News-Record.com

... that, yes indeed, blogging can indeed be journalism:

It was amazing to see how many participants, at how many sites, took part, and the skills at their command, mainly Web-based. The material the detectives at DailyKos and other blogs drew out of obscure or abandoned Web sites -- and caches -- regarding Talon, Gannon, and a dozen other threads was astounding, although I couldn't quite tell if any of the searches and grabs required talents well beyond the reach of even the most advanced computer wonks. ...

Well, I was growing impressed with blog research. Cutting away the over-the-top rhetoric, snarkiness, and conspiracy theories, most of their far-fetched facts were standing up. So when Americablog uncovered what appeared to be nude photos of Gannon/Guckert advertising his wares as an escort, along with something of a paper trail linking him to those sites, I was no longer skeptical. Soon The Washington Post was citing this evidence. ...

Sure, there is plenty of junk-research out there on the blogs, and unproven or offensive comments still abound in the postings. But what surprised me the most were the resources the major blogs (as opposed to the Mom-and-Pop operations) can call upon for this type of story, enlisting experts around the country -- non-journalists, but people with similar, or even more highly developed, Web skills.

And here's the nut of it: In the blogoshere, it's often asked, on both the left and right, "Why can't the mainstream media get to the bottom of these scandals like the blogs sometimes do?" I understand part of the answer now: No single news outlet has anywhere near the army of workers who toil at the larger blogs.

We here at the News & Record have offered you a venue for doing your own journalism. Now, local blogger Mr. Sun offers you the tools -- the Mr. Sun Citizen Journalist Starter Pack!

No, we're not getting kickbacks. More's the pity.

We were pleased on Monday to play host to Dwight Silverman, online editor for the Houston Chronicle, who is here for a few days this week to learn about the N&R's online initiative and the Greensboro blogging community. (He was scheduled to be getting together today with some local bloggers, including Roch, Chewie and Sue.)

While he was here, he talked with me and a variety of other staffers in both News and N&R Interactive. He liked a lot of what he saw, but what appeared to blow him away the most was the dialogue on Patrick Eakes' blog involving a post in which Patrick challenged a couple of factual assertions in our Sunday article on character education. "You're so calm and serene about it!" he marveled. Well, yes, I said, because in the future we're trying to create, this is exactly what is supposed to happen. (And you can keep to yourself any snarky comments about my being calm and serene. Hee.)

Dwight talked about some obstacles he sees to trying to do in Houston what we're doing here, even as he listed some encouraging signs. To Dwight or anyone else, I would say: This stuff looks a lot more feasible once the truth really sinks in that business as usual will kill your business. As Ed Cone has said frequently, there's nothing all that special about Greensboro. This could be happening in a lot of other places, if a few people simply decide to make it so.

This essay on what open-source digital media can learn from the open-source software movement. Hint: We're gonna need new business models, and I don't envy whoever has to sell that notion to The Powers That Be.

NiemanWatchdog.org, a Web site that exists to suggest questions that journalists ought to be asking, is taking suggestions for questions to ask Rupert Murdoch, head of News Corp. (parent company of, among other things, the Fox television empire), when Murdoch addresses the American Society of Newspaper Editors convention in Washington in April. If you've got a question you'd like Murdoch to answer, you can submit it here.

According to the caffeine-free industry, March is Caffeine Awareness Month.

Apt commentary from my favorite coffee shop/community-journalism blog, Baristanet:

According to these caffeine nannies, drinking too much coffee can lead to moodiness, insomnia, anxiety, heartburn, tremors, depression and irregular heartbeat. And they have pictures on their website of people in white jackets wearing stethoscopes.

Downer, man.

In our experience, drinking too little coffee can lead to headaches, listlessness, sleepiness, depression and not getting a damn thing done all day.

Michael Verdi posts step-by-step instructions here. And it's free, assuming you have some kind of device for recording video in the first place.

And remember that if you're submitting a story for publication on our Web site, you can attach may also be able to submit any accompanying *.jpg photos you have, too. E-mail me for more information.

An academic paper: "Are Zombies Logically Possible? And Why It Matters."

If this guy's not paying his own way through school, I pity his poor parents.

... as only "The Daily Show" can, featuring NYU journalism prof Jay "Pressthink" Rosen as straight man. Video here.

This might be the most amazing true story I've ever read.

Doc Searls, editor of Linux Journal and co-author of "The Cluetrain Manifesto," frequently posts photos he has taken from airplanes and asks readers of his blog to guess where they were taken. One of his more recent was of the array of transmitter towers south of Charlotte, very near where I grew up, used by WBT-AM. (I recognized the shot immediately, having flown in and out of Charlotte/Douglas International many times; you pass just east of the towers when taking off toward or approaching from the south, where the main runways face.)

