February 2008 Archives

Anil Dash of blog software house Six Apart on Joshua Micah Marshall and his Talking Points Memo wining a prestigious George Polk Award for Legal Reporting: It was the first time an internet only news service had won this journalism prize.

At Six Apart, we've always believed that blogs are nothing more, and nothing less, than a new medium, native to the web and nimbler than the ones that preceded it. That means that, even though people have been falsely debating "blogs vs. journalism" for the better part of a decade, the truth has always been that this is just another medium in which a great journalist can do great work.

Apart from the self-congratulatory PR on the blogging platform, Dash makes a a good point.

Louis Gray says all salaried folks are working for free today because of Leap Day. There are 366 days in the year this year and only 365 last year and next year.

But wait, my annual bonus fell into my bank account today.

Nevermind. It truly is a bonus day. Even the accountants have a sense of humor.

A new Zogby Interactive poll shows the shift away from traditional media - particularly newspapers - continues to move at warp speed. We're down to only people 65 and older getting most of their news from something other than the Internet - and that's probably TV.

When only 7 percent of the key 18-to-29 year old demographic say they use your product, it might be fair to say your long term prospects are marginal.  Across all age groups, 70 percent of respondents said journalism is important to the community, but only 10 percent partake of it in a printed newspaper.

Does that indicate a problem?

Surely, not, they say round the watercoolers at traditional media companies. People will always read/watch/listen to us - and, more importantly, buy advertising.

If this poll is accurate - and Zoby says its margin of error is 2.2 percent - even many of the people subscribing to newspapers must not be reading them.  My theory is the people looking for a long gradual decline in traditional media consumption (and revenue) are suffering from data smoothing delusions.

The tipping point has been breached.

It is not enough to shift your news to the growing online consumption; the underlying business structures need to quickly evolve to digital strategies with radically different cost and revenue structures. That has not begun to happen with any true urgency; in fact, online revenues for many U.S. newspapers are declining against year ago numbers or showing anemic single digit gains. (Most traditional media have their old world and new world joined like Siamese twins, where one goes, the other must follow.)

At traditional media operations, revenues, profits and readers/viewers/listeners (audience) from the traditional sources are outsized compared to digital even if stagnant or declining. Digital revenues and audience are the rocket booster on the mothership. At some point - a point that is within sight - that has to flip with traditional media the booster rocket to a digital business model. Unfortunately, that cannot be done easily or bloodlessly.

Analyzing your traditional business processes for productivity gains are unlikely to provide the systemic change necessary. Remodeling, repainting and landscaping only go so far.

From Zoby's news release on its poll:

Nearly half of respondents (48%) said their primary source of news and information is the Internet, an increase from 40% who said the same a year ago.

>Younger adults were most likely to name the Internet as their top source - 55% of those age 18 to 29 say they get most of their news and information online, compared to 35% of those age 65 and older.

>These oldest adults are the only age group to favor a primary news source other than the Internet, with 38% of these seniors who said they get most of their news from television.

>Overall, 29% said television is their main source of news, while fewer said they turn to radio (11%) and newspapers (10%) for most of their news and information.

>Just 7% of those age 18 to 29 said they get most of their news from newspapers, while more than twice as many (17%) of those age 65 and older list newspapers as their top source of news and information.

Web sites are regarded as a more important source of news and information than traditional media outlets - 86% of Americans said Web sites were an important source of news, with more than half (56%) who view these sites as very important. Most also view television (77%), radio (74%), and newspapers (70%) as important sources of news, although fewer than say the same about blogs (38%).

Here's a link to the results of a similar Zogby poll last year.

For those that scoff at such things, the Zogby data is pretty consistent with this January poll

(via No Silence Here)

In my email this morning was a note from Google that Google Sites had been enabled for my jacklail.com domain.

As the official Google blog says:

Meet Google Sites, the newest addition to the Google Apps product suite. It was designed to allow you to easily create a network of sites and share them with whomever you choose. Google Sites lets you pull together information from across Google Apps by embedding documents, spreadsheets, presentations, videos, and calendars in your sites. Of course, we also harness the power of Google search technology so your search results are always fast and relevant.

