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.

If you think “blogs suck,” then there ain’t anything I’m going to say here that will convince you otherwise. I never knock another person’s religious beliefs.

If you are looking for more evidence to arm yourself in the battle of whether bloggers are/are not journalists, then please stop reading now. I have about as much interest in the answer to that question as I have in debating whether figure skaters are athletes.

BUT… if you are a journalist who wants to start blogging or be a better blogger then welcome. And if you’re a blogger who wants to be more newsy, then read on, my friend.

And if you don’t have time, just check out the PDF one-pager.

THE BLOG FORMAT

It’s important to understand that blogging is merely a format, not a point on the continuum of fact and opinion.

Starting in 1999 with the widespread adoption of the first Web-based, free publishing system called Blogger, the Web has exploded with sites that are laid out in the blog format. Blogs – which is short for “Web logs” – grew in popularity first as a tool for amateur diarists to publish text to the Web without the need to know HTML code. Since then, some of those bloggers have become semi-professional or full-time professionals as diarists, commentators or even news-breaking reporters in every small niche category imaginable. And the format has become widely adopted at traditional news organizations like The Washington Post and The New York Times, where editors once shunned it. Most bloggers, however, are amateurs who do not consider themselves to be journalists, do not adhere to a tradition of professional ethics, and are not writing for a general audience.

What is a blog? That question remains in debate among circles of avid bloggers and traditional journalists alike. But blogs generally have these characteristics.

1. A blog consists of “posts,” which can be of varying length. Posts, like news stories or articles, are about a single topic or event. But unlike articles or news stories, they do not necessarily follow the same inverted pyramid structure.
2. Posts are laid out vertically on a blog’s homepage in reverse chronological order. The most recent post is at the top of the page and the oldest post is at the bottom.
3. Professional news blogs are almost always on a single topic. In newsrooms those topics are often called “beats.” Music, schools, parenting, technology, politics, a certain sports team or a specific television show are all common topics for a blog.

From there, however, blogs can take on all sorts of forms. They can be filled with straight news or pure commentary, and they are often a mixture of both. Many allow their readers to comment on each post. Most are written by a single author, but many of the most popular technology news blogs have several reporters who post to them. Most bloggers make prolific use of links within their posts to footnote their commentary or to demonstrate transparency by allowing readers to view original source material.

POST-CENTRIC, NOT STORY-CENTRIC

Displaying text in reverse chronological order does not alone make a blog. News wires have always done this. And news Web sites have followed the convention. The difference between a blog and a traditional news story is that in a traditional news story the paragraph is the unit of composition, but in blogs the post is the unit of composition.

Both paragraphs and posts build upon previous paragraphs or posts. But news stories are written in inverted pyramid, with the most important information at the top. Blogs always put the newest post at the top, even if a previous post is more newsworthy.

Paragraphs should contain one and only one idea. Posts really need to contain only one fact. They don’t need to connect one fact to another in the same way that paragraphs and stories do.

BREAKING NEWS BLOGS
Because of their layout that places the most recent post at the top of the page, blogs are good tools to use for breaking news situations. When a gunman killed 32 people and himself at Virginia Tech University in 2007, student journalists at The Collegiate Times and professional reporters at the nearby Roanoke Times both turned to a blog format to publish breaking news updates to the Web.

Note how the newer posts avoid repeating information found in older posts. This is one aspect of the blog format that makes it different from updating a breaking new story that is written in a traditional inverted pyramid style.

PROCESS-ORIENTED JOURNALISM

Most journalism is product oriented. Reporters follow a production process that turns information that is collected, aggregated and distributed at a single moment in time. The reason everyone snapped up Obama newspapers is because those products captured and froze that moment in time.

With their format of short posts written in reverse chronological order, blogs lend themselves to process oriented journalism. In process oriented journalism, the journalist focuses on telling the audience about the reporting process. At its best, process oriented journalism is humanizing, interactive and humble. At its worst it can be self-indulgent, petty and incomplete to the point of being unfair. It is not inherently either good or bad.

I’ve written earlier that part of Edward R. Murrow’s success should be attributed to his innovative use of process oriented storytelling. Listening to his report on the first CBS World News Roundup (audio) and comparing it to the stilted style of the other correspondents, I was struck at how “Murrow’s report is packed with first person pronouns and with street-level intelligence. He has long pauses. In at least one place he stumbles over words. It doesn’t sound professional; it sounds authentic.”

Ryan Teague Beckwith, a political reporter who writes the “Under the Dome” blog for The News & Observer in Raleigh also uses this format to update fast-moving stories. But his writing style is more similar to the style of writing that audiences might find commonly used by news or sports columnists in a newspaper. In a word, the style is more “conversational” and less formal in its adherence to grammar and more likely to include subtly subjective adjectives like “finally” or “only.” Despite these differences in style, verified factual reporting remains the driving force behind his posts.