WBT (1110) is one of the few remaining clear-channel stations in the U.S. -- that is, no other station broadcasts on that same frequency. AM radio signals, which bounce off the ionosphere and back down to Earth, can travel enormous distances after dark if there's no interference (sunlight limits their reach), and WBT's signal, staticky though it might be, covers much of the East Coast between sunset and sunrise.

You'd have to be an old-time radio geek to know why these towers are so interesting, and I won't bore you with the gory technical details. But for our purposes, Searls gives a shoutout to WBT's corporate parent, Jefferson-Pilot, for restoring the two towers that were knocked down by Hurricane Hugo in 1989, even though the company could have approached the damage in other ways ... and for not selling its broadcast outlets, which include some of this state's first, biggest and most respected, to one of the corporate behemoths now buying up stations nationwide.

Online Journalism Review, published by the School of Communications at the University of Southern California, has published three online guides for would-be citizen-journalists, students and other people who aren't journalists but might want to function as one. They're in Wiki format, so if you learn something in your work that isn't covered, you can add that information yourself.

Information is here.

The guide to ethics.

The guide to reporting.

The guide to writing.

I'll have more to say about these later.

As JR said earlier today, I and several other N&R staffers have begun three days of training in the use of Publicus, our new Web-publishing system. Speaking as someone who has been blogging for years and still doesn't really get CSS, the markup language used to design many blog pages, I can say after one day of training that I am in a world of trouble and really, really need a beer.

The good news: I'm done with two-and-a-half days of training in Publicus, the new Web-publishing system we're going to be using.

The bad news: We can't just start producing new Web pages and new content right here, right now.

Our instructor told us that the absolute soonest he'd ever seen a new site launch was four weeks after training, and that was at a site that wasn't doing any major redesign. (We, of course, are doing a major redesign.)

The main reason is that the system relies on a set of files -- templates and other things -- that have to be created before Web publishing can commence. That would take a while even if we were using an existing, basic page design. But we're designing from scratch, and although that process began before training, we're nowhere near done.

I'd been under the impression that that work was complete, or nearly so -- that it was supposed to have been completed before training began. That's not correct, and to the extent that anything I've said may have led people to share my misimpression, I apologize. And I promise: I'm not going to offer any more estimates or predictions.

Good thing I work in the communications bidness, huh?

If you have a hankering to do your own reporting, one of the basic tools in your toolkit will be federal and state open-records laws. The critical importance of those laws is being recognized by news organizations nationwide this week during what's being called, the current weather notwithstanding, "Sunshine Week."

Now, I am not a lawyer, nor do I play one here at The Lex Files. But I've had to deal with open-records and/or open-meetings issues every month, if not every week, for my entire 21-year newspaper career, so I know a little.

It's important to remember that the Freedom of Information Act, the open-records legislation you're most likely to have heard of, applies only to federal records and only to executive-branch agencies, not Congress or the courts. North Carolina law applies to state/county/municipality records.

North Carolina is blessed with one of the country's better laws regarding open records in that, at least in theory, it presumes that state and local government records are open and recognizes only a few exceptions to that general presumption. What happens in practice is sometimes different, which is why the N&R has filed more than a few open-records lawsuits during my time here.

We do that not only for our benefit but also for yours: North Carolina law properly makes no distinction between a reporter for a major news organization and John/Jane Doe who walks in off the street. And if bureaucrats jerk around the N&R, with its high-dollar, white-shoe law firm on retainer and its reputation for being willing to sue, over public records, how much worse will they treat Mr. or Ms. Doe when one of them comes in to see records on, say, the development being planned for their neighborhood?

Below the jump, I'll list a number of links and Web resources relevant to open records. As more of our readers begin to contribute to the conversation that news in Greensboro is becoming, I expect, and hope, that these resources will become even more commonly used. Let the sun shine in! In government, sunshine has killed far more bad ideas than good ones.

They can help prevent international incidents.

Gee, thanks, Mr. Sun. I go read your goofing on the Large Hadron Collider only to find some actual news contained therein, so now I have to do some work. Grrr.

It was sort of an indirect trip, however.

I read about the collider, a particle-physics project, and got interested because it is generating so much data that analyzing it all will require "distributed computing" -- that is, the data are broken up into pieces and shipped to computers all over the world for analysis, then shipped back. Otherwise, even the biggest, fastest, smokin'-hottest computer in the world would take [Carl Sagan voice] meelyuns an' meelyns of yeerz [/Carl Sagan voice] to analyze it all.

Perhaps the best-known distributed-computing program is SETI@Home, in which people can use their idle work or home computers to analyze data gathered by radio telescopes searching for signs of intelligent life elsewhere in the universe. (Participants also get a way-cool screensaver out of the deal.)

