John McQuaid's blog

Saving newspapers

2008-05-27T14:38:16-04:00

There are two reasons why I left the newspaper business and, at the moment anyway, have no intention of going back. The first was that many of the people controlling the business today do not care all that much about journalism. The second was that, among those who do care, hardly any have a clue about what has hit them, or what to do about it.

I don’t have any magical suggestions, but it’s clear the future of most newspapers is paperless, free, and heavily local in character. But these are very broad descriptions; there is still an enormous range of possible outcomes, good and bad, even with those preconditions.

For instance, the “hyperlocal” idea is useful but inadequate if taken literally, given that we’re in an era when categories of local and global are increasingly blurred. Virtual communities know no geographical boundaries. Both economic globalization and climate change have serious local and global effects, and political/policy fixes will increasingly have to straddle those categories. The more “hyper” the local in newspaper coverage, and the more it becomes just a buzzword, driven by business models that don’t incorporate an understanding of the community or the world, the more blinkered and navel-gazing the local newspaper will become. Not good, given where they’re starting from.

Lee Abrams is Tribune’s new innovation director, coming from XM Radio and a long, highly successful career as a radio executive, and he’s made a practice of writing long, stream-of-consciousness memos about what’s wrong with newspapers. His latest is up on Romenesko. (Speaking of, why did Tribune - apparently - make Abrams abandon his blog? Seems like exactly the kind of reflexive, decidedly non-innovative corporate diktat that is killing the business.) It’s great to see an outsider and proven innovator looking critically at the business. But I’m not loving what I’m reading:

*Changes are made but they are SO subtle that no-one outside of the building notices.

*Writers and Editors content is undermined by a generally dated and tired look, that is tweaked but not noticeably evolved.

*Are rife with assumptions. That people will find great stories…that the paper will get credit for breaking stories…that the writers are known commodities…that the paper is the center of the local news universe. Well—-not necessarily. Historically yes, but in 2008, not a given. Gotta REALIZE WAR HAS BEEN DECLARED by the Google’s and Fox’s…and FIGHT BACK…RECLAIM YOUR TURF! Ain’t gonna happen by osmosis.

*Are not very aggressive. At least by today’s standards. If a radio station had the circulation declines facing newspapers, all hell would break loose and you’d see the big guns pulled out. I don’t see that in newspapers. When AOL started declining, they blew up the company. My point is that we gotta fight back….fight back to reclaim. It’ll never be 1938 again, but there’s no reason newspapers can’t aggressively get in the 2008 competitive groove and grow again.

Well, yeah. But all of this has been obvious for years. If Tribune needs to spend big bucks to hire a proven innovator to come in and write memos telling its employees what any reader can see, things are worse than even I imagined. And while a little old-fashioned fire in the belly can’t hurt, it’s not a solution. Abrams mentions Fox and Google as the competitors, the enemy newspapers must gird themselves to battle. But if you’re at at a medium-sized, Tribune-owned paper, are Fox and Google really your chief competitors? How are newspaper execs, editors and reporters supposed to get lathered up for a fight when they don’t even know who or what their rivals are anymore? (Blogs? XM Radio? iPods? Jon Stewart?)

Again, no brilliant solutions here. But newspapers do need to blow things up. The current model, with its layers of editors, copy editors, classified ad reps and pillar-of-the-community caution, has to go. Papers need to experiment, try new formats, new models. There’s the open-source idea advanced by newassignment.net, or by local startups such as Paul Bass’s New Haven Independent. That’s one way to inject both new perspectives and some buzz into the business at the same time. But papers also have to protect and nourish two things they already have - reporting and the newspaper “brand.” Original voices and journalistic credibility are pretty much all papers have left - and they’re good both for making money and for the healthy functioning of society.

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Losing Lileks

2007-05-07T14:43:00-04:00

The Star Tribune’s decision to eliminate James Lileks’s column and reassign him to a beat as a local reporter is so self-evidently dumb, an Umbridge-worthy example of the bureaucratic mentality run amok, that you have to wonder if newspapers – especially the once-robust, medium-sized daily paper – have indeed reached some kind of suicidal turning point.

Others have said it, and I’ll repeat it: Lileks is a unique talent. He is a clever and funny writer on the cheesiness and delights of pop culture and a keen observer of life in the American suburbs (mainly, his own). He also writes on politics and has been a prominent warblogger (though on those fronts I rarely agree with him). So he stands out in a medium whose adherence to convention and tradition are slowly strangling it, pushing it out of the boundaries of general interest and relevancy.

Lileks could be a great resource for the Star Tribune or any newspaper trying to homestead various niches on the web (as he notes himself). He is already “branded” and read widely (are Strib editors even aware of this?) and smart about the plastic ways of the new medium, from design to photos to video. His website is an interesting, ever-changing repository of words, images, impressions.

(In the 1990s, I worked in the Newhouse News Service bureau along with Lileks, then – and now – an NNS columnist. I can’t say we were close; at one point, I wrote a rather cutting parody of a Lileks column, and I don’t think he ever forgave me for it. But I wouldn’t have bothered if there wasn’t something distinctive and rich there. How many of us can even write recognizably enough to be parodied?)

So why constrain Lileks’s talent within the stilted conventions of reporting and newswriting, rather than harnessing it? The dynamics of such decision-making are invariably opaque to anybody not in the room. It sounds like somebody said, “we have too many columnists,” and went from there.

Perhaps they did have too many columnists – five is an awful lot. Being a columnist doesn’t imply academy-style tenure anymore, nor was it a good thing when it did. But if you’re making decisions about your paper, and the starting and ending point is a box on a checklist that says “reduce number of columnists,” rather than “how can we use the resources we have to do new things, because our survival depends on it,” then you clearly don’t have a clue that your survival is, indeed, at stake.

Defending the Interview

2007-05-04T15:19:00-04:00

The recent roundabout discussion about the nature of the journalism interview has been interesting, but not very edifying. Briefly: Fred Vogelstein at Wired wanted to interview Jason Calacanis, who said, can we do this by email? Vogelstein declined to do it that way. Jeff Jarvis declared it was time to reinvent the journalistic interview. Jay Rosen recounted his frustrations at being interviewed at length by a reporter for New York Times, who then cherry-picked a single quote to illustrate his predetermined point – with which Jay disagreed.

Shorter version: thanks to the Internet, there’s plenty of ways to do an interview. And journalists are (take your pick) luddites, sticks-in-the-mud, or asses.

I concede both points. (Or, at least, that some journalists fall into each of the above categories.) But before we consign the traditional q-and-a to the ash-heap of history, we should weigh some of the pros and cons.

First off, there is simply no substitute for the give-and-take of an actual, verbal conversation in which words fly, in real time. Ever watch My Dinner with Andre? It’s a movie that consists entirely of a conversation, over dinner, between Wallace Shawn and Andre Gregory, apparently “playing” themselves. They range far and wide over questions of philosophy and art. It’s absolutely riveting, in part for its unexpectedness – you don’t know quite where Gregory (who takes on the role of the interviewee to Shawn’s curious questioner) is going to go next. (Yes – it’s scripted! But let’s not go down that rabbit hole.)

For a journalist trying to fully explore a topic, this kind of give-and-take is ideal. (Dinner and wine are optional, but can’t hurt.) Having a genuine conversation helps paint a complete picture of what the person you’re talking to really thinks. It can also show how they think. It can generate insights and unexpected digressions that help shape your own thinking on the topic at hand. The personal dimension is also revealing: does someone give straight answers? Does s/he keep to a “script”? In the broadest sense, is his/her thinking interesting?

A blog post or an email exchange won’t do all this. Just as a phone interview will convey less information than a face-to-face encounter, email eliminates some of the human dimension from an interview. And it all but eliminates the promise of spontaneity. It assumes there is a concise, single answer to each question, something that tends to cut off new lines of inquiry, not expand them. If someone already has a script, a message he’s trying to get across on the topic, it’s easy to be lazy, to cut-and-paste.

Of course, this doesn’t mean email or other forms of electronic communication are useless for interviews. Internet-based conversations can be complex and fascinating, such as the recent debate over the nature of faith between Andrew Sullivan and Sam Harris. If an emailer has time and the inclination, you can get a truly stimulating back-and-forth going. Inspiration that you might never get in a phone interview may strike at 2 a.m. and pop up in an IM.

It’s also important to note there are different kinds of journalistic interview. For a reporter trolling for quotes for a daily story (perhaps the most common type of interview, but not a true “interview” at all), email may be the most efficient way to get something. If you’re after a particular quote that illustrates your point, why force someone talk for a half hour, then ditch the 29.5 minutes you don’t want? Journalists cherry-pick quotes all the time. Sometimes they take stuff out of context. Sometimes that’s sloppy and stupid. Sometimes it crosses the line.

But the basis for the complaint may also just be that the journalist had a different perspective on the topic than the person he/she interviewed.

Sometimes people I’ve written about didn’t like the way they came off in the finished product. Is it because I was stupid, or didn’t get it? Maybe. But it might also be because I saw things differently than they did. Maybe I was true to their point, but I also undercut it somehow. When I was in college, I took a nonfiction writing seminar from John Hersey. The first day of class, he noted that a journalist has three responsibilities – to him/herself, to the audience, and to the subject. These responsibilities are rarely in perfect alignment.

Or, as Janet Malcolm wrote, journalism has the qualities of a confidence game; every story has an element of betrayal – because it’s the journalist’s story, not the subject’s. (Cf. Capote.)

The game has changed profoundly, because if anyone can publish on a blog or website, the exclusivity of the journalist’s control over/access to the publishing medium has been eliminated. That’s all to the good; if someone misrepresents you, you can respond and let people judge for themselves and respond. The conversation expands.

But journalists still provide access to a wider public. Calacanis writes, “I own my words.” That’s absurd. By definition, published words slip our grasp, whether they appear in a personal blog or a Wired story. By the same token, the notion that the conversation is all about control - that journalists cannot be trusted, and that if one contacts you, you should exercise the strictest form of message discipline (whether through email, interview-by-blog post, or sheer terseness) is a recipe for the worst thing in the communications world: boredom. “Message discipline” is one of the most insidious – and overrated – ideas of our time. Do we really want a public discourse that sounds like presidential debates?

