PressThink: Case Study for an Unconference: Ken Sands brings spokesmanreview.com to BloggerCon IV

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."

Ken Sands is the online publisher for The Spokesman-Review in Spokane (circ. 100,000) where he has worked since 1981. He is an active member of the Online News Association. He told me he had always wanted to come to a BloggerCon.

At the session I’m leading (Users-Know-More-Than-We-Do Journalism, June 23, 10:30-11:45 am, background here) I hope we can conjure with the case in Spokane. Ken Sands and his editor Steve Smith—who was recently profiled in the Boston Phoenix—would like to do more social network journalism, if they can figure out how. That’s where the mix and flow and people at BloggerCon come in.

Here’s Ken with the facts of the case. It’s background for anyone coming Friday, but the discussion can start now in comments. —JR

Special to PressThink

Case Study for an Unconference
by Ken Sands
Online Publisher, SpokesmanReview.com

I’ve been to about 30 cities in the past year or so to speak at journalism conferences and offer advice to newspapers on what to do with their web operations. That’s because in an industry that finds the Internet pretty scary, I’m a dissenter, one of a handful of editors who’ve embraced the disruptions and are keen to experiment. So I get called upon to deliver the “magic bullet” solution everyone’s looking for.

I’m going to BloggerCon IV because I know there is no magic bullet. There’s only the challenge of doing new stuff that informs the people who choose to use it. I’ll be at Jay’s session in San Francisco because I want to learn about that and because “empowering the users,” the theme of this year’s BloggerCon according to Dave Winer, is exactly what my site, www.spokesmanreview.com, needs to do.

I am the publisher of that site. And I’m trying to do better journalism with it. I need to know about the tools in use (but not in our industry) and how to get them for my newspaper. I want to hear about technology that doesn’t exist yet, but could be invented.

This is no idle exercise. Ideas that come out of BloggerCon can meet their test in Spokane. Our newspaper is eager to experiment. We’ve proven it before, and received industry recognition. Our latest adventure is part of our Transparent Newsroom initiative. We just started webcasting our two daily news meetings. Now you can watch us sift through events and make decisions. We think it will improve trust. But no one knows.

Here’s what I believe: The readers and users know more than we do. How do we make from that better journalism? I have some ideas to test with you. But, first, the background on us.

Regional portrait

Spokane’s metro area is about half a million people, making it the biggest population center on the northern tier between Seattle and Minneapolis. It’s historically a blue-collar town, a regional hub for railroads, timber, mining and agriculture, and home to a large Air Force base. It’s a politically conservative region in a liberal state. (In 1994, U.S. Speaker of the House Tom Foley, a Democrat who had been in office 30 years, was not re-elected by eastern Washington voters.) More than 90 percent of the residents are white.

The news out of Spokane is equal parts Norman Rockwell and Norman Bates. For more than 50 years, South Hill neighbors have been gathering around an iced-over pond on Christmas Eve to sing Christmas carols. Spokane is known as a great place to raise a family. Bing Crosby grew up here. But it’s also a town where a serial killer murdered more than a dozen prostitutes and a serial rapist once terrorized the city. Our gay-bashing mayor was recalled last year following allegations that he had molested young boys, and used his office to lure young men into having sex with him.

The Spokane region is an odd mix of rugged individualism and conformity. Some people come to this region of beautiful lakes and mountains to escape from city life. Yet social events take on epic proportions. The 12k Bloomsday road race is the biggest timed road race in the U.S., with around 50,000 participants. The annual Hoopfest tournament (held this weekend) has about 25,000 players and is the largest three-on-three street basketball tournament in the country. Clearly, when people here like something, they really like it.

The Newspaper

In Spokane the owners are local people— a rarity in the newspaper industry. The Cowles family of Spokane has owned The Spokesman-Review since 1894. It’s their only newspaper.

In 1910 there were 47 full-time, professional journalists and 250 “correspondents,” or freelance writers, sending in stories and tidbits from throughout eastern Washington, northern Idaho and western Montana. Jump to 2001. The staff of full-time professional journalists had grown dramatically (a disputed number, but somewhere around 167), while the freelancers were down to a dozen or so feature writers and reviewers.

