If you are like most Americans, most of your news consumption comes from television. You may also get much of your news via Facebook or other online news sources. In this class you will learn to become a more critical consumer of news from all sources. As you begin to study journalism and mass communication, you may find it particularly useful to read the print edition of a national newspaper like USA Today or The Wall Street Journal as well as a local paper. If you read news critically, you will be circling words, writing notes and highlighting passages.

Is anyone out there using a tool for annotating digital content that you actually find useful? You don’t need to necessarily be able to share the notes but the notes preferably would be persistent from device to device.

In the great debate about the future of journalism and the relevance of journalism schools, the Athar anecdote supports my belief that *every* college student should take a course in journalism. Whether they practice the profession or not, many of them will be “brothers in the crowd” — to borrow a phrase and a scene from Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man.

At those moments, we don’t need journalists as much as we need people — like Athar — who practice journalistic thinking.

But I also envied Drescher. He was also the only one at the table who had ever dropped $200,000 of his company’s money on an investigation of a state agency. And the only one who knew what it was like to spend four years pinging the government for public records before he had a story solid enough to sell to his subscribers and advertisers.

One other thing made Drescher an enviable character in the Triangle’s media ecosystem. Despite their valid criticisms of increasing gaps in The News & Observer’s coverage of our communities many noted without irony in their voices, the small, independent and non-profit news operations had the most impact on public policy when they got the attention of Drescher’s paper or one of the local television stations.

And that made me realize that if our state is going to retain its generation-long reputation as a home for journalism that gives voice to the voiceless and holds powerful people accountable, then we must find a way to foster dozens of new and diverse tributaries of news and information that flow into the big, slow-moving mainstream media. Without the tributaries, the MSM seems likely to evaporate entirely. Without a larger channel into which they can empty, the tributaries seem likely to overwhelm us with a flood of disconnected datapoints.

Drescher and the rest of us at the meeting had been brought together by Fiona Morgan, a Duke graduate student, former reporter for The Independent and author of an excellent new study about media in the Triangle. The report is one of several local media ecology studies produced by the New America Foundation‘s Media Policy Initiative. The meeting was hosted by the Triangle Community Foundation. Two quotes in the report struck me as bookends that support my belief that North Carolina needs both professional and amateur journalists in order to build a sustainable news ecosystem in the age of digital, networked media.

For a traditional journalist like me, Ruby Sinreich is the model blogger. Her site, which deals with Orange County politics, is unabashedly left-leaning but also deeply respectful of the facts and of diverse views. Sinreich breaks news and fosters conversation that far surpasses anything found elsewhere in the media glut of Chapel Hill and Carrboro. As Morgan’s report chronicles, Sinreich maintains her blog as a hobby. The site costs $240 a year to publish, but the labor she puts into it is probably worth $25,000 to $40,000 a year. Considering Sinreich also has a day job and a small kid, that’s an amazing contribution to the community. But it’s also a precarious contribution. Sinreich’s blog is not a sustainable business and she told Morgan that she wasn’t sure she wanted it to be.

“It’s a perennial question whether to take advertising,” Sinreich is quoted as saying. “If I did, I feel I would have to be more accountable to the readers of the site and do more research on my posts, rather than writing about whatever interests me. If there were an important meeting coming up, I’d feel like, ‘I don’t want to go, but I have to go cover it.’ … I have a job, and it pays much more than BlogAds.”

So how much, exactly, can you make selling ads on a local blog? Well, Durham blog Bull City Rising brings in $50 to $400 a month. Cary Politics aims to raise $100 a month in donations.  And the entertainment-heavy New Raleigh blog has a self-reported annual revenue of “the low six figures.”

The revenue for these new media startups is dwarfed by even the most troubled mainstream media outlets in the region. Compare the blogs’ revenue to the Triangle’s most established “alternative” newspaper, The Independent. In a good year, The Independent brings in $3 million, its president, Steve Schewel, said last week.

Incumbent media outlets also dwarf the websites’ in terms of audience. According to Morgan’s report, the blogs get between 2,000 and 40,000 people to their sites each month. The N&O and WRAL draw a few million to their sites.

