Kathlyn Clore

I just read this job advertisement on JournalismJobs.com, which was the premier job board for newspaper gigs when I graduated from J-School a few years ago:

“Looking for a new challenge and a new venue for those writing and reporting skills? Then help us create a paradigm-shifting website for one of Los Angeles’ most effective and popular elected officials, L.A. County Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky. With fewer journalists covering our political institutions, we’re looking for a writer with sharp editorial skills to produce web stories across a variety of topics, including health, transportation, arts, environment, criminal justice and the economy. Our goal is to connect and communicate with constituents on issues that impact their lives and intersect their interests.

This part-time job is best suited for applicants who’ve worked at newspapers, have superior story instincts, appreciate the complexities of government and have embraced the visual storytelling and community-building of the Internet.”

I think this is evidence of an argument I have been making to my former editor: That the work journalists produce is a public service. News reports, especially local news reports, can provide a lot of value to communities. At many past local events I’ve covered, I was the only reporter there. Local newsrooms are so often the only places producing content for people who want to read about local events.

This advertisement demonstrates (happily) that there IS a market for local news. What I’m not sure about is if I want all the laid-off reporters going to work for government officials. That’s sort of scary.

Although, better to have some reporting on local affairs instead of none. And perhaps my trepidation regarding jobs like this one speak to a sort of old-school American bias: That journalists should be totally objective and separated, to an extent, from society (some even going so far as not to vote). Probably journalists can produce fine work just being honest about their position and ethical in their dealings with sources and the public.

Margot Wallström this week stopped by the press room at the “Berlaymonster” to highlight the launch of PressEuropa.

In her opening remarks (video below), she says the site is one of many Commission attempts (there was a government tender out on this project, which means it is funded by EU taxpayers) to foster the European public information sphere.

I think the idea behind this website is a sound one. I enjoyed my first looks at the site itself, which aggregates the most interesting news sites from the top newspapers in the 27 member states. It is indeed a fun, magazine-like read. The aggregation is done by hand, as I understand it, as is the translation. Articles are translated into 10 EU languages.

The site begs two questions:

1. Are the newspapers from which stories are culled offered compensation for the repurposing of their content?

2. The stories are all selected by an independent team of journalists, but must reflect - according to the site’s editorial charter - topics of interest to the “European Project”.

I wonder if promoting wider circulation of stories involving Europe isn’t “EU propaganda”; ie, pushing the concept of “Europe” down the throats of folks residing in the member states. And if so… Is that a good thing, or a bad thing?

Further, is it effective propaganda (if it is)? Or is this the creation of a multilingual echo chamber?

Just watched FC Barca put Man U on lockdown to win the Champion’s League final 2-0.

Even if this year’s final was not as dramatic a match as last year’s (which went to a shootout), football at this level is no matter what really just… the beautiful game. It’s hard for me to watch enough of it, even though I don’t really have time to follow the teams very closely.

Someone today asked me during an interview what my dream job would be. I think it would be covering soccer on a daily basis. Anytime, anywhere. Men’s or women’s, just about any level of professional play.

At last week’s Sixth Conference on Innovation Journalism, I spent a few hours in the academic track, a new course of offerings at the annual InJo event in Palo Alto, California.

Doctorates and Ph.D. candidates from around the world presented their research in 15-minute snippets. Everything related to the intersection of journalism and innovation.

Normally, I would choose to listen to journalists who did some “best practice,” rather than sit through afternoon of academia. But with the industry in such a mess, it is a good time to listen to the people whose job it is to sit around all day thinking, reading and researching. They actually have time to examine situations more in depth and dream up, from their ivory towers, solutions.

One talk that made a lot of sense from me was Jonathan Silberstein-Loeb’s presentation on “Telecommunications innovation and the shape of the British news market.”

Silberstein-Loeb, an American who is doing a fellowship at Oxford University Saïd Business School, talked about lessons to be learned form the nationalization of the telegraph industry in Britian.

At a certain point, he writes, nationalization of the medium broke up the collusive trio of the Press Association (PA), an organization of the provincial press, London press, and Reuters. This made it more expensive for provincial (smaller) news organizations to have a competitive (or much of any) access to news.

“So, nationalization liberalized trade in news, but a single news organization promised a reduction in
costs to individual newspapers and to facilitate increased and equal access to the news,” he writes.

So the monopolistic trio got going again — to protect the plurality of the news market, especially in the farther-flung regions.

After examining a similar situation with the rise in news wires, Silberstein-Loeb concludes that “monopoly, collusion, and price discrimination helped to protect plurality among newspapers.”

