1. A lead. The who, what, when where at minimum. Add the how and why if needed. One paragraph. No anecdotes.

2. Links from every relevant proper noun to a very brief reference card about the person or organization.

3. A timeline. How’d we get here? Where are we going?

4. A map.

5.  An FAQ. 

6. A search form. Backed by a relevant database.

7. A hosted, asynchronous discussion. It doesn’t matter whether it’s Twitter, Facebook or article comments. Just make sure it’s truly hosted by a knowledgeable human being adept at using conversation to clarify and verify rather than merely amplify assertion.

Now, I know from watching site metrics and studying award patterns that these aren’t the seven elements that most people prefer. Maybe four.

1. A number — or the words “How to…” — in the headline.

2. Breaking News. Often of relatively small increment.

3. Photos.

4. Something to click.

How about you? What presentation elements do you find yourself seeking out? Are there elements you see showing up repeatedly in award-winning pieces or audience favorites?

Here are the Top 10 Best Things that the students in my journalism classes need to know about Mr. Broder.

10. Be a reporter first and an analyst second. Long after Mr. Broder was a television talking head, a syndicated columnist and a Pulitzer Prize winner, he knocked on the doors of voters in the Ohio River Valley.

9. Respect democracy. Mr. Broder believed in the value of public service and respected the sacrifice of candidates and elected representatives. I saw him treat the most influential members of both parties as human beings rather than targets, even as he probed them with smart, aggressive questions. I suspect the esteem in which he held public service allowed him to have high expectations that required tough questions.

8. Do not be driven by the “scoop.” By the time I had the chance to meet Mr. Broder, political journalism was already on its way to being driven mostly by the ability to deliver small details before your competitors could put together a cogent narrative. But even then, he cared more about being able to explain the story than break it.

7. Write plainly. Mr. Broder’s columns, news stories and books are a pleasure to read for their precision and economy of words. His prose seemed to be designed to make people feel smarter than they really were rather than dumber.

6. Work hard. I suspect that if given the choice between a deadline and party, Mr. Broder would choose the deadline every time.

5. Clean up your office. Seriously. Mr. Broder’s was a death trap. The La Brea Tar Pits of political reporting. Nobody’s perfect, after all.

4. Try new things. Mr. Broder was doing live online discussions with washingtonpost.com readers in 1998. What’s your excuse?

3. Have a sense of humor about yourself. During one of those early online discussions, the website’s political editor sent him an email of thanks and encouragement. Mr. Broder’s response is one I hope to get made into a t-shirt one day: “Did I do something bad on the Internet?”

2. Be an optimist in a world of cynics and naysayers. Mr. Broder cheered for the Cubs. He never tried to convince anyone that the world was worse than it is, and nor did he try to convince them it was better.

1. Take the kids to lunch. When I’m 81, inshallah, I’ll still remember the lunch I had with Mr. Broder. Just he and I. He had lunch with me not because he wanted anything from me. Not because he owed me anything. But because I asked for his time and he was kind enough to offer it. It was sometime around the 2004 election and we talked about his 1981 book, The Changing of the Guard. I had been wondering what the book would look like if it were a series on washingtonpost.com about yet another generation of political advisers and candidates. We talked about how it could be interactive and multimedia. He let me ask questions and make statements that alternated between naive and presumptuous. But he never checked his Blackberry, never looked around the room and never interrupted.

Mr. Broder had so many wonderful characteristics that I try to emulate. Being a great journalists is just one, and far from the most important. He was a great journalist because he was so much more. And I hope that the future of journalism can yield many more in his mold.

When news producers begin to get into “that data state of mind” they are trying to achieve both a business goal—ubiquity of their news organization’s information and influence, and a social goal—efficient use of information. If one person has a piece of information and can share it at no cost to everyone else, other people shouldn’t have to repeat the work that went into acquiring that information. The DRY principal of programming when applied to news creates a sustainable news ecology. The energy that is used to gather a fact needs to be expended only once. After finding information from a trustworthy source, journalists can spend all of their energy on analyzing and providing relevant context that adds value to the piece of information. Within a news organization, journalists can also reduce, re-use and recycle content. Consider the way that hyperlinks in a story make news consumption and news production both more efficient.

