Countdown to Veep Debate -- 3 Questions in Media Coverage

Less than 60 hours 'til debate time. Is it just me or does it feel like there's more buzz about Biden v. Palin than Obama vs. McCain? Wash. U. is starting to resemble a county fair with all the tents and fences and signs. But still no sign of media types.

Before reporters go live from campus, here are three questions about how the press will influence the debate and shape the storylines afterward.

1. How many times will Sarah Palin aides, pundits and anchors utter the phrase "exceeded expectations?" If I was creating a drinking game for Thursday night, it would go something like this: Take a shot for every reference to the GOP veep candidate doing better than predicted. With conservatives saying that Palin is simply out of her league in this election, and YouTube junkies expecting no dearth of must-see Palinisms posted by Friday morning, is it possible that Joe Biden's in a no-win situation?

We've seen this act before. Many television pundits declared that Palin had exceeded expectations in her Republican Convention address. Don't expect the analysis to be much different unless Palin follows Tina Fey's lead and actually does ask to phone a friend.

2. Will moderator Gwen Ifill channel Jim Lehrer and push for candidate interaction? After all, that is the point of a debate, right? After McCain and Obama spent the first 10 minutes fixated on the camera, Lehrer did just about everything possible to get them to look at and talk to each other. They loosened up eventually, with an assist to the PBS anchorman.

Ifill might have a tough task getting Palin and Joe Biden to engage in a true back-and-forth, given that Biden can't really prepare for combat without knowing what Palin thinks about the issues, and that Palin is a rookie debater. But if viewers are to get a real sense of Palin's thought process (and not just canned answers courtesty of top aides), it will be Ifill's prodding that likely produces such impromptu moments.

3. Can reporters keep the debate in context? I'm hopeful. On live TV, it's almost guaranteed that this will be viewed as a momentum-seizing night for the GOP or a major flop for the Dems. Print's often a different story -- and beat writers and bloggers have seen enough of these things to put it all in perspective. In all likelihood, we'll hear some about Palin's ideals and Biden's relaxing Amtrak rides. But this will be more theater than anything else.

Circus Week in St. Louis

The show's coming to town. The media trucks are rolling in, campaign buses not far behind. It's the Wolf Blitzer blitz, Anderson Cooper live from the Arch! Joe Biden's coming -- get your digital recorders ready. Oh, and I heard there's another veep candidate who people are kind of curious to hear.

Yep, it's vice presidential debate week in St. Louis. The big event is Thursday evening at Washington University -- about seven blocks from where I live. Check back for regular updates about the media scene and what it's like to cover those covering the debate.

It's a Vertical World

I can remember the sarcastic comments from some journalism buddies in Washington when word starting spreading about a start-up political publication. Wow, political news! Focusing on the Beltway! What a novel idea!

The market's too crowded, we agreed. Even if top dawgs at the Washington Post were coming to start this venture, how would this Web site plan on beating the Post at its own game?

Two years later, the joke's on us. Politico is a powerhouse of political journalism, shining brightly with strong traditional reporting and insightful blogging. During the political conventions last month, its editors helped set the news media's agenda.

What's to learn from Politico's success story? Web journalism is thriving? It's an election year; timing is everything? People really do care about political minutae? Sure. But that's not seeing the bigger picture.

Politico is an example of what's called a vertical publication. One subject. A targeted audience. In other words, a news organization that's not trying to be everything to everyone. And that might just be the future of journalism.

At newspapers and magazines across the country, resources are spread thin. Institutional knowledge is leaving the newsroom with every buyout or layoff. In-depth reporting suffers. But at vertical publications -- mostly Web sites these days -- reporters have well-defined jobs. Editors can focus on their favorite kind of copy. It's perfectly acceptable for a site to post 20 articles in a day. It's fine to post five stories. There's no convention.

Staffs can be lean. Advertisers know what kind of readers they're reaching. Experts in the field can engage with each other on message boards and write op-eds.

