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Read about Jay Rosen's book, What Are Journalists For?

Excerpt from Chapter One of What Are Journalists For? "As Democracy Goes, So Goes the Press."

Essay in Columbia Journalism Review on the changing terms of authority in the press, brought on in part by the blog's individual--and interactive--style of journalism. It argues that, after Jayson Blair, authority is not the same at the New York Times, either.

"Web Users Open the Gates." My take on ten years of Internet journalism, at Washingtonpost.com

Read: Q & As

Jay Rosen, interviewed about his work and ideas by journalist Richard Poynder

Achtung! Interview in German with a leading German newspaper about the future of newspapers and the Net.

Audio: Have a Listen

Listen to an audio interview with Jay Rosen conducted by journalist Christopher Lydon, October 2003. It's about the transformation of the journalism world by the Web.

Five years later, Chris Lydon interviews Jay Rosen again on "the transformation." (March 2008, 71 minutes.)

Interview with host Brooke Gladstone on NPR's "On the Media." (Dec. 2003) Listen here.

Presentation to the Berkman Center at Harvard University on open source journalism and NewAssignment.Net. Downloadable mp3, 70 minutes, with Q and A. Nov. 2006.

Video: Have A Look

Half hour video interview with Robert Mills of the American Microphone series. On blogging, journalism, NewAssignment.Net and distributed reporting.

Jay Rosen explains the Web's "ethic of the link" in this four-minute YouTube clip.

"The Web is people." Jay Rosen speaking on the origins of the World Wide Web. (2:38)

One hour video Q & A on why the press is "between business models" (June 2008)

Recommended by PressThink:

Town square for press critics, industry observers, and participants in the news machine: Romenesko, published by the Poynter Institute.

Town square for weblogs: InstaPundit from Glenn Reynolds, who is an original. Very busy. Very good. To the Right, but not in all things. A good place to find voices in diaolgue with each other and the news.

Town square for the online Left. The Daily Kos. Huge traffic. The comments section can be highly informative. One of the most successful communities on the Net.

Rants, links, blog news, and breaking wisdom from Jeff Jarvis, former editor, magazine launcher, TV critic, now a J-professor at CUNY. Always on top of new media things. Prolific, fast, frequently dead on, and a pal of mine.

Eschaton by Atrios (pen name of Duncan B;ack) is one of the most well established political weblogs, with big traffic and very active comment threads. Left-liberal.

Terry Teachout is a cultural critic coming from the Right at his weblog, About Last Night. Elegantly written and designed. Plus he has lots to say about art and culture today.

Dave Winer is the software wiz who wrote the program that created the modern weblog. He's also one of the best practicioners of the form. Scripting News is said to be the oldest living weblog. Read it over time and find out why it's one of the best.

If someone were to ask me, "what's the right way to do a weblog?" I would point them to Doc Searls, a tech writer and sage who has been doing it right for a long time.

Ed Cone writes one of the most useful weblogs by a journalist. He keeps track of the Internet's influence on politics, as well developments in his native North Carolina. Always on top of things.

Rebecca's Pocket by Rebecca Blood is a weblog by an exemplary practitioner of the form, who has also written some critically important essays on its history and development, and a handbook on how to blog.

Dan Gillmor used to be the tech columnist and blogger for the San Jose Mercury News. He now heads a center for citizen media. This is his blog about it.

A former senior editor at Pantheon, Tom Englehardt solicits and edits commentary pieces that he publishes in blog form at TomDispatches. High-quality political writing and cultural analysis.

Chris Nolan's Spot On is political writing at a high level from Nolan and her band of left-to-right contributors. Her notion of blogger as a "stand alone journalist" is a key concept; and Nolan is an exemplar of it.

Barista of Bloomfield Avenue is journalist Debbie Galant's nifty experiment in hyper-local blogging in several New Jersey towns. Hers is one to watch if there's to be a future for the weblog as news medium.

The Editor's Log, by John Robinson, is the only real life honest-to-goodness weblog by a newspaper's top editor. Robinson is the blogging boss of the Greensboro News-Record and he knows what he's doing.

