Last week’s launch of The Bay Citizen, a San Francisco journalism non-profit that will, among other things, feed The New York Times’ Bay Area report, adds one more piece to a journalism mosaic that’s increasingly experimental, entrepreneurial and, dare I say, hopeful.

It’s pretty amazing, really, to see what’s emerged over the last several years. It’s the antithesis of journalism pre-1995.

Back then, news reporting mostly came in five basic flavors: newspaper, radio, TV, magazine, book. Now, enabled by technology, forced by the economy and in recognition of core declines, journalism’s finding a way forward in smaller, independent ways:

• Non-profits spinning up to handle investigative or regional journalism. ProPublica, with its recent Pulitzer, is one of the most prominent. But there’s also California Watch (from the Center for Investigative Reporting), Voice of San Diego, The Texas Tribune, Texas Watchdog and many others.
• Educators breathing life into investigative journalism, such as those at American University’s Investigative Reporting Workshop.
• For-profit, web-only journalism startups. Washington, D.C., has the soon-to-launch TBD.com from Allbritton Communications. The Faster Times bills itself as “a new type of newspaper for a new type of world.”
• Data, maps and stories targeted to the block where you live (Adrian Holovaty’s Everyblock).
• “Community-powered reporting,” where the public suggests and funds stories (Spot.us).
• Hundreds or thousands of bloggers and citizen journalists who are writing about their town or street — and organizations that  aggregate or network them.

I call it a hopeful sign, even if some of it’s not brand new. While legacy journalism battles to refashion itself, and lays off thousands of skilled journalists in the process, from the wreckage emerges a hint of a rebirth.

Particularly encouraging: They often focus on investigative journalism or local coverage that’s been the victim of cuts at legacy institutions, and they’re making smart use of data and analytic journalism.

Whether these efforts thrive or fizzle will, I believe, be determined largely by the quality of the content they produce. But their emergence is good news, whether you’re a journalist fresh out of college or one who needs to reinvent yourself 20 years into a career. Or a reader.

Update, June 1, 2010: Check out this list of promising local news sites from Michele McLellan. There’s even more to this mosaic than you might realize.

May 31, 2010 | Journalism
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Out of the 9,000 words in James Fallows’ recent Atlantic piece “How to Save The News,” this quote from Google News creator Krishna Bharat resonated most with me:

“Usually, you see essentially the same approach taken by a thousand publications at the same time,” [Bharat] told me. “Once something has been observed, nearly everyone says approximately the same thing.   …  I believe the news industry is finding that it will not be able to sustain producing highly similar articles.”

During my undergrad journalism studies at Marist, then-professor David McCraw assigned us Timothy Crouse’s The Boys on the Bus — a chronicle of the 1972 presidential election from the view of the reporters covering it. Aside from coming away thinking that R.W. Apple was quite the character, the book introduced me to pack journalism — the tendency for news media to follow one another to the point where they all say mostly the same thing.

It’s this tendency that Bharat — in a world where search engines reveal and aggregate everything written on a topic — finds unsustainable. I agree. It seems to me that:

• Unique content is a journalism organization’s most valuable currency.
• Width, depth and quality on a topic builds uniqueness.
• Uniqueness breeds reader loyalty.
• No one will pay you for something they can get free elsewhere.
• Trying to match “the pack” on stories that wire services and others already have covered pulls you away from achieving bullets 1 and 2. So, either find something unique to say or don’t bother.

These hold true whether you’re a blogger or a worldwide brand, whether you’re doing stories, photos, news apps, graphics or databases. Why? Because, as Fallows’ story says, the assumption being made by Google (which seems to be smart) is that people actually are willing to pay for news. But not just anything:

… People inside the press still wage bitter, first-principles debates about whether, in theory, customers will ever be willing to pay for online news, and therefore whether “paywalls” for online news can ever succeed. But at Google, I could hardly interest anyone in the question. The reaction was: Of course people will end up paying in some form—why even talk about it? … The deeper differences [between news orgs and Google] involve Google’s assumptions about what the news business will have to do to “engage” readers again—that is, make them willing to spend time with its printed, online, or on-air products, however much they cost.

If this is true, and I suspect it is, news organizations need to answer a basic question:

What do we have that readers can’t get anywhere else?

May 16, 2010 | Journalism
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A reporter called recently for tips on setting up “a CAR desk” in the newsroom of a decent-sized community newspaper. The editor had watched the reporter’s success at gathering and analyzing data and, as typically happens,  now wanted the reporter to train the rest of the newsroom.

Here was my advice:

Focus on a few: Instead of holding building-wide Excel classes or database journalism seminars, start with just one or two reporters who show a combination of interest and decent technical smarts. That lets you go deep on a couple of beats rather than spread yourself thin. Also, success breeds success. Watching a few reporters land great stories will possibly spur interest from others.

Have the right goals: Goals like “publish one CAR story a week” miss the point. Better objectives are to have data-thinking ever present in the reporter’s mind, have the reporter well-versed in her beat’s data sources, and have the reporter develop basic data skills. From that, stories will flow.

Inventory data: Speaking of data sources, have each reporter you work with find out the sets of data local governments keep. File FOIA requests for table layouts and database schemas. Get the data, then study it. That will spur story ideas.

Crawl first, run later: All the hot talk in data journalism these days is on Web frameworks and visualizations, but there’s plenty of work for the beginner in the land of Excel and Access. Build those skills as a starting point.

Your thoughts? Add a comment below …

Feb 6, 2010 | Analysis, Journalism, Workflow
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For a devout music fan weaned on what’s now called classic rock, the ’80s were miserable. Sure, we had U2 — they alone helped ease the pain of hair metal and synthpop. But from an audiophile’s perspective, for someone who thinks sound is as important as structure, the era made for painful listening.

Why? Because most music recorded in the ’80s — for all its supposed ambition and technical innovation — sounds more dated, more processed and more fake today than the music of the ’60s and ’70s, including disco. Line up Abbey Road or Dark Side of the Moon next to anything by Duran Duran or Human League and the point is made.

What hurt ’80s music most was the rush to digital sounds. Musicians grabbed every gizmo they could find — synthesizers, drum machines, vocal effects, digital guitar processors — and abandoned their lovely analog gear. When Phil Collins’ engineer figured out how to use a noise gate to make his drums sound as big as a 747, everyone copied. Songs now revolved not around good lyrics or melodies but the sounds of these machines. It all had a big wow factor, but it lacked one important quality:

None of it was timeless.

Oh, people thought it was. That’s what it feels like in the midst of every movement. “This will last forever.” Well …

(more…)

Nov 23, 2009 | Journalism, News technology
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