Too many blogs, but a gonzo idea...

For a possible new blog, I came up with a first post, mirrored below, that I thought might prompt some discussion. Comment here or there, either is OK. (For visitors from other Twitter flocks, AEJMC is the Association for Education in Journallism & Mass Communication.)

Event-design as Rorschach test... Am I the only one who mistook the jagged white Rocky Mountain profile ranging through next year's AEJMC Convention logo for a hint that the organization is fracturing? Or took it for an optimistic graph of media industries' ups and downs, showing a slight upturn on the right? On second thought, the line looks exciting, dangerous and cracked, which reminds me of someone...

Getting a crowd of journalism educators together in Hunter Thompson territory in August could be a lot of fun. I hope I can attend... (I hope anyone can attend, given the state of academic travel budgets, if my own institution is any indicator.)

Thinking of Hunter inspired a rewrite of this post and gave me a panel discussion idea for the event:

"Going Gonzo: From Uncle Duke to Johnny Depp, how do journalism faculty and today's students deal with Hunter S. Thompson's legacy?"

He's in my students' textbook, on a page headed, Journalism heroes, legends and folklore. He's relevant to bloggers and skeptics, rebels and iconoclasts, lefties -- and libertarian lovers of recreational firearms.

So let's make that a discussion question for any journalism educators who see this post: How DO you treat Hunter Thompson in your classes? Is he in the textbook you use? (In my case, it's a "yes" for Tim Harrower's Inside Reporting.) Is he discussed in writing classes? In magazine classes? Reporting classes? History classes? Ethics classes? Do students read him? What do they think?

---

Background: This paragraph was at the top of this post before the link to it slipped into the Twittersphere, referring to the part above. Rather than be accused of "burying the lead," I've turned things around.

About having multiple blogs. My old Radio Userland blog had an interesting feature: I could tag items with "category" names that actually became separate blogs. I used that to create a subset of my blog posts so that I could link some of them to the Association for Education in Journalism & Mass Communication newspaper division's website, which I've been editing for a few years. I even had evidence that someone read it once or twice.

Now I've been wondering whether to use Blogger or WordPress to recreate that blog as a separate entity, possibly as a more formal adjunct to the Newspaper Division site, which I never seem to get around to updating in a timely fashion.

Among other things, I haven't been able to attend the last few AEJMC conventions, which makes it difficult to spread news about the organization. So here's an experiment: I'm going to point the division officers to a trial site or two and see what they think. With WordPress, I might be able to enlist a co-author or two. Here's the prototype, with a question about Hunter S. Thompson.

Journalism students across the globe share a reporting project

This looks very interesting... An online discussion among journalism students has produced a road map for a "global collaborative reporting project."

The timely topic is health, with sub-topics for feature writers, beginning reporters, "data miners" and investigative reporters.

Suzanne Yada at at San Jose State University has this page about the project: Journalism students across the globe, here is your reporting assignment.

Sarah Jackson at Kwantlen Polytechnic University in British Columbia has this: Eye to eye: #Collegejourn crew is planning a global collaborative journalism project

Josh Halliday at the University of Sunderland (UK) posted the plans to the Online Journalism Blog: The CollegeJourn global reporting project.

That "#Collegejourn" they mention is a Twitter "hashtag," the key to an online discussion conducted via Twitter.

Some participants also will be using the UK site Help Me Investigate, which I haven't had time to investigate myself. (It's partly the work of Paul Bradshaw, online journalism prof at Birmingham City University and publisher of that Online Journalism Blog mentioned above.)

Maybe between h1n1 flu (my school just had its first case) and the U.S. health insurance debate, enough journalism students have become health-issue conscious and will take up the challenge to come up with school newspaper and school website stories, class projects... or maybe to get something published in the off-campus media.

Coincidentally, there's a free 60-minute webinar Wednesday (Sept. 9) on Health Reform Coverage: The Key Issues with Trudy Lieberman, contributing editor to the Columbia Journalism Review; Kay Lazar of The Boston Globe; Karen Tumulty of TIME; and Robert Laszewski of Health Care Policy and Marketplace Review. Mike Hoyt, editor of CJR, will moderate. Register in advance at the link above. The webinar is also accepting early questions.

Here are a few other places students might browse for health-reporting inspiration:

• A 2003 issue of Nieman Reports on Medical Reporting
  
• The Association of Health Care Journalists, and its blog.
  
• The UNC Chapel Hill (my alma mater) master's program in medical journalism.
• A Journal of the American Medical Association article about Medical Journalism and Public Awareness.
• The Journal of Health Communication at George Washington U (more academic research on public health publicity, but could have some story leads).
  

