than relying on the traditional linear storytelling paradigm:

Now what we're doing in this big chaotic, fractal-like media space -- where we're all talking and exchanging ideas with each other, giving away software to each other -- now it's about making connections. It's about finding patterns in this media space. When you watch the Simpsons, the reward is not the cookie that you get for making it through the story. The reward is making an association. Right? "Oh, here they're satiring Alfred Hitchcock. Oh, this is a satire of that commercial. Here -- that's that." Connections. Connections and openings. Connections and openings. It's no longer a beginning, middle and end. It's a series of connections. It's very different.

So yes, I agree that a paradigm shift needs to happen to stop thinking only in terms of traditional storytelling, and to start thinking about how to map out the links and associations between nuggets of information by aggregating user contributed metadata.

Posted by: Kent Bye at June 19, 2006 10:36 PM | Permalink

So yes, I agree that a paradigm shift needs to happen to stop thinking only in terms of traditional storytelling, and to start thinking about how to map out the links and associations between nuggets of information by aggregating user contributed metadata.

I'd not discount the importance of narrative to this extent. Bartlett and Steele weren't just world-class reseachers, they were world-class writers, and it was their latter talent that made their work compelling.

As I suggested earlier, one of the keys to success in this kind of endeavor will be the ability to "simplify, simplify, simplify" -- "distributive knowledge networks" will need more than just aggregated facts; in order for those facts to make a difference, those networks will also need people who can translate those facts into a "traditional storytelling" format.

Posted by: plukasiak at June 19, 2006 11:05 PM | Permalink

What Paul says is true, and it's particularly hard for me. Narrative is what I do. Data is a struggle. I prefer to work with the instinctual tools of the writer. The methodologies of the researcher are necessary evils. I wish it could be like I imagine it was once. I think I came along 20 years too late for the newspaper career I dreamed of having.

But tools change, and new tools change culture. I believe there will still be room for those instinctual skills in this new media landscape -- but the foundation of this new world is the database, not the document.

The good news? Since all sorts of people can be good at compiling databases, perhaps that gives guys like me a new role: helping those compilers to communicate what they've found so that the maximum number of people will understand it clearly. Would that, as Paul suggests, involve narrative? You bet your sweet bippie. But I think we all agree that it need not be limited to traditional journalistic narrative.

Posted by: Daniel Conover at June 19, 2006 11:26 PM | Permalink

I'd not discount the importance of narrative to this extent. Barlett and Steele weren't just world-class reseachers, they were world-class writers, and it was their latter talent that made their work compelling.
As I suggested earlier, one of the keys to success in this kind of endeavor will be the ability to "simplify, simplify, simplify" -- "distributive knowledge networks" will need more than just aggregated facts; in order for those facts to make a difference, those networks will also need people who can translate those facts into a "traditional storytelling" format.
Posted by: plukasiak

I entirely agree. It's all about stories. It has been since man emerged from caves -- or perhaps even before. It's hugely important to assemble facts, but if aggregated facts do not coalesce into a coherent story, no one will grasp their import.

Posted by: Steve Lovelady at June 19, 2006 11:52 PM | Permalink

I'm not a journalist, or even a blogger. I'm just a guy that gets the majority of his news off the web. Haven't bought a newspaper in years. Not much point unless I was a coupon user.

I just finished scanning the majority of the comments. I get the impression people here visualize setting up some sort of hierarchical system. Journalists handing out bits of targeted projects from on high. People on the web doing research for free. Journalists then making a pass/fail judgment as to what is reportable. I don't see it as workable. You might get a few minions to do research for you, but how much can you trust someone willing to do your bidding unrewarded? You going to add them to the byline as an incentive? They wouldn't have done it spontaneously, so what's their motivation?

The net is a society with varying interests that operates bottom up, not top down. The vast majority of people that provide tidbits of information on various subjects are doing it for their own enjoyment. Not because they got an assignment from someone on high. Is the info always right? Of course not. It depends on their expertise and honesty. Once someone points out an important incongruity, others on the net spontaneously do the vetting for free and respond with a critique. Fact and fiction soon get separated. That's how swarms happen. If you pay attention to the rational arguments and not the hyperbole and ad hominems you can generally figure out the real deal, even in areas you have little expertise.

If it's about an error you're responsible for, and you can't explain it, fess up quickly and learn from your mistake. If some new information appears on the net that hasn't been reported, you don't have to be first, and you don't want to be last, but you should get it right. How fast you get to report on it depends on how quickly you can accurately judge the source(s). That's where you should concentrate on honing your skills. Find net sources that you can trust because their arguments are presented cogently with a high signal to noise ratio.

The news media has become slovenly about sourcing material with unnamed sources becoming all to common and known biases left unmentioned. Agenda journalism seems to be continually increasing. Take a close look at how you use adjectives and adverbs. If it's a news item, drop the ones that may slant it to your viewpoint. You're no longer insulated from criticism and accountability and more people are becoming aware of slant when supposed news is presented. You're not getting slammed left and right because your doing a good job. It's because quality journalism is becoming a rare commodity. It doesn't have to be earthshaking material, just reliable.

If you happen to think I'm just another crank on the web, fine. But maybe some will be willing to give consideration to the points I've presented.

Posted by: Bob___K at June 20, 2006 12:36 AM | Permalink

Ability to complexify (and not lose everyone) is as important as the ability to simplify.

I think we recognize the limitations of "an assignment from on high." Thus: "open source journalism is more likely to evolve than it is to spring from someone's design."

Off topic: My Web Users at the Gate is currently the third most viewed at post.com. That's a first for me. Totally a result of promotion of the piece on the home page of the site, as lead article in Opinions for much of the day.

Posted by: Jay Rosen at June 20, 2006 12:55 AM | Permalink

"When you break an issue down into a multitude of small parts, how do you assign them? Do you post a list of questions and ask those who feel they are competent to get to work on their favorites?"

Wrong culture. In the new world, you don't assign, people do it because they want to. You get to pick what you want to distribute as news.

Posted by: Tim at June 20, 2006 7:55 AM | Permalink

Article from Ziff-Davis's Donna Bogatin: Social freeloaders.

Wikipedia’s “small core community” that does the vast majority of the work (see NYT piece) reflects the extremely low ratio of contributing users to non-contributing users throughout the new social Web that relies on user contributions for its content.

From Wikipedia to de.licio.us, and from YouTube to Riya, both not-for-profit endeavors and purely commercial enterprises are staking their entire existence on user-generated content that is unreliable, inconsistent and difficult to come by.

The average YouTube user is watching the content, not generating it, “while more than 35 million videos are viewed daily, only 35,000 are uploaded” and at Riya photo search, “searchers outnumber the uploaders…20 to 1.”

