Journalism Day panel at Ohio University

I'm going to liveblog a panel today at Ohio University all on one post, which I will publish frequently. I'll timestamp everything manually in this single post, as Blogger doesn't have a Twitter function built in.

2:06 p.m. - I just learned the panel is titled Making New Connections: Social Networking, Blogs & Mobile Media. The panel features:

• Bob Benz, partner, Maroon Ventures
• Randy Ludlow, reporter and blogger, The Columbus Dispatch
• Steven Siegel, vice president, Brand Solutions, HipCricket

2:11 p.m. - "[The Internet] has become a mass phenomenon not just for the every day user, but for journalism. We of course are very interested in how the online medium changes and hopefully advances journalism but also how these changes might have side effects that we want to talk about." - Bernhard Debatin, journalism professor and panel blogger

2:15 p.m. - Debatin cites a Danish paper printing offensive cartoons about the Muslim prophet Muhammad as a prime example of how a very local medium was forced into the global sphere by the Internet.

2:17 p.m. - Debatin cites Iceberg Theory of social networking. The visible part of the iceberg is the user's perspective. The invisible, underwater part, is the large network of personal data that users provide voluntarily and that can be aggregated, combined, filtered and reoganized for purposes of targeted marketing, advertising and PR.

2:24 p.m. - Benz: "[Social networking] is having a major impact... marketers are sitting up ad taking notice. ... I find it exciting and sometimes frightening."

2:27 p.m. - Benz, when he switched from newspapers to Maroon Ventures, first spammed his connections on LinkedIn, and then started a blog. Heard in a meeting with Yahoo that they were reading the blog.

2:29 p.m. - Knoxville News-Sentinel has a Twitter page. Might be a good idea for The Post.

2:31 p.m. - Facebook is worth $15 billion based on a Microsoft purchase of 1.6% stake. Insane.

2:32 p.m. - Scripps is worth about $7-8 billion... MySpace worth about $5 billion, Benz said.

2:35 p.m. - "Social capital leaks into the air, wasted, and nobody notices. Could mobile, networked, computatiionally powerful personal communication devices weave us into social networks that havent existed before, just as eBay brings buyers and sellers into a market that never existed before." - Howard Rheingold, 2003
Benz argues that it's happening now. I'd tend to agree. More TK on this later.

2:37 p.m. - Randy Ludlow is beginning. "As a journalist, I value questions and answers above lectures." I love this man already.

2:41 p.m. - "I now feel like a dinosaur destined for extinction in a digital world," Ludlow said. This is unfortunate. If digital mediums are the death of good reporters, journalism is more than in trouble. "Fewer reporters means less quality journalism." (2:43 p.m.)

2:43 p.m. - "Online clicks are a lot less profitable than a dead tree product on the doorstep."

2:44 p.m. - The Mac just freaked on Ludlow and he said "to heck with it." Sounds good to me... let's leave the Internet behind and keep printing. How naive I must sound.

2:47 p.m. - Ludlow recognizes that Internet and multitasking future journalists are important, but that traditional skills -- reporting objectively and keeping government/businesses accountable -- needs to persist.

2:51 p.m. - Siegel is getting started.

2:53 p.m. - Ohio students can get sports updates by texting OHIO to 462788. Didn't know this existed before... Siegel cites this is a way marketers are connecting to consumers.

2:54 p.m. - According to Siegel's slideshow, 88 percent of the 13-year-old-and-over population has at least one mobile device. 50 percent of mobile subscribers are using text messaging. 15 percent of subscribers are using mobile Internet.

2:56 p.m. - Mobile in a marketing context is an "immediate medium" to connect with people all the time, Siegel said. This is great for marketers, but what about consumers? What about privacy?

2:59 p.m. - I guess Siegel addresses my previous concern and notes that mobile marketing is all opt-in. I'm not sure I buy that.

3:00 p.m. - Mobile is "a digital extension of self," Siegel said. My cell phone is a piece of junk... I'm not sure how that reflects on me.

3:09 p.m. - Siegel just talked about marketers leveraging QR codes. These things are scary to me... essentially, cell phones or other portable devices could read these bar codes and get tons of aggregated information about whatever it labels. For example, a QR code could go on Baker Center and I could scan it and bring up stories The Post wrote about Baker Center along with tons of other information.

My concern is what happens when I get a QR code? Am I going to be labeled? Sounds strange, but I don't think it's far fetched.

Online needs to be a supplement, not the whole thing

I was stricken by a paraphrase today on Mark Glaser's Mediashift blog:

"David Boardroom, Seattle Times: I think longer stories actually are better in print. We want people to read the story in print and then to go online to the web to read more, to read the whole thing."

Glaser is live-blogging “The Crisis in News: Is There a Future for Investigative Journalism?” the School of Journalism at the University of California at Berkeley. This panel, for which Glaser was a questioner, included media big whigs such as Len Downie, Bill Keller and Larie Hays.

The paraphrase from Boardroom rings pretty clearly with me. In the video I posted last week, it became startlingly apparent to me that the Web isn't built for everything. Some stories are just better told in print.

