Journalism is a Process, Not a Product

Monthly archives for June, 2009

Should You Go To J-School?

Jun16th
2009 22 Comments Written by Digidave

I make every effort to be as open and available as possible. Occasionally I receive questions about how to start a nonprofit, advice on content management systems, etc and I make an effort to answer every single one.

It just so happens that the following question was sent just before I got on a plane. So this individual will get a long and detailed response. And because it is a question I get regularly, I will point people to this blog post in the future when they ask the ever popular question: “Should I go to graduate school for journalism?”

My Background: For undergrad I did a double major in philosophy and rhetoric at U.C. Berkeley. These were both useless unless I wanted to sell thoughts on the street. To get started in journalism straight from undergrad I did a little over one year as a “professional intern.”

If One Doesn’t Go to J-school?

If you are set on journalism and straight out of undergrad be prepared to do the year of professional internships. You will not be handed a job. This has nothing to do with the current state of things. Even ten years ago when profits were high, you wouldn’t have been handed an ideal job. Journalism is a craft and has an apprenticeship model. They say a fair percentage of students don’t get past the first year of law school. Well, think about whether or not you can get past the first year of internships in journalism. If you aren’t prepared to pay some dues and start at the bottom, then don’t start at all.

Getting some experience: After about 1.5 years of professional internships at various places I had a fairly steady gig at Wired. In fact, I suspect if I didn’t leave to go to J-school, I would still be at Wired (I hired my replacement, a friend, who has moved up the ranks and is still working there).

So, I’m confident I could have made it in journalism without getting my masters at Columbia. By no means is a graduate degree required. I repeat: BY NO MEANS IS IT REQUIRED.

So Why Did I Leave?

My gig at Wired was turning steady but I still felt stagnant. This is in part because I wanted to do more than tech journalism (the irony is that once I got to Columbia, I realized I LOVED tech reporting). I needed to start somewhere fresh where I wouldn’t have started as “David the Intern” but “David the guy who came from Wired.”

There were two amazing editors at Wired who, whether they knew it or not, have had a big influence on my career.

Marty Cortinas: Never went to J-school (if memory serves) and didn’t think it necessary by any stretch of the imagination. For him, it wasn’t – he continues to be a great editor. He advised me against it. (UPDATE: See comments. THANKS MARTY!!!!)

Kourosh Karimkhany: Had gone to Columbia and filled my brain with starry eyed visions of taking over the world. He would point back to his time at Columbia as origins for the business savvy he uses today in various jobs within Conde Naste. Journalism school was very fruitful for him and he recommended it.

Both were right.

So I left because I needed to get out of the Bay Area for a bit. I got a paid internship at Columbia Journalism Review and figured that was my “in” for J-school.

My Standard Line on J-school (here’s the meat of the post)

“I don’t regret having gone to J-school.” But I say that for the same reason one should never regret anything they do in life. I met lots of great people – folks who I can earnestly call my friends. I had the opportunity to write/report about things outside of technology. I lived in New York!!!

What I do regret is the student debt that I still have on my shoulders.

The reason J-school worked out for me: I was a part-time student and continued to work while I was a student. As a result my loans aren’t that bad, I paid some tuition out of pocket.  More importantly, I was WORKING the whole time. I got practical experience while I was in New York. And in truth – I learned more on the job than I did in J-school. And while my connections from Columbia are great (and some would argue the whole point of going to J-school is to make connections) I got more practical and meaningful connections while working. I got to work for folks like Jay Rosen on NewAssignment.net. Without a doubt, that helped bolster my young career.

If you can find a journalism program that has a part-time option. Take it!!! Be prepared to slog, sleep on couches in the student lounge, etc. But if you are young, it can be a wildly awesome ride.

A practical warning: J-schools are figuring themselves out right now.

I went to school at Columbia. I worked for Jay Rosen at NYU, Jeff Jarvis at CUNY and I consider Geneva Overholser at USC’s Annenberg program a colleague. I speak with journalism professors all the time. I know a thing or two about J-schools and one important footnote that I bet they’d be willing to admit is that their programs are in flux. From my perspective CUNY and USC are drastically pushing the envelope. I just found out that even Columbia, the flagship of J-schools, has an entrepreneurship class.

Which forces me to ask the question – what is the best way to learn entrepreneurship? Is it by taking a class or just by going out and being an entrepreneur? (There is a side question here about whether or not young reporters should learn how to report or learn how to be entrepreneurs and I think the answer is both, so the conversation becomes very nuanced at this point).

There is obvious benefit from taking time and really thinking about what one wants to do in the wide open space of online journalism. J-school gives you the space and time to screw up without it reflecting negatively on one’s career. if anything J-school provides a buffer space to screw up and get positive feedback rather than getting fired and burning a bridge.