Future business model

Over the past five years, the newspaper has lost 30-40 positions from its peak staffing level. If the newspaper industry continues to struggle with its business model—most observers believe it will—the number of full-time professionals on the news staff may continue to shrink until a new equilibrium suitable to ownership is found. Could we build a sustainable business around, say, 47 full-time staff journalists and 250 part-time, freelance journalists… and perhaps thousands of other users who are participants in the newsgathering process? The people here are community-minded and they are “joiners,” up to a point. We don’t know yet whether they would be willing to join in our readers-know-more-than us experiments. But there’s only one way to find out: try stuff.

Doing good journalism

This is not just a matter of an industry met with disruptive technology, struggling to adapt. Technology may let us harness the “power of many” to create a kind of journalism that never was possible before – to gain knowledge that’s been hard to get, or once gotten hard to analyze.

Journalism is not known for innovation. The Spokesman-Review is an exception. The Cowles family has embraced the ethic of trying stuff to see what works, first under long-time editor Chris Peck, and since 2002 under the editor Steve Smith.

Smith’s arrival in Spokane coincided with an explosion of interest in the Web. Shortly before he got there, in early 2002, the newspaper began its first efforts at blogging. Smith created a new position – managing editor of online and new media– and directed the staff to break the rules. A true experiment, he likes to point out, has an uncertain outcome. Failures will happen. 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.

Data points outside the media

For about a dozen years, I’ve been following the social network of University of Oregon sports fans. An email listserv evolved into a web site run by volunteers, which joined with other fan-based sites in the “Scout” network. That network now has paid professionals, and thousands of fans cough up $99.95 a year for access to premium content. In all the time I’ve watched this social network develop, it’s always been the first to report University of Oregon sports news. Not once have I seen a breaking news account in the mainstream media that hadn’t already been reported by the social network.

When the Iraq war began in March 2003, I discovered Command-post.org, a volunteer network of media watchers around the globe who found, and linked to, original reporting from a vast range of media sources 24/7. How did this aggregation service compare to the vast resources of, for example, the Associated Press? No contest. Command-post was better, faster, and far more comprehensive. Alan Nelson explained the concept—he called it “the power of many”—in a speech to newspaper editors in 2004.

Progress at The Spokesman-Review

Opinion writer and columnist Dave Oliveria has a “talk-of-the-town” blog in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, a resort community of about 100,000 people. He happens to be very good at blogging. He has a loyal base of readers and contributors, many of whom have started their own blogs, even forming a social network. When Dave live-blogged a recent primary election, his Huckleberries Online (HBO) blog had 11,000 pageviews and 500 comments in one day. Writers frequently bring up issues that then are addressed by government officials. HBO is a public space that is watched by people in power. Here’s a quote from one blog participant (a former city official):

“I’m often in contact with officials from throughout north Idaho. Invariably, the discussion turns to HBO, and how many of them come blurking for public input on important issues. Sometimes, it’s the only public input they’ll get on an issue until, of course, they’ve made a decision on something. Like me, they wish people would comment before a decision has been made, at public hearings scheduled for that purpose. Beyond that, there’s HBO.”

We’re also in beta testing of a blog for an outlying community in eastern Washington. It’s called the Deer Park Dispatch, and is intended to be a place for users to surface the news of their community— one that’s usually ignored by the newspaper. At “News is a Conversation” the readers are the bloggers. They critique us, we respond. Sometimes we ask questions to get feedback.

Where to go from here

These efforts merely scratch the surface of what’s possible, and this is where we need help from BloggerCon participants.

We know there are local knowledge networks. Should we try to “tap into” them, or is it better to leave them alone until something happens to make partnership possible? Correspondents— we’re familiar with them. But we don’t know how to operate a vast and dispersed network of correspondents, linking hundreds or even thousands. Does anyone?

Here are some ideas we’ve had. They reflect the state of our thinking, pre-BloggerCon.

