UPDATED: KSU Poynter ethics seminar today

Jill is reporting today from the KSU Poynter Media Ethics seminar. Wanted to be there but couldn't swing the $50 price tag just now.

There's also a twitter feed here.

UPDATE #1: Jay Rosen is keynote today at KSU. Hope he shakes things up a bit. Keep hearing words like "timid" and "risk-averse" in describing journalism today. Certainly those are not words I ever would have associated with being a journalist.

So far seems to be a very one-sided conversation with a lot of traditional journalism angst and hand-wringing. Where are the bloggers in this workshop????

Hoping Jay Rosen can shake them out of their collective malaise. Read Jay's PressThink post today for preview/outline of his remarks.

Damn! Wish I was there.

UPDATE #2: Oy! They just don't get this. Blogging is a conversation about transparency, it's not a hierarchical top-down form of communication. It's two-way, interactive. So while traditional journalists fret about objectivity and proper filters, they are missing how transparency and the ethics of linkage perform that function for blogging.

Jay Rosen's keynote is up next. Hoping for a little common sense.

Why citizen effort is needed on Cuyahoga County story

Ed Morrison just sent me a link to a new site called Map the Mess: Cleaning Up Cuyahoga County.

It' s a citizen journalism effort using social networking software to map the many business and civic connections among Cuyahoga County's leadership. This is the perfect story in which to use the mapping technology, social networking and crowdsourcing. 

The vastness of this story will never be fully understood if people don't report and explain connections. A quick chat with friends and neighbors usually brings forward more connections that have yet to be reported in the mainstream press. However, this type of effort only retains credibility if the information posted can be verified.  

UPDATE: Latest Monitor story: Father of the halogen bulb

My latest story ran in yesterday's Christian Science Monitor, but I'm so out of whack without my laptop that I forgot to check and forgot to post. Readers of CI may recall I was disappointed by the PD's story on Elmer Fridrich a few weeks ago. After blogging about that, I heard from the inventor's daughter and a man working with him on marketing his latest inventions. They invited me to come meet Fridrich, so I fired off a pitch to the Monitor. Their reply: "a big yes!"

Check out my story, "The tinkerer's literal light bulb of discovery was halogen." There was so much more to this guy and there's a business opportunity waiting for some smart investor who realizes how far ahead of the curve Mr. Fridrich is working.

For those of you who hate the greenish-bluish light of compact flourescent bulbs, but keep them in your lamps because you want to be "green," his latest invention of a twin-bulb halogen that reduces the cost to manufacture halogen bulbs could be music to your ears.

Fridrich performed an experiment with me that demonstrates the different quality of light between compact flourescents and halogens. Take a CD, stand about 10 feet from the light source. Using the bottom side of the CD, angle it up to capture the light spectrum. When you do this using a halogen, you'll see a smooth rainbow of color that reflects the entire spectrum. When you do this with a compact flourescent, you'll see a broken line of color that is heavy on the greens and blues. Give it a try.

Heard in the library
The library has been a very busy place this week, which is totally cool as far as I'm concerned. Couldn't help but overhear a guy asking to post a notice on the vestibule bulletin board. He's starting a Westlake/Bay Village Observer site just like the Lakewood Observer and the Heights Observer. "The reason we're doing this is there's nothing in the paper that's important to citizens of this area," he said. "We all know things happen, but nothing gets reported." I'll be interested to see how this citizen venture develops.

Speaking of citizen ventures
Have you heard about the proposed Northeast Ohio Citizens League? Fellow Bay Village resident Mike Gesing is working hard to make this happen in Northeast Ohio. If you're interested in hearing more (and I hope you are), shoot me an e-mail and I'll send you a newsletter based on the initial meeting held last week.

Mac update
I had an appointment yesterday at 5:40 at The Apple Store at Legacy Village to talk with someone at the "Genius Bar" about my hard drive. I thought this would be a simple process. It took me 20 minutes to get from I-271 exit to Legacy Village, which is what, a mile! The parking lot was positively crammed with cars so I parked in the boonies, which is fine because I like to walk when I can. And then I walked into The Apple Store, which was positively crammed with people. I waited 45 minutes to have someone look at my laptop, only to be told that it may take 7-10 days to get the repairs done. ARRGGHHH! I was reassured that it was a "quick" fix, so hopefully I'll get it back sooner. I feel like a nomad right now.

My time is almost up on the computer. Gotta fly...

UPDATE/ADDITION
I know I've probably used this quote before, but it's a good one and always make me smile.

"It's none of their business that you have to learn how to write.
Let them think you were born that way." Ernest Hemingway

Clay Shirky on cognitive surplus

Check this out from Web 2.0 Expo. The video is about 16 minutes, but well worth the time.



The entire presentation in couched in the context of a conversation he had with a TV producer pre-screening him for an appearance. His point: media targeted at you but not including you may not be worth sitting still for. Just ask your nearest preschooler.

Word of the day
audacity: the quality or state of having intrepid boldness

Should reporters credit bloggers?

An interesting column (and corresponding discussion) is taking place on Poynter about whether or not (and when) mainstream journalists should credit bloggers for material that informs a story on which they are working.