So we shouldn’t be surprised when even the most altruistic amateur journalists are driven more by their political interests than their financial interests. Money can keep a reporter on the beat even when there’s something else she’d rather be doing. Money keeps the watchdog on the lookout even while the rest of us enjoy our daily lives.

But, of course, money’s influencing power can also color the media’s reporting of the facts. As Morgan notes, UNC-TV gets more than half of its money from the state legislature. Recently, that’s created a conflict and public debate about whether the state’s open records law trumps the state’s “shield law” that is intended to keep reporter’s notes private and from being co-opted as a compulsory investigative force for the government. As it played out, UNC-TV management opted to act as a state agency.

In the media business, as in politics, many small streams of revenue seem more likely to dilute the ability for one large stream to exercise undue influence. And also just as in politics, incumbency seems to have its advantages in the media business.

The similarities between politics and the news media don’t end with those two examples. It was another quote in Morgan’s report – this one from Jock Lauterer – my colleague at the UNC School of Journalism and Mass Communication – that shows just how much the MSM needs the blogosphere as well. Lauterer is director of the Carolina Community Media Project, a co-producer of the Northeast Central Durham Community VOICE newspaper.

“The whole community organizing dynamic is what newspaper publishers and editors have not been good at, or haven’t had to do before. But if we’re not partnering, we’re dead. We have to be constantly seeking out new partners to be sustainable,” he told Morgan for her report.

Now I don’t know how many newspaper editors and publishers you know, but most of the ones I’ve met are allergic to the idea of organizing or being organized. It runs against the fierce sense of independence that allows the best of their investigations to be unmoved by popular sentiment. The mainstream news editors I know have grown accustomed to being harangued by often loyal but sometimes deeply disturbed members of their audience. Inviting them any closer into the journalistic process seems a threat not just to their professional integrity but their personal wellbeing.

So that’s another way that mainstream journalists are much like political candidates. The difference is that any political operation worth its salt knows that you never turn away any willing supporter – even the crazy ones. Not every volunteer is going to get access to the strategy meetings, but good campaigns finds some small way that any potential friend can contribute to the cause.

Professional reporters, whose ranks are being mowed down by an unsustainable business model that relies on corralling an increasingly dispersed and disaggregated audience, need to organize their audience in order to lower the cost of reporting.

The Triangle doesn’t necessarily need more professional journalists. What it needs is more people who think journalistically. We need more people who can not just describe what is seen, but who are curious about what we might not be seeing. We need more people who are less interested in what they can make people think and more interested in showing them how we know what we know. Curiosity and verification are the core tenants of journalistic thinking that I teach my newswriting students, and we need to find a way to hone those instincts among all North Carolinians. At the very least, they’ll become better consumers of news and there’s a chance that some might even become better producers of news.

But organizing a community takes more than just will. It takes a plan, and there are a few actions we can take right now if we want to strengthen journalistic thinking in the state and lower the barriers to entry for new media entrepreneurs:

1. Every public record that is produced after today at every level of government should be made available quickly online in a format that can be easily digested by computer programs. These programs can lower the cost of detecting early trends or newsworthy oddities by automatically combing fields of data.
2. Every incumbent news organization should hire at least one person to actively cultivate online community. Like broken windows in an abandoned urban neighborhood, the uninformed anger and irrelevant rants of article comments on news websites have given visitors the impression that it’s OK to behave badly in those places. Site publishers have to be active and engaged hosts who reward good behavior and punish bad. Similarly, blogs and social media have too long been on “the wrong side of the tracks” from the places where traditional reporters look for stories. The mainstream media needs to help anyone in their community that is already blogging on current events learn how to dig deeper into a story by requesting public records, identifying larger trends, and verifying everything they see and hear.
3. Community foundations should establish and fund a volunteer program similar to AmeriCorps that financially supports recent college graduates who want to spend two years reporting news from communities that have no professional reporters dedicated to them.
4. Journalistic thinking and digital publishing should become a part of any civic leadership or volunteer training effort. Morgan’s report notes the importance of “neighborhood colleges” and public access television in helping to develop community leaders and media producers. Each of those programs should add journalistic thinking and digital publishing to their agendas.
5. Leaders of the high-tech industry in the Triangle should organize public-interest “code camps” during which computer programmers spend intensive weekends focused on developing free and open-source digital tools that can be used by professional and amateur journalists.
6. Media literacy should be added to the state middle and high school curricula. Journalistic thinking can help North Carolina’s students learn about writing, math, and the scientific method. Teaching them to produce digital media can increase the fluency with information technology that will help them find jobs and develop the state’s rural and urban economies.