Often in news stories the audience wants to know more about specific people or organizations than just their names. In print journalism, reporters provide this information in an appositive immediately after the name of the person or organization. For example: “Irwin Collier, an economy expert for North American at the John F. Kennedy Institute at the Free University, pointed out that [German Chancellor Angela] Merkel, who has backed the package, holds a majority in parliament.” Online, by linking the words “Irwin Collier” to a biographical page about the expert—a page that would not be limited to the cursory information presented in the appositive example—the sentence would be almost half its original size.

Once you begin thinking of facts as pieces of organized data, you are ready to start thinking about how you might “program” information as a nonlinear narrative, one that doesn’t proceed in the usual order from top to bottom, but instead might update or rearrange pieces of information dynamically depending on the conditions and context of the audience.

The inverted pyramid has long been used in journalism as a metaphor to describe the traditional structure of a basic news story—the most important information is summarized in the lead, with details of decreasing importance following in each subsequent paragraph or section. For an audience that skims articles rather than reads them, the inverted pyramid remains one of the best ways to construct a news story for the Web. But by using links, online journalists can turn a news story built as an inverted pyramid into a story presented as several inverted pyramids. While printed inverted pyramids are linear, online inverted pyramids can be nonlinear.

In a linear inverted pyramid, every reader starts in the same place—the first paragraph—and ends at the last paragraph, taking the only logical path between those two points. This is a perfectly accept- able way to write news stories both online and off.

But some news events lend themselves to a nonlinear story structure, which breaks apart the traditional news narrative and creates several paths of links the audience can choose to follow. By establishing links from the lead to various elements of the story, and also links among those story elements, journalists can craft a nonlinear narrative that helps each reader more quickly find the specific information he or she wants.

Adrian Holovaty, a pioneer of online news, wrote in 2006 that for journalists to take full advantage of the Web’s hypermedia, they first needed to abandon what he calls “the story-centric world view.” Using as his example a newspaper story about a local fire, Holovaty wrote on his blog:

“[W]hat I really want to be able to do is explore the raw facts of that story, one by one, with layers of attribution, and an infrastructure for comparing the details of the fire— date, time, place, victims, fire station number, distance from fire department, names and years experience of firemen on the scene, time it took for firemen to arrive—with the details of previous fires. And subsequent fires, whenever they happen.”

By breaking down a story into its atomic pieces and using hyperlinks to reconnect those pieces, readers can explore different aspects of the story, each at a level of detail chosen by the visitor. In nonlinear storytelling, journalists gather the input and information as usual, but then tell the story using links that allow the audience to drive the experience.

Chapter 3 of Producing Online News and its related tipsheet provide a good overview of the who, what, when, where and why of online news audiences. (And that’s something that’s always changing, Pew reported yesterday that 4 percent of online adults — and 10 percent of Hispanic online adults — use geosocial tools such as Gowalla or Foursquare.)

But students can begin to learn both mass communication research concepts as well as skills if they have the chance to use Google Analytics (or the high-priced and industry dominating Omniture service) on a real, live news site. That will prove to be one of the strength’s of UNC’s new Reese Felts Digital Newsroom, an opportunity that is still pretty rare for journalism students.

The good news is that the Web is full of good free guides to using Google Analytics on a news site. Here are four good guides to get you started:

In yesterday’s coverage of the NCAA investigation into football at the University of North Carolina, Robbi Pickeral made a mistake on her News & Observer blog post. But then she provided a good example of how to correct it…and some examples of how a news organization could be more transparent about the mistakes they publish during the reporting process.