100 Best Blogs for Journalism Students??

2013 Update: Better late than never, after four years,  I have just received an email note from the keepers of this site saying that they plan a substantial redesign, and requesting that I remove the link to its old address. 

Just a little bit of critical thinking will help journalism students identify the flaws in this list of the 100 Best Blogs for Journalism Students. [Link removed by request.]

Here are my top 10 clues:

10. It misspells the name of #14 Harvard's Nieman Foundation and Nieman Journalism Lab. (Remember "i before e..."?)

9. It identifies the #12 Columbia Journalism Review as a blog in the "educators" category, when it's a leading magazine in the field.

8. The site is entirely silent about its ranking methodology. Stacking a bunch of categories, starting with "general" and "educators," suggests that numerical rank isn't really the point. And UK journalism blogs are omitted. (See this UK list.)

7. There is no contact information to respond to the creator of the list.
The "reply" area at the bottom of the list says you must be logged in to comment, but offers no way to log in.

6. Descriptions of the sites are very thin, often just the keywords from a site's self-description (including mine).

5. The name of the blog is "Learn-gasm." How serious can you take that?

4. The list does not include a link to this page, at either http://www.stepno.com/blog or http://boblog.blogspot.com , which has been my main blog for the past year.

3. The list also does not include a link to http://www.stepno.com/oldblog or http://couranteer.com, the archive of my old blog posts, whose original server is being discontinued later this year.

2. The list does link to that old blog of mine (#10), on its soon to be discontinued server.

1. Last but not least, it lists my blog (that old one) in the world's top 10 blogs for journalism students! Gotta be something wrong there.

Actually, the list of 100 does include a lot of blogs that journalism students should know about, even mine. I'm happy to be in such good company, but can't imagine how I wound up above most of them (including those Harvard and Columbia sites, Mindy McAdams, Jeff Jarvis at CUNY, Jay Rosen at NYU, and many more.

Here's an idea: Take the numbers off the list, replace them with bullets, and run some program to randomize the order! (But, in my case, if this essay doesn't get me bumped off the list entirely, please use my current address or its shortcut, http://stepno.com/blog, not the one that will evaporate in December. )

Online college media sites and resources

With a new semester rapidly approaching, here are a few links I hope the editors of student media websites already have on their bookmark lists. A few are old friends; the others are places I'm just starting to explore. I may add a few more over the next week. Quoted comments are from the sites themselves:

Society of Professional Journalists

"The Society of Professional Journalists is the nation’s most broad-based journalism organization, dedicated to encouraging the free practice of journalism and stimulating high standards of ethical behavior." (Annual convention coming up Aug. 27-30 in Indianapolis. Also see its Student Resources page.)

Innovation in College Media

"The Center for Innovation in College Media is a non-profit think-tank that was created to help college student media adapt and flourish in the new media environment." (Also see this MediaShift column by founder Bryan Murley.)

Journalism 2.0

"Mark Briggs coined the term Journalism 2.0 in 2005 when he was invited to write a book about digital literacy for journalists based on a training program he had created at The News Tribune in Tacoma, Wash. Mark is currently working on an updated version of the book, to be published by CQPress in fall 2009." (The original is still online here.)

ReportingOn

"A professional reporting community for journalists... helps journalists of all stripes find peers with experience dealing with a particular topic, story or source."

Collaborative Journalism | Publish2

"Link Journalism: Bring the best of the web to your readers. Complement your reporting with links to relevant and interesting content." (Newest feature: Social Journalism.)

CoPress

"CoPress empowers student newsrooms to hack the future of journalism." It has a blog, forum and wiki as well as selling hosting service to college newspapers.

Associate Collegiate Press

"ACP is the oldest and largest national membership organization for college student journalists. Since 1921, we've offered our members resources to help their publications - newspapers, yearbooks, magazines, broadcast programs, and online publications - improve."

Education Writers Association

"The Education Writers Association is the professional organization of education reporters and editors. We support the ongoing professional development of journalists as part of our mission to help improve the quality of education reporting in the United States." (That's a link to its higher education resource page; the group also offers $30 memberships for students. Faculty have to pay $100!)

HigherEd Watch

"Analysis, reporting and commentary on the world of higher education, with a focus on college access, affordability, and quality." (A blog at the New America Foundation.)

The Chronicle of Higher Education

"the No. 1 source of news, information, and jobs for college and university faculty members and administrators. Based in Washington, D.C., The Chronicle has more than 70 full-time writers and editors, as well as 17 foreign correspondents around the world." (Long-standing place where professors look for jobs. Some content is free with registration, some for paid subscribers only.)