His paper also examines the beginnings of the British Broadcasting Company (the predecessor to the corporation) which lead to a similar conclusion.

He concludes, then, that “Cooperation is, and has always been, the way forward. Before the widespread use of telegraphy, newspapers exchanged news by post. When the telegraph was invented, newspaper publishers formed news associations. The Internet offers great possibilities for increased collaboration. The model of the PA (or the American Associated Press) – an association of newspapers sharing content – should be reinforced and exported by encouraging greater cooperation among newspapers around the world.”

A parallel point Silberstein-Loeb made at Stanford University last week: the news media in their current (crumbling) form were forced on a population of people (by the colluding groups like AP, Reuters, etc.) who never had a chance to create any other kind of structure for information markets.

Back to cooperation, though: Silbertein said during his presentation of this thesis that, “Despite the fact that some people have predicted the collapse of the AP … We ought to rely on cooperation more extensively. I can imagine an AP of the AP.”

It’s a conclusion that flies in the face of decisions made at publications like the Minneapolis Star-Tribune and Las Vegas Sun, which have stopped their subscriptions to the AP in favor of all local content.

But this line of thinking seems to have prevailed in the offices of Ohio newspaper publishers, who recently entered into a content-sharing agreement in order to stay afloat.

And more recently, the EU today unveiled this translation and content-sharing project, an aggregation attempt that is certainly about cooperation (but will it help any of those newspapers make money?)

Part of why collaboration may be necessary to ensure media pluralism, the American scholar argued last week, is because journalism is and has always been a supply-side business in which it is difficult to let the market determine the value of news.

News publishers push information to the public and put a price tag on it. Readers are pretty much unable to determine if the value of that news they’re consuming is fair until they consume it.

With newspapers, of course, the price of news has been so low (as low as a penny, historically) that it’s easy for readers to conclude that they can be fairly assured that the price of NOT KNOWING is higher than the value of buying the day’s news information.

I don’t know if Silberstein-Loeb means to make any real conclusions - beyond “embrace monopoly” - about how journalists should make money on the Internet (THE big problem), but his thoughts and the promotion of looking at current problems through a historical lens are worth consideration.

I agree with the Columbia law professor who says “To love Google, you have to be a little bit of a monarchist.”

But I also agree with this comment Marissa Mayer made during this month’s U.S. Senate hearing on the future of journalism. I had not read Mayer’s testimony until editing this summary of her talk, written by an Italian entrepreneur for the EJC.

It’s one of those comments that helps you view today’s media landscape through a smart lens. Mayer does not suggest any actual steps news publishers should be taking, but she describes a useful way for them to think about the content they publish.

This comment and its use of “basic atomic unit of consumption” is one of those that leaves you smacking your forehead ala Homer Simpson and wondering why you didn’t say this yourself. So obvious… But like they say about contemporary artwork, “Yeah, but you didn’t do it…”

Mayer said:

“Changing the basic unit of content consumption is a challenge, but also an opportunity. Treating the article as the atomic unit of consumption online has several powerful consequences. When producing an article for online news, the publisher must assume that a reader may be viewing this article on its own, independent of the rest of the publication. To make an article effective in a standalone setting requires providing sufficient context for first-time readers, while clearly calling out the latest information for those following a story over time. It also requires a different approach to monetization: each individual article should be self-sustaining. These types of changes will require innovation and experimentation in how news is delivered online, and how advertising can support it.”

Last night I watched Lord of War, a 2005 film in which Nicholas Cage stars as a witty arms dealer.

I recommend the movie for its dry humor and quirky portrayal of illegal arms dealers.

During the movie, Cage’s character often tells his troubled brother, played by Jared Leto, “that’s not our fight.”

He says this line most often in Africa, it seems, during moments when Leto’s character is obviously troubled that the arms deal the pair is brokering will enable a

mass killing.

I wonder if the “it’s not our fight” line is true in the case of Parwiz Kambakhsh, an Afghan journalist recently sentenced to a 20-year prison term for blasphemy. Kambakhsh says he is innocent.

In my e-mail today, I received a note asking me to sign a petition about this case. The Kabul Press website is circulating a petition asking the U.S. State Department to exert political pressure on the president of Afghanistan - as they pressured the Iranian government to release Roxana Saberi - in order to prompt Kambakhsh’s release.

The question is, though, is this a fight for the U.S. State Department?

From what I have read about this case, things don’t look good. Justice is not being served. It does sound like this young journalist is not getting a fair trial.

But this case is one involving an Afghan citizen who is tangled up in his own country’s legal system, however shoddy that system may be.

Saberi, though, is a U.S. citizen. So of course, the State Department owed her (in my opinion) at least some help.

