Social media isn’t just about Twitter and Facebook. Sometimes it’s about finding new ways to listen to your audience. Even reader comments, which seem so 1998, can be a good starting point.
Today’s example: For some time now, a commenter to the New Haven Independent who goes by the handle of “Norton Street” has been posting smart missives on issues related to architecture and urban design.
On Tuesday, NHI editor Paul Bass revealed Norton Street’s identity — he is an architecture student named Jonathan Hopkins — and accompanied him on a walking tour of New Haven’s architectural highlights and lowlights.
The story has already attracted 17 comments, including yet another long post from Hopkins.
Here is the NHI’s comments policy, which I think is a model of how to do this right.
Michael Chaves was a “lumper”: He worked as a laborer for long-haul truckers and slept in their trailers. Dale Anderson was a lumper too. One night they were hanging out at a truck stop when Anderson, drunk, urinated on the spot where Chaves slept. They argued, and Chaves beat him to death with a bat.
That’s the story Chaves told to police in Phoenix, Arizona.
Former Wall Street bad boy Henry Blodget takes a look at the state of the newspaper business and asks an impolite question: So what? Blodget writes:
“Journalism” is alive and well, as evidenced by the still-robust health of companies like Bloomberg and Reuters, the survival of the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and other great news organizations, the hyper-growth of online news and commentary sites, and the rise of social media.
Interestingly, Blodget’s provocation coincides with news that conditions are improving at the New York Times Co., which, despite its financial woes, is almost certain to be one of the winners in the emerging media landscape.
And I don’t think anyone would disagree with Blodget’s assessment that “society doesn’t need hundreds of White House reporters.” Back in the day, many of us used to argue that at least a few newspapers ought to have the guts to leave the White House to the AP and instead dig into the undercovered federal agencies. It never happened, and the moment has long since passed.
But I can’t be as cavalier as Blodget. If major metropolitan newspapers like the Boston Globe, the Philadelphia Inquirer and the Miami Herald can’t reinvent themselves as robust local-news operations, or somehow be replaced, then democratic self-government will suffer.
As you know, I’ve been paying a lot of attention to the New Haven Independent, a non-profit news site that stands as an interesting model of where local journalism may be headed. The local daily, the New Haven Register, is owned by the Journal Register Co., which is bankrupt. [Correction: The company emerged from bankruptcy in August.] The Register still does good work, but the Independent focuses more closely on the city, on urban issues and on community-building.
But the Independent employs just four full-timers, plus another two at an affiliate site. And it may never get much bigger than that.
I have very little nostalgia for the newspaper business, and I’m excited and energized about what’s taking place at the grassroots. But if we lose the capacity to throw bodies at certain kinds of complicated stories, especially local stories, then we’ll have lost a lot. (Via Jack Shafer’s Twitter feed.)
Len Downie, former executive editor of the Washington Post, and Michael Schudson of Columbia University will release a report tomorrow that calls, among other things, for direct government funding of local journalism. Rick Edmonds of the Poynter Institute says such funding could amount to $500 million a year.
Despite Downie’s sterling credentials — and he’s looking better every day — I suspect this isn’t going anywhere, nor should it. True, Downie and Schudson try to draw parallels to existing models such as the National Endowments for the Arts and Humanities in order to make their proposed Fund for Local Journalism seem less exotic. But it still amounts to a direct government bailout for the news business, which would severely compromise journalism’s ability to act as a watchdog on government.
Indirect government subsidies in the form of non-profit status and the tax incentives that go with that status make much more sense. Not that every news organization should go non-profit. But many non-profit news organizations are already doing good work, including public radio and television (which, alas, do receive some direct government funding) and community Web sites such as Voice of San Diego, MinnPost and the New Haven Independent.
If legislation is needed to bring non-profit news more into the mainstream, that might not be a bad idea. But when government starts writing checks, it will, inevitably, demand to have some say in what it’s paying for.
Regular readers know I’m closely following the New Haven Independent, among the most journalistically substantial of the non-profit community news sites.
This morning I want to share with you an astonishing story from the Independent on the state of urban America — a feature by Melissa Bailey on community volunteers who cleaned up the dried blood left behind in a three-family home after a recent murder.
Not to indulge in clichés, but it’s a story that quite literally combines hopelessness and hope. And the comments actually cohere into a worthwhile conversation.
Closer to home, if you missed Boston Globe columnist Yvonne Abraham’s Sunday piece on Maria Dickerson, a Springfield woman raising the four children left behind by her murdered friend, it’s not too late.
Good call running it on page one and giving Abraham the space she needed to tell the story properly.
Melissa Bailey, the managing editor of the New Haven Independent, has written a fascinating story for Slate’s Double X on the steps she took to protect the identities of the fiancée and the ex-girlfriend of Raymond Clark, who’s been charged with the murder of Yale University student Annie Le. Bailey writes:
We learned the girlfriend’s identity, as well as the names of Clark and his current fiancee, before their identities were public. This was in the days after Le had disappeared but before her body was found, when slews of national reporters had descended on our city to find clues to the killing. As we chased the story, I wanted to break news — that’s my job. But I also wanted to shield the women caught up in the case from an onslaught of judgment and national attention that would make things harder for them.
Bailey writes about the decision to use material from the women’s Facebook and MySpace pages even while withholding their names. The Independent also withheld Clark’s name until he had been formally charged, even after New Haven police put it in a press release and repeated it at a news conference.
Her essay is an interesting, close-up look at applied journalism ethics. I’m not sure whether I’d have made the same calls as the Independent. But I’m impressed at how much thought went into Bailey’s and editor Paul Bass’ decision-making.
Media Nation links to the New Haven Independent’s coverage of the Annie Le murder, noting that the news site refrained from naming the suspect, Raymond Clark, until he had been formally charged. The Independent links back to Media Nation’s commentary on said decision and asks its readers to comment.
Police in Connecticut this morning finally charged Raymond Clark in connection with the murder of Yale University student Annie Le. And with that, the New Haven Independent — which had refused to identify Clark when he was merely a “person of interest” — has named him and posted a photo.
After I posted an item earlier today on the New Haven Independent’s decision not to identify Raymond Clark, the “person of interest” in the murder of Yale University student Annie Le, I invited editor Paul Bass to comment on his decision.
Bass replied by e-mail, telling me that “you’re so right — it’s futile. But we wanted to be consistent.” He added that “we originally broke the story about this suspect. The national media said a student was the suspect. We reported that, no, it was a lab tech, and we gave details that wouldn’t lead the public to be able to find him. We had the name pretty early, and some good info, but decided to go with the basic story.”
In a follow-up e-mail, Bass explained, “We do have quite a strong policy about withholding names. In our routine police stories, we rarely name people (non-public figures) arrested unless there’s a compelling reason, or we’ve gotten their side. We might be wrong, for sure. Lotta back and forth. Maybe a futile high horse thing. Don’t know.”
A 24-year-old resident of Middletown, Conn., has been detained and identified as a “person of interest” in the murder of Yale University student Annie Le.
Most news outlets, including the New Haven Register and the New York Times, have identified the man as Raymond Clark, a Yale lab technician. Each includes a photo of him in police custody. Yet the New Haven Independent, a non-profit news site, has declined to name him. In a story posted late Monday afternoon, editor Paul Bass wrote:
As of Monday afternoon, police had no suspects in custody in the investigation of graduate student Annie Le’s grisly death, [New Haven Police] Chief James Lewis said.
He told the Independent that his cops have been busy interviewing “and reinterviewing” “lots of people.” The department will not reveal the names of interviewees or “persons of interest,” according to Lewis.
“We don’t want to destroy people’s reputations,” Lewis said.
But Lewis reversed himself once Clark was taken into custody. The New Haven Police Department named Clark in a press release shortly after Clark had been removed from his Middletown apartment. Following Lewis’ news conference Tuesday night, the Independent’s managing editor, Melissa Bailey, wrote:
“We’ve known where he was at all along,” Police Chief James Lewis said at a press conference late Tuesday night at police headquarters. He spoke before a throng of video cameras.
Police named the target of the search, calling him a “person of interest.”
In an accompanying video Bailey shot of Lewis speaking to the media, Clark’s name does not pass from the chief’s lips. In a follow-up posted shortly before midnight, Bailey added: “A prime suspect is a 24-year-old Yale lab tech who until this past week worked at 10 Amistad St. among other locations. His identity was confirmed by officials close to the probe. The Independent is withholding his name.”
There’s certainly a strong case to be made for not naming Clark. Unless he is charged, he is not a suspect in Le’s murder. The possibility exists that an innocent person will have had his reputation permanently smeared.
But though the Independent’s — well, independence — is admirable, it’s also futile. (Which is why I named Clark.) Still, by taking a principled stand, Bass may well earn the respect of his readers. Take, for instance, this comment to the Independent, at the bottom of this story, from “ASDF,” posted Tuesday evening:
This better be the person who did it, because his name is being published at other sites. Thank you for the good sense to not publish his name at this time — ever since the NHPD took the case over, the leaks have been coming out at a pretty fast pace.
I really don’t understand what there is to gain by releasing his name — if you don’t have enough evidence to arrest him, then you don’t have enough evidence to smear him in the media.
Finally, I wonder why Chief Lewis folded as quickly as he did. In less than a day, he went from vowing not to name anyone who hadn’t been charged with the murder to blasting out Clark’s name in a press release.
Maybe he believed his hand had been forced, since Clark’s name was circulating anyway. Maybe he just couldn’t resist. But it strikes me that his first instinct was the one he should have followed.
