Lovejoy Journalism and News Literacy

Lessons in Objectivity

aehrenre@colby.edu (Allie Ehrenreich) — Thu, 08 Sep 2011 15:13:26 GMT

I just finished my internship with WBUR's Here and Now, and I'm feeling nostalgic. Working for the show has been rewarding and makes me excited for what the future could bring... (jobs, anyone? I sure hope I can find one post-graduation).

It's interesting to think about biases in the newsroom. Alongside the internship I've been reading from a book Sound Reporting: The NPR Guide to Audio Journalism and Production by Jonathan Kern. He writes:

"If newsrooms were as diverse as the rest of America, there would be lively debates whenever a story idea was suggested. But broadcast journalists are more like one another than they are like the population as a whole, and news reporting can suffer because of it." (12)

It's true. As you sit in a room, processing the news day after day with people you inevitably come to know well, you're bound to expose your personal political beliefs. Yes, the office I was in has an undeniably liberal bent. Even if you actively try to keep a balanced perspective in the news, you're dealing with a room full of like-minded people.

That doesn't mean we were left wanting for lively debate. In fact, sometimes it got so lively our senior producer would have to put the conversation on pause so that we could meet deadline. But it was that debate that was so crucial in the pursuit of integrity. The folks at Here and Now were objective enough to know their own biases and remarkably able to keep the scripts that they wrote relatively balanced.

It's not so unlike a small liberal arts college, in that sense. When you come to Colby, you can safely assume that the population is dramatically more liberal than the country as a whole. In a burst of enthusiasm for our shared beliefs, it's easy for voices to get lost in the mix. So in both the newsroom and the classroom, it's a matter of admitting your own biases, knowing your limits and striving for objectivity. It's also about surrounding yourself with intelligent people willing to call you on your bias, yet having integrity in your convictions. That's what impressed me at Here and Now (among many other things); they were able, somehow, to maintain a balance between objectivity and a strength in their own convictions. I will try to bring that attitude into my life in general--at our school paper, The Echo, in class discussion and term papers, and in day-to-day life.

And, as Simon and Garfunkel sang in "The Boxer:" "Still a man hears what he wants to hear, and he disregards the rest." We're facing a day and age where you can simply go online to a blog somewhere and affirm your own beliefs, all facts to the wind. I think it's important for both news organizations and individuals to open their eyes, ears and minds...and set a goal for honesty and objectivity in communication.

The Way Life Should Be

qnkhan@colby.edu (Qainat Khan) — Thu, 08 Sep 2011 14:20:24 GMT

As my summer drew to a close so did my internship at Maine magazine and my time in Portland. Although the bright lights of New York beckoned, I left the Pine Tree State reluctantly. As Jack said to Ennis in Brokeback Mountain, ?I wish I knew how to quit you.?

I loved my internship at Maine magazine and I am extremely thankful that I got a job I liked in a city I love close to people I care about. However, working at Maine wasn?t all doe-eyed love. Certainly there were moments of tedium and longing for something else as I am sure is the case with any job. As I stuffed envelopes one day I was reading fellow student Oscar Mancinas? blog from his semester abroad in Peru. He had just come back to the States. In his blog, Oscar wrote about an afternoon he had spent at a shelter for girls who had experienced some truly terrible things. And after his afternoon with them, he came to this conclusion:

?These girls, for me, transformed from examples of everything dark in the human spirit, to every act of genuine beauty of which that same human spirit is capable? To sum up my time with these little miracles, I'd like to paraphrase Cormac McCarthy from his novel The Road: ?If these little girls are not the word of God, then He never spoke.??

I smiled in an attempt to blink back tears. I knew that same joy and recognition when I was in India teaching students at the Gandhi Ashram over JanPlan. At the Ashram, I did meaningful work every day, I had the most genuine interactions with my students every day. And now I was stuffing envelopes. While I continued to stuff, my boss Sophie (who was seriously the best boss anyone could ask for) excitedly showed me and my fellow envelope-stuffer/intern Paul the layout for the lead article in September. Seeing the photograph initiated another attempt at stopping the waterworks. It was literally one of those photographs of heartbreaking beauty and normalness, those plastic bag moments of American Beauty fame that make your ?heart cave in.?

***

The lead article for the September issue of Maine magazine is an article about Tide Mill Farm in Edmund Township, Maine (click here to read the article). Tide Mill Farm has been in the Bell family for nine generations, dating back to when Europeans landed on America?s unsullied East Coast of forests and vast wilderness. The King of England gave the first Bell a massive grant of land which remains with the family. The farm, in a word, is stunning. It sits on six miles of shoreline, the cows graze on beautiful green pastures by the ocean. The New York Times ran an article on the farm awhile back, on the viability of small dairy farms.

I took a JanPlan course on Sustainable Agriculture with Andrew Marshall (which changed my life) and learned that people have a really skewed view of what organic means. In point of fact, did you know, the same huge conventional agribusiness organizations had a major hand in determining the criteria for ?USDA ORGANIC CERTIFIED? because they would stand to profit from having an organic brand?

As the USDA has it, to be ?certified organic? simply means not to use synthetic chemicals. It?s a reductive and stupid standard that rips off consumers who think they are saving the world when they are actually still complicit in the same awful practices of conventional farming on a large scale.

Organic in its best and most comprehensive form of the word has so much more to do with SUSTAINABILITY both from an agro-ecology and human ecology perspective. That is, it?s about sustainable soil management and other linked agricultural practices that won?t leave a deleterious impact on the ecology that you are disrupting to grow food. And it is about providing the people who work the farm a stable and steady income for the massive amounts of work and worry that goes into growing food.

This has all been to say that Tide Mill Farm is organic and sustainable in the truest and most comprehensive senses of the words. Carly and Aaron care so deeply about the tradition and the land they are tied to and the implications of living their life this way.

Despite Carly and Aaron?s drive and dedication, there pervades the entire article an air of sadness. Roland Barthes said the thrill of listening to classical music comes from the potential for failure. The audience is aware of the difficulty of the performer?s feat, but the performer manages to produce nonetheless. But sometimes he or she can?t.

I imagine it is much the same with the farm. No matter how trained and smart and dedicated Carly and Aaron are, I cannot imagine the kind of crippling burden they have to bear in order to continue a way of life that is being rendered obsolete by normative measures of success (wealth, progress, efficiency, speed, growth). The potential of failure of their way of life weighs heavily on them, judging from the article.

But hope nonetheless persists: the opening spread shows Aaron and Carly?s son, the ninth generation of Bells, blonde-haired with penetrating eyes like his mother?s, bottle feeding a calf.

And he, with his calf, reminded me of my kids in India, on their communal farm. Of the families who kept livestock and shared their products with their neighbors?milk, meat, eggs. Of the generous people who would always feed me tea and biscuits when I came to visit their homes.

So as I continued stuffing subscription renewals into envelopes I was content, because the people I was preparing to send these envelopes to would be receiving their September issue in the middle of August. Soon enough they would see that same photograph that made my heart cave in. In early September, the magazine will hit newsstands all over Maine, and even more people will see the beautiful farm and have their own reactions.

Whether in the foothills of the Himalayas or in Eastern Maine or Peru, people live with dignity despite hardship and uncertainty. They experience sadness, but also joy in the shouts of their delighted children.

And like Lester in American Beauty, I realize:

?It's hard to stay mad, when there's so much beauty in the world. Sometimes I feel like I'm seeing it all at once, and it's too much, my heart fills up like a balloon that's about to burst... And then I remember to relax, and stop trying to hold on to it, and then it flows through me like rain and I can't feel anything but gratitude for every single moment of my stupid little life.?

Fight Club Bleakonomics: Or, at Marketplace, ?Let?s Do the Numbers? (and Hope They Go Up)

dnwasser@colby.edu (Dash Wasserman) — Fri, 12 Aug 2011 13:04:28 GMT

Amid the irritable jolts and jitters of our current economy, a few words from my sage mother appear to ring true: ?You sure chose a good time to work at Marketplace, Dash.?

As a senior English & Creative Writing major, I admit I never got around to taking an economics course during my time at Colby. Instead, I spent my time reading novels and writing short stories, discovering that the world was full of stories waiting to be told. More importantly, though, I found out they were waiting to be heard.

So when I started interning with the business and economics show, Marketplace, I had to develop a working knowledge of our country?s economic landscape. I read up on the jaw-dropping mechanics of the financial crisis in 2008; learned about major Wall Street players and large corporate banks; introduced myself to the controversial and puzzling world of financial regulation; educated myself about the curious habits of financial instruments; and saw the staggering amount of inequality and financial stress affecting average Americans.

And, at this point, I was just catching up... Marketplace was living in the shadow of the 2008 economic meltdown, and while another one seemed to be brewing. A whole whirlwind of economic troubles presented themselves this summer, and it?s been an interesting experience to watch the news unfold with the journalists there to decode it all for you.

First, debates on budget accounting and taxes held our nation?s debt ceiling captive until a bipartisan deal was struck, and it seemed that things would rebound?at least in the short term. Over the next few days things seemed fine until Wall Street nosedived unexpectedly, baffling spectators and economists alike as the numbers fell towards their worst since the recession. To boot, S&P?s downgrade of the U.S. credit rating has had the very fabric of the financial world fraying from within. As stocks tumbled further, people both inside and outside the American financial system appear shaken by the future to come.

Never before had I paid enough attention to the world of economics, or knew how this mysterious thing called ?the market? could affect people with no direct connection to Wall Street.

For me, it?s kind of like that final scene from the film Fight Club where Edward Norton and Helena Bonham Carter hold hands and watch the buildings collapse in front of them. Right now, everything feels like it?s falling apart.

OK, this scene wasn?t just some metaphor for our postmodern condition? Did I mention that those buildings are the offices of credit card buildings? If you watch the film you?ll know that they?re a part of a grand scheme known as ?Project Mayhem??the idea being, that with everyone?s credit obligations erased, the financial world as we know it would literally collapse because everyone would be given a blank slate.

While it may seem like the financial world is, in fact, collapsing from economic smoke and mirrors, there is one key difference between Fight Club and real life. Instead of everyone being freed from their creditors, we?re constantly reminded of our inability to fulfill these obligations.

Mayhem ensues when people realize our economy is reliant on the faith of people. But why?

If interning at Marketplace has taught me anything, it?s that the closer you get to something the larger the distortions become. Sometimes that means faith in the system, and sometimes that means having faith in the idea that the system can be changed. If you get knocked down: grab some soap, clean your scuffs, and get ready to fight for your life.

This reminds me of a Wall Street proverb in one of the offices at Marketplace:

?If you?re going to panic, panic early!?

? The Market

Good luck with that.

Reflections: Interning for Public Radio

aehrenre@colby.edu (Allie Ehrenreich) — Thu, 28 Jul 2011 13:59:51 GMT

Here and Now, where I?ve spent a good part of my summer interning, is a National Public Radio program out of Boston's WBUR. The office is small, bustling and its occupants grow notably tense as noon--airtime--approaches, but the vibe is driven, if slightly frenzied, and it appeals to me. I like it.

I'm in my fourth week at this part-time internship, and the first story I've pitched aired Tuesday (if interested, you can listen here). The story itself?on how some Manhattan pet shops are banning drunk puppy buying?was not terribly time-sensitive nor was it of vital importance. Rather it reflects the lighter side of the Here and Now ?news magazine,? placed alongside stories of America?s debt talks, Whitey Bulger?s arrest and other, more news-worthy matters.

Intern duties really run the gamut. I?m there to help gather audio, to make cuts and pitch, research and edit stories; and, I?ll be honest?I?ve also fetched lunch.

The goal of this internship is to walk away as a producer on the show, with some supervision, of course. The office, in fact, is made up of producers and the one host, Robin Young, who conducts almost all of the interviews. I enjoy the people who surround me at Here and Now. They are an eclectic bunch, information junkies and just interesting to be around. I enjoy watching and learning from them. And finally, I?m getting the sense that I?ve found a place there, although there?s certainly a long way to go.

I?ll report back to you with more on this story as it unfolds, but for now, I?m Allison Ehrenreich. Enjoy your summer months.

Getting To Know Maine by Qainat Khan

qnkhan@colby.edu (Qainat Khan) — Tue, 05 Jul 2011 17:30:00 GMT

I moved to Portland the day I graduated. In retrospect it was a mad and stressful thing to do. I could have gone home for two weeks, since my internship didn?t start until then. But as Jack Kerouac said, ?The only people for me are the mad ones.? I moved in with two other Colby grads. It was weird to think of myself as a grad, as one of them even though we were all in different class years. It was weird to say ?I went to Colby? rather than ?I go to Colby.?

I spent the two weeks between moving to Portland and my internship by taking walks around Portland and reading. I spent a little time in Portland while I was at Colby, but really being steeped in the city is so much different. I love that the entire city comes out to the art walk, that Longfellow Square is filled with young people selling their crafty things: recycled shirts, jewelry, paintings, and that people really consider what they are selling. I love that young people busk on the street corners of the Old Port. I love the old, gorgeous houses on the Eastern Prom that overlook the sea, with their second floor porches. I imagine someone walked on that porch in the 1800s, waiting for her sailor husband to come home, standing on the ledge to get the first glimpse of his ship.

Working at Maine magazine has made me love Maine more and more. I?m an editorial intern at the magazine, which means I do a lot of social media (updating the many Facebook pages the magazine has with advertisers? events and events the magazine sponsors), writing some short clips for the magazine and editing and fact-checking articles. I was thrilled (and frankly shocked) that on my first day, I was asked to read through the final draft of the magazine; it was going to print later that afternoon. I was even more shocked (in a good way) that some of my suggestions about commas and ambiguous antecedents were considered and added to the final draft. You always hear about the miserable, lowly intern who fetches coffee and clears printer jams. Thankfully, that is not me.

The most revelatory thing about working at Maine magazine has been the business aspect of the industry. I think of written journalism as purely about the writing. I forget what a huge role advertisers play in written journalism. The role of advertising is way more apparent in television journalism because the ads play in between segments and there is pretty much no way of escaping them. At least you can flip through the ads in magazines and newspapers or ignore them. Advertising in print journalism feels much more passive than television journalism, in which advertising is pervasive and aggressive. I pretty much stopped watching television news because 1. It?s vapid and 2. I hate television advertising. For all the reasons I hate television advertising, see this essay. http://jsomers.net/DFW_TV.pdf

Maine magazine has obligations to its advertisers?a certain number of Facebook posts about an event, vying to be the exclusive media sponsor of a certain event to get the Maine brand out there and lure in more advertisers and maybe subscribers. Given the content and readers of Maine and Maine Home & Design, the advertisers are generally art galleries, architects, interior designers, clothes makers, craftspeople, artists, contractors etc.

I must admit here, that although I enjoy most postmodern art and literature, I am drawn to Marxist critiques of postmodern culture, in which people like Jameson and Lyotard argue that free market capitalism?s invisible hand has become so pervasive in our culture, that nearly everything is transactional: relationships with other people, art like Damien Hirst?s, Times Square.

So this relationship between advertisers and Maine magazine caused me a little consternation initially, in my totally insular, abstracted, academic way. Certainly, writing up a few Facebook posts isn?t an awful example of how commerce becomes intertwined in a steamy embrace with a publication that is, in my mind, about good writing and stories people care about. But all the parties with advertisers and sponsoring events and all this stuff that is unrelated to the business of writing. Does it affect the quality of the magazine? Are articles not as they could be because staff is off schmoozing with advertisers and picking up potential advertisers? Do advertisers hold some invisible sway over content? So many moral questions.

There is a fine line between keeping advertisers happy, running a business that makes a profit and putting a magazine together. I am happy to say Maine straddles these three really well. I am proud to work at a magazine that runs new age-y articles alongside gritty, beautiful, human articles about quintessentially Maine topics like lobstermen on Monhegan Island. I love that the magazine supports Maine businesses, people who are committed to their work and clients, not to their shareholders (these are the people whose ads appear in Maine magazine). I like that I work for a small, regional magazine staffed with people who know the region well and really do care about this state they call home (and you know, like each other).

Basically, working at Maine has made me less cynical about making money: that the advertising is a small business supporting other small businesses, whose money stays within the Maine economy. And that you can make money and still do something affecting and responsible.

Also, working at the magazine, I?ve learned about the state and have found myself falling deeply in love with it. I came here for the snow. And I want to stay for the people.

In working for Maine magazine, I?ve learned that Maine has the most artists per capita of any state. I?ve learned that the majority of town halls in Maine are also attached to a performance venue. Think of how Portland?s City Hall is attached to Merrill Auditorium or the Waterville Opera House is attached to Waterville?s city hall, and think about what this says about these cities? commitments to the arts. I?ve learned about Maine?s many art galleries, from big meccas like Portland to out of the way places like Deer Isle. I?ve learned that Maine is fiercely independent yet extremely communal.

I like Maine because the state is not a brand or a stereotype. There isn?t one image of Maine or one idea of Maine that dominates. You might say that when outsiders think about Maine, lobstermen and lighthouses come to mind. And I would say yes, this is probably true, but you can?t caricature these lobstermen and lighthouses. There are so many lighthouses in Maine, and each is something a community values and of which it is proud. Something of their history is rooted in that singular lighthouse, and no one lighthouse is like another. Each one?s construction is different, each one has different myths and stories attached to it. Same with the lobstermen. I cannot imagine how many lobstermen are in Maine, but each is an individual, singular human being. Some of them are artists who?ve studied with renowned painters. Others of them went to elite colleges in New England but couldn?t stand to be away from the sea. Others of them have lobstering in their blood, something their families have done for generations.

And Maine magazine does an excellent job with covering all the aspects of Maine that make it one of the most irrepressible and wonderful states, one of the most irrepressible and wonderful places in which I have had the good fortune to live. The easy way, the postmodern, consumptive tourist way of covering Maine would be to run only stories about picturesque lighthouses and the quaint seaside towns, to flatten complexities and make it easily marketable and digestible.

What Maine magazine does so well is not cater to this. Instead, Maine runs articles that are about a variety of subjects, that appeal to a variety of readers, and that are at their core about the people who make this state so amazing. The human element in a real way, not in the Dow Chemical PR blitz kind of way.

I?m excited to be going to graduate school in New York City, the city of dreams, where people go to remake themselves. But I cannot wait to come back to the place that has felt like home, where the people really are the mad ones: ?the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing.?

Old Radio, New Media by Dash Wasserman

dnwasser@colby.edu (Dash Wasserman) — Tue, 05 Jul 2011 17:07:05 GMT

When I walked through the doors of Marketplace?s New York Bureau, I imagined myself out in the city, wearing bulky headgear, and recording conversations with interesting people. My timing was a little off. Instead, I plunged right into the stories, listening and helping radio gurus hard at work to meet their encroaching deadlines.

David Brancaccio (former Marketplace host, turned special correspondent) just returned from a trip to Egypt and the United Arab Emirates where he was covering several stories for his Economy 4.0 project. With tape in hand, it was up to him and his Economy 4.0 team (a veteran producer and a production assistant/researcher) to start writing scripts and drafting the stories.

Immediately, I went to work logging and transcribing tape as I tried to catch myself up on weeks? worth of content. It?s kind of a rush getting to listen to all of the tape that doesn?t make it to the air. A reporter might spend an hour in an interview only use to use a few of seconds of tape. In radio, probably more than any other medium, it all comes down to the edit.

Additionally, listening to a reporter ask their questions is an incredible experience: you get to see their strategy for interviewing, but, more importantly, you get a sense of their ear. Radio, after all, has no pictures. Unlike taking notes or putting a person?s words in print, the tape speaks for itself because it?s a business of storytelling.

It appears, though, that audio is just one aspect to the field of audio journalism. While I?ve now done my fair share of logging and transcribing tape, writing promos to be read by Kai Ryssdal, and shadowing Mr. Brancaccio work his magic in the studio, it?s amazing to see how much goes beyond the two or three minute stories that hit the air. There are countless hours of interviews, numerous pages of research and preparation to be reviewed, and there?s also the production of the pieces themselves.

Even further, radio hasn?t been able to escape the throes of new media. In the past week, I?ve written three blogs for the Economy 4.0 website, and I?ve also been doing research for an interactive map for Marketplace?s website. There?s also tweeting involved and plans to get the Economy 4.0 project a Facebook page.

On the other side, it becomes increasingly clear that our culture is changing the way it consumes information. It reminds of that old publish-or-perish slogan you hear in academia. In journalism, I guess it?s ?tweet or perish.? Regardless of one?s personal philosophies on new media, I think it?s all about making it your own. Because radio is all about personality and establishing intense connections with its listeners, I have the utmost confidence that it?s a medium suited to thrive in increasingly online society. The Economy 4.0 team, for example, has great personality, and it shines through their work both on and off the air.

I realize we?re at an exciting and terrifying junction for journalism, but its important to realize that everything is always changing. This just makes we want to see Page One: Inside the New York Times, plus I?ve just realized that I?ve blogged about blogging. Too meta.

Blogging in the new media world: Some glory, no pay by Cindy Skrzycki

goldfarb@colby.edu (Cindy Skrzycki) — Sat, 12 Feb 2011 15:37:27 GMT

I fear for students who plan on entering the brave new world of media.

Although journalism professionals and academics teaching journalism and non-fiction writing often believe there will be more opportunities for writers in the future because of the internet and new technology, that optimism has to be qualified when you look at the media deal that was done between Adrianna Huffington and AOL Corp for a cool $315 million.

All for her, none for most of her staff.

Since Huffington Post has been built on the backs of writers who exchange national exposure for no pay, the question now becomes, will those who write for the new company be compensated for their effort? Well, if you look at the model so far and how well it has worked for HuffPo, why change now? And, since Huffington herself will head the new company, it's unlikely she will volunteer pay and benefits for existing or new recruits.

In fact, the memo that went out to the thousands who blog for Huffington basically said "thanks" for all the hard work and, by the way, expect nothing more than an expanded readership. "Thank you," Arianna Huffington wrote, "for being such a vital part of the HuffPost family?which has suddenly gotten a whole lot bigger."

This has been going on since 2005 when Huffington launched the Post, which really is little more than an aggregator and blogging site with some paid reporters and editors. Brilliantly, Huffington has capitalized on free labor and she just pocketed the rewards.

Bloomberg's BusinessWeek interviewed Roy Sekoff, HuffPo's founding editor who said bloggers and writers came to them for exposure, not pay. And the site does have paid employees:

"Currently, the Huffington Post has 255 paid employees, including 148 editorial staffers. Sekoff says the site invests much time and money in preparing bloggers' submissions for publication?editing the content, optimizing it for search engines, and moderating the millions of comments attached to posts every month. "It's a symbiotic relationship," says Sekoff."

Huffington's new business partner, AOL, doesn't offer much hope for decent pay, either. AOL put a reported $50 million into starting Patch, a network of hyperlocal "bureaus" that put out the hiring call last year for editors and reporters.

But there, too, if you don't have much experience, you are likely to be a reporter?not an editor?in one of these markets and get about $50 a piece.

Students realize that there are plenty of places to park their writing, but the prospect of little or no pay really hasn't sunk in yet. Unlike journalists who were starting out 30 years ago?many of them now out of real journalism jobs?the pay was low but it was a regular salary and it often came with benefits. Young writers stayed long enough to get smart and they moved on to better professional opportunities and usually, better pay. Not great pay, but better.

Freelancing never was a great way to make a living wage but it really wasn't until Huffington came along that the idea that professionals should write for free insidiously took hold. Plus the site constantly brags that big name contributors beg to be posted by HuffPo.

Of course, there still are writing jobs, on and off the internet, that do pay. Just not as much as Huffington put in her pocket.

Cindy Skrzycki is a Worldview correspondent for GlobalPost and has been a business writer and columnist for 30 years. She is also a senior lecturer in the English Department at the University of Pittsburgh.

Cable news journalism: Verification (news) versus bloviating (opinion) by David B. Offer

goldfarb@colby.edu (David B. Offer) — Mon, 31 Jan 2011 15:50:07 GMT

The recent announcement that Keith Olbermann was leaving MSNBC was interesting but not very important to anyone wanting to know the news.

Despite appearances to the contrary, the left-leaning Olbermann and his right-tilting competitors have nearly nothing to do with the news. They are entertainers masquerading as journalists. Unfortunately, the masquerade has worked. Too many people watch these shows ? left and right ? and think they are seeing the news.

That point was made by respected TV newsman Ted Koppel, former managing editor of ABC News, in an essay in The New York Times in November.

"We live now in a cable news universe that celebrates the opinions of Olbermann, Rachel Maddow, Chris Matthews, Glenn Beck, Sean Hannity and Bill O'Reilly ? individuals who hold up the twin pillars of political partisanship and who are encouraged to do so by their parent organizations because their brand of analysis and commentary are highly profitable."

Bill Kovach, chairman of the Committee of Concerned Journalists, and Tom Rosenstiel, director of the Project for Excellence in Journalism, call the kind of opinion-based programming "the journalism of affirmation" and note that "its appeal is in affirming the preconceptions of the audience, assuring them, gaining their loyalty, and then converting that loyalty into advertising revenue."

I use their excellent book, "Blur," in a course I teach at Colby College. My goal is to give students the tools they need to think critically as they consider news reporting in print, broadcast or on the Internet.

Kovach and Rosenstiel call the kind of reporting that people can best trust "the journalism of verification" which is based on evidence, authoritative sources, independence and transparency. The journalism of affirmation fails to meet those standards, they write.

In his New York Times essay, Koppel used a more colorful description. Fox News and MSNBC do not even attempt objective journalism, he wrote. "They show us the world not as it is, but as partisans (and loyal viewers) would like it to be. This is to journalism what Bernie Madoff was to investment: He told his customers what they wanted to hear, and by the time they learned the truth, their money was gone."

Koppel argued for a return to objective journalism. Olbermann responded on his show that true objectivity is impossible and argued that even the most-respected reporters like Walter Cronkite and Edward R. Murrow showed bias. Cronkite let viewers know his feelings that the Vietnam War could not be won, Olbermann said. Murrow made it clear that he thought Sen. Joseph McCarthy was a danger to democracy. Even Koppel showed his opinions in reports about the hostages in Iran.

Olbermann has the facts right, but he misses the point. Complete objectivity in journalism has never been possible but good journalists adopt an approach that is fact-based, where opinions are left out their reports or acknowledged openly so readers, listeners and viewers can evaluate them. Kovach and Rosenstiel call that approach "transparency."

Koppel ? and Cronkite and Murrow ? did that. So does CNN. Olbermann, Beck, O'Reilly and their colleagues don't even try.

Neither MSNBC nor Olbermann offered explanations for their divorce but it has been no secret that the relationship between the network and its star has been strained for months.

Olbermann was suspended for two days ? and was nearly fired ? in November for violating an NBC News policy by donating to three political campaigns, including the congressional campaign of Arizona Democratic Rep. Gabrielle Giffords. He returned to the air and apologized to his fans, but he never publicly apologized to NBC for violating the policy.

The problem, in my view, stems from the difficult relationship between NBC and MSNBC. NBC News seeks to provide traditional journalism ? the journalism of verification ? where stories are supported with evidence and transparency so viewers can evaluate what they see. MSNBC does not, but (like Fox) it pretends to do so. The tension between the two approaches within the same company has been obvious.

NBC wanted to hold Olbermann to standards that are part of the value system of traditional journalism but that have no home in the opinionated world where Olbermann worked. "We don't make up facts here and when we make mistakes we correct them," Olbermann said.