A couple of things to note:

1. Errors can have real damage. Note the first comment.
2. The error was up for six hours. And when it was caught, it was a reader who finally caught it. (Odds are that the N&O doesn’t edit its reporter’s blogs, but I need ask Pickeral about that.) Actually, two readers caught it and demonstrated savvy about sourcing. One said contrary information was found on ESPN, but that this wasn’t an “end-all-be-all” source. The other found contrary information the NCAA site and wanted to provide a link to prove it. I wonder how many other readers realized there was an error, but didn’t say anything. I wonder how many saw the error, but took it as fact. My belief is that in the absence of professional copyeditors, a mass of readers is the next best thing. But news organizations have to make it as easy as possible for the online audience to report errors, they must be responsive so that readers know their efforts are efficacious. And you have to have enough readers on your blog so that the odds of one of them catching an error is acceptably high. To me, six hours is too long to have an error of this magnitude up on your site.
3. Pickeral fixed the problem 45 minutes after the comment was posted. And she responded to the reader acknowledging her error, explaining why she thinks it happened, and thanking the reader for catching it. That means she’s keeping up with comments, which is probably above and beyond the call of her official duties. She could have responded angrily or not responded at all. Apologizing in public is not fun. And I admire Pickeral and other journalists who do it…. as long as they don’t have to do it often.
4. The correction was placed at the top of the post, making it easy for readers to see. But how did the N&O get the correct to people who saw the original error? I didn’t see a follow-up news email news alert on the item. (The N&O sent out an e-mail alert that included the fact error, and one thing that’s bad about making an error in e-mail is that just like the printed paper you can’t recall it after it’s been delivered.) I also didn’t see a “Correction” headline in the blog’s RSS feed, or a page on the site where I could go to keep track of the news organization’s errors and corrections. ESPN, for example, links from its homepage to a page of corrections.
5. The error was removed from the body of the story. If news organizations work with archival or other vendors, such as Lexis-Nexis, it’s important that they make sure the corrected version of the story makes it into those historical databases as well.

The last comment I want to make on this is to address my fear that some people might think that I believe fact errors like this are acceptable collateral damage as journalism moves from product to process, and that the original errors don’t matter as much as correcting them the “right” way.

I don’t think that.

What I do believe is that in news reporting — as in all things — you can have something that’s made fast and cheap, fast and good, or cheap and good. But you can’t make something fast, cheap and good. Sometimes I’d rather sacrifice some quality for speed. And sometimes I’ll sacrifice some speed for quality. It’s all a balancing game, but I worry that the prevailing preference of both news producers and consumers is that they almost always prefer cheap the most, fast the next most and good the least.

The other thing I believe is that not all errors are created equal. In my news writing class at UNC, we take off 50 points for a major fact error, 10 points for a minor fact error, 5 points for a grammatical mistake and 2 points for an error in following the arcane but important Associated Press style rules that are unique to news writing. Correction or not, process-oriented journalism or not, Pickeral — who was actually one of my colleagues at The Daily Tar Heel when we both studied journalism as undergrads at UNC — would have lost 50 points on this one.

That said, I didn’t talk to her before writing this. And for that I would have lost 50 points, too.

You can find more about this topic in chapters 10 and 11 of my new book, Producing Online News: Digital Skills, Stronger Stories, available from CQ Press.

When I talk with older journalists about my students, they often assume that the Millennials constant exposure to the Internet means that they will be the ones to figure out the future of news. And what I hate to tell those older journalists is that while young people today are voracious consumers of services that have good product design and high social utility, that that alone doesn’t make them curious or informed or creative. And technological proximity alone doesn’t provide vision and leadership for journalistic innovation that our nation needs. It’s up to professors like me to cultivate those things in as many students as we can.

On the other end of the chronological spectrum, I talk to young people whose ambition sometimes eclipses their ability. I’m drawn to their gung-ho attitude but often put off by their assumption that journalists who are closer to the end of their careers than the beginning have somehow used a limited lifetime allotment of creativity and curiosity that they’ve been given. And what I tell those young people is that just as youth doesn’t guarantee innovation, neither does age limit someone’s ability to seek a fresh approach to the industry’s problems.