College sports. The big sports teams around here are Washington State University football and Gonzaga University basketball. Social networks already exist on fan sites in the Scout or Rivals networks. New information is invariably reported there first. But it’s hard to find, sometimes, because of the proliferation of banter. Part of the appeal of sites like those is the opportunity to share random thoughts and opinions. Is the banter a necessary part of the network? Does it get in the way of surfacing news, or does news flow to the top because of banter-generated interest? We have sports writers who are one-person operations already working too many hours a week to write one or two stories a day based on their reporting; we gave them blogs but they are spread too thin to master the form. Yet the network effects are such that they’ll fall behind if they are not online with the fans. What are we missing?

A new, interactive beat. A simple way to get going is to designate one reporter, on one beat (health and medicine, public schools, youth sports) whose mission would be to harness and aggregate the knowledge of readers and users in order to do better journalism. This is largely a cultural issue. It’s difficult to find a reporter who “gets it.” It’s tough for their editors to adopt a totally foreign method of generating news. But it’s also a cultural issue for the readers, as well as a technical challenge for us. How could such a beat-plus-network be developed online? Where should we start?

Consumer-goods comparison shopping. Spokane residents love a good deal. So much so that they’re willing to drive across town (it’s not that far) to save a few bucks on groceries or other goods. We already know about gasbuddy.com, and how drivers share information with each other about where to find the cheapest gas. Maybe we should set up a site where users could share information about commodities like bread, milk, and many, many other essential items. How would it work?

A regional online encyclopedia. From the Spokesman-Review, possibly a joint project with local high schools. A good supplement to Wikipedia, or redundant and unnecessary?

Outdoors and recreation: real time data sharing. Our region has one of the highest interest levels in the nation for outdoor sports and activities. We could try to create a site where users could share news and information about their passions. What does the Liberty Ridge route on Mount Rainier look like for this weekend? Is the water level on the Alberton Gorge of the Clark Fork River low enough to be safe following last weekend’s fatality? I know these sites exist already, in bits and pieces, but to my knowledge they are not well aggregated.

High school sports news. The demand here is huge. We have a statistical data base and it’s a start, but what we need is a site that empowers people to inform themselves about their school teams. How?

Weather watch. We recently purchased the domain name Spokaneweather.com with the intent of building a site where weather watchers and photographers could document, in great detail, the unique weather of our area. If that’s worth doing what’s the best way?

Transportation watch. There are two seasons here-– winter and road repair. Winter destroys the roads, and the rest of the time is spent fixing them. Everyone has “pothole hotlines,” but we want a more structured data base that would include lots of information, such as: quickest routes; ill-timed stoplights; dangerous intersections. How to collect and display it?

Holding politicians’ accountable. We want to give out more report cards on how our public officials are doing in living up to their responsibilities and promises. Is there an open source way of grading political leadership?

Finally, if you look at the “citizen journalism” initiatives launched by mainstream providers in the United States, most of them lack spark, life, or intuitive appeal. The “if you build it they will come” approach clearly hasn’t worked. Is neighborhood or city a flawed concept to begin with? This one has stumped me for years. I don’t know what to do, except link to local bloggers. I certainly wouldn’t replicate the “citizen journalism” we’ve seen so far from mainsteam news organizations; there’s no traction there.

I’m far more impressed with the user-generated content on Flickr and YouTube and even MySpace (where we created a persona for our entertainment site). Those sites work; the mainstream media versions—the industry calls it user-generated content—do not. Why?

After Matter: Notes, reactions & links…

Kevin Anderson at Corante is interested in some of the same questions. See his What would audience-driven journalism look like? (July 3, 2006)

I couldn’t agree with Ken more when he says that there’s no traction in the citizen journalism out of mainstream media outlets. Yes, as we’re about to look back a year after the July 7 bombings here in London, everyone remembers the iconic cameraphone pictures. But I think Ken is talking more about community around content rather than the flood of pictures we now get at the BBC during large news events in the UK. Is there a sense of community, a sense of participation in sending off cameraphone pics to large news organisations?

Probably not.