Maybe not, but there is a vast difference between the way NBC and MSNBC deal with the facts. NBC and other responsible (and traditional media) report the facts, provide evidence and explain how they learned what is being reported. MSNBC, Fox and others in the opinion business cherry-pick facts to argue what their audience wants to hear. They accuse, they bluster, they argue.

Kovach and Rosenstiel call this kind of fake reporting "bloviating."

I think my Colby students recognize it when they see it. I hope readers of this column do, too.

David B. Offer is the retired executive editor of the Kennebec Journal and the Morning Sentinel in central Maine.

Regions of Fear Rule Mexico by Alfredo Corchado

goldfarb@colby.edu (Alfredo Corchado) — Mon, 06 Dec 2010 15:19:34 GMT

A few weeks ago I was in Ciudad Juarez, one of the most dangerous cities in the world, and couldn't wait till the taxi driver reached the international bridge that connects Juarez to El Paso, Texas.

The ride was long and road construction only made the minutes seem like hours. It didn't help that convoys of hooded federal agents patrolledthe streets with AK-47 weapons. While I sat in the back of the taxi, a question lingered in my mind: Is the perception of fear greater than reality, as many Mexican government officials insist.

Juarez is a city I know well. I spent time here as a kid. My relatives still call this home. Yet Juarez, with a population of roughly 1.2 million, has recorded more than 7,240 murders in two years, including two journalists. Most of those killings remain unsolved.

While just across the border, El Paso, a city of more than 750,000, boasts of being one of the safest cities in the United States. The city recorded less than 30 murders in the past two years, and most, if not all, resulted in convictions.

For journalists, particularly a Mexican journalist, or anyone else, those numbers are numbing. You can't blame my colleagues for taking the difficult decision of self-censoring themselves. My native Mexico has become one of the deadliest countries in the world for journalists. In the past 10 years, more than 65 journalists have been killed, many more have disappeared and even more have been threatened, or beaten up. And nothing happens to the culprits. Consequences are few.

That's why today there are regions of silence in Mexico. Regions where few know what's going on in their own communities because fear reigns. Mexico is not a failed state, but it is home to regions of fear, a deafening silence.

After my recent trip to Ciudad Juarez, I'm back in the bubble of Cambridge where I'm conducting research for my first book. I walk aimlessly in Harvard Square without looking over my shoulder. Little things like that make me appreciate how lucky I am. Lucky that as an American journalist I can parachute in and out of dangerous Mexican cities and towns. Still, I feel mad and revolted that Mexico, celebrating its 200th Bicentennial Anniversary as a nation, remains a country ruled by power and not by laws, a place where judicial institutions mirror museums, with laws on books that seem so progressive, but rarely enforced.

Until Mexico is able to demonstrate political will by solving hundreds ? or at the very least ? dozens of murders, that deep seeded perception of fear will remain intact. Regions of silence will grow in Ciudad Juarez, Durango, Nuevo Leon, Michoacan, Tamaulipas, and Coahuila. If Mexico is serious about changing perception, it cannot simply parade accused suspects in front of television cameras. The people behind the cameras, the ones taking notes, must feel a sense of security that their images and words will truly break the silence now engulfing Mexico.

Alfredo Corchado is the Mexico Bureau Chief for the Dallas Morning News. Corchado was honored with the 2010 Lovejoy Award for his courage in covering the drug-related violence and corruption that plagues Mexico and its borders. Corchado is currently working on his first book and is also an incoming Fellow at the DavidRockefellerCenter at Harvard.

Make way for the Content Curators by Jenny Chen

goldfarb@colby.edu (Jenny Chen) — Mon, 08 Nov 2010 21:39:34 GMT

Pablo Picasso, Rembrandt van Rijn, Michelangelo di Lodovico Buonorroti Simoni: all the bigwigs in the art world, well-known to artists and laymen alike. But what about Gustav Klimt, Robert Rauschenberg, or Hieronymus Bosch? Or what about Marcel Duchamp, Jean Ingres, or Jean Corvous? The truth is, when it comes to art, the artists that bob about in the everyday conversation are only droplets in the sea of artwork that has been created over the years ? a fact that is mind boggling and discouraging to any normal citizen just searching for a little culture for Pete's sake. If all the artwork ever created were thrown at you (including Bosch's "painting" of a blank canvas) you'd probably hate art forever.

This is where the art museum steps in. This benevolent institution carefully arranges a select few pieces of artwork in a pleasing way, creating an experience that interests the average visitor, and leaves them feeling mildly smarter. The art curator has done his job well.

Since the last couple of years has made self-publishing as easy as zapping Bagel Bites in the microwave, the amount of user generated content has exploded across the internet and grown exponentially. Pretty soon, the iconic placid father calmly sipping coffee over the morning newspaper has been replaced by the harried businessman sitting at his computer with a million windows open and a cell phone that Dings! every time a new post is up.

Is it any surprise that once people were tired of generating content, the content curators stepped in? Perhaps the first of the species was Huffington Post, but many sites including Reader's Digest, Treehugger, and GOOD Magazine have joined in ? culling through the vast sea of information and picking out the choicest morsels for a more manageable meal. Even blogs have shifted from creating content to reposting others' posts. To take the analogy a step further, retweeters on Twitter are essentially collecting pieces of information just as a curator would collect pieces of artwork.

This means that sightings of bikini clad Demi Moore eclipsed the Guardian's report on Tibetan nomads who are struggling as grasslands disappear as a result of climate change.

What lives on in public memory then depends on what has been retweeted, commented, and re-posted the most ? the Picassos, the Rembrandts, and the Michelangelos of the information world.

Jenny Chen '12 is an English and international studies double major; she first got her taste of journalism when she pitched a youth column for a local newspaper in 2008 and was paid to write about her opinion on the news. Since then, she's enjoyed the excuse for snooping and trying the new things that a career in journalism offers.

Running the Triangle by Nick Cunkelman

goldfarb@colby.edu (Nick Cunkelman) — Thu, 07 Oct 2010 16:43:58 GMT

As mantras go for writers, "earn your reader" sets the bar quite high. Taken to its extreme?that is, viewing each story merely as a series of sentences where every comma, semicolon or period is a station for readers to hop off your train of thought?is just plain horrifying. Perhaps the better saying, and certainly less hostile one, is "love your reader" (implying an audience that wants to ride that train). Indeed, here love is conscious. We could also say be empathetic.

Or: be considerate. Or: they are on your side.

Yet this modification covers only one leg of the journalistic triangle. Two other mantras?"honor your sources" and "be curious"?form the remaining relationships that, taken together, constitute the whole of reporting balance. So, while it is tempting to give your reader all the scoop (which, provided your curiosity aligns with your readers', also satisfies "be curious"), make sure to consider those you're writing about. I don't say this to advocate hesitant, reluctant writing but rather to stress that how one treats sources?and the information they give?is key to running the triangle. Below is an example from summer development league ball (i.e. internship) to illustrate the point. (Note: the situation has been altered to maintain leg number two above.)

To begin, imagine you're writing a story on a skyscraper-painting family business. Their job is dangerous, and it intrigues you that they've managed to cover the market in your city so well for so many years. At the end of the interview, after you've discussed various experiences in the field, you ask if there's anything else they'd like to add. One member of the family, who hasn't talked much during the interview, speaks up. "There is one thing," she says. "Sometimes, when we're painting, members of the smaller companies will make their way into the buildings and protest our work with signs and chants. I know it's entirely their right, but it really bothers me."

Now, flash forward to you, at your desk, writing the story. This offhand fact about rival companies intrigues you?and, out of love for your reader, you wish to include it in the piece?so you do a follow-up call to inquire more about these protests. Your source becomes uncomfortable, insisting that if those comments are included, they don't want their name in the piece. So here, as you run the journalistic triangle, you are toeing a line on the court. You need their name and quotes for the piece, yet this information, although would make for an interesting layer to the story, would take them out of it. What to do?

There's no hard and fast rule, but in my case I found it pays to look at how essential the information is to your core point. Oftentimes these interesting side notes can embellish your reporting but at the same time detract from your focus. And you can always use these pieces as leads to other stories where you don't reveal the initial source. Then you're running the triangle.

Nick Cunkelman '11 is a ColbyCollege philosophy major who starting reporting as a sports columnist for The Colby Echo during his freshman year. He plans to pursue a journalism career and his dream job would be to write articles examining trends in politics, the environment, music, and sports for magazines across the globe.

A Most Timely Lovejoy Honoree by Stephen Collins

goldfarb@colby.edu (Stephen Collins) — Fri, 24 Sep 2010 16:27:19 GMT

So far in 2010 more than 7,600 people have been killed in Mexico's bloody drug wars. Many if not most victims lived along the Texas border. Dozens of victims are journalists, the most recent a photographer killed last week in Ciudad Juarez.

This year's Lovejoy Convocation couldn't be more timely. Colby honors Alfredo Corchado, the Mexico Bureau Chief for the Dallas Morning News, a journalist whom the Lovejoy award selection committee called the most intrepid reporter on the most dangerous beat in the Western Hemisphere.

An American Journalism Review feature (http://www.ajr.org/Article.asp?id=4890) this summer provided chilling details of what Corchado has faced, including death threats and the promise of this 'favor' -- "As we're chopping you into pieces," he was told, "we'll tape it so we can send it to your mother in El Paso."

Beyond Corchado's own courageous efforts to illuminate the dark shadows of narcoterrorism and the inability of governments to deal with it, there's a broader context. How does civil society, both in Mexico and places where the drug violence crosses the border, function with such brutal chaos in its midst? What is the cost of not knowing what's going on when journalists are prevented from reporting who is killing whom and why they're getting away with it?

Last weekend the Juarez paper, El Diario, put that question in front of citizens from north and south of the border when it published an open letter to druglords. It asked the cartels to explain "what you want from us?"

What, El Diario's editors asked, should we try to publish or not publish, "so we know what to expect?"

That's chilling.

What better moment to hear Alfredo Corchado give the 2010 Lovejoy Address (5 p.m. Sunday, Sept. 26, in Lorimer Chapel)? What better time to hear Corchado, Belo TV Mexico Bureau Chief Angela Kocherga, and University of Texas Knight Professor of Journalism Rosental Alves talk about covering Mexico-U.S. relations (panel discussion at 11:30 a.m. Monday, Sept. 27, in Roberts)?

If you can't attend and help us honor these courageous reporters, audio recordings will be available the following day on the Goldfarb and Lovejoy websites (http://www.colby.edu/goldfarb).

Stephen Collins '74 majored in English and is now the College Editor at Colby.

The new reporter by Elisabeth Ponsot

goldfarb@colby.edu (Elisabeth Ponsot) — Mon, 30 Aug 2010 17:40:27 GMT

There was a time?in, as some pessimists might describe it, journalism's heyday? when reporters were specialists in their craft. They had beats. They covered the stories that came out of city hall, or the intricacies of D.C. politics, or the transportation headlines. These reporters conducted interviews, wrote well, and if they were lucky, worked their way up the ladder: to more reputable news publications, better salaries, editorial positions, management.

In some of the larger newspapers that dot the American landscape, this kind of specialization is still valued. There are still arts and entertainment, health and business experts out there, and their work is as important as it ever was. Yet, if my time at The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette has taught me anything so far, it's been the realization that the new reporter is not a specialist. The new reporter is a multi-tasker.

I began at the Post-Gazette with a vague title: "Multimedia Intern."As a new graduate and young reporter who had only previously worked in the print medium, I had expected to gain experience at One of America's Best Newspapers working alongside their web team. I envisioned myself editing a few videos, conducting interviews, and ultimately, adding another notch of experience to my résumé.

What I found was something completely different. As of my first day at PG, I was editing video segments for the web and shooting in-house video podcasts. By the end of my first week, I had gone out on assignment with a video camera and tripod and produced a news report for post-gazette.com. Now, about a month and a half later, I find myself constantly busy, always multitasking, and perpetually challenged. I've morphed from "Multimedia Intern," to part videographer, part photographer, part traditional reporter. I've written for the Post-Gazette's Summerburgh blog, learned how to shoot from a manual DSLR, started a long-term feature story for the print edition, and created video intro segments using software like Apple Motion and Final Cut.

While I've learned a fair amount here so far in terms of technical skills, what I've taken from this internship most of all is the full understanding that as the reporters of today and tomorrow, we must be adaptable. We must reinvent ourselves, learn new skills, and be willing to confront new challenges. Just as the 24-hour news cycle risks making coverage irrelevant after a few hours, we reporters risk becoming irrelevant, replaceable if we cannot evolve with the changing times.

We can no longer be specialists; we need to be good at everything.

Elisabeth Ponsot '10 (Beth) recently graduated from Colby College,where she majored in Government. Beth was formerly the Editor of the Colby Echo, and is currently a multimedia intern for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. She plans to pursue a career in multimedia journalism, and is looking forward to a three month trip to New Zealand and Southern China this November. Beth's blogs can be found at: http://blogs.sites.post-gazette.com/index.php/living/summerburgh

The death of newspapers doesn?t mean the death of news by Jenny Chen

goldfarb@colby.edu (Jenny Chen) — Thu, 19 Aug 2010 11:30:39 GMT

"It was the best of times; it was the worst of times." So goes the infamous beginning to Charles Dickens' A Tale of Two Cities, but he could very well have been speaking about the newspaper industry of 2010. The Washington Post, the Ann Arbor News, and the San Francisco Chronicle ? all former giants of the newspaper industry ? are now tottering on spindly legs as they scramble to recover from sharply declining ad sales, sharply rising overhead costs, and dwindling readership.

Of course, the death of the newspaper doesn't at all mean the death of news. People always want to know what's going on. In the waning shadow of the traditional newspaper, a different kind of news has sprouted up online.

It's no question that this shift from print to web is a big one. And despite the doomsayers, it's not necessarily negative, either. For one thing, it eliminates the quandary that morning newspaper readers have of trying to eat their breakfast with their inky fingers and read a paper that covers their face at the same time. For another, the web opens a whole playground of possibilities that allow newswires to share stories, offer multimedia and publish higher resolution graphics. Publishing on the web also reduces many of the overhead costs of the traditional newspaper, allowing news bureaus to redirect their money to content rather than on printing.

But does the money really end up improving content? The thing is when you move from the print to the web, you're covering a whole different beat. Everything on the web moves at a startling speed. Studies show again and again that readers tend to browse rather than read on the internet and so web journalists have only a second to capture the web browser's attention. As a result, a lot of online content has been reduced to short blurbs and slideshows. On websites like Time.com and newsweek.com, seldom is an article is longer than one page. The New York Times' website is the only website that consistently has five-page articles.

And while news has traditionally always been time sensitive ? with the web making it easy to publish anything for the entire world with a click of a button ? there is an even greater emphasis on split second news. A common feature next to articles on the web is the timestamp, indicating that the article was updated as recently as seconds ago. Competition for "new" news is fierce, which means that the website that can generate content the fastest wins, regardless of its quality. Say bye-bye to time-consuming journalistic standbys such as fact-checking and proofreading.

Also, now more than ever, news is dictated by the readers. Unlike the days of old when journalists and editors had a certain responsibility to tell the public what they ought to know about the world, today's journalists and editors are told by the public what they want to know. It's too easy for users to close a window on something they don't want to read (even if they should).

In order to keep visitors on their website (and thus keep courting their advertisers), web publishers pore over statistics on what drives traffic to the site, what keeps readers reading, and what they are searching. There was no print equivalent to the web analytics tool and so web journalists have the unique blessing (or curse) of knowing exactly what readers want and what makes money. Entire businesses have been built on this very concept ? for example, ehow.com creates articles based on the most commonly searched Google terms. These articles can be written by anyone and as such, are not very useful. (According to ehow.com, the first step to getting a guy to like you is: "Make sure he is available. Before you can start doing your thing, you gotta [sic] make sure he doesn't have a girlfriend, or that your BFF doesn't like him, or else you can get yourself into a cat fight! MEOW! If you're BFF likes him, then he's kinda out of the question because your BFF likes him! So that would just be rude to steel [sic] her crush away, after she liked him first.") Whether this is a positive development or not remains to be seen, but the balance between consumer and journalist is clearly shifting and the lines between the two are blurring.

The ease with which content can be created spawns hundreds of citizen journalists, making news as ubiquitous as weeds (and sometimes, just as useful). In the babble of voices on the internet, voice is what makes a website stand out. Websites like The Huffington Post and Slate have risen to the top for their snarky commentary. Jumping the bandwagon, traditional newspaper and newsmagazines now give "bloggers" more spotlight on their websites. These writers are essentially the electronic version of columnist and they provide much more editorialized news content, which may be refreshing for the savvy news consumer, but dangerously biased to the mass consumer.

All these developments are just the beginning. The news revolution may not involve guillotines and petticoats, but it is a story that promises to be just as dramatic and turbulent as the one documented in Dickens' A Tale of Two Cities. After all, as opening chapters go, this one is a real cliffhanger.

The highest treason by Nick Cunkelman

goldfarb@colby.edu (Nick Cunkelman) — Thu, 05 Aug 2010 11:42:21 GMT

We all know word choice counts. So when Michael Schudson, a Professor at Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism, said that the Internet was "dismembering" the public, sixty of the journalists gathered in the audience squirmed in their seats. I did too. Here I was, a fly on the wall at a lecture and discussion among professional flies-on-the-wall, and Schudson had just bloodily torn apart anyone's high-minded ideal of civic discussion like it was medieval torture. And considering we were in England, it just may have been.

Schudson's point?that by going to specific websites catered to specific interests, citizens aren't adequately equipped to engage in meaningful political discussions?was part of a larger discussion on the reconstruction of American journalism. It began with the typical eulogy we've all heard, as Schudson announced the total "devastation" within a "pulsing set" of 25 major metropolitan U.S. newspapers, and moved gradually from there to where we now sat?albeit rather uncomfortably?having just seen our beloved "public" hanged, drawn, and quartered by digital horses running off into cyberspace at the speed of light. Perhaps this was British-style punishment for an American crime, but that characterization seems too simple and metaphorically muddy. Instead, let's take the principle of contrast as a foundation and work from there. (It's reconstruction, after all.)

In the U.K., government support for the media is 15 times what it is in the States (a mere $400 million) and 75 times more per capita. And though some may argue that such funding automatically equals censorship?pointing their supportive-evidence fingers at North Korea?let us keep in mind that vibrant democracies certainly exist with both freedom of the press and government-funded media. Aside from the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, with its enormous British Broadcasting Corporation, these nations include Germany, Estonia, and Japan. And to those Americans who fear coercive government-funded media, do they shy away from PBS and NPR? In many cases, an often-enlightened, well-balanced, informed discussion begins with, "I heard on NPR this morning?" In short, these media do far more good than harm.

Yet this is to skip a few steps, namely from one of blaming selective internet-surfing for a less informed public?that is, informed in the true sense?to one of calling for wide government intervention in our media, and so I should qualify Schudson's "dismemberment" as only one threat to the well-being of American media and democracy. The other, and perhaps more important, is that as media sources increasingly recognize that opinion sells, it's becoming harder and harder to stick to objective neutrality in the world of news. And this is why some suggest intervention.

Realistically, however?and despite 2009's proposed "Newspaper Revitalization Act" in Congress?such bailouts to the media are not going to happen. And considering that the media is increasingly absent at state and local levels (these days, inside-the-beltway polarization seems entertainingly magnetic to all those outside), traditional metropolitan papers have an arguably greater responsibility to our public-on-life-support. Indeed, in stressing that city papers often break stories and set the national agenda, and that newspaper investigations which begin locally can open up national and even international issues, Schudson?standing in a room in Oxford, England?pointed to The Boston Globe's exposure of the Catholic church's sexual abuse cases.

In June I began working at the Globe (as part of my Lovejoy internship), and though I can't reasonably expect to break the big story or engage in any ultimate ideal of civic journalism, I can already sense the responsibility that comes with a tradition of accuracy, fairness, and balance on all issues. To do anything else would be to betray not just our role as journalists but also as citizens in a healthy democracy. It would call for being hung, drawn, and quartered.

It would be the highest treason.

Nick Cunkelman '11 is a ColbyCollege philosophy major who starting reporting as a sports columnist for The Colby Echo during his freshman year. He plans to pursue a journalism career and his dream job would be to write articles examining trends in politics, the environment, music, and sports for magazines across the globe.

No comparison by David Shribman

goldfarb@colby.edu (David Shribman) — Wed, 04 Aug 2010 13:31:15 GMT

Please go to the link below for Shribman's column, which was published August 1, 2010.

http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/10213/1076258-372.stm

David Shribman is the executive editor of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.

How will National Geographic cover the BP Oil spill? With compelling details and in-depth reporting by Victoria Pope

goldfarb@colby.edu (Victoria Pope) — Tue, 27 Jul 2010 15:45:40 GMT

At National Geographic magazine, where I am deputy editor and the chief editor for text, we have been hotly debating how to cover the explosion of the Deepwater Horizon drill ship ever since the tragedy occurred on April 20. We knew it was a story we had to weigh in on, but our deadlines?we close most issues about three months before they reach newsstands?made it difficult to know when and how. But we took the plunge and decided to tear apart our October issue, which reaches subscribers in mid-September. Our challenge was to find stories and photographs that would satisfy readers saturated with blow-by-blow news coverage of the disaster.

Sadly, the BP oil spill is the story that keeps giving: At this writing, on July 15, it looks like the containment cap that has been placed atop the well is doing its job of holding back the gushing oil. But as BP readily admits, the cap is just a short-term solution. I am quite sure that the story will still be a moving target when we close the October issue in several weeks time.

We were lucky that one of our regular contributors Bruce Barcott had just returned from reporting in the Gulf wetlands when news of the disaster broke. He was the first in a number of freelancers who asked to cover the story for us. His angle was to go to the Louisiana Bayou and take stock of the situation there. We said yes, and he arrived in the wetlands in time to go to QueenBeeIsland with local officials to see the first of the oil-drenched pelicans. It isn't the toxins in the oil that kill these birds. Rather, encased in oil, they are in danger of being fried to death by the sun. We were also fortunate to have contributing writer Joel Bourne ready to dive into the intricacies of deep-water drilling and explain to readers why the geology of the Gulf makes it particularly dangerous for deepwater drilling.

Bourne's story is fair-minded throughout, but it is hard not to conclude that deep-water drilling is hazardous. But will his story and Barcott's and others like theirs be a call to reassess the deep-water oil rush? I would like to think so, but at least here in Washington, D.C. the outrage that was palpably felt in the first month after the spill seems to have dissipated. There's plenty of scorn for BP, to be sure, but overall the verdict seems to be that it is not realistic to stop deep-water drilling while demand for oil is so high. I can't quibble with that. Nor can I criticize the groundswell in the Gulf for continued drilling. The region needs the jobs. But it is disappointing that this terrible event in the Gulf has not set off some passionate lobby to stop our addiction to oil through the development of more alternate energy sources. I was hoping that the Deep Horizon calamity would ignite a new level of environmental activism, much as the Cuyahoga River Fire did in 1969. "The lower Cuyahoga has no visible signs of life, not even low forms such as leeches and sludge worms that usually thrive of waste," wrote Time magazine in its report on the June 22 incident, when an oil slick and debris caught fire on a portion of the river in Cleveland, Ohio. "[The river] oozes rather than flows." Coverage of that event kindled a great deal of outrage over the summer of 1969 and it fueled resurgent activism in the environmental movement. That renewed commitment led to the passage of the Clean Water Act in 1972. I'm not seeing a similar spark this time. What will it take?

Victoria Pope is deputy editor and the chief editor for text at National Geographic. She spent a week at Colby in April 2010 as a Lovejoy Journalist in Residence. Before she joined the magazine, she was executive editor for U.S. News and World Report.

Working for a national magazine, gives one Colby intern a chance to focus on topics that appeal to women by Courtney Yeager

goldfarb@colby.edu (Courtney Yeager) — Thu, 15 Jul 2010 17:11:17 GMT

For the past two years, I've spent countless hours a week with my second family, the dedicated editors and writers of the Colby Echo. Each Tuesday evening, I expect arguing, last-minute layout adjustments and an air of overall pandemonium ? all of which I take in stride. I understand the chaos of producing a newspaper. Writers submit articles last minute, and copy editors destroy pages with vibrant pens. As I walked into the office of Woman's World magazine in early June, I braced myself for ringing phones and frazzled coworkers. But only a friendly murmur met me at the door, and a smiling assistant showed me to my desk. I was going to like working for this magazine.

Although the office seemed relatively calm, I quickly realized that everyone is on a deadline. Producing a full-sized weekly magazine with a relatively small staff of about 45 people sounds daunting, but when working for the magazine is your only responsibility ? without the distractions of homework and spending time with your friend ? you realize that such an undertaking is reasonable.

I was unsure what to expect when I accepted this Lovejoy Journalism Internship position. So many hopeful journalists launch their careers as coffee runners or mail sorters; but Woman's World, a NewJersey-based weekly magazine with a 1.5 million circulation, had me writing on my first day. Most of my internship duties involve reporting and writing for various health sections of the magazine, and I also work for the travel section one day a week.

There are quite a few columns to which I contribute, but my favorite project to tackle is "Ask the Doctor." I have been scouring the New York Times online health section since I was in high school, and when I told my boss about my fascination with new medical research, she immediately assigned me to work on this column.

Now I'm constantly communicating with doctors regarding groundbreaking health research on topics such as whether women need a yearly pap smear and the side effects of ADHD medications. Not only am I amazed by what I hear from the experts, but I am also learning how to stylistically write about health topics ? even without a science degree. The process involves researching recently published articles and scientific studies and applying a new angle to their findings. Then, I contact doctors and write up a version of their detailed responses. I work on this column for at least a couple of hours each day, and it never becomes monotonous. That's the great thing about writing on health: the topics are endless, and research never ceases.

When I am not working for various health editors, I spend many hours researching and writing "Armchair Travelers." Each week, a new destination is covered in the travel section, and the travel writer fills two pages with highlights of the city. The "Armchair" column features introductory ledes and recipes for foods, drinks or spa treatments that are specific to the region. This section requires creativity and sleuthing skills, and the responsibility of the entire column has been awarded to me.

For each town, I either contact the local travel bureau or conduct my own research. I prefer the latter because it allows me more creative freedom, but sometimes it is difficult to track down a town's specialty. Last spring at Colby, I was enrolled in a travel writing course taught by Tilar Mazzeo, and some of the skills I learned in her class now help me as I work for Woman's World travel section.

Interning for a magazine rather than a newspaper has shown me that not all journalistic outlets are cutthroat. Instead of reporting the latest news to the masses, I'm taking the time to sift through newsworthy topics and writing about only what seems to be particularly eye-catching to women. I'm intrigued by the opportunities I will encounter during my internship, and I am eager to see my stories published in future issues of Woman's World. And I know when I return to Colby in the fall for my junior year of college, the skills I've learned at this nationally-renowned magazine will help me when I jump back into the frenzied pace of putting out the college's weekly newspaper.

Courtney Yeager '12 hails from Cincinnati, Ohio; she is one of three Lovejoy Journalism Interns working at newspapers or magazines this summer. Courtney is majoring in English with a concentration in creative writing and minoring in Italian. Her high school didn't have a newspaper, so her first experience reporting came when she began working for The Echo during her freshman year. Her dream job is to be an author, someone whose fiction books are as raw and real as Margaret Atwood's.

