I have new duty to add to journalists’ jobs: Imagine how readers will use the information news organizations disseminate.

In the past, it was enough to gather the information, accurately explain it, and make some sort of sense of the news for readers. Now, journalists need to imagine what is is like to be the consumer of that information — and to use that knowledge to better craft the messages, regardless of what format (text, video, photo, audio, social media) they employ.

An example illustrates my point. Recently, my family and I were driving back from a New Year’s trip to New Orleans. We were about half-way through the 20-hour drive, when we hit the snow-and-ice covered roadways of Interstate 81 in southern Virginia. We were going along at a decent clip, when suddenly traffic stopped.

Read the rest of the post at Harvard University’s Nieman Journalism Lab.

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Today I’m again handing my blog over to veteran journalist Amber Smith, a friend and former colleague of mine at The Post-Standard in Syracuse. In her free time, she blogs about dementia at DementiAwareness. She offers Part 2 of how old-time journalism relates to  the changing world of media.

As a veteran-journalist-but-newbie-blogger, I’m learning something new every day.
Yesterday I wrote about some of the axioms journalists sort of lived by as I was working my way through the ranks.  

Today, I’m exploring some of the common newspaper practices that I believe journalist bloggers, writing in an online world, would do well to follow. (Plus a couple I believe they can safely ignore.)

See if you agree:
 
Inverted pyramid. (KEEP)
Long drilled into journalism students, the inverted pyramid (pertinent information at the top of the story and least important at the bottom) is a style that I find even more important online. Blog readers of today, like newspaper readers of yesterday, have short attention spans, so they must be hooked in the lead of your article. Unless your subject lends itself to a lengthy narrative style, readers won’t stay with you if they believe they have to spend too much time for the information they seek.
 
Most of the posts on my blog, DementiAwareness  follow an inverted pyramid style. I don’t think this makes them boring. I think it makes them easy to read and useful, and helps give it a newsy “voice.”
 
5 W’s and the H. (KEEP)
If you’re trying to communicate, it makes sense to answer all of the basic questions: the who, what, when, where, why and how. Leave your readers with questions, and they will search elsewhere—away from your blog. Of course the answers to these basic questions can be answered in a skillfully written way. No need to quash creativity for fill-in-the-blanks. Although, just as in newsprint, when writing about an upcoming event, nothing beats a little “fact box” containing the particulars.
 
Background paragraphs. (TOSS)
Including paragraphs of background material, for the benefit of readers who were unfamiliar with the subject, can take up several column inches in a newspaper. Blogging journalists have a wonderful, wonderful tool called “links” at their disposal. If you’ve covered the subject previously, link to your work. It saves you time and space, and readers who need to be brought up to speed on the subject can easily do that with a click.
 
Whenever I write about frontotemporal dementia, the type my father has, I link to an early post in which I explained what this is. 
 
Newsworthiness. (KEEP)
General circulation newspapers and their online equivalents strive to be pretty much all things to all people. With few exceptions, they have not tried to specialize in areas beyond local news coverage. Reporters on specialty beats (such as religion, education, health, environment) have spent entire careers pitching stories to editors who challenge the news value: Who does it affect? What is the impact? Why should we devote newshole to that? Essentially: Who cares?
 
Blogging journalists with focused blogs can easily answer that question. Choose a rich niche, and you’ll never lack for something to write about. Connect with a dedicated audience, and you’ll always know exactly who cares.
 
Yes, any journalist worth his or her salt could cover anything, but I recommend choosing a subject for your blog that’s important to you. Even if you do not practice “advocacy journalism,” the passion you carry in your heart for your subject matter will come across. In addition, your genuine interest will guide you to the best stories — helping to keep your blog relevant and newsworthy.
 
Projects. (KEEP)
 In some newsrooms, the reporters who are perched highest in the pecking order are reporters on “projects teams.” They’re not bothered with daily reporting responsibilities. They concentrate on longer-term assignments, bigger stories with bigger impacts. When times were flush, even small newsrooms tried to afford projects; today, formal teams are a luxury found only in the most fortunate newsrooms. So reporters — many of whom work in newsrooms that struggle to do more with less — are left to chisel away at that big story only after their regular work is done.
 
This is sort of what journalist bloggers do, in practice. We chisel away. Our blogs are works in progress. Instead of reporting on a subject, saving up notes, writing chunks to be part of a big story, our blogs are the story. Our blogs are our project. And we may not realize the body of work we create, one post at a time, has a way of telling a bigger story.