That brings me to the answer that I give journalists who ask for my advice on how to stay fresh and relevant. It’s the same advice I try to heed myself. Keep an eye on your audience and stay one step ahead of them with story ideas as well as storytelling and delivery tools.

In France, according to The New York Times, only 10 percent of those aged 15 to 24 read a paid-for newspaper daily in 2007, down from 20 percent a decade earlier. But that’s a meaningless statistic. How many young people read ANY newspaper? How many are getting news for free… on TV… from freely distributed papers… on the Internet … at libraries? It is obvious that nobody is going to pay for something they can get for free.

In the U.S., according to Pew, a third of people 18-24 got NO news from ANY source yesterday. This is not a problem that free newspapers would solve.

The decline in newspaper readership pre-dates the current economic slump. Newspaper readership is not declining because people can’t afford them.

Free content on the Internet may be causing newspaper declines, but young people have become even more disinterested in news since the advent of online news. The percentage of 18-24 year-olds who get no news has INCREASED 9 points in the last 10 years — faster than any other age group.

The problem is so much bigger than newspapers. Young people have either a dangerous lack of interest in public affairs or are getting information about the world around them via some channel that they do not identify as “news.”

Ironically, the people for whom this is going to be the biggest problem are the 18-24 year olds. They are the ones who need to step up and propose solutions to the problems of their peer group. So why not hand out a couple million dollars in grants every year to recent college grads who want to try to solve the problem? And not the problem of declining newspaper readership, but the problem of the declining news readership in any medium.

She and others have been asking me whether this is strong evidence that new online-only news organizations will never work. My question back to them: Why do you expect them to work? We are in an era of innovation and entrepreneurship. We are early in the process of leaving behind the security of mass media and we can expect to see many failures as brave journalists look for new ways to re-engage a shrinking news audience and to make money doing it.

Let’s agree on this fact first: There is little evidence to indicate that the Internet will not be a large part — if not the single largest part — of the news diet for the Internet-connected world. The decline in newspaper readership has been going on for decades and telephone surveys by the Pew Center for the People and the Press show that for18-24 year-olds in the U.S. the Internet is most often cited as the most important source for news among that age group. Television remains equally strong, but all other media have been left behind long ago.

We may not know where we are going, but we cannot go back. Our future lies somewhere else, even if we don’t yet know where that is. We are explorers sailing for a new shore that we can’t yet see. Not all of us will make us to the new world alive. And say whatever else you want about explorers, but explorers are brave.

Failure and exploration go hand-in-hand. Not every base runner who leaves first makes it to second. But that doesn’t keep baseball players from trying to steal bases. And what percentage of new restaurants fail? That doesn’t seem to keep new ones from springing up all the time.

In fact, many Internet utopians (including me at some times) have said that this digital network of information is the biggest revolution since the printing press. And it took 158 years after the invention of the printing press for the world to even invent a newspaper. There were 198 years between the arrival of Gutenberg’s press and the launch of a newspaper that would survive until the arrival of the Internet. The first newspaper in what would become the U.S. launched in 1690… and folded after one issue.

So, folks, please be patient. With risks and new ventures there can come great reward. But that’s because for most us, risk yields failure. Let us hope that we make them quickly and cheaply.

What did I find? Unable to speak Chinese and woefully ignorant of the subtleties of country’s recent history, I was able to take mental snapshots of China, without knowing the signifance or meaning of those images in my head. But today I sit here writing a blog post that my friends in China probably won’t be able to read. And I find it incredibly ironic that while the Chinese government let me freely wander Tianament Square two weeks ago, today it prevents me from speaking freely with friends — or enemies — who live there. In the interconnected world of social media, I feel the spirit and tension of Tiananmen more today while I’m writing this blog post than I did two weeks ago standing in that concrete pasture 7,000 miles away.