Fishbowl DC is about the world of Washington journalism. Gossip, controversies, rituals, personalities-- and criticism. Good way to keep track of the press tribe in DC

PJ Net Today is written by Leonard Witt and colleagues. It's the weblog of the Public Journalisn Network (I am a founding member of that group) and it follows developments in citizen-centered journalism.

Here's Simon Waldman's blog. He's the Director of Digital Publishing for The Guardian in the UK, the world's most Web-savvy newspaper. What he says counts.

Novelist, columnist, NPR commentator, Iraq War vet, Colonel in the Army Reserve, with a PhD in literature. How many bloggers are there like that? One: Austin Bay.

Betsy Newmark's weblog she describes as "comments and Links from a history and civics teacher in Raleigh, NC." An intelligent and newsy guide to blogs on the Right side of the sphere. I go there to get links and comment, like the teacher said.

Rhetoric is language working to persuade. Professor Andrew Cline's Rhetorica shows what a good lens this is on politics and the press.

Davos Newbies is a "year-round Davos of the mind," written from London by Lance Knobel. He has a cosmopolitan sensibility and a sharp eye for things on the Web that are just... interesting. This is the hardest kind of weblog to do well. Knobel does it well.

Susan Crawford, a law professor, writes about democracy, technology, intellectual property and the law. She has an elegant weblog about those themes.

Kevin Roderick's LA Observed is everything a weblog about the local scene should be. And there's a lot to observe in Los Angeles.

Joe Gandelman's The Moderate Voice is by a political independent with an irrevant style and great journalistic instincts. A link-filled and consistently interesting group blog.

Ryan Sholin's Invisible Inkling is about the future of newspapers, online news and journalism education. He's the founder of WiredJournalists.com and a self-taught Web developer and designer.

H20town by Lisa Williams is about the life and times of Watertown, Massachusetts, and it covers that town better than any local newspaper. Williams is funny, she has style, and she loves her town.

Dan Froomkin's White House Briefing at washingtonpost.com is a daily review of the best reporting and commentary on the presidency. Read it daily and you'll be extremely well informed.

Rebecca MacKinnon, former correspondent for CNN, has immersed herself in the world of new media and she's seen the light (great linker too.)

Micro Persuasion is Steve Rubel's weblog. It's about how blogs and participatory journalism are changing the business of persuasion. Rubel always has the latest study or article.

Susan Mernit's blog is "writing and news about digital media, ecommerce, social networks, blogs, search, online classifieds, publishing and pop culture from a consultant, writer, and sometime entrepeneur." Connected.

Group Blogs

CJR Daily is Columbia Journalism Review's weblog about the press and its problems, edited by Steve Lovelady, formerly of the Philadelpia Inquirer.

Lost Remote is a very newsy weblog about television and its future, founded by Cory Bergman, executive producer at KING-TV in Seattle. Truly on top of things, with many short posts a day that take an inside look at the industry.

Editors Weblog is from the World Editors Fourm, an international group of newspaper editors. It's about trends and challenges facing editors worldwide.

Journalism.co.uk keeps track of developments from the British side of the Atlantic. Very strong on online journalism.

Digests & Round-ups:

Memeorandum: Single best way I know of to keep track of both the news and the political blogosphere. Top news stories and posts that people are blogging about, automatically updated.

Daily Briefing: A categorized digest of press news from the Project on Excellence in Journalism.

Press Notes is a round-up of today's top press stories from the Society of Professional Journalists.

Richard Prince does a link-rich thrice-weekly digest called "Journalisms" (plural), sponsored by the Maynard Institute, which believes in pluralism in the press.

Newsblog is a daily digest from Online Journalism Review.

E-Media Tidbits from the Poynter Institute is group blog by some of the sharper writers about online journalism and publishing. A good way to keep up

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July 31, 2007

"Find Some New Information and Put it Into Your Post." Standards for Pro-Am Journalism at OffTheBus

You can't write an FAQ like this until you have operated a while without it. People have to ask you questions, and from the actual frequency of some the list grows. "It’s not important to us that contributors keep opinion out. What’s important is that they put new information in."