Perhaps the social Web will come to be known for its freeloaders, rather than its uploaders.

Something to keep in mind...

Posted by: Jay Rosen at June 20, 2006 9:47 AM | Permalink

plukasiak asks:

"what happens when a "distributive knowledge network" that is working on a story finds out there is no story?"

That's a good question. Listening to Jay on the Open Source program he linked to in After Matter, one of the things I thought was that whether there's a "story" these days very much depends on whether there's photos. The host, Chris Lydon, asked, "Where are today's Pentagon Papers?" The answer is, Everyplace, but nobody cares unless there are pictures.

>>Photos are what made Abu Ghraib an A1 story. The head of the CIA resigning in a scandal involving hookers has mostly faded from the news. Difference? Pictures.
>>Digital cameras and cameraphones are becoming very, very widespread.

So, thinking of Jay's example above of widespread checking on WalMart's employment practices: Everybody bring a camera and take a picture of a worker's face. The end result: a huge, web-accessible mosaic of the faces of cheated workers.

That, not text, will be the story that becomes a Story.

(I say this with chagrin, being a person whose native medium is text).

Posted by: Lisa Williams at June 20, 2006 11:26 AM | Permalink

Bob__Kat is right, about the hierarchy think, too. Nobody will do it if it feels like whitewashing someone else's fence.

One of the reasons the blogosphere works is that everybody has their own little patch of it that they "own" and can improve. Take that away, and a lot of the motivation is taken away.

Which brings me to point #2. We've pretty much proven that people won't pay to *read.* My guess is that they're a lot more motivated and may pay to *be heard.* This may take the the form of memberships to forums where the membership allows the participant things like a friends list, a profile page showing the stories they've worked on, etc.

One of the ways you know that a site has become successful is when they stop coming to read and start coming to hang out with each other. So far, we've talked about Media Talks To Audience, and Audience Talks To Media, but not Audience Talks To Audience (no, wait; I think Kent Bye's project does have this aspect).

Posted by: Lisa Williams at June 20, 2006 11:43 AM | Permalink

One of the most remarkable examples of distributed journalism is playing out below the radar screen as we speak: The decision of the U.S. Intelligence Community to put thousands and thousands of untranslated captured Iraqi documents up on the Web.

Information on a variety of topics - the most preeminent of which is the nature of Iraq's WMD programs in the closing months of the Hussein regime - is dribbling out in tantalizing pixels, thanks to a small army of obsessive compulsives with a smattering of Arabic knowledge and too much time on their hands.

Major media sources only understand the "smoking gun," of course, and so the information we are now learning is not widely publicized.

Posted by: Jason Van Steenwyk at June 20, 2006 12:06 PM | Permalink

Lisa Williams will be in the crowd with mike at the BloggerCon thing in SF, as a Deputy Sherrif who knows the landscape.

I'm hoping this group will tell us how this kind of journalism can be done, but maybe we need more than that...

Posted by: Jay Rosen at June 20, 2006 12:10 PM | Permalink

Jason: I assume you mean people stitching together the meaning of untranslated documents, and putting parts together, pooling limited Arabic skills, dividing up labor, yes? Or not..? How does the "social" part of it work?

Posted by: Jay Rosen at June 20, 2006 12:32 PM | Permalink

"I entirely agree. It's all about stories. It has been since man emerged from caves -- or perhaps even before. It's hugely important to assemble facts, but if aggregated facts do not coalesce into a coherent story, no one will grasp their import."

It may be a story, but it does not have to be put into words. With new software it is possible to provide drill down from the initial view of the data to finer and finer levels. For instance, we have all seen the Red/blue map of the last two presidential elections. Some of us have even seen that map by county. It is now possible to provide the same information, without too much work by any number other variables, or to see to base data for early exit polling, etc.

At this point, people can make their own stories, from their own perspective. At this point, the news distributer can aggregate these perspectives into a much better story than was available initially.

Posted by: Tim at June 20, 2006 12:48 PM | Permalink

There seem to be some minor disconnects about how things work now in the world, at least, of newspapers.

The idea that a story doesn't pan out doesn't depend on someone's agenda (that agenda-based decisionmaking belief seems to be a pretty common.) It much more frequently depends on whether the speculative premise that prompted research turned out to have a basis in fact, and, beyond that, these days, a basis in facts which can be proven and which will stand up in court.

It's storytelling and investigation wrapped into one concept, the premise. "We're going to tell you about an abuse of power." "We've discovered an interesting conflict of interest." Whatever. Both the research, and then the story, have to prove the premise, so that when the readers are finished with the journey you're taking them on, they share the conclusions that made you think the story was worth telling in the first place.

Very often, when my gig was strictly investigative journalism, my method was to take the situation I was tasked with examining, and creatively take it apart on this basis: "If I was a crook, what things would I do to make illegal gains, and what kinds of tracks would I have to leave?" Then I'd look for those tracks. Might be a chain of deeds, might be mislabeled farmland. I once, no joke, found something described as a subdivision with streets and sidewalks that turned out to be a red maple swamp in New Jersey, used as loan collateral. But it didn't always prove out. Sometimes the "bad thing" was merely plausible but not really happening.
So here's the thing: If things don't pan out and the premise remains unsupported, there's no story. The only agenda in that case is a desire to be accurate.

My only other semi-salient observation is that the Wal-Mart example is actually my idea of how journalism can work in the face of stonewalling authority. I've never really craved being an insider journalist who is just the mouthpiece for whatever it is important people want to share. I've always enjoyed being the fellow who does go out to where the policy hits the little people and describes what the effects actually are, rather than what the big bugs want you to think is going on. I'm a troublemaking pissant at heart.

Actually, one more possibly salient thought: In the end, here's what matters: Can I, as a website publisher, blogger or anything else, depend on the truthfulness of those gathering information for this joint effort, from any source? Those who provide ideas, information and insight are ultimately culpable for what gets published, no matter what the venue. As an editor, I'm making that decision -- evaluating the accuracy and integrity of data -- several times a day already; I don't see it changing simply because data is coming in from more sources.

Posted by: Bill Watson at June 20, 2006 4:06 PM | Permalink

re: the role of traditional media in all this.

Let's establish this up front: Grassroots efforts that choose to do distributed journalism projects don't need traditional media to get their message out. They can bypass us entirely. They don't need our control, our printing presses, our editorial processes. They can go straight to the people via the web.

The question becomes, why might it benefit such a group to work in partnership with traditional media? And when you look at it this way, there are reasons why cooperation could be mutually beneficial.