Google Sites is the reborn technology from acquisition JotSpot and it's interesting enough in itself, but what's beginning to make Google far more indispensable to Internet users than just a search engine is the the whole Google Apps suite. The integration of the Google Apps suite; its strengths in collaboration among teams, organizations and even everyone; the continual improvements such as the web form recently make them business worthy tools.

And, oh yes, there's the price, free to not much depending on features/level of service desired.

Venture Beat says:

Most significantly, it's the latest move by Google to entice you to transition to Google's "cloud," its collection of servers that lets you store and manipulate your data cheaply. It's a continued challenge to Microsoft's grip on office applications: Indeed, Microsoft's effort to buy Yahoo is also seen by some as an effort by that giant to acquire online customers who will one day use its own cloud, to fend off Google.

For me, use of this cloud has already become indispensable in the way I want to work, from various locations, from various computers. with the work at hand always accessible. If search was the killer app of Google's first generation; I think replacing Microsoft Office is the killer app of Google's second generation.

There's more about its features and how to create a Google Site here.

And for anyone with a domain name, Google Apps for your domain is a no-brainer.

Maybe our business has changed. Pay phones?

(via the knackered hack)

I'm still kind of digesting and fermenting all the things I heard at the computation + journalism symposium at Georgia Tech last weekend. It also had the long name of "Journalism 3G: A Symposium on Computation & Journalism."

Rich Gordon, a New Media journalism professor at Northwestern, called it a first date and has a great rundown on some of the key points brought up by speakers.

It also was a little like a 20th-year class reunion for an Investigative Reporters and Editor's computer-assisted reporting bootcamp with Gordon, Shawn MacIntosh, Nora Paul, and Bill Densmore on hand, all journalists who know more than a thing or two about using technology in the practice of journalism. But that's not quite right because a lot of the other people were either not born 20 years ago or were toddling around in diapers.

So maybe the first date analogy stands, or at least there were some Facebook pokes. Gordon did try to outline the intersection and the missed connections of journalism and computer science:

I concluded that journalists and technology professionals do have two things in common. First, the best people in both fields really do want to change the world and make it a better place. Second, both believe that people want and deserve access to the best possible information.

But there also is a substantial gap between journalism and computer science. Too many journalists don't respect technology development as a creative activity -- they think developers should just build stuff they want. Too many technologists don't respect journalism as an intellectual activity -- they think journalists just pump out content for their algorithms to process. Too many journalists really don't like technology change; they blame it for hurting media businesses, threatening their livelihoods and diminishing the quality of news available in local communities. Too many technologists think it's not their job to worry about the negative impact of technology innovation on media companies and journalism -- and when they do think about the consequences, think only about information at the national and global level (which is broader, deeper and more accessible than ever) and not at the local level (where online news ventures rarely do the kind of original reporting that newspapers do).

He also points to another great recap of the sessions that I hadn't seen: John Christopher Burns' coverage here and here, who was using one of those "One Laptop Per Child" (OLPC) computers at the two-day event.

Good stuff; good conference

(Photo from conference web site.)

Scott Karp may have coined a new term in "link journalism."

It's a bit of jargon news editors need to unravel because it's a powerful way to engage audiences.

It's not a new concept. "Link journalism" has been practiced every since the Web was born and people began linking.

But Karp, founder of Publish2, argues it's a valuable journalism function and defines it thusly.

Link journalism is linking to other reporting on the web to enhance, complement, source, or add more context to a journalist's original reporting.

In fact, he sees it as a Web approach to reporting. And Web specific innovations in journalism beyond adopting and adapting new technologies are few.  

Karp says:

The standard journalistic technique for providing context and support for assertions is to quote sources, but on the web, the "link journalism approach" is to link to other actual reporting.

Mindy McAdams picks up the theme:

Rather than relying on what Bill Kovach and Tom Rosenstiel have famously criticized as the "journalism of assertion," the new link journalism supplies evidence by backing up statements. Rather than making a phone call to a favorite and easy-to-reach expert or pundit, the journalist conducts research (imagine that!) and sources the facts by linking directly to them.

Josh Catone in ReadWriteWeb notes a problem:

There is, of course, one major hurdle in the way of convincing newspapers that this is a smart thing to do: the mainstream press doesn't like to send people away from their web sites

I've been posting content that consisted of links to blogs for about a year and have for a long time included outbound links in stories. But those efforts are accelerating. I recently began experimenting with Karp on creating sets of links as content, some created by one person bookmaking relevant content and some as collaborative efforts of multiple bookmarkers.

