Tag Archives: journalism

Just because it's online, doesn't make it journalism

Internet,

There’s a lot more going on with Alana Taylor’s post at MediaShift than I have time to get into here, but this post by the PBS ombudsman deals with some of it (even as it utilizes possibly the least essential subheds ever). There’s still a lot of bias against reporting news online in academia, mostly due to ignorance. So I admire Taylor for the futurist that she is.

But in pointing out the speck of wood in NYU’s eye, she fails to notice the plank in her own. In this post, she says: “These days anyone who has access to the internet is, in fact, a journalist because they are inputting information that — for someone, somewhere — is newsworthy.”

What she should have said was this:

“These days anyone who has access to the internet has the potential to be a journalist because they are inputting information that — for someone, somewhere — could be newsworthy, provided it’s reported in a way that has journalistic context.”

Re-reading Taylor’s original post about her class and using Pew Research Center’s guidelines for journalism, it’s pretty clear her post fails on points 3 and 4, even as it succeeds on others.

I’m not one of those people who thinks blogs or online reviews are damaging journalism – the two can co-exist peacefully – but journalism isn’t just publishing information that may be of interest to other people. It’s also about doing right by the subjects of your reportage. Had Taylor published her story on her own blog, she’d have been free to exercise her opinion however she likes. But in the same way that putting on a cape doesn’t make me a superhero, publishing something online (or even on MediaShift) doesn’t make it journalism.

Nick Clooney: The unfrozen caveman lawyer of journalism professors

Internet

From the Cincinnati Enquirer:
Nick Clooney is as restless as a college freshman leaving home for the first time. “I’m nervous about this. I’m very nervous,” says Clooney, 74, about starting a new career, teaching journalism at American University in Washington, D.C.
[snip]
…Becoming a college professor has finally forced him to buy a personal computer. Until a few weeks ago, he had never sent an e-mail, watched YouTube or looked up something on Wikipedia.

You know, I’d probably be nervous too if I was teaching a subject and wasn’t up-to-date with advancements in the field.

This isn’t to say that Cloooney doesn’t have any journalistic bona fides – he’s been a television anchor and newspaper columnist, after all. Since the tenets of journalism haven’t changed much since Clooney’s heyday, he might have plenty to teach the young turks about responsibility, conscience, and ethics. And since, according to the above article, Clooney’s only teaching opinion writing and a course based on his 2002 book, Movies That Changed Us, he probably won’t do too much damage.

But the way we report and deliver the news has radically changed, even in just the last ten years. So having a journo professor who doesn’t regularly use a computer is like hiring an economics professor whose never studied the Sarbanes-Oxley Act.

Recently, a group of journalism professors came to Time Out Chicago‘s offices and spoke with our publisher, editor-in-chief, managing editor and myself about the business of putting out a magazine. Everyone had recommendations, and we told them what we look for in prospective writers. One of the things I told them was to make sure that they make the use of the Internet and its tools a component of the curriculum. While the jury’s still out on a complete set of best practices when it comes to how newspapers’ and magazines’ Web sites can benefit from the use of blogs, Twitter, online video, and social networking tools, it’s obvious that they’re already a part of the reporting process, and anyone who comes out of academia with a working knowledge of them will be a better candidate for any journalism job than someone who doesn’t.

Think about it: Clooney is teaching a class on opinion writing, and, based on the above, it’s safe to assume he probably doesn’t read blogs. Not that blogs should be the model for journalistic opinion – in most cases, they shouldn’t be. But that’s all the more reason for Clooney to be familiar with them, so he can compare and contrast the form with journalism and – imagine! – instruct his students on how blogs can be used to further journalistic pursuits.

But hey, take heart Washington University journalism students: You’re being taught by George Clooney’s dad! And he was the Old Spice man! That has to count for something.

ChuffPo, comments and interns

Internet,

When I started at TOC, one of the first things I did was allow the blog to accept comments. They hadn’t yet done this because it was a can of worms no one wanted to open, I suppose.

In an ideal world, we’d have a system that requires someone to create a profile before they comment on our site. The reasons why we don’t do this involve a lot of issues that aren’t germane to this post, but suffice it to say, this is how I’d do it if we had unlimited resources.

