Pavlik says a repackaging of news for the digital medium will transform journalism

John V. Pavlik, a pioneering scholar of content migration online, rues that "journalism has adapted very little in terms of its fundamental form, practices and assumptions" in one-and-a-half centuries.

Professor Pavlik advises nothing less than "a complete metamorphosis" for journalism. From the latest New Jersey weekly Courier:

Through the interconnections of facts and sources, reporters, writers and editors assemble the facts into packages called the story. The story is the first level of packaging of the news. Groups of stories are assembled into a second tier known as the section, such as politics, metro, or sports. The third tier is the newspaper. There are comparable groupings in radio and television as well as online.

The time has come to explode this traditional approach to news packaging. Digital technologies make it possible to individually tag each fact, its sources and other attributes and make these facts and attributes directly available to the public. Using the extensible mark-up language, or XML, each fact can be assigned meta-tags that have been commonly used for pages on the World Wide Web, but can now be assigned to individual pieces of information. Some tags can be assigned automatically, such as the time, date, location and reporter identification stamp on a photo, video or audio. Other tags can be embedded in a semi-automatic format, by utilizing real-time speech to text translation software or text analysis software to tag key words extracted from a reporter’s notes, if captured digitally. The remaining tags need to be assigned manually, by a reporter, editor or other staffer. These tags can provide not only context but can enable readers to access the facts and interpret the facts and sources in ways reporters and editors may not have previously identified.

Find the whole deal here.

How a shuttered newspaper may live online

Even if the Seattle Post-Intelligencer halts its printing presses in the next few weeks, it might still stay alive online -- like the shuttered Cincinnati Post (Ohio) and Capital Times (Madison, WI).

Eric Pryne of the Seattle Times on how those newspapers fared upon going online, and what the Seattle P-I might learn from their experience:

The Cincinnati and Madison online newspapers emphasize what's local. Both contain familiar newspaper content, such as obituaries and high-school sports results. The Wisconsin site even has comics.

Full article here.

Professors could save newspapers: NYU don

A hundred years ago a band of American journalists whom Teddy Roosevelt in 1906 dubbed "muckrakers" tenaciously exposed venal politicians/police, harsh labor conditions, food adulteration and such.

Think Ida Tarbell, Lincoln Steffens and Upton Sinclair.

Their journalism defined the Progressive Era of 1902-12.

Now Jonathan Zimmerman, the NYU historian, brings up a muckraking German-educated American sociologist who exposed Belgian atrocities in the Congo. (Ah, muckraking globalized.)

The context? Professor Zimmerman would like professors to be active, even activist, via newspapers -- all for the sake of saving the newspapers. He does not seem to be joking. From today's Christian Science Monitor:

[I]t's getting too expensive to gather news.

So here's a novel idea: Let's get university professors to do it. For real. And, best of all, free of charge.

Remember, most professors aren't paid for what they write now. When I publish an article in an academic journal, I don't earn a cent. But I also don't engage more than a handful of readers, mainly fellow specialists in my own field.

It wasn't always that way. A hundred years ago, many of the leading lights in the social sciences and the humanities wrote for the popular press. If we want to revive the press – as well as our own struggling disciplines – we might look to their example.

Consider Robert E. Park, founder of the "Chicago School" of sociology and one of the most prominent intellectuals of the early 20th century. After earning his PhD in 1904 from the University of Heidelberg, in Germany, Park became secretary and press agent of the Congo Reform Association. Park's muckraking magazine articles exposed Belgium's vicious atrocities in the Congo, helping to turn world opinion against the colonial regime of King Leopold.

Citizen journalists should be wary of distracting or ego-stroking media coverage

David Sasaki directs Rising Voices, a Web platform set up to "empower under-represented communities to make their voices heard online."

In a new column, the 2007 Knight News Challenge winner hints at his struggle to keep the focus.