Cooperating with trad media allows you to reach a larger audience; reach a different audience; be noticed by more media outlets more rapidly.

Additionally, no matter what you think of trad media, everyone knows that having "your story" picked up by the NYT or Anderson Cooper means your story is taken more seriously. This isn't necessarily logical, but it's true in the practical sense. To be covered by one of the majors is to receive an endorsement of significance.

So: in addition to wider, faster exposure, the benefits of cooperation with trad media also include greater credibility with a mass audience; better packaging; better promotion; greater opportunities for expanding the story across media forms.

We're talking here about how this stuff will have to evolve from the bottom up. Agreed.

But think about pole beans. I can't make them act like a bush, but if I put a trellis over a bean seedling, I can encourage that pole bean to climb it. The pole bean is more productive on the trellis than it would be spreading along the ground, so the pole bean plant "succeeds," but I succeed too because I get a larger, better crop. All I did was provide a structure, and the pole bean did what it does naturally.

If we work cooperatively with grassroot projects, providing a structure that serves both parties, media can benefit from such projects. The key is, it has to understand its new role in such agreements.

Posted by: Daniel Conover at June 20, 2006 5:20 PM | Permalink

Can I, as a website publisher, blogger or anything else, depend on the truthfulness of those gathering information for this joint effort, from any source?

in a word, "no". What you need are is information that can be verified, because (as Mark pointed out) these kind of "public" investigations create a significant risk of being subject to sabotage. One "wrong" move can damage, if not destroy, the credibility of an entire project.

Taking Jay's "Walmart" example -- lets say you've built up a database showing that Walmart has not merely not improved its personnel policies, but in certain stores things have gotten worse. There would be a natural tendency to highlight the more extreme cases when constructing a narrative --- and all Walmart has to do is to get you to use an unsubstantiated (and false) example of "employee abuse" in your narrative to create the perception that the entire database is worthless.

*******

off topic: I meant to say this in earlier comments, but Jay's piece Web Users Open the Gates is excellent, and if you haven't read it, do so.

Indeed, I think his next thread should be a discussion of that piece -- but don't start it too soon, Jay. This has been a great thread -- like the Pressthink that I remember from the "old days" before partisan arguments took over every discussion.

Posted by: plukasiak at June 20, 2006 6:33 PM | Permalink

Exactly, Daniel. Keep going.

A vision very different from yours was put forward this week by the executive director of Investigative Reporters and Editors, a leading professional group with a strong and active membership. He writes in the Dallas Morning News about how irreplaceable investigative reporting by non-aligned news organizations is.

I would compare "we won't be replaced" to "re-purposing content" for its effectiveness in leading the press astray about the Web. Replacement thinking makes the mainstream press and what it does the starting point, not the World Wide Web and what it can do.

In order to establish this--"we won't be replaced, no way..."--he has to diminish what amateurs and independents can do..."...especially by those partisan windbags with modems, the bloggers." He gives no quarter on who has credentials. He sees trust as a fixed pie; less for you means more for me. But it ain't that way. Brant Houston hasn't heard of the possibility that networks of wired citizens can accomplish what investigative reporters can't (and vice versa). He's too busy being irreplaceable...

For too long, the news industry has regarded investigative reporting as too time-consuming and costly. (And that attitude continues. Just last month, Time magazine laid off two of the best investigative reporters in our time because they were "too expensive.")

Media owners also have seen investigative reporting as a "niche" kind of reporting: nice for the sake of public service and awards-gathering, but not really a daily concern.

But it's becoming increasingly clear that investigative reporting may be the beleaguered newspaper industry's best franchise for the future.

Investigative reporting distinguishes journalists from agenda-pushing bloggers, from advocacy talk shows that parade as fair and balanced, and from the shallow reporting that happens when Wall Street pressures newsrooms to cut staffs.

The worth of investigative reporting is not measured in constant bean-counting, but in how well it serves the public interest. Solid investigative reporting demonstrates the credibility of a vigilant press, as well as the need for one – a need that's greater than ever.

With the advent of the Web and the blogosphere, rumors and misinformation have run rampant.

Simultaneously, officialdom has grown more secretive, public relations and media manipulation have become more sophisticated, and the free press has suffered ever more relentless attacks by governments and corporations that don't want the public to know what they've been up to.

But good investigative reporting cuts through those rumors, misinformation and manipulative practices. Investigative reporting rips through veils of lies that hide corruption, incompetence and injustice. It reveals dangers that governments and businesses should disclose but fail to do. It provides accurate, useable information that ordinary people can use to protect themselves.

These stories are not the kind produced by those who approach the world from an opinionated point of view and fit the facts around preconceived conclusions. No, these are stories supported by detailed documentation and a multitude of interviews – and they often go further by making use of data analysis and social-science methods. You can't do these stories quickly or on the cheap...

Does your favorite blogger or TV pundit do this? No, only investigative reporters do.

Houston writes in the tone of "I can't believe I have to explain this again to these people."

Posted by: Jay Rosen at June 20, 2006 6:45 PM | Permalink

> I'm hoping this group will tell us how this kind of journalism can be done, but maybe we need more than that...

?
(this is too cryptic for at least one reader)

> In order to establish this [assertion] --"we won't be replaced, no way..."--[IRE's executive director] has to diminish what amateurs and independents can do...

Which could help to explain why IRE still has no membership category (thus, legit. way to join) for citizen journalists, more than a year after the issue was raised.

Posted by: Anna Haynes at June 20, 2006 8:21 PM | Permalink

Is it me or has there been more than the usual number of straw-man arguments against citizen-created media?

I mean, does anybody really think that Wikipedia's policy of Wikipedia's policy of protecting some entries merits A1 above the fold, as the New York Times did on Saturday? Especially since I think it's not really news -- I remember pages on John Kerry and George Bush being temporarily locked during the 2004 political conventions. Add that, of course, to the lampooning of Yearly Kos by Maureen Dowd and Ana Marie Cox, and a piece in this week's Book Review by, of all people, John Updike, who decries Kevin Kelly's vision of (I paraphrase) books turning into a collection of 400 word snippets.

I'd quote at length to you from the Updike essay, because it's not online yet; but it's on the nightstand, along with the Globe, The Herald, and the Watertown Tab, next to my sleeping mother, who does her best to be a significant percentage of the entire target market for Boston newsprint. The pieces by Dowd and Cox aren't worth your time; I'm sure most of you could write parodies of these pieces without having read them.

Then, Alexander Cockburn, in The Nation (subscribers only):

Is there any better testimony to the impotence and vacuity of the endlessly touted "blogosphere," which in mid-June had twin deb balls in the form of the Yearly Kos convention in Las Vegas and the Take Back America folkmoot of "progressive" Democrats in Washington, DC?...In political terms the blogosphere is like white noise, insistent and meaningless.

