By Dan Kennedy • The press, politics, technology, culture and other passions
Dr. Denny says he’d pay a blogger $191 a year to cover his community. And what if hyperlocal bloggers cobble together user fees with advertising? “Just maybe that advertising income, paired with the subscription money, will allow you to make a living, live in a community you grow to like, raise a couple kids and become a respected journalist,” he writes.
Not a bad idea.
This is big news. Adrian Holovaty, one of the most important journalists you’ve never heard of (or maybe you have), has quit washingtonpost.com to strike out on his own after winning a Knight grant to experiment with hyperlocal journalism. His project will be called EveryBlock.
Holovaty, who’s in his mid-20s, is the master of the mashup, in which datastreams are merged to create something new and useful. Using publicly available data from the Chicago Police Department, he created ChicagoCrime.org, which automatically sorts crime information and plots it on Google Maps. (If you’d like to see such a feature in Boston, forget it — although the Boston Police deserve credit for their innovative blog, they do not make crime data available in a form that would allow an outside programmer like Holovaty to make sense of it.)
Another Holovaty special: The Congressional Votes Database at washingtonpost.com.
I saw Holovaty speak last summer at the Media Giraffe conference at UMass Amherst. I thought his most interesting comments were in response to a question as to whether he considers himself a journalist. His answer: absolutely. He laid out the differences between an electronic journalist and a traditional journalist like this:
Do young people who want to pursue careers in journalism need to become programmers? Well, it’s certainly a promising field for those with the inclination and talent — but it’s not absolutely necessary. In fact, the Congressional Votes Database depends on contributions from traditional journalists, who do old-fashioned tasks such as deciding which are the key votes and describing them. At best, such journalism is a skillful amalgamation of old and new.
You can watch a video of Holovaty demonstrating ChicagoCrime.org here. And here is an excellent Q&A with Holovaty posted in the Online Journalism Review.
Photo of Holovaty (cc) by JD Lasica. Some rights reserved.
Should newspapers report what’s important or what interests people? Good ones do both, attempting to strike a balance between the serious and the frivolous.
Last night, at a panel discussion at the Boston Public Library sponsored by the fledgling New England News Forum, I caught an interesting exchange between John Wilpers, the editor of the free commuter tabloid BostonNOW, and Ellen Hume, director of the Center on Media and Society at UMass Boston.
Among BostonNOW’s innovations is a daily webcast of its editorial meeting, and the ability of viewers to send text messages about what they’re watching. On one occasion, Wilpers said, he and his staff were discussing a government story, and a viewer wrote in, “I’m bored already, and you haven’t even written the story.” Wilpers said he decided on the spot to kill the story, and then proceeded to offer a few disparaging words about the notion of government stories in general.
When Hume next got a chance to speak, she responded, “Part of what you said, John, gave me a little bit of a creepy feeling. You’ve got to cover government. I don’t want to kill the government stories.”
Wilpers responded, “I would never kill a story just because a blogger or a viewer of the webcast didn’t like it. I’m not going to turn my newsroom over to whoever happens to be
watching.”
Well, that’s a relief — even if Wilpers did seem to contradict what he’d said just a few moments earlier. Yes, it can sometimes be difficult to make government stories interesting. But the First Amendment wasn’t written into the Constitution to protect the right of newspaper publishers to cover Paris Hilton endlessly. That’s just a side effect.
Jesse Noyes reports in the Boston Herald today that the folks at Facebook are upset with the media for using the social-network service to track down interview subjects in the Virginia Tech story. A Facebook spokeswoman is quoted as saying, “We see this as a violation of user privacy.” Really? Good thing Ma Bell didn’t try to take our phone books away back in the 1970s and ’80s because we were violating people’s privacy by, you know, calling them up.
I’m with Boston University journalism professor Fred Bayles, who tells Noyes that journalists are going to use any method they can to contact people. Indeed, I tell my students that it’s perfectly ethical to use Facebook, listservs and Usenet (most easily accessed through Google Groups) for exactly that purpose as long as they make it clear that they’re reporters working on a story.
I am more sympathetic to Facebook’s objection that the media shouldn’t reproduce text and images from people’s online profiles without permission — although, again, Facebook, MySpace and the like aren’t exactly private forums.
The New England News Forum is holding its coming-out party tomorrow at UMass Lowell. I’ll be on a panel from 9:30 to 10:30 a.m. on “The Blogger as Journalist: Making New Law and Definitions,” along with Christine Stuart of CTNewsJunkie.com and Robert Cox, founder of the Media Bloggers Association.
It looks like a great program. If you can make it, I hope you’ll look me up.
Among the best examples of Web journalism I’ve seen recently is this special report produced by The Enterprise of Brockton. Titled “Wasted Youth,” the package offers an in-depth look at kids who are battling OxyContin and heroin addiction — a battle some of them end up losing.
The online version encompasses long-form narrative storytelling (don’t let anyone tell you that everything on the Web must be broken into bite-size chunks), narrated slide shows, discussion boards and resources for further information and for help. The paper is running follow-ups as well. A triumph.