The Great Newspaper Fuzz-Out

2007-04-30T12:31:00-04:00

I had a strange experience the other day. I was on a plane leafing through the New York Times, when somewhere over Connecticut I had the sudden sensation that I was reading through a kind of haze.

By “haze” I mean the inevitable fuzzing effect of mainstream media conventions - the assumption of a distant omniscience, and the fealty to “balance” that is now so easily manipulated by media-savvy interests in politics, business, or entertainment. The result is a seemingly contradictory sense that, in spite of all the quotes, facts and context, reality is not being accurately rendered but obscured.

This haze has enveloped traditional media stories on politics, rendering the form increasingly useless, except as a venue for punditry and gossip. Politics is inherently a subjective business, of course, and accelerating trends of the past few years have taken political coverage almost completely round the bend: MSM cluelessness about the changing media environment, the rise of the conservative press and the netroots, and the Bush administration’s determination to transgress traditional rules of journalism, politics, and government to further GOP advantage (the last, as we know, has now backfired spectacularly).

Sure enough, the lead story in the Times on that day (last Wednesday) was headlined Bush and Cheney Chide Democrats on Iraq Deadline. The story reported some Bush and Cheney spin as straight-up news, the most important event of the day in the judgment of Times editors. The story ends up telling us nothing about the underlying dynamics of the faceoff - what this really means. The paper as a whole is moving away from this formula. But it’s not happening fast enough.

Thankfully, there’s still less haze surrounding your basic, on-scene reporting - whether it’s from faraway locations or the NY area. Ditto with science, business, maybe sports. Traditional journalism still delivers on those things better than anybody else, and the Times that day had a good assortment of stuff - an interesting, if predictable, story on the foxes guarding the OSHA henhouse; a story by the talented Dennis Overbye on the discovery of an earthlike planet outside the solar system; a report on Islamism in Turkish politics.

It’s an impressive range and depth. But even such specialized reportage is losing its once-impregnable niche. The Times used to have, if not a literal monopoly in some of these areas, then a cultural monopoly - a presumption it was the go-to source, the ultimate authority. But now, to cite one example, there’s ever-more access to scientific information on the web. If you have a particular interest you can satisfy it much more easily on the web than via a standard newspaper article, which is meant to reach the broadest possible audience. Ditto with business stories.

So it wasn’t surprising when, on the plane, the entire NYT-reading experience went fuzzy on me. Usually, I suppose, I’d just put the paper down if I got bored, but being a captive audience drove the point home - something is palpably breaking down here. Circulation keeps dropping not just because there are other choices, but because newspapers can no longer command, or even tenuously hold, people’s attention.

Maybe you don’t think this is remarkable; maybe you never read newspapers, or had this type of experience five years ago. But I used to love reading newspapers; I am a newspaper person by training and experience, and it pains and alarms me to admit the sudden urge to pitch the whole thing, wash off my ink-stained fingers and be done with it.

On the other hand … David Carr goes to Jazz Fest, and finds time to do a quick story on The Times-Picayune, my former employer, which more than any other newspaper these days embodies the basic mission of journalism. There’s nothing really new in Carr’s piece, but its portrait captures something important: Just about everybody who has returned to New Orleans reads the paper, because their future literally depends on it.

To put it another way, New Orleans is a community in constant flux, under threat by nature, its own internal problems, and national indifference. And yet it is a community, and the newspaper plays an important role in binding it together. What’s going to do that for the rest of us? And if the answer is “nothing,” what does that mean?

The Limits of As-It-Happens

2007-04-17T22:46:00-04:00

Let me concur with and expand a bit on Steve’s post below, and also throw some respectful skepticism the way of Jeff Jarvis. Here’s what he says about the coverage of the Virginia Tech shootings via blogs, cell phones, and other 21st-century means:

This yields a new architecture of news, a distributed architecture. It’s what is bound to happen. Those students put their news up on their own sites because they have them and because the people they care about know their addresses and will read them. … I have no doubt that people will soon have their own live YouTubes/blog pages where they broadcast what they are doing at the moment: Twitter Video. We will all be Justin.TV. And sometimes, what we broadcast or blog will be news, big news, live news.

So what is the relationship of big, old, centralized media to this new, small, decentralized architecture of news? They need to link to reporting at its source. They will not have the time to get exclusive interviews and feeds. It’s live.

But this phenomenon is less revolutionary than it seems. Such distributed networks can be useful on the most basic level of news gathering: conveying information and impressions from the scene of an unfolding event. But they usually can’t fill the most important blank in the journalism equation: telling us what is really happening, what the story is. Who’s doing what where, and why?

Unfiltered immediacy is great. But unless it’s that rare situation where the guy with the video device is actually in the room where the event is happening (and, ideally, provides some kind of narration), unfiltered immediacy has serious limitations. It is raw material, and raw material from such an event is not only potentially incorrect, as Jeff notes, but by nature fragmentary, often incomprehensible. An unfolding news event - or, more generally, reality itself - is very complex. It resists instantaneous interpretation. Any media machine, new, old, distributed or centralized, will run into the same epistemological barriers.

Steve makes this obvious point, somehow overlooked elsewhere, in his post: you can’t tell what the heck is going on in the Albarghouti video. What is the value of something “live” if you don’t know what you’re looking at? Cable execs will disagree, but “live and on-scene” is not an end in itself.

On Monday, everybody – students, journalists, the public – were in the same boat as events played out – we all had to wait for police to investigate, for closed-mouthed university officials to open up, for some clear storyline to emerge. I stopped looking at news websites Monday afternoon because they simply were not adding much new information – the most salient detail was the rising death toll – and sometimes the information was wrong.

It’s predictable, but here it comes: facts, ideas and impressions must still be assembled into an understandable narrative, and radio, TV and newspaper newsrooms still have the resources to do that faster and better than anyone, or any group, out in the field. And that takes time – sometimes minutes, but more likely hours, and maybe not until tomorrow. Or next week.

An emergent ecosystem of on-site bloggers, videographers, amateur and professional news gatherers will spontaneously appear around any big event now, and the best stuff will quickly rise to the top, guided by CNN or Drudge. That’s a big change from what cable networks have been doing, mostly by themselves, for 20 years. But like he web itself, even the “best stuff” is going to be random and variable in quality, and that makes it more of a challenge to find the good stuff, the true stuff — and the core of the story itself.

The Blurring Lines Between Media and Politics

2007-02-09T08:20:25-05:00

The lines between traditional media, new media, and politics continue to blur. Bloggers are covering the MSM reporters testifying at the Scooter Libby trial. After the Edwards blogging dispute, bloggers thinking about careers in politics are now scanning their archives, wondering what hidden time bombs they may contain.

We’re on the cusp of something new, especially with a presidential campaign getting underway that will produce unprecedented amounts of online coverage and chatter. With the formerly clear dividing line between “media” and the rest of us rapidly disappearing.

Rick Perlstein has a piece in TNR Online in which he notes the rough treatment that Jay Carney received when he made some mistakes in a post on Time.com’s new political blog, Swampland. A swarm of commenters, many directed his way by Atrios, quickly pointed out the errors. Though they were right on the facts, Carney lashed back at them. The Swampland blog is interesting in part because you can see the journalists adjusting, at times awkwardly, to the demands of blogging. At the same time, you can see Ana Marie Cox, who was not so long ago firing off barnyard epithets at Wonkette, cover the Libby trial for Time.com.

As Perlstein and others note, the trial has laid out the symbiotic relationships between Washington’s establishment reporters and the administration officials who use them to transmit a given political “message.” Leaks are never going to go away – we need them to see how government works, or doesn’t. But the opportunistic, misleading leaking and credulous reportage that accompanied the Iraq war (including, at times, the Wilson sideshow) has gone a long way to discredit the old system.

The John Edwards/blogging thing takes place on another fuzzy frontier.

Just as reporters who blog can get swarmed by commenters, bloggers who join campaigns are fair game for the (often arbitrary) feeding frenzy. A campaign is about message, not speaking your mind. Now, campaigns have also become too rigid, drained of life and spontaneity, so a little blogging mojo can’t hurt. But any blogger who goes down that road – especially if the road keeps on going – has to be prepared to give up some degree of honesty and outspokenness in service to the candidate’s message. The ritualistic statements out of the Edwards campaign may be an encouraging sign for bloggers, inasumuch as these two weren’t fired. But it may also signal the ultimate dominance of spin.

Or take the case of Ryan Grim, a Politico reporter who used to work for the Marijuana Policy Project, a pro-legalization group. He called the White House, seeking to get some questions answered. Instead of responding, officials turned around and accused him of having a conflict of interest. In a blurb accompanying the story, the Politico pointed out that his work history is not exactly a secret; it’s already on his bio. True enough. But who reads reporters’ bios?

As the MSM monolith slowly crumbles, there’s a lot of competition, more choices and perspectives, and they will continue to proliferate. But it’s all a bit confusing. Is so-and-so a “traditional reporter” reared on “objectivity”? (Is that good or bad?) If it’s a blogger we’re reading, what candidate did s/he affiliate with in the last election cycle?

Once, we had a pretty good idea of where journalistic authority emanated – from established institutions, founded long ago, with a tradition, a clear set of values. Today, those institutions are under siege. Their values are (sometimes) exposed as less pristine than we once thought. In a fragmenting, yet very interesting landscape, where does journalistic authority – the sense you’re getting the straight dope – come from now?

Dan Froomkin on Open Source Journalism

2007-01-25T17:49:20-05:00

Dan Froomkin, who writes the White House Briefing for washingtonpost.com has stirred up controversy at times with his skeptical take on the Bush administration. After Washington Post ombudsman Deborah Howell called him “opinionated and liberal,” the Post hired a conservative blogger for balance. That didn’t work out, but Froomkin’s daily roundup of White House coverage was more clearly labeled as an opinion “column.” For the purposes of newassignment.net, I was less interested in his take on the White House than on the media; Froomkin was a newspaper journalist who became an early convert to the Internet. (Full disclosure: Dan and I worked on the college newspaper together; I worked in the Newhouse bureau when Deborah Howell was bureau chief. I consider them both friends.)