Here are my snapshots of China. I’d like your help thinking about what they will mean to us on the 40th anniversary of Tiananmen and the world in which my daughter will be entering when she turns 21 on June 5, 2029.

http://picasaweb.google.com/s/c/bin/slideshow.swf
Full Screen Slideshow

(Conflict of Interest Disclosure: My airfare to Beijing was paid for by the China Internet Information Center, which is controlled and directly funded in large part by the Information Office of the State Council. I was invited to China for the purpose of speaking with the staff of China.org.cn about online journalism, through an ongoing partnership between that Web site and the School of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.)

Censorship and Surveillance in China

I have to admit that one of the sights I was most looking forward to seeing in Beijing was the “Great Firewall of China.” While I worked at washingtonpost.com, our coverage of controversial stories in China often coincided with reports that the site was not available there, so I was looking forward to seeing this first hand. What I found instead was an Internet that was relatively open to controversial subjects, compared to my experiences in other countries such as Dubai. I think the only two sites I couldn’t access were a Time.com blog about China… and this blog. But that was easily overcome by asking friends in the U.S. to cut and past the text of specific stories in to emails.

Of course, the picture of censorship on the anniversary of Tiananmen Square looks much different today. The whole cat and mouse game seems like a sad waste of everyone’s time. It’s tough to create a visual of Internet censorship, but this video from Australia 7 News via Yahoo does a nice dramatic interpretation I think.

The futility in that video is hilarious. Not so funny, though, when the dance between pro-democracy and anti-democracy forces looks more like the final — but often forgotten — final seconds of the video of this famous scene from 1989.

We often see the still image from that sequence as passive resistance in the face of overwhelming odds. But the events at the end — the man climbing up on the tank and looking for the damn door — is a great metaphor for efforts to create online discourse about political freedoms in China: “Come on out, we just want to talk.”

It is important that we try to keep the doors open and respect a two-way free flow of information and opinions. As much as I want the Chinese government to remove any walls that prevent me from speaking directly to my friends and former students there, I also sincerely want to hear the government’s view of the world. You don’t like something reported on washingtonpost.com? Don’t block it, link to it and tell me why not. I’d welcome much more a partisan view of the Tiananmen Square events than a pointless effort to pretend it didn’t happen.

Oddly enough, the kind of censorship I saw most often today was the anachronistic efforts to make lemonade out of lemons in print media. The one-year anniversary of the devastating earthquake in Sichuan province that crushed school buildings and the children in them. Several American reports have raised serious questions about whether shoddy construction led to unnecessary deaths. And a year later, according to the New York Times, victims of the earthquake are seeking detailed information about the numbers, names, places and causes of thousands of deaths. An American journalist in China with first hand knowledge of the situation told me that residents in the area are still secretly trying to get information about school construction in to the hands of journalists.

But there was no mention of this controversy in China Daily. What did it name it’s special section commemorating the tragedy? “Sichuan … Marching On: Icons and Images” — the images predominantly consisting of smiling children and heroic first-responders.

(On a bizarre side note, the same day’s paper reported that New York Times columnist Paul Krugman was greeted in Beijing by a “wall-size poster” of “his smiling visage” and the words “‘the great prophet is coming!’” Reportedly, people paid between USD $850 and $8,500 to hear him speak at Peking University.)

But censorship in China doesn’t come only under the “put-on-a-happy-face” brand. When I showed some folks the JibJab cartoon from the 2004 U.S. presidential campaign, one said “If we did that in China, we’d be executed.” It may have been hyperbole, but considering the number of unarmed people shot in back by the Chinese military only 20 years earlier on streets not more than a mile from our conversation, I took the comment as sincere.

The Spirit of the People

Most Americans, I suspect, can hardly imagine what it must be like to live under such a restrictive environment. Speaking only for myself, I’d imagined it would be a country filled with people living daily life with either resigned depression or displaced fear and anger. I didn’t find either. The people whom I met there were joyful for the most part — people who were able to giggle as we discussed the subtle differences between the English words “transgender” and “transvestite.” They were able to debate the finer points of the current season of American Idol. One Sunday morning, I saw hundreds of older and middle-aged men and women playing games in a park.