This following FAQ post instructs contributors to OffTheBus in what we are seeking. It also shows PressThink readers how pro-am journalism is developing in NewAssignment.Net’s second major project. (The first was Assignment Zero. It’s now concluded. Launched July 18, OffTheBus is a collaboration between Huffington Post and New Assignment.)

At this stage—two weeks in—we’re still establishing blogging standards for open platform campaign journalism. The instructions steer away from a rigid divide between news and opinion, replacing it with posts that make an original contribution vs. those that don’t because not enough went into them.

As the project scales a consequence of getting lots of contributors to sign up is that headquarters is quickly overwhelmed by the demand for instructions and “tips.” But a blog post plus comments solves the problem.

Tips on How to Write a Post for OffTheBus and Possibly Make the Front Page

(Orginally published at OffTheBus. Lightly edited.)

As things start rolling, we’re getting a lot of inquiries about effective blog posts. Many of the people who signed up with us are seeking some guidance. We’re hoping that if we can get on the same page with contributors about what makes a good post for OffTheBus, then the site will soon start rocking. The following Q and A is intended to move that along.

Q. If I want to get my post on the front page of OffTheBus, what’s the best way?

A. Find some new information and put it into your post. That is the single best way. But there are several different ways to do it. Bring the scattered facts together in one place so that we have a view of them we didn’t have before. Conduct an original act of reporting and tell us what you found. Interview someone (or multiple someones) whose knowledge and perspective adds to our understanding. Witness a campaign event and report what happened, making sense of it for those who weren’t there. Provide an overview of an episode in the news and the range of reactions to it by linking to those reactions and to the best accounts you can find online. (Then express your own attitude.) Take a moment when the campaign for president intersected with your life, came into your house, and push on it until it reveals its secrets.

Q So OffTheBus posts have got to be about the presidential campaign, right?

A. Right. But the campaign for president includes not only the candidates as they struggle to win, but the people running the campaigns or seeking to influence them, the people who report on the race for the news media, those who volunteer or otherwise try to participate out of conviction. It includes the money, the technology, the business of campaigns, the spectacle, the human comedy, the stuff that’s novelistic, if there is any. (An election is an episode in national psychology; the campaign includes that.) It includes the national dialogue that a big election like this ought to inspire, where it’s happening, where it isn’t. And of course the plain meaning of the 2008 election in the lives of the American people, who own it but don’t run it. And it includes the people who are left out, unheard, or erased from the campaign, as well as the view from abroad: how other nations see the next election in the United States.

Q. What about Americans who are abroad and following the campaign?

A. Yes. In a sense they are ideal contributors because the American news media barely realizes what a stake other countries have in our elections, into which they feel dragged. That’s a complicated (and global) story and for users of the American news product almost completely untold— “foreign” territory. So it’s a natural for OffTheBus. We need to be shrewd about finding the gaps in the On the Bus story, the places the narrative doesn’t go, the informational jobs it declines. Good posts grow from that.

Q. So there’s an element of media criticism in a good OffTheBus post?

A. That is not always the case. But it is frequently the case that a good OffTheBus post will start from something lacking or puzzling—or weird—in a news story covered the regular way. “I read this yesterday in the Los Angeles Times and it puzzled me so I did a little checking…” If behind that sentence there is a lot of checking, then we’re golden. Because the story of what you discovered when you checked it out is bound to be engaging.

Q. And what are some things we should not be doing?

A. Some of our contributors seem to think they have stumbled on a more “open” version of the Huffington Post itself, where titles like Snow Perfectly Conveys White House’s Total Arrogance are regularly found. That’s not us. OffTheBus is not about politics in some general sense; it’s about the 2008 contest for president. It lives at the Huffington Post, but its focus is a lot tighter. And as I said in an earlier post, “We don’t want your latest rant at Bush or dig at the Clintons. Sounding off at some stray headline won’t cut it.” We’re not an op-ed page. We’re trying to offer new information and original perspectives not found elsewhere. Posts that do not have requisite links (so we can see for ourselves, get other accounts, check further into it) are not trying very hard to be published.