In fact, I think most sites should operate this way. If you want to comment, you create a profile. Even people with assumed names tend to take responsibility for the persona they’re creating. It doesn’t mean you won’t have any assholes, just fewer. It’s not just personal opinion either, as other sites find this helps make their content better, and foster community.

But since we don’t have profiles, I moderate every comment that gets posted on the site. I’m pretty lenient with what gets posted, but anything that comes across as a personal attack on the writer or another commenter won’t go up. And anything that I deem to be (as our comment policy states) “just plain nasty” doesn’t go up. Is it subjective? Yes. But I’m generally pro-comments and wouldn’t ever think of not posting something just because it was critical of the content of a post, even if it was my own. (For proof, check out the comments on this Liz Phair review I wrote back in June.)

In a side note on yesterday’s post, I mentioned how Marilyn Ferdinand of Ferdy on Films said some of her less-than-positive-but-still-constructive comments weren’t posted. The Beachwood Reporter also printed letters from those who dared to fact-check the mighty John Cusack (ahem) and found their comments similarly blocked. Now, granted, these are all comments from the readers of one site, so there may be a bit of an echo chamber at work here. (That’s no slam on the usually-fine work of the Beachwood or its readers – of which I am one – just an acknowledgment of a small sample size). Even so, Kevin Allman looked at ChuffPo’s commenting policy and found that – to put it mildly – it seems to be rather broadly enforced. Especially since an off-topic comment on HuffPo is as easy to find as a drunk at quarter draft night.

Now, the funny thing is, ChuffPo has a profile system. So you’d think it would let those who are big on the pointless negativity bury themselves. But it seems the site is more interested in keeping it positive, to the detriment of an interesting dialogue. I know from experience that moderating comments is an inexact art (there’s nothing scientific about it). But it should be done in a way that errs on the side of openness. If you’re wrong, take your lumps. Even if you’re John Cusack.

As for the rest of ChuffPo, another day hasn’t found me more impressed. I know Rachel Maddow replacing Dan Abrams on MSNBC is a big deal to a small group of people – most of whom probably include HuffPo on their list of daily reads – but I’d hardly call it a lead national news story. And while I was born a south suburban kid who had a huge crush on Jami Gertz, even I can’t see the reason for publishing her mash note to…Glenview. (Seriously, Glenview?)

Part of me thinks I’m being too critical. Then again, if Lee Abrams likes what they’re doing maybe I’m right on this after all.

“I think they do a great job for day one. Personally, the story selection, the categories, the scannability [sic] are all great. Check their Crime page.”

Incidentally, the “Crime page” that Abrams refers to is nothing more than a link and pretty picture to SpotCrime.com, which has nothing on the ease of use of EveryBlock, which gives you the same information, and much more. (Don’t let SpotCrime fool you: It doesn’t have much data for the current day, unless you believe that no crimes occurred in the city…)

Finally, I’m still wondering about this whole “HuffPo not paying bloggers is wrong” meme. The only argument seems to be “Arianna Huffington has a lot of money and ought to spread it around.” In that case, shouldn’t the same people who are taking HuffPo to task for its use of free labor also direct their ire at other well-heeled members of the publishing and media industries who use free labor (a.k.a. interns) all the time? Seriously, convince me. Or do you not think doing your interview transcriptions and running across town to pick up product from a vendor is also something of value? Even though the only reason you have time to write is because your interns are doing all the shit jobs you don’t want to do?

More on ChuffPo

Internet, Media,

I’ve mentioned before the difficulty I have in deciding what to blog about here and what to blog about at TOC. My TOC blog post on Huffington Post Chicago – or as I’ve been calling it ChuffPo – could have gone either way. But the gist of that post ended up directed not so much at ChuffPo, but at the whole of the arts and entertainment press and their blogger brethren. In our quest for page views or cover lines, we’re missing some things, or letting publicists dictate our coverage. So we – the experts – are missing the city that exists all around us, and running the risk of someone else acquiring the mantle of the most informed.