Ah, the sounds of the circular firing squad! How quaint and reminiscent of the Clinton years. CJR Daily also takes a couple shots, including this one.

I've had a suspicion that I've held for a long time but never voiced, but I will now: I suspect that some bloggers deliberately b**tchslap another blogger with more traffic than they have for the explicit purpose of getting that blogger to link to them and thus raise their profile.

Has the media caught on to this trick?

They have done so with no central organizing force, like a miraculous self-organizing swarm...oh, wait, isn't that what we say about le blogosphere?

Posted by: Lisa Williams at June 20, 2006 9:32 PM | Permalink

I'm hoping this group will tell us how this kind of journalism can be done, but maybe we need more than that...

Anna: I was being cryptic, yes. What I meant was I am trying to arrange for Ken Sands, the Online Publisher for the Spokesman-Review in Spokane, to bring himself--and his desire to do users-know-more-than-we-do journalism in the Spokane market--to the BloggerCon session in San Francisco so we have a real world "case" on the table.

Sands can submit practical problems to the BloggerCon brain trust. He's willing to go back and do things that are out of the box. There are social network projects he would like to try but he can't figure how to do them. He comes from a real community and one of the most advanced Net-friendly local newspapers I know of. He said he's always wanted to come to a BloggerCon (really) and soak up the rays.

I'm trying to get him to write a blog post for me laying out the facts of the Spokane case. That way participants have something to conjure with.

I believe the S-R just started webcasting all its morning editorial meetings where the day's stories are charted and yesterday's paper is critiqued. I will check that.

Background:

* Blogging @ Spokesmanreview.com
* Ask the Editors blog
* Steve Smith: Fortress Journalism Failed. The Transparent Newsroom Works. (Smith is editor of the Spokane Spokesman Review)

Posted by: Jay Rosen at June 20, 2006 10:46 PM | Permalink

> I am trying to arrange for Ken Sands, the Online Publisher for the Spokesman-Review in Spokane, to bring himself--and his desire to do users-know-more-than-we-do journalism in the Spokane market--to the BloggerCon session...

Excellent!

And it looks like he thinks you've succeeded. ("It looks like I'm going to BloggerCon in San Francisco on Friday for a session on citizen journalism...")

Posted by: Anna Haynes at June 21, 2006 12:03 AM | Permalink

Lisa, that's a little paranoid. MSM sites swarm to attack bloggers to drive up the MSM's traffic?

Kos thought that Dowd was catty to Cox:

Our interview consisted almost entirely of her wondering whether we really wanted to replace them ("the mainstream media"), and if so what would happen to her. Would she still have a job? And (here's the "catty" party) wasn't it just horrible that Anna Marie Cox was writing at Time?I mean, Dowd had spent 15 years working her way up to get to where she was at the NY Times. Cox got her Time gig after just two years of blogging. That just wasn't right!

You ought to read what bloggers were writing about Wonkette emeritus, here and here.

Everyone likes to dish, but few can take it, including people in the MSM. And the strawman depends on your POV.

Posted by: Hue at June 21, 2006 12:40 AM | Permalink

Hue: I think your browser doesn't support the /irony tag.

Posted by: Lisa Williams at June 21, 2006 1:28 AM | Permalink

You're probably right, and reading too fast.

Posted by: Hue at June 21, 2006 1:46 AM | Permalink

I also couldn't figure out if you were ice-fishing for fish or stories. I would need my caffeine level to rise.

Posted by: Hue at June 21, 2006 2:00 AM | Permalink

I totally agree with Daniel (quoted below) about plenty of opportunity to find evidence of government miscues/misdeeds for anyone to research. You just have to know how and where to look.

I came upon this thread because I stumbled across Jay Rosen's story about "Web Users at the Gate" when I looking for another story on Washingtonpost.com ("Illegal Hiring is Rarely Penalized" 6/19/06) because I recently set up a yahoogroup to find out more about WHY, in 1999, the Bureau of Immigration and Customs Enforcement essentially halted its effort to stop illegal employment of aliens, which now is considered as much or more than the border aspect for the increase in illegal immigrants.

I'm rounding up collaborators for the yahoogroup ("smart mob", as Jay says) and I'm pretty confident that we can find something more about this aspect of an important issue, because I am a former government insider (five agencies in 25 years) and I grew my listserv on "Reinventing Government" (REGO-L, 1993-95) to over 1,000 subscribers, many of whom were journalists based in D.C. (People had email, but no web-browser, so I gophered to the Wash.Post and cut-and-pasted text from their Federal Page.)

I may never find my way back here, so if you want to check in (sometime later) to see if my new experiment in "smart mob reporting" works, you can find it at:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ICEbetter

vr, Stephen Buckley

Posted by: Daniel Conover at June 19, 2006:

I remember reading years ago that when he was with the Washington Post, William Grieder convinced the paper to devote a page to regular coverage of the federal regulatory process -- which, if you're unfamiliar with it, is where the bulk of the corrupt fixing goes on. I'm told it was a cool piece of journalism, but that it didn't get much interest, and was put to rest with little outcry.

I bring this up as an example because it represents a special class of investigative reporting: Not finding what is hidden in secret, but revealing that which is hidden in plain sight.

Ever since Watergate we've been addicted to the idea of the Smoking Gun. It's the journalistic equivalent of The CSI Effect on juries: today, if a jury doesn't have DNA evidence like they see on TV, they're more likely to have reasonable doubt. Same thing with investigations: If you don't have the president on tape talking about criminal activities, it's as if the rest of the evidence is immaterial.

Journalists do those kinds of high-risk, high-reward investigations, and I don't ever see a distributed team of volunteers replacing them in that function. But in the public watchdog role? Sifting through public records on which the volunteers might have some real expertise? Working cooperatively in conjunction with a news organization, but not under the control of a news organization?

Maybe. I can imagine that.

Posted by: Daniel Conover at June 19, 2006 08:36

Posted by: Stephen Buckley at June 21, 2006 2:35 AM | Permalink

re: IRE. Investigative Reporters and Editors is a great organization, although I've let my membership lapse in the past year. And I certainly agree with the idea that there are types of investigations that I think are best suited to centralized news organizations.

And, yes, the piece Jay cites is a bit whacked when it comes to bloggers. Yet I feel the urge to offer at least a bit of a defense for the combativeness it expresses. I mean, here we are talking about how to encourage new relationships between trad media and citizen journalists. Perhaps what we should also be doing is encouraging new relationships between trad media and its own reporters. In the midst of the most prolific news media expansion in the history of mankind, investigative journalism is starving to death. To paraphrase The Boss: Fifty-seven (million) channels and there's nothing on.