Handling tough and tragic interviews on stories that matter by Erin Rhoda

goldfarb@colby.edu (Erin Rhoda) — Wed, 02 Jun 2010 17:04:47 GMT

One of the hardest things a reporter will ever have to do is interview a mother whose child has just died.

Reporters become more cynical over time and harden themselves to difficult situations. Soon, it becomes natural to question political leaders, inquire about inequitable power on governing boards or listen to the details of a murder.

But, for me, talking to people who have lost loved ones reverberates in a way other interviews don't. Last fall, when I called the fiancé of a man who had just been shot in Anson, my voice shook. The woman was curt, refused to talk.

When we hung up, I walked out of the office and burst into tears. I didn't cry because she declined to talk but because, for one small moment, I had put myself in her situation. I'd briefly felt her unbearable pain. I mourned for her loved one and for her.

Recently, I again had the opportunity to interview someone who had lost a loved one. In this case it was the mother of Eric Benson, 24, of Westbrook, who was attacked in downtown Portland one early May Sunday and died hours later of a traumatic head injury.

While his mother, Wendy, spoke to me on her cell phone, she found two four-leaf clovers outside. Her son was dead, and she told me how she usually finds at least two four-leaf clovers together. Like twins.

Her first-borns were twins, Eric and Andrew, she said. One alive, the other dead. She was kind to me; she laughed when she told me about Eric as a child. She cried.

She described the moment he passed away in Maine Medical Center. He was peaceful, she said. His family surrounded him.

I was already past deadline and had an entire story to write. My colleague told me, "Take your time," as he left for the day. It was a straightforward article to write: a boy is dead, a mother remembers. But there was so much weight to it.

Interviewing loved ones who were close to someone who has died tragically is important for that reason: they lend weight, or meaning to the person's life, so readers understand what has been lost.

People who die are more than statistics or an obituary, even. They are the sum of their dreams and history. Those close to them can explain how they mattered.

It wasn't until I got home that night that I recounted the interview to my loved one. "She told me about the moment he died," I said, and my voice cracked; my eyes filled with tears.

As a reporter, I keep my composure. I do not let emotion obstruct reporting facts. But I am glad Wendy's story moved me. If anything, it lets me know it's worth its space.

Erin Rhoda is a reporter for the Maine Morning Sentinel and covers Somerset County. She graduated from Colby College in 2006 as an English major, with a concentration in creative writing. Three years later, she earned her master's in creative writing from Trinity College in Dublin, Ireland, which she attended as the recipient of the national George J. Mitchell Scholarship.

Covering the Olympics, one young reporter's dream by Nathaniel Herz

goldfarb@colby.edu (Nathaniel Herz) — Mon, 10 May 2010 15:57:44 GMT

Ten months ago, as my senior classmates at Bowdoin College were frantically dashing off job application forms to the far corners of the United States, I met up with a potential employer for a different kind of interview: a rollerski workout.

For those not in the know, rollerskiing is akin to rollerblading with poles, and it's the training method preferred by cross-country skiers. That May afternoon, I was headed out for an hour with Topher Sabot, the owner of FasterSkier, a cross-country skiing news Web site.

Our meeting led to a job offer that, while low-paying, came with a number of perks. Foremost among them was a bed for me to sleep in during the 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver?something I'd been dreaming about for years. Through the summer and fall, I reported on the minutiae of the sport?from training camps to technique?in anticipation of the racing season. Then, in December, two months before the start of the Games, I lucked into a reporter's credential, which would give me full and free access to nearly every Olympic competition.

All of this explains how I found myself in a conference room with a pencil and notebook at the Main Press Center in Vancouver on February 12^th, watching from 50 feet away as IOC President Jacques Rogge struggled to account for the death of a Georgian luger. There I sat, among 200 reporters and 40 video cameras (yeah, I counted)?in thrall of the momentousness of the circumstances and humbled to be there. And it was only the first day.

I had taken the bus that morning to Vancouver from Whistler?the location of the cross-country ski races, as well as where Topher and I were staying?because I'd managed to nab a ticket to the opening ceremonies. Between that display, and the press conference earlier, I was both awestruck and starstruck.

That feeling dissipated as soon as I arrived at the races to find dozens of journalists from big media outlets ready to pounce on the beats that I'd so diligently cultivated throughout the last year. I'd e-mailed and called these athletes at their early-season races in Europe, withstood single-digit temperatures as one of the few journalists at national championships in Alaska in January, and now I couldn't get a word in edgewise. The mainstream reporters would interrupt me, soaking up valuable time after races by asking questions that fit their own narratives, which were usually broad and overarching rather than focused on the details. Those types of stories made sense for the broader public, most of whom could barely tell a ski from a pole, but I had a responsibility to keep our few-thousand hardcore fans in the loop.

By the end of the first week, I had my feet back under me, and had devised a few techniques for getting the full stories, as well as those crucial embellishing details. First, I'd discovered that the post-race interviews with athletes were usually useless. Many had been through media training (which taught them to say as little as possible in as many words as possible), and all of them had better things to do than to stand around in their sweaty clothes talking to reporters.

The best sources were those on the sidelines, especially those who weren't as busy, like coaches or support staff. At other events, it was sometimes hard to tell who was who, but at the Olympics, everyone had to wear a gaudy plastic credential that clearly stated their name, nationality, and occupation. That helped me track down Patrik Noak, the Swiss team doctor, who gave me one of the best details I got for a story at the Games. A few minutes after one of his team's skiers, Dario Cologna, had won the men's 15 kilometer freestyle race, I stumbled upon Noak, who told me that Cologna had been so cool the morning of the race that he showed up 10 minutes late for his warm-up?he wanted to see his Swiss countrymen finish their alpine runs on TV.

The other good way to get information was from foreign journalists. Since we weren't competing with them, the Scandinavian reporters were usually willing to keep us in the loop about their countries' teams. (Norway and Sweden are the two big powerhouses.) And fortunately, unlike the Russians, they all spoke English. We got tidbits from them ranging from rumors about illness and injury to bizarre anecdotes about drug tests and urine samples.

These tricks went a long way towards getting me the material I needed. But they also could not substitute for experience and boots on the ground, which was what the rest of the American media had over us. Two hours after the races ended, as Topher and I were just finishing up our interviews and sitting down to write, we would see the first reports already popping up online. Other outlets got interviews and stories from officials that I hadn't even thought to consider. We kept fighting back though, cranking out our articles on deadline, working our own sources, even eavesdropping on other reporters' conversations (only when necessary?I swear).

This competitive atmosphere was unlike anything I'd experienced earlier in the winter, when I'd often be the only journalist working for an English-speaking audience. But as frustrating as it was to get scooped, the back-and-forth pushed me to learn every single day. Working side-by-side with hardened veterans, I could see exactly how they went about their work and getting their information. Once I'd filed my own reports, I could go online and peruse a dozen other stories on the same race?giving me a window into how those reporters had arranged that information. It was an incredible opportunity, a front row seat at the World Series of Journalism. Except I wasn't in the stands?I was a participant. I'm already plotting my trip to Sochi for the next Olympics in 2014.

Nathaniel Herz is the associate editor of FasterSkier.com, a news website for cross country skiing, biathlon, and nordic combined. He has also worked as a reporter for the Maine Center for Public Interest Reporting, a non-profit watchdog journalism organization based in Hallowell.

In world of Twitter, 24/7 cable and iPhone Apps, news comes fast, but is it reliable? by Susan Nestor

goldfarb@colby.edu (Susan Nestor) — Thu, 08 Apr 2010 17:48:16 GMT

In the 1990s, I was lucky enough to work at CNN with an icon in the news business. He was Bill Headline, longtime Washington Bureau Chief for the network. With a name like that, this guy was destined to be a great newsman. And he was. He steered the bureau through the early days when the broadcast networks poked fun at CNN ("Chicken Noodle News") and cable TV was fighting to make its mark. He understood the enormous responsibility, capability, and resources we had as the first 24-hour news network to deliver the news quickly, but also accurately. And he always said, "If we can't get it first, we've got to get it best." Those words guided my news career, and I wish Bill Headline was still alive to offer his sage advice to communicators now.

Clearly, we are immersed in a world of instant messaging, social networking, 24-hour everything. Anyone's news becomes everyone's news in a nanosecond. And we simply take that for granted. As an over-40 mom, I still consider myself a novice but evolving social networker. Just this week, I noticed I had neglected to fill out "relationship status" on the Facebook profile I'd created months earlier. Since I tied the knot 17 years ago, I figured I probably should edit that to indicate that I was, in fact, married. That mouse click was the shot heard 'round the world! Literally, within seconds, I was bombarded with messages and postings from everywhere, congratulating me on the big news of my nuptials. Many professional contacts I hadn't seen in years were surprised, happy for me. Others seemed confused, but wished me well anyways. Not one questioned me or asked, "Huh? What is this?" Everyone was just happy to get the newsflash.

I had a similar situation recently at work. I do public relations for a large insurance association in Washington. When the House of Representatives passed the health care reform bill in the middle of the night last week, my association issued a press release within seconds, reacting to the legislation and how it would affect our members and consumers. A few minutes later, several news stories broke which included quotes from our release. I could understand this if I worked for the House Speaker or the White House. But I work for one in a sea of hundreds of groups with an interest in these sweeping reforms. Don't get me wrong, this is an ideal result from my perspective?a PR person's goal, indeed. We were thrilled for a mention in these articles. But I cannot help but wonder if my group was cited simply because we were one of the first in the journalists' email inboxes. Did any of them really understand who we are and why it was important for us to react? Were our comments truly poignant and relevant (I'd like to think so) or merely convenient for tired reporters in the middle of the night? We won't ever know. No one called us for more information or to probe any further. They just instantly spit out what we had fed them.

Young and aspiring journalists and communicators of all kinds have Bill Headline's "get it first" mantra down pat. And that certainly has its merits. This generation is far more sophisticated and better than I am on the Facebook-Twitter-iPhone App landscape. It has to be. In our fast world, we are addicted to consuming news?.fast. I wasn't sure how I'd survive when I first left CNN, not being the first person to know every little drop of news that flowed into the newsroom. Turns out, I'm fine. So I urge everyone to remember Headline's "get it best" message too. Whether it's Facebook commentary or bona fide news reports we write, are we too frequently hitting "send" without regard to context, analysis, or big picture perspective?

My friend used to teach a college class on online journalism. She had a lesson she called "Feed the Beast." Her warning to students was this: make sure, as news writers, that you have the resources and wherewithal to support the growth of your product. Deliver more and more news, and your audience craves it all the time. How does that affect quality? She asked them to consider whether it's better to create fewer, meatier features that you can better control and update. I think she and Bill Headline had it right.

Susan Nester '88, is Broadcast Media Director at IIABA. Previously she worked as Washington financial producer for CNN, organizing business coverage for CNN's nightly "Moneyline with Lou Dobbs" and other world financial programming.

Joe Shoquist, an editor who cared about ethics, fairness, and getting it right.

goldfarb@colby.edu (David B. Offer) — Thu, 01 Apr 2010 16:56:52 GMT

A blog dedicated to news literacy seems like the right place to write about Joe Shoquist.

Joe died last month. He was 84 years old and had retired from two careers. First, he was a journalist and editor ? managing editor of The Milwaukee Journal. He retired from that in 1986. Then he was dean of the school of journalism at the University of South Carolina. He retired from the university in 1991.

We didn't talk about news literacy in the years I worked for Joe in Milwaukee. The term had not been invented.

But everything he did led to the kind of journalism readers could trust.

Joe was involved in journalism ethics long before the modern ethics movement took shape with new codes and seminars. He wrote a code of ethics for the Journal and, more importantly, he enforced it. Reporters for other newspapers might accept free tickets, meals or gifts. Not those at Joe's paper. Others might be involved with causes or groups they covered. Not those at Joe's paper. Conflict of interest ? real or apparent ? was unacceptable. I know of one reporter who was fired for an ethical violation. There may have been others.

Joe turned that focus on ethics to journalism nationally, and led a committee that developed a code of ethics for the Associated Press Managing Editors association in 1974. Ethics remained a key focus when when Joe became president of APME in 1978.

Ethics are important in new literacy. Readers, listeners and viewers have a right to expect the men and women who bring them the news to be honorable.

But new literacy goes far beyond ethics. It requires an unwavering adherence to the facts. Verification, not assertion, is a hallmark.

We didn't use those terms, either, when I worked for Joe, but that's what he demanded from his reporters.

That requirement was not just theory nor was it a top-down order from an isolated, ivory tower editor.

I was an investigative reporter for The Journal in the 1970s. That meant my stories often accused someone of wrongdoing.

Joe made it clear that accuracy, fairness and balance were starting points for that kind of reporting and he showed that he meant it by personally editing many of my stories ? a task not usually performed by the managing editor of a metropolitan newspaper.

Preparing to have Joe edit a story or a series of articles took work. I knew he would want sources, specifics and details to support every sentence. He also reviewed my notes. If I cited a document, he wanted to see a copy. If I said something happened on a Monday, he looked at a calendar to make sure I had the day was right.

Sloppy reporting was simply unacceptable.

So was casual use of unnamed sources. Joe didn't like them very much because, he said, readers didn't trust them. More than once insisted that I work harder to get information on the record. He was right; a bit more effort from me found other sources or persuaded off-the-record sources to allow their names to be used.

In later years, Reid MacCluggage, another outstanding editor, called this process of reviewing stories "skeptical editing." I've heard others call it "prosecuting a story." Whatever name, it demands commitment to the highest standards of journalism.

Joe taught me how to be an editor, how to set standards, how to lead an ethical newsroom, how to look at our responsibility to readers.

That was the base for Joe's journalism, and became the base for mine.

David B. Offer is the retired executive editor of the Kennebec Journal and the Morning Sentinel, two daily newspapers in central Maine. He is spending this year as the C.W. Snedden chair of journalism at the University of Alaska Fairbanks. He taught news literacy at Colby College in 2008 and will do so again next January.

"This is how the end of the world will look"

goldfarb@colby.edu (Brian MacQuarrie) — Thu, 25 Mar 2010 15:11:07 GMT

     I have covered my share of natural and human calamity -- Hurricane Katrina, war in Iraq and Afghanistan, mass shootings -- but I have never seen anything like the tableau that greeted me in Port-au-Prince after I arrived on an Air Force transport with troops from the 82d Airborne Division. I had been assigned by The Boston Globe to chronicle the aftermath of the devastating Jan. 12 earthquake that ravaged Haiti, the poorest country in the hemisphere, and I figured that my quarter-century of experience had prepared me for what I was about to witness.
    But after spending the night in an Army tent off the airport tarmac, shielded from the capital's human and physical destruction by walls and gates and a thick cordon of heavy military security, I ventured outside the pale with a military escort. What I saw was a parallel universe of destruction unparalleled in my career. I saw teeming masses of homeless, hungry, and disoriented people, cut off from housing, food, water, medical supplies, and their now-dead relatives and neighbors. Nearly every building had collapsed or been heavily damaged. The cratered roads, poorly maintained in the best of times, now were next to impassable. And sanitation appeared nonexistent as human waste and rotting garbage grew swiftly on the roadsides into shocking, disease-infested heaps.
     This is how the end of the world will look, I told myself.
      I was lucky because I had found one of the few undamaged hotels in the city. The hotel, however, had become a fortified compound where danger lay only a stone's short throw away. Armed guards were posted outside our doors throughout the night, and an increasingly desperate population milled just beyond the grounds.
     Despite the avalanche of food, medicine, doctors, troops, and water pouring into Haiti, it was obvious that all this assistance was but a drop in an ocean of need. This was survival, pure and simple, day by day, for a people whose history has been a long and tortured tale of tragedy. Where would the next meal come from? How long would it take for new housing? Months, years, decades? What about public safety, which seemed to be fraying by the hour? Where was the government? Where was the hope?
    For all the evidence of courage, and resilience, and inspiring acts of compassion, the situation seemed overwhelmingly and depressingly daunting. Once the aid workers leave, and foreign governments become distracted, does this country have the ability or the willingness to repair and re-form itself? Time will tell, but the signs were not encouraging.
     What was encouraging, however, was the human spirit's incredible reflex to survive. Despite the hellish environment, many Haitians clearly had begun to adapt. Some cleared rubble, some danced on the street, others found a reason to smile. The will to live, seen in countless faces every day, once again had trumped the temptation to surrender.
     But for Haiti, this time, inspiring resilience might not be enough. The needs are that great. As I left Haiti, crossing into a Dominican Republic that seemed a lush paradise by comparison, I could not shake the feeling that the chaotic border station had actually been the gates of hell.
     I hope not. I would like to return, and I hope that this depressing image will become nothing more than an unfiltered and premature impression.

For the last twenty-one years, Brian MacQuarrie has been a reporter and editor for the Boston Globe, where he has covered several national and international breaking stories, including the invasion of Iraq, the September 11, 2001 attacks, Hurricane Katrina, and most recently, the earthquake in Haiti.

It's not over yet for this young journalist

goldfarb@colby.edu (Veronica Reino) — Fri, 12 Mar 2010 14:52:26 GMT

   'What do you want to do with your degree?'
   Sitting in the front row at my final senior seminar class I was perplexed. I had told my professors, my advisors, and my parents that I wanted a career in print journalism. I worked on the campus newspaper, not the online magazine, so I could set the page layouts and feel the paper. I interned at two local papers that still hadn?t fully embraced online reporting so I could edit pages. I sent in application after application to papers so I could get my dream job. Yet still they asked me, what do you want to do with your degree?
    Maybe I was naive to think print wouldn't disappear. It's still there, barely hanging on to its readership.
In the four years since I had applied to Saint Michael's College, journalism had drastically changed. Newspapers had moved online to survive. Students were required to know how to edit film, print, and online content to graduate. We made Web sites, created videos, and wrote articles in hopes we'd someday do it for pay.
   Upon graduating, I still didn't have a job lined up. Perhaps I was thinking naively that someone would have an opening. I was wrong. The few interviews I did have ended with, "You'd be great, but . . ." There was always someone more qualified and out of work, or for one editor, the mistrust of young entry-level journalists. He claimed he had a bad experience with a college student that quit and thought we were all the same. I wish he had given me the chance to prove him wrong.
   A few months ago, I had all but given up. I wasn't able to produce more clips and the feeling of failure was ever looming. That's when I realized it would only be my fault if I threw in the towel. So I did what any desperate young writer would do, I started a blog. Not a "look at me blog," but a way to publish clips. Even if I wasn't making any money out of it, at least I was doing something that I loved.
   So I blogged, I blogged, and I blogged. I blogged until I found a site that said they would pay me to blog. It was pennies, but it was something.
   In reality, it's all about the evolution of journalism. The United States has lost a fifth of its journalists to newspaper cutbacks and bankruptcy. That's a huge chunk of the industry fighting for a new job. Where was it leaving me, an entry-level reporter? My competition is steep; they have 20 years of experience, I have less than one.
   But back to the question, what do I want to do with my degree? It's simple, I want to write. Whether it's online or in print, I want to write. Getting a job is the same as trying to get that really good quote from an interview; ask questions in different ways, meet new people, and don't give up.
   So I will continue to blog, and I won't stop applying for jobs. Because if I do, I may never see my dream come true.

Veronica Reino, 23, is a 2009 graduate from Saint Michael's College with a BA in Journalism and Mass Communication and minors in French and Global Studies. She currently works full-time welcoming guests to the Sheraton Hotel in Portsmouth, NH to pay off college loans. In her spare time, she blogs at www.vreino.wordpress.com and http://www.suite101.com/profile.cfm/vreino.

The Truth is Still Alive and Well by David Shribman

goldfarb@colby.edu (David Shribman) — Thu, 14 Jan 2010 17:35:07 GMT

The Truth is Still Alive and Well
by David Shribman

In my line of work I hear the plaint often: Something-or-other (synonyms: the Internet, mobile devices, Twitter) is the death of writing. Or the death of letters. Or the death of news. Or the death of literacy. There sure is a lot of dying going on.

I?ll concede the death of letters. I think I got one this year from a sane person, and many scores from people who probably aren?t or who most certainly are in prison. (Inmates write a lot of letters to newspaper editors. Often they want to date the female reporters. I?m not a dating service.)

But the thoughtful letter from abroad is deader than Jacob Marley, and the discursive letter from college or between friends, on life support a decade ago, is dead, too. Gone. That?s a shame; read the letters of Theodore Roosevelt, and you will see an active, inquisitive mind at work, or read the letters of Daniel Webster, and you will see a man who is a dreamer struggling with another version of himself who is a schemer, and you?ll understand why the words ``Devil?? and ``Daniel Webster?? flow so easily off the tongue, or the keyboard. In his complete collection of letters, published in book form in six illustrated volumes in November but also available on the web, Vincent van Gogh says: "Writing is actually an awful way to explain things to each other.?? He?s wrong, of course. And if the letter is dead, the blog is alive and well. If you read that last sentence, you have proved my point.

As for the rest of it?how everything is dying--I?m not so sure.

I am sure, in fact, of one thing quite the opposite. The computer?or the word processor, its handmaiden?has quite definitely improved, rather than destroyed writing. Take the first paragraph of this little blog essay. It?s not a thing of beauty but even so, surely you don?t think I wrote it that way the moment I sat at the keyboard. I played around with it, substituted words, changed a long sentence into sentence fragments (maybe not the greatest literary artifice, but serviceable in this regard). In the old days?within my own lifespan?that would have cost me valuable minutes and a lot of paper. The time you needed to retype the whole thing. The paper you needed when you retyped it. The angst you expended about whether it was worth the time and paper to rewrite the damn thing. In short, in the old days I would have stuck with what I typed in the beginning and to the hell with fixing it. Today I just held down the delete-button and played around a bit.

Thus my theory: The computer is the best thing that ever happened to writing.

I?ll admit to being something of a romantic when it comes to reading, and to be old enough to have been schooled to find delight in the similarity between the word "romantic" and the French word for novel, which is roman. I like a book, the feel of it, the weight of it, the way it seems perfect in the hand (where it wants to be read) the way a baseball sits perfectly in the hand and wants to be thrown. But I am open to the idea that there might be a more cost-efficient way of reading, one that suits my aging eyes, one that suits an aging planet. So I am not prepared to say that the electronic reading devices (and especially the ones that haven?t yet come out) are going to be the death of the novel. The novel died a thousand deaths before we ever heard of Steve Jobs or Bill Gates. It will die a thousand more before all of us die.

As for the death of news, I think that is being proven wrong every day. We?re getting news in new, and better, forms every week. The romance?there?s that word again--may be gone but, really, was the romance of the news business in the consuming of it or in the gathering of it (and in the gathering of the gatherers, where real romance thrived)? To ask the question is to answer it. There will be news even if there are not newspapers, but I actually think there will be newspapers, at least as long as Bates dislikes Colby.

Now to the death of literacy. Literacy is the casus belli of much of our cultural conflict, but it is the raison d?etre of this blog, and the reason Colby?s Goldfarb Center for Public Affairs & Civic Engagement and efforts elsewhere, including the News Literacy Project and the groundbreaking work of Howard Schneider at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, are so committed to separating the wheat from the chaff. In our case, it?s not just wheat, but whole wheat.

Let me conclude with a thought and a link. The other day I encountered a particularly beguiling piece of writing, not even 300 words long, tucked away at the very bottom of a newspaper page. It was a little essay by Mark Cocker of the Guardian newspaper in England, one installment of a column on natural history and country life that the paper has run for more than a century, which means even before BASIC and Fortran, and it began this way:

When the half-moon rose and dusk fell on the town's special Christmas market, nightfall seemed to bring only a deeper sense of intimacy and atmosphere to the heart of this delightful place. A drop in temperature also made the seasonal lights burn brighter. In one young Norwegian maple I noticed that its leafless branches were threaded with a circle of five twinkling white stars and eight other illuminations that attempt to mimic the momentary downward glow of a falling comet.

You can read the whole thing, a glimpse of Bury St. Edmunds at holidaytime, right here. It will take you only a minute, maybe two. Having tried it both ways (in the paper, where it is a half dozen or so words shorter, and on the screen, where you get the whole thing) I can tell you that the beauty of those 287 words rings true?and ringing true is what this whole thing is about?either way. Nothing?s dying, except maybe our capacity to imagine how robust is the truth, and how robust is a truth well expressed, and how it cannot die.

David Shribman is executive editor of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.

The Blurring Line Between P.R. and News by Kelli Arena and Susan Nester

goldfarb@colby.edu (Kelli Arena and Susan Nester) — Thu, 17 Dec 2009 20:50:50 GMT

The Blurred Line Between P.R. and News
by Kelli Arena and Susan Nester '88

During our days at CNN, our show would get 40-50 pitches a day from public relations reps trying to peddle everything from experts on issues to the latest surveys to actual story ideas. Most were non-newsworthy or uninteresting and went straight in the trash. Only a few bubbled to the top and made it to the list of items we might use on the air. And we were actually grateful for those ? compelling or interesting pitches that showed the p.r. rep did some homework. A good p.r. person knows how a news story is written, understands how video is edited, and has developed an instinct for news cycles and how newsrooms work.

Okay, the work of the reporter and the pitchman is similar. No doubt about it. But they serve two different masters. And this is important to remember. Journalists should never pander to corporations or special interests. But that is exactly what p.r. reps are paid to do. Journalists should report the good, bad and ugly. Public relations pros try to minimize, or spin, the bad and ugly and play up the good. The lines between the two professions should be clear, bold and well understood.

Unfortunately, they are not.

The lines are becoming more blurred than they have ever been. What?s more, as we all know, journalism has taken a bad economic hit?thousands of journalists have lost their jobs?and the ones left behind are being asked to do way too much.

The result is great for those of us in public relations, but we believe, very bad for the integrity of journalism.

An example: I (Nester) am the broadcast media director for a large trade association in Washington, DC. A reporter from a major news organization called me recently for ?help? on a story. But the reporter was working on three other stories at the same time. She knew I used to be a television producer, so she asked me to dig around and do some research within my organization on a certain topic that interested her and her editors. This is a p.r. person?s dream. As quickly as possible, I gathered all the information, selected two of my members for on-camera interviews and drew up some suggested questions, set up the video shoots, and handed over everything to the reporter. This story wasn?t controversial in any way. I genuinely tried hard to provide accurate, useful, and fair information. And I think I did. But of course, these interviews made my people look smart and helpful. I fully expected the reporter would get back to me with questions or eventually find another element to this story to balance things out. But she never did. Instead, she sent me her script for ?approval.? Clearly, this was great for my association, and for me personally as its p.r. person. But as a former journalist, I have to say it bothered me. I still cannot believe any journalist worth her salt would ever run a piece completely put together by an interest group. Back in the day, CNN would have fired me for that.

And that?s not all. Over the summer, my organization decided to run some ads on a national radio network. For years, I?d had been trying to pitch stories to this radio network with little success. Suddenly, this summer, I got calls just about every week for interviews and information on a bunch of different stories. I?d like to think it was just my hard work finally paying off, but I fear the interest in my group and industry was instead because of the money my association had spent. Interestingly, when sponsorship stopped, yes, so did the phone calls from that newsroom. What? It suddenly wasn?t news anymore?