Q Could you give some examples of what you do want? I mean actual posts?

A. Sure. From our first two weeks in business: OffTheBus contributor Jeff Marion was there when the Democratic candidates spoke before a trial lawyers’ association. He told us what they said and how that particular crowd reacted: what it was listening for, what it heard. Kerri Glover, who was on site, asked the same question of multiple people she ran into at the YouTube debate in Charleston: what difference did it make that citizens asked the questions? Ross Smith knows the guy who was in charge of debate preparation for Bill Richardson. He did a quick interview about how the staff prepared the candidate for the YouTube debate, presented in Q and A form.

Q. Okay, that’s helpful. Any more?

A. Jack Muse collected key links and reactions to the news that the Republican candidates might skip the next YouTube debate in September. (Then again when the story advanced another day.) That’s not new information, but it has value for another reason: it saves the reader time, which is one of the best rules-of-thumb I can offer you. Zack Exley took the same news—Republicans might skip the next YouTube debate—and revealed what was at stake by comparing the two parties strategic positions online. His was an interpretation I had not seen elsewhere, and it made the front page of Huffington Post. In this report that I wrote but eight other OffTheBus’ers contributed to, we tracked down some of those whose video questions got asked in Charleston and asked them about their experience. No one else had their reactions. This too made the front page of Hufffington Post. So the basic model is established. Successul posts filter up and reach a series of section fronts, gaining clicks.

Q. It sounds like you’re saying you don’t want opinion, just reporting. Is that so?

A. No. I’m saying that the best way to make the front page of OffTheBus—and just possibly the Huffington Post—is to offer new information not found elsewhere. Opinion based on discovery, some kind of finding you have made, is likely to be a lot more valuable. We have no desire to muffle our contributors’ opinions. If they are based on information “everyone” has… well, that 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.

Q. Fine, but most of us have day jobs, busy lives and limited time. We cannot go to Charleston or Iowa City for the big event. Most of us don’t know Bill Richardson’s debate prep guy. We’re outsiders, not insiders. So how can we do original reporting, which seems to be what you want? Sure, we could try to call Rudy Giuliani’s campaign and get answers, but what are the chances they’re going to respond? We’re not professional reporters. So they won’t know us from Adam— or Eve!

A. That is true. It is implausible to expect our contributors to do what reporters from Newsweek or NBC News can do. This is not our expectation. The reason we call this project “off the bus” is that we think there’s a role for contributors who do not have the advantages of a Big Media calling card. One can develop original information just by digging online. We urge contributors to work from areas of expertise they may already have. For example, we’d love to have an articulate physician comparing the candidates’ health care plans, which are publicly available. Find the right expert in the academic, business or government worlds to comment and with an email or two you might be able to score a phone or IM interview.

Q. IM interview? Could you explain?

A. Pretty simple. Let’s say you want to do a post on Internet donations. Find someone who has genuinely deep knowledge. He wrote a book. She studies the subject. He used to have a job that put him on the front lines. She went through a similar situation before. Chances are they have been thinking about the 08 campaign. Find an email address, write a note explaining what you are doing and what OffTheBus is, tell your source his or her knowledge is badly needed, and ask for an hour of their time. If they use IM (instant messaging) it’s easier because now you have a ready-made transcript. Just doing that can land you on the front page if it’s a timely interview and tells us something we didn’t know before. And that’s what I mean by: “find some new information and put it into your post.”

Q. What would you recommend for the contributor who is thinking of making a commitment to reporting and posting for OffTheBus, a consistent contributor if it works out?