So yeah, I understand why the guy has got veins in his teeth.

The sad irony is that if IRE would take its eye off the rifle scope long enough to scan the horizon for a few minutes, it would recognize that the Anna Haynes of the world are the perfect new partners it needs for advancing its values. For those of you who don't read her blog, Haynes is a blogger who tries to apply investigative techniques (among other things) to addressing the problems in the community where she lives.

Posted by: Daniel Conover at June 21, 2006 9:14 AM | Permalink

No sympathy from me. They're investigators. They're supposed to know what they're talking about. The message their executive director sent the troops was: reflexive defenses, resentful cliches from five years ago and lazy-ass assumptions are just fine as long as its journalism we're talking about.

We can be embarrassingly behind the times; no one will notice. To wit: Mr. IRE's op-ed... The news business is facing more competition and downed gates. Therefore it needs to emphasize its unique value. Nothing is more unique or more valuable than investigative reporting. Therefore we are the future of the news business. It's obvious! Q.E.D. But no one seems to realize it. (The idiots.) Bloggers are not going to replace us, no way. (Those idiots.) That's why I'm publishing my op-ed-- to kindly educate the idiots out there. And if this continues you can expect some angry letters to Romenesko! Hey, investigative reporting is expensive, very very expensive, so ante up, publishers. (Bean counting idiots.) We won't give up. Change? We don't need to change; we are the public interest. You're gonna change that? Listen, pal, Gene Roberts won 17 Pulitzers in 18 years; when Josh Marshall has done that maybe I'll look at his blog. We don't need to study the new platform before deciding we already mastered it. You can't make us and we won't. Journalism is journalism. Doesn't change. We're Investigative Reporters and Editors and we can kick the Internet's ass.

Brant Houston told his people what they wanted to hear. They are both the heroes and the saviors of real public-interest journalism, and if everyone would just recognize that, provide the resources for the I-teams and leave the real journalists alone, the industry's troubles would be over.

That's a pathetic statement, Daniel. Not combative-- pathetic. No sympathy.

Posted by: Jay Rosen at June 21, 2006 9:41 AM | Permalink

Yep. And I concede.

Posted by: Daniel Conover at June 21, 2006 10:34 AM | Permalink

> To wit: Mr. IRE's op-ed

Jay, that was wonderful - please consider doing more synopses like this in future.
(However, applying such a value-laden label to his thesis isn't likely to encourage Mr.IRE to come here and respond, or to think.)

and Daniel, thanks for plugging the blog (which I generally don't link to from here because IMO it is rarely worth the outside visitor's time)

Posted by: Anna Haynes at June 21, 2006 12:03 PM | Permalink

Ken Sands asks users:

In the true spirit of you, the readers, knowing more than I do, what specific kinds of journalism could we do in Spokane if we were able to tap into the "power of many?"

Using sheer numbers of people to analyze data bases? Surface breaking news on high school sports, the weather, Gonzaga basketball, Cougar football?

I stashed Mark Anderson's off topic comment here so as to prevent thread de-railment. His headline, Ron Suskind reopens the "US Military is deliberately killing journalists" debate.

Posted by: Jay Rosen at June 21, 2006 2:15 PM | Permalink

Dan, I agree; at least a scan of the horizon might make them see that bloggers are, at least, one thing that news reporters should want: NEWS JUNKIES. These are the people who actually care when you break a story, as opposed to the people who yawn and move on to today's Jumble.

(I have similar "community management" issues with H2otown, the news and community site I run in Watertown, MA. Occasionally, I get a really hot one -- a comment that's full of profanity and personal attacks. Thing is, these are the people I want on the site: the ones who care. I email them and tell them that, and I ask them to dial it back just a bit, because I'm trying to preserve the diversity of the audience and that kind of thing scares off big portions of the audience. Of course, newspapers can't do that with the blogosphere. Or can they? We need examples of successful, constructive engagement; but in a lot of places, both sides are pretty entrenched in their positions, esp. regarding national stories. I bet Lex of the Greensboro N&R would have a good example).

That, along with the broad strokes that paint all bloggers as nutjobs, or lazy, or political, are offensive. I am none of the above. Such attacks cherrypick blogs that suit their argument, and bypass the 99% that don't -- hence my assertion that they're weak arguments.

Posted by: Lisa Williams at June 21, 2006 3:06 PM | Permalink

For what it's worth, Lisa, I was interviewed yesterday by a professor who is writing about newspapers and blogging, and I made the point about how Eskimos have 17 words for snow because in the Artic you need distinct words for different types of snow conditions. Compare that to us. Right now we've only got one word for "blog" and it isn't enough. The language simply isn't keeping up with the development of the medium. I think when we talk with trad media it's important to explain that blog is an awfully general word of an awfully diverse category of expression.

Posted by: Daniel Conover at June 21, 2006 3:54 PM | Permalink

Boy, Jay, you're imputing an awfully lot to Brant Houston that he didn't even come close to saying.

I see only two glancing references in that op-ed to blogs and none at all to platform preference or to resistance to change.

The truth is, most investigative reporters with whom I've dealt are "techie" by nature, far more so than the rest of the newsroom. That's why they were the ones who led the way 35 years ago on computer-assisted reporting ... 15 years ago on database mining ... and to this day in exploiting the treasure trove of the Internet.

That's why to set this up as "IRE vs Internet" is an entirely false dichotomy.

The last IRE convention that I went to (which was a few years ago) seemed to devote as much as 40% of its time to seminars and panels on ... the Internet. (Confirming my impression that I was trapped on a rainy and endless Washington weekend inside a hotel packed with dweebs, nerds and geeks!)

Posted by: Steve Lovelady at June 21, 2006 4:29 PM | Permalink

Times to Sell Ads on Front of Business Section
One blogger/ fund manager isn't buying this idea:

This incredibly dull news comes during the newspaper industry’s annual New York City confab in which the various newspaper chains get up in front of analysts and explain away declining subscriber counts while highlighting extensive cost-cutting measures and the fabulous growth in their internet properties.

Unfortunately, the internet side of the newspaper business is, generally, 1) insignificant, revenue-wise, and 2) not very profitable anyway. Thus something must be done to find incremental revenue, and the newspapers are pulling out all the stops.

The ads are expected to sell at a premium rate because of the prominent showcase the front of the section affords.

Stop the presses! More ads at higher rates for fewer readers!

... If that’s the best a once-mighty near-monopoly can do to help cover the enormous fixed-cost burden of a slowly dying distribution model, it’s a sorry response to the underlying problem.