So the Answer Is??

I would never prescribe anything for anyone I didn’t know personally. Sorry – this post is and may just remain a back and forth of the positive and the negative.

In that same vein I’ll add that there is no right/wrong answer here. That is the beauty of it all. J-school works out for some folks and it doesn’t for others. Whichever you pick you have to commit to it 100 percent. If you are on the fence and decide not to go – you can’t ever look back and say “if only I had gone to J-school, I’d be handed positions left and right.” That isn’t the case – and you have to be prepared to slog through some dirty internships before you reach dry land.

And if you do decide to slog through a year of J-school, don’t worry about the student loans (which is the major practical downside). You are young, lots of folks have student loans. My sister is a social worker with student loans. Much like journalists, social workers, teachers, chefs and other schooled jobs don’t make much money, so save the sob story. And if you do decide to go – don’t think that means you get to skip the slog of working in the real world. Even recent J-school students start at the bottom. I think there is a misconception that they hand out jobs at the end of J-school. I think 10 years ago this may have been true, but it isn’t right now, perhaps never will be again. The goal for when you come out of J-school is to start at the bottom, but be so refined and qualified that they’ll recognize how good you are quickly. Whereas others straight out of undergrad will be learning on the job – you’ll be showing off on the job. And there is real practical benefit to that in one’s career.

So that’s how I see it. Go forth and journalize.

Journalism Theory/Analysis    ,

Spot.Us: Building a Plan to Release the Kraken!

Jun15th
2009 1 Comment Written by Digidave

Note: The most important link is this Google Form where we are asking YOU for feedback/goals/etc. As always to stay more current on Spot.Us development check out our blog (recently redesigned). Digidave.org will have occasional updates but otherwise will remain my personal blog to rant and rave.

Spot.Us recently had its second community advisory board meeting at Tech Liminal. We experimented with making the meeting more open by invitingnew interns, volunteers and people in the community, so that we could have an open discussion about setting goals. We felt it was important to get as much input into this process from different community members in order to create a conversation about the direction of Spot.us as an organization.

On the agenda: mapping out where we wanted to be in three months from now until we reach September 15, 2009. We received a lot of amazing and useful points to consider and are eternally grateful to our Advisory Board. Keep reading to learn more about what we hope to accomplish and how you can help shape our future.

Below is a quick recap of what we’ve accomplished and  the goals for the next three months, without any particular priority. We want you to help us prioritize them.

Are these the goals and activities we should undertake?
Is there an outside the box goal or activity we left on the cutting room floor?
Let us know via the simple Google Form at the bottom of this post.
You can also express your interest/vote for one of the goals that we have already put down.

  • What we’ve accomplished:

We’ve proven the concept of “community funded reporting.” The tricky part will be if we can build the platform and concept into a sustainable organization over the course of the next 1.5 years. Spot.Us has been labeled a “media darling” and, as alluded to in the six month “State of the Spot,” the challenge is to see if we can become a “media force.”Key to this, we believe, will be transparency – hence this post. This is a community site. The road to success is paved by including you in everything we do and how we create a viable and replicable model for journalism. So while the experiment continues, we do have to take root in firmer ground regarding what practices work and which ones need to rethought or reconfigured.

Mission Statement: To fund local, independent, original reporting.
(You thought we were selling shoes, huh?)
Goal: To Grow the community and launch Operation “Release the Kraken”

kraken

Activities to achieve the goal:

  • To create a bloggers network, like the East Bay Bloggers Network, that will the Spot.Us community grow and take root in the community’s flowerbed.
  • To build a volunteers corps, the “Kraken” of raw people force, that can move and support reporting projects, organizational development and more.
  • Create more opportunities for On/Offline socializing: The site doesn’t let folks interact. (This is also included under site development).
  • Highlight donation of talent so that volunteers can donate their skills and knowledge:  (This is also included under site development

    Goal: To create a business development plan.

Young speaker at a meeting

Activities to achieve the goal:

  • Work on a business plan. Our meeting and this post are intended to be step one in a five-step process to create a more solid business plan.
  • Create more infrastructure (what does this even mean?) Organizational structure of Spot.Us?
  • Make the Spot.Us model replicable and scalable. Asses the ability to replicate what Spot.Us does.
  • Assess cost per story: how much time does each story require from an organizational standpoint?
  • Marketing plan and brand: The marketing plan will emerge from a business plan, but Spot.us should have a more organized marketing plan. Editorial Note: David is always skeptical here, but a little organized marketing never hurt. So far we have been pure word of mouth and David’s shameless self-marketing.
  • To develop an expansion plan and come up with expansion criteria for the next cities to launch Spot.Us.
  • Micro-payment in other forms: Let people donate regularly instead of to just to a story.
  • Come up with a money and funding plan to support the organization‘s activities.