After working for a decade at the Winston-Salem Journal, Miami Herald, and Orange County Register, Froomkin did the University of Michigan journalism fellowship in 1996, where he decided that he didn’t simply want to cover the Internet, but to work in the new medium. After helping to set up Education Week’s website, he moved to washingtonpost.com, where he worked as a politics producer, metro editor, and number two editor at the site. He recognized one advantage of the Internet over dead tree publications was the utility of its endless digital space. “What attracted me a lot about the Internet was not really the interactivity or the immediacy of it, although I liked those,” he told me. “It was the endless news hole. It was the endless shelf life.” Whereas news stories typically glossed over the core debates going on in favor of some incremental advance, websites could provide the context, an explanation of, say, what got us to the point we’re at in the Roe vs. Wade debate. Excerpts from our conversation follow.

Q: We began by lamenting the rapid implosion of the newspaper industry. How can newspapers - and all journalists - use the Internet to open up their coverage?

Froomkin: The big reason why newsrooms and newspapers are undervalued right now in the Internet age is because they don’t brand them. They hide behind the boring byline.

You look at a newsroom for a good newspaper, and you look at those people, and I think they have enormous value and I don’t think that their value is being effectively communicated and shared with the public through the dead tree edition, through an incremental news story. You have somebody who is a really good beat reporter, and that means they can write a good incremental daily news story – but that really only touches on their talent. So I want a great local reporter to also be sharing his beat-notes: What stories is he interested in, what themes he sees on his beat? I want him to take questions from readers and post them online. Sort of a constant FAQ. I want him to be doing timelines and stuff and doing live discussions and all sort of stuff which would give the reader more access to what this guy knows, also show the reader what this guy knows, rather than hiding behind a byline and a passionless, boring news story.

Q: One question I’m looking at is how to bring some of this openness and verve to the national political/policy story. Washington-based political journalism has always turned on its access to sources who are powerful and/or plugged-in. But open-sourcing allows more access to “real” people – who are, of course, why Washington is there in the first place.

Froomkin: One of the tremendous disadvantages of Washington journalism has been that everybody covers what Congress does, and there’s no sense of what effect it actually has on people. Trying to find a person to illustrate something is very hard. Ideally, in a world where everyone is on the network, you would be able to easily find many people who would be affected by any major bill and have them tell their stories…. I was talking to one woman who was a Neiman fellow a few years ago and did American Indian issues. And to them, Washington had a much more visceral impact on their lives than a lot of people because so much of their lives are controlled by the Bureau of Indian Affairs. But [without that kind of connection] it becomes very abstract, and potentially open source reporting makes it that much less abstract.

“… . What excites me is people telling stories, people telling about their own personal experiences. That’s what I think open source journalism is going to be doing a lot of: letting people tell their stories and finding themes among those stories.

Q: Some people do want to tell their own stories. Look at some of the Katrina-related Web sites. But Katrina, of course, created about a million dramatic personal narratives. Are lots of people eager to tell stories on more mundane issues? If they are, might you get some kind of selection bias, where you get interesting material, but can’t really tell whether it reflects a trend, what’s really happening?

Froomkin: So much that’s happened on the Internet has happened organically, as a function of what people want to do, you’d think this would have happened already if people wanted to do it. So that’s a possibility.

Q: The average newspaper’s default version of “the conversation” is some combination of comments and message boards. But this isn’t a good model. Particularly on political issues, those tend to tip heavily toward, to put it kindly, assertions of opinion. An exception can be a local issue that taps some vein of thought and emotion. One example, you noted, were the protests last year at Washington’s Gallaudet University, the nation’s first university for the deaf. Protestors objected to the choice of a new president, and eventually forced the nominee to step aside. It generated an interesting conversation on the Post site.

Froomkin: I was reading the stories in the paper, and it struck me as a fascinating and important conflict, something with broader implications about America. But the Post’s daily coverage didn’t tell me much about why it was happening – what brought the school to this pass, why feelings were so intense, why it had come to a head now, what it meant for the future of the school, and more broadly, for deaf people in the United States.

It would have been a much better story if you’d have been able to hook up the Internet to the people who were protesting, directly. What was it that made them protest in a way that no students had in I don’t know how long?

Q: If the form is opened up a bit, it offers the chance to influence public policy, bring urgent local problems – or national ones that are ignored – into the debate in Congress and the executive branch.

Froomkin: Imagine if your levee story had been done in an open source fashion. People might have been talking about it, and reading it, and sharing info about it more than they did. It might have made more of a difference. It might have saved your city. … It creates more attention, and more conversation. The tragedy of that series of course was that the conversation, to whatever extent it existed, didn’t go on long enough to affect anything.

Q: On the other hand, the crowd doesn’t always know best.

Froomkin: There’s an old joke about kindergarten. A kindergarten teacher brings a bunny into class, and says, ‘Okay boys and girls, is this a boy bunny or a girl bunny?’ And half the kids scream boy, the other half scream girl, and one kid says, let’s vote! No.

Q: What should newassignment cover? One obvious theme is economics. Washington operates on economic numbers and projections, wielded like weapons by ideological and partisan combatants. You can look more effectively at issues such as taxes and income inequality from the bottom up – through the prism of individual states and congressional districts, the decisions of congressmen, senators.

Froomkin: The story that came to my mind when I was thinking what value regular people would bring to a really important national story is a story that I guess Peter Gosselin at the Los Angeles Times has been doing better than anybody else, which is the whole risk shift. This is really fundamental to the Republican platform right now, which is to get rid of all these safety nets, and get rid of these social insurance nets and turn people into investors, and owners. And for the poor, that comes at a tremendous risk. …The great thing about Peter Gosselin’s story for the Times was that it was based on real people – but only a handful of them.

Q: Looking at these issues through the prism of the Internet will produce some bias in your sample, however, because of the socioeconomic profile of Internet communities differs from the general population. This is where the digital divide becomes a problem.

Froomkin: Look at income inequality. It is the issue of the moment, and a big problem with the Internet as a news gathering device is it doesn’t have a lot of poor people on it. What you need to do is try to get on the listservs of people who run homeless shelters, or soup kitchens…. The most undercovered people in the world are the underclass.

I had a fantasy once – this was when I was in my own little risk shift period – I was thinking of getting a foundation grant to set up a blog for poor people. I would go interview folks at soup kitchens and battered women’s shelters, homeless shelters, and I would do blogs, as told to, just to get their voices in the blogosphere, because they’re not there.

Q: We also talked about the new campaign cycle, the most wired in history.

Froomkin: I have this crazy notion of doing an open source book on issues and politics and having readers help me pick a dozen seminal issues in the 2008 election and help me pick the archetypal positions on those issues – sharing with me why they have those positions – and then at that point doing an actual poll to make it scientific. And then publishing a book saying here’s what America thinks on these issues. What I’d want in this case is not people saying ‘anybody who disagrees with me is an idiot,’ but ‘here’s how I came to this conclusion.’

And I am kind of excited about YouTube in the 2008 elections. I think there’s going to be a million hand-built campaign commercials on YouTube in 2008. But the question is, are they mostly going to be, or the ones that are most popular: ‘Anybody thinking about voting for Hillary Clinton is an idiot,’ or ‘why I became a democrat.’

Q: One interesting change in the YouTube era is that candidates may be digitally recorded any time they appear in public – whether it’s a campaign speech or crossing the street. This used to be true only of presidential candidates – now, as George Allen found out, it applies at all levels. There were a number of video clips last fall that showed some earnest citizen – or member of a hostile interest group – asking questions of a candidate, and the candidate either rudely ignoring them or worse. It came off as rude, or funny - revealing either way. But I wonder if it will chase spontaneity completely off the national political scene.

Froomkin: People make mistakes and people say stupid things that shouldn’t be the end of their careers, and it shouldn’t be blown out of proportion if it’s not relevant. But with Allen, that’s why I think it took off, because it was resonant.

Holding Transparency Up to the Light

2007-01-17T13:28:43-05:00

Clive Thompson is examining the idea of radical transparency for Wired, and naturally he’s throwing open his own notebooks and computer files, and has a post up on his blog soliciting thoughts on the topic. Here are his three central ideas:

-Secrecy Is Dead: The pre-Internet world trafficked in secrets. Information was valuable because it was rare; keeping it secret increased its value. In the modern world, information is as plentiful as dirt, there’s more of it than you can possibly grok on your own — and the profusion of cameraphones, forwarded emails, search engines, anonymous tipsters, and infinitely copyable digital documents means that your attempts to keep secrets will probably, eventually, fail anyway. Don’t bother trying. You’ll just look like a jackass when your secrets are leaked and your lies are exposed, kind of like Sony and its rootkit. Instead …

-Tap The Hivemind: Throw everything you’ve got online, and invite the world to look at it. They’ll have more and better ideas that you could have on your own, more and better information than you could gather on your own, wiser and sager perspective than you could gather in 1,000 years of living — and they’ll share it with you. You’ll blow past the secret-keepers as if you were driving a car that exists in a world with different and superior physics. Like we said, information used to be rare … but now it’s so ridiculously plentiful that you will never make sense of it on your own. You need help, and you need to help others. And, by the way? Keep in mind that …

-Reputation Is Everything: Google isn’t a search engine. Google is a reputation-managment system. What do we search for, anyway? Mostly people, products, ideas — and what we want to know are, what do other people think about this stuff? All this blogging, Flickring, MySpacing, journaling — and, most of all, linking — has transformed the Internet into a world where it’s incredibly easy to figure out what the world thinks about you, your neighbor, the company you work for, or the stuff you were blabbing about four years ago. It might seem paradoxical, but in a situation like that, it’s better to be an active participant in the ongoing conversation than to stand off and refuse to participate. Because, okay, let’s say you don’t want to blog, or to Flickr, or to participate in online discussion threads. That means the next time someone Googles you they’ll find … everything that everyone else has said about you, rather than the stuff you’ve said yourself. (Again — just ask Sony about this one.) The only way to improve and buff your reputation is to dive in and participate. Be open. Be generous. Throw stuff out there — your thoughts, your ideas, your personality. Trust comes from transparency.

Here are a few thoughts. In general, transparency is a powerful, revelatory thing. When I was working at a newspaper, I was bewildered by the peculiar customs surrounding corrections. You couldn’t be too detailed, and you couldn’t identify the flaw in the editorial process that produced the error – an editing glitch, a reporting mistake, et al. The idea was, we are a literally a corporate entity, and we rise and fall together. (And we really, really don’t want to get sued.) Needless to say, I thought this kind of opacity was bit odd at a paper that does a great job shining a light on the community. But that’s the way papers are. The NYT is thinking about abandoning its public editor position, which has caused some gastric distress among the editorial ranks, but on balance been good for the paper and its relationship with the public.