So how does a news consumer know what?s really news? Something is wrong with this picture. And it raises a whole host of ethical questions. Public relations reps have no responsibility to anyone but their employers. It is not their job to make sure stories are balanced, or to point out the flaws in their company?s new product line. It?s not their problem that journalists are falling down on the job. It?s too bad that, too often, it is only the p.r. flacks? good conscience that stands between them and a vulnerable public.

Kelli Arena is a former CNN correspondent and is now the Dan Rather Endowed Chair at Sam Houston University in Texas. Susan Nester '88, is Broadcast Media Director at IIABA. Previously she worked as Washington financial producer for CNN, organizing business coverage for CNN's nightly "Moneyline with Lou Dobbs" and other world financial programming.

The Rise of Nonprofit Journalism by Alexis Grant

goldfarb@colby.edu (Alexis Grant) — Thu, 17 Dec 2009 20:21:28 GMT

The Rise of Nonprofit Journalism
by Alexis Grant '03

It?s totally in. All my friends are doing it. And I?m starting to wonder: should I join them?

I?m talking about nonprofit journalism.

Several of my reporter friends have transitioned from newspapers to nonprofits. One?s at the Texas Tribune , an online publication that focuses on public policy, politics and government. Another friend was lured by California Watch, an investigative team created this year by the Center for Investigative Reporting.

It's a solid alternative to the world of traditional media, much of which is struggling financially. ?Even up until two years ago, serious reporters saw newspapers as their ultimate destination,? Jim Barnett, an expert on the nonprofit model, said in a radio interview. ?Now that?s no longer the case. People recognize that there may be an answer here (in nonprofit journalism) ? not thee answer, but an answer.?

A former reporter, Barnett?s studying nonprofit journalism for his master?s of public administration. If you don?t already read his blog, The Nonprofit Road, you should. He lays out the pros and cons of going nonprofit: it helps preserve journalism -- a public good -- but doesn't necessarily provide a long-term solution to the demise of newspapers; it may fund expensive investigative work, but not other parts of the paper; and, like all new ventures, some nonprofit startups will succeed, but more are likely to fail.

Some not-for-profit media organizations like The Christian Science Monitor, National Public Radio and the Associated Press have long proven the model works. But now that an increasing number of these outlets are cropping up ? attracting some reporters who have lost their jobs with traditional media ? critics are asking questions about this type of funding.

While leaders of nonprofits say they don't have financially-driven biases like for-profit media, critics counter that those hidden agendas have simply shifted according to the desires of funders. ?Having just evicted the usual gatekeepers, how many readers are going to be eager to have philanthropists reset the news agenda?? asks Jack Shafer in a Slate column called Nonprofit journalism comes at a cost.

In an article entitled The trouble with nonprofit journalism, Jonathan Weber writes that ?new (for-profit) business approaches will, ultimately, be a much better guarantor of quality journalism - and democracy - than sugar daddies." He poses this question: "How can a news organization properly go about its business when it?s constantly on bended knee looking for funders?"

There are, however, plenty of supporters who say nonprofit works ? and will continue to work. Among them are the founders of several new startups (Barnett offers a list of startups on his site). Check out, for example, the rationale of the Texas Tribune. ?Journalism in the public interest is too vital to a civilized society, to a functioning democracy, to be left to the vagaries of the free market,? its founders write. ?Philanthropy must and will become a bigger part of the equation.?

So as I prepare to re-enter the workforce as a journalist, I ask myself: should I go nonprofit? In the end, the job market may help make that decision for me.

Alexis Grant '03 is a journalist writing her first book, a travel memoir about backpacking solo through Africa. Until May 2008, she was a reporter at the Houston Chronicle.

Privacy in an Age of Alternative Media? Not Even for Tiger By Brian MacQuarrie

goldfarb@colby.edu (Brian MacQuarrie) — Tue, 08 Dec 2009 21:24:35 GMT

Privacy in an Age of Alternative Media? Not Even for Tiger
By Brian MacQuarrie '74

The great golfer Tiger Woods wants the news media to respect his privacy. Well, doesn't everybody? He's entitled to that wish, of course. And whatever is happening in his tightly shut home in a Florida gated community is a very personal matter that ultimately concerns only his family and possibly a few other intimately interested parties.

But Woods appears clueless about how the modern media operate as he, and his corporate handlers, have fumbled their response with misdirection, questionable outrage, and ambiguous apologies. For someone whose image has been burnished and presented with all the vanilla scriptedness of an annual shareholders meeting, the fallout from his middle-of-the-night pinball adventure with a Cadillac Escalade must be the stuff of sheer terror. Well, welcome to the 21st-century media landscape, Mr. Woods.

The mainstream media have done their thing, albeit with a little more enthusiasm, space, and time than I would have expected. But Woods is the world's first billion-dollar athlete, a hands-down global icon whose skill with a golf club might run second to his allure as a marketing symbol. And, then again, the circumstances of his run-in with a fire hydrant and a tree were so wacky, and initially inexplicable, that traditional news coverage was an editor's no-brainer.

Woods and his "people" have long believed that they knew how to handle the traditional media. Access could be shut off to any journalist who dared to muse about the golfer's fits of anger, his too-good-to-be-true persona, or his widely whispered penchant for attractive women. My colleague at the Globe, Charlie Pierce, incurred the nuclear-level wrath of Camp Woods, way back in 1997, when he wrote a jaw-dropping Esquire profile of the golfer that famously unveiled a proclivity for crude, sexist, and racially charged humor. After those bombshells hit the streets, the spin doctors at International Management Group, the keeper of the Woods image, expanded and reinforced the fortress.

For 12 years, the walls held fast. But social media are expanding at warp speed, and a seemingly incriminating phone message to a Los Angeles cocktail waitress, purportedly from Woods, was obtained by Us Magazine, the celebrity publication. Woods's apology for unspecified family transgressions came shortly after that report, which speaks to the reach of the public's obsession with celebrities and also the power of the once-fringe news outlets that give it voice. And those outlets, as Woods undoubtedly was belatedly told, are tireless and voracious.

The lessons in all this? Not that there are many skeptics left, but alternative media are more popular and powerful than ever, and will only become more so. (Their reporting also seems to be getting better, by the way.) The public's appetite for celebrity news is growing, and will continue to do so as long as reality TV and its ilk are a barometer of mass American tastes. And no one, not even the once-untouchable Tiger Woods, is fully protected in a society where cellphone pictures, text messages, phone tapes, and salacious emails make every move or word a potential target.

For a public that still longs to believe in heroes, we have yet another cautionary tale. If it seems too good to be true, it probably is.

For the last 20 years, Brian MacQuarrie '74 has been a reporter and editor for the Boston Globe, where he has covered a wide range of major breaking stories, including assignments as an embedded reporter during the invasion of Iraq, the Sept. 11 attacks, and Hurricane Katrina. He is the author of a recently released book, The Ride, a nonfiction work that chronicles a family's long recovery after a devastating murder. He lives in Boston.

Evolution on the Airwaves by Chris Morrill

goldfarb@colby.edu (Chris Morrill) — Tue, 08 Dec 2009 19:08:15 GMT

Evolution on the Airwaves
by Chris Morrill '81

The PBS NewsHour moves into a new era this week, dropping Jim Lehrer from the name-in-title spot and making a commitment to integrate broadcast and online content.

It?s an admirable adjustment in this era of constant struggle for longstanding news organizations. Lehrer promises that their mission won?t change and the show producers are committed to continuing ?a deeper daily dive into the ?why? of a story, not just the ?what happened?.?

In the show last Friday, the well-respected anchor shared guidelines for the show?s type of journalism, which include:

-   Do nothing I cannot defend.
-   Cover, write and present every story with the care I would want if the story were about me.
-   Assume there is at least one other side or version to every story.
-   Carefully separate opinion and analysis from straight news stories, and clearly label everything.

These are all good rules to follow at a time when the American public believes the accuracy of the press is at a 25-year low. According to the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press, only 29% of us believe that news organizations generally get the story right, while 63% say news stories are often inaccurate.

Should we blame the growing credibility gap for the struggle that newspapers find themselves in now? It certainly doesn?t help, but I?m more inclined to focus on the ?no time to read? factor and the way the web is changing our definition of what news is, when we can get it, and how it can be delivered.

The Pew report, released in September, also highlights television?s leadership as the dominant source of both national and local news for Americans. Some 71% of Americans count on TV for national news, while 42% turn to the Internet and only 33% to newspapers. More surprisingly, when asked, ?Who does the most to uncover local news stories?? 44% say TV stations and only 25% say newspapers.

These numbers leave newspaper veterans shaking their heads. They know how many TV stories are gathered and reported using the local paper as a primary source.

Whether you?re a TV-news fan or a newspaper junkie, the sad fact remains that there are fewer and fewer professional reporters gathering important stories about national affairs, not to mention the states and towns we all live in. PBS news leaders certainly have high standards and have earned the respect of their audience; let?s hope they succeed as they evolve.

Chris Morrill, Colby '81, an editor and executive at The Hartford Courant for many years, is a Connecticut-based digital media consultant.

News Literacy Through Comedy by Ruth Jacobs

goldfarb@colby.edu (Ruth Jacobs) — Wed, 02 Dec 2009 23:14:14 GMT

News Literacy Through Comedy
by Ruth Jacobs

There was a time when it pained me to hear that young people got their news from Jon Stewart. Now I am starting to think there are worse things?and that The Daily Show may actually be contributing to news literacy.

Case in point: Sarah Palin coverage.

On Nov. 18 Stewart discussed one of the day's biggest stories?Palin's book tour and media blitz. He started by pointing out that her interviews garnered far more media attention than his own with the sitting vice president the day before. A little media criticism there.

So why does Palin get so much attention? According to "Top 10 reasons America is obsessed with Sarah Palin" on MSNBC's Morning Meeting with Dylan Ratigan, "She's Hot" (#9). Okay, thanks for pointing out this pathetic excuse for journalism, Stewart.

But it gets better.

Following #9, Ratigan's crew flashed a photo of Palin in an American flag bikini and holding a rifle?an image that, as Stewart pointed out, circulated during the campaign and was clearly not real.

"Hey, look at that," Stewart said. "They're using those Photoshopped pictures of Sarah Palin in a bikini that got passed around during the campaign and are, of course, fake. And since MSNBC's a news network, I'm sure they knew that."

Cut to Ratigan, the following morning, issuing an apology.

"I want to apologize to Governor Palin and all of our viewers on Friday. In a very misguided attempt to have some fun in advance of Sarah Palin's upcoming book Going Rogue, our staff mistakenly used some clearly Photoshopped images of Ms. Palin without any acknowledgment, and on behalf of the show I would like to say that this was completely unacceptable. We should have never used those photos in the first place, and you can rest assured we spent the weekend and Friday afternoon taking measures to make sure it will never happen again. I apologize."

Okay, everyone makes mistakes. But the most important part of this Stewart segment is that it shows that nothing can be taken for granted?and that it shouldn?t take "the weekend and Friday afternoon" for a news show to sort this out. You can't even assume that MSNBC employees know enough to verify the authenticity of images before broadcasting them to millions.

Watch carefully, America. Or, if you can't, at least Jon Stewart will.

Ruth Jacobs is associate director of communications at Colby College.

The Daily Digest by Gerry Boyle

goldfarb@colby.edu (Gerry Boyle) — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 18:57:43 GMT

The Daily Digest
by Gerry Boyle '78

"This is the way the world ends/ Not with a bang but a whimper."
-T.S. Eliot, The Hollow Men

Apologies probably are due Thomas Stearns Eliot, but at the breakfast table the other morning I found myself thinking of his oft-quoted line. The daily paper was spread about, and because it was a Monday (a thin paper after the weekend advertising, news staff stretched, too) I'd read every column inch in that day's edition, from page one to the classified ads and back again. And my tea still was hot.

So I said to the person with whom I live: "Not a lot in the paper today." She says, with a nod to her laptop, at the end of the table, "Well, we could just read it online."

And I say, "No way. We have to get the paper." Which is what I always say. After all, I spent 18 years in the newsroom. And every day for pretty much my whole literate life has started with the local newspaper on the breakfast table. But this time for a millisecond, or maybe it was a nanosecond, I didn't reply. And then I gathered up my discussion-ending retort. Until next time.

If it had continued we could have noted that reading it online would save us a couple of hundred bucks. And do we really need to read the police blotter (yes, we do!) classified ads (I do enjoy the personals and lost and found)? And if you read it online you don't have to pull on a parka and boots at 6 on a snowy winter morning and trudge down to the road to get the newspaper from the tube by the telephone pole. And what about all the trees we could save from being ground up for newsprint? And when we go away, we wouldn't have to ask a neighbor to collect the papers so we can go through them upon our return.

To which I say, yeah, yeah, yeah. We still need to get the newspaper.

But for the first time, there was a flicker of consideration of the possibility. If that moment is extended each time the discussion comes up, will there be a time when I actually cave? Will this domino fall as did all the others in our personal technological evolution, things I opposed that are now part of our lives: cable TV, internet, wireless, a TV in the bedroom?

And if somebody like me doesn't get the news in print, who will?

Newspaper companies probably have this all mapped out in their business plans. They've given up on me before I've given up on myself. And maybe this is okay. After all, my children don't subscribe to newspapers. (Well, one does get the Sunday New York Times delivered) and they're educated, keep up with the news (especially national and international), and read more online than I do at the breakfast table.

But even if this is the future I don't want to contemplate it. Not yet. I don't look forward to a time when breakfast isn't punctuated by pithy comments regarding the day's events, the state of the economy, and the patter of conversation over toast and tea, like, "You through with the sports?"

A laptop breakfast would be, by comparison, a dull affair, silent but for the chewing.

Gerry Boyle '78 was a staffer at the Morning Sentinel from 1980 to 1999, spending most of his career as an at-large columnist. He is editor of Colby magazine and creator of a series of crime novels featuring an ex- New York Times reporter named Jack McMorrow. His writing life is chronicled at gerryboyle.com

Behind the Lens by Susan Nester

goldfarb@colby.edu (Susan Nester) — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 20:02:59 GMT

Behind the Lens
by Susan Nester '88

My friend is a journalist here in Washington, DC. A couple of weeks ago, he covered a tragic accident where a city bus had killed a pedestrian in a busy intersection. As you can imagine, it was a gruesome crime scene, abuzz with police activity. My friend was hustling to gather the needed elements for a TV news story, interviewing emergency personnel, eye witnesses, and transit authorities on the scene.

Days later, the same journalist was up to his waist, literally, in the bitter cold Chesapeake Bay after a brutal Nor?easter ripped through the mid-Atlantic , flooding homes and washing cars away. Just getting to this spot was a precarious challenge, and only then did his job of bringing breaking news to anxious TV viewers begin.
But the TV news man in both cases isn?t who you might think. He isn?t the blown-dried, polished reporter everyone saw on ABC for either of those stories. He is, in fact, the videographer. And I think this job is the most misunderstood and underrated position in television news.

Camera crews are the backbone of any TV news operation. You watch their work every day, probably never thinking about the people who are actually making the pictures. During my tenure at CNN as a producer, if I didn?t make it to a news conference to ask my question, chances are, a colleague from another network asked it. My cameraman was rolling. If I missed the stakeout outside the Capitol and couldn?t shout at the Congressman with the hot bill that day, another reporter did. Again, I could review the tape. But what if my photographer didn?t show up? TV is nothing without video.

The job of a photojournalist is hard. It often means countless hours, days, even weeks away from home and family on faraway news assignments. It?s physically demanding. Imagine standing in 100-degree heat for 10 hours to get a 10-second piece of video. Think about carrying heavy gear up a mountain to achieve that perfect panoramic view behind the on-camera talent. Try unpacking and re-packing enormous suitcases full of equipment a dozen times in a single day, and schlepping it up and down narrow staircases in between. I have worked with crews who have done all that and much more. And their tough job is growing harder.

Budget cuts in the sour economy have forced the elimination of audio technicians, the videographer?s sidekick and second set of hands. In many cases, video editors are also gone, so it?s now up to the photojournalists to not only shoot the story, but also edit it together on a laptop in the field and send it back to the station online. And with newsrooms squeaking by with fewer reporters, many videographers are winding up just like my friend did at the bus accident, not only shooting the interviews, but asking the questions to produce the needed soundbites from the scene.

Photojournalists are just that?journalists. They are called upon every day to use their carefully honed news judgment, to snap into action on a moment?s notice, to be both the first responders and the last resort for news teams that are stretched too thin. And they enjoy little of the recognition or accolades of their on-air colleagues or even their producers.

Think back on the major news events of the last decades. The first steps on the moon. The crumbling of the Berlin Wall. The space shuttle Challenger exploding. That plane slamming into the New York skyscraper on 9/11. It?s not the reporters or producers or shows that endure in our collective memory, but the images themselves. And for each of those, we can thank the hardworking photojournalists who were there to capture the moment and share it with the world.

Susan Nester '88, is Broadcast Media Director at IIAB. Previously she worked as Washington financial producer for CNN, organizing business coverage for CNN's nightly "Moneyline with Lou Dobbs" and other world financial programming.

Hold the Obit: Newspapers Aren?t Dead by David Offer

smthomps@colby.edu (David Offer) — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 21:52:44 GMT

When I told friends that my wife and I were moving to Fairbanks for a year and that I would be teaching journalism at the university here, several asked how I could teach about an industry that is dying and why any student would want to learn about it.

I talked about those questions and the future of newspapers recently in a speech to about 50 people in downtown Fairbanks. I called my talk ?Hold the Obit: Newspapers Aren?t Dead!? and explained why I am optimistic about the future of the industry in which I worked for more than 40 years.

The doubts are reasonable. Newspapers have been failing. Some have closed, some are in bankruptcy court, and others have been sold at fire-sale prices.

The steady stream of buyouts, layoffs and cuts has been painful; many of my friends in the industry are out of work. Those who still have jobs agonize about how to provide decent news coverage with smaller staffs.

Numbers explain the ugly necessity to take steps editors deplore.

Nationally, newspaper ad revenues have fallen 23 percent in the last two years. Classified ads have migrated to Craigslist.org.

As newspapers seem to be wasting away, the Internet soars; traffic to news websites continues to grow. Newspapers provide much of the news content you find online ? especially local news. That?s easy to understand. Despite the cuts, in every community the newspaper still has the largest and most professional staff of reporters and editors.

Early on it was assumed that sooner or later advertising revenue from the Internet would grow to offset much of the cost of reporting the news but that has not happened. Advertising on news websites is far from the level required to support newsgathering.

There is no reason to expect that to change.

These dismal trends lead many to think the newspaper industry is dying.

I do not agree.

The newspaper industry is not dying; it?s changing.

I think newspapers will emerge from the current economic chaos prepared to adapt to the Internet world.

I hope I?m right ? and you should, too -- because democracy requires a vigorous press, and even in this Internet age, that means newspapers.

Newspapers lead the fight for open government.

That was certainly true for my years as executive editor of the Kennebec Journal and the Morning Sentinel in central Maine.

We fought when a judge ordered the paper not to print news about a court hearing.

We used open records laws to get records about suicides at the local jail.

I went to city and town meetings to demand access for reporters and for the public.

We printed editorials when officials tried to govern in secret.

That?s the kind of thing newspapers do ? they confront the powerful, dig out important information, and present it to readers.

While there are some interesting examples of local reporting by bloggers there is no significant Internet model to replace the kind of beat reporting newspapers provide.

That?s no surprise; it takes an experienced reporter to pour through city, town and state budgets and make sense of them for readers, to attend enough council meetings to understand what?s really going on, to ask intelligent questions of officials and to know when the answers just don?t ring true.

And then there is investigative reporting ? one of the most vital functions good newspapers provide.

The problems facing the newspaper industry today stem from economic assumptions that are no longer true.

Phil Meyers, a respected journalist, teacher and author, commented on those assumptions in an article nearly 15 years ago when he compared newspapers to the goose that laid golden eggs.

He said buyers assumed the goose would continue to lay one golden egg a day ? and they paid a lot of money for the goose. When the goose dropped production to one golden egg a week, the buyers went broke and were forced to sell the goose for a lot less than they paid for it. But the new owners were happy because they didn?t expect a golden egg every day.

Substitute ?newspaper? for ?goose? and you have the story.

Papers deep in debt are failing or being sold at reasonable prices to new owners prepared to accept lower profit levels. Not 30 or 40 percent that newspapers once returned ? a golden egg a day; maybe 10 or 12 percent ? a golden egg a week.

That?s a reasonable analogy for what happened to these newspapers in Maine.

In some ways it?s sad to see the changes, but it can also mean good things. Owners not overburdened with debt can afford to cover the news and serve their communities.

Some will do that; other will not. It takes more than money to run a good community newspaper. It takes commitment and leadership; some newspapers have that, some don?t.

Despite my optimism there are great uncertainties about how the newspaper world will fare in an Internet age.

Some newspapers are requiring readers to pay for access to the paper?s news on the Net.

Some are withholding some content from the Net, offering it only to print subscribers.

Other publishers continue to put everything on the web for free, hoping to attract more readers and, perhaps, advertisers.

There are discussions about charging aggregators like Google for the content they now take from newspapers for free. I expect that to happen and it could have a significant impact on newspaper revenue.

I don?t know which of these approaches or what combination of them will work but I am confident that one or more of them will succeed

Newspapers will prosper in an Internet age because readers and advertisers value the coverage newspapers provide and they can?t get it anywhere else

The newspaper world of the future will be different than the one in which I started as a reporter in 1965.

But it will be an exciting world for journalists.

Most of my students at the University of Alaska-Fairbanks think the days of print are ending.

I think they are wrong ? and I?ve told them so.

David B. Offer is the retired executive editor of two daily newspapers in Maine, the Kennebec Journal in Augusta and the Morning Sentinel in Waterville. He is spending a year as the C. W. Snedden chair in journalism at the University of Alaska-Fairbanks.

iTunes as a Model? Google and the News by Beth Healy

goldfarb@colby.edu (Beth Healy) — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 13:00:10 GMT

iTunes as a Model? Google and the News
by Beth Healy

Let me get this straight: Newspapers everywhere are struggling to make money. Most of us are giving our product away for free, online, and we have no idea how to get people to pay for news. Google, meanwhile, turned a $1.6 billion profit in the third quarter ? right, that was just for three months.

We are doing something seriously wrong.

Now Google, the king of search, does lots of things well, not least selling online ads (something we ink-stained types could learn to do better). And users have lots of reasons to go to the ubiquitous Internet utility ? to find a restaurant, to check a fact, to get some background on a date or figure out how to replace batteries in a wireless mouse (turns out you don?t; you throw it away).

But Google has another, increasingly big, draw: News. Type in health plan or Madoff or bank bailout, and you get the top stories of the day ? of the moment, really. And, no surprise, the top reports are generally from the best newspapers and wire services in the country.

I?ve often wondered: What would happen if we all withheld our news from Google (and other search sites) for a day? If Google?s users wanted to see the top stories on the health bill in the Senate, for instance, and they couldn?t get the New York Times, The Washington Post, the Associated Press, and a handful of other sources, they wouldn?t be getting the stories they need to see. Google news would lose popularity fast if the only sources that sprung up were snarky blogs or the Podunk Gazette.

Don?t get me wrong ? we all want to show up on a Google news search. But do we want to give it all away for free? What if Google had to pay a few cents a hit for every click through to a top story? After all, they?re getting eyes driven to their site, to their revenue-generating ads, on the basis of our (free) content. Google is basically a middleman, a virtual newsstand that, instead of getting a cut for distributing our news, gets the whole payout.

Cutting such a deal with Google is impossible, you say? News is already free and Google rules the planet?why would they ever deign to put a price tag on the best news sources?

Think of iTunes as an analogy. Sure, lots of people want free music, and they?re going to figure out how to get it. Napster made a business of that trend and Google is just the biggest entity helping giving away news for free. But when the music industry woke up and realized it was about to be destroyed, folks got together and managed to agree to sell MP3s electronically. Millions of people still pay for their favorite artists? songs ? only they do it on iTunes, not at the record store.

Such a system for news could have a number of positive effects. For one, it would reinvigorate competition among newspapers, nationally and online. It would even level the playing field for smaller news operations.
While the Times might often break news on a new bill in Washington, a small local paper or TV station would likely be the first on the scene at a rural shooting. And it could raise the profile of small start-ups like the Texas Tribune, aiming to break news on politics and other local matters.

Of course, getting newspapers to agree on such an approach would be the hard part. It?s a fiercely competitive industry where people don?t agree on much. And we certainly aren?t known for innovating.
That?s another reason to bring some smart technology and marketing types into the discussion. What newspapers are good at is getting stories. We need to keep doing that, and the country frankly needs us to keep doing that as well. But we need some smart folks to figure out how we can get paid to do it in the new world order.

Putting up a gate at the front door of our own web sites probably won?t work; readers are already used to getting news for free. But requiring the middleman to share some of the revenue he?s collecting ? on customers he wouldn?t have without us -- that just might work.

Beth Healy '87 is an investigative reporter at the Boston Globe. She currently works in the paper's business section.

Can there be much more that can go wrong with newspapers? by Cindy Skrzycki

goldfarb@colby.edu (Cindy Skrzycki) — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 21:24:00 GMT

Can there be much more that can go wrong with newspapers?
by Cindy Skrzycki

Last month, the publisher of the New York Times compared print journalism to the Titanic. Not that the grand ship sunk because of the hubris of the captain (there?s a lot of that in the newspaper world, too), but because it would have gone down anyway in the wake of a new industry taking over sea-bound shipping?airplanes.

Most journalists still at their posts and those hanging on for dear life would buy the simpler explanation: the ship sank slowly. Period. It?s hard to tell a class of journalist wanna be?s that their lives are going to be built around an industry that provided pretty decent salaries, benefits, and career challenges. It?s like telling them to buy a ticket on the Titanic. The main challenge they are going to have is finding a stable news outlet, online or otherwise, that is underwritten by a sugar daddy who values their work. They will have to find the new financial model that works because their elders have not had much luck. In fact, they are fiddling while Rome burns.

So, whenever there are hints of counter-currents that print not be dead yet, some of us do sit up straighter and take note.

The Los Angeles Times, which itself has been torn asunder by layoffs leaving it a shadow of its former self, ran a story on October 28 marveling at how a busy, popular news stand has stayed busy and popular. People continue to patronize it, buying ink on printed paper. In fact, the news stand owner also downloads newspapers for his patrons who have to have it on paper?1,133 titles in 40 languages from a service called Newspaperdirect. It is $5 on weekdays for a printouts; $7 on the weekend.

Why does the owner of the news stand do this? Well, it?s about shipping again. He says it?s too expensive to get the real thing anymore, especially foreign editions. He also says he is trying to serve his customers. Many of them have been coming for years, mostly to buy lottery tickets, but also to pick up a glossy magazine which is just not the same on a computer screen?even those are being closed down at as brisk a clip as newspapers.

Then, there are whispers that a Kindle or other digital book readers are a great thing to have if you do a lot of traveling. But even those who love that they don't have to haul six heavy books in their carry-ons admit there is something missing in the gray-on-gray pages that scroll by, making Dickens seem even drabber. They appreciate that producing a printed book requires someone with an excellent sense of proportion and artistic design to pick a correct and enjoyable font, a nice stock of paper, and the cover design that may have drawn them to the book in the first place.