A concept that gets bandied about a great deal is that news organizations need to help people “make sense of the world.”  I’ve used the idea myself to show how news organizations need to realize they sell convenience, not news. We all kind of know what we mean by this concept, but it doesn’t have a clear definition.

Last week, I encountered a situation that clearly illustrates what I think it means for a news organization to help its readers/viewers make sense of the world.

At 5:30 a.m. on day, I got a text message from one of  my local television stations alerting me that my kids’ school was closed because of an impending snowstorm. This was a valuable bit of information. Getting it by text was incredibly convenient. My phone buzzed on my bedside table, alerting me to the text.  I didn’t even have to get out of bed. I turned off my alarm and slept in, a rare luxury in my frenetic life.

Read the rest of the post at Nieman Journalism Lab.

The legacy press or the traditional media or whatever we’re calling newspapers these days has one main challenge for 2010. And it’s not finding a new business model, although, of course, that’s important, too.

But the main challenge has nothing to do with business plans. It has to do with vision. It has to do with being able to imagine a world that does not yet exist.

While the news media’s woes come from lagging ad rates and content that’s scooped up (or stolen, depending on your perspective) by aggregrators, these are all symptoms of the main problem. The true problem for the media is an inability to imagine what media consumption will look like in one, five, 10 years.

Read the rest of the post at Nieman Journalism Lab.

I can hardly believe it has been more than a year since I started this blog. Back in those early days, I had hardly any readers. I was writing for myself, but bit by bit some of you started to read. I thank all of you for that. I appreciate your comments, your interest in what I have to say, and your ideas for the transformation of journalism. I hope to see you around the blogosphere in 2010.

Here are the 10 posts from Save the Media that you made popular in the past year:

1. 10 “journalism rules” you can break on your blog. This one raised the biggest buzz of anything I’ve written. Some liked it. Others didn’t. But it is safe to say this post got a lot of people thinking, which is always a good move in my book.

2. How Journalism Can Change. The credit for this one goes to my former Post-Standard colleague, Amber Smith. She blogs about health and fitness.

3. Top Twitter told for journalists. How to use Twitter as a journalistic tool, not just for telling people what you had for lunch.

4. A journalist’s guide to the ethics of social media. Is ethical social media use an oxymoron? I think not. I explain that ethics in social media are just like ethics anywhere else. Right is right.

5. Is blogging journalism? Yes and no. Blogging, I write is a tool, like newsprint or airwaves. Blogging can certainly be used for journalism, but not every blog is journalism.

6. The “hyperinterest” approach to news. What’s hyperinterest? It’s tailored to the niche. It’s specific to the audience.

7. Twitter etiquette, style rules for 2010. My take on the rules of Twitter.

8. How journalists can use Facebook.  Facebook is fun, but it’s also useful as a reporting, crowd-sourcing and community-building tool. Here’s how.

9. More on newspapers social media rules. This was about the ongoing hub-bub about The New York Times, The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal coming up with rules for how their staff use social media.

10. So what’s journalism? Folks on Twitter and yours truly tried to come up with a definition in today’s changing media climate.

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I heard the news about Editor & Publisher closing as I hear many things these days – through Twitter. Patrick Thornton (jiconoclast) tweeted: “Does anything better symbolize the state of print media right now than the closure of E&P? Yes things are very bad.” At first, I hoped his tweet didn’t mean what I knew it meant. But a quick search of Twitter yielded proof. Yes, E&P had told its staff Thursday that it was shutting down its print and online operation.

This shook me even more than when Gourmet announced its closure a while back. (By the way,  I found about a Gourmet’s death on Twitter, too.)

I read E&P almost religiously in my early years as a journalist. The magazine had a bright purple cover back then. I’d pretty much devour it when it arrived in my mailbox. As time went on, I didn’t renew my subscription. I’m not sure why.

The thing is I enjoyed E&P’s articles. I appreciated the reporting. In fact, in the last few years, its Web site became one of regular online haunts to find out what’s going on in the news business. Sometimes, I’d head to the E&P Web page myself, but more often I’d be drawn there by a well-worded tweet or a blog post from someone whose opinion I valued.

Read the rest of this post at Nieman Journalism Lab.

Over the past several months, much has been said about transparency being the new objectivity in journalism. As news organizations figure out whether they’ll use social media, and, if so, how they’ll use it, the phrase has been popping up more and more in the blogosphere.