Here's the background on a story brewing in the Twin Cities as reported on Poynter by Maryn McKenna, a freelancer who has caught my attention with two great posts in a sometimes so-so e-media column:

On Nov. 29 and 30, Twin Cities blogger Ed Kohler posted (here and here) on an emerging story involving Minneapolis-based Target Corp.: Students doing viral marketing for Target on Facebook were asked to conceal their affiliation with the company. Kohler's posts hat-tipped and expanded on posts by University of Georgia senior Rosie Siman, who revealed the concealment on Oct. 8. (In an Oct. 9 update, Siman posted that she'd learned the administrator for the Target Rounders program claims the original request was a "miscommunication.")

A few minutes before midnight on Nov. 30 the Star-Tribune published its version of the story online. They also bannered it across the front page of the Dec. 1 paper. The story quoted Siman, Target and Target's marketing arm. It did not mention Kohler's blog; even though referred to Target being "outed in online blogs."

The question is: Should the Strib have named Kohler as a source in the story?

Reporters often gather a lot of material that never gets used in an actual story but often informs the final story in the way of background. There are even interviews with sources that never see print but that help the reporter to give a story more context for the reader.

However, in this case, it appears that the Strib learned of the story from Kohler, that he did deeper digging on this story when he realized the traditional media had missed it. In that case, he and his blog should have been at least referenced as the original source of the story. Give it the mainstream equivalent of a hat tip.

There's a squabble over whether or not Kohler was the original source of the story or whether he just furthered it along. Either way, I think reporters can't just grab material from bloggers without at least indicating where they found the information. At the very least, talk to the blogger via comments or offline, explain what you're working on and ask to chat further because it's possible and probably likely that the blogger has even more info and sources that he or she has not yet shared. It appears the Strib reporter did that, but then still neglected to attribute Kohler as a source.

Traditional reporters cannot be obtuse about the nature of such relationships. The net result of transparency and cooperative reporting is even stronger coverage of everything from politics to business, education to city hall.

The Minnesota Monitor (a cool site similar to what I'd like to see happen in Cleveland) picks up the argument here.

What do you think?

Should journalists credit bloggers? If so, under what circumstances?

Do you think reporters and bloggers should nurture source relationships?

Have you any experience doing so either as a journalist or a blogger?

Have you any experience working with a reporter or a blogger to improve coverage of certain issues?

Wide Open is closed shut

Let me add my voice to the cacophony of bloggers lamenting the events of the past 24 hours that resulted in the implosion of The Plain Dealer's experiment with bloggers on its Web site.

I'll let Jill, Jeff and Tom explain the details of what happened. In a nutshell, the PD did not think through this Wide Open experiment with bloggers. It held the bloggers (whom it hired to write in a partisan fashion about the issues) to the same standards to which it would hold newsroom journalists.

I won't presume to speak for the four bloggers who participated, but my guess is if the PD wanted them to work as "journalists" they would have been less likely to join in the experiment. Their charge was fundamentally different from those working in the newsroom. They were paid for their partisan views and those views (two conservative, two liberal) were supposedly balanced. It was naive of the PD editors to believe that partisan bloggers would not have contributed to or worked for some campaign.

The PD has a bigger problem on its hands in that the public, specifically the blogging public, has discovered how political power holds sway over editorial product. That's a PR problem for Ohio's Largest Daily. No matter how valid or invalid were Congressman Steven LaTourette's complaints, the public perception is that the PD caved because a public official, who should have a thicker skin about such things, whined about unfair treatment.

I'll be honest. I'm not a political blogger and I rarely spend much time reading political blogs. They are not my cup of tea. For the most part, my dissatisfaction in the experiment largely stems from the reality that the arguments routinely fell along partisan lines. I find reading such diatribes tiresome and not informative enough to convince one way or another to support any one side.

There were exceptions—moments when real, honest, authentic dialogue took place and it usually revolved around issues other than politics, such as religion. Of course one could argue that the religious questions were also political, but the comments really tried to dig deeper into the why, which made compelling reading. Credit is due to the four bloggers who took those issues and addressed them in such an intelligent fashion.

Maybe the experiment started with the wrong kind of blogger. Politics are always fraught with questions of ethics, conflict and bias. Some of the best political blogging, after all, comes from people within the political system. I've not had a problem with blogger transparency on this issue, but I know others have.

Maybe what the PD should've done was start such a new/old media experiment with more feature-ish topics—books, food, arts, education, religion.

I had high hopes that such a collaboration would work. Hopefully, this doesn't turn traditional media off of the experiment for good, but rather provides lessons for how to do better in the future.

UPDATE: Here are some links to more on this story:

Poynter Institute E-Media Tidbits

Bad American

Plunderbund

Daily Bellwether

Exciting news on news

Some cool stuff being reported today on news. By far the coolest is news of Reuters Africa. Not only will this new service cover the continent, but it also seeks to link to external source—bloggers—to help in that process.

Read more here, here and here.