Let’s accept that these days, circling the wagons in this way is self-defeating. And that secrecy is (mostly) dead. What’s the implication for journalism? Un-secret information can still be un-transparent. A lot of interesting and/or horrible stuff is not secret, and never was. It’s just that nobody’s paying attention to it. Or it’s too complicated. Or nobody ever saw it in quite that way before. More transparency will help expose these things, because more eyes will be probing more information. But we can’t assume it will all happen automatically, or that the process will be unerring, because it also depends on who’s doing the probing, and their motivations (as with the warbloggers’ recent attempt to take down the AP).

Malcolm Gladwell had an interesting New Yorker piece recently arguing that because virtually all the information on Enron’s nutty accounting practices was in the public domain, the prosecutors’ claim of a nefarious plot was bogus. As Gladwell notes, it took journalists and lawyers to burrow into all that stuff and make sense of it. What some consider the ultimate smart crowd, or at least one with the best incentives to weed out bad bets – the market – didn’t pick up on it.

I’m not sure I understand the “reputation” idea. For an individual, it makes sense. Becoming more transparent will definitely goose my Google profile. But it’s also the kind of thing that can be abused. If I’m a corporation, a government agency, a politician or Paris Hilton, I am going to want to shape my reputation (well, maybe not Paris Hilton), and maybe trash those of my competitors or enemies. A logical response would be not transparency, but to put bullshit out there instead (or a faux-transparent mixture of truth and BS) – like the sunny press releases that accompanied Enron’s dire quarterly reports.

Frank Rich and George Will Don't Understand "You"

2006-12-27T08:05:26-05:00

Both George Will and Frank Rich (the latter alas, behind the TimesSelect wall) – among the preeminent pundits on the right and the left in America – have treated us to their ruminations on the Internet in the past week, specifically the Time cover story naming “you” the magazine’s Person of the Year.

It’s always easy to mock a newsmagazine for yet another goofy trend story, and Time’s is exactly that. But in this case each pundit seizes on the story as an example of social ills that simply don’t exist.

Rich’s message is that we’re retreating into navel-gazing in the virtual world to escape, like the president, from the harsh reality of Iraq:

As of Friday morning, “Britney Spears Nude on Beach” had been viewed 1,041,776 times by YouTube’s visitors. The count for YouTube video clips tagged with “Iraq” was 22,783. Not that there is anything wrong with that. But compulsive blogging and free soft-core porn are not, as Time would have it, indications of how much you, I and that glassy-eyed teenage boy hiding in his bedroom are in control of the Information Age. They are indicators instead of how eager we are to flee from brutal real-world information that makes us depressed and angry. This was the year Americans escaped as often as they could into their private pleasure pods. So the Person of 2006 was indeed you — yes, you.

First of all, Rich shows just how clueless he (or his assistant) is about YouTube. This appears to be the clip he is referencing. It’s a joke – on people who skim YouTube looking for this type of thing. The clip consists of a photo of a cat with the question “EXCUSE ME WTF RU DOIN” superimposed while music plays for 29 seconds. Midway through if flashes a blurry photo of Britney on the beach in a bikini. There’s a similar one, Britney’s Skirt Flies Up, also with more than a million views.

(If I’m wrong, and there is a real “Britney Spears Nude on Beach” on YouTube with over a million hits, please let me know.)

I take Rich’s obvious point is that there is a lot of trash on YouTube. But you don’t have to be a statistician or sociologist to see through his meaningless comparison with Iraq – especially as that country is agonizingly coming apart, while Britney is leaving her underwear at home. So Americans – and people the world over – love trashy celebrity gossip and fluff. That was true this year, five years ago, thirty years ago, a century ago. Which has the bigger circulation, the National Enquirer or the New York Times? Which has more viewers, “Dancing with the Stars” or “Newshour”? Is that bad? Maybe. But it has nothing to do with the Internet or Iraq.

Will’s complaint is essentially the same as Rich’s – that Americans have self-indulgently disappeared into their online pursuits. Only he pins it not on Iraq, but on liberal relativism. To Will, the Time story is a cave-in to philistinism and the self-esteem movement. Everybody doing his own thing on the Internet gets a pat on the back, whether it’s crap or not, and most of the time it is. To Will, the Internet is a vast, weedy jungle of mediocrity in which genuine excellence is impossible to find, if it exists at all:

Richard Stengel, Time’s managing editor, says, “Thomas Paine was in effect the first blogger” and “Ben Franklin was essentially loading his persona into the MySpace of the 18th century, ‘Poor Richard’s Almanack.’” Not exactly.

Franklin’s extraordinary persona informed what he wrote but was not the subject of what he wrote. Paine was perhaps history’s most consequential pamphleteer. There are expected to be 100 million bloggers worldwide by the middle of 2007, which is why none will be like Franklin or Paine. Both were geniuses; genius is scarce. Both had a revolutionary civic purpose, which they accomplished by amazing exertions. Most bloggers have the private purpose of expressing themselves for their own satisfaction. There is nothing wrong with that, but there is nothing demanding or especially admirable about it, either. They do it successfully because there is nothing singular about it, and each is the judge of his or her own success.

I don’t disagree that out of 100 million bloggers, the vast majority may be writing stuff George Will (or I, or most people) won’t care about. We all know about the excesses, the blogorrhea, the exhibitionism that’s out there. But does Will really believe that’s all there is? My wife, for example, maintains two blogs, one about our kids, the other about her various medical travails. The only people reading them are our family and friends. But are they mediocre, self-indulgent? No. And if there are 100 million blogs, if only 1 percent of them don’t suck, and 1 percent of those are excellent, and 1 percent of those are works of true, George Will-approved genius, that’s 100 “genius” blogs. There’s got to be a Paine or a Franklin in there somewhere.

We expect Will to be frowning on popular culture in general, and Internet culture in particular. But Rich is a pop culture maven who delights in limning the latest, zeitgeisty developments for their political significance. But in his column he too seems to have missed the obvious – heck, if Time magazine can identify a trend, why can’t these guys?

I won’t go into it – just read the NewAssignment site – but both Will and Rich ignore what, at this point, are obvious innovations of the Internet, the things “you” never had before: the ability to link, to share, to swarm, to generate interesting conversations, whether it’s about your neighborhood or Bush administration policy. These things make online discourse different from pamphleteering – or column-writing. We are only beginning to see their political, economic, and social effects, but they will be big.

Strangely, both pundits reach to pin a single label on American mass culture. But technology and the mounting array of choices mean the American public is ever less unified in its cultural obsessions, and more fragmented into discrete communities of common interests. (Of course, there is consensus on some things, including dissatisfaction with the Iraq war – which is why so many people left their laptops for the voting booths last month.)

Usually, I like both Rich and Will. They both had Iraq nailed early on, coming at it from different directions. But the kind of obtuse snobbery in these two columns is one reason that the dead tree industry is dying. It’s easy to rag on poor Rick Stengel. But at least he got the basic story right.

Should the Media Be More "Cynical" Covering the White House?

2006-12-21T11:06:51-05:00

I’m going to veer off from open source journalism for a minute to focus on the MSM.

There is a more than a hint of ridiculousness in the media’s handling of President Bush’s pronouncements on the war this week. Media conventions – anything the president says is news, and any incremental rhetorical changes by this particular president are really big news – are simply inadequate to the task of rendering what is actually happening.

Tuesday, the president gave an interview to three reporters in the Washington Post in which he admitted for the first time that “we’re not winning” the Iraq war (he also said, “we’re not losing”). The Post devoted major space to the fruit of this 25-minute interview, doing two new stories, an analysis, and publishing a complete transcript over two full pages in the printed edition. That also included a bunch of photos, three of the president sitting in a chair in the Oval Office, appearing to be enjoying himself mixing it up with the press, and a third of the him greeting the three reporters (not available online).

My first reaction was, come on – you’ve got to be kidding. It’s notable when Bush talks to the press he has disdained. But media conventions for presidential interview haven’t changed in the past 50 years. The Post clearly expects readers to be impressed its reporters – not the New York Times or somebody else – sat down with the president. But why do we care? Do we need to see a large photo Peter Baker, Michael Fletcher and Michael Abramowitz shaking hands with the president upon entering the Oval Office? They cover the White House, so they’re doing their job. Big deal.

The Post’s self-congratulation is coupled with Bush’s own evident self-regard, which comes off as a bit peculiar under the circumstances. At one point, he starts talking about how he really does like and respect the press. “We appreciate that, and you’ve certainly been good for business,” says Baker (a nice, dry line). “Good. That’s what decision-makers do, Peter,” Bush advises. “People who seize the moment and make decisions to lead give people things to write about.” (Under this formulation, the president’s job is basically, don’t be boring. At this point, a little Eisenhoweresque boredom would be welcome.)

The drama is joined: The newspaper that brought down a president goes mano a mano with the Decider.

Once, perhaps (though I doubt it), these exchanges were an opportunity to probe a little more deeply, get some insights into the president’s thinking. But we don’t really see that here, or in the coverage of Bush’s Wednesday press conference. There is semi-substantive stuff in the interview, such as Bush’s intention to increase the size of the military. But the main thing you come away with is the headline: “Not Winning.” And even that appears to have been a misfire on the president’s part – in his Wednesday press conference, he shifted a degree back in the other direction, saying that “victory is achievable.”

There’s something else going on here besides rhetorical tacking, or even the immediate issue of whether there will be a surge in troops. The problem is, we don’t really know what that something is, and the coverage doesn’t help. It recounts everything in a linear fashion, following the handy narrative the White House presents: the president is mulling things over, open to alternatives, yet ever-resolute, and some slight shift in policy will occur at some point soon.

In fact, what the media should be focusing on is the White House’s principal frame of reference: domestic politics.

One thing – perhaps the most important thing for America and Iraq – that Bush is doing in these encounters with the press is laying the political groundwork for the next two years. I have no unique insight here, but one of his principal aims at this point has to be to get out in one piece – to avoid leaving office in Johnson-like disgrace. That alone is a consuming political project – and we know that, wounded or not, Bush is first and foremost a politician.