Which brings me back to a few lingering thoughts on ChuffPo…

Granted, it’s only a few days in, but I’m not really sure what the site has to offer. As I allude to in the TOC post, most of the content on the site consists of links to stories you’d see in many other places. Nothing wrong with that, but there’s nothing that distinguishes that content. Even Gapers Block‘s Merge section, which offers a quick to-the-point glance at big headlines of the day, still manages to do so with a certain style and voice.

Yes, it has some celebrity bloggers you might not find elsewhere. Unfortunately, none of them have had much to say (really, John Cusack, that’s all you got in you?). And the true Chicago voices in the mix have…well, if I want to read or hear what they have to say, I can go elsewhere, as most of them have columns, features or work in other places.

Speaking of HuffPo contributors, Steve Rhodes at The Beachwood Reporter raised an issue last week (2nd to last item) about the site’s lack of monetary compensation that’s been on my mind as of late, ever since a Gawker post on the same subject: If people are going to write for you – and you’re making money off them – you ought to be paying them. Rhodes has a point, to an extent, particularly about the lunacy of helping a competing business for free. But magazines – and newspapers – utilize unpaid talent (we call ’em interns) all the time. In fact, they depend on them. And those who excel in this grindhouse boot camp are often placed at the front of the line when there are jobs to be had at those same publications.

Disclosure time: I used to blog at Chicagoist, and while there was some monetary incentive for going above and beyond, I gave it away for free during most of my 2 1/4 year stint there (not to mention the work I did for our Ctrl-Alt-Rock events that were for the promotion of the site/brand). But all that free labor directly led to paid freelancing work, and is largely responsible for me having a job at TOC. So it’d be ridiculous of me to suggest that free labor in this environment is unethical (a Gawker blog commenting on fair labor practices would seem problematic as well, but nevermind). And since most of the critics in a TOC roundtable back in January said they’d still be doing what they do even if they had to do it for free, who am I to criticize?

It’s fine for these folks to look for more exposure (and some of the print scribes probably see it as I saw Chicagoist – as a door to more work down the line). But the whole thing has a very arm’s length feel to it right now, a sort of best-of compendium that has yet to present a real view of the city. And frankly I worry that its east coast pedigree will give it the bona fides that it hasn’t earned (especially since according to Ferdy, it can dish it out but has trouble taking it).

Yet.

Consider the following:

“With all its unfair built-in advantages, Huffington Post Chicago could actually help push one or even both of Chicago’s daily newspapers — both struggling mightily for different reasons — right to the brink of extinction. And if that happened, HPC would ultimately be shooting itself in the foot. If the Chicago Tribune disappeared, so would half of the actual news the Huffington Post now highlights.” – Will Bunch; Philly.com

To be fair, ChuffPo is blogging about stories from all over. And since sites like ChuffPo actually funnel traffic to newspaper sites, I’m not really sure how Bunch’s point follows. Besides, a site like ChuffPo ought to be filling in the blanks – particularly with content like this nightmarish account of one person’s stay at Swedish Covenant Hospital – not trying to do what a daily does. That’s now how it will become a source of real power.

Maybe Bunch just wanted to get quoted on Romenesko, and that’s why he said something so ludicrous. In fact, in the next paragraph he turns around and says that dailies and ChuffPo need each other. So there you go.

And that’s what I mean about the view from a distance. If Bunch knew anything about Chicago, he’d know the Tribune isn’t in any immediate danger of disappearing (even if some of its great talentis). The Sun-Times is doing a fine job of killing itself, with no help needed from ChuffPo or anyone else.

Lessons from the Web

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Back in Jaunary, I had a little fun with Chicago magazine. Annoyed that they were taking too long to post an online version of its “171 Great Chicago Websites” story – even though the print version had already been out for weeks – I had one of our interns write a blog post listing every site they mentioned, along with a link to it. It was a tweak of their nose for not understanding the medium of the Web and as a bonus, it ended up being a nice traffic boost for us.

This week, Scott Karp at Publishing 2.0 wrote a post titled “What Magazines Still Don’t Understand About The Web” that details his frustration over a similar situation: Wanting to write a post about a story in The Atlantic, he discovers it isn’t available on their site, even though it’s available in print and – as he later discovers – available via Google. He doesn’t go to the trouble of posting the thing himself but maybe he doesn’t have an intern.