A. Develop a beat and stick with it. If the beat works and you’re consistent, we’ll promote you as, say, our Elizabeth Edwards: Illness and Strength correspondent (great beat, right?) Here’s a post from Deanie Mills who is thinking about developing a Hatred for Hillary beat. Beats—if our contributors can pull them off—effectively solve the “new information” problem. A specialist tracking one part of the campaign story consistently over time quickly knows more about it than 90 percent of the press, which is something we learned from blogging. Bloggers can apply a more consistent focus to what interests or obsesses them. It is one of their natural advantages.



After Matter: Notes, reactions & links…

Participate in politics by covering the ‘08 campaign for OffTheBus.Net

OffTheBus is having a meet-up and special recruiting session at Yearly Kos in Chicago. It’s happening Friday, Aug. 3, 2:30 to 4:30 pm in room 106-B of the McCormick Place convention center. Find out how you can become a campaign blogger reporting on the election, join in crowd-sourced reporting projects, or even claim your own beat. Whether your skills are in writing, digging, interviewing, organizing people, video, audio, photography or tech… we can definitely use you.

So join Jay Rosen (PressThink, NewAssignment.Net , NYU, co-publisher, OffTheBus) Amanda Michel (Generation Dean, New Organizing Institute, director of OffTheBus) Zack Exley (Director of Online Organizing for Kerry/Edwards 2004, OffTheBus correspondent) and Roy Sekoff (Editor, Huffington Post) in ditching horse race, “haircut” journalism for a more bottom-up, people-powered alternative. They’ll all be there welcoming new contributors.

I’ll also be talking about OffTheBus on a panel at Yearly Kos in Chicago. It’s called Time for a New Kind of News Organization (Saturday, Aug 4, 10:30am, Room 101a of McCormick Place convention center.)

This event will look ask whether, in the age of the Web, a new interactive platform and a new balance of power in the media can also be a new kind of news organization—more two-way than the traditional newsroom, open to many more participants, able to produce reliable information and generate trust without pretending to “objectivity” or taking the view from nowhere. Examples from new media like Daily Kos, TPM Muckraker and OffTheBus.Net will be compared with old media attempts at re-invention. Visions of a new operating style in the production of news will be floated from both sides—new media and old. Lessons from the experience of doing it will be shared.

Speakers include Susan Gardner of Daily Kos, Andrew Golis of TPM Media, and Will Bunch of the blog Attytood and The Philadelphia Daily News.

If you’re going to be there and want to contribute to OffTheBus, email us and let us know you’ll be at the meet-up!

Not going to be in Chicago this weekend? Still want to blog for OffTheBus? The sign up form is here, and you can check beat reporting if that’s an interest.

Will Bunch on his appearance at YearlyKos.

Currently, I am at work on a book that is be published in early 2008 by Vaster Books — the imprint that was created last year by Markos Moulitsas of Daily Kos (whom, for what it’s worth, I have never met or spoken to or even traded emails) and Jane Hamsher of Firedoglake. It’s called “The News Fix,” and the goal is to design a new kind of news organization for the 21st Century, something that I call a “norg.” One of the keys to a successful “norg” — and saving the endangered jobs of American journalists like me — will be to stop talking down to or even insulting our so-called “audience” of readers — but forming a working partnership with everyday citizens who care about good journalism.

People like the American citizens of the Daily/Yearly Kos communities… As for Bill O’Reilly and this manufactured controversy, all I can say is that this mainstream journalist — with more than a quarter-century of experience and several awards under his belt — has looked at Daily Kos and seen an important piece of the puzzle of fixing the American news media. I’m proud and honored to be able to speak at Yearly Kos and to continue the conversation.

For years, my only comment on O’Reilly has been the post I wrote about him, Bill O’Reilly and the Paranoid Style in News. And I am very proud to say that if you put the search terms “Bill O’Reilly” and “paranoid style” into Google that post almost always comes up.

I’m with Will Bunch: the Daily Kos community is one of the strongest on the Web, and all of us who are trying to find a future for journalism on the Web should study its success. That’s what the candidates and politicians who are coming to Chicago should also be doing.

From Assignment Zero: Contributor Anna Haynes interviews Susan Gardner of Daily Kos.

Posted by Jay Rosen at July 31, 2007 12:41 AM   Print

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