There's certainly still room for smart journalism at jack-of-all-trades publications. But as the media come to grips with an increasingly fragmented audience, it makes sense for journalists who are passionate about a topic to coalesce. Of course, there have long been niche publications on everything from gardening to fantasy sports. But many haven't moved online in earnest -- and they certainly haven't embraced interaction with readers.

Vertical start-ups have done well covering higher education, health, sports. There's room for so much more.

Put Up and Read Up

First came “crowdsourcing,” the fancy term for journalists tapping the collective knowledge of their sources (typically through the Internet) to find news tips and expand their networks.

Now a similar word is entering the media lexicon: “crowdfunding.” The idea is simple. People who are interested in reading an article about a certain topic collectively raise money to pay a reporter to investigate.

The model, also called “community funded journalism,” is being tested by a 26-year-old former technology reporter who has received financial backing (a two-year, $340,000 grant) from the Knight Foundation.

David Cohn, project director of the nonprofit Spot Us, spoke with This Media Moment last week about the state of journalism…

"I don't even have to explain this to people outside the media world any more: Everyone knows that newspapers are falling apart in terms of a business model. The newspaper can fall apart. I don’t care as long as journalism doesn’t. Newspapers play an important role in local communities – that of a watchdog. Traditionally investigative journalism was bundled in newspapers, but now with the Internet and the economic crumbling we’re seeing the unbundling of journalism. Audiences who are passionate about investigative journalism won’t necessarily see it in their newspapers, but they still need a place to go."

… and about his endeavor.

“The idea is to make journalism more participatory. This gives a new sense of editorial power to the public. Imagine if you went to a restaurant and a waiter said, ‘Here’s what you’re going to order.’ Essentially that’s what the media have done. The public should be able to create its own freelance budget. That’s what we give people a chance to do.”

Below are some other highlights from our conversation – plus a little narration from yours truly. I recognize that I’m going old media on you all by posting part I of this interview above part II, but, hey, isn’t the point of blogging in the first place to defy conventions?

Put Up and Read Up (Part II)

Here’s the rest of my interview with Spot Us director David Cohn:

This Media Moment: Tell me about your journalism career thus far.

David Cohn: My entire career has been online. I wrote for Wired.com, Seed Magazine, and was a technology and science freelance writer. I interned at the Columbia Journalism Review and worked for (NYU journalism professor and media blogger) Jay Rosen.

Cohn went from being a tech reporter to a tech consultant to news organizations. He explained to editors the idea of citizen journalism and how to implement projects focused on reader-reporter interaction.

While researching crowdfunding for a chapter in a book being written by a Wired Magazine editor, Cohn decided to pitch the idea to news organizations. Why not adopt a platform where readers could suggest topics and help fund the journalism?

Editors didn’t bite. But Knight did.

TMM: So you get this grant and put up a Web site. What’s on there now?

DC: Right now the site is under development. I decided against a “ta-da” moment. I wanted to reveal what I’m doing as quickly as possible. You can see some of the article pitches on the wiki, and between that and the blog, that’s what I’ve been working on.

TMM: Explain what’s on the wiki.

DC: There are two things right now: Pitches from reporters (ranging in topic from recycling to future of policing) and article ideas that were suggested by members of the community. That’s the way it’s going to work – writers will come up with their ideas and pitch them, and the community will also have tips.

TMM: Let’s go through the details of how this is going to work once the site is fully functional. From your Web site…

Step 1: An individual or journalist creates a pitch that outlines an untold story in a local community.

TMM: Which stories move forward and which ones don’t?

DC: I don’t decide, because I don’t want to define what is and isn’t good journalism. In the end what Spot Us is is a marketplace where independent journalists, news organizations and community groups meet and work together. Money has normally been left out of the equation, because it’s assumed the articles are paid for by the news organizations. But that’s increasingly not going to be the case.