Morgan’s report and her follow-up conference last week make it absolutely clear that the Triangle has an unusual diversity of journalistic species. But what’s lacking is a symbiotic ecosystem that all of them need to survive. Whatever you think about the MSM or about pajama-clad bloggers, you can’t help but realize when reading Morgan’s report that in our current Darwinian media landscape, the creature most likely to become extinct is a free, fair and factual public discourse that holds powerful people accountable, shines light in dark places and gives voice to the voiceless.

The bottom line is this: most of this student work was very good, and it’s important to show industry and other journalism students how we’re preparing the next generation to lead change in newsrooms. Students are young and therefore their work is not perfect, but it can be awfully good. Here are three examples, and the reason that each gives me hope for the future of journalism.
Splash! makes waves in school language programs
By Anika Anand and Kellen Moore

Update: Anand’s blog post on her final project experience, from Dec. 24

• The article was well written and free of grammar, style and structural errors. It demonstrated good news judgment. It was full of details that are best suited for text. It placed a story in a statewide context and clearly showed a substantial research effort to discover facts beyond the surface. It wasn’t investigative journalism by any means, but a good and full explanation of the subject.
• The content of the videos were appropriate for that medium. Anand and Moore used personal anecdotes that complimented the hard facts in the text. The subjects for the video were central to the story.
• The execution of the videos was very good, but probably had the most noticeable flaws of the project. I liked very much the consistency of visual style — the lower-thirds and the angle from which the videos were shot. Whether intentional or accidental, the effect of shooting up at the subjects and having the subjects look farther up still (and off the angle of the camera) made their comments seems “loftier.” Of course, you have to be careful of unintentional editorializing, but I found the message that was communicated visually here consistent with the content of the subjects’ words. The videos could have been shot tighter, I think. Especially in the one video where there are some distracting cords in the lower right corner of the frame. The audio on the video seemed hollow, which may have been a result of microphone equipment, placement or compression.
• The story included two videos that the students posted to YouTube. Using that method of getting video on site has weaknesses, but it also has two strengths. First, it’s easy. Second,  it serves as an additional distribution outlet for your journalism and a way to tease people back to the full story. A few things to remember when using YouTube to drive people to your site — be sure to include on the YouTube video a description of the story and and link back to your site. Also, consider grouping all other related videos together. The file names appear both on YouTube and on the site into which the videos are embedded, so be sure that the file names are descriptive. In this case, the titles were not descriptive enough to be helpful to searchers and scanners.
• All the videos were embedded in appropriate places in the story. Working with a designer would have improved the look of the package. But Anand and Moore did an excellent job with the tools they were given, and no editor or audience member could ask for more than that. By intent or accident, the alternating placement of the video subjects on the left and right provided a pleasant visual effect.
• Excellent work breaking up the story and anchor linking.
• The students on this project really demonstrated their ability to look for the “next-best” solutio — and that’s an underrated skill in deadline-driven journalism. When they weren’t able to embed their Google Map because of a problem inside the CMS, they solved the problem on their own by using  a screen grab. They had to do their own research to figure out how to grab a good still frame from the video to illustrate the piece. (The only improvement I’d make would be to make a link out of the map image as well as the map caption text. I wanted to click on that durn map.)
• Excellent and appropriate use of Google Maps to convey the *where* element of the story. Anand and Moore wisely used different colored markers to convey information. (Although I almost missed the key. Remember that when presenting tools like this, many people — especially people who are very comfortable with computers — will simply start clicking before they read. If they start clicking and don’t quickly “get it” then they will humph loudly and be on their way. The best tools rely on as little CHA (“Click here asshole!”) as possible.

Out-of-state students receive support from campus group
by Rachel Scall, Jeff Woodall and Tristan Long

Each piece of this project was executed well and the package as a whole made sense.