I’m not ignorant to the difficulty of balancing a print product and a site that’s largely built on what appears in it. I have it easier with TOC in that it’s a weekly. Most of our subscribers receive the magazine on Wednesdays, and the new content is always available on Thursday at the latest. If there’s something particularly exciting – food/drink content or something related to a weekend event, we’ll push it live earlier. So we don’t have near the delays associated with a monthly like The Atlantic or Chicago magazine.

Why not make everything available immediately? Partly it’s because of the way our metrics are assembled; Utilizing specific dates when we push new content out helps us to understand how people use our site. And we’ve – and by that I mean me, I guess – become adept at how to serve new content out to people each day of the week using this schedule. There’s something to be said for “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” There’s also a production/time aspect, too: Just because the articles themselves are ready to go, doesn’t mean the rest of the site is ready to show it off. But if I knew that content was already out there in print form, I’d absolutely move it live on the Web ASAP. Because I know that someone else would, whether that someone is Google or someone like me.

The real challenge, though, is this: Using the Web to provide more context, information and value. For example, this week’s TOC feature story is about tourist spots and how even a jaded city-dweller can find the fun in them. (Yours truly braved the wilds of Excalibur for the first time in ten years, and you can read all about that here.) On the Web, we created a spot-the-tourist photo quiz, and had editors name their favorite recurring events that are fun for tourists and locals. In the Web version of the story, you also have quick access to the listings of the places we mention. For reasons of medium and space, you can’t do that in print.

Creating content like this presents its own set of challenges. Someone has to go out there and take the pictures (in this case, Jake Malooley, the TOC Reporter With No Fear. Dude ate a bug once for a story because TOC asked him to), editors need to spend extra time selecting events, in addition to all their other work, and someone has to link to all the event listings. To really create exciting Web content, you need more people power. And yet every time you turn around, magazines and newspapers are letting go of their employees. As Karp notes, related content about what’s in a magazine is easily available via Google so it’s the job of a magazine to create content that satiates the reader’s desire for more.

So in addition to Karp’s complaints about what magazines don’t understand about the Web, I’d add “that just getting the story up on its site isn’t enough.”

Free Jim DeRogatis!

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If a bunch of lawyers – even ones who are incompetent enough to use a Wayans Brothers movie as part of their defense strategy – were trying to charge me with possession of child pornography – I’d be pretty down in the mouth about it.

So I’m glad to see the Sun-Times folks are keeping a sense of humor about the whole thing.

Seriously though, the open access to our courts system has already taken a pretty serious beating thanks to Judge Gaughan, but the defense’s attempts to get back at the reporters who broke the story is a new low.

I believe the interns are our future

Internet,

This post is a little “inside baseball” and I’m kind of burying the lede. So if you want to immediately see what I’m building up to, read this.

A couple weeks ago – as we were going to press on the blogging issue of Time Out Chicago – I found out that the cover story of Chicago magazine’s February issue was “171 Great Chicago Websites.”

Initially, I hit the roof.

Our feature involved critics from almost every major media entity in the city – I interviewed a handful of them for my story and Theater writer Kris Vire hosted a critics’ chat room with many more – so we were a bit worried that another publication would get wind of it and scoop us on our story.

To the casual observer, it probably looks someone’s a copycat. But Chicago magazine is a monthly, so they were probably closing their feature before we started writing ours, and I can honestly say that no one at TOC knew about what they were doing until we closed. It’s a coincidence that occurs often when you’ve got so much media out there.

After perusing a copy of Chicago, it turned out that both features covered different ground. Ours was focused on online criticism, specifically, and they cast their net wider to include every informational resource in town, and then some. They did a very thorough job, and I was hoping both stories would spur more of a discussion about what’s happening online in Chicago, but so far that hasn’t happened.

While Chicago beat us to the punch on the newsstands, we beat ’em online. In fact, I’ve been waiting for weeks for the story to show up on its website, as its other stories from February are already up. It’s been a running joke in the TOC offices that Chicago‘s story about websites wasn’t actually on its website even while people were commenting on the placeholder page.

As someone whose job depends on all media recognizing the importance of the Internet, I was irritated that Chicago wasn’t gettin’ to business. I was complaining about this to one of the NYC directors that was in town, and she said “Well why don’t you just put the links on our blog?”