So I e-mailed the P.R. person for the Large Hadron Collider project to ask whether I or, you know, Joe/Jane Public with a computer, could participate in the data analysis.

Her diplomatic answer: Not now; maybe later. However, she said, there is another distributed-computing project that the public can participate in, called Einstein@Home, which seaches for spinning neutron stars (pulsars), using data gathered by gravitational-wave detectors. Participants download a program to analyze data, as they do in SETI@Home, in an effort to confirm or disprove the notion of gravity as waves, Albert Einstein's last untested prediction. It is one among many projects created to mark 2005, the centennial of the publication of Einstein's greatest works, as the World Year of Physics.

I would be near-suicidal over the depths of real, actual news into which I had fallen were it not for the name of the program you download to participate in this effort: BOINC. Pronounced "Boink!" Who cares what it stands for?? It's called BOINC!

Anyway, if you want a BOINC -- ahem. If you want to participate in Einstein@Home ... and I know you want to ... you can get more info or get BOINC here.

(*A play on the title of a "Calvin and Hobbes" cartoon collection.)

UPDATE: My love for physics is not infinite, however. For one thing, I have no desire to create my own black hole.

A newspaper in Wisconsin is charging people for the right to hang out with the newspaper's executives, a practice described in other contexts -- Washington, say, -- as selling access.

My longtime friend and former co-worker Forrest Brown, now a page designer at The Charlotte Observer, has a very funny, and very true-to-life, account of what buyers would be getting for their money if the Observer sold access to him.

I get paid in part to read blogs. The only thing weirder than that would be to charge someone to watch me do it. Not that I wouldn't entertain the notion -- particularly if I got a cut. We're still wrestling with the whole notion of what the Public Square's business model ultimately will look like, and I think the only appropriate position to take at this point is that nothing is off the table.*

*(If your Irony Alert isn't buzzing, please get it checked. Just sayin'.)

Well, OK, some of these have been around for a while, but we've now put up a one-stop link to blogs written by local politicians. The link also appears on our home page, in the left navigation bar, under "News."

We're still discussing what kind of blog aggregation to have on the redesigned site, but this is a step that we could take before that question gets settled.

For now, if you're a local politician who blogs and you want your blog added to the list, contact Mike Fuchs and he can take care of it.

I spent last week at a seminar in Berkeley (snippets from which archived here), which I did not publicize in advance because I thought it might not be a good idea to tell all the Internets that my wife and kids were going to be home without me for a week all alone. Except for the guns. And the dogs. And the landmines.

I'm just sayin'.

I have much to share, but before I do, I need to 1) file the kind of expense report that JR dreads getting and 2) check my inbox for anything needing my immediate attention. Once those tasks are done, I'll come back and fill you in on what happened and, to the extent I know it, where we go next.

I'm still digging out, but there are two new blogs to keep you occupied while I do so.

The Greensboro Truth and Reconciliation has its own blog, here.

And our GoTriad arts/entertainment section now has a blog to call its own: staffer Jeff Hahne's Musical Garbage Can, featuring quotes and outtakes from interviews Jeff does, concert and CD reviews, and so forth.

Enjoy.

To whoever at UCLA's Center for Communications and Community was kind enough to send me the Winter 2005 edition of the journal "Context," thank you very kindly. There's a lot to chew on here. I'll get to it ASAP.

As I mentioned, I spent last week at a seminar on multimedia and convergence at Berkeley. The seminar is held under the auspices of the Western Knight Center for Specialized Journalism by the graduate schools of journalism at Berkeley and Southern Cal.

There were 15 of us, mostly working journalists plus an educator. We spent most of the week working in teams doing real-life reporting and editing on multimedia presentations (or at least the first couple of pages of them) while learning practical techniques of reporting for the Web: audio and video recording and interviewing, recording standups and voiceovers, editing sound and video and creating Flash presentations.

(For grins, you can look at my team's presentation here. Our assignment called for us to create a site of at least three pages, incorporating at least two video clips, at least one audio clip and at least one Flash presentation. But as a piece of journalism, none of us would would call this "finished," so you need not e-mail me about holes in the reporting, etc. Anyway, it's about a Berkeley professor researching the possibility that herbicides may be causing certain species of frogs to grow ovaries inside their testes. It's called "A Man and His Frogs," a title my team chose after rejecting my suggestion, "Dude! Where's My Gonads?!")

I've got a background in music and radio production, but the last time I edited audio was with Ampex tape and a razor blade, so my immersion in digital editing was quite the awakening. If this technology had existed when I was in high school, I suspect my life would have taken a very different course.

In addition to the practical work, we also learned more about the philosophy of online journalism vs. more traditional news media, including some things to keep in mind when attempting to report a story for the Web from the git-go, rather than reporting for print and then spinning off some sort of Web presence for the story.