• The choice to do a photo gallery in video format was wise. The video editing application was the tool that these students knew the best and with which they felt the most comfortable. The content did not suffer at all because of their tool choice. The audio was well-matched to the images. They had multiple sources. The title on YouTube looked good, too.
• The map on this project was a knockout. It was nicely embedded into the story and it wisely provided two navigational techniques. The details were excellent and required a lot of reporting. I enjoyed spending a lot of time with it just clicking around, and that is the hallmark of a good online news package.
• The story was nicely done. It could have stood alone well, but it was appropriately enhanced by the other elements. Its links were appropriately placed and sent readers to appropriate destinations.
• I really like the smart way that Scall, Woodall and Long linked between each of the three elements of the story, allowing people to navigate horizontally. Each element stood on its own and had its own editorial reason for being.

Feeding hungry children one backpack at a time
By Elizabeth Lilly & Heather Mandelkehr

Overall, this is a good project. It went beyond the minimum requirements in terms of text length and presentation of the Google Map. The gallery was nicely organized from start to finish. There were a few things that kept it from being an excellent project, but it was overall well done.

• The choice to use a photo slide show instead of video was a smart one because they students were confident in their photo reporting and editing skills than their video production skills. To me, knowing your strengths and weaknesses shows a lot of maturity. Also, the subject didn’t need video. The order of the photos had a clear narrative arc that took us through the distribution process and it had a nice mix of faces and things.
• The audio of the slides sounded a little hollow, but that’s a technical problem that improves with experience. The bigger issue for me was an editorial one — the story of the audio I don’t think fit the photos as well as it could have. A better — and more difficult — audio would have been done with multiple voices of the volunteers talking about the program and walking the audience through the weekly process. Finally, I would have hid the captions as the default. I kept wanting to read them while looking at the photos and listening to the audio. Since I couldn’t do all three at once, I found myself getting distracted from the audio and stopping and restarting. If there’s good info in both the audio and the text, you don’t want your audience to miss either.
• The text was probably the weakest component of this project. There were some grammar and style issues, some passive sentences and imprecise wordings.  Also, I would have liked to read more about money, volume of food and quantitative descriptions of the program or its impact — and less about changes in procedure.
• The map was very well done and appropriately used for the information in the story. Good caption on the map and on each item’s window.
• Lilly and Mandelkehr  also showed an excellent ability to find the “best available” solution to problems. They were smart to insert a JPG of the map and also very smart to link the JPG as well as the text caption. And they demonstrated resourcefulness in your ability to embed the Soundslides. More than any technical proficiency, these problem-solving skills are important in all forms of journalism.

As Ferreri notes in the story, I think there’s a significant difference between using technology and understanding its social, political and economic implications — just like there’s a difference between driving a car and being able to repair its engine. (This is why it’s still important to teach students HTML.)

The challenge for educators is to get students to begin to reflect in both positive and normative terms about how they communicate in different media environments.

Reflection is a key component in service learning, but it’s also critical to add a level of consciousness to any field that has developed informally and organically. Journalism students don’t need classroom education to BE in the world — they can acquire skills more efficiently just by doing internships. But they do need classroom education in order to EXPLAIN the world and to LEAD it.

Our role as journalism professors in a world where anyone can publish a blog is to develop leadership, not merely train practitioners.

The Daily Tar Heel is preparing for a massive run on student newspapers tomorrow, and is asking that souvenir seekers take only one free copy.

But this also from the paper: “We ask that our readers be on the lookout for this, as you have in the past, and call our office at 962-1163 or e-mail dth@unc.edu if you believe you are witnessing the theft of the DTH.”

Print value = permanence and when demand exceeds supply (of both content and newsprint).

Online value = Interactivity. I’ll be curious to see whether Twitter is lit up more with reports of newspaper theft or reports on which newsboxes are getting refilled. Also, watch for amateur photo and video from Franklin Street tonight to beat anything done by professional media.

Of course, this is all moot if UNC doesn’t win, so GO HEELS!

(And, yes, this post is pure Google bait.)

Good advice for future journalists from Alan Murray, the editor of the Wall Street Journal’s Web site, who gave the Park Lecture at UNC’s School of Journalism and Mass Communication on Thursday night. His approach to online journalism certainly sounded right to me, but what I didn’t hear was any hard evidence that would help support my gut instinct.

The biggest question I still have: Is there any business model for high quality local public affairs journalism?