What gets lost in the debate over the transition to a completely digital world is that there is a world of artistic talent being lost. Some of this can be reproduced digitally, but not the whole package that can be held in your hand at one time, be it a magazine, a newspaper or a book. Even companies, which used to plow a wealth of resources and talent into their annual reports, which were mailed to shareholders, now urge their investors to view it all digitally. Again, it's one thing to view a quarterly report on line and save the trees, but an annual, distinct print product used to be a point of pride.

I have been arguing this point for what seems like forever with my journalism students who do not read printed newspapers until they are assigned to them. And, even then, they don't have the patience for appreciating that a whole team of people think about what that day's edition is going to look like and feel like to a reader--from the editorial cartoon, to single-page graphics, to photos, to section fronts and the front pages. Not to mention the writing. It's an artistic tour de force, everyday.

It must be something in the eye, or brain, that comes with years of training that makes one be grateful for that kind of package and think it wonderful because I find the clutter of digital editions annoying, time-consuming and distracting. Or, as the woman at the LA newsstand said when she plunked down $22 for a copy of Vogue Italia: it was worth it.

But it takes taste to know that, the expediency and cost-saving that comes with looking at a glowing screen be dammed.

Cindy Skrzycki is a Worldview correspondent for GlobalPost and has been a business writer and columnist for 30 years.

Fighting for the Local Edge by Chris Morrill

goldfarb@colby.edu (Chris Morrill) — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 20:22:20 GMT

Fighting for the Local Edge
by Chris Morrill '81

Which would you choose: The New York Times on your doorstep, or the San Francisco Chronicle? How about the San Jose Mercury News vs. the Wall Street Journal?

Two of the nation?s most respected national dailies are launching San Francisco editions, taking advantage of the struggling metro papers that are battling advertising and readership declines. Perhaps this is good news for many well-educated Bay Area print readers, who will now find a certain amount of good local content packed inside these quality-driven media giants.

It makes me wonder: Could this fly in cities across the country, hastening the demise of the metro daily? And if it did, would people be well enough served without their once-healthy regional paper? That?s assuming they can afford home delivery of national papers, find weeklies packed with local ?good news? and advertising, and turn to the Internet for much of the commodity-type news that has filled papers for years (stocks, weather, entertainment listings, news updates, and so on).

Would we really have much to lose? What are the points of differentiation?

1.   Editorial Page Voice. An important part of a good local newspaper, but sadly under-appreciated and misunderstood by many readers. The Internet ? where everyone can be part of the dialogue ? is where it?s at now.

2.   Doorstep Delivery. It used to be that having a local press and a network of paperboys was the only way you?d be able to deliver a daily product to thousands of readers before 6 a.m. That?s no longer the case. Adult route drivers handle multiple local and national papers now. The big papers are printed regionally, and often arrive with or before local alternatives.

3.   Timeliness: Good mid-sized dailies once brought ?scoops? to their readers. They were timely as well as topical. Not so much anymore, as newsrooms have shrunk and news spreads immediately online. (How long has it been since you heard about a major news event from a print product?)

4.   Local Boosterism. This would likely be lost. If the New York Times replaced the ailing Boston Globe with a Boston-centric edition of the Times, that would be the end of the many commemorative edition front-pages featuring Red Sox victories. I suspect most local TV news stations have this territory covered already.

5.   Great Reporters and Columnists. Many of these folks are already leaving newspapers, through buyouts, layoffs or a desire to move to a positive place. Some of the best are writing for online sites. Smart national papers would be wise to hire them for their local editions, just like ESPN is buying up local sports talent for its city sites. And the national papers are increasingly open to teaming up with smaller bona fide local journalistic ventures to add authentic voices and news.

It?s interesting to think about the value of a powerful national paper vs. a shrinking regional choice, but that?s really not the battleground. The New York Times faces most of the same challenges that are haunting mid-sized papers, including ?no-time-to-read? syndrome, advertising losses, fewer younger readers, nimble Internet competitors, and the lingering question about whether people will be willing to pay for news content.

Good luck to them, both large and small.

Chris Morrill, Colby ?81, is Associate Director/Syndication for GlobalPost, a new international-news organization based in Boston.

Lighting out for the South by Tracy L. Barnett

goldfarb@colby.edu (Tracy Barnett) — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 20:31:02 GMT

Lighting out for the South
by Tracy L. Barnett

I took a few minutes recently to listen to the speech of Elijah Lovejoy Award honoree Paul Salopek, captured on podcast right here, and I am so glad I did.

Salopek, for those who may not know, is the two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning foreign correspondent who was captured and held captive in Sudan for a month while reporting a National Geographic cover story on Africa?s Sahel region.

The talk Salopek gave upon receipt of Elijah Lovejoy Award is nothing short of inspiring. His humility impresses me almost as much as the hardcore commitment to human rights exemplified in a lifetime of world-class reportage in some of the most dangerous, out-of-the-way corners of the world, places where he shines the light of conscious witness to the world.

But what really caught my attention was his advice to young reporters, which I think is right on the money:
?I would advise any ambitious young reporter today not to head to Washington or to London to launch a career but to light out for the south, because that's where the global narrative is rapidly taking shape," he said.

I am no longer a young reporter, but lighting out for the South is exactly what I am preparing to do. Over course of the next year, I will be traveling through Latin America, reporting on the important and innovative work of world-changers at the grassroots level.

Citizens of the Global South have too often been portrayed as victims, villains and bit characters in the global narrative playing out around us. We see the images of the distressed and dismayed, buffeted by yet another catastrophe. We hear about the druglords and narcotraffickers, the swine flu outbreaks and the hordes of undocumented immigrants besieging our borders.

What I have seen in my travels in the Global South is a sharp contrast. Yes, there is suffering, but as Salopek also noted, there is great joy. He describes Africa, with all its entrenched poverty, as one of the happiest places he?s been. Paradoxical, yes; but paradox is the great crucible of the soul, and therein lies the story I am about to tell.

My Global South is peopled with heroes and heroines, men and women who face down their fears and the formidable challenges that stand in their way to produce meaningful change. It?s also peopled with ordinary folks who are tackling the same challenges we are, but from a different angle.

My Global South is working quietly to create a model for a future that is ultimately more sustainable than the one that we here in the overdeveloped world have created, and we have barely noticed it.

In the year ahead, I will be giving voice to these unsung world-changers in the pages of The Esperanza Project, a green bilingual (and ultimately, I hope, multilingual) news portal for the Americas.

In this newspaper, citizens of the Global South are the protagonists of their own narrative, and one that we here in the North would do well to follow, as there is much to be learned from them.

We are looking for contributors and collaborators from all over, and you can be one of them. You can follow us on Facebook or Twitter, subscribe to our RSS feed or receive updates in your e-mail. You can post relevant stories in the newsfeed, or even write stories of your own, if you feel so inspired.

I hope you will join the hemispheric conversation that is about to begin at http://TheEsperanzaProject.org. Click around the site, add comments, forward it to your friends. This is how a new online media project is born, and you can be a part of it.

Tracy L. Barnett is an independent writer based in Houston.

Obama vs. Fox by Brian MacQuarrie

goldfarb@colby.edu (Brian MacQuarrie) — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 18:46:19 GMT

Obama vs. Fox
by Brian MacQuarrie '74

For US presidents, criticizing the news media is expected, a de rigueur exercise designed to keep reporters and commentators on the defensive and use the White House bully pulpit to advance an agenda through the usual thicket of problematic questions, investigation, and analysis. And today, with the unstoppable advance of the nattering juggernaut of cable news networks, finding a target has never been easier.

But for President Obama, a self-proclaimed champion of greater government transparency and accountability, the decision to single out the Fox News Channel as a water-carrier for the Republican Party carries risks that could outweigh the benefits. Fox appears to be relishing the fight, and the spat can only serve to highlight its formidable position at the top of the heap for the three major cable news outlets. In addition, the criticism from top Obama officials, and the exclusion of the network from the president's unprecedented Sunday morning blitz of five news talk shows, is certain to buoy and cement Fox's already rabid following.

What does the administration gain? The criticism of Fox from aides such as Anita Dunn, the White House communications director; David Axelrod, the president's senior adviser; and Rahm Emanuel, his chief of staff, voice what much of the public already seems to know: that Fox News is not as much a neutral broker of the news, as it is a not-so-thinly veiled purveyor of conservative perspective. For a president who railed against the secrecy of the Bush administration, the offensive against a hostile media voice seems out of bounds.

After all, this is a president who, in nine months, already has commanded the nation's attention with nightly news conferences as many times as his predecessor or President Bill Clinton did in their entire two terms. Obama's media presence seems ubiquitous, and the September 20 merry-go-round of the Sunday talk shows, in which he pushed hard for health-care reform, was as breathtaking for audacity as for its display of stamina. There is no doubt: Obama is a locked-down, bona fide media darling, but one who also is a canny manipulator of that dazzling star power.

There are precedents, of course. John Kennedy kept careful score of his friends, and Franklin Roosevelt attacked press opposition to the New Deal with withering scorn. Richard Nixon included journalists on his famous enemies list.

Obama is correct when he laments the blurry line between news reporting and commentary that pervades much cable fare. And he is right when he says that fringe views -- those opinions on the rhetorical extreme that generate heat and often higher ratings -- seem to receive much more attention than they deserve. The effect, an incessant drip-drip-drip of outrage over discussion, is polarizing. The national debate is skewed, and a default interest in conflict, instead of consensus, becomes the business plan.

As a result, Obama said at a memorial for legendary CBS News anchor Walter Cronkite, "we fail to understand our world or one another as well as we should -- and that has real consequences in our own lives and in the life of our nation."

Those cautionary words illuminated a troubling trend. But punishing a single outlet, no matter how distasteful its programming can be to a president's objectives, is a rejection of the very principles of vibrant, varied, and occasionally discordant discourse that lie at the heart of the ideal of American democracy.

A Law to Shield Reporters by Philip Taubman

smthomps@colby.edu (Phil Taubman) — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 15:17:44 GMT

A Law to Shield Reporters
By Philip Taubman

After years of debate and hesitation, Congress seems on the verge of approving a shield law for reporters. It?s about time.

The idea gained the critical endorsement of the White House recently, after it tempered its opposition to some aspects of the proposed law.

American democracy would be the winner if the shield law is approved and signed by President Obama. As journalists have learned the hard way over the years, freedom of the press is not an absolute right under the Constitution, at least as interpreted by the courts.

Numerous reporters have been pursued by government officials interested in learning the source of stories. Some have spent time in prison and the surge of prosecutorial activity during the presidency of George W. Bush had a chilling effect on news reporting.

I saw this as Washington bureau chief of The New York Times when the paper published Jim Risen and Eric Lichtblau?s landmark story about the National Security Agency?s warrantless eavesdropping program. Not long after publication in December of 2005, federal prosecutors initiated a grand jury investigation of the story and how Eric and Jim learned that President Bush had secretly authorized the N.S.A. to conduct domestic spying outside the purview of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.

The act, approved in 1978 (see the original act and amendments here), set up a special court ? the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, known as the F.I.S.A. court ? to review government requests for warrants to wiretap on United States territory in the course of intelligence and national security investigations. The Bush operation bypassed the court, as officials intercepted international telephone and Internet communications looking for terrorists and their plots.

Some of the communications that originated overseas also involved people in the United States, which should have triggered the requirement for a court order.

There was a serious threat that the government would demand that Jim and Eric identify their sources or face punishment, including possible jail time. There was also discussion in the government about charging The New York Times with violating signals intelligence statutes which, in effect, would have been akin to accusing the newspaper of treason.

While the shield law under consideration in Congress is not an impervious defense against irresponsible government pursuit of news organizations, it would be a major improvement over the current landscape. There is no federal shield law; about three-quarters of the states have some form of shield, though the degree of protection varies significantly.

According to Charlie Savage?s piece in Saturday?s Times:

"In civil cases, the litigants seeking to force reporters to testify would first have to exhaust all other means of obtaining the information. Even then, the judge would apply a ?balancing test? and the burden would be on the information seekers to show by a ?preponderance of the evidence? why their need for the testimony outweighed the public?s interest in news gathering.

Ordinary criminal cases, as in prosecutors? effort to find out who leaked grand jury information about professional athletes? steroid use to the San Francisco Chronicle, would work the same way, except that the balancing test would be heavily tilted in favor of prosecutors.

Most cases involving disclosure of classified information would work the same way as criminal cases?"

In the case of the NSA wiretapping story, the government argued strenuously with Times editors that publication would endanger national security by exposing a vital technique for detecting and preventing terrorist attacks. The paper held the story for a year, partly because of those arguments. I endorsed that decision.

When we decided to publish, Times editors were convinced that the public?s right to know about the program outweighed the government?s interest in hiding it. I have no doubt that was the right decision. A balancing test would show that the extra-legal measures taken by the Bush Administration, while perhaps understandable in the immediate aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, involved legal and constitutional issues that cried out for public discussion and Congressional involvement.

Philip Taubman is a consulting professor at the Center for International Security and Cooperation at Stanford University, where he is working on a book project about nuclear threats and the joint effort of Sid Drell, Henry Kissinger, Sam Nunn, Bill Perry and George Shultz to reduce nuclear dangers. Before joining CISAC in the fall of 2008, Mr. Taubman worked at The New York Times as a reporter and editor for nearly 30 years, specializing in national security issues, including intelligence and defense policies and operations.

A hazardous extracurricular? By Cliff White

goldfarb@colby.edu (Cliff White) — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 15:21:58 GMT

A hazardous extracurricular?
By Cliff White '06

When I moved last year to State College, Pa. ? Happy Valley, home to Penn State and their vaunted football program ? I knew the level of excitement surrounding Saturdays here would be a few notches higher than what I had experienced in Southern Maine. I did not, however, expect a riot.

Even though I write for a magazine here and cover local events, I was watching from the comfort of my own home when Penn State beat Ohio State last Oct. 25. Michael R. Felletter, an unpaid photographer for The Daily Collegian, the university?s official newspaper, was asked by his photo editor to cover the crowd gathering downtown. He grabbed his camera and headed out into the morass. Thousands of celebrating students began to convene in a row of apartments known as Beaver Canyon, halting traffic, generating a huge volume of noise, and as the night wore on, eventually uprooting trees, light posts and street signs, setting cars ablaze and battling local police officers for control of the streets.

Felletter, a 20-year-old junior at the time, was one of 14 students arrested during the melee. He was later charged with five counts of failure to disperse and one count of disorderly conduct, both misdemeanors under Pennsylvania law. According to the criminal complaint, police said Felletter's photographing caused the crowd to become "more exuberant, excited and destructive.?

Following the event, police also approached both Felletter and Collegian Editor-in-Chief Terry Casey to obtain unpublished photos in order to identify riot participants for possible prosecution. Both refused to surrender any photos, telling the authorities that it was against the newspaper?s policy to hand over photos that had not been published. Police ?did not press the issue,? according to Casey.

The charges against Felletter were withdrawn in January, but one charge of failure to disperse was re-filed in March. Centre County Judge David E. Grine dismissed that last charge on July 22, ruling the prosecution's evidence was ?unclear in showing whether Felletter complied with police orders to ?move along,?? according to the Collegian. But District Attorney Michael Madeira filed an appeal July 31 to the Superior Court and was quoted as saying the case would ?definitely? go to court. Madeira, a Republican, faces a tough reelection fight in November in a county split between the largely liberal university town of State College and the overwhelmingly conservative rural area surrounding it.

This story has captured my attention not for its particulars, but rather as an example of how academic journalism can become politicized and how student-journalists for college papers such as, for example, The Colby Echo, can be at a higher risk of running into trouble with the authorities. I find myself asking: would a photographer for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette or The Philadelphia Inquirer in the same situation be subject to the treatment Felletter has received?

This isn?t the only case of zealous prosecutors taking aim at student journalists in the news these days; The New York Times reported that in Cook County, Ill, students involved in the Medill Innocence Project, run through Northwestern University?s graduate program in journalism, are having their grades and personal e-mails subpoenaed by local prosecutors who are questioning the work they did in researching the background of a murder case currently undergoing judge?s review.

Situations like these threaten college journalism itself. A student facing a possible lawsuit for work they?re doing for the school newspaper is less likely to stick his or her head out to collect news that might be the source of any sort of controversy. Many students, whose gateway into journalism is the school paper, might be discouraged from even joining in the first place for fear of the expense and inconvenience of facing potential prosecution.

The controversies also bring up the larger question looming in the modern world of journalism: in this day and age, where anyone with a cell phone or a Twitter account can potentially engage in journalism, what does and does not constitute a journalist? And who gets to decide?

Cliff White graduated from Colby in 2006. He is a reporter and assistant editor for the Pennsylvania Business Central.

How News Marketers Undermined the News by Gerry Hadden

goldfarb@colby.edu (Gerry Hadden) — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 03:32:09 GMT

How News Marketers Undermined the News
by Gerry Hadden '89

At some point many years ago a bunch of marketing goons convinced TV executives that what people really want from the news isn?t the news itself but celebrity newscasters. This marked the beginning of the end of TV news?s integrity.

I single out television because it happens more in that medium than in print or radio. Just flip on any major network TV news show, or cable news program, and sit back. Before, after and between actual news segments you will be told that your host and his or her team of reporters are 'hard-hitting,? ?seasoned,? that they know how to ?get the story behind the story,? and how to ?ask the tough questions YOU deserve to hear answered? and so on.

If you?re moderately unlucky you?ll then be subjected to a few sound bites from said news team, in action, saying pithy things in a montage without context. ?I found that hard to believe,? one says indignantly. ?The evidence points to the contrary,? accuses another. The lighting is perfect, the expressions concerned and serious. ?Journalism you?ve come to count on,? a voice-over might tell you, ?with journalists you can trust.?

And if all the stars have truly lined up against you, you?ll be sideswiped by one of those infomercial-like self promotion ads in which it appears that the network?s reporters themselves are being interviewed. By whom? We don?t know. The subject: the reporters' own importance.

And all the while you will hear a musical soundtrack, usually military sounding but with a techno drum beat that helps you feel entertained to boot.

The question is, Who did this to TV news? Whoever you are, please stop. Because when viewers watch ordinary human beings whipped up into something impossibly grander, slicker, we know in our guts that we're being manipulated. We know in our guts that when the studio lights go off those same reporters turned superheroes hit the lu for a big bowel movement or go home and drink too much or ride their exercise bicycles or read to their kids or call their ailing parents. They walk their dogs. They fart around on Facebook. They take the pills that doctors have prescribed to them and hope that these will finally clear up their problems. In short, when reporters climb down from the marketers' pedestal they get on with being just like everyone else.

This disconnect is the not-so-invisible elephant lurking in living rooms and news rooms. The more marketing we?re subjected to the less we trust the very people the blitz is designed to promote.

Marketers try to create a story line around their news personalities but violate one of the cardinal rules of story-telling: Show, don?t tell. I was too young to witness Walter Cronkite?s ascent but I understand he did not become such a trusted figure due to a multi-million dollar marketing campaign bombarding Americans with some Madison Avenue-constructed image. People came to trust him because he proved himself trustworthy, over time. He earned it.

Marketing-heavy TV news programming has been disappointing me for nearly two decades, since major network coverage of the first Gulf War turned tragedy into entertainment with slick jingles, titles, graphics and personalities. But its especially on my mind now because I've just seen first hand that it can undermine media across the board. Yesterday I was talking to a bright, well traveled friend about some item or another in the news when she said to me bluntly ?But I don?t trust anything I learn from the news anymore anyway.? She said it seriously and with no little disgust.

If I'd scratched away at her declaration I might have dismantled its foundations (How, after all, does she even know not to trust a certain news story or outlet? Answer: most likely via other news sources). But I couldn't have removed her underlying sense of suspicion. While declining trust in the news is a complex issue and there are probably dozens of reasons for it, I maintain that a principal one is TV marketing. Its relentless drive to brand celebrity reporters and force feed us their star qualities is unserious. The movers and shakers in TV news ought to turn off the marketing taps, and the soundtracks, and let reporters earn their own reputations. Let them report and read the news. The good ones will stay, the bad ones will go. Over time we could win some of the public trust back.

Gerry Hadden '89 is Europe Correspondent for Public Radio International's The World.

Social Networking for Journalists: To Friend or Not to Friend? by Kelly Field

goldfarb@colby.edu (Kelly Field) — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 15:46:47 GMT

Social Networking for Journalists: To Friend or Not to Friend?
by Kelly Field '99

When I joined Facebook a couple years ago, I didn?t think twice about listing my political views along with my religious views, hometown and relationship status. That is until someone in my newsroom alerted my editor.

I should have known better. As reporters, we?re trained not to march in protests, donate to political campaigns, or post campaign signs in my yard. But for some reason, I didn?t make the logical leap to the online sphere; while more people see my Facebook page than my front lawn, it somehow seemed more private. (ha ha)

Since then, I?ve been ?friended? by sources from both ends of the political spectrum, and I?ve refrained from signing petitions or joining in partisan debates. I would never post an update celebrating a political victory or commenting on legislation.

But what?s proper, and what?s professional, isn?t always that obvious. For example, should you identify yourself as a journalist on your Facebook page? Is it okay to ignore or reject friend request from sources, even if it risks the relationship? And should you try to segregate your professional and personal lives by maintaining separate accounts for the two?

I?m hardly the only one grappling with these questions. According to a recent article in the American Journalism Review, many newsrooms are updating their ethics guidelines to deal with the proliferation of social media. Some of the new policies, like the Associated Press,? are intentionally broad, requiring Facebook postings to meet the organization?s underlying ethical guidelines. Reporters are encouraged to monitor their profile pages and delete material posted by others that violates AP standards.

Other policies are narrower and more prescriptive. At the Wall Street Journal, staffers are told not to mix ?business and pleasure? or ?recruit friends or family to promote or defend your work.?

But the most straightforward, common-sense advice to reporters comes from the Los Angeles Times: ?Assume that your professional and your personal life merge online regardless of your care in separating them. Don?t write or post anything that would embarrass the LAT or compromise your ability to do your job.?

Sounds logical. Unfortunately, not everyone agrees on how to accomplish this goal. Many of my colleagues create separate accounts for sources and friends or use privacy settings to shield sources from potentially incriminating information or photos. But the Washington Post discourages its reporters from having two pages, and requires staff who use social networks to state what job they hold at the paper. ?We would be concerned by people having two pages ? a public and a private page,? Hal Straus, assistant managing editor for interactivity and communities told the AJR. ?Who are you on one page and who on another??

News organizations must walk a fine line when crafting policies governing social media. On the one hand, they want to protect the company from embarrassment and allegations of bias; on the other, they want to harness the power of social media as a reporting tool ? a way for journalists to find sources and track developing stories.

At their best, Facebook and other social media sites can be humanizing, transforming bylines into human beings. They make reporters more accessible to readers, connecting them with the communities they cover.
But they are also highly unpredictable, with limits on what news organizations can control. And a policy that seems perfectly calibrated today could become obsolete by next month when a new site emerges. That means that ethics policies must be fluid, adapting to evolving technology.

As Monica Guzman, a news gatherer at seattlepi.com put it to AJR, ?there will be a continuing conversation on how best to do this.?

?The technology will always be changing and we need to be mindful that there will be new ways to screw up.?

Kelly Field '99 is the chief Washington reporter for the Chronicle of Higher Education, covering Congress and the Education Department, among other agencies.

Flipping Channels by Susan Nester

goldfarb@colby.edu (Susan Nester) — Sun, 18 Oct 2009 03:02:12 GMT

Flipping Channels
by Susan Nester

My family and friends hate watching the news with me. I have itchy fingers that hit the remote every few seconds at the top of a newscast. I jump among three or four programs within the first 30 seconds. Or worse, I use the same picture-in-a-picture feature my brother uses when he wants to watch two football games at once. I can?t help it. As a former CNN producer, watching the news is my sport. It?s fun to see who is leading with what. What has each producer decided to air as the day?s top story? But these days, I really think my habit is more than sport, more than an annoyance to those in my family room -- It?s a necessity for any news viewer who wants to know what?s really going on.

Here?s one recent and not-so-atypical example. Fox?s Washington, DC affiliate opened its late night newscast with a story and ?exclusive? interview with the city?s police chief. Apparently, this particular weekend is historically notorious for violent crime sprees and murders. But not this year. For the first time since 1983, the reporter told us, there had been no killings in the District over this infamous weekend, and reports of violent crime were way down in the same period. A victorious police chief outlined the department?s strategy that had reaped this success. Next came kudos from citizens and some other officials. All very nice, but my fingers are pounding buttons to NBC.

That station, too, is featuring a story about DC cops on the job over the very same weekend?or not on the job, if you are to believe this program. It turns out some unlucky person called 911 for help with an emergency and got no police response for something like 40 minutes. And when the cop arrived, he reportedly had to wait for back-up, ill-equipped to deal with the problem at hand. How could this happen and where were those cops, the reporter asked? Maybe they were out foiling violent criminals, if you are buying the Fox story. So are the members of the DC police force crime-busting heroes or the Keystone Kops of 2009? That depends on which newscast you like to watch. While there is no reason to believe that either report is wrong, neither mentioned the nugget of news revealed on the other show.

Good thing my remote has speed-dial. The era of passive news consumption is over. With so many local news outlets, blogs, 24-hour cable networks, online newspapers churning out not one version of each story each day, but many breathless updates, there is little time or support for the research required to dig a little deeper and tell the whole story. As news audiences have become more fragmented, so has the reporting. Add to that the budget constraints that challenge most newsgathering operations, and it?s not hard to understand why the news isn?t what it used to be. But I?m not sure this is all bad. We are fortunate today to have so many news sources, not just the handful I remember from growing up. Acquiring information from many sources, not just one, is a good thing. My Colby professors taught me that when I was writing all those papers on Mayflower Hill. News consumers just have to know that they must take some responsibility in the process now. You may just need to fill in the gaps that the news teams leave open.

Susan Nester, Colby '88, is Broadcast Media Director at IIAB. Previously she worked as Washington financial producer for CNN, organizing business coverage for CNN's nightly "Moneyline with Lou Dobbs" and other world financial programming.

Climate lobby investigation goes global ? and digital by Tracy L. Barnett

smthomps@colby.edu (Tracy Barnett) — Fri, 16 Oct 2009 18:12:03 GMT

Climate lobby investigation goes global ? and digital
by Tracy L. Barnett

(We are fortunate to have Tracy Barnett as a guest blogger, taking over for Alexis Grant, for two months.)

For those who haven?t been paying attention to the work of the nonprofit Center for Public Integrity and its International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, it?s time to start.

ICIJ has been breaking new ground since it was launched in 1997 to extend globally the Center?s style of watchdog journalism. Its international tobacco smuggling investigation, Tobacco Underground, has been raking in the awards and kudos, as much for its innovative presentation as for the reach and breadth of its reporting.

Now it?s taking on an even more complex and nebulous target: the international lobbying effort currently spending millions to influence the coming treaty on global climate change.

?It?s probably the most important story unfolding in the world right now because the stakes are so high,? said Marina Walker Guevara, deputy director of ICIJ and an award-winning investigative reporter in her own right.
The scope of Tobacco Underground, ICIJ?s first online multimedia project, was staggering: It involved 22 journalists in 14 countries, tracking a shadowy multibillion-dollar industry. The illicit cigarette trade amounts to about 12 percent of all sales for a total tax revenue loss of $40 billion annually. Worse, the proceeds go to fuel organized crime and narcotrafficking networks and terrorist groups like the Taliban.