Consider this exchange between MediaShift's Mark Glaser and Reuters President Chris Ahearn:

Glaser: You talk about bringing this in as a resource for reporters and editors. What’s their attitude about it? Does it take a change in mindset to accept that, or do they feel like someone’s on their turf?

Ahearn: I think it’s both. It goes one person at a time. Our online group was involved with everything. It was more the people who were away from the experiment, there’s a level of concern in the journalistic community, ‘Are they out to replace me?’ The answer is no, God no. It’s my job in management and running the business side to ensure that there’s as much choice out there for our editors as there can be to best address the audience.

The struggle here is how do you let the audience identify what they actually care about and how do you mesh that with the two pillars of control. As a brand, I do want to control what’s around me; as a consumer, I want to control everything about my experience. My own supposition is the reality is somewhere in between. One of the reasons newspapers are such a valuable thing or that people lean back and watch TV is that at times people say, ‘Show me, I like that serendipity.’ At other times I want to be very self-directed, I don’t like that on the page.

And later, Ahearn continues:

Going from 2,400 journalists to 24 million sources — that’s a lot of scale and there’s some skepticism, but how might that change the news cycle or the ability of people to make sense [out of everything]. I also wonder how much time is wasted in the rewriting of someone’s else’s copy that doesn’t really change the story or add that much unique value. What’s the obsession with that? I like a world where there’s different levels of news trust and brands and people can mix and match. If you have something unique, then go for it. Everybody is guilty of it, everyone has their unique version, but if you matched them up, how much are they really unique? How much is there overlap vs. a story you really, really need to tell? Can you spend your resources on something incremental?

Speaking of mainstream media and bloggers working together, here's a thought from Jeff Jarvis on reallocating reporting sources.

He argues that big news organizations should be writing investigative pieces about the care and treatment of soldiers returning from Iraq and Afghanistan or North Korea's decision to invite the International Atomic Energy Agency's Mohamed ElBaradei in to the country. What we don't need from The New York Times is front-page coverage of Anna Nicole Smith's death or the public un-glueing Britney Spears.

His advice: "Cover what you do best. Link to the rest."

Citizen media goes mainstream

There's been a lot of talk in the traditional media about bloggers getting credentials to cover the Scooter Libby case. Some of that coverage has been overly defensive (no surprise there), just look at Miles O'Brien's drippingly defensive report from last Friday's CNN This Morning.

It strikes me as I look down the potential witness list (which includes the names of 26 journalists from news organizations including The Washington Post, New York Times, Time Magazine, The New Republic, The New Yorker, NBC News, Wall Street Journal, CBS News, MSNBC News, Chicago Sun-Times, Newsday and Newsweek) that this is independent media's story.

The major news organizations are so enmeshed in the story, having become a party to the proceedings, that this is an opportunity for citizen media to fill in the role of news reporters in addition to commentators. The powers that be in the U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C., were smart to invite citizens into the proceedings to witness firsthand rather than comment on what the mainstream is reporting. We'll be watching to see how the coverage unfolds.

So far, I see a great deal of care being taken on the part of the MBA bloggers. Let's hope this experiment proves successful and opens the doors to other institutions.

Media Bloggers gets Libby trial seat

I haven't had the time to read the whole thing, but I think this is a big first step toward elevating blogging. I'd like to throw my hat into the pool of MBA bloggers to cover this trial. Hmmm, we'll see if I can swing a few days in DC.

Valerie Plame is silenced for now

It seems Valerie Plame may be a bit more important to the CIA than originally posited by the Bush Administration. Either that or the CIA Publications Review Board is excessively paranoid about an ex-operative who brought negative attention to the agency and, through her husband, the Bush Administration.

In related matters, Media Bloggers Association of which I'm a member, has announced that U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C., has granted credentials for two MBA seats to cover the upcoming Scooter Libby trial. Libby is accused of outing Valerie Plame in 2003.

This is exciting news because it's only the tip of the iceberg in getting credentials for bloggers to cover major news events.

From Reuters CEO Tom Glocer

Reuters CEO Tom Glocer gave this speech to the Globes Media Conference yesterday in Tel Aviv. It's an interesting take on the opportunities and challenges to covering news in partnership with citizen media. In reference to the doctored stringer photo from conflict in Lebanon, Glocer said Reuters learned three key lessons:

The first is accountability. The upside of the flourishing blogosphere is that beyond our own strict editorial standards, there is a new check and balance. I take my hat off to Charles Johnson, the editor of Little Green Footballs. Without his website, the Hajj photo may well have gone unnoticed.

The blogosphere provides accountability. They’re not always going to be right. Indeed, many of the accusations levelled at traditional media are partisan in nature – but some are not. We have to listen to the bloggers – we shouldn’t ignore them.

The second lesson is about the trust of our audience. We learned at Reuters that the action of one man – a man who wasn’t even a full-time staff member – could seriously hurt the trust in our news, built assiduously over 155 years. His stupid decision to clone smoke cost us.

We learned that your reputation is only as good as the last photograph you transmit, or the last story you file.

The final lesson we learned was this – more than ever the world needs a media company free from bias, independent, telling it as it really is, without the filter of national or political interest.