We also heard from such new-media luminaries as Neil Chase, ex-Marketwatch managing editor and now with NYTimes.com; Bill Gannon of Yahoo; Craig Newmark of Craigslist; and Rob Curley of the Lawrence (Kansas) Journal-World, KUSports.com and Lawrence.com. I'll spare you the details (Curley's got a great story and tells it well, but his presentation ran more than 2 hours and included a 98-page PowerPoint file), but taken as a whole, their remarks and predictions were interesting ... and reassured me that, if there is a way out of the dead-end situation in which the newspaper industry finds itself, we're probably headed in the right direction, albeit too slowly.

I've briefed JR, outlining generally where seminar leaders think we need to go from here: 1) I need to practice my new skills and get really proficient (and I'm going to need some software to do that); 2) I need to get with others in the newsroom to begin a) getting them to start reporting stories for the Web and b) training them in the practical techniques; and 3) finally, once Nos. 1 and 2 are well along, begin training people in the community who are interested in multimedia reporting for our site.

Without betraying any confidences or scoops, I can tell you that I've already begun Steps 1 and 2a (and I can edit audio/video at home in a pinch). So this seminar is already beginning to pay dividends for me, the N&R and, I hope, you.

Below the jump, I'm posting a list of links to sites that helped inform our learning and discussion during the seminar, courtesy of seminar co-leader Jane Ellen Stevens.

On a journalism-ethics e-mail list to which I subscribe, Patrick Thibodeau, an ex-daily newspaper writer who is now a tech writer, posted the following, which I reprint here with his kind permission:

Can a working reporter write an interesting blog without compromising their ethics?

I don't see how, unless they want to write really boring content, which is why North Carolina's News & Record experiment can't succeed.

An AP story recently offered a report about the newspaper's 11 staff written blogs. The AP reporter described it as an "audacious online experiment." But the reporter blogs are the opposite of what the best blogs are about; instead of provoking readers with sharp opinion and cogent analysis, the reporter blogs are as thrilling as a comfortable slippers. It is copy about nothing; wordy news briefs.

It's not for lack of talent. This is a good newspaper with solid news writers as capable as any. I'm sure News & Record reporters could write stinging blog copy. That's not the issue.

But how can a reporter write a blog that's worth reading and not violate core ethical guidelines? They can't express opinions about the people they cover. They can't take sides. Even if they ask sharp questions, these questions -- out of the context of an interview -- may be taken as opinion. Satire and skepticism? Probably out of the question, unless you rewrite a newsroom's ethical code.

I quickly responded to the list (no hotlinks in my original e-mail):

So I'm either dull or unethical. THERE's a helluva choice.

For the record (no pun intended), two of our blogs are written by editorial staffers, who have shooting licenses as far as opinion goes. A third is our daily letters to the editor, with comments enabled on every letter. And if the blogs generate compelling online dialogue, as frequently happens on our K-12 education blog, what does it matter if the original posts aren't stinging?

A couple of other related thoughts:

-- "Worth reading" is a subjective judgment.

-- I'm the only one of our bloggers who has been blogging any length of time, and my N&R blog at this point is primarily intended to keep readers abreast of what progress we're making in our transition to an open-source, multimedia news operation. It's not intended at this point to offer stinging analysis (though I've done that a time or two, on such subjects as Sinclair Broadcasting Group and a local city councilman's criticism of the N&R). As our writers find their footing, I think you'll see the blogs evolve.

-- As blogs become more a part of what news organizations do, I suspect that some ethical standards will evolve to take blog culture into account. Sure, it's odd to see a working journalist express an opinion on a blog ... but it's equally odd, for now, to see the subject of the post respond and for an online dialogue to develop. Still, that's part of what "news as conversation" entails, it's going to become more common, and as it does I think you'll see both journalists and audiences adapting to it. For now, most working newspaper journalists who blog are playing it fairly safe, and rightly so ... but then, standards for "safe" are evolving, as well. To take just one example, torture as an instrument of government policy used to be beyond the pale; any journalist criticizing it would never be criticized in return. But now the practice is considered appropriate in some quarters, meaning that that same criticism is no longer "safe."

-- Finally, keep in mind our goal: the transition, which I mentioned above, toward an open-source, multimedia news operation that remains a viable business as well. That transition was the point of the AP article; the blogs are intended to be simply one means, among many, toward that end. (Jay Rosen's most recent "Pressthink" post, "Laying the Newspaper Down to Die," examines the conditions that he, and we, think make this transition necessary.) The point isn't for our blogs to succeed. The point is for our transition to succeed, with or without the blogs, because or in spite of them.

I'll be happy to answer any other questions or address any additional concerns anyone has.