San Francisco Chronicle columnist David Lazarus and Dan Gillmor, founder of the Center for Citizen Media, have been going back and forth over a column Lazarus recently wrote on whether newspapers should start charging for their online editions. In brief, Lazarus: yes; Gillmor: no.
I’m not going to take on every argument each is making. Rather, I want to address the notion that newspapers are hurting because they’re giving their product away on the Web. Certainly Lazarus believes that, and he goes so far as to suggest that newspapers be given an antitrust exemption so they can get together and demand payment, both from readers and from aggregators such as Yahoo News and Google News.
Lazarus isn’t entirely wrong, but the real problem is that Web advertising simply isn’t as valuable as print advertising. Much of this is because lucrative classified ads have migrated to the likes of Craigslist and Monster. The Wall Street Journal has succeeded in charging for its Web edition, and the New York Times has been relatively successful with its much-maligned TimesSelect service.
But I don’t think most newspapers are ever going to be able to charge for their online editions — and I don’t believe it’s fair that they try, either. Here’s why:
So is there a way to get some money out of readers? I think so, and it goes back to the earliest days of the Web. About a dozen years ago, people were talking about digital cash — electronic money that you could spend online without your credit-card company being able to trace it back to you, just like the cash in your pocket. (It’s all in the math.) Here is a 1994 story from Wired that I remember reading when it first came out.
That type of digital cash never caught on. But the idea is that you might read 20 articles at a variety of Web sites during a given morning and pay a tenth of a cent apiece — or a penny apiece, or a nickel, or a dime. These microtransactions would be handled anonymously and automatically. Your privacy would not be compromised, and you wouldn’t have to slow down to enter usernames and passwords.
As newspaper executives try to figure out how to move into an all- or mostly online future, it may be time to take another look at microtransactions and digital cash.
The Associated Press reports on Citizendium, an attempt to create a user-written online encyclopedia that’s more reliable than Wikipedia. Citizendium’s founder, Larry Sanger, says he’s a co-founder of Wikipedia — a claim that’s vigorously disputed by Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales.
As you’ll see if you follow the links, Citizendium and Wikipedia look much the same, and they’re based on the same idea. The difference is that Sanger says he’ll require real names and use a more rigorous system of expert verification.
There’s no doubt Wikipedia has had its problems, such as the editor who fooled the New Yorker — and everyone else — about his credentials. Like many college instructors, I tell my students not to cite it, though I also tell them it can be a great starting point.
Still, Wikipedia has achieved a certain critical mass. Citizendium will be worth watching, but I wonder whether it might be easier to fix Wikipedia than to start all over.
Check out NYTimes.com’s interactive map of yesterday’s congressional vote on the Iraq war. You can do breakouts by urban, suburban and rural districts; affluent and poor districts; mostly white and mostly minority districts; and Kerry and Bush districts. Roll your cursor over a square and you get thumbnail information on each House member and how he or she voted.
Washingtonpost.com does something similar with its Votes Database. It’s not as graphically interesting, but it does let you break out the vote by, among other things, a House member’s astrological sign and by whether or not she or he is a Baby Boomer.
If you were online in the early 1990s, then today’s New York Times story on MySpace‘s entry into politics will seem familiar. Back then, Prodigy users couldn’t send e-mail to friends on America Online, who in turn were walled off from folks on CompuServe. We were still a few years away from the Internet being expanded so that all online services — and their customers — could talk to each other.
Well, here we go again. Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama and John McCain are just a few of the presidential candidates who have deep, useful Web sites. But apparently that’s no longer enough. Now candidates have to have separate sites on MySpace and Facebook. Up next: Second Life, an alternate-reality site explained last summer by Camille Dodero, then of the Boston Phoenix, now of the Village Voice.
At least MySpace and Facebook are free — it’s not like having to pay monthly subscription fees to Prodigy, AOL and CompuServe in order to stay in touch with all of your online friends. (Not that anyone could actually afford to do that.) But it strikes me that politicians, by setting up shop on such social-networking sites, are moving backwards. The interactivity of the Web is being broken up into chunks. Content on MySpace and Facebook can’t even be Googled. You’ve got to register and log on to each site if you want to keep up.
Here is Obama’s MySpace site; here is his Facebook site. (You can access the MySpace page without an account, although you won’t be able to do anything but look. To view the Facebook page you’ll have to register.) Any reason these couldn’t be integrated into his main site? Of course not. And I honestly don’t think it’s me who’s being the Luddite here. I remember how frustrating the online world could be before everyone was connected. Why are we moving back to the bad old days?
A few months ago Lisa Williams got me to sign up for yet another social-networking site, LinkedIn, which I guess is supposed to be like a Facebook for grownups. I do want to explore it when I get some time, as it seems to have some pretty neat features. Ultimately, though, it’s yet another walled-off community that I’ll need to log on to on a regular basis.
No doubt Hillary, Barack et al. won’t be far behind.