The results are impressive. These outbound linking articles are strong traffic drivers because, I believe, they are providing a valuable, time-saving service to readers. On more than one day in the past week, a link "article" was the No. 1 "story" on the combined knoxnews/govolsxtra sites. And in the context of stories, they provide an additional rich layering of information.

As Karp notes, Google figured out the counter-intuitive nature of outbound linking years" ago: Just remember Google's law of links on the web -- the better job you do at sending people away, the more they come back."

Howard Weaver says sites ought to be looking at how they can do this. He's dead right.

More on "Link Journalism."

Blogtalk Radio caught up with E.W. Scripps' Jay Small and former Scripps exec Bob Benz in Orlando. Listen!

Lots more interviews here.

Muhammad Saleem says Yahoo! Buzz is brilliant.

It would be nice to be able to post knoxnews links into it, but it looks to be a small list of publishers in the beta. Hmmmm.

See it here.

We sure got beat on this one about "Tennessee Helpless Against New Basement Tornadoes:"

"Some people lost their entire basements," said Knoxville-area relief worker Dan Weiss, who personally observed a dozen rec rooms that were completely destroyed, and a half-dozen more that might have been destroyed, though it was difficult to say for sure. "Everything they had ever stored was suddenly lost. So much extra stuff gone to waste."

From The Onion.

(Via Rex Hammock)

I'm thinking they were over-caffeinated. 

The National Rifle Association is getting blogger savvy.

I've heard the politically powerful group has been reaching out to "gun bloggers" in a serious way and this year they'll be able to 'cover" the national convention in Louisville, Ky.

A Second Amendment Blog Bash will be May 16-18 in conjunction with the NRA convention. SayUncle is among those planning to head to Kentucky and has more info.

The bloggers will get media credentials and access to the media room.

Pretty smart media strategy! The NRA definitely isn't all NRA caps and pickup gun racks on the backroads.

I wonder how many other organizations are developing media strategies around bloggers?

Knoxnews won three Digital Edge Awards on Monday from the Newspaper Association of America. The Digital Edge Awards are part of the NAA's larger Media Innovation Awards. Winning was good!

The Digital Edge Awards, or Edgies, are one of the most prestigious online newspapers awards. The Knoxville News Sentinel competes in a category with a large number of papers, those with print circulations between 75,000 and 250,000. There are many excellent newspaper Web sites in this group and lots of innovative things happening.

We won:

Best Overall News Site

Most Innovative Visitor Participation (schoolmatters.knoxnews.com)

Best Design and Site Architecture.

Here is a complete list and details.

There are a number of talented people working on knoxnews/govolsxtra at both the newspaper and the corporate level in Knoxville. A hat tip to all! But I'd especially like to thank the newsroom team of  Deputy Managing Editor Tom Chester, Online Editor Jigsha Desai and online producers Lauren Spuhler, Erin Chapin and Talid Magdy.

We also have this semester two talented practicum students from the University of Tennessee: Yolanda Ortiz and Samantha Thornton.

(Katie Kolt Hall was also an online producer during the time covered by this contest. She's, now doing wonderful things as the Web content specialist at the Knoxville Area Chamber Partnership.)

They rock the house!

The corporate developers have quietly rolled out mobile versions of knoxnews and govolsxtra.

See m.knoxnews.com and m.govolsxtra.com.

Let me know if you experience any issues.

The next time you see one of those big TV remote trucks with the dishes on top, think about this: CNN does much the same that the truck does with a 65-pound backpack of electronics.

That was one of the things I learned about at the "Journalism 3G: A Symposium on Computation & Journalism" conference that vividly illustrated how technology is changing newsgathering.

CNN has begun using these backpacks throughout the war-torn areas of the Middle East, in part, because they believes it better protects the people in the field (a reporter wearing a backpack is a smaller target than a reporter with a truck load of equipment). But it also allows them to leapfrog competitors in getting video of the news from nearly anywhere.

A journalist can set up and get live video on its way to CNN headquarters in less than 10 minutes, said Paul Ferguson, supervising editor, International News at CNN. Ferguson was on a Saturday morning panel on "Advances in News Gathering" at the computation+journalism symposium at Georgia Tech.