I agree with that sentiment to a point, and I support the idea of transparency whole-heartedly. But at the risk of sounding like the glutton who wants her proverbial cake and to eat it, too, I ask: Why can’t we have both? Why can’t we aim for both objectivity and transparency?

Objectivity is unattainable in my mind unless robots begin to replace journalists (and even then, there’s still the opinions of the humans programming the robots.)  But I think it’s a goal worth shooting for. Journalists should, I believe, try with all their might to show all sides (not just two) of a story,  to be fair, to be accurate, to hold their own opinions in check in the telling. Even viewpoints we disagree with should get the airing of open discourse.

Read the rest of the post at Nieman Journalism Lab.

My occasional series  “What the Heck do You Do on Twitter?” is picking up some steam. Here’s the latest. But first, be sure to read the whole series, especially if you’re new to Twitter.

And if you’d like to be featured, e-mail me at savethemedia@yahoo.com or direct message me on Twitter.

Here is what Laura-Grisselle Aguayo, 20, a junior magazine journalism major at Syracuse University, has to say about how she uses Twitter:

How long have you been on Twitter? I have been for about 2 months now.

Why did you get started? I first started my account because it was required for my NEW 305 class, but I also saw that my roommate was interested in getting an account so the decision was easier because I wasn’t making an account by myself.

Did it end up being different than you expected? It is very different than I expected. I thought that Twitter was just a way to let people know what you were doing on a daily basis, but it is much more than that. You can post links to interesting articles, communicate with other users, and retweet interesting things others are saying. I find out a lot about the news and what’s going in my community through Twitter.

How much time do you spent on Twitter daily? How many days a week do you log on? I probably spend about an hour everyday. I log on every day, even though I don’t tweet everyday.

What is the primary reason you use Twitter? I like to check up on the news through Twitter as well as some of my favorite celebrities, magazines and friends. I like to see the trending topics and see what others are talking about most, and I feel like I keep up with the news better than reading a newspaper or watching the news because the top stories just pop up on my home page.

The news comes to me instead of me going to it. Also, what my friends say is important to me. They post music and links that might interest me too since they are part of my peer group. It helps me keep up with music and entertainment trends.

Do you mainly follow people you know in the face-to-face world, strangers, or a little bit of both?Anything else you like to add about your Twitter use? I follow both people I know face-to-face and strangers but not random people. Just celebrities that are of interest to me. I keep my tweets private just to have a sense of security on the Web, but some celebrities tweet about my favorite music and TV shows, so I can keep up with them that way.

I also follow news sources and magazines, which help me keep up with the top news and magazine trends without always having to buy the magazine. Before I started using Twitter, I thought it was just for ego-centric people who wanted people to know what they were doing at all times. Now I look at it as a tool to connect with others and keep up with the world around me in a quick and accessible way. The 140-character limit makes sure people keep their thoughts to the point, which is great for a society that is always on the go.

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A friend, Glenn Coin, has asked me to guest lecture about the ethics of social media for his Utica College journalism class, so I figured I’d blog my lesson plan to save time — and spread the message.

I thought the ethics of social media is a timely topic, given the debate over social media rules that has been waging now for months. It began in the spring when first the Dow Jones Co. and then The New York Times issued social media rules. Then it resurfaced recently when The Washington Post released its rules, and a WaPo editor admitted he quit Twitter, rather than violate the rules.

In the meantime, several ethical moments in social media have taken place, and I’ll got through them each later in this post.

First, what are ethics?

Merriam-Webster defines ethics as:

A set of moral principles : a theory or system of moral values.

What about for journalists?

For journalists, the definition of ethics gets a lot longer. The Society of Professional Journalists offers a long list of what constitutes journalistic ethics, including:  making every effort to be accurate, avoid stereotyping and offering a diversity of viewpoints. It also calls for journalists not to plagiarize and to distinguish between advocacy and news reporting.

So are things any different online?

Online Journalism Review argues no. Journalistic ethics are pretty much the same online as in print or broadcast:  Don’t plagiarize; tell readers how you got your information; don’t accept gifts or money for coverage; tell the truth; be honest.

I agree with OJR. Journalists online must be accurate and honest and strive to tell the truth, and they can’t copy others’ work. (I’d argue that linking isn’t copying, although not everybody agrees with that.)

So are ethics any different on the Web or in social media than in the rest of journalism?

I say no. I think ethics are ethics. You can’t have one set of rules for online and another for print. But I do think the medium impacts how we live out these philosophies, and I’ll get to that more later. When it comes to social media, one of the key questions becomes: If a journalist offers an opinion on Twitter, is that unethical? Does that violate some type of rule? Think about that — and we’ll discuss more later.

Personally, I follow a basic code of ethics that works for me in the face-to-face world, the professional world and online. It’s quite simple:

• First do no harm. I try in every part of my life to avoid doing anything that would hurt another person. (To me, this doesn’t mean writing only good or happy news. But it does mean getting as many sides of the story as possible before writing about something that could put anybody in a bad light. It also means giving a source an adequate chance to repond, not just calling once.)

• Don’t put anything on the Internet (Twitter, Facebook, what have you) that you’d be embarrassed to see on the front page of The New York Times. That means no drunk pictures, nothing “inappropriate,” nothing that accuses another person of something without verified support.

3. Be transparent. That means be honest about what’s going on. If you make a mistake, admit it. If you misunderstood something, acknowledge it. If you inadvertently wrong someone, say you’re sorry and try to fix it. To me, this doesn’t mean you pretend you don’t have opinions. You’re just honest with yourself about how what you’re thinking shapes your worldview.

The bottom line with ethics is it comes from inside you. I can’t tell you how to live any more than you can tell me how to live. Ethics aren’t black and white; they are gray, very gray. If a clerk gave you more change then you should have received, and you noticed in the store, would you return it? (I would.) What if you’d driven home already before you noticed? For me, it would depend on how much more. If it was change or a few dollars, I’d chalk it up to good karma on my part. If it was significant money ($20), I’d mail a check to the store with a note. But you might not, and that’s OK. My code doesn’t have to be yours.

What every journalist, what every person must do is really think about what ethics means and come up with a personal code that reflects that. And then stick by it. Certainly, if you work for a news organization, you’ll be bound by whatever code that organization adopts. But you still need to have your own personal code, and you may need to argue your point — in a nice way.

Don’t fall into the trap of … My boss told me to do it. My editor said it was OK. You know in your gut what’s right. Follow that. Would you be embarrassed if someone knew you did something? Then don’t do it. That queasy feeling we get in our stomach is there for a reason — to stop us from doing something stupid. Feeling guilty in many cases is often a normal response to doing something wrong.

Next, I’m going to go through some recent ethical dilemmas in the sphere of journalistic social media. I’ll tell you whether I think each case was ethical or not, but you need to figure out what you think for yourself. Argue your case. Stand for something. The goal of this exercise isn’t to teach you rules, as I might if I were teaching algebra (solve within the parentheses first, then the exponents, then multiplication and division from left to right, then addition and subtraction from left to right). Ethics is messy or mungy.

Ethics is often case by case because you may encounter a situation you never expected or thought of or that doesn’t mirror anything else that has happened before. Being ethical in practice is easy; living it is harder. (Think of it this way: You find $1,000 in an un-marked envelope in the mall. My ethics say I must return it, even if I have no way of knowing if it will reach its true owner. But it’s a lot harder to do that if your rent is due, and you have no idea how you’ll pay. Believing something is easy. Acting on it can be difficult.)

Some examples:

• The “jackass tweet.” President Barack Obama called hip-hop artist Kanye West a jackass for grabbing the microphone from teen country singer Taylor Swift during the MTV music video. Obama made the comment off the record during an interview with CNBC.  “Nightline” co-anchor Terry Moran tweeted to his more than 1 million followers that the president had called West a jackass.

Right or wrong? I say wrong. The comment was off the record, and that means the journalist should not disseminate it. Period. OK, let’s mix it up a bit ethically. What if a guy from a local deli was in the room at the time, delivering sandwiches. He overheard the president and tweeted it. Right or wrong? To me, that’s more fair game. He made no promise of being off the record. Word to the president: Don’t call people jackasses even off the record.

• The erroneous tweet: About a year ago, Mathew Ingram, communities editors for the Toronto Globe and Mail, tweeted after seeing a report on CNN’s iReport “citizen journalism” portal about Steve Jobs having a heart attack. He noted there were reports of a heart attack, but they were unverified.  A minute or two later, he noted where the tip came from, that someone on Digg saw the report on the news, and that the report could be from a troll. He caught fire from some who argued as a journalist Ingram should have made sure the report was true before he passed it on. In the end, it turned out that Jobs had not had a heart attack.