Inside Higher Ed

"Inside Higher Ed is the online source for news, opinion and jobs for all of higher education. Whether you're an adjunct or a vice president, a grad student or an eminence grise, we've got what you need to thrive in your job or find a better one..." (All free... challenging the Chronicle since 2004, without killing trees.)

Global Student Journalists

"...an online meeting place for student journalists from around the world. Students currently enrolled in a recognized post-secondary Journalism program, anywhere in the world, can create a profile and begin connecting with other student journalists. Members can network, share ideas, upload projects and receive feedback on their work." (New, started by journalism students in Canada.)

... and, last only because I've mentioned Mindy's RGMP recently:

Teaching Online Journalism

"Notes from the classroom and observations about today's practice of journalism online," by Mindy McAdams, including her Reporter's Guide to Multimedia Proficiency (RGMP).

Quite a Rugmap: Do it yourself multimedia journalism education

For her online Reporter’s Guide to Multimedia Proficiency, University of Florida journalism professor of Web wizardry Mindy McAdams has spent six months compiling a terrific collection of links, lessons and sage advice for would-be multimedia reporters and producers.

(She abbreviates the heading "RGMP" at the top of each page, which I either read as "RCMP" and expect the Mounties, or want to pronounce "rugmap." hence the odd headline on this item. Come to think of it, we've been weaving the World Wide Web so long that we might call it a World Wide Rug.)

The 15 RGMP pages are part of her Teaching Online Journalism blog, where the concluding episode landed today: RGMP 15: Maintain and update your skills.

A key quote:

"... let go of your self-defeating ideas about how you are 'not a computer person,' or how 'computers don't like me.' These attitudes are killing you and your future in journalism."

As she mentions, many well-known practitioners and teachers of online journalism skills have learned how to do what they do on their own, or informally -- from other Web sites, online tutorials and workshops. Even today, when most journalism programs have courses in digital media, every formal college class has to stop somewhere -- but the technology keeps going.

Part of the agenda for digital media students has to be coping with change -- new technologies, new versions of old ones, and new stories to tell. With all of the new things Flashing and Twittering and Huluing around, Mindy makes an especially good point about setting priorities, weighing what to learn. She suggests asking yourself these questions about that shiny new thing:

• What will you use it for?
  
• How well does it fit with your other skill sets?
  
• And above all — is it a skill that is going to be relevant for a long time?
  

The topics discussed on her 15 RGMP posts are the basics of multimedia -- Web publishing (with a blog), digital audio editing and publishing (with a podcast), photography and basic photo editing, video and low-cost video editing, and putting it all together to tell stories. Take a look, starting at the beginning:

• RGMP 1: Read blogs and use RSS

For the list of all 15, see the last episode:

• RGMP 15: Maintain and update your skills.
  

Guiding journalists into social networking

The Journalist's Guide to Facebook is the latest in a series of compilations about online social networking for journalists at the "Social Media Guide" website called http://mashable.com.

Among the others (also listed at the end of the Facebook article) are:

• 10 Ways Journalism Schools Are Teaching Social Media
• How Social Media is Radically Changing the Newsroom
• 10 Must-Haves for Your Social Media Policy
• The Journalist’s Guide to Twitter
• Everything I Need to Know About Twitter I Learned in J School

Speaking of online journalism, congratulations to the Roanoke Times (http://roanoke.com) for being cited by the Associated Press Managing Editors Awards in the "convergence" category for its interactive tour of new $66 million Taubman Museum of Art. The announcement is here on page 2 of the award story. (Roanoke Times editor Carole Tarrant's name is at the top of that page because she was a judge in another category of the competition, listed on the previous page.)

What we get from good reporters and critical readers

In Who Needs the NY Times? We All Do. Still, Jim Sleeper points out what a newspaper can do by supporting excellent reporters, even if the same institution has critics who consider it guilty of a laundry list of sins from stodginess to dishonesty.

To make his case, Sleeper discusses three stories and a column that demonstrate reporters' skills, Times resources and something extra:

• "Nina Bernstein's front-pager yesterday blew open this country's scandalous post-9/11 immigration policies..."


• "Michael Powell's similarly fine-grained, explosive work on predatory mortgage fraud..."


• An example of "grounded moral witness" from "Roger Cohen, who stayed in Iran at great risk thanks to a true journalist's passion and courage..."


• An example of journalism as a bearer of "public memory as well as moral witness in Bob Herbert's column about the Vietnam War..."