But the topic of Tiananmen didn’t come up. I’m embarrased that I never asked anyone about it directly. In 1989, many of the people I met must have been about the same age of the students in the square. Many more of the people I met were recent university grads themselves. What snapshots of the events did they have in their minds? What did they mean? Were they anything like the memories I have of seeing the streets of L.A. after the 1992 riots or the smell of the burned-out Pentagon as I drove by it in September and October 2001?

What controversial topics did we discuss? Well, I remember talking about corruption among real estate developers in Beijing. I remember a cross-generational and cross-gender conversation about family planning that surprised me very much. I remember someone asking me why Americans who visited Beijing always said they felt they “needed” to learn Chinese and never said they “wanted” to learn Chinese. I had an interesting conversation about what it meant for a young Chinese person to wear hipster t-shirts with images of old revolutionary posters on them…. we agreed that it didn’t have the same irony I intended with the Mao Zedong wristwatch I purchased at his mausoleum in Tiananmen Square.

20 Years From Now

One of the great blessing of my life has been my ability to meet people who were once sworn enemies of each other. I’ve met Americans who fought in World War II, Jewish survivors of Nazi concentration camps, a German man whose father carried a gun for the Nazis and fled as a child from the atrocities of the invading Russian army.

I’ve stayed at an ultra-luxury hotel feet from where President Reagan urged Gorbachev to “tear down this wall.” I’ve been to a bar in the gutted building that once housed the communist parliament of Easy Germany.

Will my children meet the children of students who were killed in Tiananmen Square and also meet the children of the soldiers who drove the tanks? And, more importantly, will they share a narrative of different perspectives based on a set of common facts?

I’m going to do what I can to make sure they will. I will continue to build personal friendships as well as professional relationships with my own Chinese friends. Maybe not today, but someday, they will read this post and they will comment. They will tell me they disagree.

And one day, all of our children may read the dialog because we did not let another 20 years pass without remembering and discussing and recording together the first rough draft of our shared human history.

Update: March 6, 10:44 a.m. ET

Following the news that the Seattle Post-Intelligencer is likely to go online-only if it stops printing sometime after March 10, Ken Doctor wrote on his blog, Content Bridges, uses some loose estimates to wonder if newspaper newsrooms are about to go from employing 44,000 journalists to 6,600.

A recent scan of newspaper mastheads and some loose estimates of my own put the number of online journalists currently working in the U.S. at between four and five thousand.

*** WARNING: These numbers count ONLY NEWSPAPERS. They do not count TV stations and unaffiliated sites.***

Doctor uses an unsourced estimate that there are “44,000 journalists left in U.S. newsrooms.” From there he says “The PI starts with 170 newsroom staffers. Online-only, it moves to 22, which would be 12.9% of its print staff.”

Here are two estimates I’ve made of the number of people working in “online journalism” in American newsrooms. The first starts with a survey of North Carolina newspapers:

• There are about 1,400 dailies in United States.
• 47 of those are in North Carolina.*
• 25 of the North Carolina dailies have a dedicated Web staff creating original content for their own Web site.*
• A census of online mastheads with follow-up calls to editors gave us an estimate of 110 online journalists in North Carolina, or an average of a little fewer than three per paper.
• 2.34 online journalists per paper X 1,400 1,399 dailies = about 3,274 people working online at newspapers in the U.S…. based on lots of interviews, I believe that most of those are white (95+ percent) men (60 percent) with 5-10 years of experience who spend most of their time editing text. Most of them do not have experience with multimedia, programming, online community management or SEO.