Here is an example of how he used process oriented reporting to cover a tussle in 2008 between the John Edwards presidential campaign and a journalism student at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

1. Beckwith wrote his first post at 7:51 a.m., after he saw on a blog (of all places) that Edwards and the student journalist were in a dust up. Most journalists start their days by checking in with their sources. And this is merely a new way of journalists getting tipped off to the big story. In product oriented journalism, these tips don’t get repeated until they achieve a higher level of reporting that typically includes getting the story from at least two unrelated sources. Not so here.
2. Three minutes later, Beckwith posts the full video of the student report. He is beginning the process of reporting. And he’s immediately letting his readers in on it. Courageously transparent or recklessly hazardous?
3. At 12:26 p.m., the blog post gets its first reader comment. The comment criticizes the report for being published before it is fully and fairly reported. The criticism comes from someone using the same pseudonym that’s often used by a liberal blogger married to a journalism professor at Carolina.
4. At 12:30 p.m. Beckwith gets a quote from the student’s professor. We still don’t have both sides of the story, but we have a more detailed account from one side.
5. At 1 p.m., Beckwith responds to the first commenter, defusing the potential flame war with “Thanks for asking. We’ve put in multiple calls to the staffers in question and will report more as this story unfolds.” Fifteen minutes later, the commenter expresses his appreciation for the update.
6. At 4:42 p.m., Beckwith posts quotes from the student.
7. In the next morning’s paper, a complete traditional story appears.

BE HIP

In his book Hip: The History, John Leland says that hipness began in America “as a subversive intelligence that outsiders developed under the eye of insiders.” A good blogger is hip. One way a good blogger achieves hipness is by linking casual readers to little Easter eggs of original source documents for the junkies.

Journalists who don’t want to blog often complain that they shouldn’t put anything on the Web that doesn’t merit appearance in the print edition. I gather these are the same writers who gripe about the shrinking news hole, too, but that’s another story.

Blogs should be a little something extra. They’re a little something for the junkies. The newspaper is for the score of the game. The blog is for the full injury list, the meaningless stat, and the PDF of the arrest report. The newspaper is for AP style and blogs are for use of idiosyncratic words and acronyms that signal to their loyal readers, “Hey, buddy, if you know what I’m talking about you’re getting the inside scoop. Yeah, the whole world can read this for free, but you? You’re hip.”

SOME EXAMPLES

Here are some good examples of blogs that represent the diversity of writing styles that can all be called blogs.

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/breakingnews/

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/politics/early/archive/nov98/early1104.htm

http://www.boingboing.net/

http://slashdot.org/

http://blog.washingtonpost.com/rawfisher/

http://pogue.blogs.nytimes.com/

http://projects.newsobserver.com/dome

http://miva.citizen-times.com/cgi-bin/miva?blogs+blog_id=hshuler

http://www.blogmaverick.com/

http://talkingpointsmemo.com/

A FINAL 140 CHARACTERS

If you need the Twitter version of “How to Blog,” it’s this: Write as if you were writing an email to your most loyal reader and source. E-mails are brief. Never write a blog post this long.

I don’t know whether anchors like Katie Couric can survive, but there is one kind of news anchor that is thriving. They’re called bloggers.

The Newsweek article is built around this money quote from Don Hewitt:

And Hewitt, 85, the man who coined the term “anchor,” says it may signal the end of an era. Today’s anchors no longer possess the magnetism to draw new viewers, he says. “They’re all good but not great,” says Hewitt. “There are no more Cronkites and Huntleys and Brinkleys. Tom Brokaw’s face was the logo of NBC. Peter Jennings’s was ABC News.”

We hear those last two sentences a lot, but what do they mean? I think there are two answers, one economic and one editorial.

The economic answer is that in an era of media proliferation and audience splintering the human personality is the most important factor in brand differentiation. Competitors can replicate news judgment, design and distribution, but they can’t replicate you — the individual, the human face … the anchor. See Jay Hamilton’s excellent book, All the News That’s Fit to Sell, for a more thorough discussion of this.

The editorial answer is that anchors build trust. We know from decades of social science research that Americans have an increasing tendency to distrust institutions — Big Business, The Media, The Government. But they still trust the individuals who make up those institutions. This first struck me in an August 2002 poll by The Pew Research Center for the People & the Press. Among other things, it said this:

The three major broadcast networks are rated about equally in terms of believability: roughly one-in-four say they believe all or most of what they see on ABC, NBC and CBS.

but it also said this:

Despite modest believability ratings for their network news programs, Tom Brokaw, Dan Rather, and Peter Jennings remain the most trusted figures in television news. … More than a third of those able to rate them say they believe all or most of what the broadcast network anchors say, and only about one-in-five give these news figures even modestly negative ratings for credibility.