More pain to come as dinosaurs (or spotted owls) figure out how to generate revenue (and cover the news) in the electronic age.

Posted by: Hue at June 21, 2006 4:50 PM | Permalink

Anyway, that's off-topic. Trying to steer it back...

How might trad media encourage some kind of new relationship with distributed, interest-group media?

Well, what if in addition to your regular news functions, you encouraged groups in your community to submit not only story ideas, but proposals for distributed reporting projects?

Let's use Anna Haynes as an example: She's been trying to understand this strange recurring event that seems to happen to her local water supply. So maybe Anna and her friends form a group, and they all agree to take samples from their taps at regular intervals, documenting all their steps. They could test these samples and look for patterns over time. In theory, taking a bunch of systemwide snapshots of water quality might offer insight into what is causing the strange, intermittant odors.

Anna's group could propose a joint project to the local paper. The newspaper could set its own terms and conditions, and projects that appear to meet those initial standards could be the subject of negotiations. Either party could walk away.

Then, along the way, there could be various deadlines and checks, with steps taken upon the satisfaction of each stage of the agreement. Say, Anna's group agrees to abide by certain quality control guidelines, and in return, the paper agrees to run stories and free ads soliciting volunteers for the study. Or to pay for series of tests. Whatever.

With the group showing its work to the paper during the research, the paper's staff would be in a better position to see where the results were leading. Maybe the paper assigns one of its most experienced editors or reporters to work with the citizens. Maybe when the citizens get stonewalled, the newspaper writes stories and editorials about the standoff, asks its lawyers to intervene, etc.

In other words, perhaps the news organization uses its institutional clout help keep the citizens' effort moving along.

In the end, regardless of whatever the paper published, Anna's group would be free to publish its findings online in any way it sees fit. And the newspaper would be free to publish its version of the story however it chooses, without Anna being able to veto it.

Where's the balance on abuse? What about this: an agreement that both the group's online report and the paper's online report would include mandatory mutual links.

I can imagine problems. BUT what about mutual benefits? I think so.

Posted by: Daniel Conover at June 21, 2006 4:51 PM | Permalink

This is the correct link to blogger/fund manager.

Posted by: Hue at June 21, 2006 4:52 PM | Permalink

That's right, Steve, I am reading into what he's saying and leaving unsaid. An interpretation of his remarks. And it's true that investigative reporters are more techie by nature. That makes the blinkered view of their executive director more dispiriting.

It's not his couple of cheap digs at blogging; those are newsroom boilerplate, almost like a membership badge. I'm bothered by 1.) the zero analytics approach. "Will someone figure out how to fund us soon, please? What we do is irreplaceable, you know. No lie..." 2.) taking a form of address fit for the professional powow--we'll always be essential because...-- and putting it in front of the broader public is not wise.

To my ear (ears do differ) his op ed sounds like a campaign commercial for IRE, or ads the teachers' union runs in New York, trying to remind you how essential they are. Investigative Reporters and Editors are here to tell us that "the best way to restore and renew the American public's faith in and appreciation for journalism" is to realize "the irreplaceable value of what investigative reporters do." How does that differ from a campaign ad, even if you agree with it?

Posted by: Jay Rosen at June 21, 2006 5:11 PM | Permalink

Hey, Rosen: Back on topic!

Posted by: Daniel Conover at June 21, 2006 5:38 PM | Permalink

Back on topic... we have had people in this thread ask us a good question: what would motivate people to participate in one of these little social network, open source journalism projects you are dreaming up for them?

One way to inquire into that: what motivated people to participate (cooperate) for the good of the project in open source software episodes.

Posted by: Jay Rosen at June 21, 2006 6:21 PM | Permalink

To my ear (ears do differ) his op ed sounds like a campaign commercial for IRE, or ads the teachers' union runs in New York, trying to remind you how essential they are. Investigative Reporters and Editors are here to tell us that "the best way to restore and renew the American public's faith in and appreciation for journalism" is to realize "the irreplaceable value of what investigative reporters do." How does that differ from a campaign ad, even if you agree with it?
Posted by: Jay Rosen

I guess the difference is that I do agree with it -- and all the more so after the New York Times' NSA eavesdropping story, the Washington Post's secret prisons story and the New Orleans Times-Picayune's Katrina coverage.

Posted by: Steve Lovelady at June 21, 2006 7:38 PM | Permalink

One way to inquire into that: what motivated people to participate (cooperate) for the good of the project in open source software episodes.

a common agenda.

Posted by: plukasiak at June 21, 2006 9:30 PM | Permalink

Andrew Tyndall has been having trouble posting (glitch) so I am doing it for him.

Excellent thread everyone!

Allow me to pull back from the lofty journalistic heights of the investigative category to the mundane world of the daily news story.

Besides assembling the nuts and bolts of the five W¹s, a large measure of the journalist¹s job consists of collecting ancillary soundbites (in the area of my expertise, TV journalism) that flesh out those underlying facts.

Take a simple example from last week: the controversy around the PSA campaign that used scare tactics to persuade mothers of newborns to breastfeed rather than use infant formula.

No investigation here, no spreadsheet, no database Šbut plenty of work for the TV producer to find a pro-and-con nursing-vs-non-nursing pair of mothers to anecdotalize each side of the story along with adorable baby pix.

This scenario is repeated over and over again: find a patient suffering from a disease-of-the-week; find a destitute Enron retiree to comment on the Lay-Skilling verdict; find an American-born child of illegal immigrants who will become an orphan if her parents are deported; find the grieving father of a US Marine blown up by an IED in Fallujah.

Before thinking about mobilizing the masses to monitor WalMart or wade through the tax code or check Congressional voting records, there is a vaster, less noble area, where the work of TV producers can be distributed and relinquished to the vox pop -- the entire televisual enterprise of putting a human face to an abstract story.

-- Andrew Tyndall

Posted by: Jay Rosen at June 21, 2006 9:32 PM | Permalink

what would motivate people to participate in one of these little social network, open source journalism projects you are dreaming up for them?

I've been fascinated by this book by Robert Neuwirth entitled Shadow Cities: A Billion Squatters, a New Urban World. I think what Neuwirth says about squatter cities where residents are actually improving their standard of living applies here:

It doesn't matter whether you give people title deeds or secure tenure, people simply need to know they won't be evicted. When they know they are secure, they build. They establish a market. They buy and sell. They rent. They create. They develop. Actual control, not legal control, is the key.

Neuwirth also points out that it's important to allow people who build up value in a community to be able to pass it on or share it with people of their choosing -- individuals, not the entire society; yet the sharing generally does benefit the society as a whole.