But is the U.S. State Department the right government body to petition here? Is it the job of the U.S. State Department to fight for the rights of Afghan citizens?

I think a petition would be better directed at the government in Afghanistan, the UN or another international body.

In somewhat related news, my director at the EJC yesterday sent this quote about sportswriting:

Quote from Michael Connelly / The Scarecrow: “They were good writers like most sport reporters have to be…”

No new ideas were introduced during this month’s U.S. Senate hearings on the future of journalism.

But I did find a few with which I disagree.

This vanilla bit of insight from Arianna Huffington, first off, characterizes the essays on the Senate’s website:

“We stand on the threshold of a very challenging but very exciting future. Indeed, I am convinced that journalism’s best days lie ahead — just so long as we embrace and support innovation and don’t try to pretend that we can somehow hop into a journalistic Way Back Machine and return to a past that no longer exists and can’t be resurrected.”

This is not a new line of thinking.

Of course journalism has to change. The newsgathering industry must find a way out of the perfect storm Huffington aptly describes, the blizzard created by a lack of advertising revenue and the simultaneous proliferation of the Internet. For many years (15, Huffington says) this storm went largely unaddressed by rigid newsrooms (and the universities that produced their staff) that failed to adapt their approach to content creation.

Huffington lavishes praise on non-profit initiatives like her Investigative Fund, The Center for Public Integrity and ProPublica. These foundations exist to endow the serious investigative work of freelance journalists “many of whom have lost their jobs”.

She also thinks highly of citizen journalism initiatives and says more of them will come on the scene. Citizen journalists are, according to Huffington, “engaged readers can, among other things, recommend stories, produce raw data for original reported stories, write original stories themselves, record exclusive in-the-field video, search through large amounts of data or documents for hidden gems and trends, and much more.”

Plus 10 points for a nice definition, Arianna. Minus 50 points for failing to address a major problem with citizen journalists: They are not paid for their work.

And that means that they’re basically free labor. The addition of more citizen journalism sites to the online publishing landscape means the addition of sites that don’t pay content creators. Or maybe they pay writers, say, $7 an article. Or, maybe a penny a word. Or how about a tiny percentage share of advertising revenue, which writers receive after they publish their first 15 articles?

Such pithy offerings may be the free market price of some content online, but these offerings do not represent a livable wage. These wages don’t fund content that was written after interviews, research or beat reporting. They don’t fund writing that adheres to a journalistic style guide. These prices don’t pay for reporting that includes FOI requests, travel or well-edited multimedia production.

Huffington also says she doesn’t think the government should subsidize “what exists now.” I agree.
She misses the mark, though, when she fails to delve into the problems of “what exists now”.
Part of “what exists now” are business conglomerates that include many kinds of businesses within their portfolio. Consider Sam Zell, for example, who bought The Chicago Tribune and The L.A. Times in 2007.

He has a big portfolio of holdings, as described here. The Tribune and Times are just two of many holdings within his big company.

When he mismanaged his entire portfolio by taking on more debt than he should have, he put the Tribune’s operations in jeopardy.

Perhaps regulations should be written to prevent newspapers from being part of large portfolios managed by people who are more interested in real estate than newspapers.

That idea brings me to David Simon’s testimony.

He presented a engaging essay, but it goes awry with this graf:

“Similarly, there can be no serious consideration of public funding for newspapers. High-end journalism can and should bite any hand that tries to feed it, and it should bite a government hand most viciously. Moreover, it is the right of every American to despise his local newspaper – for being too liberal or too conservative, for covering X and not covering Y, for spelling your name wrong when you do something notable and spelling it correctly when you are seen as dishonorable. And it is the birthright of

every healthy newspaper to hold itself indifferent to such constant disdain and be nonetheless read by all. Because in the end, despite all flaws, there is no better model for a comprehensive and independent review of society than a modern newspaper. As love-hate relationships go, this is a pretty intricate one. An exchange of public money would pull both sides from their comfort zone and prove unacceptable to all.”

I don’t understand why Simon takes issue with journalism that takes public money while failing to mention the similar pitfalls of accepting private money.

Everything I have read about sustainable media development says the key to long-term success is a diversity of funding sources. Every freelance writer will tell you this is true: a diverse revenue stream is important for long-term survival.

Why rule out the government as one of those funding sources? A government’s job is to collect taxes from its citizens and use the resulting tax revenue to improve the lives of its citizens.

Journalism done with money collected from the citizens would be, by nature, accountable to those citizens. And it is in the government’s interest to fund a free press (which I mean in a platform-neutral sense), because the press is useful for distributing all kinds of information to citizens.