Murray nicely laid out an argument for the kind of “do what you do best, and link to the rest” journalism that makes sense on the Web. He wasn’t sanctimonious about do-gooder journalism and gave well-deserved props to Matt Drudge for being a great editor who creates value not by creating content, but by being incredibly in tune with what his audience wants. Nor did Murray take the self-loathing approach that’s increasingly common in the MSM; he said that the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal that Drudge so doggedly promoted was the low point of his career.

The Journal is often cited as being in the fortunate position of being able to get people to pay for its product. It’s a niche product that serves an affluent audience with information its readers use to make money for themselves. So Murray had some ideas for local papers: The Houston Chronicle, he said, should be the go-to source for information about the oil industry, and the San Jose Mercury-News should be all over Silicon Valley.

That all makes pretty good sense to me, and I still have no idea why papers aren’t pursuing those strategies more vigorously. But here’s an important question for which I still don’t have an answer — do those business models scale down?

The Houston Chronicle may be able to make money by assigning three people to cover the oil industry and charging $1,500 a year for a subscription to a Web site featuring their work. They could probably even make good money by selling ads on that content for a free site with a national audience. But would that niche strategy work, too, if the Houston Chronicle’s niche were the Houston Independent School District? Are there as many people who care about Houston’s schools as care about Houston’s oil? Are both groups of readers as valuable to advertisers? And — this is the biggest question — are both groups willing to pay the same amount to subscribe to their niche of interest?

Let’s take a look at Chapel Hill. It has one of the best public school systems in the country and easily the best in the state. Parents are wealthy, highly education and, I’d imagine, have high expectations and high levels of involvement. It serves 11,000 students. According to the Census Bureau, there are 5,386 families in Chapel Hill with kids under 18 — and, presumably, in public or private school. About 5,000 people voted in the 2007 school board elections.

So let’s hire 1 FTE to cover education in Chapel Hill and Carrboro. We’re going to hire someone right out of college and pay her the national average for new journalism grads working at daily newspapers — $28,000. Just so nobody accuses us of being a pajama-wearing blogger, we’ll go ahead and hire a 0.5 FTE to edit the education stories, and we’ll pay the editor half of her $40,000 annual salary.

And, just make everything neat and tidy, let’s publish on the Web only and not charge any of the overhead utilities, legal or equipment costs to this beat. But let’s say you need to pay 16 percent in Social Security taxes and benefits and would like to have a very conservative 5 percent profit margin. So, let’s say the education beat needs to earn you a little under $60,000.

$60,000 divided among 5,000 subscribers is $12.00. How many of those 5,000 potential subscribers would pay the 12 bucks to subscribe to a Web site about the Chapel Hill-Carrboro City Schools? Let’s say we could only get 3,000 subscribers. Would they pay $20 just for that one beat?

Well that’s exactly how much one of my fellow professors said he would pay when we were discussing this scenario after Murray’s speech. But he said he’d pay it only if he received a very selective and relevant report. He’d be willing to pay more money for less content, as long as that content was hyper-relevant, he said.

That leads to some other interesting questions — what would be the public affairs journalism consumption budget for the average Chapel Hillian? How many beats would she buy? About 6,000 people voted in town council elections. Would half of them pay another $20 a year for coverage of town government? Or, could you still do a decent report with a 0.5 FTE for each beat?

Dunno. But this is really the business model we’re talking about when we talk about niche publishing. The newspaper has been disaggregated by the Web. News companies can add little value to their reporting with packaging and no value to their reporting with doorstep delivery. Readers already pay Dell, Microsoft and Verizon for those additional services. This is what we’re talking about when Web metrics allow us to see ROI at the story level.

This model may not save local public affairs reporting, but I doubt it’s going to make it worse. I’m pretty sure there’s nobody covering Chapel Hill schools even half time right now.

(My live tweets of the speech are here. I will post video and the text of his remarks when they are available.)

The only thing standing in the way of better collaboration had been the difficulty so far in matching the problems with the resources. We would need to create a Match.com of journalism innovation, I said, where newsroom leaders could submit RFPs and where educators could post the research and technical resources of their students.