Posted by: Lisa Williams at June 22, 2006 12:31 AM | Permalink

Dan: Why would Anna's group go to the paper?

Blogs and newspapers do, already, collaborate on stories, except the mechanism isn't as direct. Reporters are very likely to read local blogs. A blogger posts a question or an observation that gets a healthy comment thread going, the commenters start posting new things they found out on their own blogs...and the reporter does a story on his dead tree blog (just kidding) and then bloggers say, hey, check it out, there's a story in the newspaper, and look what else I found out.

This way of doing things allows the maximum amount of both freedom and control to all the participants: The blogger doesn't have to agree to externally imposed "quality controls" by people they don't know very well, and the reporter is not obliged to print anything that they haven't put through their own process of calling, checking, poking, and prodding to see that it's okay, running it by an editor, etc.

Maybe arm's length has more to recommend it than we thought. Getting closer means limitations on either freedom (usually for the blogger) or control (for the newspaper). What's the benefit of giving these things up?

Posted by: Lisa Williams at June 22, 2006 12:39 AM | Permalink

Sorry, Daniel, I shouldn't shorten your name to "Dan," since I have no idea if you go by that in real life.

Posted by: Lisa Williams at June 22, 2006 12:39 AM | Permalink

One more thing that the "arm's length collaboration" has going through it: the participants are pointing (linking) to each other, which is profoundly motivating. In the Google world, it may be better to have bloggers *off* your own site pointing to you than it is to have them publishing material on your own site. If they link to you, it raises your PageRank; if you point from the paper to a blog, you've raised the value of that blogger's own little patch of the Internet, which is engaging and exciting for them. Virtuous cycle commences.

Posted by: Lisa Williams at June 22, 2006 12:45 AM | Permalink

re Lisa's

> Dan[iel]: Why would Anna's group go to the paper?

Limitations - in motivation, time and talent - to what a "network" of size 1 can accomplish is one reason. Access to resources like Lexis-Nexis is another. But the twin benefits of experience and authority are the big, big reasons, if someone(s) might not like what you're looking into.

For the endeavor to succeed, newspaper and bloggers would likely need to have congruent goals and values.

If the Sacramento Bee ever gets a cit-j outreach going akin to Lex Alexander's project in Greensboro, it'd be very appealing.

Posted by: Anna Haynes at June 22, 2006 2:03 AM | Permalink

New post alert... Case Study for an Unconference: Ken Sands brings spokesmanreview.com to BloggerCon IV. In Spokane, we know the users are in charge of their informational encounter with us. Increasingly we operate 'on demand' from them. Only a fool would fail to recognize the new balance of power. But these are difficult notions for the Association of Tight-Assed Editors of America.

I will leave the comments here open. But check out the case study.

Posted by: Jay Rosen at June 22, 2006 2:33 AM | Permalink

Sorry, Daniel, I shouldn't shorten your name to "Dan," since I have no idea if you go by that in real life.

No, that's fine. Lots of people call me Dan, including my wife, who also calls me "Danny." But most people just call me "Asshole."

As to your question: I'm playing along with the thought experiment here and trying to keep my focus on the distributed model, rather than the blog-paper cooperation model. As I envision it, that means a bunch of people contributing pieces of work to one larger project. Such a model wouldn't even require that the participants blog -- only that each knows how to use a computer to communicate.

As for newspapers cooperating with bloggers, I see ZERO benefit to bloggers from those kinds of agreements. (Well, maybe one: if a newspaper wants to offer an ad-network/revenue-sharing plan to local bloggers, it might require some kind of agreement on appropriate content).

As for the "bloggers identify good stories" relationship you mention, you might want to talk with Lex about the way they handle that in Greensboro: If I remember it correctly, their reporters have to cite the blogger who had the original idea, even if the N&R did 100 percent of the reporting that goes into the print story. A very enlightened policy.

Posted by: Daniel Conover at June 22, 2006 9:38 AM | Permalink

I see a couple of problems. One is motivation and the other is connection, or ownership.

Why should the many associate themselves with trad media's new efforts?
Use the example of assembling info on recreation in a resort area like the best of the Pacific Northwest. What if a blogger sets up a website and various contributors contribute what they know about conditions, opportunities, and warnings? With enough traffic, the site could have ads. Where does the local paper come in?
The other question of motivation is whether the trad media involved in this experiment can reliably expect enough of the many to be interested in the same things as they are.

The other issue, connection or ownership, is what value the trad media brings to the many, considering blogs provide at least some opportunity to aggregate the work of the many. How do you do it better than a well-run blog?

Posted by: Richard Aubrey at June 22, 2006 12:31 PM | Permalink

This argument has been made, but why do newspaper and media websites not charge for access? I think it's foolish. Make people pay and then you truely know the value of the content.

The best way to assess the value of something is the take away. Plus we know that the media will be going all electronic. Go on the offensive rather than lamenting the slow death. MSM websites are barely monetizing the page views now. (The dead tree versions aren't free.) How many businesses just give away their product? If people don't want to pay for the news now, they will never pay for it.

Blogs that primarily do media criticism will have to pay for that priviledge or develop original content.

I have a friend who live in Mississippi (one of my former newspaper stops) who a few years ago put a working window air condition unit in front of his house hoping someone would take it. No one did. Then he put a for sale sign on it, and the next day it was gone.

In open source software, I mentioned that people prefer Windows vs. Linux, eventhough Linux is better and free. (It's more complicated than that since Mr. Softee has a monopoly and can leverage that with computer manufactures. Plus, other software computer write more products for the Windows platform.) All the geeks and hackers who help program Linux have ownership in their parts of the project. It's not assigned, they just pick the area they want to develop. The difference with open source journalism is that the software tool can be reused and built upon. Whereas in journalism, it's once and done, and you must start over with the next project.

Posted by: Hue at June 22, 2006 1:42 PM | Permalink

distributed journalism : distributed computing :: ?? : SETI

Now that we have succeeded in achieving an improbable degree of accord on this board, it is just a matter of finding the SETI of this genre.:-)

Posted by: village idiot at June 22, 2006 9:38 PM | Permalink

could someone please post another comment on the Ken Sands thread. I thought he made some excellent and thought provoking suggestions, but my comment has been the only one on the thread all day.

(hell, at this point, I'd almost settle for one of JVS's "nobody cares what you think" posts.

almost

;)

Posted by: plukasiak at June 22, 2006 11:22 PM | Permalink

Notes (by Dave W?) from the session are here

Posted by: Anna Haynes at June 23, 2006 4:29 PM | Permalink

correction, the notes are by Doc Searls not Dave W.