Mark Jurkowitz of the Boston Phoenix profiles Spokesman-Review editor (and PressThink guest author) Steve Smith, who “brings newspaper transparency to a whole new level.” It begins…

Even in an era of buzzwords such as media “transparency” and “interactive dialogue” (between news consumers and news producers), what’s happening at the Spokesman-Review in Spokane, Washington, is pretty strange stuff.
Beginning on June 13, the paper began webcasting its two daily news meetings to the public, letting viewers with computers sit in on the key decision-making staff meetings — once considered secret and sacrosanct — at a daily with a full-time staff of almost 130 people.

Now that’s transparency. Jurkowitz comments: “Having spent two decades interviewing newspaper editors of all stripes, what really strikes me about him is a level of candor and introspection that is increasingly rare in a business where freewheeling and extroverted editors — such as the Globe’s Tom Winship and the Washington Post’s Ben Bradlee — have yielded to successors much more inclined to rely on safe, if opaque, corporate-speak.” Very true. (I was interviewed for Jurkowitz’s piece.)

“Moan, moan, moan. Complain, complain, complain. Wallow, wallow, wallow. This could only be a national convention of newspaper editors in the middle of the first decade of the 21st century.” David Shribman, editor of Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, on the American Society of Newspaper Editors convention.

Patricia Sullivan, staff writer for the Washington Post, in an overview of what the Net is doing to the news biz. “Newspapers, the biggest and oldest segment of the mainstream media, are built on the work of creative, contentious and quick-witted people, but also of curmudgeons who resist change.”

Posted by Jay Rosen at June 22, 2006 1:19 AM Print

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." More...

Migration Point for the Press Tribe: "Like reluctant migrants everywhere, the people in the news tribe have to decide what to take with them. When to leave. Where to land. They have to figure out what is essential to their way of life. They have to ask if what they know is portable." More...

Bloggers vs. Journalists is Over: "Here is one advantage bloggers have in the struggle for reputation-- for the user's trust. They are closer to the transaction where trust gets built up on the Web. There's a big difference between tapping a built-up asset, like the St. Pete Times 'brand,' and creating it from scratch." More...

"Where's the Business Model for News, People?" "It’s remarkable to me how many accomplished producers of those goods the future production of which is in doubt are still at the stage of asking other people, “How are we going to pay our reporters if you guys don’t want to pay for our news?'" More...

National Explainer: A Job for Journalists on the Demand Side of News This American Life's great mortgage crisis explainer, The Giant Pool of Money, suggests that "information" and "explanation" ought to be reversed in our order of thought. Especially as we contemplate new news systems. More...

The Beast Without a Brain: Why Horse Race Journalism Works for Journalists and Fails Us. "Just so you know, 'the media' has no mind. It cannot make decisions. Which means it does not 'get behind' candidates. It does not decide to oppose your guy… or gal. It is a beast without a brain. Most of the time, it doesn’t know what it’s doing.." More...

They're Not in Your Club but They Are in Your League: Firedoglake at the Libby Trial: "I’m just advising Newsroom Joe and Jill: make room for FDL in your own ideas about what’s coming on, news-wise. Don’t let your own formula (blog=opinion) fake you out. A conspiracy of the like minded to find out what happened when the national news media isn’t inclined to tell us might be way more practical than you think." More...

Twilight of the Curmudgeon Class: "We’re at the twilight of the curmudgeon class in newsrooms and J-schools. (Though they can still do a lot of damage.) You know they’re giving up when they no longer bother to inform themselves about what they themselves say is happening." More...

Getting the Politics of the Press Right: Walter Pincus Rips into Newsroom Neutrality "The important thing is to show integrity-- not to be a neuter, politically. And having good facts that hold up is a bigger advantage than claiming to reflect all sides equally well." More...

A Most Useful Definition of Citizen Journalism "It's mine, but it should be yours. Can we take the quote marks off now? Can we remove the 'so-called' from in front? With video!." More...

The Master Narrative in Journalism: "Were 'winning' to somehow be removed or retired as the operating system for news, campaign reporting would immediately become harder to do, not because there would be no news, but rather no common, repeatable instructions for deciding what is a key development in the story, a turning point, a surprise, a trend. Master narratives are thus harder to alter than they are to apprehend. For how do you keep the story running while a switch is made?" More...