The backpack is a camera, a G4 Apple laptop and a satellite modem. Firewire the camera to the laptop, connect the laptop to the modem, fire up the software and, BAM, you're on the "internet in the sky," Ferguson said.

Prices for this technology vary, but Ferguson said the equipment to do broadcast quality TV costs under $20,000. That doesn't include the satellite time usage.

CNN was honored last month with the Technology & Engineering Emmy Award for its IP-based newsgathering system. It's groundbreaking stuff.

What Ferguson called the "Internet in the sky" is a satellite Internet system called BGAN, or Broadband Global Area Network. CNN uses the Inmarsat BGAN, but that company isn't the only provider..

Incredible. Bill Densmore posted audio of the Advances in News Gathering session. And there's more conference of the symposium here.

It's one of my theories that mainstream media needs to operate a lot more like startups: nimble, flexible, quick, resourceful and hungry. We need to particularly be doing this when we create our own internal "startups."

So it was nice to hear Elizabeth Spiers share some of the secret sauce ingredients to making a successful Indy online publication. She was speaking at "Joururnalism 3G: A Symposium on Computation & Journalism" at Georgia Tech on Saturday.

Taking advice from a gossip columnist - again? No, I was listening to the advice of a savvy media player who happened to gain a good bit of notoriety as the first editor of gossip blog Gawker. (She says it didn't start out a celebrity gossip rag; it was focused on Manhattan. It certainly launched owner Nick Denton's blogging empire.)

Spiers also has written for a number of magazines and newspapers. She was editor in chief of mediabistro.com. She formed blog network Dead Horse Media (and abruptly left in April in a disagreement with her partners).

With her Gawker days behind her and a novel coming out in November, Spiers is a familiar name in New York media circles, That's not bad for a young woman from Wetumpka, Ala. (a small town of about 5,700) with a degree from Duke who decided to make in the toughest media market in America. Like I said, I was listening closely...

"I've only worked in journalism about five years, which is as far as I can tell, the length of a New York Times internship," Spiers said. Instead of learning how to run the copy machine, she learned blogging, how to start a business and how to get good writing gigs, she said. I call that pretty good cred.

For Indy online publications with limited budgets and resources, Spiers' ingredients for a secret sauce include:

* Keeping it tightly focused on a topic or very limited niche. You don't have the resources to be broad or mass.

* Post 12 to 20 new pieces of content a day. "It's a lot more rigorous than it sounds," she said.

* Experienced journalists might not be the best hires. They can blog, but can quickly burn on posting 12 to 20 times a day, she said. And the heavy posting often gives experienced journalists a disincentive to do original reporting. A young person breaking into journalism may find it rewarding. They get a lot of responsibility and user feedback.

* Ask readers to help. She said ask nicely and ask for granular info. She gave an example from earlier this year in Gawker. Nick Denton asked in blog post:

Matthew Winkler  Working on a story on Bloomberg's editor-in-chief. Is he still as much of a tyrant? Examples please! Email nick@gawker.com.

The blog got an mp3 file, posted soon after the original query. Denton describes It "an audio clip of one of the most amazing newsroom tantrums I've ever heard. That man yelling, with growing fury, is Matthew Winkler, head of Bloomberg's news organization."


The query post ended up setting off a string of blog posts about Winkler.

* Your competition is unlikely to be your print publication. The majority of reading will happen when people at work a few features to surf to your site,

She recalled an email she got while working on Dead Horse Media blog dealbreaker.com, whose average user is about 29, works on Wall Street and makes over $200K a year.The emailer wrote she had to look at a Web site. It turned out to be "Spider-Man Review Crayons."

"Your web competition is not necessarily what you think it is," Spiers said. Your competition is what other sites your readers choose to go with a spare few minutes at work.

* Build credibility. Correct, update, link to source material.

* Be transparent, probably more important than it is for traditional media.

* Don't be afraid to run longer pieces, but she said, not all investigative journalism has to be long pieces..

Not a bad list. More blogging from the Symposium.

On Friday afternoon at "A Symposium on Computation & Journalism" (a sort of geeks and journos mashup at Ga. Tech), Shawn MacIntosh, director of culture and change at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, gave an update on the upheaval at the AJC as it tries to remake itself for the digital age.