So with 10 minutes left in the panel, I whipped open a Word document and projected it on the screen at the front of the room. I was ready to start brainstorming right there and begin making a quick list of research questions and innovation projects. Oh, the excitement of a panel discussion that would be more than just talk! The bridges that would be built!

But then we hit just one small snag. Of the hundred or so people in the room, about 90 percent were from the classroom. Somehow, on an otherwise unremarkable Friday afternoon in Washington, the Statler conference room at the Capital Hilton had transformed in to an ivory tower. We had built a bridge to nowhere.

Larry Dailey from the University of Nevada, Reno, made the good observation after the session that we probably had a marketing problem. We had the words “university” and “academia” in our panel title. We were competing against one called “Optimize and Monetize.” Not really a contest, is it?

All that said, we still had a great group of panelists I had the privilege of moderating. One panelist — Paul Volpe, the deputy politics editor at washingtonpost.com — made a dead-on observation that makes the homogeneity of the panel moot anyway. “Pitch me,” he told the journalism instructors in the room. He said he gets more proposals than he can handle every day from vendors who are trying to sell a product to The Washington Post. Some of them, he said, are attempting to solve a problem he didn’t even know he had until they made their pitch. If academics want to play a leading role in “research and development” for the news industry, he said we needed to be the ones to identify market needs and build the solutions. Journalists, whose days are more than full simply trying to deal with immediate publishing demands, don’t have time to ponder these things.

He make a good point. If universities want to be R&D shops, then we need to start being the places where services like Pluck or Inform or Apture are born. We need to be the places to create original sites like Slate or MediaStorm or Everyblock. Why not? In Chapel Hill alone we have incredible resources to foster and incubate these kinds of projects — resources like Carolina Launch Pad and the Carolina Challenge. Shoot, we have one of America’s best journalism schools at what The Princeton Review has called the most entrepreneurial university in the country.

The other two panelists are tackling the newsroom-classroom partnership from two different angles. Jay Rosen is getting ready to launch Studio 20 at New York University and Retha Hill is gearing up for her second year as director of the New Media Innovation Lab at Arizona State University.

Rosen said he was trying to shake the metaphor of j-school as boot camp and replace it with the metaphor of the studio theater — maybe like the one at Yale. “If you imagine yourselves that way, people will treat you that way,” he said.

Studio 20 aims to partner with a news organization around a specific project. That project will then get taken “in to the studio” and become an integrated part of the curriculum. In fact, it becomes the whole curriculum. Everything about the Studio 20 master’s degree program is centered around these projects. If the Studio had been up and running this year, for example, Rosen said they would have partnered perhaps with Talking Points Memo to do a project.

When the program gets up and running next year, it will have 15 master’s students and three instructors. Rosen also said the program would have visiting fellows from the profession who would help lead some of the projects.

Rosen’s suggestion for academics who want to make better connections to industry:

• Make a personal connection to a decision maker by teaching that person something. Become a one-on-one tutor demonstrating that your expertise can fill his or her need.
• Offer to build something for free for that decision maker’s news organization.

Hill’s program in Arizona is already up and working with clients such as Gannett and AZCentral.com. One of the products they’ve created is a Facebook application for the Arizona Republic’s coverage of high school sports.

Clients approach the New Media Innovation Lab, the students consult with the client and then provide a demo.

At ASU, the experience is extra-curricular. Hill pays her grad students $10.75 an hour and her undergrads $9.75 an hour. Each works about 20 hours a week in the lab. The students come not only from journalism, but engineering and finance as well. For each role in her lab, Hill said she has six or seven openings, with anywhere between 10 and 40 applicants for each role. One of the challenges, she said, was that some of the more experienced programmers and designers can easily make more money by taking their skills outside the university.

One thing that struck me is that while students in these programs are doing a great job creating products, there isn’t much time left for creating knowledge, for creating broader theories from the specifics of the project and engaging the research faculty to better understand the broader lessons about how or why a particular product works or fails.

Retha and Jay ARE building bridges. Paul Volpe has some great ideas about creating a place where students can train alongside newsroom veterans who want to re-train. And I see more and more examples of these kinds of partnerships every year.

So what if we didn’t get to create our database of newsroom client needs and academic resources yesterday. I’d like to do it here. You have a resource in your classroom, or a problem in your newsroom? Post it to the comments are here and we’ll keep the conversation going.