He Said, She Said Journalism: Lame Formula in the Land of the Active User "Any good blogger, competing journalist or alert press critic can spot and publicize false balance and the lame acceptance of fact-free spin. Do users really want to be left helpless in sorting out who's faking it more? The he said, she said form says they do, but I say decline has set in." More...

Users-Know-More-than-We-Do Journalism: "It's a "put up or shut up" moment for open source methods in public interest reporting. Can we take good ideas like... distributed knowledge, social networks, collaborative editing, the wisdom of crowds, citizen journalism, pro-am reporting... and put them to work to break news?" More...

Introducing NewAssignment.Net: "Enterprise reporting goes pro-am. Assignments are open sourced. They begin online. Reporters working with smart users and blogging editors get the story the pack wouldn't, couldn't or didn't." More...

What I Learned from Assignment Zero "Here are my coordinates for the territory we need to be searching. I got them from doing a distributed trend story with Wired.com and thinking through the results." More...

If Bloggers Had No Ethics Blogging Would Have Failed, But it Didn't. So Let's Get a Clue: "Those in journalism who want to bring ethics to blogging ought to start with why people trust (some) bloggers, not with an ethics template made for a prior platform operating as a closed system in a one-to-many world." More...

The View From Nowhere: "Occupy the reasonable middle between two markers for 'vocal critic,' and critics look ridiculous charging you with bias. Their symmetrical existence feels like proof of an underlying hysteria. Their mutually incompatible charges seem to cancel each other out. The minute evidence they marshall even shows a touch of fanaticism." More...

Rollback: "This White House doesn't settle for managing the news--what used to be called 'feeding the beast'--because there is a larger aim: to roll back the press as a player within the executive branch, to make it less important in running the White House and governing the country." More...

Retreat from Empiricism: On Ron Suskind's Scoop: ""Realist, a classic term in foreign policy debates, and reality-based, which is not a classic term but more of an instant classic, are different ideas. We shouldn't fuzz them up. The press is capable of doing that because it never came to terms with what Suskind reported in 2004." More...

Karl Rove and the Religion of the Washington Press: "Savviness--that quality of being shrewd, practical, well-informed, perceptive, ironic, 'with it,' and unsentimental in all things political--is, in a sense, their professional religion. They make a cult of it. And it was this cult that Karl Rove understood and exploited for political gain." More...

Journalism Is Itself a Religion: "We're headed, I think, for schism, tumult and divide as the religion of the American press meets the upheavals in global politics and public media that are well underway. Changing around us are the terms on which authority can be established by journalists. The Net is opening things up, shifting the power to publish around. Consumers are becoming producers, readers can be writers." More...

News Turns from a Lecture to a Conversation: "Some of the pressure the blogs are putting on journalists shows up, then, in the demand for "news as conversation," more of a back-and-forth, less of a pronouncement. This is an idea with long roots in academic journalism that suddenly (as in this year) jumped the track to become part of the news industry's internal dialogue." More...

Two Washington Posts May Be Better Than One: "They're not equals, but Washington and Arlington have their own spheres. Over the newspaper and reporting beats Len Downie is king. Over the website Jim Brady is sovereign. Over the userï¿½s experience no one has total control. There's tension because there's supposed to be tension." More...

Laying the Newspaper Gently Down to Die: "An industry that won't move until it is certain of days as good as its golden past is effectively dead, from a strategic point of view. Besides, there is an alternative if you don't have the faith or will or courage needed to accept reality and deal. The alternative is to drive the property to a profitable demise." More...

Grokking Woodward: "Woodward and Bernstein of 1972-74 didn't have such access, and this probably influenced--for the better--their view of what Nixon and his men were capable of. Watergate wasn't broken by reporters who had entree to the inner corridors of power. It was two guys on the Metro Desk." More...

Maybe Media Bias Has Become a Dumb Debate: "This here is a post for practically everyone in the game of seizing on media bias and denouncing it, which is part of our popular culture, and of course a loud part of our politics. And this is especially for the 'we're fair and balanced, you're not' crowd, wherever I may have located you." More...

Bill O'Reilly and the Paranoid Style in News: "O'Reilly feeds off his own resentments--the establishment sneering at Inside Edition--and like Howard Beale, the 'mad prophet of the airwaves,' his resentments are enlarged by the medium into public grievances among a mass of Americans unfairly denied voice." More...