It was just a year ago that a major reorg of the AJC was announced. MacIntosh has been at the center of the whirlwind of change that re-molded the newsroom into four areas: News & Information; Enterprise, Printed Product; and Digital Department.

One of the first changes was the news meeting, which used to focus on Page One for the next day, which was "kind of crazy" for paper that already had a major Web operation, she said. The meeting was refocused on Web first and within two weeks, ajc.com was seeing Web site traffic gains.

To achieve just that obvious change required a task force and eight months of meetings, complaining and planning. That illustrates the culture change newspapers are up against, she said. "The pressmen in the halls are not used to mixing it up with the search engine optimization expert."

MacIntosh said the biggest challenge has been serving two mediums. Some newsrooms say they are content agnostic, but not Atlanta. Print and digital are fundamentally different and newspapers that try to replicate Page One online or replicate the print "newspaper experience" online are making a mistake, she said. "The same content does not delight and thrill the same audiences," she said. "We found honestly we couldn't do both well."

Roughly a third of AJC.com's users, MacIntosh said, haven't looked at a printed edition in some time.

Because of the differences and different audiences,  the printed paper and the Digital Department are separate.

The newspaper's reorganization strategy appears to be succeeding: print circulation has stabilized and Web traffic is rocketing.

More blogging about the symposium, which continues Saturday..

A wearable computer. Not a new concept, but today was the first time I had ever met anyone using one. Ga. Tech professor Thad Stamer, who's been building these gizmos since the early 1990s, was explaining the technology. He can type 130 words a minute with a 12 key keyboard -- seemingly while talking to you and not looking at the handheld keypad.

Nobody sells these things; they build them in the lab. The strange "eye part," which is the "monitor," is connected by a cable to a small computer running Linux.

Who's Starner? He a runs a million dollar sandbox, I mean, lab at Ga. Tech. His Wikipedia entry says he is:

... one of the pioneers of wearable computing.

Starner received a PhD from the MIT Media Lab in 1999, where he was one of the first six cyborgs involved with the MIT Wearable Computing Project.

Starner is a strong advocate of continuous-access, everyday-use systems, and has worn his own customized wearable computer continuously since 1993. His work has touched on handwriting and sign-language analysis, intelligent agents and augmented realities. He also helped found Charmed Technology.

I think that means he is crazy smart. What this guy is up to is more than mildly fascinating. There's more here.

And his "mad scientist" project ... something about going straight from the brain to typed text.  It was over my head from there.

Got some great news on Tuesday. From an Inland Press Association news release:

Winners of second newspaper Web contest chosen
The Globe Gazette, News Sentinel receive best in circulation size

The Globe Gazette, Mason City, Iowa, and the Knoxville (Tenn.) News Sentinel took first-place honors in their respective circulation divisions in the second New Frontier Awards sponsored by Inland Press Association.

The contest honors the best in newspaper online initiatives. It consists of seven categories that recognize newspapers' achievement in producing and disseminating news content using online and new media platforms. Entries are judged on creativity and results, along with category-specific criteria. The contest is open to all Web sites run by U.S. newspapers.

The Globe Gazette (www.globegazette.com) won for papers with less than 20,000 circulation. Judges noted the ease-of-use of the Web site and its strong user engagement through multimedia. Placing second was the Rome (Ga.) News-Tribune (www.romenews-tribune.com). Taking third was the York (Neb.) News-Times (www.yorknewstimes.com).

The Knoxville (Tenn.) News Sentinel (www.knoxnews.com) won for papers over 20,000 circulation. Judges noted its well-organized Web site packs a lot on the page without sacrificing accessibility. The Rapid City (S.D.) Journal (www.rapidcityjournal.com)
earned second place. Taking third was the Frederick (Md.) News-Post (www.fredericknewspost.com).

Judges were Michele Bitoun, Medill's senior director of undergraduate education and teaching excellence; Janice Castro, senior director of graduate education and teaching excellence, Medill School of Journalism; Rich Gordon, director of digital media in education, Medill; Jon Marshall, Medill instructor and editor and publisher of SPJ's News Gems blog (www.spj.org/gems); Mary Nesbitt, managing director of the Readership Institute and Medill associate dean for curriculum and professional excellence;  Nora Paul, director, Institute for New Media Studies, University of Minnesota; and Richard Roth, associate professor and senior associate dean, Medill.