Because Sleeper wrote his defense of the Times in the Talking Points Memo Cafe forum, there's a thoughtful discussion at the end of his column, and unlike too many online writers, he makes it a conversation. I get the impression that some of the participants didn't follow his advice and go read the Times stories themselves. I'm going to go do that now that I've bookmarked them.

This morning, however, I've been distracted by following links to other articles by Sleeper, a writer and teacher with a long resume, on topics ranging from Thucydides and the value of classical education to George Orwell, Tocqueville and journalism.

I've bookmarked his page of articles on News Media, the Public Sphere and the Phantom Public, surprised and embarrassed that I haven't read his stuff before.

Off to run 'Tell the Truth and Run'

Will today's students pay attention to a 98-year-old on a July morning when they could be at the beach?

As substitute prof for a summer school "Media & Society" class tomorrow, I get to show, watch and discuss the film George Seldes: Tell the Truth and Run. (George is the 98-year-old, not me. At least he was 98 when interviewed for the film. He lived to be 104.)

I first saw the film in 1997, when Rick Goldsmith presented it at a conference in San Francisco. His work was nominated for an Oscar back then, but although well reviewed, it had a tough fight against story of the Ali-Frazier "Rumble in the Jungle," which took the prize that year.

For this course, Seldes is a more appropriate battler than Ali -- as a journalist, as a media critic, and as self-publisher of his "In Fact" newsletter.

Discussion question: How much did he have in common with some of today's bloggers and citizen journalists?

For students who want to get right to the source, some of Seldes's writings are online at PublicEye and brasscheck.com/seldes, including Ten Tests for a Free Press.

That could be a good segue into another piece of early press criticism, Upton Sinclair's The Brass Check, which is also available online.

And the film quotes I.F. Stone, who called Seldes "the father of the alternative press," which might inspire some of the students to peek at Stone's own online archives.

Here's a bit of the blurb brasscheck.com ran about the documentary, probably from the original press announcement. Students should learn the names...:

"Seldes at age 98 is the centerpiece of the film: remarkably engaging,witty and still impassioned about his ideas and ideals. Ralph Nader, Victor Navasky, Ben Bagdikian, Daniel Ellsberg, Nat Hentoff and Jeff Cohen, among others, provide incisive commentary. Stunning archival footage and over 500 headlines, photographs and articles provide a rich historical backdrop."

Hmm. It just dawned on me that one of the narrators of "Tell the Truth and Run" is back in the news this summer. I wonder if the students will recognize his voice. They're probably too young to remember Lou Grant.

Information overload department:

• Is the Entire Press Corrupt?
• Facts and Fascism
• Lords of the Press
• Witness to a Century
• You Can't Print That: The Truth Behind the News 1918 to 1928

By way of introducing one of Seldes' themes to the class, I should bring my banjo and sing this song... But I'll be kind and just play Pete Seeger's clip of one verse, then read the more pertinent verse about "Press-titution."

Journalism needs pros, amateurs, devout agnostics

Ellen Hume, one of my favorite authors and thinkers on media-future issues for almost 15 years, is leaving the Center for Future Civic Media at MIT.

Coincidentally, there's a conference this week at MIT on "The future of news and civic media," and Hume's parting message is full of food for thought: The future of news?. A veteran of both the Wall Street Journal and PBS, Hume says major news organizations are still needed, even while many of today's fine journalists have never set foot inside any mainstream media organization.

Snippets:

• "Joshua Micah Marshall is I.F. Stone2.0 (http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com)"
  
  
• "Twitter is dazzling, as a headline service and a conversation. But I need more than Twitter, YouTube and my Facebook social network to understand this complicated world."


• "My bottom line has always been: how can people understand their real choices for shaping their own lives and communities? How can the flow of news actually promote personal and community agency? This is why the future of journalism and civic media are important to me."
  


• "If the best and brightest young folks don’t value agnostic, professional journalism, even a dozen new business models won’t work for long."


• "I am waiting for a public relations campaign to argue the virtues of Kovach and Rosenstiel-style journalism (http://www.journalism.org/node/71), combined with a comprehensive news literacy curriculum at all levels, in all countries, that invites people to produce, consume and pay for public service news."


• "Fair, important, earth-shaking journalism is actually hard to do. It’s harder than simply repeating what anyone tells you, or selecting the facts that support your own biases. That is what all the fuss is about as newspapers around the country collapse and die."

Read the whole thing.

More about Ellen Hume.

More about the Future of news & civic media conference at MIT.