Go to their web page, launch the project and you?ll see what I mean. In the old days, this massive project would have been presented as a weighty tome sure to impress public officials and investigative journalists, but about as likely to be tackled by the average reader as the Federal Register.

Round two of the global tobacco investigation takes a much different tack. The whole project has been designed around an interactive map, with menacing-looking hot spots throbbing from virtually every point on the globe. The presentation begs for interaction, and the stories, video and audio do not disappoint.

The group also experimented with digital technology in the reporting phase, creating a virtual newsroom that the entire team could use to share and organize documents, photos, video and ongoing discussions in real time.

Now CPI and ICIJ are serving up an encore. CPI has already tackled the enormous task of identifying the hordes of lobbyists descending on Congress in The Climate Change Lobby.

?Other media had published stories about one company or one industry lobbying on climate change,? said Walker Guevara. ?The Center took a step back and looked at all lobbying records, built a database and found that lobbying on the issue had jumped 300 percent in the last five years.?

?Now it?s only natural that we take this investigation to the international level.?

This time the international network is gearing up to launch in the coming weeks as journalists report from eight different countries, including some of the biggest carbon-emitting culprits, like the U.S., China and Brazil.

The rollout of the group?s research efforts began two weeks ago with a brand-new twitter feed specifically targeting this issue ? @climatelobby ? which will serve as a newsfeed for related coverage. It will also help build readership for its coming series of reports, which will launch in early November and continue to publish leading up to the climate talks in Copenhagen in early December.

?The idea is to make this website a one-stop shop? exposing the maneuverings of special interests trying to shape the agreement, Walker Guevara said. ?The prospects are not very good for a strong treaty. So it?s important to investigate how powerful interest groups are quietly twisting governments? arms.?

The group has already had great success with its fan page on Facebook, earning followers and even tipsters in some unexpected places, like Africa. ICIJ uses the news feed to promote not only the group?s work, but that of investigative reporters around the world.?Through Facebook we've rapidly built a base of readers in more than 20 countries," said Walker Guevara. "It shows that there?s a need worldwide for the kind of deep-dive, cross-border journalism ICIJ does.?

Tracy L. Barnett is an independent writer based in Houston.

Finding Inspiration in Unexplored Territory by Chris Morrill

goldfarb@colby.edu (Chris Morrill) — Fri, 16 Oct 2009 17:53:20 GMT

Finding Inspiration in Unexplored Territory
by Chris Morrill

I guess I felt a little out of place.

I was sitting on a panel late last month with two very bright and enterprising people who have developed new online news-content organizations. To my left: Adam Gaffin, the founder of Universal Hub, a Boston-based hyperlocal site that aggregates content into a city portal. To my right: Michael Rothman, director of sales for Thrillist, a profitable email newsletter company.

The audience members were newspaper editors who belong to NEAPNEA, or New England Associated Press News Executives Association. I was there to represent GlobalPost, another young news organization, but one with more traditional journalistic roots than my fellow panelists.

Universal Hub collects information posted at a wide variety of Boston-based blogs and citizen contributors to assemble a city portal site with news sorted by neighborhood and by topic (such as ?The T?, crime, and the Red Sox). You can find timely posts from subway riders stuck on the Red Line and police notes on a car-jacking in Dorchester. Gaffin is happy to admit he points to good content from the Boston Globe and other papers staffed to do more substantial reporting. Quantcast estimates 50,000 people visit his site each month.

Thrillist is equally intriguing. While you can visit their website, they are primarily an email business, expecting to bring in $5-10 million in sales this year. They target young affluent men in about a dozen cities across the country with a daily email. It?s packed with useful stuff about bars, clubs, events, gadgets, fashion and entertaining web sites. Advertisers? messages are pushed to the readership too. They have about a million subscribers.

Universal Hub and Thrillist do not pretend to be much like newspapers, but they certainly work to build daily readership and ?inform and entertain? that group. The news editors who gathered to listen to Gaffin and Rothman were clearly engaged, trying to extract advice that might them help reshape their papers? future online.

There was a time when this audience probably would have smugly said, ?We would never stoop to printing unverifiable information from average citizens.? And they wouldn?t have considered allowing editors to support the marketing/sales side of the business as Thrillist does.

A panel that preceded ours was filled by folks still ?inside? the newspaper business. The CIO from Media News Group talked about plans to carve up all online content between free and paid. An executive producer from the now print-only Seattle Post-Intelligencer talked about the challenges of continuing when the print edition has been shuttered. And an executive from the Newport (RI) Daily News explained why they charge far more for the online edition than the print edition!

What?s clear: The existing daily newspaper model is being stretched, perhaps beyond recognition. New competitors are arriving from many directions, with different sets of rules.

What?s also clear: Some editors are watching and listening ? more closely than ever.

Chris Morrill, Colby ?81, is Associate Director/Syndication for GlobalPost, a new international-news organization based in Boston.

Brain Drain by Becky Hanger

goldfarb@colby.edu (Becky Hanger) — Fri, 16 Oct 2009 14:51:10 GMT

Brain Drain
by Becky Hanger

Many of the posts in this blog have focused on the uncertainty facing print journalism. These trends -- declining circulations, layoffs, etc. -- are clear to anyone paying attention, inside or outside the business. But for many of us working in journalism, one of the most disturbing trends is the brain drain going on all around us. Many of my friends and mentors, talented journalists whose work I respect, are choosing to get out while they still have a choice.

After journalism graduate school, I went to work as a picture editor at The Palm Beach Post. It was a great place to learn, one of the best photo departments in the country with a staff of four experienced and nationally-respected photo editors. Three of those veteran photo editors have taken buyouts, offered as a way to limit layoffs, over the past few years. (The fourth has moved to the Post's website.) Eight years after I started there, the physical paper is a shadow of what it once was. I can't believe how light it is when I pick it up, and the half-page ads on section fronts feel desperate. The losses behind the scenes are just as great. A place known for shaping hungry and talented photojournalists into leaders of their professions is missing the leaders who built that reputation. Who will teach the new recruits now?

But it's not just the senior staffers who are choosing to get out. A friend who is an extraordinarily talented photographer and photo editor recently lost his job at the The Seattle Post-Intelligencer, which went online-only in March. On a recent visit to New York, he told me he'd applied for a communications job with the IRS. This is a truly gifted shooter who has decided that he simply can't make a living in journalism. If the IRS is lucky enough to get his talent, what will they do with it?

The list goes on. A few weeks ago a freelance photographer who I've worked with quite a bit in New York told me that he's leaving photography and the city to work in his family's business in the Midwest. He can't afford to do the work he loves anymore.

Just this weekend, I spent some time with a friend who is a reporter for The Chicago Tribune. I asked her how things were going at work. She told me that nearly all of the experienced editors had been replaced by people with less experience, less talent and, in her opinion, less news judgment. She just took the LSAT and is also thinking of leaving the newspaper business.

It's hard on a personal level to see these people I admire getting out of the business, but I can't blame any of them for making the decision. So far, I'm one of the lucky ones. Although The Times has made cuts, they haven't been as extensive as many smaller papers', and there are still great mentors and journalists all over the building. Not many newspapers can say that anymore. So what will happen all over the country when the mentors and the bright new stars all opt out? I'm scared to find out.

Becky Lebowitz Hanger has been a photo editor at The New York Times for the past 6 years. Before that, she was a photo editor for The Palm Beach Post in West Palm Beach, Florida.

We Need More than the AP by David Offer

goldfarb@colby.edu (David Offer) — Thu, 08 Oct 2009 22:05:17 GMT

We Need More than the AP
by David Offer

Anyone who pays attention to the steady stream of articles about the decline of the newspaper industry is aware that some writers think the era of the daily newspaper and the general demise of all newspapers is no great loss.

After all, they write, the Internet is already providing news, so who needs newspapers?

?It is possible that the newspaper model has ceased to be relevant as ever more Internet based news sources develop,? Mark Rice, chair of the American Studies Department at St. John Fisher College in Rochester, NY, wrote in Forbes last month. ?In many ways the U.S. is well poised to continue a successful transition to the primacy of online news. . . Like most Americans I already get most of my news online. If I lost my morning paper, I?d probably mourn briefly, than move on.?

Rice is not alone.

Unfortunately, this view fails to recognize that no one has developed an Internet business model that will provide both the local journalism that is the mainstay of all but the biggest national newspapers and that can also underwrite the costly and vitally important investigative reporting that the best local newspapers provide.

Of course, there are models of Internet neighborhood coverage. And there is some investigative reporting on the Web. But neither exists in the quality or quantity that the newspaper has provided in cities across this country and there is little indication that anyone has found a business model that will allow them to do so.

Sure, there will be some genuine in-depth coverage found in a few places here and there ? but that kind of journalism is needed everywhere. And it certainly won?t come from Internet sites that now rely on newspapers for most of their content.

A recent visit to Milwaukee, Wis., provided an example of the kind of journalism we will lose if good daily newspapers do not emerge ? and prosper ? in the future.

The front page of the Sunday edition of the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel on Oct. 4 was filled with stories that require the kind of money, leadership and experience that are hard to find anywhere but at a newspaper.

One article disclosed that all of the guns used to shoot six police officers in September came from one gun store in suburban Milwaukee ? and that this store had sold more guns to straw buyers ? those fronting for felons who cannot legally buy guns ? than any other store. The reporter reviewed court records for five years to learn that the store accounted for 21 of 27 gun cases prosecuted.

Another story reported that the county sheriff was failing to collect DNA from prisoners at the jail despite a law requiring him to do so ? and despite the fact that he complained that others were not obtaining the samples.

And, most impressively, the paper published the results of an investigation in which reporters spent months reviewing thousands of pages of court filers, police reports and government documents revealing that at least 22 Milwaukee County children died despite clear warning signs to the Bureau of Milwaukee Child Welfare that the child was at risk.

It was brilliant journalism?the sort that the public has come to expect from newspapers.

And more than detractors recognize, it?s the kind of good journalism they get ? not everywhere and not every day, but often enough to keep the public informed.

It?s expensive journalism because it?s very difficult work, requiring experienced reporters and excellent editors, and a substantial budget.

The death of newspapers will not end neighborhood news coverage everywhere, nor will it be the end of investigative reporting. But it will diminish that kind of journalism.

Mark Rice may mourn briefly and then move on ? but society will be poorer if newspapers do not find a way to survive.

David Offer retired as executive editor of the Kennebec Journal and the Morning Sentinel at the end of 2006, ending a 42-year career in journalism. In January 2009 he taught a News Literacy Course at Colby College. This fall he is teaching at the University of Alaska- Fairbanks.

No One Writes Any More by Mike Eckel

goldfarb@colby.edu (Mike Eckel) — Mon, 05 Oct 2009 21:58:25 GMT

No One Writes Any More
by Mike Eckel

That is to say, no one ever writes emails any more. To be precise, no one ever writes those meaty, mull-it-over-and-kick-it-around-the-synapses kind-of email correspondence any more. (never mind those things that people used to compose on paper, put into envelopes, paste with a postage mark and drop into rounded blue metal boxes on street corners for delivery within a couple days).

These days, it seems I get more Facebook messages than emails. If I'm looking for routine news from a friend or a family member, I might have to subscribe to a Twitter feed. Instant message exchanges on Gmail or an SMS-text message from an iPhone passes for a conversation. A soundbite on a YouTube video turns out to be more persuasive than a well-reasoned argument. At the news organization I work for, a 50-character headline is expected to capture the essence of a complicated 1,000 word analysis or complex news story.

Just like email buried the written letter, I can't help but wonder whether the 140-character microblog is the death knell for email and for something more troubling.

This is a bit tendentious of course. History's dustbin is littered with fraught warnings about momentous changes in technology and their effects on the thinking and the means of communications of the day (see: Gutenburg, radio, television, typewriters, the personal computer, the Internet, Google, Twitter, and so on).

Admittedly, this lament is coming from a person who didn't get his first email address until his sophomore year in college or thereabouts. (DEC VT-100 terminal anyone?) But this much is indisputable: the way we communicate with one another today -- be it the news media to an audience, or individuals to one another -- is undergoing a seismic shift, and that's changing the way we converse, the way we discuss, argue, debate.

When was the last time you had actually had an exchange of emails (or letters, if you know what those are) --a back-and-forth, give-and-take of ideas and proposals and arguments and counterarguments, with anyone? A friend? A parent? A relative? You know, the kind of thing where you posit an idea, you get a response, you disagree with the response, you get concurrence or another twist in the argument and so on?

Take this phenomenon to its logical next step: How can you debate the merits or flaws of proposals to reform the U.S. health care system via Twitter? Or Gmail instant messages? Or by posting things on someone's Facebook wall? Doesn't that have consequences for how a group of people -- a community, a city, a state, a nation -- makes important decisions? In a semi-authoritarian, top-down country like Russia, where I live, it doesn't really.

But in a democracy, it does. Witness the YouTube videos of the shout-fest town-hall meetings held across the U.S. this summer and the effect they've had on the debate over health care reform.

I'm not so much of a Luddite to dismiss this phenomenon outright. I have a Facebook page that I actually use for reporting sometimes, and Twitter has been useful in tracking down, in particular, breaking news events in the past. But the volume, the quality, the articulateness of information that comes via social media (as the idea is called) requires time, patience, critical thinking, the ability to sift the wheat from the chaff, to figure out exactly what is information, what is speculation, what is well-reasoned argument and what is complete and utter crap.

There's related phenomenon worth touching on here: when was the last time you read the letter-to-the-editor page in your local newspaper (do those even exist anymore?) Oftentimes, the letters lean toward the lunatic fringe or just malicious malcontent. But occasionally, you'll come across an interesting argument or point-of-view that might not have otherwise occurred to you.

At a good newspaper, that type of thing isn't limited to the op-ed page. You might come across a news article that grabs your attention, illuminates some alternative argument or opinion and gives your convictions or beliefs or prejudices a good shake, momentarily jarring you out of your self-satisfied, self-fulfilling view on the
world. Notwithstanding the glaring flaws in the business model of the newspaper these days, the concept of the newspaper as a public forum, a kiosk or shop stall in the marketplace of ideas, is still valid -- and so essential.

What's happens to the marketplace of ideas if the currency of choice is an idea limited to 140 characters?

Mike Eckel, '93, has been a correspondent for The Associated Press in Moscow, Russia, since 2004. Prior to that, he worked as an editor on AP's national and international desks in New York and in AP's bureau in Montpelier, covering the Vermont Statehouse.

The Journalism Job Market: An Uncertain Future by Brian MacQuarrie

goldfarb@colby.edu (Brian MacQuarrie) — Mon, 05 Oct 2009 21:32:19 GMT

The Journalism Job Market: An Uncertain Future
by Brian MacQuarrie

The future of mass communication has never been more uncertain, and a recent released survey of graduates in the field paints a grim picture that cannot be linked entirely to the disastrous economy. According to a national poll in 2008, only 60.4 percent of mass-communication graduates reported that they had found full-time employment within six to eight months after leaving school. That figure was the lowest in the survey's 23-year history and a drop of nearly 10 points from 70.2 percent in 2007.

The survey also found that wages were stagnant, benefits had been cut, and the 14.3 percent unemployment rate for these graduates was more than 2 percentage points higher than for all 20- to 24-year-olds in the labor force. All of these negatives occurred in a year when US journalism and mass-communication programs granted 55,056 degrees, a counter-intuitive, all-time high.

And, at the risk of piling on, more graduates said they were less optimistic about the job market, less satisfied with the jobs they had found, and wish they had prepared for another profession.

In the survey's closing comments, released in August at a journalism educators conference in Boston, the authors wrote that "there even is some question as to whether what was once an occupation that could produce a living -- if only at a low standard -- has now become only a hobby."

As a result, communication students "have to be trying to make assessments about what it will mean to be a journalist today, tomorrow, and in the future," said Lee Becker, a journalism professor at the University of Georgia, who has been conducting the survey since 1987. "One thing they have to learn is how to change and how to adapt."

Becker, who is director of the Cox Center for International Mass Communication Training and Research, did not try in an interview to sugarcoat or downplay his findings. But he did raise a critical question, and one that offers hope to aspiring journalists who often must feel they are wallowing in a sea of ever-worsening prospects.

"Is our society in the future likely to be one in which communication techniques and activities play a less prominent role than they do today?" Becker asked. "I think the answer is 'more prominent.' If students think of it that way, then they can be optimistic. Nobody knows exactly what the future is likely to be like, but I don't think anybody thinks it will involve less communication activity."

As a result, the walls at journalism schools are coming down between once-separated print and broadcast departments, and even between those departments and such specialties as public relations and advertising. For future communicators who will produce their own content and bring that content to market, business acumen will be essential. "Broadcast students are learning how to write for websites, and print students are incorporating video and images of all sorts in their work," Becker said.

That trend has been occurring at the University of Georgia and also at nearly every other journalism school in the country, including the University of Texas at Austin, where lecturer Doug Warren, a former longtime editor at The Boston Globe, is prodding his students to "think like editors for the 21st century." Warren's challenge to his editing students is that "when they're assigning stories and planning, they need to be thinking about audio-visual elements, graphic elements, and design."

Whether such training is enough to secure a job in a tough market is another matter. But adaptation -- on-the-fly, innovative, and forward-thinking -- will be essential for success. In the survey, eight out of 10 graduates agreed that "almost all communications jobs in the future will require audio, visual, and writing skills."

In 2005, that question had not even been asked.

For the last 20 years, Brian MacQuarrie has been a reporter and editor for the Boston Globe, where he has covered a wide range of major breaking stories, including assignments as an embedded reporter during the invasion of Iraq, the Sept. 11 attacks, and Hurricane Katrina. He is the author of a recently released book, The Ride, a nonfiction work that chronicles a family's long recovery after a devastating murder. He lives in Boston.

Remembering Bill Safire by Phil Taubman

goldfarb@colby.edu (Phil Taubman) — Mon, 05 Oct 2009 14:52:17 GMT

Remembering Bill Safire
by Phil Taubman

Bill Safire, who died Sept. 27 of pancreatic cancer, will be remembered by his admirers and critics as an erudite, politically astute columnist who wielded his pen like a rapier, rarely missing his mark. As a colleague and friend of Bill?s for three decades, I will remember him as one of the most generous journalists I had the good fortune to know at The New York Times. Goes to show that what you read in the paper doesn?t necessarily inform you about the people who put out the paper.

Bill?s column could be withering, and I often disagreed with his views. At times, I thought his attacks on Washington figures were unfounded and unfair. But I always admired his razor-sharp writing style and talent for polemics, or as he preferred to say, punditry.

The Bill Safire who worked down the hall in The Times? Washington bureau was an entirely different person than the slashing columnist. He was funny, welcoming and remarkably generous. When I joined The Times in 1979, he stopped by my desk on my first day of work to introduce himself and to invite me to drop by his office anytime. He recalled that, while a correspondent at Time magazine, I had done the first story on the tangled personal finances of Bert Lance, Jimmy Carter?s budget director. Bill had pursued the Lance story, and won a Pulitzer Prize for his Lance columns.

Soon, he was feeding me tips about government mischief, most of which led to good stories. While his political views were clearly visible in his tips, he never sought to interfere in my reporting and never complained if my stories wound up disclosing news that Bill would have found politically uncongenial.

A few of his tips led to wild goose chases, including several involving Billy Carter, the errant brother of the sitting president. Ed Pound and I pursued a few of these to exotic destinations and dead ends, but I have to admit we had a lot of fun, and met a fabulous cast of flamboyant characters.

More often, Bill?s tips proved correct. A few months after my arrival at The Times, Bill turned over a highly-placed government source to me. I still can?t publicly identify the person, or even the agency where the source worked, but I can say that the connection led to a number of blockbuster scoops. He also opened the door for me to Bill Casey, Ronald Reagan?s CIA director. I was covering intelligence issues, so this was an invaluable gift. The Casey-Safire connection, not noted in the obits about Bill, was priceless ? as a rising public relations adviser, Bill helped manage Casey?s first and only political campaign, an unsuccessful run for Congress in 1966.

Later, when I became deputy bureau chief and eventually bureau chief, Bill was always quick to pass along news tips and political insights. Bill and Helene Safire?s annual Yom Kippur, break-the fast-dinner brought together an eclectic, politically diverse Washington crowd at their Bethesda home. The good spirits and nonpartisan flavor of those evenings were always memorable. Bill?s unflagging support for a free press and his unyielding defense of civil liberties were inspiring, and not always in synch with some of his Republican friends.

My frequent lunches with Bill at Loeb?s Deli, his favorite neighborhood place, around the corner from Lafayette Park, ranged over an infinite array of issues and personalities. I never understood his affection for beef tongue sandwiches, but he probably couldn?t fathom my passion for pastrami. Happily, we shared a taste for very sour pickles. The owners of Loeb?s loved Bill, more for his company than his business.

I could see that.

What Ted Nugent and Bed Bugs Have in Common by Sandy Maisel

goldfarb@colby.edu (Sandy Maisel) — Thu, 24 Sep 2009 16:50:50 GMT

What Ted Nugent and Bed Bugs Have in Common
by Sandy Maisel

Many of those filing posts on this site have lamented the seemingly irreversible decline of print journalism because of financial pressures. As one who devours multiple newspapers?albeit their online editions?every morning, I share those concerns.

But some solutions may be worse than the problem. Within the last month Jim Romenesko, in his daily digest of news from the journalism business that is circulated by the Poynter Institute, has reported two disturbing stories. On August 17, Romenesko reported that Ted Nugent had been fired by the new editors of the Waco Tribune. "The new editor of the Waco Trib recently told me that I could only write nice things about people, that I could not be critical. I can not, nor [sic] will not, comply with this Romper Room request. My reply: Nuts! The editor is wrong to try and [sic] muzzle my opinions."

The new editors, who had recently inserted ?In God We Trust? on page one, clearly feel that the way to sell more newspapers is to report only positive news. ABC News tried this approach two decades ago. It did not work then, and it will not work now. A newspaper might cover stories of local interest more than national; editors might well reallocate column inches to appeal to certain segments of the audience. But muzzling columnists, reporting only feel good stories, or avoiding controversies when they clearly exist violates the basic values of news gathering. Such tactics will not save newspapers; they will only degrade them.

(I need to admit a personal interest in reporting this incident. Some months ago I resigned as a columnist for the Kennebec Journal and Morning Sentinel because the editor censored a column I wrote. While the editor was not emphasizing ?happy news,? her claim was that the paper had already given enough space to the issue of gay marriage, the most controversial social issue on Maine?s political agenda in many years. Rather than accept this censorship of my column, I chose to leave the papers.)

The second incident reported by Romenesko might be even more disturbing. The Hartford Courant refused to run a column by 40-year veteran George Gombassy, the paper?s consumer watchdog, in which Gombassy reported that the office of Connecticut?s Attorney General Richard Blumenthal was investigating Sleepy?s, one of the papers larger advertisers, for selling used mattresses (in one case, one infested with bedbugs) as if they were new. As a result, Gombassy left the paper, continuing to air his views on an independent blog.

The bold line between a newspaper?s advertising department and the news (and editorial) staffs cannot be allowed to blur. Gombassy?s independence should not have been compromised. An editor pressured to do so by a publisher had only one recourse, to resign first. Again, the question is the basic values that a newspaper purports to uphold. In the case of the Courant, the dollar ruled over the principle that a paper must report the news without favor to those who support it.

Certainly one can understand the financial pressures faced by today?s publishers. But quality papers will survive much more readily than those pandering to what Nugent described as a ?Romper Room? public or to advertisers like the one that swayed the Courant?s coverage of a story clearly important to the paper?s readers.

As news consumers we deserve the best from the publications we read?and we should demand that papers maintain appropriate standards. Watchdog news consumers can help papers that are struggling financially maintain their standards.

L. Sandy Maisel is director of the Goldfarb Center for Public Affairs and Civic Engagement at Colby College.

Reading for the Next Generation by Kelly Field

goldfarb@colby.edu (Kelly Field) — Thu, 24 Sep 2009 14:45:20 GMT

Reading for the Next Generation
by Kelly Field '99

With our first child coming in a couple months, I?ve been thinking about what the media landscape might look like when she?s my age. (Not as much as I?ve been thinking about crib varnishes and bedding sets, admittedly, but it?s been on my mind). I wonder how many daily newspapers will be left, and how many reporters will be staffing them? Will Twitter and Facebook ? or whatever social media has replaced them ? be the main way people stay informed (or, more often, misinformed) about the world around them?

When I was growing up in the late 70?s and early 80?s, my dad used to get the Bangor Daily News every day. It was his morning ritual to read the paper cover to cover while drinking his coffee, and I would join him, at least for the comics and the weekly Mini Page. That early exposure to newspapers, coupled with a daily dose of PBS? Reading Rainbow, fostered in me a love of reading and a curiosity about the world.

The Mini Page is still around today, appearing in 500 newspapers across the US, but how many kids are seeing it? With fewer and fewer parents subscribing to newspapers, chances are that their numbers are shrinking.

And what about Reading Rainbow, the show that turned reading into an adventure and kids into book reviewers? At age 33, I still remember every word to the catchy, if somewhat cheesy, theme song. ?Butterfly in the sky, I can go twice as high. Take a look, it?s in a book, Reading Rainbow!? Sadly, the show ended its 26-year run last month, after PBS, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and the Education Department declined to renew the broadcasting rights. According to National Public Radio, the government has decided to focus more on the mechanics of reading ? the phonics and spelling ? than on the pleasure books can bring. With funding tight, Washington had decided to direct its limited resources elsewhere.

Now I don?t blame public broadcasting for putting a priority on literacy. Clearly, a love of books does you little good if you can?t actually read them. But I think it?s just as important for us to teach kids why to read as how, particularly at a time when surveys show that half of the U.S. population does not read literature.

Perhaps I?m just being nostalgic, but I?m troubled by this new direction in educational programming. Obviously, television is no substitute for involved parents or effective teachers; but for kids of the 80?s and 90?s who had neither, Reading Rainbow was the next best thing. I wonder what will fill its void.

But maybe it?s silly to worry about trends over which I have no control. As a journalist and soon-to-be parent, I can no more stem the tide of declining newspapers subscriptions than I can resuscitate Reading Rainbow. The best I can hope for is to raise one more young reader, one more curious mind.

I read recently that newborns can recognize books that were read to them in the womb. Maybe I should start with my childhood favorite ? Goodnight Moon ? tonight.

Kelly Field '99 is the chief Washington reporter for the Chronicle of Higher Education, covering Congress and the Education Department, among other agencies.

On Publishing the Perished: The Associated Press Controversy by Sumner Lemon

golfarb@colby.edu (Sumner Lemon) — Wed, 16 Sep 2009 16:32:36 GMT

On Publishing the Perished: The Associated Press Controversy
by Sumner Lemon

The recent release of an Associated Press photograph showing a mortally wounded Marine from Maine is rightfully stirring a broader debate and reflection about the role of the press and restrictions imposed on reporters during wartime.

The photo of Lance Corporal Joshua M. Bernard was taken by AP photographer Julie Jacobson on a battlefield in Afghanistan and published over the objections of the Marine's father and Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, who wrote a letter to Thomas Curley, the president and CEO of the AP, asking that the photograph not be released.