Step 2: Members of your community vote, with their money, on what stories are most important to them.

DC: I’d argue that if 50 people come together, agree a topic should be covered and reach for their wallets, news organizations should respond. If we don’t, we deserve everything that’s happened to us as an industry.

Step 3: A journalist researches the facts and puts together an article. Editors provide check-and-balance on the story.

TMM: What’s the journalist’s obligation once he’s pitched the idea and set a price?

DC: If this is a marketplace, the pitch is a contract. The reporter is saying, ‘Here’s what I’ll do and for how much.’ That’s half the contract. Then it goes to the public. Say only $500 is raised for a $1,000 story. The journalist doesn’t have to do anything unless full funding is reached.

TMM: What are you looking for in journalists? Do you have to be a freelancer?

DC: You can be working for a news organization, but anything for Spot Us has to be as a contractor for us. I’m not writing checks to news organizations.

In fact, 90 percent of the money raised by the community goes to the reporter, while 10 percent goes to what Cohn calls a “quality assurance editor,” who is selected by Cohn based on that person's area of expertise. The editor does fact checking to insure balanced reporting, Cohn said.

TMM: What’s an average project going to cost?

DC: I’m expecting in the range of $1,000-$2,000. It’s supposed to be an investigation -- longer-form journalism, not day-one stories. Even if the writer asks for $250, it probably won’t be raised that day.

Readers already raised the $2,500 needed for a project that aims to fact check political ads in local S.F. elections. More than 70 individuals sponsored the project, with some donating as much as $150 and some as little as $2.

Spot Us doesn't allow any one donor to give more than 20 percent of the cost of the story. That's one way Cohn said he addresses the concern that crowdfunding is just journalism being bought by the highest bidder.

DC: A reporter is being commissioned by the public and isn't beholden to one person. Names of the donors are there for people to see. I want to ensure that no more than 20 percent of money for an article comes from anonymous donors. One of my guiding philosophies is that journalism should be a participatory process. I don’t want people to donate money in sort of a hidden way and disappear. The appearance of a scandal is as bad as a scandal itself.

TMM: But what's going to stop a group with a clear political agenda from rounding up its members, pitching a story and collectively paying for it? Are you concerned about the system being abused?

DC: My snide response is there’s no such thing as clean money. The more reasonable response is that there are lots of steps that have to be taken for the system to be abused. First, the political group in the example you use has to be well organized. Then it has to find a reporter who’s willing to put his professional reputation on the line. Group members need to hope a quality assurance editor doesn’t raise a red flag. The idea is that with checks and balances there won’t be any crappy stories.

Even if all this happens, and it gets published on our site, the only people who are going to read it are members of the political group who paid the money.

TMM: But won’t the article be prominently displayed on your site?

DC: I’m not going to be highlighting the content produced. It’s not like a blog or a news site. You can read the stories, but it’s not a news destination. The goal is to get other news destinations to re-publish it.

Step 4: Spot Us publishes the story in its news feed and works with local media outlets to have articles published more widely.

DC: There are three ways a news organization can use the content:

1. We’ll give publications the story once it’s already been published on our site and totally community funded.
2. If editors at a publication find out about an article that’s about to be published and is 100 percent community funded, they can buy it in its entirety, pay the journalist and refund community members 100 percent.
3. If there’s been a public pitch and only 25 percent of the money has been raised, a news organization can put down 50 percent of the price and have temporary exclusive rights to it. That option is there until the story is 51 percent community funded – at that point there’s no exclusivity. So a publication’s buy-in has to be either 50 percent or 100 percent.

TMM: You’re being very up front about what articles are being researched. Is there a concern that between the time money is being raised and the article is finalized that other reporters will pick story idea?

DC: My gut reaction is that [the reporter] will look like a jerk. The real answer is that it makes much more sense for the publication to work with me than against me. Rather than use a reporter, who is a precious resource, the news organization can either have the story for free or buy it early on. Otherwise they’ll be chasing every pitch – and I guarantee we have more freelancers than they have reporters on staff.