Thoughts on the Killing of a Young Correspondent: "Among foreign correspondents, there is a phrase: 'parachuting in.' That's when a reporter drops into foreign territory during an emergency, without much preparation, staying only as long as the story remains big. The high profile people who might parachute in are called Bigfoots in the jargon of network news. The problem with being a Bigfoot, of course, is that it's hard to walk in other people's shoes." More...

The News From Iraq is Not Too Negative. But it is Too Narrow: "The bias charges are getting more serious lately as the stakes rise in Iraq and the election. But there is something lacking in press coverage, and it may be time for wise journalists to assess it. The re-building story has gone missing. And without it, how can we judge the job Bush is doing?." More...

The Abyss of Observation Alone. "There are hidden moral hazards in the ethic of neutral observation and the belief in a professional 'role' that transcends other loyalties. I think there is an abyss to observation alone. And I feel it has something to do with why more people don't trust journalists. They don't trust that abyss." More...

"Find Some New Information and Put it Into Your Post." Standards for Pro-Am Journalism at OffTheBus: "Opinion based on information 'everyone' has is less valuable than opinion journalism based on information that you dug up, originated, or pieced together. So it’s not important to us that contributors keep opinion out. What’s important is that they put new information in. More...

Out in the Great Wide Open: Maybe you heard about the implosion of Wide Open, a political blog started by the Cleveland Plain Dealer with four "outside" voices brought in from the ranks of Ohio bloggers: two left, two right. Twelve points you may not have seen elsewhere." More...

Some Bloggers Meet the Bosses From Big Media: "What capacity for product development do news organizations show? Zip. How are they on nurturing innovation? Terrible. Is there an entreprenurial spirit in newsrooms? No. Do smart young people ever come in and overturn everything? Never." More...

Notes and Comment on BlogHer 2005 "I think the happiest conference goers at BlogHer were probably the newbies, people who want to start blogging or just did. They got a lot of good information and advice. Some of the best information was actually dispensed in response to the fears provoked by blogging, which shouldnï¿½t be avoided, the sages said, but examined, turned around, defused, and creatively shrunk.." More...

Top Ten List: What's Radical About the Weblog Form in Journalism? "The weblog comes out of the gift economy, whereas most of today's journalism comes out of the market economy." More...

A Second Top Ten List: What's Conservative About the Weblog Form in Journalism? "The quality of any weblog in journalism depends greatly on its fidelity to age old newsroom commandments like check facts, check links, spell things correctly, be accurate, be timely, quote fairly." More...

Blogging is About Making and Changing Minds: "Sure, weblogs are good for making statements, big and small. But they also force re-statement. Yes, they're opinion forming. But they are equally good at unforming opinion, breaking it down, stretching it out." More...

The Weblog: An Extremely Democratic Form in Journalism "It's pirate radio, legalized; it's public access coming closer to life. Inside the borders of Blogistan (a real place with all the problems of a real place) we're closer to a vision of 'producer democracy' than we are to any of the consumerist views that long ago took hold in the mass media, including much of the journalism presented on that platform." More...

No One Owns Journalism: "And Big Media doesn't entirely own the press, because if it did then the First Amendment, which mentions the press, would belong to Big Media. And it doesn't. These things were always true. The weblog doesn't change them. It just opens up an outlet to the sea. Which in turn extends 'the press' to the desk in the bedroom of the suburban mom, where she blogs at night." More...

Brain Food for BloggerCon: Journalism and Weblogging in Their Corrected Fullness "Blogging is one universe. Its standard unit is the post, its strengths are the link and the low costs of entry, which means lots of voices. Jounalism is another universe. Its standard unit is "the story." Its strengths are in reporting, verification and access-- as in getting your calls returned." More...

Dispatches From the Un-Journalists: "Journalists think good information leads to opinion and argument. It's a logical sequence. Bloggers think that good argument and strong opinion cause people to seek information, an equally logical sequence. What do the bloggers bring to this? My short answer to the press is: everything you have removed."More...