In a series of journal entries, Jacobson discussed her decision to file the photograph along with other images taken before and after the battle:

"We are allowed to report the name of the casualty as soon as next of kin has been notified. It is necessary and good to recognize those who die in times of war. But to me, a name on a piece of paper barely touches personalizing casualties. An image brings it home so much closer. An image personalizes that death and makes people see what it really means to have young men die in combat. It may be shocking to see, and while I'm not trying to force anything down anyone's throat, I think it is necessary for people to see the good, the bad and the ugly in order to reflect upon ourselves as human beings. It is necessary to be bothered from time to time. It is too easy to sit at Starbuck's far away across the sea and read about the casualty and then move on without much of another thought about it. It's not as easy to see an image of that casualty and NOT think about it."

Much has been written about the AP's decision, including thoughtful posts by The New York Times' Lens blog, which also published the photograph, and Jamie McIntyre.

"In the end this is a judgment call. It's about weighing the newsworthiness of the photograph against respect for the wishes of the family. And that can be a close call. Journalists don't want to give any outside party a veto over what they report; not the Pentagon, not families, not anyone whose desire is to keep the most accurate account away from the public," McIntyre wrote.

Unlike earlier wars fought by the U.S., there have been relatively few images in the press of U.S. servicemen and women killed in battle in Iraq and Afghanistan. The media has been blocked from showing caskets of those killed in action returned to the U.S. in caskets draped with the Stars and Stripes. At a time when cell-phone cameras and high-speed networks allow images and video to be posted online from just about anywhere at any time, the absence of such images during wartime -- when thousands of young Americans have lost their lives -- is jarring.

Sumner Lemon '93 is a correspondent for IDG News Service, a technology news service based in Boston, MA. He lives in Singapore.

Everywhere (in Europe) At Once by Gerry Hadden '89

goldfarb@colby.edu (Gerry Hadden) — Wed, 16 Sep 2009 16:03:13 GMT

Everywhere (in Europe) At Once
by Gerry Hadden '89

The other night at a dinner with friends I got to talking about Hostile Environment Training for journalists. For those of you unfamiliar with HET, it?s when reporters go into the woods for a week with a bunch of former Special Forces nut-jobs who teach you how not to get your butt shot off while covering wars, coups, urban unrest and so on. They teach you things like, "Don?t dress in military fatigues, no matter how comfortable they are."   Or, "Determine where the photojournalists are and then run away from them." I?ve been on two HET courses, once with NPR and more recently with the BBC. At dinner I was recounting how one night some commandos had simulated an urban riot by pelting us with real, flaming Molotov cocktails (We were wearing protective suits). One of my neighbors started laughing.

?I can see how that must come in handy,? she said, ?as you report the news from your house here in Barcelona!?

I parried with a joke about the dangerous wild boar that I?m constantly chasing from our garden (really) but inside I felt myself wince a little. Because her quip brought up an issue that nags at me: I?m the Europe correspondent for our show but it's true that I do file a lot from my base in Spain. There are a couple of reasons. First, because it would literally be impossible for me to cover Europe in the old fashioned sense of the term. That is, being physically present on the scene for every story. Even if I were constantly traveling, covering nearly thirty countries by myself would defy the laws of physics.

Secondly, I?ve set a limit on how much I travel, barring big stories and emergencies: I?m on the road about a week a month. Any longer and I begin to feel like the archetypal absent father I swore I?d never become. This is a purely personal choice that my editors happily accepted from the get-go.

So how is it that I can ?cover Europe?? To wit, with help from a lot of people. As a BBC World Service show we have access to, and contribute to, the network?s vast data bank of audio and contacts. They?re in the ether for our downloading pleasure. Thus I?ve been able to do stories on political scandals in Italy, worker strikes in France and terrorist arrests in Germany all in the same week. Its not that I rely entirely on such audio gathered by someone else. I do my own reporting too, consulting other sources over the phone or, if possible, in town. I talk to analysts, eye-witnesses, spokespeople and so on. And I check my colleagues? information for accuracy. In the end I do the same amount of reporting whether I?m on the scene or not.

But what happens when a listener hears my voice coming each day from a different corner of the continent? Are they left wondering how I?m able to move about so quickly?   Or do they realize that I'm not on the scene for some stories? And if so, does that undermine their faith in the accuracy of my work? The BBC is a reliable news source, but the fact remains that at times I file using recycled sound gathered hundreds of miles away by someone else.

We?ve little choice. Our radio show has neither the money nor the air-time to post reporters, say, in Berlin, Paris, Rome, London and Barcelona.   So I move between these places as I can. And when I can't (and we can't find a freelancer to step in) I know that I'm still getting the story right, through a combination of thorough reporting and dipping into the 'system' audio. The question is, how does this sit with listeners?

I'd also be curious to hear from any colleagues, journos or otherwise, who might be facing similar issues in foreign reporting.

Gerry Hadden '89 is Europe Correspondent for Public Radio International's The World.

Is Diane Sawyer Wasting Her Time? by Cindy Skrzycki

goldfarb@colby.edu (Cindy Skrzycki) — Tue, 15 Sep 2009 21:42:04 GMT

Is Diane Sawyer Wasting Her Time?
by Cindy Skrzycki

Sure, Diane, get on the back of that dinosaur.

The announcement that Diane Sawyer, a super-professional television journalist, finally secured the top spot?anchor?on the ABC nightly news makes me think: What could she be thinking?

If this coveted award was given to her, or any other woman in television broadcasting, say, 10 years ago, this would be something to celebrate. Under these circumstances, it is not.

The numbers tell the story. According to the Pew Foundation?s 2008 annual report on the state of the news media, things are dismal. Newspapers are disappearing, some 5,900 newsroom jobs disappeared last year, and no one wants to pay a cent for news. That?s all bad?for us as a society and for the professionals who are in it or training to be in it. One of the revelatory numbers is how many Americans still watch the nightly news. Of the 300 million in this country, only 22.8 million press the remote to bring up the network nightly news and most of these are the lucky ones who got to retire with a pension and are home at that time.

In the history of journalism, a woman?s place has been where the men told her to be: the women?s section, the food section, the advice column, the wedding announcements, the party scene, and certainly not the hot news beats that lead to page one stories. Until the last decade, most of the stories on the glory beats that bring money, prestige, and recognition went to the guys making the assignments. When women did become anchors?like Connie Chung?they had to sit alongside a guy to preserve ratings.

Of course, some of this has changed. We have wonderful and brave women correspondents who have reported and died in every foreign country?take the Boston Globe?s late Elizabeth Neuffer. We have women on the front pages of the big national newspapers and regional papers?like Pulitzer-prize winning Dana Priest. We have serious television reporters who are working in the field because they are skilled (and not just because they're pretty)--CBS News Correspondent Kimberly Dozier and Christiane Amanpour, CNN Chief International Correspondent.

But the struggle has been a long one from the days of Ida Tarbell, Nellie Bly and Martha Gellhorn. Those women were rarities in their day and they struggled personally and professionally for their accomplishments in journalism. ?Many took great risks in the social sphere by saying what they did and caused outrage,? said Eleanor Mills, who edited a book called Journalistas.

So, the coronation of Katie Couric on CBS and now Diane Sawyer are consolation prizes, not career toppers, because these kinds of careers in journalism?sitting in the anchor chair for network news casts?are over and the men already did it.

These women will never be as prominent or revered as Walter Cronkite, John Chancellor, or even Dan Rather. Kevin Klose, dean of the journalism school at the University of Maryland, said in the latest edition of the American Journalism Review, ?Nearly 15 years after he retired from the 'CBS Evening News,' Cronkite was rated No. 1 television journalist in the country in seven of eight categories by a TV Guide opinion poll taken in the mid-1990s.?

Katie Couric is likely to be best remembered for bringing down vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin, not drawing millions of eyeballs to the nightly news cast. She is third in the ratings. And remember, her appointment was highly controversial and her first months in the anchor chair were like sitting on thumb tacks.

Sadly, even the network who gave Sawyer the job found it hard to be enthusiastic about the pick. There was no build-up about who might get the job because predecessor Charlie Gibson simply announced an abrupt departure. It was as if Sawyer got the job because she happened to be around and was long-suffering in waiting for it.

What?s sad about this is that Diane Sawyer is a top-notch journalist. Yet, she had to stand in line for this a long time. Now that she has it, the big question is how long will the nightly news even be around?

Maybe a better idea for talented women who strive to be anchors is to leave the dying genre and take their considerable talents to the street as the excellent reporters they are. It might mean a pay cut for them, but it would be better journalism for viewers. Even Ed Morrow realized that staying at CBS, which didn?t share his outlook or news values, was a mistake.

Imagine all that talent being freed from the strictures of television norms that affect male as well as female professionals and deal with looks, the prevalence of infotainment over news, and ratings. Cronkite knew there was nothing like daily reporting for a newspaper or wire service where the news was more than headlines on ?the magic tube.?

Godspeed, Diane. But this might just be a waste of your talent and another indication that the men are already moving on.

A New Model: The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette On the Cutting Edge

goldfarb@colby.edu (David Shribman) — Thu, 10 Sep 2009 22:15:27 GMT

A New Model: The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette On the Cutting Edge

David Shribman, executive editor of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette and a 2009 Lovejoy Fellow at Colby, and Chris Chamberlain, president of the Post-Gazette and a member of Colby's Class of 1993, talk about a new initiative they developed together in Pittsburgh.

First, Mr. Shribman, a regular blogger in this space:

Here is an important question in the civic literacy world: Can a mainstream media company survive or thrive on the Web?

We at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette are determined to try. Just this month we launched a new, paid Web site, Post-Gazette Plus, an effort to produce premium content for Post-Gazette readers and Web fans who want to know more about our region, dig deeper into social and cultural questions, and learn even more about the Steelers, Penguins, Pirates, Pitt and Penn State sports (plus high schools, too) than we provide in our regular Web site, post-gazette.com, and in our newspaper.

We think this is an important moment, and an important experiment, for several reasons. It's critical that mainstream news organizations not give up the fight in the face of declining revenues, diminishing circulation and changing lifestyle and reading patterns. We wanted to show some fight, and we wanted to make the case--an essential argument, in our view--that information of value has just that: value. (And if you are wondering why we're not charging for our regular Web site, the answer is simple. That battle is too big for us to fight alone, and the expectations of free content are too strong for us to resist.)

So a bunch of us at the Post-Gazette--folks on the news side, folks on the business side--sat down and came up with something different, something extra and, not incidentally, something we think we can use to enhance our revenues at a time when newspaper revenues nationally are in decline, in part because of the recession, in part because of changing advertising practices across the economy. We are determined to keep alive the journalistic instinct and ethic, and we know that supporting a talented newsroom requires money. (We are cured, totally cured, of the fantasy that we lived with for so long, that by some mystery or magic or divine inspiration there would always be enough money hanging around the business office of a news organization to underwrite a news staff. That is so 1998.) So we decided to charge for this innovation, but to charge very little--$3.99 a month, or $36 for customers who sign up for a full year of Plus. A really terrific bargain. A whole month for less than the price of a premium coffee, for gosh sakes. And we decided to produce an Experience, not just a Web site. Our visitors get news, commentary, perspective, entertainment--and perks, like discounts on coffee, cultural attractions, and even homes and automobiles.

This effort produced both enthusiasm and skepticism. A lot of us were excited that an institution fitted with presses, fed by paper, distributed by trucks and fueled by gasoline could produce something new even as the smart people on the coasts and on the Web were saying that we as an industry were endangered. A lot of other people wondered whether the same people who hewed to honored but aged standards and practices could produce anything of value in the new medium. That debate is flaring elsewhere and this is not the place to examine it. But it is the place to raise the notion that the new technology--and the great opportunities it possesses--should not be the exclusive province of the new information ideologues. When I say that I am not an editor who dislikes blogs, I am saying it because I read them, I enjoy them and I profit from them. I spend a good deal of my day on the Web. So to me the Web is not the enemy, though to some denizens of the Web we are a very inviting target. Because we are not seeking to compete with bloggers and other sites. They do what they do--putting meaning into the doctrine of free expression that we have espoused for so long--and we now are producing yet another version of what we do, though in a dramatically different and, I have to say, very exciting, form. Plus we're having a great time. May I whsiper in your ear and tell you that that is why we started this in the first place?

And now Mr. Chamberlain gets the final word:

We felt strongly that PG+ would be a brand extension, as opposed to a replacement for our existing products. Despite the copious ink our industry spends documenting its own problems, the PG brand and its existing products are incredibly vibrant. Our unduplicated print and online audience represents the highest readership the PG has ever had. Given the tough economic year everyone is having, our advertising trends are some of the best in the country. Our online traffic is robust, and growing. And with our stable circulation and the trust our readers and advertisers place in us, I am confident our print product will remain dominant in the region for quite some time?for the unforeseeable future in fact. And because it is thus so important to maintain that trust, and the quality that our current print and online customers expect, we did not take things away from existing products for PG+ in content or resources.

We did acknowledge that as a newspaper company today, having a solid print product and a robust, ad-supported website is not enough. In our industry there is an urgent need to develop our existing audience and grow new audience in all the new ways they seek us out, including the web, mobile, and for us, PG+.

Plus is a brand extension driven by market needs, not our own. We hear from customers in many ways who tell us they want a deeper, more intimate, more interactive connection to all things Pittsburgh, which they trust us to deliver with our resources and reach. It is an exciting complement to what we already do, and while we?re only one week old, we are steadily signing members up.

We have said all along that this is something that will evolve, both in terms of content and as a business proposition. I am certain there is no one ?holy grail? out there for how to monetize content online, and one will not be invented in a conference room somewhere. For the PG, that will come to us in a way that is uniquely suited to our audience, market, and brand, and we will only get there by testing new models.

We are very happy with the launch of PG+ thus far. But we will also continue to look for additional business models to extend our brand in a media landscape that is daunting on some days, but exhilarating in its potential on many more days.

Survival Of The Smallest by Chris Morrill

goldfarb@colby.edu (Chris Morrill) — Thu, 10 Sep 2009 11:07:18 GMT

This week, I?ve been reading ?What Would Google Do?, a digestible book that takes the rather obvious approach of suggesting we can all learn tricks from the world?s most successful search-engine company. The author, Jeff Jarvis, is a well-know media guy, college professor, blogger and self-promoter. He reminds readers that the mass media world is quickly fragmenting into thousands of niche products, fueled by consumer?s individual interests and the cheap content-creation tools on the web.

Jarvis? point got me thinking more closely about the fate of America?s smaller newspapers, which have gotten little attention compared to big-media company woes (newsroom reductions, bankruptcy court filings and threats of closure). I?ve long been a believer that these smaller daily and weekly papers would be insulated from a lot of the pain being felt upstream. They don?t carry the debt load, have invested conservatively, and can boast of meaningful relationships with local advertisers.

But now I?m getting worried for them too. Why? Google searches now take readers directly to sites and/or reviews about local businesses. Many print stories feel stale in our age of Tweets, Facebook updates and push e-mail. Some smaller papers have been slow to get online, given technical hurdles and fears of content cannibalization. And they face new low-cost competition from community bloggers and ambitious online startups that have low-cost structures.

Of course, the startups face their own challenges. While they may find some foundation money to get rolling and some benefit from non-profit status, they too will have to cope with small, time-starved audiences and the apparent lack of good advertising solutions.

What matters to me is the survival of small-town journalism, and if newspapers can?t evolve and succeed with new models, there will others ready to try. And there are bright spots:

There are many experienced journalists willing to practice their craft for less money, especially outside the corporate realm. Some of them will turn their energies to hyper-local sites.

Surprisingly, many universities report continued high interest among students in journalism majors. Pair these hungry, ambitious graduates -- who?ve been trained in multi-media journalism -- with more experienced newspaper exiles, and it might be a winner for smaller news organizations.

There is potential to network lots of these sites together in all sorts of ways, including platform-sharing, technology expense and advertising infrastructure. Some newspapers, once reluctant to partner with ?the competition? are now sharing news with each other as they struggle to trim costs.

?Local news? is always going to be relatively important to consumers, no matter how dominant the big national players like Google, Amazon and Craig?s List become. If local advertising, delivered with a print product, is no longer viable, maybe we?ll all find ourselves willing to pay a little more to be well informed online. Here are a few papers, including one in Newport, Rhode Island, leading the way in getting readers to pay.

Chris Morrill ?81 is Associate Director/Syndication for GlobalPost, a new international-news organization based in Boston.

Reinvention of a Journalist by Alexis Grant

goldfarb@colby.edu (Alexis Grant) — Thu, 10 Sep 2009 10:25:17 GMT

Reinvention of a Journalist

The editor, my former colleague, didn?t even bother to whisper. Many of the desks around him were empty.

?You were smart to get out when you did,? he said.

In truth, when I left my job at the Houston Chronicle in May 2008, I didn?t think I was leaving the profession for good. I thought I was simply taking a hiatus to travel, to fulfill a dream of an extended backpacking trip.

But while I was gone, freelancing my way through West and central Africa, then Madagascar, the U.S. economy tanked, taking newspapers with it. Watching our nation elect a president from Madagascar, I wondered, would I be able to find a journalism job when I returned to the States?

It turned out I didn?t have to. If there ever was a time to pursue another long-time aspiration ? and avoid the job search ? it was now. So I began writing my first book, a travel memoir about backpacking solo through Africa.

But I don?t consider myself entirely removed from the journalism world. Through this book, I?m learning another way to tell a story, another way to engage readers. I?m finding my literary voice, which was buried beneath years of inverted pyramids. I?m rediscovering the value of being creative with words.

As I tell tales of what it was like to travel alone as a woman in Africa, I?m informing readers (or people who will read my book when it?s finally published ? oh, how I miss the daily deadline) about faraway places and interesting cultures, just as I would as a journalist. But I?m also reinventing myself as an author.

In a way, this is what journalism needs to do right now, too: reinvent itself. Journalism needs to find new ways to tell stories, new ways to engage readers, new ways to make money. Journalism needs to step outside of its box.

So no, I wasn?t smart to get out of journalism when I did, nor was I lucky. Because when I?m done writing this book, I want to get back in, some way or another. But I?ll be a different ? a better ? journalist than I was before. I?ll know how to blog, write with voice, tell stories in fresh ways. And hopefully, by then, journalism will have changed for the better, too.

Alexis Grant '03 is a journalist writing her first book, a travel memoir about backpacking solo through Africa. Until May 2008, she was a reporter at the Houston Chronicle.

Too Good to be True: Hoaxes as News? by David Offer

goldfarb@colby.edu (David Offer) — Thu, 10 Sep 2009 09:57:06 GMT

Too Good to be True: Hoaxes as News?

I call attention to an excellent column last week by Kelly McBride of the Poynter Institute noting four recent Internet hoaxes that can be traced back to sloppy or unethical work by professional journalists.

As she notes, overworked and understaffed newsrooms are more vulnerable than ever to fraud. It seems there is not enough time to be skeptical. Copy desks -- the last protection for the reader -- barely have time to get the paper to press. Top editors seldom review stories. And hoaxes find their way into print, onto the web, on the air.

The stories cited by McBride fall into the overall grouping of "too good to be true" -- the kind of stories reporters and editors want to believe. That desire for the really good story -- the kind my first editor said led readers to exclaim: "Holy shit, Martha! did you see that?" -- is understandable. But when the story seems too good, editors traditionally have stopped to ask questions. Now, that doesn't happen often enough.

The result: more hoaxes in print, more readers fooled, more credibility lost.

Take, for example, the story -- a college paper satire -- reporting that the health department at Vanderbilt University was sponsoring a bonfire where swine flu victims could burn their clothing, books and anything else that was contaminated.

Don't you love the idea of kids burning clothes and books? What fun. What baloney.

Think how easy it would be to check it out.

But the story was picked up by the Druge Report and at least one newspaper.

Or how about the report in the New York Daily News about the rapper who forced her record label to pay for her education, including a doctorate at Cornell University.

Not true.

The key fact is not that hoaxes manage to find their way into print; that's nothing new.

The more important issue is that it seems to be happening more often.

As McBride says, despite the pressures on overworked editors, it is still our job to guard the credibility of what we print or broadcast.

When we fail to do this, we damage our credibility -- and that's the most important thing we have.

David Offer retired as executive editor of the Kennebec Journal and the Morning Sentinel at the end of 2006, ending a 42-year career in journalism. In January 2009 he taught a News Literacy Course at Colby College. This fall he will teach at the University of Alaska- Fairbanks.

Stop the Presses by Beth Healy

goldfarb@colby.edu (Beth Healy) — Thu, 10 Sep 2009 09:27:36 GMT

Stop the Presses

On the last Wednesday in August, Boston Globe readers woke up to something that?s increasingly rare these days -- breaking news on their front doorstep.

The Globe stopped the presses about 1:30 a.m. that day, to get a huge story on page one: ?Kennedy dead at 77.? Nearly half the daily circulation of about 302,000 papers had already been printed by that hour, but 186,000 copies went out the door with the news of the senator?s passing stripped across the top of the page ? news that would dominate national headlines well into the weekend.

It was a sad story that kicked off four days of public mourning. And it was a very good moment for the Globe. At a time when many people are questioning the value of newspapers, it was a great reminder of what we can do when we do it well.

There had been plenty of planning involved; this was not a spontaneous response to the death of the famous Massachusetts Democrat and youngest son of the Kennedy clan. The plan worked, from waking up the Globe?s editor in the middle of the night to running a long and thorough obituary written ahead of time by former reporter Martin Nolan, which had been recently updated and edited.

Most major dailies didn?t have any Kennedy coverage until the following day, when the Globe was able to run second-day news and commentary, along with a special section on the man whose successes and failures were the stuff of routine coverage here for decades, and dinner table conversation for thousands who grew up in or around Boston. The web site was packed with additional coverage, including spectacular videos produced earlier this year as part of an in-depth series and a book on Kennedy by several Globe staffers.

It was a lot to take in, but it was all there for folks who were hungry for a mini-history lesson, something deeper than the wall-to-wall chatter on TV. Even some of the cable news guys, who did an admirable job of talking about Kennedy for four straight days, recommended reading the paper if you really wanted to learn something. Everyone I encountered said they came away from the coverage knowing more about the man, the family, and a chapter of American history than they had before.

People bought more papers than usual during those days; the Globe printed thousands of extra copies. What does it mean? That we still like to cling to a tangible printed thing in these big moments? Maybe it?s just the baby boomers, loyal readers, who, some experts are now saying, will keep buying papers and supporting us for another decade, until somebody figures out how to make money delivering news online.

It?s hard to know. But amid the made-for-TV moment that was Kennedy?s funeral, newspapers captured the man and his larger-than-life legacy. It was heartening to see the public respond.

Beth Healy '87 is an investigative reporter at the Boston Globe. She currently works in the paper's business section.

What can we trust when looking at journalistic photographs? by Becky Hanger

goldfarb@colby.edu (Becky Hanger) — Fri, 04 Sep 2009 14:32:56 GMT

What can we trust when looking at journalistic photographs?

In a New York Times story last month, Larry Rohter wrote about a new book that questions the veracity of Robert Capa's "Falling Soldier" photograph, one of the most famous photos in the history of photojournalism.

Capa made the photo in 1936 during the Spanish Civil War. In his new book, Shadows of Photography, José Manuel Susperregui, a communications professor at the Universidad del País Vasco in Spain, argues that the landscape in the picture proves that the photo was not taken where Capa's biographer said it was. After showing the landscape to locals, Susperregui concluded that the photo was taken 35 miles away - in an area that did not see fighting at the time Capa took the photo.

Not everyone agrees with Susperregui, who is not the first person to raise doubts about this photo, and the truth is that we?ll probably never know the entire story. Was this soldier killed in combat or maneuvers? Was the image absolutely legitimate, a total fake or somewhere in between? Did Capa make an honest mistake, did he misrepresent what he shot, or did he simply not provide enough information for his editors in Paris to properly caption the image? Or, was it the editors who intentionally misrepresented Capa?s work?

We?ll likely never know, but this case also leads to a larger question: What can we trust when we're looking at journalistic photographs? If this bedrock of war photography could conceivably be a fake, how do we know that today?s photographers, who have access to technology that makes faking so much easier than it was in Capa?s day, aren?t fooling us on a regular basis? The answer is less than satisfactory, but here it is: we don?t.

As media professionals and consumers, we have to be informed and observant, but trust will always be part of the equation. No matter how meticulous and suspicious editors are, in the end they have to trust that photographers are sending them unaltered images. No matter how informed and observant readers are, in the end they have to trust that news outlets are relying on scrupulous photographers and qualified editors. (This has always been true in journalism, and not just for photography. Writers have their own long history of deceit.)

The vast majority of the time, this trust is well placed, but it also helps to know how to spot a photographic fraud. As the old journalistic saying goes, ?If your mother says she loves you, check it out.? Here are a few examples.

Bill Marsh wrote about the history of photo fakery in an essay in The Times that followed Rohter's piece by a few days. Photo manipulation is nothing new. Marsh's essay ran with manipulated photos of Abraham Lincoln and Ulysses S. Grant. The Lincoln image put the president's head on a more muscular man's body. The Grant image was constructed of three separate photos in an effort to put him in the right pose at the right location.

Those fakes, when seen today, seem amateurish and obvious, but technology makes it much harder to spot a fraud. Last summer many newspapers and websites published a digitally altered photo of Iranian missile tests that showed one missile too many. The faked photo, which was released by the public relations arm of the Iranian Republican Guard, included one extra missile. Many newspapers did not catch the manipulation until the altered photo was already published. (In this case, you can?t really blame the Iranian P.R. team. They were just doing their job. Seems the editors should have been a little more skeptical of the source.)

In the first year of the Iraq war, former Los Angeles Times photographer Brian Walski photographed Iraqi civilians under fire in Basra. He was discovered to have merged two of his photographs from this situation in an effort to improve the composition. Walski was subsequently fired. But like the Iranian missile photo, Walski's altered photo ran on many front pages before the fakery was discovered. In both cases, readers felt dismayed and betrayed.

In the summer of 2006, the Reuters news agency moved a freelance photographer's photo showing smoke rising from a Beirut suburb after an Israeli airstrike. Later it was revealed that the photo had been manipulated in Photoshop to increase and darken the smoke. Reuters cut ties to the photographer and removed all of his photos from its archive. The agency also changed its photo editing protocols so that freelancers working in the Mideast would have more oversight by higher ranking editors. In retrospect, the photographer's changes seem clumsy and obvious and should have been caught by an editor before his photo was released to news outlets.

In politically charged situations such as the fighting in Iraq and Lebanon, people sometimes look for fraud where there is none. New York Times staff photographer Tyler Hicks covered the 2006 fighting in Lebanon. The Times published a slideshow of his photos from an airstrike in the southern port city of Tyre. One of the photos showed a man lifting another man amid the rubble. The editor who put together the slideshow wrote generic captions for the photos with passages from the accompanying story. Though Hicks's photo clearly showed a man who was injured and not killed (you can see the same man walking around in many of his photos from the same event), the caption that originally ran online seemed to say that the man was killed in the attack. Bloggers jumped on Hicks, accusing him of staging the photo. In reality, the error was much more mundane.

As a photo editor, I know I must communicate with the photographers about their work, and I must scrutinize any images that seem incongruous. As a news consumer, I must be an informed reader. And as an admirer of Robert Capa's work, I'll continue to believe in the greatness of his photography despite the questions surrounding one of his most iconic images.

