Media Re:public

A good session on nonprofit jouranlism here at We Media highlighted terrific work by the Sunlight Foundation and the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting sadly ran out of time before we could get very far into the issue of how to pay for it.

In perfect accordance with their principles, the Sunlight Foundation publishes a list of their donors, which is a good thing for any nonprofit to do. At the bottom of that list is this sad line

“gifts $250 or under (21 total) $3,148.00″

Not a good sign for the general public supporting nonprofit journalism, I fear.

Terrific op-ed by my fellow fellow David Weinberger on why net neutrality is only the bare minimum.
Persephone

At a conference in rainy Atlanta, Krishna Bharat of Google News showed slides illustrating what I had previously observed : how news aggregators help bury original investigative reporting. The computer, he says, “notices that a story is hot” due to “aggregate editorial interest,” meaning the same story turns up in multiple sources. So, every newspaper, agency, website, TV and radio newscast, etc. mentions the Clinton/Obama plagiarism story and correspondingly it comes up at the top of Google News.

This is exactly what does not happen with a single investigative story, no matter how good the reporting, how reliable the source (the case I originally wrote about was NPR, but it could just as easily have been the San Jose Mercury News), or how potentially important the story. It’s not the fault of Google News of course, they’re only reflecting what happens in the media world that existed before them. Certain news items create a feeding frenzy, others float off into oblivion.

Later in the day the phrase “the cream rises to the top” was spoken at least twice in an hour-long panel. How do we test whether that is really true?

Today’s edition of Online Spin, one of the many MediaPost publications that I lurve, points to a cute dictionary of online ad terms. Personally, I liked “adnausea” (noun) A feeling of sickness or discomfort in the stomach that may come with an urge to vomit prompted by excessive advertising. At least ad folks have a sense of humor about how everyone else feels about their work. Persephone

In a fascinating chat with Bill Densmore, director of both the Media Giraffe Project and the New England News Forum a while back he said something that has stuck with me. He said he thinks small-community media organizations trying to survive as all- or mostly volunteer endeavors need to learn how to “become the PTO.” That is, they need to form organizations to which just enough people feel compelled to contribute their time and energy and moderate dues to keep them going and that are able to survive constant attrition (as kids graduate, parents leave, but they are always replaced). I thought this sounded really nice, local journalism as your civic duty for a finite period of time. It also appealed to my personal feeling that the energy of kids is being markedly under-used in this field (to wit, my friend’s daughter’s middle school in a wealthy suburb has computers everywhere and a very extensive website which displays not a single pixel that looks like it was created by — or even for — an 11-year old person).

But as I am not a parent and my own parents were not what you’d call “joiners” (that’s a compliment, Ma) I have zero direct experience of PTOs. And besides, didn’t it used to be called the P T A, not O? I thought I’d be better find out before casually writing one or the other, people can be touchy about names.

As it turns out, very touchy. “All parent groups are not the same,” says the PTA, which was founded in 1897 as the National Congress of Mothers . “The PTA is a not-for-profit organization and the nation’s original and premier parent involvement group in schools. PTA has more than 23,000 local units and nearly 6 million members.” Impressive. Until I learn this: “More than 75 percent of parent groups are independent PTOs that have no affiliation with the National PTA.” That’s from the site of an organization (well, actually, a company) called PTO Today, which in case you were wondering has (in its own words) “quickly established itself at the center of the school parent group world (PTOs/PTAs) as both a valuable resource and a trusted voice to the entire parent group market.” In their helpful article PTO vs. PTA What’s the Difference? they note that “…there is a subtle but undeniable implication in PTA circles that those independent groups that aren’t part of the PTA are in some way choosing to abandon the cause of children.” Nasty.

All this, of course, is fascinating but probably besides the point. Or not. Perhaps some volunteer local news websites would like the local chapter-state chapter-national organization hierarchy of the PTA and others would like to be independent but able to access lots of technical and moral support from the well-meaning folks at ptotoday.com. If people can’t agree on how to run a bake sale, how will people agree on something as touchy as what kind of news is important? Still, I think there’s something to this, I’m just not quite sure what it is.

Anyone interested in discussing how we should be trying to understand the interactions between participatory media and the content formerly known as “the news” is welcome to join us at Annenberg March 27-28.

http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/mediarepublicforum/Main_Page

FCC Commissioner Jonathan Adelstein calls for more and better broadband! I’m sending him virtual chocolates.