Political Jihad and the American Blog: Chris Satullo Raises the Stakes "Journalists, you can stop worrying about bloggers 'replacing' the traditional news media. We're grist for their mill, says Satullo, a mill that doesn't run without us. Bloggers consume and extend the shelf life of our reporting, and they scrutinize it at a new level of intensity.."More...

Raze Spin Alley, That Strange Creation of the Press: "Spin Alley, an invention of the American press and politicos, shows that the system we have is in certain ways a partnership between the press and insiders in politics. They come together to mount the ritual. An intelligent nation is entitled to ask if the partners are engaged in public service when they bring to life their invention... Alternative thesis: they are in a pact of mutual convenience that serves no intelligible public good." More...

Horse Race Now! Horse Race Tomorrow! Horse Race Forever!: "How is it you know you're the press? Because you have a pass that says PRESS, and people open the gate. The locker room doors admit you. The story must be inside that gate; that's why they give us credentials. We get closer. We tell the fans what's going on. And if this was your logic, Bill James tried to bust it. Fellahs, said he to the baseball press, you have to realize that you are the gate." More...

Psst.... The Press is a Player: "The answer, I think, involves an open secret in political journalism that has been recognized for at least 20 years. But it is never dealt with, probably because the costs of facing it head on seem larger than the light tax on honesty any open secret demands. The secret is this: pssst... the press is a player in the campaign. And even though it knows this, as everyone knows it, the professional code of the journalist contains no instructions in what the press could or should be playing for?" More...

Die, Strategy News: "I think it's a bankrupt form. It serves no clear purpose, has no sensible rationale. The journalists who offer us strategy news do not know what public service they are providing, why they are providing it, for whom it is intended, or how we are supposed to use this strange variety of news."More...

He Said, She Said, We Said: "When journalists avoid drawing open conclusions, they are more vulnerable to charges of covert bias, of having a concealed agenda, of not being up front about their perspective, of unfairly building a case (for, against) while pretending only to report 'what happened.'" More...

If Religion Writers Rode the Campaign Bus: "Maybe irony, backstage peaking and "de-mystify the process" only get you so far, and past that point they explain nothing. Puzzling through the convention story, because I'm heading right into it myself, made me to realize that journalism's contempt for ritual was deeply involved here. Ritual is newsless; therefore it must be meaningless. But is that really true?."More...

Convention Coverage is a Failed Regime and Bloggers Have Their Credentials: "No one knows what a political convention actually is, anymore, or why it takes 15,000 people to report on it. Two successive regimes for making sense of the event have collapsed; a third has not emerged. That's a good starting point for the webloggers credentialed in Boston. No investment in the old regime and its ironizing." More...

Philip Gourevitch: Campaign Reporting as Foreign Beat: "'A presidential election is a like a gigantic moving television show,' he said. It is the extreme opposite of an overlooked event. The show takes place inside a bubble, which is a security perimeter overseen by the Secret Service. If you go outside the bubble for any reason, you become a security risk until you are screened again by hand."More...

What Time is it in Political Journalism? "Adam Gopnik argued ten years ago that the press did not know who it was within politics, or what it stood for. There was a vacuum in journalism where political argument and imagination should be. Now there are signs that this absence of thought is ending." More...

Off the Grid Journalism: “The assignment was straightforward enough,” writes Marjie Lundstrom of the Sacramento Bee, “talk to people.” When a writer dissents from it or departs from it, the master narrative is a very real thing. Here are two examples: one from politics, one from music. More...

Questions and Answers About PressThink "The Web is good for many opposite things. For quick hitting information. For clicking across a field. For talk and interaction. It's also a depth finder, a memory device, a library, an editor. Not to use a weblog for extended analysis (because most users won't pick that option) is Web dumb but media smart. What's strange is that I try to write short, snappy things, but they turn into long ones." More...

That's quite an impressive (and ambitious) agenda, Ken!

In general, there seems to be three major questions posed by your proposals:

1) What is the best way to tap in to existing "social networks" -- is, the solution "one size fits all" or does the nature of each network require a different approach? (Do the high school sports networks require a different approach than "citizen activist" networks that would be used to hold politicians accountable?)