Journalist/blogger and all-around Knoxville wired maven Katie Alison Granju hears a conversation with the power to change in the Knoxville blogosphere.

This conversation extends beyond bloggers themselves, and even past the thousands of people who now read local blogs every day. It's seeped out into the community at large - into political coverage by the "mainstream media" (which has gotten more hard-hitting and appropriately aggressive in the past year or two), and onto front porches and over backyard BBQ grills and into party chatter.

If you're just discovering the community's vibrant diversity of voices, you might start with the Knoxville Blog Network (a blog aggregator), the KnoxvilleTalks site hosted by Granju, News Sentinel reporter Michael Silence's No Silence Here blog, or the group blog KnoxViews. From one of those, I'm sure you'll discover people you'll want to have a conversation with every day.

OK, I'm stealing this one honest from Tommy's Table. I'm a sucker for stuff like this anyway.

He's challenged people to describe Charlotte in six words. Why six words?

The story goes that Ernest Hemingway once claimed his finest work consisted of six words: "For sale: baby shoes, never worn."

The people at Smith magazine took that idea and ran with it, asking readers to send in six-word memoirs. They're now collected in a book, "Not Quite What I Was Planning: Six-Word Memoirs From Writers Famous and Obscure."

Read more.

So now with the rules outta da way, describe Knoxville in six words in a comment:

(via UnderOak on Twitter)

On dark days I feel like starting a Keith Olbermann countdown to the demise of newspapers and journalism as we know it - or knew it.

Perhaps the end of journalism as I knew it when I got into this business 30-odd years ago has already passed and I missed the story?

Interrupting my bouts of grizzly cynicism, however, are events such as the Feb. 5 primaries in this valley of the American Heartland far from the high tech coastal social network meccas. Journalism appears alive and thriving if not always in the hands of those that call themselves journalists by trade and if not always in the traditional modern forms of print, television and radio.

A bit of background and I'll be brief. In Knoxville, Tenn., politics is played the Good Ole' Boy way. Think Boss Hogg from TV's The Dukes of Hazzard and its fictional Hazzard County, Georgia.

County organization charts read like family trees. Paid county employees hold county elected offices. Meetings are mere formalities for decisions made in used car lots.
 
Controversies break out among fighting factions aligned with politicos who control dollars and patronage, but rarely ripple out as interests to the average citizen.

And the voters? Don't raise taxes and keep the schools open and most couldn't tell you who represents them and couldn't care less.

The cynical have smugly believed the cozy system couldn't be breached. But it was and my theory is happened because the Good Ole' Boys (and sometimes Gals) failed to grasp that the Internet provided a transparency like X-ray vision into their hallway deals. And when the public saw, they gasped.

The most entertaining thumbnail view of the Knox County controversy is a New York Times piece published the day before Super Tuesday.  The saga, which is destined to continue for months, started on Jan. 31, 2007 on a day known as "Black Wednesday."

Term-limited by a court decision, the commissioners had to replace 12 officeholders, including eight commissioners, with appointees. Before it was over there were handshake deals, double-crosses, and fights. Cronies, a spouse and a son were appointed. People, for once, were outraged.

The editor of the newspaper I work for and a group of citizens filed a state open meetings suit that ended in defeat for the Good Ole' Boys in October.

And Black Wednesday was the match that ignited a reform fire that ousted incumbents en masse on Feb. 5 and is still burning.

News Media covered the year-long "county chaos" story with text, video, photos and by posting documents online. Stories were heavily commented upon online and in the pre-election run up, a common comment was a just a list of the incumbents on the ballot with the exhortation to vote against these.  Bloggers fanned the fire and new sites sprang up.

Since The Knoxville News Sentinel was a party in the open meetings, or Sunshine, lawsuit it was covering, Editor Jack McElroy asked a group of bloggers to cover its coverage and the newspaper highlighted their sometimes unflattering critiques.

Looking back at the year, McElroy said:

The online media played a significant role in the county commission story. Within a few days of the "Black Wednesday" meeting, the online dialog was so great on Knoxnews.com, that -- at the suggestion of online readers -- we extracted two days worth of comments and ran them in the print edition.

They filled a full broadsheet page at eight-point type and vividly showed the community the depth of the reaction. When the trial began, volunteer bloggers covered the newspaper's coverage of its own court case, helping mitigate an unavoidable conflict of interest As the scandal continued, bloggers played a significant role.