One hopes and expects a president to empirically evaluate the situation on the ground in Iraq and the wider world and respond to it accordingly. But this president doesn’t operate that way, as Jay pointed out the other day. There are always layered, interest-laden agendas at work, and the press still doesn’t really get that.

The troop surge idea, for instance, is already reframing the Iraq debate in more favorable terms to the White House. It turns the dial back a quarter or a half a notch. Suddenly, the principal question is no longer, when or how should we get out, but the effect of putting more troops in. Assuming they go in, the debate then shifts to the effectiveness of that tactic. Is it working or not? When do we draw down the surge? Do we dare, when it would embolden the enemy? Should we give it more time to work? Questions of the broader strategy and mission take a back seat. Then the clock runs out, the 2008 campaign is underway, and Bush is not victorious, but at least he didn’t give in.

This sounds like a cynical interpretation. And 20 or 30 years ago, it would have been. But based on what we’ve seen so far, does anyone not think these political factors are playing a big role, if not the driving role, in White House decision-making? In fact, that’s an obvious journalistic question – to what degree is domestic politics driving military planning?

Yet to zero in on this scenario would seem, well, indecorous and even dangerous for the MSM. For one, focusing too much on it would expose media outlets to charges of bias and, well cynicism. And the safe, conventional view is, this is a matter of statecraft and war, not politics. Those conventions, the artificial walls journalists erect between those areas of action, of course, allow the White House a lot more political maneuvering room than it rightfully deserves at this point. It’s left to the blogosphere and commentators to wrestle with these questions - speculatively.

I had the same feeling reading Peter Baker’s Sunday article on President Bush, which portrayed him as either resolute or stubborn, and quoted various people debating his predicament:

But now, as Bush rethinks his strategy in Iraq and approaches one of the most fateful moments of his presidency, he confronts difficult questions: At what point does determination to a cause become self-defeating folly? Can he change direction in a meaningful way without sacrificing principle?

This is framed as high historical drama. But I don’t think these are the right questions. The nation has already, collectively, answered the first one. Why is the Washington Post still behaving otherwise? The second one assumes Bush is operating from principles beyond basic “stubbornness.” What about the “cynical” interpretation: Bush doesn’t know what to do, and his best option to save face is to give himself political cover for the next two years?

So the question is, how do you cover this elephant in the room?

More on Investigative Journalism: IRE's Brant Houston

2006-12-07T22:04:50-05:00

To most of us, the journalism world looks to be in a state of more or less permanent upheaval (and not the good kind, generally speaking). But Brant Houston, the executive director of Investigative Reporters and Editors, has a more tempered view. While not sanguine about the staff and budget cuts roiling newspapers and TV news, he notes that those are only parts of the much broader canvas of “the media.”

The day I spoke with him about the state of reporting, open sourcing and other issues, he was talking to a conference of New America Media, a national group for ethnic news organizations founded by Pacific News Service. “I’m seeing an incredible amount of passion and incredibly well-sourced people in communities where there is deep concern over injustice,” he said. “I’m worried about the TV networks and newspapers, but at the same time I’m seeing tremendous growth in smaller community newspapers. They’re ready to go. They want to know more investigative techniques. They want to get networked. They want to know where documents are. So it’s hard to talk about one big storm cloud coming across the horizon.” His excerpted remarks follow.

Still, there’s no denying storm clouds are hovering over important segments of the media. Really, we’ve got thunder, lightning, hail and tornadoes. How is investigative journalism holding up?

At least twice a year I get asked, “is investigative journalism dying or dead?” The executive director of IRE has traditionally been asked that, as far as I know, since the `80s. I was told to be prepared for those interviews every year. There are cyclical parts of it. I think broadcast is having the most difficult time it’s had in years right now. You’ve got entertainment pressure on the news divisions. NBC’s Dateline, which was doing a lot of interesting things, has changed a great deal – I don’t even know if they’ll survive. … So there’s no question you can see weaknesses within investigative journalism right now, we’ve got some real challenges.

On the print side, because we’ve got larger numbers in newsrooms, and because investigative journalism often requires personal commitment, we’re still seeing lots of good stories. Do you see as many I-teams? I don’t think so. They’ve been hit by some cutbacks. So you’re much more to individual beat reporters now, or one or two investigative reporters.

When I asked about the open source idea and NewAssignment.net, Houston likened the concept to computer-assisted reporting. Now, the use of CAR - databases, mapping, and other digital tools - is routine at almost any media outlet, and an entire support infrastructure exists at places like IRE to educate journalists on its uses. But, of course, it didn’t exist before the advent of desktop computers. Now there is an ocean of datapoints. Secretive government officials can’t do much about it. Open sourcing will generate still more.

I think journalists surviving in the 21st century are going to have to get even better at dealing with tremendous amounts of information, and I think a whole set of journalists have been preparing for this for some time. There were only a few practitioners of database analysis in the 1970s and early `80s. Then there were probably a hundred by the late `80s, and then a few hundred more, and now you’ve got easily more than a thousand. And you’ve got thousands of people with some variation of those skills. Journalists have always had to deal with finding the real signal in the noise. Now we have to be more skilled to screen out the noise and find out what’s really going on.

Data and databases are like water. Information’s like water. It’s sort of like having a roof leak in a house. It’s very hard to keep water from coming in once you’ve got a roof leak, and we’ve had – our society has had – millions of roof leaks. They try to stop it up one place, water’s going to get in another place.

Still, he says, it took a while before CAR became widely accepted. Sometimes it’s still not seamlessly integrated with other forms of journalism. Some see CAR as an end in itself, others as an arcane sidelight. This is a lesson for NewAssignment, which will attempt some new forms and techniques, but still rely on the principles of Journalism 101.

Just because we’ve got a new way to do it, doesn’t mean that’s the only way we do it. That’s one of the things I ran into when I started pushing CAR. Either one, they were so devoted they thought it was the only way to go, or two, they were so against it that they would say, ‘you’re leaving out shoe leather reporting’ or whatever. I never left those out. I think the approach to journalism is, you work in the lab and you work in the field. The field work, you take back, you reflect on the lab work, and the lab work reflects on the field work, and you become a much stronger journalist. It’s just another tool.

I think the open source idea is fantastic. The mainstream media, through cutbacks and corporate ownership and migration of staff, has lost some of its community sourcing and the open source concept, where you rely on citizens to provide information, is very exciting, There’s tremendous impact on our ability to accumulate information, collate information. And citizens want to be journalists, really learn some of the standards, skills and techniques. I think the issue will be, as it always is in journalism, accuracy and credibility. When it comes to Wikipedia, you’re getting what happens progressively in a new medium, which is an enthusiasm and romance with that new medium, and then a realization that you’re getting a lot of inaccuracies and credibility’s being cut down. So I think you’ve got to figure out how to check things for inaccuracy and correct them.

If you are a fledgling news organization, errors can seriously damage you before you’re out of the gate. NewAssignment is developing open-source tools to sort the bad information; unlike Wikipedia, the idea is not pure open source, but to to combine professional expertise with amateur input. And there’s some experience that shows that online communities can themselves police for this sort of thing. We’ll see.

Houston also says the idea of journalistic objectivity revered by the mainstream media has become a kind of prison, and that new, well-grounded ventures have an opportunity to start fresh.

“Objectivity” was probably well-meant, but it’s been distorted, become so thin – sometimes meaning: Opinionless. Mediocre. Without a point of view. Disingenuous. Cowardly. I don’t want to discuss objectivity. I want to discuss credibility, accuracy. Is something as thorough about a subject as it can possibly be? I think objectivity has been held up as a model and it became straw person, to be beaten on. It ended up being used in a number of cases as pure self-deception. Everybody’s got a point of view. The idea is to know what your point of view is, to be open to other points of view, and to be open to your hypothesis being proved wrong by your findings.

Now, what to cover? And how?

I think anything that the government’s doing that’s secret, that affects a lot of people, and they won’t release data on it, could be a tremendous story. For example, take something like baggage handling. More people are traveling right now. It’s not the end of the world, but it does affect a lot of people, how baggage is handled by the airlines. Right now, we’re relying mostly on government stats, self-reported stats, which are pretty bad. What if, with open sourcing, suddenly, you were able to collate 50,000 passengers’ experiences in the past year in some kind of format? Well now, the journalist or the citizen who wants to report on it, suddenly has a powerful tool. When the airline says, we don’t know how much of a problem it is, or whatever, what if each of those people supplies four or five paragraphs on their experience. You could pull up a form and say, did you have a bag lost last year by the airline? Which airline? Did you get it back? Then you could say, tell us your experience. I could see transportation reporters, travel reporters, and just travelers – they couldn’t wait to get into something like this.

Given that the Internet form is quite different from dead trees, Houston urges writers to embrace the convergence of moving images and text.

I’m pushing journalists to read books about writing screenplays. In a screenplay, you get some dialogue and you’ve got to think about what you’re seeing at that point. The web gives you that ability. You don’t have to describe. When the Los Angeles Times did its harrier jets series, you didn’t have to describe the jet. The website opened up with the harrier jet rising on the page. That took care of 20 graphs of description.

Note to the LA Times: I remember this cool graphic. But I can’t find this much-lauded series on your website. (It’s on the Pulitzer site, sans graphic.)

I was struck, as with a couple of other conversations on the topic, by the heady mix of promise and peril in all this. Can we take advantage of it? Just speaking temperamentally, can we stand it?

I continue to be pretty optimistic about it, and that’s at the root of investigative journalism. Investigative journalists are a bunch of optimists. They’ll find what’s going on, believe things can change for the better, that people care.

Really? I thought we were a bunch of geeky cynics, eternally griping about stuff, especially our own future.

If you’re only studying the old industry, then you will see nothing but decline. It’s strange. Journalists seem to be advocates of change quite often. But on a personal level, they’re often locked in the past. And the discussion has centered so much on how to save newspapers, when the discussion should have been, how do newspapers and newsrooms become part of a vibrant future? When you talk to journalists, almost always they tell you everything’s going to hell. And yet they get up every day and do these stories and get outraged about things.