Another estimate, based on a national sample of newspapers and the belief that print should employ 1 person for every 1,000 readers (which, of course, changes with the size of the paper) …

• A sample of online mastheads followed up by phone calls with the top editor at 143 daily newspapers across the country.
• We found no dedicated online staff at 59 of the 143 papers (41.2 percent).
• 61 papers had 1 staff member. They ranged in circulation size from 2,000 to 72,000.
• 7 had 2 online staff members. (12K-67K circulation sizes)
• 6 had 3 staff members. (6K-83K)
• 3 had 4 staff (5K-144K)
• 2 had 5 (12K-64K)
• 1 had 6 (112K)
• 1 has 8 (81K)
• 1 had 10 (148K)
• 2 have 14 (67K-106K)

So….

• Average circ/staff ratio (including zero staffs) 1:21,000
• Average circ/staff ration (non-zero staffs only): 1:15,000
• Smallest paper with at least one online staffer: 1,805 circulation

These numbers may have underestimated the number of “designers” and “photographers” who are working Web first if their job titles didn’t contain one of the keywords that indicated that their role was specifically online (words like blogger, online, multimedia, digital, and Web)

The numbers also probably underestimate the contributions of reporters who are truly filing first and/or primarily for the Web. Editors at several newspapers insisted that they had no “online staff,” because “everyone works for the Web site.”

Based on my survey of the actual journalists, I do not trust editors who say their entire staffs work “Web first.” As I noted in an earlier post, I came across journalists whose titles strongly indicated that they were not just online-first but online-only but who refused to participate in they survey because they did not consider themselves online journalists. So, these numbers may also overstate the number of true online journalists.

If these estimates are anywhere remotely accurate, they point to a future of massive job losses at newspapers. Other elements of the future would seem to include:

• Assuming all the current online journalists keep their positions, there would be only about 3,000 to 4,000 jobs* left for people who are NOT ALREADY WORKING ONLINE. Update: I’ve been reminded that the online staff of at least paper sees a future in which online natives are replaced by print natives with more experience in news, though not necessarily online news.
• That the online staffs will have a much higher reader-staffer ratio.
• That newspapers would not have the skills or staff capacity to create any sort of innovative multimedia, interactive or customized news service.
• Most of the content will be related to drive by demand for stories about national politics, crime, weather, traffic, high school sports, celebrities (not arts… celebrities).

That original reporting would be replaced mostly by repacking of text provided by amateurs, semi-professionals, advocacy organizations, and wire services.

This is not the future of news of which I dream. So what am I missing? What data do you have that supports a brighter view of the future?

Correction: An earlier version of this post undercounted the number of daily newspapers in North Carolina. There are 49 daily newspapers that are members of the N.C. Press Association. Two of those members are collegiate newspapers.

The original post also mistated the number of North Carolina newspapers with their own Web site. Every daily newspaper in North Carolina has a Web site, but only 25 of the 47 professional daily newspapers in the state have their own Web staff creating content for their own Web page. The other papers either outsource their Web production or share a combined Web site with one or more other newspapers owned by the same parent corporation.

As a result of these two errors, the original post mistated my estimate of the number of online journalists working at newspapers in the United States.

There are 49 dailes that are members of the NCPA
-2 collegiate papers
—
47 dailies
-2 combined papers (Eden and Reidsville share a site)
—-
45 dailies
- 2 with combined staff (Morganton and McDowell share one person who does online production for both papers)
—-
43 dailies
- 5 papers that confirmed they have no online staff (Goldsboro, High Point, Lexinton, Richmond, Sanford)
—-
38 dailies
- 1 paper where “everyone works online” (Newton)
—-
37 dailies
- 10 for who we could find no online staff (Clinton/Sampson, Durham, Forest City, Henderson, Hendersonville, Lenoir, Monroe, Mt Airy News, Mt Airy Messenger, Statesville)
—
27 dailies
- 2 Freedom papers that had previously been combined with ENCToday.com but now apparently have their own sites (Kinston and New Bern)
—
25 dailies

47 dailies, 25 of whom I know have their own online staff running their own online site (53%)

Originally published: March 6, 10:13 a.m.