An off topic Q. for Jay, re Lisa Williams' session - "in order to become a published writer... I had to pass my beliefs through an editor... frustrating..."

What sorts of things does an "editor" filter prevent you from saying? or is it just that you have to fight/argue in order to say them (you reach your destination, but have to slog through wet concrete to do so)?

Posted by: Anna Haynes at June 23, 2006 10:52 PM | Permalink

Here's the podcast (audio) version of the session I did. Participants had some difficulty answering my questions, and a good number of them were pretty clearly off topic, making general observations about blogging and the news media that had little to do with users-know-more-than-we-do journalism. Even that's instructive, however.

Anna: It wasn't the filter preventing me from saying certain things or the editing of my copy. I respect an editors' right to tinker with my writing and feel the good ones usually improve it.

The kind of frustration I was talking about there had much more to do with what was considered a viable idea, what editors think is worth writing about. An example would my series of posts on "rollback." I just don't think I would have been able to publish those ideas as an essay in Columbia Journalism Review or an op ed in the Los Angeles Times. Or if I did they would be watered down.

An even better example is The Abyss of Observation Alone. A whole piece about a story recounting events that may or may not have happened? Editors wouldn't go for it. But I like (need) the freedom to write posts like that, and that's what I was talking about.

Posted by: Jay Rosen at June 24, 2006 4:30 AM | Permalink

Jay Rosen: How does anyone know they're actually doing what they said they would do at thousands of Wal Mart and affiliated stores? You need people (or a team of people) who can find out by going into every store in the country and asking a few simple questions about changes in practice.

Lisa Williams: So, thinking of Jay's example above of widespread checking on WalMart's employment practices: Everybody bring a camera and take a picture of a worker's face. The end result: a huge, web-accessible mosaic of the faces of cheated workers.

Why would either of the above be necessary? Are WalMart's employees some kind of "other" who need to be looked after by journalists or citizen-journalists?

The idea of sending in teams of people to find out what's going on seems a bit elitist. Those are people who are working at WalMart. Many of them have access to the internet and can actually write. I know that wasn't Jay's intent, but still, it comes off as a bit condescending, and misses the point besides.

Lisa's comment just drives the point home. While I guess it was offered in a tongue-in-cheek style, I still found it somewhat insulting, in a National Geographic, let's document the natives' squalor sort of way.

Citizen journalism is about citizens taking control of reporting on things in their lives and on things that affect their lives. It's not about- or at least I don't think it should be about- replacing professional, elitist, protectors of the public interest with amateur ones.

Posted by: Brian O'Connell at June 25, 2006 4:17 PM | Permalink

Huh? Elitist protectors of the public interest? What on earth are you talking about? Where did you get the idea that such a project wouldn't rely on Walmart workers? Not from me.

Posted by: Jay Rosen at June 25, 2006 10:46 PM | Permalink

Jay, rereading your June 19, 2006 10:30 PM comment, it does sounds like the project would rely on WalMart employees as interview subjects, but not as citizen journalists. You say:

But then as you give the teams more time you find they learn from other's methods of getting "inside" the store and finding out.

But there are already lots of people inside. You also specifically cite the store's local customer base as making up these teams, but you don't mention the employees.

Of course it's possible I'm reading too much into the specific wording of your comment.

My larger point (and I did have one) is that the subjects are quite capable of reporting on their own behalf.

Posted by: Brian O'Connell at June 26, 2006 12:06 AM | Permalink

Sounds like using Mechanical Turk to do journalism.

Posted by: Les at June 26, 2006 8:17 AM | Permalink

Jay,

Are you planning a thread on the decision of the New York and Los Angeles Times to publish the details of a classified effort to monitor international banking transactions for terrorist money transfers?

I can't believe this little corner of the online community has ignored the story thus far. This is a more clear-cut case of a violation of federal law on the part of our newspapers than the wiretap flap ever was, because no one is even suggesting that the program was illegal to begin with.

Are newspapers above the law?

Come on over to my place and have at it if you like. Got some good oatmeal stouts in the cooler for yas.

Posted by: Jason Van Steenwyk at June 26, 2006 12:05 PM | Permalink

I'll be on Hugh Hewitt's show about it tonight, Jason. Here's a sample of what HH thinks. It's 6-9 EST. My bit is around 7:45.

I am working on something else right now for PressThink, but if I have something to say on the banking systems story I will later.

Posted by: Jay Rosen at June 26, 2006 3:14 PM | Permalink

I thought much of Keller's letter to his readers was wishy-washy, but I was struck by the passage:

"A reasonable person, informed about this program, might well decide to applaud it. That said, we hesitate to preempt the role of legislators and courts, and ultimately the electorate, which cannot consider a program if they don't know about it."

Posted by: Steve Lovelady at June 26, 2006 5:07 PM | Permalink

Yeah, I was struck by that passage as well. Specifically, I was struck by its utter vapidity.

Keller claims he hesitates to preempt the role of legislators and courts - but that's precisely what he did.

To use a couple of historical analogies, the public also could not consider the program to decipher the Enigma code, nor could they consider whether it was ethical to have broken the Japanese code prior to the Battle of Midway if they had not known about that, either. But thank God they didn't.

The electorate's elected representatives knew about the program - Congress had been fully briefed. And both parties accepted the program as valuable.

No one is seriously arguing that the program was illegal. Indeed, the Times pretty much stipulates that it was.

The Times just didn't care. They didn't care about a damn thing other than themselves.

I'm not a fan of accusing media outlets of treason for running with a story. But this is about as close as one can get.

Cretins.

Posted by: Jason Van Steenwyk at June 26, 2006 11:58 PM | Permalink

Is there a transcript of Jay Rosen on Hugh Hewitt's show?

I don't see his segment on www.radioblogger.com under June 26.

Thanks,
Marc

Posted by: Marc Siegel at June 26, 2006 11:59 PM | Permalink

If and when I do a post on the banking systems story you can all start your prosecutions for treason then. Until then go to Jason's Indict the New York Times, or Mark Anderson's blog, or neocon's YARGB.

Here's the transcript of my talk with Hewitt.

Posted by: Jay Rosen at June 27, 2006 8:45 AM | Permalink

Meanwhile, there is a new post: The People Formerly Known as the Audience.

"You don’t own the eyeballs. You don’t own the press, which is now divided into pro and amateur zones. You don’t control production on the new platform, which isn’t one-way. There’s a new balance of power between you and us. The people formerly known as the audience are simply the public made realer, less fictional, more able, less predictable. You should welcome that, media people..."

This thread is closed. Cheers.

Posted by: Jay Rosen at June 27, 2006 8:50 AM | Permalink