TMM: Is the plan to make this a national site?

DCC: This is in the Bay Area only now, and if it ends up being only a San Francisco site I’m totally fine with that. But I’d love it if this grows into a national project -- though it’s always going to be local journalism. If this works here, there’s no reason why we can’t take it to another city. If this idea expands and it’s not on my site, I’m fine with that, too.

An Early Education in Newspaper Woes

If you think about it, student newspapers and metropolitan dailies have quite a lot in common these days. Staff turnover is high. Management changes every few years. Pay is low. Gossip is commonplace.

And it shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone who's been following the plight of newspapers that campus publications are also taking a financial hit.

The Daily Californian, UC-Berkeley's independent student newspaper, is cutting back a day of publication -- skipping the Wednesday print edition and directing readers to its online version. The paper sites, drumroll please, "a national epidemic of reductions in print ad revenue."

Salaried positions at the newspaper already have taken a 10 percent cut.

Meanwhile, at Syracuse University, The Daily Orange is no longer publishing a print edition of its newspaper on Fridays. New content will still appear on the Web that day.

Facebook, a.k.a. Sourcebook

True story: I joined Facebook strictly for work purposes.

As a higher education reporter constantly searching for student quotes, I needed Facebook in a bad way. Simply put, young people generally don't have land lines. Colleges list students' addresses and room numbers, but again, that's not much help nowadays. (And you can forget about getting any info from schools about high school students.)

Some Facebook searches are so easy that a reporter almost feels guilty. Like when you're doing a story about students who are against college x bringing speaker y to campus, and you find a group called "Students against college x bringing speaker y to campus."

More often, finding good sources through Facebook is like finding good sources via other methods -- it requires putting to use the shotgun method. Put out a bunch of e-mails and see what comes back. (It takes a few tries to learn the art of crafting the initial message to a student explaining that, no, you're not a creepy stranger or Internet spammer.)

And with social networking sites, you can make more informed decisions about who you contact: You can search by major, year in school, political affiliation, etc.

Journalists are increasingly seeing social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace as treasure chests of sources. Beatblogging.org, a collaborative effort by a dozen news organizations and NewAssignment.Net to think about how journalists can use social networks to improve beat reporting, had a recent post about the importance of using Facebook.

The blog's author makes several important points. He writes:

In [one reporter's] current newsroom, it's a bit unclear how editors feel about using social networks in the reporting process. At his old paper, a lot of his coworkers used social networks to help improve their reporting, but social networking is a new frontier for newspapers. Most papers are still forming policies about appropriate use of social networks for work proposes.

"We still have this situation where all the top editors are the old people," he said. "And they just haven't fully embraced how online can help our jobs."

He tries to stress to his editors that he uses Facebook as a starting point. He uses it as a way to contact students via e-mail, the phone or in person. He does not quote people's profiles.

It's hard for young journalists to believe, but there are still editors and reporters who are skeptical of anything found on a social networking site. That's why, as the blog post says, it's important that reporters make clear that they will take the conversation off Facebook as soon as possible.

That's not to say you can't have a few e-mail exchanges to warm up a source, but, as it always has been, a phone conversation is best. At the very least, a reporter should get Facebook sources to respond through another e-mail account as a way of verifying their identity.

The Sexy, Cool, Funny Political News

To find what's above, look where you might not think to during this convention/general election season: alt weeklies. By their nature, they aren't obliged to follow the traditional storylines that are driven now more than ever by cable TV and politics-only blogs. So what you get are some pretty creative ways of covering the news.

Sample this week's offerings, for instance. The Denver Westword has a piece on where prostitutes were during the DNC. City Pages, the Minneapolis alt weekly, set out in true Daily Show fashion to find what it calls the "Republicaniest Republican of them all."