And that’s how this happened. And then Metroblogging Chicago did us both one better by creating a newsreader file of both their story and ours.

So far, no reaction from the folks at Chicago magazine, but I’m hoping they’ll take it in the good-natured spirit that it’s offered. There’s already a troll in the comments section at Chicagoist who’s making the predictable arguments. (The notion that because our intern was working on this story, all other work in our offices stopped is amusing, but not worth addressing).

Blogging and remixing content of other media outlets isn’t “stealing” so long as credit is given where credit is due (for example, Gridskipper routinely Google-maps TOC content for stories like this). I’ve had dust-ups in the office about how our content’s being used online. Over the past year, one of my goals has been to get folks there to understand that this is the way that media works now, it’s ultimately good for us, and TOC needs to be doing it as much as Chicagoist, Gapers Block and all the rest do (so long as we stick to standards of journalism ethics, even if other folks don’t).

If we – or any other media entity – fails to recognize the importance of what’s happening online, someone else will.

TOC tackles blogs

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This week’s Time Out Chicago is devoted to an important question: as blogging and user reviews become the most widely-read forms of reviewing and criticism, how do you know who to listen to?

The answer is simple: Read more.

I’ll just dispense with two bits right off the bat: anyone who doesn’t take blogging or amateur review sites like Yelp seriously is an idiot and anyone who doesn’t read any critic or reviewer with skepticism is too.

I wrote the lead story in the feature package, in part because I was so mouthy about how it should be written during the early brainstorming sessions that the Features department finally called my bluff and said “OK, you write it then.” It’s already engendering a little hysteria on the Yelp forums – hysteria that quickly dissipates when someone actually reads the piece.

I’ll admit to being in the pro-blogging camp, thanks to my time at Chicagoist; there is simply no better medium than blogging for writing about the immediacy of culture. But even though it’s a medium that’s been around for a decade, people are still coming to terms with it as its effects shape the consensus about not just movies and music, but also restaurants, businesses and current events. I believe online writing ought to be treated the same way as print criticism: one should take the time to understand the person who’s doing the critiquing before they can really understand the writing.

This was a risky subject for us to tackle, since the fact that we’re published on paper will automatically make anything we have to say on the subject of blogging seem suspect. And truth be told, this issue was a difficult birth. But overall, I’m really happy with the job we did. We take a critical, but respectful look at online writing that addresses the pros and the cons.

I count many bloggers as friends and acquaintances. So perhaps there was a bit of myopia at work when I began this issue. I think I felt that the Chicago blogging community was much larger than it actually is. We really had to push ourselves to find people in Chicago that were looking at their chosen subjects with a critical voice (and weren’t blogging as an extension of their profession), while not being too duplicative in the people we chose to profile over eight different stories, most of which profile several different blogs. Some fields (theater, food) have more voices than others. But some that you’d expect would be overrun with criticism – music, for instance – were not.

Let me be clear: there are lots of great music bloggers in Chicago. You can click on any of the folks in the Chicago Music Blogs section at right, and find wit, intelligence, and great writing (and Lord knows that blogroll needs and update cos there are lots of people I’m missing). But the folks who are writing actual criticism – writing that puts the works they discuss in context and measures what the artist is trying to do against what they accomplished – are rare. The field is still wide open for someone to step in and have an influential voice. And this isn’t just me saying this. Most of the folks I talked to, bloggers and professional critics alike, had a tough time naming local online writers they checked out on a daily basis.

But it’s really true of any field of culture right now, despite the fact that Chicago magazine is able to name 171 great websites* in the city. There’s a lot of information out there, to be sure. But the world could really use someone to put it all in context. That ought to be a challenge to anyone reading this. Frankly, it ought to be a challenge for me to do more with this space than just making snide comments about 80s metal, but I could use a break from work sometimes.

I’d encourage you to read all the articles in the package, but in particular check out the online roundtable featuring local print and online critics and the rundown of amateur critics’ blogs we found most worthy of bookmark status.Oh and my piece, of course. But you’ve done that already, right?

* Their story is more about informational websites, rather than critical/reviewing websites. It’s something you’d be able to see for yourself if the damn thing was posted. I know what it’s like having a small Web team, Chicago magazine. But get this story online already!