Summer fun for journalism students and grads

Mark Luckie has an inspiring list of 30 Things You Should Do This Summer for journalism school grads, most of which involve getting practice with new online journalism tools... and they are perfectly good ideas for students a year or three away from graduation.

Meanwhile, the Society of Professional Journalists has a "Journalist's Toolbox Update," with more than 30 resources for reporters, editors and teachers -- from online social network tools to background articles on swine flu and government contractors in Iraq. Exploring any of those would be a good idea, too...

As Luckie puts it, "You could spend this summer working on your killer tan... or you could use the downtime to get heads up on the thousands of other grads competing for journalism jobs."

I added a footnote to his post, suggesting that many journalism grads would also profit from the less technological activity of reading some really good journalism -- both to experience the writing and to think about how the reporting was done. I'm working on Max Frankel's autobiography, "The Times of My Life, and My Life with The Times," myself. Gay Talese's "The Kingdom and the Power" and David Halberstam's "The Powers that Be" are old favorites for J-school grads who haven't read them yet.

Here are some source lists:

• Mitchell Stephens' list of 100 top works of journalism


• Pulitzer-winning booklength works of general non-fiction and biography


• Pulitzer-winning feature stories, investigative reporting, and more.
  

Those last Pulitzer examples include stories you can read online. The book-length suggestions, on the other hand, are easier to take to the beach.

Journalism as a pro-am lifestyle... sometimes with music

A UK university offers an MA in Social Media, asking & answering: "Is the MA in Social Media for me? If you are a media or cultural studies graduate, have experience in the web, PR, or marketing industries, and want an opportunity to explore the emerging area of social media through scholarly research or practice, then: yes."

Picking up threads from my recent Twitter obsession... Coincidentally, blogger MarketingProfs offers: "Everything I Need to Know About Twitter I Learned in J School" http://bit.ly/2lEzsm

And NYTimes.com blogs out its requests for local neighborhood citizen reporters to go to meetings: http://bit.ly/dxrW8

... with a Twitter boost from blogger & J-school prof Jeff Jarvis:
"NYT to public: 'Be the journalists.' The Local assigns the locals. http://bit.ly/11GNEB "

Maybe J-schools need a new slogan: "It's not a career; it's a lifestyle"?

And one you can combine with your other talents -- in this case, not the usual underground press, but something I considered when I lived in Boston.

At the time, I even had a line or two from this song in mind... "newspapermen meet the most interesting people..." along with this picture from one of my favorite LP jackets.

New slogan for banjo heads -- or laptop lids? -- "This machine surrounds unemployment and forces it to surrender."

Connecticut news outsourced to Indian staff

Hartford Advocate: News - Outsource This!:
"We hired Indian freelance journalists to write the paper this week...

"Vanishing revenues have put the newspaper industry in a death spiral and many papers long ago outsourced other functions (like IT support centers and telemarketing) to India. We devised this issue as an experiment on what outsourced news might look like."

Back when I worked for The Hartford Courant, I remember delivering a bundle of copies of the first issue of The Hartford Advocate to the University of Connecticut for my next-door neighbor, one of the four people who started the paper.

As I recall, Ed, Linda and another couple launched the whole Advocate chain after Ed and the other guy got fed up with "part-time" copydesk jobs at the the now-fading but then-independent Hartford Courant... which eventually was gobbled up by a chain, which was gobbled up by another chain, which then bought the Advocate alt-weeklies.

So much for "alt." But it's good to see someone still has a sense of humor.

UPDATE: The New York Times reports on the same "outsourcing" stunt, but closes with a nice shout-out to former Advocate staffer Paul Bass's New Haven Independent, a Web-only newspaper that has concentrated on what you might call "in-sourcing" his city.

"Mr. Bass said he liked the outsourced issue, but it reminded him, alas, that so much of American journalism these days actually can be done from a desk in Mumbai, and that the threat facing most American newspapers isn’t necessarily outsourcing or even the new frontier of the Internet. It’s dull, stodgy products that have been downsized and bled dry by corporate owners. If what you do can be done, however imperfectly, from Mumbai, he said, then maybe you need to go back to Square One."

To see what I mean by "in-sourcing," which involves having your feet, head and heart in a local community, see this story and this story, including their background links. Nothing there looks "phoned in" -- not from Mumbai; not even from some office across town.

Sing a song of press-titution?