One orchestrated an online campaign that resulted in a recall provision being placed on the general election ballot. During the election, bloggers helped profile the candidates and, in one case, presented the most comprehensive look at campaign contributions.

The county shenanigans had been a continual topic at KnoxViews, a self-described progressive or Liberal group blog in this region known for conservative Republican politics in the mold of Howard Baker Jr., Lamar Alexander and U.S. Rep. John J. Duncan Jr. It's a place that by just driving around and looking at bumper stickers, you would think state native son Fred Thompson is a shoo-in for the GOP presidential nomination.

KnoxViews founder Randy Neal, who first gained local notoriety blogging as South Knoxville Bubba, said in an email:

I think the role of blogs in all this boils down to a couple of things.
 
One, blogs consolidate news and updates from a variety of sources, including mainstream media reports, online official documents, eyewitness accounts, and expert commentary. There's a sense of immediacy about it, especially at a group blog like KnoxViews where you have potentially hundreds of participants scouring the Internet and talking to sources for information about a breaking story and then posting it in real time as it becomes available.
 
Two, blogs provide a forum for people to react and discuss the implications, and in some cases organize around an effort, and also to maintain a level of awareness and sense of continuity, especially where previous posts and comments can be linked together and easily referred to. Certainly not all 90,000 Knox County voters were reading KnoxViews, but blogs attract informed and engaged people who are active in their communities, not to mention public officials from time to time, and their sphere of influence extends far beyond the blogosphere.
 
To a lesser extent, blogs provide a way for the media and the candidates and local officials for that matter, to "take the pulse" of the electorate. But, as I just mentioned on the blog recently, getting an accurate sense of the mood can be skewed somewhat by blog participant demographics, which don't necessarily correspond to the general population or the "typical" voter in terms of education, awareness, and involvement. That said, anyone following the Knox County term limits controversy on local blogs would have easily picked up on the near universal anger and frustration with the status quo, which predicted the Feb. 5th outcome for candidates involved in Black Wednesday.
 
On the second point above, the advent of allowing reader comment and feedback at media websites has, to a certain extent, affected the role of blogs as a discussion forum. My observation, though, is that most blogs provide for a more extensive and thoughtful conversation of the issues. And, depending on how they're implemented, blogs can carry on the conversation long after the news is off the front page. Also, blogs build up a community of responsible and thoughtful participants over time, and there is a general sense of mutual trust and respect among participants which adds value to the conversation, especially when there is a wide range of experience and expertise to draw from.
 
All that said, blogs aren't going to replace the mainstream media as a primary news source any time soon. Somebody has to go out and get the story, and in contrast to bloggers they are usually trained professionals who get paid to do it. But blogs can add value to the story in ways previously mentioned, and, for good or ill, we are starting to see a lot more "citizen journalism" taking place.

Other sites popped up. A retired accountant set about doing his own audit of county expenses.  A blog called Knox County Wood Shed surfaced and another called PoliticalKnoxville. One site, Knoxify did its own candidate questionnaire with responses posted on its site.

Bloggers with their own sites, of course, found county politics a ready topic for words.

The founder of PoliticalKnoxville, Brian Paone, describes the origins of his site:

Political Knoxville was formed with one purpose in mind - providing a neutral, unbiased information source covering local politics.

When I was watching the Sunshine Law coverage, I found it difficult to find 'raw' information on the trial; all I was able to find were soundbites and short video clips. Articles written about the trial focused well on certain aspects, but there were no video or audio archives. There was a distinct lack of documentation available as well.

Since that's what I wanted to see, and there was no central location available that had those documents, I just took my father's advice: 'If you want something done right, you've got to do it yourself.'

Thus, Political Knoxville was born.

Since its creation, PK has seen hundreds of unique visitors a day, searching through our documents, watching our archived videos, and contacting us for specific information on a variety of topics. We've received a number of compliments via phone, email, and in person commenting on our site design, ease of use, and - most importantly - the variety of our information available.

Will the attentions of voters eventually wander elsewhere and allow business as usual to return under the cover of apathy? Perhaps.

But the year of intense focus has shown that citizens empowered with the tools of the digital era will on occasion raise their voice to question and examine in a very journalistic type role. And the mainstream media can provide a forum for conversation in addition to digging for truth.