The Chicago Tribune dips its toes further into the online video waters

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A couple weeks ago, I noticed that the Chicago Tribune removed the navigation window that allowed direct access to its blogs from its front page. (Boo-hiss, incidentally.) In its place was an expanded video console that gave you access to more of its taped video packages, from site-specific packages to CLTV news reports.

So it shouldn’t have been a surprise when they launched an entire separate site devoted to video called ChicagoLive.com. I wrote a brief post about it for TOC, but it started squeezing my mindgrapes again today when the Trib posted a story about Mayor Daley’s response to his son’s investment in a company that had business with the city.

(That’s a whole separate post, so I’ll just say this, particularly to those Chicagoans who’ve found themselves calloused over by corruption as of late: if you’re giving Mayor Daley the benefit of the doubt, and believe he didn’t know his son was involved with Municipal Sewer Services, is that really a man you want running a world-class city?)

Here’s what’s great about the way this story is posted: I can get the 4 W’s from the story itself, and then see what happened at that news event via the video of the news conference, unedited and uninterrupted, complete with some guy shushing the chatterboxes in the background and Daley’s voice cracking when he speaks of how much he loves his son. It’s a complete picture.

Unfortunately, it’s the exact opposite of how the Trib normally handles video on its site.

More often than not, the Trib slaps video segments on its site that aren’t at all complimentary of the stories they’re paired with. In fact, they’re usually CLTV stories on those same topics. CLTV is fine on its own, but everyone knows that television news presents a shorter, capsulized version of a newspaper story. So instead of the video providing more of the story, it actually provides less.

And that brings me back around to ChicagoLive.com. The Trib is honest enough about the goals of the site. In a press release (posted in full at The Lost Remote), Allison Scholly of Tribune Interactive said:

“Chicagolive.com serves our customers by creating a unique and visually engaging environment for users to post or view videos and for advertisers to promote their messages.”

An excerpt from an internal memo posted by Chicagoist put a finer point on the matter of advertisers:

“Chicagolive.com will also serve our advertisers by offering a new avenue for them to reach the audience they are looking for. Online video is growing by leaps and bounds, and advertisers are looking for ways to take advantage of its interest to web users.”

As I alluded to on TOC‘s blog, ChicagoLive.com is “unique,” but for all the wrong reasons: it doesn’t have many of the social networking or community aspects people normally expect of sites that depend on user-submitted content, and it requires an approval process before videos will post.

The latter is perhaps to be expected: The Trib’s a huge entity, and an easy target for lawsuits. So it’s in its best interest not to post videos that would be controversial. The likelihood that someone will submit hard-hitting citizen journalism is certainly there, but it’s unlikely it’ll get past the Trib’s screeners since they’d be unlikely to post anything that would anger a potential source or their advertisers. But if they’re serious about it, they’ll need to find a way to come to terms with it. Still, I think the jury’s still out on the feasibility of crowdsourcing in journalism so perhaps it makes sense for the Trib to take tentative steps. (Then again, it’s been a year so perhaps a mistrial’s already been declared.)

That hesitancy is, I think, what is at the heart of the the Trib’s reluctance to embrace all of the Web 2.0 tech. In its past online offerings, the Trib has taken a wait-and-see approach. Tribune columnist Eric Zorn was an early adopter – early for the MSM anyway – of the power of blogs, but it was a while before the Tribune extended the privilege to anyone else. But with all its resources, the Trib is in a position to give people exactly what they’re looking for so it can compliment what it already offers, and provide that complete picture. The Daley story above is a great example of that.

Sooner or later, the Trib will get more comfortable providing this kind of instant access to news events, and will see the value in allowing people to create their own version of its site, whether through crafting user-specific front pages or offering more user-submitted content. They’ll do this if for no other reason than because advertisers follow users, and users follow content that gives them more information, not less, and information that gives them exactly what they’re looking for, and allows them to move it around as they please. Even if that information is as mindless as a bunch of kids from Park Ridge High School doing “The Safety Dance.”

And for anyone who’s reading this and thinking “Hey, why don’t you take all these high-minded musings and put ’em to work on TOC‘s site, smartass?” all I can say is: just wait.