Feeling Hyper

2006-12-02T20:53:23-05:00

Chris Lopez’s post below got me thinking about the latest savior of newspapers, going hyperlocal. I’m all for it – everybody wants to know what’s going on in the community, on their street if possible. They like reading about themselves – and learning more about what is literally going on around them. In my neighborhood, for example, there are two or three local listservs that are constantly humming with tips and information about local development news, recent crimes, new restaurants, yard sales. In most places a gulf still yawns between this ongoing conversation and the local newspaper. Lots of interesting and important stuff gets passed over out as too local, too parochial, too small. There have never been enough staffers or space in the paper to get down to the block-by-block level. Now, on the web, space is no problem. With online networking of various kinds, finding what’s happening on a given block is no longer a problem either.

But even with these tools now at their fingertips, newspapers aren’t that great at this. The Washington Post is my local paper, and has a great, nationally-acclaimed website. But if you drill down past the marquee stuff – the political and foreign reportage, opinion, Style – it starts to get fuzzy. One example: The other day I wanted to place an announcement of an upcoming event on the Saturday religion page. The first problem was navigating to the spot to submit something. I know where and when to find this info in the daily paper, but I didn’t have that. On the website, you have to find the religion page, scroll to the bottom to find event listings, click on that, then go to the end of the second page to find a sentence telling you what to do (mail something in, call, or – last – send an email). It’s now Saturday night – but this week’s event listing, from this morning’s paper, has not yet been posted to the page. If I’m looking to attend some event on, ahem, Sunday, I’m out of luck.

It’s easy to see what happened here. Somebody has transferred the content of the dead tree edition to the web – too slowly – but not thought about how to use the power of the new format.

So, great on the hyperlocal, for existing newspapers and new ones as well. An old friend, Paul Bass, founded a hyperlocal paper called the New Haven Independent that skillfully burrows into the life of that city, and does it on a shoestring. You don’t need a huge corporation backing you to do this. That’s great. But that fact alone could mean trouble for traditional newspapers going this route - they won’t have the field to themselves.

That’s just one of the caveats with going hyperlocal. I’m no expert, but I don’t think we know if going hyperlocal is going to rescue the newspaper business model, or even make much difference at all. Should papers go down this road? Yes – it’s the future. Will it change the harsh realities confronting these old institutions, in a world where anyone can produce local content with almost no infrastructure whatsoever?

Second, we should all squint skeptically when corporate types slap capital letters on top of their jargon. Here’s a bit of it from the Gannett memo: “The Information Center will let us gather the very local news and information that customers want, then distribute it when, where and how our customers seek it. It is the essence of our Vision and Mission and a key element of our Strategic Plan.”

Uh, right. You can rename your newsroom, retitle the positions of reporters and editors, organize them differently, and create dozens of new blogs and databases in pursuit of your Strategic Plan™. But the risk is that that newspapers on this track end up taking Marshall McLuhan’s famous epigram “the medium is the message” a little too literally. All we hear about hyperlocal journalism so far is its focus – hyper and local! – and the way it will be delivered – new and differently!. But the core mission – which can’t be accomplished by listservs and databases – is to report on communities, interpret what’s going on. You know – say something intelligent.

In particular, I think that it’s glib to say most papers can just leave national and international coverage to the AP and the New York Times and do nothing but hyperlocal, 24/7.

To cite the most common example, do papers like the Baltimore Sun need correspondents in Moscow and South Africa (or wherever) as much as they need reporters covering schools and economic development? Obviously not, especially if money’s tight. Does that mean the foreign bureaus are mere hood ornaments? I’m not so sure.

The flip side of the digital revolution driving newspapers to hyperlocal coverage is that the Internet also obliterates distance. Forty or fifty years ago, when the postwar modern newspaper we now see eroding was on the rise, people’s community horizons were mostly limited to local neighborhoods, schools, churches, workplaces. But that’s no longer the case. Digital technology is now enabling the creation of new communities that have no borders at all. Our once-comparatively isolated existences are now ever-more enmeshed with those of people far away from us, across the country and around the world.

This phenomenon has implications for every newspaper reader, of course, but also for society, government, the economy, foreign affairs. Your food, your electronic gadgets, your clothes all come from different spots around the world. The Chinese hold our debt. You get the picture. Newspapers ignore the local community at their peril. But it will be even more perilous for them, and their readers, if they ignore what’s going on around them in the nation and world and don’t bother to connect it to what’s going on down the street.

Sunlight Foundation's Bill Allison - How Can the Internet Be Harnessed for Investigative Journalism?

2006-11-30T11:28:16-05:00

Ink is giving way to nodes and networks, ledes and inverted pyramids are being swallowed up by a tsunami of blogs and memes. Amid the din and aggressive edge of the digital conversation, how do we figure out what’s really going on in the world? The aim of NewAssignment.net is to harmonize these worlds, do a mashup of the best of each. On the one hand, there’s traditional shoe-leather reporting, where you call people up, assemble data and information, extract insights and ultimately a storyline that says something interesting. Though oft-derided these days, this is a craft, and done well it can have a tremendous impact – on individual lives and the political process. On the other hand, you have the digital world, where distance is obliterated (reducing, in some ways, the wear and tear on shoe leather), distinctions between “journalists” and “everyone else” are blurred, any curious citizen can post insights and ideas, and the pool of available digital data is growing exponentially.

So far, few people have managed to skillfully straddle these worlds; Bill Allison of the Sunlight Foundation is one of them. He worked at the Philadelphia Inquirer, where he was a researcher for investigative reporters Donald Barlett and James Steele; afterward, he spent nearly a decade at the Center for Public Integrity. At Sunlight, he has placed himself at the emerging nexus of citizen journalism and national politics, specifically Congress. Since starting at Sunlight last year, he has had a run of interesting stories and projects that capture something of how journalism will look like in the future – and, while it looks quite different, the fundamentals are the same.

He broke the story of $207 million in earmarks that Dennis Hastert obtained for a highway called the Prairie Parkway – a project that would spur development on land Hastert holds a stake in. Teaming up with bloggers and readers, Allison and his Sunlight colleagues helped out two Senators who’d put an anonymous “hold” on a bill requiring the government to create a searchable database of government contracts. (Not surprisingly, the two were champion pork appropriators Robert Byrd and Ted Stevens.) He has run several projects that utilize citizen journalists – or, more commonly, curious readers with a little extra time on their hands – to gather information on Congress.

I sat down recently with Allison to get his insights on the Internet and reporting, social networking, data and other topics – his remarks are excerpted below.

Bill Allison: I certainly don’t think that we’re at a point yet where the Internet could do something like the series you did on what was going to happen to New Orleans. They certainly can’t do a Barlett and Steele type investigation. There’s things the Internet isn’t capable of doing yet. There are bloggers who have expertise in a certain area who will write about their area of expertise, but that’s the opinion of one expert…this is just one person’s experience, and journalism is trying to put together, the joke is, two people’s experiences.

But the Internet, of course, makes it much easier to get two people’s experiences – or 200, or 2,000.

Everybody’s seen in a newsroom when the email goes out: I’m looking for someone who had to move out of Philadelphia who had to move because his insurance rates are too high…On the Internet, those people are out there now, and they’re scanning their insurance bill and putting it up as a pdf, saying ‘look what I have to pay because I live here.’ The sources are a little bit louder and a little less hard to find. So you can really et a much better sense of what’s out there. The question is, how do you organize it? How do you make sure that what’s important gets out – organize the pathways.

There are people out there writing who really know the issues. You can read people with a lot of military experience writing about what’s gone wrong in Iraq, and it’s really as informed as anything you’ll read in the Washington Post or the New York Times – and in some ways more informed, because they know institutionally what the military’s good at, what it’s not good at, where it’s wearing down. Those are amazing things. You’ll also obviously get the pro-military side too from that kind of thing. You’ll never get hurt from hearing more perspectives, getting more sources of information.

There are people out there who want to inform, and people who want to be informed. It’s a two-way street, it’s a conversation. If you give them the opportunities to find out something – let’s answer this question, who is putting all these earmarks into bills, who is responsible for them, who is putting a hold on the legislation – they will respond.

This is kind of what happened with the Hastert thing. There were people writing about the Prairie Parkway on their own websites and blogs, and there was one guy who had the community activist site who was trying to stop the parkway. They had found out that it was quite close to where Hastert lived, and then what I was able to do was to start from that and say, does he own any other property, what else is going on here?

What you have are these tantalizing pieces of information that it takes five or six people to put together. It does kind of snowball. After we did the Hastert thing, Ed Morrissey at Captain’s Quarters, a conservative blogger, looked at census data, settlement patterns, and was able to make a pretty strong argument that this was being built to spur development, and not the other way around. There’s almost nothing along where this road is. Somebody else was looking up and found all of these home sellers and developers, not the ones Hastert sold to, but they were advertising in their model home areas that they were going to be a few miles from Prairie Parkway. That’s interesting information that we didn’t have that people ferreted out on their own. That makes much richer stories, I think.

The Hastert revelation generated a lot of media attention and interest from readers, so they decided to capitalize on that, Allison says. But that’s when the truly experimental, trial-and-error nature of this new kind of journalistic enterprise became clear.

We thought we’d do a citizen journalist effort where people would look into their own members – read your own member’s financial disclosure form, contact the member. And so we did that – and that one was a disaster.

We were very open-ended, do whatever you want; there wasn’t any kind of guidance. I think the instructions were to just read it and see what you find, contact them and let us know. We got a lot of interest, but it was frustrating because people were looking for either exactly the same situation as Hastert – even if there was something wrong with a member’s form, you weren’t necessarily going to find a Hastert-like situation with an earmark. The forms certainly don’t disclose anything about their legislative acts, so people were confused: ‘so, why isn’t there anything about the Prairie Parkway in this particular thing?’ There were bad instructions. There was no way for people to post the information they had. There were all kinds of problems with the effort. I think we lost a lot of the good will we engendered, just as we really didn’t think at all about how we were going to design this.

Our thought was, anybody can go out and be an investigative reporter. The fact of the matter is, if it were that easy everybody would be one – you wouldn’t need newspapers if everybody could find out whatever information they needed on their own. It doesn’t work that way.

They learned more while working to expose the “secret hold” Senators. Asking readers to call their own Senators’ offices and find where they stood on the bill, they were able to zero in on their quarry by the process of elimination.