That survey caught my eye because it was released a month after I wrote a memo for The Washington Post’s Web site titled “Anchored News: Online Newsrooms Have Been Living in the Wrong Dimension,” which argued that “Online news sites should develop anchors who guide users through news and information throughout the business day.”

In this memo, I was trying to get a print organization to see in broadcast the appropriate analogy for incorporating blogging into a legitimate newsroom.

(From it sprang one short-lived, terribly unsuccessful and un-resurrected idea. During the invasion of Iraq in 2003, we videotaped the site’s on-camera star, Jessica Doyle, providing a brief overview of the site’s new content each day. We did this in part to solve a frustrating navigational challenge of getting the audience to actually see the cornucopia of content we were spreading before them every day. But the other was to try to use a human face to make our content more accessible, inviting and trusted. While that effort was pretty lame — through no fault of all the smart people who tried hard to make it work; I just took the broadcast analogy far too literally — it was part of an important evolution in the role of the anchor.)

Here, adapted from that six-year-old memo, is my argument that the idea of an anchor — a trust human who guides an audience through the news of the day by introducing first-hand news reports by other trusted humans — is probably the most important non-technical element to the future of news.

When XM Radio launched in 2002, it promised an unmatched breadth of music choices. But a friend who was working there during the early days told me that the company discovered that the real key to success was the DJs. An all-reggae channel — like you can find on XM — is rare, but it would not be as compelling if it were not hosted by a former guitarist for Bob Marley and the Melody Makers.

The XM experience is a pretty close replica of earlier radio history, when FM expanded musical offerings. But is was DJs, not technology, that made FM so revolutionary.

Online news and information is consumed in an environment similar to radio. Web browsing is a solitary activity. The users are alone, often at work. They are seeking quality information delivered to them at the right time by someone they trust.

Online journalists must become DJs of information, using their professional judgment and unique personalities to guide online users to compelling stories. To use an analogy from broadcasting, online newsrooms must become anchored.

Online news sites should develop anchors who guide users through news and information throughout the business day. A quality anchor must have authoritative knowledge of the subject and a unique voice and perspective on the news. He or she must invite the audience to participate in the community and generate content. News sites must develop their anchor’s familiarity and invest its brand in the anchor’s personality. It must make the anchor familiar to his or her audience.

Journalists in anchored online newsrooms are divided into three primary job functions: Editor, Anchor and Producer. Copyeditors, night and weekend anchors, researchers, programmers, technologists, photographers and designers support those three primary roles.

The Editor is the person who goes to meetings. Responsibilities include long-range planning for the desk and co-ordination with other desks. Management of the desk’s anchor and producer is left to the editor.

The Anchor is the chief person in charge of the desk’s daily blog. The anchor guides users to specific types of information at appointed times during the day. The anchor provides commentary on the news, does original reporting, interacts with users, hosts online discussions and is the primary public face of the desk. They must have strong personalities, deep knowledge of their subjects and a clear voice.

The Producer is responsible for all non-textual content created by the desk. Producers must have the creativity and technical knowledge to tell stories using multimedia and interactive tools.

An anchor’s day looks like this:

8 a.m. – 10 a.m: Post guide to articles from the affiliated traditional news source. Augment with short online discussions with reporters or relevant newsmakers. Take selected submissions from users.

10 a.m. – Noon: Post a roundup of news from other sources. Augment with short online discussions with reporters or relevant newsmakers. Take selected submissions from users.

Noon – 2 p.m.: Host a live online discussion with a newsmaker, and post appropriate user-generated content.

2 p.m. – 4 p.m.: Conduct some original reporting as news warrants, primarily via audio or video. Guide users to news updates and original documents related to the day’s news.

4 p.m. – 6 p.m.: Post summaries of evening news shows, and preview tomorrow’s stories.

(6 p.m. – 2 a.m.: This shift is covered by a night anchor. Night anchors may cover several desks at once to reduce staffing levels to appropriately match the audience. Overnight anchors post appropriate user-generated content and guide users to breaking news.)

Online news organizations should consider blogging not just as a trendy tool for organizing and presenting content, but the vehicle to better define the rolls of online journalists. Online newsrooms with traditional news counterparts should reorganize the newsroom into an anchored model more commonly found in broadcasting than print newsrooms. It should also simultaneously shift its advertising sales pitches and techniques to those that more closely mirror broadcasting. Successful online advertising will interrupt not just space, but also time. The job of bloggers — anchors — is to drive an audience forward through that time, by engaging the audience, building trust and building a unique brand.