Village Voice Media, the parent company, has been promoting the heck out of these two convention host city weeklies with a "Convention Coverage 2008" box that appears in some of its publications.

Learning From "Learning From YouTube"

As mentioned in a previous post, I spoke about a year ago to a Pitzer College media studies professor who was teaching for the first time a course called “Learning From YouTube.” During that interview, Alex Juhasz explained the concept of a class "on, in, and about YouTube," as she put it.

Students would take a close look at how the video-sharing site serves different audiences, including college students in an academic setting. They’d post every assignment online and speak to each other (and outside observers) primarily through student-generated videos uploaded to YouTube. As another wrinkle, class sessions would also appear on the site for all to see.

So began the most transparent course in American higher education history.

I caught up with Juhasz again last week as she prepared to start another academic year. We spoke about what lessons she and students learned about YouTube, how the media covered the course, and how it ended up taking on a 'Truman Show'-esque quality.

Here’s an abbreviated version of our conversation. (TMM= This Media Moment;
AJ= Alex Juhasz)

TMM: You posted a series of video blogs on the course Web site, and in your final video you called the course a “wild experiment in education.” Are you satisfied with the experiment?

AJ: I’m more than satisfied. It gave me a lot of critical insight into how YouTube works. I’ve written a lot academically about YouTube, but I never would have gained the same insight had I not engaged in the experiment. The interactions with 30 young people were critical. I don’t need to do the experiment again in exactly the same way, because I learned quickly and efficiently what YouTube doesn’t do and why.

TMM: When we last talked you said that you were "underwhelmed" and "unsatisfied" by much of the content on YouTube. Then there’s this passage about class discussions from your blog:

"We've also deduced that there are two YouTubes: the mainstream one made and maintained by Google and millions of users out to waste some time, and the innumerable experiments in form, content, behavior, and community that fall outside the logic of entertainment, advertisements, popular culture, hits, numbers, and favorites. See one and the other becomes less visible; ask a question of the other and learn little of use to understand the first. Our class falls into the second category: unseen by most, unattended to by the site's architecture and poorly supported, barely getting by but learning nevertheless."

It seems like your critique of the site and its ability to serve your class didn't change much from start to finish?

AJ: Our critique of the site stayed the same. I’d have to say it sounds banal, but it’s important to emphasize that corporate ownership of the site produces certain structures; it has a logic of its own. There’s nothing wrong with corporate logic. That logic is organized around making you want to waste time by moving from video to video in a form of distraction that gets viewers to ads. My criticism isn’t that it’s corporate – God bless them that they figured out a way to make money.

But it’s not a structure that produces other things humans might want. I’m a college professor. I’m interested in looking at things carefully, linking and working collaboratively. [The people behind YouTube] don’t want it to be a place of community. They want you to stay distracted as an individual watching a lot of videos.

TMM: Did the students feel the same way?

AJ: They came in as boosters of the site and didn’t leave as boosters. They still generally like YouTube, have fun on it and think it’s exciting. But when the guy who runs the politics page at YouTube came to speak to us, students were very critical of the way that page limits interactions -- one of the hallmarks of Web 2.0.

Put it this way: Everyone can put a video on YouTube, but if only three people see a video it won’t ever move up. It’s democratic in that people can get on it, but it’s not democratic in the ability for people to move equally within the site.

TMM: The course received quite a bit of media attention. Among other appearances, you went on Fox News and CNN. The television headlines ranged from “You Kidding: Class focuses on YouTube” to “YouTube 101: Educational Wave of the Future?” – and both of those titles appeared on FOX during the same interview. A local NBC affiliate referred to “that laughter of a class.”

So I was a bit surprised to see on your blog this post:

"I've been able to do nothing else all day but worry about how I represent myself, my ideas, my course through a mainstream media which does not usually talk my language or acknowledge my concerns, given their erudite nature and political leanings (see my blog!). But reporters have been polite and inteligent, I'm an expert after all, a PhD; as have I. Why?"