Media need to realize that they cannot shift everything to the Web. Keep using the expansive features the Internet provides to tell important stories that you couldn't in print, but please do not kill stories at out of technolust.

Standing pat

The title of my blog is "Where are we going?" because I intend to write about the shift the industry is seeing.

I'd like to argue that maybe we should stand pat.

Last weekend at the Scripps-Howard National Journalism Awards, the reporters, editors, news directors and anchors who received awards had a common theme to their acceptance speeches: no matter how much the industry changes, a primary role of the press needs to focus on solid investigative, accountability journalism.

One reporter even suggested that in a time where news executives are claiming they cannot afford to pay for investigative journalism, the real question they need to be asking is "how can we afford NOT to have this kind of journalism?"

I left the awards inspired, but not entirely convinced. After all, the news organizations that accepted the awards were the big boys -- The New York Times, Chicago Tribunes and Washington Posts of the world -- and not little newspapers and television stations with shrinking budgets.

But I did realize in the following week that the little guys have a few battles to win too. This week, my 14,000 circulation college newspaper ended a stalemate with Ohio University to obtain records we believe to be public. It won't be Pulitzer-winning work, but it's a small victory for David in an era of corporate Goliaths.

Faculty read resolution to evaluate university president

Back to basics

In Dan Gillmor's "We the media," the author writes extensively about the future of corporations that use technology -- blogs, SMS messaging and RSS, among others. Gillmor implores corporations to let its executives (and underlings) blog more frequently and responsibly. But what really stands out is how he begs public relations professionals to embrace technology, specifically RSS feeds, to more effectively do their jobs and help journalists.

I don't disagree with Gillmor altogether. I think that it would certainly be easier to receive press releases in an RSS feed than in my inbox; oftentimes I find myself wading through pressers to get my real, urgent e-mail. But, such as is the case in journalism almost as often as in public relations, the people Gillmor wats to embrace new concepts have not mastered the old. Too often do ineffective PR people block information from getting to journalists and, consequently, news is just a shell of what it should be.

Getting a press release in an RSS feed doesn't make the quality of the information any better, just easier to access. Maybe I'm idealistic, but I've compiled a (small) list of PR improvements I'd like to see... and none of them touch technology.

1. If you’re writing a press release about a person who is paid with public dollars, include his or her salary. Readers have a right to know, and good reporters will only call to ask for it later.
2. If you are the contact person on a press release, be prepared to answer questions. If you aren’t an expert on the subject matter, put the journalist in contact with someone who is. It’s inefficient to let the journalist ask questions and for you to ask the expert and relay those answers back.
3. Don’t make promises you cannot fulfill. Do not say you can get a sit down interview for the journalist with the company’s CEO and then never call back.
4. Be willing to talk to the reporter. Yes, talk… as in with your mouth. E-mail is an OK way to follow up, but no good reporter will settle for strictly e-mail communication because the interview can never be candid and it leaves little opportunity for immediate follow-up.

I’m sure with a lot of thinking – and probably very little asking of other reporters – the list could be longer, but these are just a few things I think PR people can do better. What do you all think?

Ethics of Blogging

In my steadfast reluctance to create a blog, I have long relied on the argument that bloggers are not journalists. There is no system of accountability, oftentimes no editing and, except in rare circumstances, no objective reporting.

So I find it interesting that CyberJournalist would include a Bloggers Code of Ethics on its Web site. The guidelines were adapted from the Society of Professional Journalists code.

Among the guidelines CyberJournalist lists is "They should not oversimplify or highlight incidents out of context." This is one of my greatest pet peeves on the Internet. Oftentimes, intelligent discussion degenerates into quotes pulled out of context and straw man arguments. There is no true, effective system of accountability on the Web. There is no filter.

Shrinking profits, shrinking newspapers and a disappearing role

The walls are closing in on us.

Or maybe it’s just the margins.

Following a national trend, the pages of The Post— the independent student daily at Ohio University where I work as editor— are shrinking by about half an inch in width.

Sounds like a small hit, half an inch does, but the resulting loss of area on which the newspaper can print is about 10 column-inches, or a typical meeting coverage story.

The financial woes of newspapers nationwide aren’t just shrinking staffs and newsprint width, though. It’s effectively killing the role newspapers play as the establishment’s watchdog.

Sure, the big boys in New York and Washington D.C. can still throw throngs of reporters on the accountability journalism beat, but newspapers are shifting largely to providing more “infotainment” than investigation.

And who can blame them? The explosion of entertainment news and the public’s ability to find it easily on the Internet has shifted the ideas about what news consumers want. And to stay afloat, newspapers have to shift the balance between giving readers what they want and what they need.

That scale has traditionally tipped toward the media role as government watch dog, a role the public needs the media to play. But how can newspapers continue to play this under-paying role in the face of diminishing profits? I would argue it can’t forever, and that role will eventually die out.

With more entertainment news, maybe more people pick up the paper. With more people picking up the newspaper, maybe ad revenue takes an upswing. And maybe, someday, the news industry banks enough money to buy back all those half inches they cut from the newspaper’s width.

But I wonder, by then, if all of that will be enough to restore the public faith in a newspaper’s ability to actively hold the establishment accountable.