It’s such a delicious thing, a secret hold on something supposed to promote transparency and accountability in government. So [blogger] N.Z. Bear came up with this kind of checkerboard thing with all the senators. It had a parlor game feel to it, which is part of what made it so successful. … We started with two or three. Soon we had 20 or 30. I think they got down to three or four people left who hadn’t denied it, and then Rebecca Carr, who works for Cox News Service, got confirmation from Stevens’ people that Stevens had a hold. Then we also got word there was a Democratic hold. It may have been TPM Muckraker that outed Robert Byrd.

They then used that lesson in developing better interactive tools.

The idea was, could you come up with a very simple web tool to let people do investigations, do things in five minutes, essentially. …If we were doing a Center for Public Integrity piece and we’re using a lot of interns to do the work, we’re saying get this form, go to this office, get that. Now, because of some of this stuff online – contracts on line, grants on line, campaign expenditures online, now you don’t have to do that kind of legwork. You develop tasks where a computer should be good at, but isn’t, and instead you have a human being eyeball this stuff. So, this is where we’re at right now.

They used it in the earmark project, which asked readers across the country to research 1,800 earmarks in a Labor/HHS appropriations bill. Allison also trolled blogs and news sources, looking for stray references to such projects.

There was a guy in Delaware, a college student, who found this weird nutrition group that’s actually like a marketing agency for produce companies and the food and vegetable industry, getting all this money for this eat healthy campaign – which is really an advertising campaign for the fruit and vegetable industry. Just something that was a line item in a bill, nobody would have noticed it, but he dug down into it. It was in comments to somebody else’s blog. You would never ever find this unless you were someone who just incessantly goes through Technorati as I was doing, searching for earmarks, labor bill, or whatever.

You have this wonderful effort all over the country, but it’s so diffused. Some blogs, only a hundred people will read. Some, hundreds of thousands will read. You can have the best information on a blog that for whatever reason has only a couple 100 readers or less. We really learned that for this to be successful, you have to have a way of collecting and collating and presenting results, the findings. You have to have a central repository for it. I don’t think we’re quite there yet.

One big issue is, this type of effort is always going to be incomplete, very rough around the edges. But, Allison says, don’t worry about that. Every great story starts out as a fragmentary picture.

Maybe you get only like, 35 House members and 12 Senators. But say you did get that – that’s enough to say, is there a pattern here, is there a trend here, and is it worth continuing? Maybe it is, maybe it isn’t. But there’s a lot of things that you just don’t know until you start. It’s only by doing that initial research. It’d be great to find people and not have to spend the week it would take 1 person to do it. You could get 15 people to do it they could all do it in a day or two. It would be kid of an early warning system for what people should be looking at. And that would also serve to save reporters a lot of time.

For efforts like Sunlight and NewAssignment, the inquiry’s done in the open, not held back until the end like a standard journalistic investigation. That means other journalists, bloggers, or whoever, can freely borrow – and ideally, develop – the material. Stories become more free-floating, distributed efforts. Competition is defused.

If you are a reporter and you see this kind of effort, you could just jump in. Rather than it be a competitive – ‘oh we had this first and it’s our story’ – it becomes more of a, this is the buzz we’re picking up on, and we’re advancing the story. As an institution what we are able to do is, we can get that member of Congress on the phone, or his staff on the phone and put the question to them in a way a blogger can’t, or isn’t able to do or isn’t comfortable doing.

What about accuracy? The more participants such a “distributed” effort has, the greater the risks of errors or even sabotage. Allison explained how it worked on another project, where readers were asked to find out if politicians had put family members on campaign payrolls. Sunlight staff checked everything carefully, and the web interface was set up to discourage random or malicious contributions. They found a few mistakes, but overall, no big errors.

Shifting gears, though more and more government and campaign data is coming online in interactive forms – a tremendous opportunity for journalists of any stripe – some stuff is also disappearing.

I’ve head that a lot of stuff, particularly in energy, is no longer online, in the environment, a lot of infrastructure information, bridges and roads that need repair. There used to be website you could go to in the Department of Transportation, where you could see what were the priorities of spending, what roads needed repair. All of that is gone. Also, there’s a bill in the Senate that’s being blocked that would force FOIA offices to release things in the time that they’re actually supposed to release them. Anyone that that’s ever filed a FOIA request knows this almost never happens.

What kinds of stories lend themselves to the distributed, web-based approach? Like his former boss Chuck Lewis, Allison pointed to the relentless march of outsourcing government functions to private firms.

Where you’ve got to begin is with agencies that deal a lot with the public. The IRS is going to start to use private collection agencies, including one that had one of its partners in a bribery scandal in Texas. There will be more interactions with the public, more areas where the public starts bumping into this as time goes on.

Look at Medicare Part D [the prescription drug benefit]. These are all private companies administering this government benefit, and what is the experience of people who are dealing with these companies? How is that working? You’ve outsourced a government benefit to a whole bunch of private firms that are given a whole lot of leeway in how to structure these benefits. How good a job are they doing? Everybody has a relative who takes some prescription medication. That’s a huge reservoir of information to tap into. The Internet could be a great vacuum for information about people’s experiences with this. One thing you could do would be to develop a database of testimonials of people’s experiences with this, and their experience with companies. You would hear good, bad, how it could be better, where things are working, whether they’re not working. The advantage of this is, you get citizens engaged with this in a way that the end result is, you point to things that work and don’t work, expose the bad guys, point to programs people are happy with. There may be people who think this is the best it’s going to get, and they’re going to find out jeez, they get this, and this is the drug I take, and they get it for $18 and I’m paying $225 a year?

Data! Data! Data!

2006-11-21T11:34:13-05:00

Last Friday, the Sunlight Foundation and Mitchell Kapor Foundation gathered the tech- and politics-savvy together in San Francisco for a workshop on government data, transparency and the web, dubbed Open Data/Open Government (or, alternately, Open(Data)/Open[Gov] or ODOG). The idea was to brainstorm on how to make previously unavailable and/or hard-to-understand data as friendly as possible to the average web-surfer.

The basic subtext: To most Americans, government operates opaquely, its decisions driven by money and special interests. Making data more transparent (and, by extension, decision-making and patterns of influence) will draw interested citizens to be more engaged, and – one hopes – make politicians more accountable. (Of course, lobbyists and interest groups can also access this information and use it to refine their tactics.).

I felt a little out of place at times amid the technical jargon flying. But it was a fascinating meeting. Like most reporters working in Washington, I’ve pored over campaign finance information, data on lobbying expenditures and federal contracts. Sometimes this is smartly crunched and organized, as on the Center for Responsive Politics site. More often, though, it’s heavy going. A couple of years ago, seeking information on lobbyist-paid trips by House members, I trekked to an office in the basement of the Capitol, where a guy handed me alphabetized binders – only one out at a time – with handwritten sheets for each member and his/her staff. The information was “public” – but not really. (I’m told it’s now online)

Now, thanks to the relentless march of digitization, a flood of this data is coming online – as are new and ever more powerful tools for analyzing it. All available to anyone, anywhere with an Internet connection.

Simply trolling through OMB Watch’s contracts database raises lots of questions about how government works – companies you’ve never heard of are getting billions of dollars to do … what, exactly?

New websites can integrate data, graphs, background information, media coverage, blog commentary on individual issues. One, MAPLight.org, tracks bills going through legislatures (right now, it’s just California, but will expand to Congress and other states). It has a neat timeline feature that shows a bill moving through committees to eventual passage of failure – and also tracks the strategically-timed campaign donations of interest groups. As the vote approaches, the money flows.

Interesting ideas emerged. One was to create an “Open PAC” that would donate money to politicians who promote transparency in government.

Some issues came up. Many of the new web ventures represented had similar goals and content – info on Congress. There are more gaps on the state and local level, though the Institute on Money in State Politics is covering a lot of ground on state legislatures. For NewAssignment, this is where citizen involvement could prove particularly useful – if someone can go to their local county office or city hall and dig up some data or contract information, then contribute via email or online data repository.

The conference dealt with making data more accessible and developing tools to interpret it. But as a journalist – and, for that matter, as a citizen – I’m looking for more than access to data. I’m looking for patterns that reveal an interesting story. Why is Industry X giving so much Senator Y? Why did Industry X suddenly become interested in this issue this year after ignoring it in the past? Is something fishy going on? Is some hidden economic earthquake changing the way Industry X operates? And so on.

In one breakout session, we touched on this idea – if websites (both new and established ones) can point to where the most interesting/revealing data or facts or events are this week or this month – that adds a lot of value.

The meeting also dramatized how technology has blurred of the once sharply-defined lines between media and the public.

Sunlight’s Ellen Miller (see her post on the conference here) remarked at one point that the media used to be the prime customer for the datasets assembled by the Center for Responsive Politics (which she founded). But now, interested citizens are primary, traditional media secondary on CRP’s list of customers/readers. That points to broader changes that will benefit a model like NewAssignment. Rather than journalists gathering information and dispensing it to the masses, there is now a continuum that includes interested citizens, bloggers, and journalists. All have access to more information than ever before. We can all trade it and collaborate more easily. At the same time, with no Walter Cronkites in sight and the New York Timeses losing their cultural primacy, where’s the authoritative voice? Whom do you believe?

One final note – the Open Data meeting was held at the Kapor Foundation offices. Beforehand, participants were advised that the office was a dog-friendly environment. Sure enough, during one of our breakout sessions a couple of dogs started barking loudly at each other outside the door. Well, I thought, it’s a long way from the grizzled city desk editor with the bottle Scotch in his drawer.

Charles Lewis on the Future of Investigative Journalism on the Web

2006-11-20T09:58:58-05:00

Can in-depth journalism survive the changes now engulfing newspapers, TV and other “old media” – the demands of Wall Street, the public’s fragmenting attention in a world of expanding digital choices, the media’s own flat-footedness in dealing with all this flux? And how can you harness that flux by using the unique properties of the Internet – wired social networks, digital technologies, do-it-yourself reporting and blogging – to do in-depth journalism, as we’re trying to do with NewAssignment.net? I sat down recently and chatted about those questions with Charles Lewis, the founder and longtime director of the Center for Public Integrity, one of the nation’s premier independent, non-profit journalism organizations. Lewis left CPI in 2004 and is now Journalist in Residence at American University in Washington, D.C. – one among several hats that he wears. I excerpt his remarks below.