Giant private companies (and, to a lesser extent, publicly traded companies) don’t always have that interest. And they are given extreme leeway (as compared to the government, at least the U.S. government) when it comes to transparency about their budgets. A look at today’s unemployment rolls tells us what a good idea it is for businesses to be intransparent.

It’s easily riskier to take money from private companies – which can stonewall and intimidate journalists to a greater extent than public companies - than it is to take money from the government.

That point addressed, I find it hard to understand why Simons can simultaneously think:

“But a non-profit model intrigues, especially if that model allows for locally-based ownership and control of news organizations. Anything that government can do in the way of creating non-profit status for newspapers should be seriously pursued.”

and

“Lastly, I would urge Congress to consider relaxing certain anti-trust prohibitions with regard to the newspaper industry, so that the Washington Post, the New York Times and various other newspapers can sit down and openly discuss protecting their copyright from aggregators and plan an industry wide transition to a paid, online subscriber base. Whatever money comes will prove essential to the task of hiring back some of the talent, commitment, and institutional memory that has been squandered.”

Right on. I hope the Senate strongly considered these thoughts. But I fail to see how a non-profit model funded entirely by private money is a good idea.

This gorgeous video took 14 years to produce.

That’s because it depicts a story about suburbanization. Two farmers talk about leaving their land while a homeowner talks about life with her family in their new house. This story is unfolding all over the American Midwest.

As Mindy McAdams points out, the juxtaposition in the photos is effective in evoking a response in the viewer. This is a story that makes you happy some photographers stay in the same place for a while. It’s also a story with photos that make you realize people will do the same activities all around the world no matter what the circumstances.

And, it is a story that makes me happy some farmers hold out. For example, some landowners on Book Road in Naperville, Illinois, have been holding on to their land while other farmers have sold land that is now a WalMart. I am so much happier when I drive past open land than when I cruise past the ubiquitous and repetitive strip malls which characterize so much of the American landscape.

My adolescence transpired during a transition phase in Naperville. Land had been sold to developers but had not yet been developed. That meant lots of good places for soccer practice.

I also truly felt like I grew up “on the plains” of the Midwest, because I could go outside and see large swaths of undeveloped land. To this day I find wide open spaces “fit my eye”. I hate obscured landscapes such as Interstate 95 in South Carolina, which is buttressed on either side by pine trees. It’s impossible to look out over the landscape.

My boyfriend points out to me, though, that I should not have felt like I grew up on the plains. Apparently the authentic Illinois landscape included a lot of forest. I’m not sure about that, though, because I grew up going on so many “prairie” themed field trips. Something to Google….

I am happy to see Roxana Saberi freed after spending four months in jail accused of spying for the United States.

Her case was frightening for so many reasons. It would have been awful to see Iran sentence her to a more severe punishment as a way to chill the (perhaps) slight thawing of relations with America (sad for her safety and the improvement of international relations).

It is interesting to read speculative reports saying Ayatollah Ali Khamenei perhaps had a hand in orchestrating her release.

On a somewhat tangental thread, I also am starting to wonder - after reading so many vehement denials - if Saberi was actually spying in any capacity for the United States. She’d certainly have been a good candidate for that line of work.

Of course the U.S. government would not be so brazen as to reveal her as a spy (plus, that would be illegal, as the Valerie Plame affair reminds us). But I wonder if many journalists were asking government officials about this issue.

Which begs the question: Is it unethical for journalists to ask questions that lead the interviewee to break the law? I.e., should journalists ask government officials if Saberi is a spy knowing they are anyhow not supposed to publish the information that she is a spy?

Or is it unethical (and illegal) only when it comes to publishing the information? I don’t think it is illegal for journalists to know classified information. In fact, knowing classified information could make a reporter better at her job. It’s only illegal when she tells someone that classified information (by way of publication).

Perhaps more information will come out about this in coming months. So far I have not seen reports making an issue of investigating Saberi’s background.

Anyway, what’s ultimately sobering about this is that for every reporter released, there are others going into the Big House every day. My RSS reader brought me this story about two reporters in Zimbabwe who are being prosecuted for “‘publishing falsehoods.’”

I also saw this story break over the weekend, about the murder of a Mexican journalist. Seems like whenever journalists are killed in Mexico no one can ever officially tell if it is because of their work.

Sad, especially given how many young American journalists who want to work hard to support their colleagues taking on tough stories in dangerous places are sitting at home right now on company-mandated furloughs.

Anyway, violence and intimidation (economic or physical) against journalists should not go unaddressed. Brings to mind this chilling video, inspired by a poem I first read at Yad Vashem from the ALDE Civil Liberties campaign: