Two prisms, two news brands

These two stories came across fairly close together, and they’re worth grouping here. One is a first-hand look at the direction Al Jazeera is heading. The other is a ground floor view of AOL’s Patch.

From the Nieman piece on Al Jazeera:

(I)t’s worth looking at his time at Al Jazeera because it’s likely the idea of “distributed distribution” will be one of his legacies as it played a role in transforming the website of the Middle Eastern broadcaster into a experimental online news operation in itself.

“We’ve done some great work over the years, especially the last two years with our coverage of the Arab Spring, and we built the website up to a place where I’m quite proud of it and quite happy both with the journalism we do and the form that we do it in,” Nanabhay told me.

Nanabhay has been with Al Jazeera more than 7 years, starting as the head of new media, a kind of digital projects division that allowed Nanabhay and his team to experiment with many of the things that are common practice at Al Jazeera English today: using social media in reporting and distribution, cultivating video from citizens, exploring the use of mobile tools for news. One of the biggest accomplishments during his time was the decision to allow Al Jazeera footage to be licensed under Creative Commons. As he prepares to leave two months from now Al Jazeera English is poised for more growth, establishing a foothold here in the U.S.: at least 40 percent of the traffic to Aljazeera.com comes from America.

The other article is an essay from one of the local editors of a Patch site, published in CJR:

Patch is relentlessly driven to refine and tweak its strategy to reach its goals, and it is entirely different now than it was in 2009. When I started, the organization was full of untested ideas, generalized performance targets, and grinding workloads. But it also offered local editors the unique opportunity to test content, prove their worth, and exert some influence on the editorial focus of the organization. For someone just establishing his journalism career, the fresh attitude and encouragement from the top was exciting.

Putting aside the uniform look of Patch sites at that time, we were given the opportunity to set our own work schedules and, more important, editorial priorities. Some editors focused almost exclusively on sports and schools, while others preferred hard news and politics.

[...]

No doubt the Patch model will adjust to market realities. It is still focused on that original goal of total community integration. The effort to find the balance between shoes-on-the-ground reporting and search-engine pop that aids profitability will result in sites that have a dramatically different character than they did even a year ago.

If anything, I think Patch’s trials and errors will show that online local news can be sustainable, even profitable, if you have good, hardworking journalists, a strategy to keep costs at a minimum, and a willingness to stick to what has made community news a staple across America for decades. It’s a challenge, and I wish my former colleagues the best of luck. 

There is a great, great deal more to that essay which defies excerpting. Do check it out.

“Owning” news

Matthew Ingram at GigaOM throws a little cold water on those trying to downplay the role of Twitter in the public square:

One of the signs of how much Twitter and other social tools are disrupting media is the strenuous argument about how they aren’t doing this at all — including the repeated assertion that “Twitter doesn’t break news.” In the latest example of the genre, a writer in the American Journalism Review makes the case that Twitter didn’t break the news about recent events such as Whitney Houston’s death or the assassination of Osama bin Laden, because those events didn’t actually become “news” until they were confirmed by mainstream sources. This kind of thinking betrays a fundamental misunderstanding about how news works now.

Ingram could have shaved off the word now and improved his word count, but the bigger problem he notes is the implication of the perception of others.

He quotes Barb Palser, a columnist at American Journalism Review:

While nearly an hour passed between the first known mention of Houston’s death and the AP’s report, Twitter’s timeline clearly shows that the story flatlined until the AP tweet. It was that properly attributed post by a credible news organization with a broad following that broke through the noise.

There’s a lot to digest there, once you get over the flatline pun. Best are those phrases “properly attributed” and “credible.”

Understand: attribution is crucial. Credibility is key. (My research dabbles in that area, after all.) Also there is the absolute importance of accuracy, which everyone should have learned is something to be carefully regarded when it comes to hot news on fast platforms like Twitter. To imply, however, that the one (the outlet) must come before the other (the dissemination of information) is a statement idly wanting for creation and control, ownership of news.

Palser is discussing a familiar aspect of the news business, where the feeling has always been one of controlling content — and thus the message and the money. In the world you live and work in, though, control is often something else: the ability to build a place for users to do what they want to do. (What they’re going to do anyway.)

Editing, curating, has evolved into aggregating information and, as a credible resource yourself, sharing, learning and educating. The job is swiftly becoming less about controlling a flow and more about improving (community content) and encouraging (collaboration).

As Jeff Jarvis says:

News, then, begins to take on the architecture of the internet itself: end-to-end. At one end are the witnesses sharing, at the other the readers reading and interacting, asking their own questions, having their own say, passing on and recommending what interests them. No need for a gatekeeper. No need for a distributor. No need for a central hub. No tolerance for controllers. The conversation is occurring on its own.

Journalism is sometimes a subset of that conversation. It can add value. It can serve. But it should not think of itself as the creator of the conversation, the setter of the agenda, though that is what I see in so much of the BBC’s worldview as demonstrated at events this week. They might have learned that better if instead of a meeting, they held a conversation.

The conversation is news.

What is a journalist?

Alicia Colon takes a look at some of the nuance stemming from the Crystal Cox trial:

In the past, many famous and well-respected journalists had no formal training but honed their craft on the job, in many cases beginning their careers as copy boys/copy girls. Walter Cronkite, once cited as the most trusted man in America, was a college dropout who had a series of newspaper jobs reporting news and sports. Eric Sevareid, Chet Huntley, and David Brinkley started their careers as broadcast journalists but never had journalism degrees. Dan Rather did receive a degree in journalism, and we can see how well that turned out once he decided to switch to advocacy journalism instead of the traditional who, what, when, where and how protocol of traditional journalism.

Advocacy journalism intentionally and transparently adopts a non-objective viewpoint for either a political or social agenda and has morphed today into nothing less than media bias and propaganda. Today the mainstream media is predominantly composed of liberal democrats, and this bias has been quite evident since the 2008 presidential race. There is also a marked difference between opinion and reportage journalism.

I have a hard time claiming to be a member of the fourth estate, although I have been writing for newspapers since 1998 as an op-ed columnist. During that time, however, I have covered news events and press conferences and submitted non-opinion articles. I never attended Journalism College, nor have I even taken one writing course. I had to drop out of college to support my mother who had had a stroke. Mark Steyn, who is a brilliant writer, never attended college at all but can write reams around many inhabiting the elitist realm of the New York Times.

Read the whole thing for an interesting point of view.

Mobile reporting necessities

Backback journalists, one-man bands, multimedia reporters, MoJo — whatever you call that slice of the industry — is a skillset, a mindset and an equipment set. You have to be able to discern your story quickly and, just as quickly, understand and apply the appropriate medium to cover the details of the tale. You have to be able to work independently, often quickly and with several stories and moving parts at play.

And you need the right tools. Here are 10 must haves from Media Bistro.

It is a good list. I’d add extra batteries, an extra recorder and sharp, comfortable shoes.

Preoccuppied on Wall Street

Citizen journalism is hard at work in New York City.

From the perspective of the media, perhaps what is most interesting is what has not been said about the movement; Occupy Wall Street claims it has not been given adequate coverage by mainstream media outlets, although coverage via user generated content, through sites such as Citizenside, has proved popular. It is this kind of independent citizen journalism together with social networks – as opposed to traditional media outlets – that has been the driving force behind the movement’s popularity and media presence.

Following that you’ll get an interview with the editor of a site called Citizenside on their growing niche in grassroots coverage.

This loosely organized group has, for whatever reason, been complaining about their media coverage. If that’s the case, the next best thing is to make your own media. Here, then, is a Tumblr account on the people involved in the demonstrations.