Goal: To fund more independent stories.

notebook_reporter

Activities to achieve the goal:

  • Manage our relationships to get the most out of them for our activities. (See “Grow community” activities.)
  • To create a story workflow and standards – a more standardized process.
  • To create or support journalism training programs that provide skills to Spot.Us freelancers and reporters to deliver their product.
  • Put out a paper product, perhaps by using Printcasting, http://www.printcasting.com/ or partnering with more papers or bloggers to deliver a print version.
  • Create and invest in more “outside the box” pitches in areas such as corporate reporting, beats, multimedia.

Goal: To form more strategic partnerships.
Activities to achieve the goal

  • Develop a finer grained editorial structure.
  • Increase and build relationship with publishers.
  • Expand to other regions: Los Angeles is in our line of site and we might have a strategic partner.
  • Get a technology partner, perhaps as part of the volunteer core, so we can get much-needed technical support to be donated.

Goal: To develop the Spot.Us platform and tool.
Activities to achieve the goal:

  • Redesign the front page. We need more activity on the front page
  • Implement some SMS text-a-tip service that makes it easier to get more tips for story ideas from the community.
  • Feature the donation of talent high up on the Web site so people should be able to get involved in the journalism easier.
  • Implement features that highlight what other folks are doing on the site.

Give us feedback on the above via this simple Google Form.

Your help is more important and appreciated than you could ever know!

My Work    ,

Citizen Journalism Networks Stepping Up Editorial Standards

Jun10th
2009 3 Comments Written by Digidave

A post I did for MediaShift’s IdeaLabl blog.

I tend to avoid the “professional vs. amateur journalism” debate, saying “I have constructive criticisms for both sides.” As we’ve hit a flash point for traditional news organizations, the evolution of citizen journalism networks like NowPublic, AllVoices and others may shed light on how the media space will resolve. Perhaps the two “opposites” will meet somewhere in the middle or, as I suspect, find out that they are more alike than they ever thought.

Recent news in the space has included Orato and Ground Report making shifts to require higher editorial standards in the submissions they accept and publish.

Alfred Hermida wrote a post on Reportr.net titled “Orato turns its back on citizen journalism,” in which he notes that the site used to focus on first person narratives of events but….

Instead the focus is on “concrete and trustworthy information that is objective and under-reported.” The owner and founder of Orato, Sam Yehia, said the changes were made to “further professionalize the site, focus its newsworthy content, create and enforce a viable business model and keep pace with Web 2.0 standards.”

When I met up with longtime friend Rachel Sterne, founder of Ground Report, at the Beyond Broadcast conference she explained that her network was making a similar change. While I’m one example shy of a trend, I think these two shifts warrant
some thought.

Rachel Sterne explains the changes happening at Ground Report:

What is the shift on Ground Report?

From what I gathered, there are four main shifts in Ground Report’s editorial policy.

  1. Content from new users goes through a longer vetting period. Ground Report is trading speed for accountability.
  2. Content from a trusted user or source skips this vetting period — but only because the contributor has proven themselves.
  3. Expanding the powers of volunteer editors, who can now edit anything on the site. Again, these are trusted contributors.
  4. A part-time managing editor who is in the process of writing editorial guidelines. This is a tough line to walk because they want to preserve the uniqueness of the writers’ voice but also make sure they are up to the higher editorial standards.

The reasoning

Sterne explained the logic behind the new system: “It is something that in the commercial world has just started to enter the dialogue while it seems obvious in an academic world.” There are several reasons why the policy change makes sense to me:

  1. Trading speed and accountability seems like a no brainer to me. Twitter has come on the scene to dominate the speed world, which means citizen journalism networks can offer an added value of accountability.
  2. Ground Report, Now Public, All Voices and others are looking to syndicate their content to larger distributors. To do that, they must provide a sense of trustworthiness.
  3. iReport, YouTube and other large user-generated sites have begun highlighting well produced work from dedicated contributors while making the larger mass of content they host harder to find.

Even more interesting, according to Sterne, contributions on Ground Report have dropped 50 percent in the month since the site began implementing the changes, but traffic has increased 10 percent. That seems to be a trade off that most publishers would take — giving them a more streamlined workflow and process along with higher traffic.

Some things to note

According to the Wikipedia page on Citizen Journalism:

Allvoices was also the first citizen journalism site to measure the credibility of contributed reports and their authors, providing readers with a gauge launched in March 2009 for assessing the accuracy of news accounts.