Lewis has been studying large-scale trends in the journalism industry – audience, readership, the future. To him (as to many of us) the current journalism landscape is a mixture of the appalling, the unknown, and the tantalizing – so much that our conversation induced a case of whiplash. At one point, he was describing the present moment as “a very, very deeply worrying time.” A few minutes later, he was saying, “I see this is as an absolutely, beyond words, thrilling time.”

NewAssignment has a particular interest in Chuck Lewis because he’s a pioneer in the nonprofit journalism model, and doing ambitious investigative journalism that touches people’s daily lives. He also thinks – as we’re hoping – that readers can dig up a lot of interesting stuff. During the 1990s, for instance, CPI put out a how-to book titled Citizen Muckraking. On a related project, Lewis and his colleagues became fascinated by the intense interest and involvement of people – some individually, some as members of local environmental groups – battling polluting industries near their homes.

We noticed that the first seeds of interest by ordinary folks who noticed their neighbors dying of cancer and they started asking questions, going to meetings and talking to public officials, are the exact same first things that journalists do. … Based on my limited experience I am pretty certain that there’s an immense world out there that is waiting to speak and has an incredible amount of knowledge.

But first, back to the appalling.

Lewis is distressed at the rounds of restructuring, layoffs and buyouts hitting newspapers and TV news operations. Investigations (and more generally, in-depth journalism) aren’t valued much by the business models employed by newspapers and TV executives, he says – quite the opposite. Meanwhile, Internet-based media ventures have yet to sink much money into original journalism, let alone ambitious reporting projects.

As newspaper editorial staffs shrink – or, put differently, as owners harvest their investments in order to keep their profits above 20 percent, which is double the S&P 500 level (they call it harvesting – we can maybe call it pillaging) – the industry is adapting to its uncertain future, which is obviously going to be entirely virtual. Newspapers will cease to exist on paper over time. The question’s not, is it going to happen – it’s when.

You’ll notice international reporting and investigative reporting are the most expensive reporting, they’re the riskiest reporting, for either litigation or journalist safety or both, and they’re the ones that have been diminishing over time. There’s been a hollowing-out of that kind of coverage. There just is.

So far, big papers – the New York Times, Washington Post, and Wall Street Journal in particular – have remained more or less intact, and still produce ambitious investigative pieces. Their public-private ownership structures have protected them to some degree, but Lewis doesn’t think that can last.

It’s pretty clear they will not be able to continue. All three of those papers have had to cut back, had some reductions. The one that will probably be the first to go, conventional wisdom is the Wall Street Journal, because the pattern with families is, they break up. They begin to sell off for the money in descending generations.

That brings us to the unknown. With the paper disappearing, whither the quaint craft of newspapering?

There’s a widespread hope that newspapering – the thoughtful, careful process of editorial information-gathering – that that will go on and continue into the future and be part of journalism. The disconcerting signs of the new journalism are that most readers of news sites stay at the home page, think they’ve read the paper by reading one story, don’t dip down in. The current earliest adult generation is consuming news at far less of a level than preceding generations – there is evidence to suggest that. News as a value in our society is under some substantial challenge – at least ‘news’ as we have heretofore come to define it.

So, we have more news outlets than we ever had, but we actually have less substance in the news. Most [Internet-only news sites] are headline packaging services. When the Googles and the Yahoos express interest in the news, they’re not talking about generating original reporting. Google’s principal mission is to set up automated systems that don’t require human beings over time. So, when you look at that and when you look at issues about outsourcing reporting itself – which has already begun, and has been going on for a few years – that will only increase along with artificial intelligence and other technologies. In that sense, it is a very, very deeply worrying time.

Depressing? Yes. But then we started talking about the possibilities. If the traditional bastions of investigative journalism see their capacities erode, it will leave that much more muck to rake.

There are literally hundreds upon hundreds of important investigative stories that are desperately crying out for coverage all over the world, every day. So it’s a little bit ludicrous on its face to suggest that those two to three papers can handle the load editorially. The fact is it’s humanly and otherwise impossible to do. What does it mean? It means there are huge openings you could drive a fleet of trucks through.

Maybe you can reduce it, in green eyeshade terms for Wall Street, to a niche market, but there will always be people in the world who will require this kind of information on various subjects. I don’t have any doubt that investigative reporting will always live on.

Finally, the thrilling. Technologies are emerging so rapidly, and driving not just changes in reading or viewing habits, but all kinds of social behavior, that Lewis sees a kind of rolling revolution.

I don’t see this as a despairing time. I see this is as an absolutely, beyond words, thrilling time, because this is where television news was in the late 1940s. Except this is larger than television – that was just one medium. So I actually think this is far larger and far more relentless than that. And that was huge. It opened up an entire new world to the masses, a mass audience around the world.

Lewis doesn’t quite know what to make of the whole social networking/smart crowd phenomenon as a journalism tool, but thinks the NewAssignment.Net concept has tremendous potential. He saw some of that in 2003 when CPI posted the 120-page, full text of the Bush administration’s proposed Patriot Act revisions on its website, against the wishes of the Justice Department. Within days, it racked up millions of hits.

That thing moved around the world in minutes. It was astonishing. The Justice Department had to issue a statement within 40 minutes of our posting. The power of this thing is enormous – if it’s still not fully understood.”

This is a special time. We have a very large global independent laboratory right now and everyone should be testing models, testing ideas, and testing means of distribution and ways to create more substantive journalism in the online context, because there’s clearly a need for it and it will evolve. It’s not a question, it’s an inevitability. The question is, what model will live on and endure.

When you say social networking, there’s good news and bad news. … The good news is you have a global reach, potentially, in breathtaking ways, and you will be able to gain access to expertise that most journalists do not gain expertise to no matter how hard they try. The other side of it, one that I worry about in social networking, is all investigative reporting is potentially actionable. … the quality control, vetting, chain of custody. The internal kind of sausage making by which newsroom assumptions are made by editors and reporters – there is no model that I’m aware of yet for social networking. That maybe is what’s going to happen here [with NewAssignment.Net], and it will emerge. But the challenge is you still have to have an internal quality control mechanism in a centralized way at some place before you publish.

That idea is, indeed, central to the concept of NewAssignment.net. We aim to combine the talents of citizen journalists, volunteer experts and journalists, professional staffers, and fact checkers. How it will all come together is, of course, a work in progress. A central question is “sorting and sifting” – if people across a city, or state, or the United States and beyond, are sending in tips, photos, data, personal stories – how do you efficiently cull the interesting from the irrelevant, and the truly dynamite from the merely interesting? As it happens, Lewis recalled, CPI once did a project called Harmful Error, run by Steve Weinberg (now at IRE). The Center used its home page to appeal for information on prosecutors across the country.

One novelty was simply coming right out at the beginning and laying out the aim of the investigation.

It was a very gutsy thing to say and to do as you’re starting. For most investigative reporters who have squirrel like tendencies, it’s exceedingly unusual, for me at least, to do that. I thought it was a brilliant idea, though so I said let’s do it. We also knew that we would get every inmate in America writing us. Poor Steve Weinberg – he had thousands of ‘innocent’ inmates. They’re all ‘innocent,’ of course. We had to sort through each letter and respond to each letter.

I don’t mean to say that there won’t be fantastic information that comes in … and information that you would not usually get – I don’t doubt that for a second. And the expertise levels – journalists have this ridiculous conceit that they know more than anyone else, when in fact they’re clueless for the most part. So of course there’s going to be thousands of people with infinite levels of expertise and knowledge, and they’re going to emerge, and that’s the genius of this. The question is more of an infrastructure issue, a management issue, the legal and corporate aspects, even in a nonprofit, of the responsibility for what is published, for that sorting and sifting. There would be a bit of a logjam there internally to sort and sift – it’s going to be more elaborate than heretofore seen.

I think technology makes a difference here. It’s easier to communicate more or less instantaneously, organize people and obtain digitized information than ever in the past. Look at some of the things the Sunlight Foundation has been doing already. People can, to some degree, also self-organize if they belong to a pre-existing social network. So I think – and hope – it will be a less significant a challenge as Lewis describes.

What about the stories? I asked Lewis specifically about covering Washington – Congress and the federal government, and their interlocking relationships with interest groups.

I think that most Americans outside those elites don’t think anyone talks to them. No one gathers information relevant to them, the political class doesn’t speak to them – that’s why 100 million Americans, half the electorate, routinely don’t vote even in presidential elections, and it’s much worse than that, 60 or 70 percent, in other elections – It’s because the political and media elites don’t address anything remotely similar to what they care about.

He reeled off a few: airline safety, pesticide safety, food safety, air pollution, water rights. Pensions. All those cell phone surcharges and taxes above the base rate.

We also talked about a central issue of the moment: government outsourcing. The basic nature of government is changing. From military functions in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere, to the Corps of Engineers and the New Orleans levees, more and more traditional government functions are being outsourced to private firms. This raises all kinds of questions, starting with basic accountability, political influence, etc., and, of course, voting machines.

The fact that the biggest symbol of small-d democracy that we have is when we allow our leadership to change hands voluntarily and peacefully periodically with these things called elections and that we would outsource that to some private company with their own secret codes and technologies that no one inside government understands, is, I find, utterly peculiar. Forget the controversy this company or that company, there is a legitimate question about governance. There’s actually a very large discussion here about what is government anymore. What does it do? Pretty soon it’s not going to fight wars. Some years ago it stopped delivering mail. It doesn’t hold elections anymore. Tell me, exactly, what do they do?

There’s also the nexus between universities and the government.

Colleges and universities, while their students were protesting the war in Iraq, were all getting contracts. This has not been done by anyone, the billions and billions and billions of dollars that have been moved to universities, in black budget military defense and other kinds of contracts throughout the nation, basically either assisting the Pentagon directly or indirectly in its policies and its efforts. It’s not unlike the anti-apartheid movement in the early 80s, when those universities were investing in South Africa. There’s a lot of neat stuff like that, and that’s every community in America – how many of them get federal money for their universities?

Finally, there are a lot of obscure, yet very interesting collections of data out there. Many are online. Those that aren’t are still much more likely than ever before to be in digital form.

There’s a lot of datasets that most people don’t know about. I was excited to hear a few years ago, that the USDA has a database of all the bad meat in America that’s been recalled. Who knew? I had no idea. I don’t know if it’s online or if it’s there internally – but there are hundreds and hundreds of databases with massive amounts of data that nobody knows about or ever looks at. You could dine off the databases.