With layoffs, buyouts and closings, these days it seems fewer newspapermen each month are "meeting interesting people..." But a friend pointed me to this 2006 video after I posted my blog item (and a flutter of tweets) about Pete Seeger's birthday concert. I haven't heard that this song fit into the program. It would need a pretty serious update, since it dates back to the days of flagpole sitters. I was writing for my school newspaper the first time I heard the song, and found a copy in the old People's Songbook, related to the still-publishing Sing Out!, the folksong magazine. I should renew my subscription and see if anyone has set Phil Meyer's The Vanishing Newspaper to music yet... Pete doesn't mention it on the video, but the later verses of Vern Partlow's song make it clear it has roots in the early -- and better -- days of the Newspaper Guild union. Now that Pete has taught you the tune, everybody sing...: Oh, publishers are such interesting people! Their policy's an acrobatic thing. They shout they represent the common people. It's funny Wall Street never has complained. But publishers have worries, for publishers must go To working folks for readers, and big shots for their dough. Oh, publishers are such interesting people! It could be press-titution, I don't know. Ting-a-ling-a-ling, advertising. Ting-a-ling-a-ling, circulation. Get that payoff, keep those readers; What a headache, what a mess. Yes, publishers are such interesting people! Let's give three cheers for freedom of the press. Oh, newspapermen are such interesting people! They used to work like hell just for romance, But finally, the movies notwithstanding, They all got tired of patches on their pants. They organized a union, and got a living wage. They joined progressive actors upon a living stage. Now newspapermen meet such interesting people, Who know they've got a people's fight to wage. [big rousing chorus now...] Ting-a-ling-a-ling, Newspaper Guild, We got a free new world to build; Meet the people, that's a thrill, All together fits the bill. Oh a newspaperman meets such interesting people! It's wonderful to represent the Guild.

Lyrics from the Digital Tradition database at Mudcat.org Just a coincidence... Here's the latest on the Guild negotiations at The Boston Globe.

Not only the usual suspects win Pulitzers

Five for the NY Times, plus several signs of the times

The 2009 Pulitzer Prizes in journalism include familiar names like The New York Times, but a few surprises, most notably a public service medal -- the most prestigious -- inspired by the work of a 29-year-old reporter a year into her job at the Las Vegas Sun.

Alexandra Berzon's stories investigated the high death rate among construction workers on the Las Vegas Strip -- a dozen fatalities in a year and a half -- and lax enforcement of regulations. The paper got behind her, giving her six weeks to develop the first stories, and following them with editorials calling for change.

“This story was about the failure of government and an attitude of the people that said it was not important to inspect for safety violations the way they’re supposed to, which results in working people getting hurt,” Sun Editor Brian Greenspun said. “It was a failure up and down the line ... When it gets fixed, that means you saved that many people’s lives. What greater purpose can you have in the newspaper business?”

The Pulitzer citation was "to the Las Vegas Sun, and notably the courageous reporting by Alexandra Berzon."

The Sun's story about the surprise award credited Berzon -- a 2006 Berkeley journalism master's grad -- -- with "persevering against closed doors and intimidation" in reporting the series.

"The Sun’s Pulitzer victory is a win," the paper said, "for the underdog — workers on the Strip, a young reporter and an all-enterprise newspaper that doesn’t cover the ordinary news of the day — and provides inspiration at a time when journalism is reeling from cutbacks."

The Sun report says Berzon's first stories grew to a yearlong project that involved not only dealing with the OSHA bureaucracy, but "ignoring threats of physical harm if she showed up at a union hall."

Web brings winners

Meanwhile, in the National Reporting category, a Web-based project took a major award, and a story first published online took the Breaking News prize.

The National Reporting Pulitzer went to the St. Petersburg Times for “PolitiFact.com,” its "fact-checking initiative during the 2008 presidential campaign that used probing reporters and the power of the World Wide Web to examine more than 750 political claims, separating rhetoric from truth to enlighten voters."

(This is the first year the Pulitzer committee considered projects that were primarily online.)

The non-profit St. Pete newspaper also used the Web creatively to accompany the long-form narrative story that brought it the Feature Writing prize. See winner Lane DeGregory's video comments at Poynter.org on why the combination of awards is especially gratifying, and an earlier story about the project itself.

The PolitiFact project came close to winning the Public Service prize, but was moved to the National Reporting category. The other Public Service runner-up was The New York Times for its "comprehensive coverage of the economic meltdown of 2008." The Times did win Pulitzers in five other categories, for stories including its investigation of the role of retired generals working as radio and television analysts, and its breaking news coverage of the New York governor's sex scandal. The latter citation commended the paper for "breaking the story on its Web site and then developing it with authoritative, rapid-fire reports."

Speaking of Web things, see the Mesa, Ariz., Local Reporting irony below...