Right or wrong? Well, first, in the interest of transparency, let me disclose that Ingram and I both blog for Harvard University’s Nieman Journalism Lab. While I’ve never meet him personally, we’ve corresponded a bit through Twitter. He also wrote a blog post a while back defending a controversial post I wrote about journalistic rules you can break on your blog. I tell you this because I believe in transparency. I don’t think all this clouds my judgment of Ingram, but you might. So here is: all on the table.

With that said, I don’t think he was wrong to tweet what would clearly be a very newsworthy tweet. I’m not saying that newsworthiness outweighs accuracy. Not at all. But Ingram, I believe, wouldn’t have tweeted something he knew to be false. He was just passing on news that many people would interest many and pointing out that it might not be true. If I had read his tweet, it would have spurred me to find out more, not lulled me into believing something based only on a tweet.

Some argued he should have verified the tweet before passing it on. Perhaps. Verification is always good. But one of the beauties of social media is its fluidity. It would be impossible for all of the millions of people on Twitter to verify every tweet before passing it on. Twitter isn’t a news medium. I think there’s an expectation that Twitter is the start of a conversation to prompt people to find out more, not the be all and end all.

With all that said, Ingram acknowledged on his blog that he’s likely do things differently. Perhaps. But Twitter only works an an information conduit if people aren’t afraid of tweeting. We’ll all make mistakes. Just last week, I tweeted something that look legit and turned out to be spam. Mea Culpa. That’s not unethical. That’s human.

• This is your brain on Facebook: A doctor in training posted a picture of a patient’s brain on Facebook, prompting a probe by Upstate Medical University, which wasn’t happy with the posting. The brain wasn’t labeled, so no one could really tell whose brain it was, except, of course the doc in training.  But some of the doc in training’s friends posted comments beside the picture that, perhaps, the owner of the brain might find, eh, unseemly:  “Do you feel like Hannibal Lector sometimes?” “Love a good BRAIN in the early morning!!” “Should that be served with a white or red wine????”

Right or wrong? My take is this was wrong, very wrong. Why? Doctors get to see us in our most vulnerable states (few things are more vulnerable than having your brain exposed), so they have even a greater obligation to protect that vulnerability. If it were me, I wouldn’t like my brain being discussed this way. And I wouldn’t want my doctor discussing any part of my body on his or her Facebook page.

But, you couldn’t tell whose brain it was, so why does it matter? To me it does. Some might say, “Lighten up; it’s funny.” I acknowledge that doctors probably need to use some gallows humor to get through the day, similarly to how cops and police reporters handle the job with humor. That’s fine. But don’t go public. Joking with a colleague is one thing. Doing it on a Facebook, very public space, the town square of our era so to speak, is different. (Yes, I know that only the doc’s Facebook friends could see the picture. But the thing is with the Web is you can’t trust that. If people can hack my credit card number off the Web, I’m guessing someone (not me) has the know-how to hack into Facebook.)

• The pulled blog post:  The Globe and Mail’s book editor attended a search-engine optimization seminar at the newspaper and then blogged critically on the newspaper’s Web site about the worshop. According to Ingram’s explanation, the books editor felt the workshop stressed too much that online headlines should be understandable to search engines, rather than people. Some senior editors at the Globe took umbrage at the post, and it was pulled. Ingram urged that he explain to readers why the post was taken down, especially considering some people had already seen the post, and at least one blog had linked to it.

Right or wrong? Well, to me, I think it was vital that the newspaper explain why it took down the post, even if no one had seen the post. The days of the detached news staff that knows better than the readers are over. So I’m glad, the newspaper explained it’s reasoning, which was the rant wasn’t particularly suitable for a books blog. I think journalists have an ethical obligation in today’s world to be transparent. To explain what they do and why they do it. Actually, I think this has always been the case, but the Web forces more transparency. (In the old days, if the books editors ranted in a print column, editors would spike it before anyone outside the newsroom would know.)

Transparency becomes an ethical issue because being transparent engenders trust in the same way that concealing things engenders suspicion. Ingram writes that he “argued that the trust of our readers was also a key part of our brand, and that we had to do everything we could to maintain it. That, I think, is the fundamental purpose of being open and honest in the first place. Trust, as Craig Newmark has said, is ‘the new black.’ ” I agree.

What do you think? Where do you draw the ethical line.

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