I am friends with several of the folk at AllVoices and hope to follow up with them next time we speak.

Most people don’t know, but I am the editor in chief of citizen journalism network Broowaha. We have had similar conversations with our own members and internal team. Not surprisingly, some of the most dedicated contributors have voiced a preference towards structure, guidelines and policy.

Where are we left?

I don’t claim to have a crystal ball, but I wouldn’t be surprised if more citizen journalism networks make this shift. I think it is perfectly possible for these networks to be picky about what they publish without being exclusive. This will be a fine line to walk so as not to lose their citizen journalism souls as they try and up their game.

Crowdsourcing, Journalism Practice, Social News, Web/Tech    ,

On the term “citizen journalism” – from Professional Mind blower Henry Jenkins

Jun4th
2009 12 Comments Written by Digidave

Close followers may have picked up on the fact that I don’t like the term “citizen journalism.” Yesterday professional mind blower Henry Jenkins put it in perfect terms for me. (Update: Amy Gahran called this in 2006. I’m just late to the game).

On background from me.

Henry Jenkins said the term “citizen journalism” is as useless as the term “horseless carriage” which was often used to describe cars when they were still a new phenomena.

carriage

It makes perfect sense that this is how we described automobiles at the time. Our culture was so fixated on the horse for transportation that when we found something that got us from place A to place B, we had to define it as something that did a horses’ job – without the horse. The “horseless carriage” term was perfect for that transition phase.

But today if you ask people for 10 facts about automobiles, that they replaced horses probably won’t be on the list. People don’t define cars by what they aren’t or what they replaced over 100 years ago.

I have been using the term “participatory journalism” but many years from now I have a hunch people will just call it “journalism” (what a crazy term, huh) and that will be just fine by me.

Uncategorized

The Postal Theory of News

Jun1st
2009 6 Comments Written by Digidave

I bought stamps yesterday and as I left Safeway I had an epiphany which has long since passed. The following is an attempt to recapture it.

Stamps are a funny requirement. It is not a tax – but if you want to send anything through the mail it is just as guaranteed as death that you’ll have to pay for it.

And while the fees are small, they can add up. A book of 20 stamps is close to $10 now.What is also unique about purchasing 20 stamps is that they represent credits. I can use those stamps however I want. To mail bills, postcards, or store them away as prized possessions. There is a decision made for each stamp. There is transparency in how I use them privately (it is my choice) and publicly if I use them.

In a Sunday Digi-Dream I brainstormed about how taxes could be revolutionized online.

That thought process went like this.

  • The government (local, state, federal) still determines how much money is needed for specific programs (roads, education, bailout)
  • Individuals still figure out how much money they owe in taxes every year.
  • The individual decides where they want their taxes paid. Which programs do they want to support?

The fun part is that the individual decides where the money should go. If they are passionate about education – they can donate all their money towards the education fund. If that fund is already filled with the money it needs, the individual must give the money towards another government need. This encourages people to file their taxes early (so you feel as though your money went towards something you believe) and might make the feeling of paying your taxes suck less.

Note: The shift in mindset. My taxes almost become a “donation.” While it wouldn’t really be a choice (taxes are guaranteed like death), it would be a choice about which government program my money goes to support. There is a sense of transparency, civic engagement and more.

Recently a bunch of newspaper execs met in a dark room to talk about micropayments.

I’m actually happy that something in the micropayment space might happen. I’d much rather a major company try it and fail then for the larger industry continue to debate about it back and forth for months. Somebody has to suck it up and try something.

But here is my advice: Add transparency and control for the user of where the money goes!!! People aren’t used to paying for the news. Charging somebody a small fee for access to an article they are going to read once is bound to disappoint somebody. Those people won’t become regular consumers.

In truth this notion of transparency and control over a donation is the real revolution of Spot.Us and why people continue to find it fascinating. Because we let the user decide and know exactly where their money is going.

It is the difference between donating to the Red Cross and donating on Kiva.org, the difference between giving to a sludge fund for educators or giving on DonorsChoose.org.

Giving to journalism isn’t new. NPR has been around for some time. But when you donate to NPR you are throwing money over a fence and hoping your money lands on good journalism. It is a donation of guilt or hope, but there is no sense of control or power on the part of the contributor.

Donating on Spot.Us is a choice that engages. It defacto brings the user into the editorial process and encourages them to be engaged throughout. They aren’t donating to a finished product – they are donating to a process that invites them in.

NPR could try something like Spot.Us tomorrow and blow me out of the water. So could any of these newspaper companies that are thinking about micropayments.

Crowdsourcing, Digi-Dream, Journalism Theory/Analysis    ,

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