The other 2008 journalism Pulitzers:

• Five for The New York Times (the second-best year in its 101-prize history)
  
• -- Breaking News Reporting - The New York Times Staff
• -- International Reporting - The New York Times Staff
• -- Investigative Reporting - David Barstow of The New York Times
• -- Criticism - Holland Cotter of The New York Times
• -- Feature Photography - Damon Winter of The New York Times
• Two for the St.Pete Times.
• -- Feature Writing - Lane DeGregory of the St. Petersburg Times for "The Girl in the Window."
• -- National Reporting - St. Petersburg Times Staff for PolitiFact and its "Truth-O-Meter."
• Explanatory Reporting - Bettina Boxall and Julie Cart of the Los Angeles Times
• Local Reporting - Detroit Free Press Staff
• Local Reporting - Ryan Gabrielson and Paul Giblin of the East Valley Tribune, Mesa, AZ (With some serious state-of-the-trade and Web irony: By the time the award was announced, Giblin had been laid off -- and launched an online legislative news startup.)
• Commentary - Eugene Robinson of The Washington Post
• Editorial Writing - Mark Mahoney of The Post-Star, Glens Falls, NY
• Editorial Cartooning - Steve Breen of The San Diego Union-Tribune
• Breaking News Photography - Patrick Farrell of The Miami Herald

What 'the collapse of journalism' means

In The Nation, Robert McChesney and John Nichols call the fading of great American newspapers "the most serious threat in our lifetimes to self-government and the rule of law as it has been understood here in the United States."

(Meanwhile, Forbes reports today that journalism is still a popular college major, despite diminished job prospects. Maybe those grads hope to find a new way to be the Fourth Estate online, if not on paper. It has some faculty feeling existential.)

Nichols and McChesney have a book coming out in the fall, titled Saving Journalism: The Soul of Democracy, but they give away good chunks of their argument in The Nation article.

While enthusiastic about ProPublica, Talking Points Memo, the Huffington Post and regional online journalism projects with non-profit funding, they call those "mere triage strategies."

Instead, they argue that newspapers' corporate owners carry much of the blame for the demise of professional journalism, and call for fourth-estate funding by the other three estates:

"Only government can implement policies and subsidies to provide an institutional framework for quality journalism... Fortunately, the rude calculus that says government intervention equals government control is inaccurate and does not reflect our past or present, or what enlightened policies and subsidies could entail."

Among those subsidies would be funds for community and public broadcasting and for high school and college papers, along with free postage for publications that limit their ad revenue to 20 percent of the budget. Such journals (hmm, like The Nation?), they note, often do "investigative, cutting-edge, politically provocative journalism."

I'm going to read more of that article later... maybe even buy their book and revive my Nation subscription. But I won't hold my breath about the chance of getting that batch of subsidies through Congress in any big hurry.

Surviving in Roanoke

Meanwhile, back in the cold world of capitalist free-enterprise journalism, here's a business-watcher with a list of 10 Newspapers That Will Survive The Apocalypse

Nicholas Carlson, who covers media and advertising for Silicon Alley Insider, says "his guy" in the newspaper-investment biz has the Roanoke Times on his survivor list.

I guess that's good news for the unwrapped fish of the New River Valley, even if Carlson does use an anonymous source and spell the name of the city "Roanake" at one point:

Our guy likes almost all of Landmark Communications papers in Virginia. They're in isolated, steady markets without a lot of overlap. The Roanoke Times is a 'good product,' a "community type paper.' Roanake is the kind of place where if the car dealers start selling cars again, they'll start taking out ads in the local paper again.

On the story's opening page, Carlson says:

Our guy is convinced that underneath the mess, there are plenty of local newspapers that, after cutting newsroom bloat and R&D costs, would be plenty profitable. He says these local newspapers just need to stop "spending on trying to find their way out" and 'instead run their current good business.'
"What does our source think of newspapers on the Web? Not much. He says local papers should have a Web site run by two people that links to international and national news and keeps all local content behind a pay wall or off the Internet entirely.

Speaking of surviving the apocalypse, Tim Thornton, an award-winning environmental journalist and the first Roanoke Times reporter I've had as a guest speaker in class, just got the ax... a bit mysteriously.

The many words of support in comments on those two NewRiverVoice stories about his departure, and elsewhere, should make Tim feel at least a tiny bit better.

The comments also include links to last fall's item on the paper in the Columbia Journalism Review. It ran with the provocative headline "Something's Rotten in Roanoke." CJR's story had several readers leaping to the paper's defense; so far none of the comments I've read about Thornton's case have taken the newspaper managers' side.

Digital Video Photojournalism Experiences & Tips

Photojournalism guru Ken Kobre has put together a special video-focused edition of The Digital Journalist, with newspaper and Public Relations or organizational/institutional communication crossover articles. More evidence that, online, video isn't just for television anymore.

Ken says:

"The Digital Journalist (TDJ) has been on the front lines of reinventing photojournalism since its first issue 11 years ago. This month, the issue is devoted to videojournalism, and we’re blessed to have some of the nation’s top practitioners in this emerging field contribute. They tell and show how they are changing this emerging field..."

Samples:

From TV News Shooter to One-Man-Band VJ

When I am out on a story and I tell someone I'm from The New York Times, the immediate response is usually a certain respectful recognition. People know the name; they know it stands for good journalism.

10 Tips for Dramatically Improving Your Videojournalism Stories

The problem with many videojournalism stories is that they are neither good video, good journalism, nor good stories.

Institutional Videojournalism

AARP Bulletin Today launched online in May 2008 as the daily-news counterpart to the AARP Bulletin, a monthly print newspaper sent to all 24 million AARP member households.

The State of the News Media 2009:
"Online Journalists Optimistic About Revenue and Technology, Concerned About Changing Values"

"Journalists who work online are more optimistic about the future of their profession than are news people tied to more traditional media platforms, but at best their optimism is an uneasy one, according a new survey of members of the Online News Association produced by the Association and the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism."

Growing a new forest of news while dead-tree media fall

Seeing a new media ecology

My headline takes some liberties with Stephen Berlin Johnson's ecological metaphor for the current transition in the reporting and delivery of news, but I recommend his essay, one of several good ones this week on saving the news or finding a sustainable model for civic or public affairs journalism. Johnson's discussion leads to his information flowchart at the right.

For more about the trend in newspapers going online-mostly, online-only or out of business, see these:

• NPR: Chronicling the death of American newspapers
  
• Seattle Post Intelligencer
• Christian Science Monitor
• Rocky Mountain News
  

Johnson's thoughts came out of the much-blogged-about South by Southwest (sxsw) conference, while a panel discussion on the future of The San Francisco Chronicle -- and local news reporting -- inspired Salon co-founder Scott Rosenberg and blogger Dave Winer to write equally thoughtful essays, each finding some room for optimism -- if not about newspapers, about the future of news itself.

(Also see Rosenberg on journalism schools, and Clay Shirky's piece I mentioned a few days ago.)

Learning from history: Saving journalism, not newspapers

As part of this essay, Clay Shirky goes back to Gutenberg to analyze what happens in a communication revolution: Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable.

Among his conclusions:

"Society doesn’t need newspapers. What we need is journalism. For a century, the imperatives to strengthen journalism and to strengthen newspapers have been so tightly wound as to be indistinguishable. That’s been a fine accident to have, but when that accident stops, as it is stopping before our eyes, we’re going to need lots of other ways to strengthen journalism instead.
"When we shift our attention from ’save newspapers’ to ’save society’, the imperative changes from ‘preserve the current institutions’ to ‘do whatever works.’ And what works today isn’t the same as what used to work."

There's a lot more in his essay, which I'm going to assign to media history students and to students looking for journalism careers.

Who's Clay? See his home page

Footnote: I had a sense of deja vu after writing that headline... See Saving journalism may not mean saving newspapers from December 2004.

Newspaper's story of coal country health care project wins video journalism award

A Washington Post report about Southwest Virginia has won an international video journalism award. Titled "The Healing Fields," the story by Alexandra Garcia took first place in the Concentra Award competition, which concluded last week at the DNA2009 conference in Brussels.

Garcia told the story of the Remote Area Medical volunteer corps, which brings more than 800 doctors, dentists, nurses and other health-care workers to Wise County Fairgrounds in July to offer free treatment to those who cannot afford it -- treating more than 2,600 patients in three days.

The two-part video originally accompanied Hidden Hurt, a Washington Post Magazine story by Mary Otto, subtitled "Desperate for medical care, the uninsured flock by the hundreds to a remote corner of Virginia for the chance to see a doctor."

The Concentra Award is sponsored by Avid and Panasonic. Its stated goal is to promote healthy competition in television news, and "to stimulate journalists to film and edit their own pieces, so they master the entire production process themselves." The Concentra Web site includes videos of winners and nominees for this year and the three preceding years.

In addition to Garcia's winning entry, two more of this year's eight finalists were from the Post, the work of Emmy award-winning video journalist Travis Fox. The competition is international, with entries from the BBC, Al Jazeera, and producers in Canada, Belgium, Germany, Norway and more -- all provided in English or with subtitles.