Becky Lebowitz Hanger has been a photo editor at The New York Times for the past 6 years. Before that, she was a photo editor for The Palm Beach Post in West Palm Beach, Florida.

Can We Measure the Effect of Blogs? by Brian MacQuarrie

goldfarb@colby.edu (Brian MacQuarrie) — Wed, 02 Sep 2009 12:48:09 GMT

Can We Measure the Effect of Blogs?

Mainstream media are riddled with worry that the explosion of blogs will erode traditional ethical standards, flood the information arena with tangential tripe, and place the responsibility for judgment, perspective, and context in the hands of ill-prepared, partisan amateurs. So far, this has been more anxious conjecture than concrete observation. The impact and influence of the blogosphere has been almost impossible to quantify. Who can possibly know, in a world of hyper-fast technological advances, the precise effect of blogs on the decision-making of ordinary Americans?

That answer might never be known, but a trio of researchers recently developed a way to track how blogs participate in the daily news cycle and how long they stick with a story. And preliminary indications, according to a massive study of 90 million articles from 1.6 million blog and news sites during the 2008 presidential campaign, is that the institutional leviathans of the news business might be less stodgy than imagined, and that a sizable number of blogs are behaving more mainstream than their critics concede.

According to Dr. Jon Kleinberg of Cornell University, one of the researchers, the data "suggest that something is going on that's neither mainstream news nor pure blogging. It's sort of meeting in the middle -- an increased professionalism of blogging, and a tendency toward blogging for the mainstream media."

In other words, Kleinberg said, blogs from mainstream news organizations such as the New York Times and CNN often are first with a story, but competing for speed with "highly professional blogs" such as The Huffington Post, which can devote considerable professional and financial resources to their product.

Kleinberg, a MacArthur Fellow who received a doctorate in computer science from MIT, teamed with his colleagues to develop a system that tracked the frequency of a sequence of four or more quoted words during the last three months of the presidential campaign. Sound bites such as "lipstick on a pig" (Barack Obama's put-down of John McCain's campaign mantra of change) and "palling around with terrorists" (Sarah Palin's reference to Obama's link with 1960s Chicago radical Bill Ayers) were just two of the phrases they tracked.

Such oft-repeated catch-words "served as a marker for a particular storyline, genetic signatures that traveled along with stories," Kleinberg said. "This seemed like a useful way to track topics as they moved through the news when you're looking at it in this giant scale."

In the study, the researchers found that the on-line attention paid by mainstream news organizations to a particular story tended to peak 2.5 hours before the blogs. But, the data indicated, the attention by blogs tended to decrease much slower than the mainstream media, where breaking stories are constantly reshaping the 24-hour news landscape.

Kleinberg begged off when asked for a prediction on the future of news-delivery systems. "I tend to always be wary," said Kleinberg, who nevertheless called the findings an "interesting development." "It's really that meeting-in-the-middle factor," Kleinberg said. "It's the fastest sources of blogging being adopted by the mainstream news, and the production values of mainstream news being adopted by blogs. This middle ground is somehow being occupied from both directions."

And that, a study of 90 million articles later, can only be a good thing.

Why Do Government Officials Leak Security Secrets? by Phil Taubman

goldfarb@colby.edu (Phil Taubman) — Tue, 01 Sep 2009 14:37:37 GMT

Why Do Government Officials Leak Security Secrets?

Over the years, I have often been asked why government officials disclose sensitive, often classified national security secrets to journalists. No two instances are precisely the same, but in three decades covering or directing coverage of diplomatic, military and intelligence affairs for The New York Times I found the most common reason was policy disagreements.

This week I?ll be reviewing several cases with a group of Stanford students. The one that most clearly reflects policy disagreements is a set of exclusive stories I did in July 1983, when I was reporting on the Reagan administration?s intelligence and military programs in Central America. The issue of Soviet encroachment in Central America may seem distant and strange today, but in the early 1980?s it was a hot-button topic in Washington. President Reagan and his top aides, especially William J. Casey, the director of central intelligence, feared that rising Soviet influence in the region threatened American security and could lead to a new Communist bloc south of the American border. The Sandinista government in Nicaragua was viewed as a potential pawn of Moscow and Havana and leftist guerillas in El Salvador were engaged in a civil war with American-backed government forces. The United States was overtly training and advising the Salvadoran army, and covertly assisting anti-Sandinista paramilitary forces in Nicaragua known as the Contras. The covert assistance eventually morphed into the Iran Contra scandal that seriously wounded Reagan and his administration.

During the summer of 1982, several years before the Iran-Contra operation exploded into public view, government officials showed me a set of Top Secret memos that Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger had sent to President Reagan, outlining steps to expand American assistance in El Salvador and increase covert activities in Nicaragua and Honduras, where Contra forces were supported and frequently based. I used the information as the basis for an intensive round of interviews with officials at the White House, State Department, Pentagon and CIA. The result was a set of stories that created a stir in Washington and in Central America.

The people who showed me the memos opposed the administration?s efforts in Central America, fearing the United States was becoming entangled with repressive regimes and prosecuting a covert war in Nicaragua that defied the spirit, if not the letter, of limits set by Congress. The sources understood that they risked prosecution and prison time if they were discovered, but felt the issues were of paramount importance. They had been unsuccessful working the issues inside the government and hoped that the bright spotlight of press coverage would put a brake on the government plans and encourage Congressional and public debate about the Reagan policies. I accepted the information and pursued it, and The Times published the resulting stories on the front page, because we felt they contained information that Congress and the public had a right to know.

Other motivations lead government officials to reveal secret policy decisions or operations. Someone in one government agency may be motivated by a desire to outflank or embarrass a rival agency. The CIA and FBI have long played that game. Personal grudges can be a factor, or perhaps the thrill of seeing leaked information ignite a political firestorm. My job, through extensive reporting, was to determine if the information was accurate, to understand the policy and political context surrounding it and to present it in a fair and balanced way. In some cases when the disclosure of secrets might expose American troops or intelligence operatives to harm or compromise operations the government considered vital to American security, The Times would weigh government requests not to publish the information. No such requests were made about the stories I describe here.

Gerry Boyle: Endangered Newsrooms

goldfarb@colby.edu (Gerry Boyle) — Thu, 27 Aug 2009 14:10:58 GMT

Endangered Newsrooms

Within a half-hour, the two messages came in, saying, in essence, that two more print journalists had bitten the dust. I don?t mean that they?d passed away. They?d just left the shrinking newspaper business, getting out while the getting was good.

One was a nearly 20-year veteran of a Maine daily newspaper. He?d covered school districts, city halls, town government. One of the remaining reporters on a staff had been cut in half, he was offered a job teaching high school English. He jumped at it.

The other was an editor/designer who had worked for several medium-sized daily newspapers, including the Providence Journal and the Portland (Maine) Press-Herald. When it appeared that her latest position, at a New York newspaper, was on the chopping block, she opted out. Now she?s a painter, following her other passion out of the newsroom and into the studio.

She?s happy; the teacher may feel he has a new lease on life, too. No calamities here that I know of (of course, the rookie teacher hasn?t covered detention hall yet). In fact, the unfortunate aspect of this may not be for individuals, as former journalists find new careers, but for newspaper readers as they find that their newspapers are giving them less news.

It?s already happening. Shrinking revenues mean fewer pages. Fewer pages mean fewer stories. Fewer stories mean just that. Stories that were reported even three years ago, are now ignored, or stay on a list of stories to do ?someday.? Labor-intensive investigative stories aren?t being reported simply because there is less time to do them. And many of the journalists with the skills, drive, and curiosity to do that reporting are doing other things: teaching Hemingway to 10th graders, finishing a landscape, done in acrylics.

Good for them; bad for the rest of us.

I say this having left daily journalism in 1999 to edit Colby magazine and write crime novels (Mea culpa. And much self-promotion can be found at gerryboyle.com). My protagonist, or one of them, is a former New York Times reporter named Jack McMorrow, who left the Times to live in the Maine woods. He?s still freelancing but he?s traded the New York newsroom for the wilds of Maine.

Years ago, when the books first started coming, the reason for this career change was a bit hard to explain. In the books, he cut a corner by not revealing his tie to a source. That led to a row with his editor, which led to him quitting and exiling himself to Maine.

Of course, today it would be a much simpler: he got downsized. End of story.

When McMorrow and I left the newsroom, it was with the assumption that we?d quickly be replaced. Today that assumption would most likely be false?which brings me to the point of this little ramble. The pool of skilled reporters is shrinking like the ice caps. And, sort of like the ice caps, it won?t be easily restored, assuming that at some point consumers of news demand to know what the hell is going on around them?on their block, in Washington, around the world.

I?m a firm believer in the laws of supply and demand. I just hope that by the time the bleeding stops, the public remembers what it has lost and will be willing to pay to get it back.

Gerry Boyle '78 is editor of Colby magazine and creator of a series of crime novels featuring an ex- New York Times reporter named Jack McMorrow. His writing life is chronicled at gerryboyle.com

Tom Cahill: How much is a scoop worth?

goldfarb@colby.edu (Tom Cahill) — Thu, 20 Aug 2009 15:11:45 GMT

Tom Cahill '89 writes for Bloomberg News from London.

How much is a scoop worth?

Beancounters have some fresh data points for this riddle, courtesy of the U.K.'s media hothouse. With little home delivery, the U.K. must be the world's most competitive news market. A dozen national dailies and a similar number of Sunday papers slug it out on newsstands while a half dozen or so free titles also scream for attention.

Standing out of the crowd this summer has been the Daily Telegraph, which riveted the U.K. with disclosures about Parliamentary expense abuses.

While the Brits have a habit of slapping the suffix "gate'' onto scandals to inflate their import (I've seen six in two and half years, including the forgettable "Pedalo-gate''), this may be the one story actually equivalent to Watergate.

The ensuing parliamentary and cabinet casualties included the first forced resignation of a speaker of Britain's House of Commons in over three centuries.

So what did those scoops mean for circulation? The Daily Telegraph's sales rose 8 percent to 836,410 copies in May when it began its daily dispatches on U.K. taxpayers picking up the tab for members of parliament's duck houses and moat cleaning. That was up from April's 774,752 copies, according to the Audit Bureau of Circulations. At 90 pence for each of the added 61,658 copies, that's £55,492 ($90,623) a day, or roughly £1.1 million ($1.8 million) for May's 20 days of sales. Still not impressed? Rivals lost sales in that same period.

And the Daily Telegraph appears to have held on to those gains, selling 835,419 copies a day for June, and 818,937 in July, according to ABC data. Advertising revenue, of course, comes on top of that, along with a general realignment of its reputation. "They went from mum and dad Middle England's paper to one that's got teeth,'' one British flack said.

Now for the expense side of the ledger. With so-called check-book journalism in the U.K., some sources try to sell information to the highest bidder. The Times of London said on April 1 that it declined an offer from an unidentified businessman who was seeking to sell the receipts for 300,000 pounds. The Telegraph has declined to identify its source, or whether it paid for the expense details.

Which brings us to the other data point.

The News of the World, the U.K.'s top-selling Sunday paper, agreed to a £700,000 out-of-court settlement over a case involving the tapping of mobile phone messages of public figures including sports stars and actors, the paper's editor told a parliamentary committee on July 21. "It's how newspapers work,'' Colin Myler, editor of the News of the World, told the parliamentary committee, according to an account by my colleague Robert Hutton.

The hearing, over whether to replace British newspapers? system of self-regulation with a statutory regulator, came after reports about the previously undisclosed payments ran in the Guardian. Myler said that as a result of new rules he?d introduced, cash payments to sources had been reduced by as much as 89 percent.

Instead of paying sources, some papers are effectively trying to pay customers.

The Evening Standard, which has been revamped after its purchase this year by former-KGB-spy-turned-tycoon Alexander Lebedev, entices buyers at London's airports with an unusual proposal. Want a £1.55 bottle of bottle water for the flight? It's free if you buy a 90 pence paper, instead.

Free water versus providing fodder for an entire nation's water-cooler conversations -- which is a more sustainable newspaper model? Beancounters sharpen your pencils.

For a highlight reel of the Telegraph's stories, click here.

Kelly Field: Challenging Conventional Wisdom

goldfarb@colby.edu (Kelly Field) — Thu, 20 Aug 2009 14:40:51 GMT

Kelly Field '99 is the chief Washington reporter for the Chronicle of Higher Education, covering Congress and the Education Department, among other agencies.

Challenging Conventional Wisdom

One of the key roles journalism plays in civic society is in challenging conventional wisdom. In journalism school, they teach you to be a skeptic, to never to assume anything (as my mother likes to say: ?assume makes an ass out of u and me?).

Yet as journalists, we sometimes accept as ?truth? statements or claims that are only half-true.

Case in point from the higher-education world: the idea that college has become unaffordable for many families. As a reporter covering college costs, I see this claim repeated in many mainstream publications. While it?s true that college prices have risen faster than inflation and family incomes over the last decade, the truth is that student aid has risen even more dramatically.

Between 1998 and 2008, the cost of attending college full time increased by 33 percent at four-year private colleges and 28 percent at four-year publics. During that same time period, financial aid grew by 101 percent, according to the College Board. Once student aid is factored in, the average student pays only $102 a year to attend a two-year public college and $2,885 to attend a four-year public in-state. Even relatively-pricey private college tuition drops by $10,200, to just under $15,000, once aid is taken into account.

By focusing on sticker price, rather than the ?net price? the average student pays, we as journalists do lower-income families a disservice, perpetuating the idea that college is not for them.

Sometimes, it takes a counterintuitive study to make us question our assumptions. That happened recently when the College Board published a policy brief that cast doubt on the idea that today?s students are drowning in debt. According to the brief, while six percent of last year?s graduates borrowed more than $40,000 during their college career, more than 40 percent of students graduated with no debt at all. The New York Times seized upon the findings, publishing an article titled ?In Study, Most Graduates? Debt Load is Manageable.?

But that myth-busting headline didn?t tell the whole story either. As Education Sector?s Kevin Carey noted in a blog on our web-site, the study was not an analysis of student debt manageability, merely a quantitative look at debt burdens. And while two-fifths of students do graduate debt-free, the rest are borrowing more than ever before (a fact that the Times did include later in its story).

Obviously, a headline can?t capture every nuance of a report -- and editors, of course, want to highlight the most surprising findings -- but this headline was at the very least misleading. Perhaps realizing this, the Times later changed it to the more mundane, but more accurate, ?Study Shows Rise in Average Borrowing by Students? and revised the lede accordingly.

So how can consumers of news know what to believe? As Ruth Jacobs put it in a recent posting, readers should ?question everything;? never assume something is true just because you?ve read it elsewhere or it sounds right.

As reporters, we should resist the urge to sensationalize and push back against headlines that tell only half the truth. At the same time, we should question our own beliefs, challenging the conventional wisdom that can make an ass out of us and our readers. We may never get to the whole truth, but we can certainly get closer.

Kelly Field '99 is the chief Washington reporter for the Chronicle of Higher Education, covering Congress and the Education Department, among other agencies.

Sumner Lemon: News By Algorithm

goldfarb@colby.edu (Sumner Lemon) — Fri, 14 Aug 2009 19:03:42 GMT

Sumner Lemon '93 is a correspondent for IDG News Service, a technology news service based in Boston, MA. He lives in Singapore.

News By Algorithm

On a recent Sunday afternoon, I caught up with a good friend and fellow hack named Mike Magee, who lives in Oxford. As the day slowly wound down, we sat in the courtyard of the Rose & Crown pub turning over the challenges and opportunities now facing technology journalists over pints of Old Hooky ale.

It wasn't long before our conversation turned to the central role played by Google News, which uses a search algorithm to rank top news stories from around the world. There is much at stake for the media industry in these rankings.

A highly ranked story on Google News will send large volumes of traffic to a Web site. That ability to drive traffic -- and therefore advertising dollars -- makes a high story ranking on Google News desirable. As a result, these rankings can sway editorial choices, helping to determine which stories get covered and which ones don't.

Figuring out how Google News works isn't easy. Google discloses little information about the site's search algorithm, including how stories are selected, ranked or ignored. Of course, that hasn't stopped editors and journalists alike from trying to reverse engineer the algorithm, searching for clues to how it works with varying degrees of success.

Mike nicely summed up the challenge that Google News presents, and its implications, in a column published earlier this year: "But if all the hacks in the world are chasing the same story, where does that leave a breaking story? Unless a heap of other news organizations and the journalists that work for them are thorough and don't rely on Google News, it's likely never going to make it into the Google News list."

As I rode the train back into London that evening, it struck me that Mike and I couldn't have picked a better place to have our conversation. The Rose & Crown sits on North Parade, a quiet lane that marks the northernmost lines of the Royalist army at the siege of Oxford during the English Civil War.

If the media industry today feels besieged by the Internet and the influence of search engines like Google News, there's no one to blame but the profession itself. Too many news sites and stories are driven by the notion of what's popular, relying on tools like Google News as a barometer of reader preferences and relevance.

That's not to say there is anything intrinsically wrong with Google News.

The search engine is a great tool for readers, giving them insight into current events and allowing them to find stories about people and places most relevant to them. But it's important for readers to recognize that sites like Google News have limitations, to understand that they offer only one perspective on what is happening in the world.

For journalists, news sites that merely chase the big story of the moment face a difficult and uncertain future. When information is widely available, it loses its value.

The publications and news sites that survive the transformation that the media industry now faces will be those who dig a little deeper, that take the time to build relationships with sources and chase down their own stories. Over time, these news sites are the ones that will offer better value and, ultimately, succeed.

Sumner Lemon '93 is a correspondent for IDG News Service, a technology news service based in Boston, MA. He lives in Singapore.

Cindy Skrzycki: The Depleted Newsroom

goldfarb@colby.edu (Cindy Skrzycki) — Fri, 14 Aug 2009 16:29:38 GMT

The Depleted Newsroom

In a few weeks I will be standing in front of 20 or so students who want to know why journalism is important and if they should bother learning about it at all.

A decade ago, this would have been a different discussion. These students would have been drooling over newspaper, magazine and other media jobs that offered a chance to report on a daily basis; travel, sometimes to exotic places; and decent remuneration.

Now, their prospects are not as rich or plentiful. The students I help with job searches may end up in entry-level administrative positions, posting other people?s work to a website, or being content editors. Some are happy with these first steps in their careers. Most don?t know how much they have missed and how much the public will miss if we do not, as a society, have professionals who will continue to report the world around them and use high standards to do it.

Even those students who are lucky enough to land a job or an internship at a journalistic icon like the Washington Post will not have the benefit of marinating themselves in a newsroom replete with Pulitzer Prize winners, experts in national policy issues, and top-notch editors. Those people are the casualties strewn across the media landscape as companies downsize, try to wring out a profit, and fit into a digital world.

I came across an interview with Tamara Jones that explains why this is a bad thing. Jones was one of the Post?s narrative feature writers and a Pulitzer Prize winner for work the paper did in the aftermath of the shooting at Virginia Tech in 2008. Her remarks remind me that almost the entire business staff of the Washington Post has been let out the door in the last five years. The reporters who were experts on banking, taxes, labor policy, the Fed, trade policy, the regulatory agencies, and white-collar crime are gone?as is the section itself. A few pages of business reporting are now tacked onto the back of the national section.

Jones was interviewed by John Temple, former editor and publisher of the Rocky Mountain News, who now writes a blog called Temple Talk. His paper went out of business in February 2009 after almost 150 years of publication.

The point of the interview is to explore what the dissipation of talent and experience in newsrooms will do to journalism. Tamara, like many other reporters over the past five years, took a buyout from the Post and is now doing freelance and working on other projects.

Her comments show how diminished journalism has become and how readers will be the lesser for it?whether they are reading online or a print edition.

?The Post newsroom has been decimated, and the people left behind keep being told to do more, more, more with less, less, less. They're exhausted, they're anxious, they're beyond demoralized. And guess what? They're still committed 110% to serving a misguided public that considers them disposable. Has quality been impacted? Of course it has, especially in feature-writing. Voice is being replaced with attitude, and there are more and more 'lite' quickies. The lack of warm bodies and resources in the newsroom also results in less first-hand observation. Travel budgets have been slashed, which translates to a lot more reporting done by phone and surfing the web. You can get quotes and factoids that way, yes, but you won't get poetry. What's sacrificed is depth, nuance, layers. Steve Coll, when he was managing editor, used to call it "sitting still inside the story." I also notice a lot of promising reporters flat-lining instead of flourishing, because editors and senior writers who served as coaches have either left or no longer have the luxury of time to mentor. When I wrote my first Style piece, Gene Weingarten was my editor, and we spent two entire days locked in his office, fine-tuning every single sentence of a 100-inch piece. It was about a miracle in Baltimore that had been used to canonize a saint. Gene told me I had "to prove whether or not God exists." Those heady days are gone for good. If I pitched the same idea today, I'd probably be told to just do a phoner with God and cobble together a 10-inch Q&A for tomorrow.?

Or, worse yet, she might just have to Twitter and be done with it.

Surely, we are missing something here. Maybe the solution is to live in parallel universes of the old media where journalists continue to have the responsibility to do as much reporting as possible and care about their writing. Next to that we can run and post whatever anyone else wants to say, in however many words.

Scribes aren?t the only ones facing a dismal future. Photojournalists also are finding that years of training their eyes to find poetry and art in picture taking is being swept away by shaky shots on cell and video cameras by whomever happens to be at the scene.

So, in a few weeks when I open another 20 young minds to the possibilities of being a journalist, I will tell them their training will matter and it will make a difference?even though the expectations of media companies and readers have changed. Some will still want the best.

Because as Helen Thomas, the oldest and most experienced White House reporter said recently, "Everyone with a computer is not a journalist."

Gerry Hadden: In Spain, Bias Can Keep You Centered

goldfarb@colby.edu (Gerry Hadden) — Fri, 14 Aug 2009 15:04:09 GMT

Gerry Hadden '89 is Europe Correspondent for Public Radio International's The World.

In Spain, Bias Can Keep You Centered

In Spain, where I live, if you want to understand any given story, start by buying two opposing newspapers and snagging one of the free rags they give out on the subway. Then triangulate.

This is news literacy, Spanish style. Because compared to the States, Spain?s newspapers are much more boldly positioned on the political spectrum, from left to right. Spain's dailies don't waste time professing to be unbiased, claiming to give all sides equal say, and so on. They just report the news from their point of view. The national daily El Mundo, for example, is unabashedly conservative. El Pais, on the other hand, is center-left. (The free metro papers serve as a sort of control; they're informational only, carrying a lot of wire copy)

On any given day the headlines tell the story of how the Spanish press works. Here?s a made-up scenario that?s not far off the mark. First, the story: ETA, the Basque terrorist group killing people in the name of a fantasy state straddling the Spanish/French border, has exploded a car bomb near a police station, killing two people. The headlines in a well known left-leaning paper might read like this:

ETA, Desperate and Cornered, Lashes Out, Kills for Perhaps the Last Time
Interior Minister Announces the Arrests of More High-Ranking ETA Commandos
Government Says Terrorists Brought to their Knees, Will Soon Surrender

Across the newsstand, a conservative paper might present the same story like this:

ETA?s Latest Killing Underscores Government?s Abject Failure to even Dent the Terrorist Organization's Ability to Strike Us
Experts Say Terrorist Group is Stronger than Ever Despite Arrests of a Handful of Low-Level Killers
Arrested Commandos: Missing Link to March 11th, 2004 Madrid Train Bombings?

That last headline refers to an ongoing conspiracy theory that says that ETA - and not Islamic Jihadists - were behind the multiple rush-hour bombings that left 191 people dead and nearly two thousand injured. 5 years on, said Jihadists have already been tried and many sent to jail. And no one has come forth with even a crumb of credible evidence pointing to ETA as the mastermind.

That a Spanish newspaper today continues to breathe life into this story is reminiscent of those American journalists who insist that President Obama was not, in fact, born on U.S. soil. But the difference is that the Obama conspiracy has played out largely on highly commercialized TV and online, where extremist views have endless space to thrive. By contrast, Spain?s ETA conspiracy has unfolded on the generally more respectable printed page.

Which brings me back to our triangulation exercise. If you?re a Spaniard, depending on your political point of view, two out of the three newspapers you've picked up today are going to infuriate you. So you probably won't triangulate very often. But if you?re an outsider, less emotionally committed to a national political party and philosophy, there?s something refreshing about holding Venus in one hand, Mars in the other (the free paper may now rest on your lap to catch the crumbs from your tomato, olive oil and garlic on bread breakfast). The so-called ?Two Spains? might never come to understand each other. But that division keeps the press vibrant, on its toes, digging and delivering. Each side is always trying to 'beat' the other. The upshot is that sometimes they deliver big stories, and sometimes nut-job hypotheses. But as a foreigner you know what filters to run each paper through. And in this way you can arrive at an approximation of the truth - while gaining insight into the pathos of a country long divided into two political camps.

Gerry Hadden '89 is Europe Correspondent for Public Radio International's The World.

Chris Morrill: The New Watchdogs

goldfarb@colby.edu (Chris Morrill) — Mon, 10 Aug 2009 13:58:00 GMT

Chris Morrill ?81 is Associate Director/Syndication for GlobalPost, a new international-news organization based in Boston.

The New Watchdogs

Media-watch sites and blogs are packed with commentary about the waning days of the daily newspaper. Hyper-local news and information sites are being launched routinely, in places both large and small. Sports powerhouse ESPN has announced an effort to target die-hard local sports fans in cities like Chicago, LA, New York and Dallas although apparently their goal is ?not necessarily to invade the turf? of local newspapers.

If we accept the premise that dailies face a future with ever-diminishing resources, what?s to become of investigative reporting? There?s no doubt that watchdog-type journalism is among the most expensive and time-consuming pursuits in newsrooms. Reporters who spend weeks or months gathering string on a potential corruption piece sometimes end up without a viable story to write. Bean-counters find that hard to justify.

The challenge of making sure this type of work still gets done and done well has not escaped many bright folks who care about journalism and the watchdog role traditionally held by the largest and most well-funded newspapers in the nation. Foundations and universities are considering whether they should play a role and under what terms.

To my mind, the most interesting fresh development is the launch of a new umbrella-type nonprofit, called the Investigative News Network. A group of like-minded individuals gathered last month and authored a somewhat pretentious document called The Pocantico Declaration intended to show their resolve to collaborate.

Some familiar long-term players were there, including National Public Radio, the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting and the National Institute for Computer-Assisted Reporting. But there were new local voices too, including the New England Center for Investigative Reporting, the St. Louis Beacon and MinnPost. The list of attendees added up to some real journalistic firepower.

Big questions remain: Can members of this network work together effectively on highly confidential topics? Will funders be willing to support these efforts over the long-term, especially if these journalists happen to zero in on well-respected institutions and people? Is there enough of an audience for this type of work to help justify the investment?

I?m optimistic. There are good reasons for these efforts is to take root now: For better or worse, there?s plenty of high-quality reporting and editing talent available these days. The Internet provides a low-cost distribution model as well as great opportunity for new types of storytelling, with text, video and deep databases working together. And foundations, well aware of the newspaper crisis, appear willing to step up with grants.

So those in powerful institutions, especially government, should take notice. The new players will be hungry for both worthwhile stories and industry-wide recognition.

Chris Morrill, Colby ?81, is Associate Director/Syndication for GlobalPost, a new international-news organization based in Boston.