In a discussion with some colleagues recently about the role of NGOs in creating media, someone said, in reference to material being posted on a website by someone other than a journalist, something like “but what if the person who writes the story is, well I don’t want to say ‘amateur,’ but what do we call them…” Our host jumped in with “People. They’re called ‘people’ now.”

Defining these terms is part of my project here at Berkman, and so far the results are not good. It’s too bad the word “amateur” has negative connotations, especially since it originally means “lover,” but I don’t think that people for whom writing or making podcasts is not their primary source of income are going to change that. For the record, I personally rate the chances of the bloggingetcetera community claiming “amateur” the way the gay community claimed “queer” at slim to none.

So what is the best term? “Volunteer” sounds OK in phrases like “it’s an all-volunteer site” but make less sense in the context of one-person “publications” (another word that badly needs replacing). Who are you volunteering for when you write for your own satisfaction? It’s my understanding that the open source software people (to whom non-professional journalists are so often and so inappropriately compared) by and large DO make their money in a related industry, which to my mind makes them absolutely different from community news site contributors, bloggers and others. What about people who are paid to know a lot about the subject they’re writing about vs. people who are reporting or commenting on it as outsiders?

I do think it’s an (not the only) important aspect of this kind of work whether people are paid to do it. I also think there are interesting differences between people who are usually paid to do it but also do it some of the time for free and people who never get paid to do it. Amateur doesn’t really help define either very well.

So I don’t like the word but for now I have no alternatives to offer. Anyone who does, please speak up!
Persephone

NPR’s Ari Shapiro did two great* stories today continuing his investigation into a report that Army officials told the VA hospital at Fort Drum last year to stop giving veterans advice on filling out their disability forms, with the result that many didn’t get the benefits they deserve. And (statistically speaking), no one (in vast, multifaceted, all-powerful cyberspace) noticed.

Today’s stories in Morning Edition and All Things Considered follow up the Jan. 29th Morning Edition story on the same event, with the Army denying flatly that it was true. Today, they produced a memo describing the meeting at which the Army “tiger team” told the VA to stop advising vets. Army Surgeon General Eric Schoomaker was forced to go on record saying there had been a “miscommunication.” You go, NPR!

But will this latest Walter Reed-like story reach anyone who didn’t have the radio on today? Not so much. It doesn’t come up in the “top news” anywhere on the web; the other mainstream media are too proud to repeat someone else’s investigation (note that there were supposedly other reporters at the briefing with Schoomaker, where are their reports?). You can find the NPR story by searching for “fort drum” on google or yahoo news, but only if you’re looking for it. I found exactly one reference to the NPR story on a blog called prairieweather.

I thought maybe it wasn’t fair to expect the blogs to react so quickly, the story was only on today after all. So I went to look for the earlier story. According to Technorati, the original (equally disturbing) story that came out 9 days ago was picked up by:
One blog called Main St. USA where it got 1 comment
One blog called ‘Imagine’ A World of Peace, Tolerance, Understanding no comments
WWTI, the local TV station’s site in upstate New York comments not allowed
and Veterans for America comments not allowed

Not what I would call a firestorm of moral outrage.

Does this mean that none of the contributors to any of the “big” blogs listens to NPR? That none care about veterans’ issues (although to me, the Army possibly covering anything up is significant beyond that which is being upcovered)? If NPR allowed comments on their website would people comment there and would that create any resonance?

For me, this is where the “cream will rise to the top” theory crashes and burns. In addition to being well-reported by an award-winning reporter at a reputable news organization, this story has everything: it’s political, it’s potentially useful to vets who might have been denied benefits unfairly, it builds on the Walter Reed story, it’s ideally suited to citizen journalism (someone needs to find the other 10 hospitals visited by the deserves-to-be-infamous Col. Becky Baker and find out what she said there). But except for the Army’s public clarification with regards to Fort Drum, I’m betting it sinks without a trace into the blood-dark sea of election horse-race commentary. I hope someone proves me wrong.

Persephone

*Actually I didn’t think it was a perfect story because they let Army Surgeon General Eric B. Schoomaker off the hook with saying “it was a misunderstanding, we never meant for them to think that” even though it seems very likely he’s lying through his teeth, but that’s nitpicking.

But more cross-Berkman PR.

Seriously, the gang down the hall has put out a really useful state-by-state guide for folks writing/producing stuff online who don’t want to find themselves getting sued and having their house taken away.

I’m eager for them to finish so we can start plotting international editions. Check it out.

Persephone