Rising Voices began with the goal diversifying the viewpoints and content on the conversational web by including members of communities that have historically been excluded from both traditional and new media. However, we quickly came to realize that these projects should meet the needs of the members of the participating communities and not just the needs of international news junkies looking for a story that no one else knows about. Mobile Voices, I believe, came to the same realization. Rather than just changing popular perceptions of migrant workers, several of the participants mentioned their desire to use their mobile phones to find work and send out alerts about immigration raids.

Also see, How training can help citizen journalists

Exploit the new reality that audience is an ally, OffTheBus director exhorts journalists

Amanda Michel authors a crackerjack piece in the latest Columbia Journalism Review chronicling the success of OffTheBus, the "citizen-powered campaign news site" which saw a 27-fold increase in contributors during its 17 months of existence ending November of 2008.

Set up to cover the American presidential campaigns, OffTheBus was joint-sponsored by The Huffington Post and NewAssignment, and hosted by NYU's Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute. It was the biggest citizen journalism experiment of its kind.

Ms. Michel, "not a journalist by training," directed OffTheBus. Her must-read story is available here. An extract:

OffTheBus discovered a niche market. Our market was defined by our access to on-the-ground information that other news outlets lacked, and collaborative, crowd-powered methods of newsgathering that made some traditional journalists uncomfortable. Private fundraisers, official campaign conference calls, volunteer meetings, and rallies—where mainstream reporters found themselves stuck in pens—were our specialty. We wanted to tell stories inaccessible to the national press. This required replacing objectivity with an ethic of transparency—we would never have broken Bittergate if we had not. ["Bittergate" refers to candidate Obama's guns-or-religion comment reported by San Francisco blogger Mayhill Fowler.]

Collectively, we could do what a single reporter or traditional news organization could not. We dispatched people to report on dozens of events happening simultaneously around the country. We distributed research tasks among hundreds of volunteers, instead of a handful of paid reporters working full-time for weeks. Ground-level access, networked intelligence, and distributed labor became our editorial mainstays. More than twelve thousand people eventually signed up to participate in one way or another, including seventeen hundred writers. With such numbers, Mayhill Fowler’s Bittergate story—or something like it—was almost inevitable.

Bob Schieffer's advice: "Bring people the news no matter what medium dominates"

This month Bob Lloyd Schieffer, 72, completes 40 years with CBS News.

The eminent broadcaster and writer (and cancer survivor) spoke at Lamar State College in Port Arthur, Texas, yesterday. One report said Mr. Schieffer was "adamant that journalists have to be willing to change formats and bring people the news no matter what medium dominates."

A couple of older quotes from the host of Face the Nation (a talk show "still information driven and not about anchors showing off"):

"For all the technology, [journalism] still comes down to the individual reporter....who has the courage and the expertise and the knowledge, who goes to wherever the story is, gets the story and then tells it..." (At his alma mater, Texas Christian University, a couple of months back)

"These have always been businesses. We talk about the citizen journalist, and we talk about bloggers. No blogger could afford to pay just the security costs alone that it costs Bill Keller to keep seven reporters in Baghdad. … This is America. It’s free enterprise. Who else would finance it unless it would be private enterprise?” (On the corporate ownership of media in TCU Magazine many months back)

"To survive, newspapers must provide a window into the local community"

Daniel Zarchy, student journalist at City on a Hill Press:

Though many lament the drop in subscriptions and advertisers as effects of the economic crisis, papers have been failing in their mission. As children of the Internet age, we know the first rule of economics in our bones, something that the newspaper industry as a whole has failed to acknowledge: people will not — ever — pay for something that they can find for free.

To survive, a local paper needs to provide something more than a dressed-down version of a story from NYTimes.com. It needs to provide a local window into our community.

Newspapers shouldn’t be a charity, and subscribing shouldn’t be an altruistic act. Support your local paper, but push for them to deserve your business. Make it known what you expect, and hold them accountable. A world with a vibrant journalistic industry is better for everyone, and an interested, proactive public is the key.