I'm curious to hear more.

AJ: The reality was that I was treated well by everyone in the media. They are smart people, and they understand that people want to think about new technology. I think they were enjoying talking to me, as I was relatively capable of saying what issues were on the table.

The radio talk shows were generally serious. Most stations screened it as a joke. That was their entry in. It’s easy to joke about it, to say kids are watching car crashes and kittens, but anyone who spends any time on YouTube knows there’s a lot more going on than that. Again, everyone was respectful and serious, but most could only frame the course as a joke.

One of the problems is that video blogging and consumer-produced culture is still considered a joke. But we ignore YouTube and user-produced content at our own risk.

TMM: How did it go with students’ work and comments in class being out there for everyone to see?

AJ: It didn’t go very well. Students didn’t like the course being that public, and being judged by the YouTube community. It points to the poor standards of cultural interaction on that space – and to the differences in social norms. You aren’t allowed to make fun of people in the classroom, but on YouTube you can say what you want.

Most people who came to watch the class were interested in the experiment, but we had our problems and students felt attacked. People were putting response videos on the site just to get hits and to get their cause mentioned on TV. At one point we stopped allowing others to add video.

TMM: How did the cameras affect you?

AJ: It got easier as the semester went on, but it does limit your freedom of expression. And maybe that’s good. There’s a lot of self-censoring that occurs. I was self-conscious that colleagues were watching and saying, “she totally missed that.” I probably didn’t teach as well because I thought I was being judged all the time.

TMM: So are you teaching this course again?

AJ: Yes, this fall, though there are some changes. We likely won’t be taping all the lectures. Students will still do assignments as before on video, but we’ll be reading real books on Internet studies and media culture instead of mostly limiting interactions to YouTube. It’s important for them to see the limitations of the site, and to value long-form content.

The best way to learn is to see what you can’t do in three minutes.

The New Rules on Corrections

At a time when journalism conventions are changing rapidly, and print publications are cutting staff and reducing page sizes, at least one tradition remains: the correction box typically posted on the bottom of page 2.

It has long been the place to find out about yesterday's mistakes, and to feel vindicated after alerting an editor that your aunt Beth's last name was spelled wrong. There's a pretty simple rule about when to run a print correction: If there's a confirmed factual error, set it straight. If the word "too" appeared when the sentence called for "to," well, then, let your English teachers foam at the mouth, confront your copy editor by the snack machine...and move on.

Some of the same rules apply to online news sites, which have the luxury of making instantaneous changes. You won't find editors alerting readers of punctuation errors, and you'd like to think that major factual errors would get the ol' "Editor's note: This passage has been changed from its original version" treatment.

But there's undoubtedly a larger gray area for when to correct online mistakes. What if it's 7:15 a.m. and a reporter notices he attributed a quote to the wrong source. He calls the editor, who makes the change. Do you run a correction with the story, even if it attracts attention to an error that few people ever saw?

Then there's the question of whether readers even know where to find these online versions of correction boxes. It's been noted that a large percentage of daily newspaper Web sites don't have such a link on their home page -- if at all.

Still, some of the most popular sites do due diligence on this front. The New York Times puts its correction link on the left bar of its home page, in between the classifieds and crosswords links. (Not a far cry from a virtual page 2 treatment.) The L.A. Times gives corrections a similar treatment. MSNBC also gives prominent play to its correction link, as does Salon.com.

What's missing, though, is consistency and transparency. News sites would do well by readers to include a corrections link on the home page. This link should take readers to a page that has a real-time list of corrections made (however small). That way, even if the editor in my 7:15 scenario above decides not to draw attention to the error by noting the correction in the story, a curious reader could still find out what a previous version of the story said.

Editor's Note: I accidentally published this post the first time without making sure it was the final version. As a wise man once wrote: D'oh!