2) How do you expand/improve the existing social networks? (How do you ensure that a high school sports network covers as many teams in as many sports as possible?)

3) How can the newspaper create new networks, either permanent (weather watchers) or single-issue based?

I have no idea what the answers to these questions are, just suggesting a framework for a larger discussion of your ideas.

Posted by: plukasiak at June 22, 2006 8:12 AM | Permalink

My first response is that a prime opportunity for a newspaper-sponsored website to add value would be aggregating of the information produced by social networks and that established websites are already producing in a diffuse manner--such as the information that bubbles up through the chat in the sports website referred to.

Many readers would surely like access to the information produced in a timely way even when they don't have the time to "chat." I'm thinking a good model to develop for many of these areas that have some established website would be a round up ala Dan Froomkin's roundups of White House coverage. He essentially aggregates information that has been established by others and organizes it as a set of bulletpoints while adding attitude and personal persepective in the process. Such projects would probably require a little more dedication to comprehensive coverage than the Froomkin model, or at least, some more concrete set of specific priorities, but that would certainly be one model to start with.

The Huckleberries Online website sounds like it has already begun this task in some ways. Perhaps one way to think about this problem is the idea of establishing a new "public commons." Turning to this concept would tell us two things: 1) The "commons" in some respects is a product of social networks that are always already there to some degree, but it is also something that requires a real world infrastructure to support it, whether that be a literal commons made up of land at the center of town, or whether it take the form of a virtual site for exchange of views. 2) The most passing glance at Karl Marx or more recent efforts to organize against globalization teaches us that privatization and commodification of the commons are both business models and a way of destroying the commons for personal profit (Robert Kennedy's recent writing on the crony capitalist privatization of government-owned natural resources under the Bush administration such as public forests, oil, and mineral rights for private profits combined with the socialization of privately generated pollution so that private profits remain unaffected by the social consequences of their actions is a high profile example of one form this issue takes).

Open-source journalism faces the following conundrum:
How do we establish a virtual commons that will be recognized and used as a public resource while at the same time privatizing and commodifying it--while at the same time privatizing public resources, privatization historically having been one of the means by which the commons is typically destroyed? Is a "privatized commons" an oxymoron? Would "open-source journalism" that is not an oxymoron have to be a non-profit entity or at least have to move from a model of capitalist ownership to a coop model of some kind?

Isn't the problem precisely one of how to privatize public knowledge such that it can produce private profit, but still pass itself off as a public resource? And how do we avoid the resentment of the individuals that actually contribute to generating the common wisdom when we steal their work to produce a profit for the company based on their uncompensated work?

There are obviously several alternatives to addressing this political contradiction at the heart of the project of open-source journalism:
1) Make participants who rise past a certain threshold of participation and become anchors of the virtual community co-owners of the website. This is essentially a coop model. It's their work, why shouldn't they have a voice in how it is utilized and receive a share of whatever profits their labor may generate?

2)Try a long tail approach that compensates individuals in some way, even if public knowledge is still privatized for private profit as part of the model. At least profits of the privatization of public resources would be redistributed to a larger circle, even if the privatization of ownership per se was unchallenged.

3)Stick to more traditional models that involve reporters developing and refining common wisdom and maintaining central control over the privatized results and wonder why the public refuses to contribute to the generation of your company's fortune rather than their own. In this context, why wouldn't they build their own website, get recognition for it, and directly receive any compensation they manage to generate themselves as the owner of the site that is at their disposal?

4) Wait until net neutrality is defeated in Congress as well as at the FCC and corporate media monopolies are restored online. Citizen websites in such circumstances will receive less and less effective distribution absent deep pockets and corporate America can drive a harder bargain for "allowing" distribution of citizen-developed information. The gate-keeping function of the corporation will be reinforced in the field of media and citizens will once again be reduced to begging for crumbs. In the corporate oligarchy such public policy aims to develop, citizen journalism will no longer be such effective competition and can be much more easily coopted or ignored. This is an obvious privilege the cartelization the new "unregulated" post-net neutrality web will offer corporate America and its customers.

Posted by: Mark Anderson at June 24, 2006 5:33 AM | Permalink

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