So maybe, I haven't missed the headline on the demise of journalism. It's still challenging the status quo, righting wrongs, serving the public interest. All the things that made journalism seem like a worthwhile endeavor to an idealistic young college student in the '70s.

(This piece is part of the Carnival of Journalism. Read this month's whole collection.)

 

All the details except where the name came from. Adventures await!

Commenting on a Broadcasting & Cable piece on the Web and TV stations, Angela Grant says:

It seems like the attitude of TV stations towards the web, according to the article, is the same type of attitude that has sunk newspapers to the level they're at today. We've both got to get to the bottom of these insecurities and turn them upside down

There's more.

Former WCPO-TV online manager Liz Foreman, a highly respected journalist who has been focused on online for years, gives a revealing glimpse of the differences between newspapers and TV stations in a Lost Remote posting yesterday.

Now, director of multimedia initiatives at the Cincinnati Enquirer, Foreman outlines for TV colleagues some of the differences she's found between the two mainstream media operations. There are tips for newspaper newsrooms.

She finds newspapers too quiet and not urgent enough, but with lots of resources even in shrinking newsrooms.

Print newsrooms haven't always had the ambiance of a library, but maybe that went away with the bottle in the bottom drawer. Make too much noise these days and you'll get notes. As for urgency, she's right, it's in spotty supply.

I say it's past time to turn up the volume -- in noise and urgency!

Pssst, we're being noisy over here and liking it, but the bottom drawer is still dry.

There's more. Good read.

Following up on my mini-rant Sunday about Microsoft Office, is the Microsoft-Yahoo deal really about free software, or to use the buzz phrase, "zero-dollar" software?

There's more than zero in the deal, I'm sure (lots of zeros, it seems), but even if sales haven't been affected yet, Web-based and open source alternatives like Open Office are clearly gaining momentum. And if you follow the presidential primaries, you know market perception is all about the Mo.

I don't think it'll be too long before corporations get comfy with using free software. When that happens, $300 MS Office licenses are a relic for the digital archeologists.

Nicholas Carr has some thoughts far more insightful than mine. 

Forget the paperless office, think paperless home.

The New York Times in a Sunday piece trots out high tech heavies Brewster Kahle and Brad Templeton on a piece on the paperless home.

Brewster Kahle is the founder and director of the Internet Archive, a nonprofit digital library, and Brad Templeton founded an Internet newspaper and is chairman of the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

Kahle: "Paper has been dealt a complete deathblow. When was the last time you saw a telephone book?"

Well, today, but it's a bit ragged and anyway it's under some other papers away from page turning temptation.

Templeton: "I'm a digital pack rat. I have phone bills from 1983 and taxes from the 1990s. But I have everything scanned, so it takes up no physical space. For me, scanners provide the magic of still having all my documents without the clutter."

Phone bills from 1983? And for why?

I do have a scanner, but haven't committed to going paperless, but I may just be a yellowing scrap of humanity from the Paper Era. The article says paper use is declining to a mere 502 pounds per person in the "richest" countries.

There's always the backup issue when going paperless, which gets amazing short-shift in the piece. You've got everything safely backed up at home, right?

But the paperless home appears more likely than the fabled paperless work office. Perhaps that's because the people doing the printing are paying for the "expendables."

At work, we're on a campaign to force duplex printing. Based on our paper use -- copy paper, not newsprint -- we could save a tidy sum with all duplex. We still print out lots of reports and sales presentations and things that find their way into the trash within hours -- often sooner. There's something deeply comforting in having the same piece of paper someone is reading the highlights of in a meeting. Call it the shuffle factor.

So go paperless in 2008, we're in the Digital Era after all. But if you have phone bills from the 1980s, trust me, you can dump them.

Gee, where I have been, asleep or something?

A Steve Rubel twitter drove me to his Web site where he's trying out a new Google Docs feature that allows users to create Web forms and collect the data in a Google Doc spreadsheet. Anybody can create them.

The feature apparently went live on the sixth.

I tried one and the only problem I noticed is that web-based version of Outlook (OWA) wouldn't write the data when the form is sent in an email, but otherwise it worked great. The form can be sent in an email or just the link to the form.

This looks to be a great tool for journalists. Newsrooms that want to quickly do a survey and collect data can without programming help. No need for a Web monkey to create a form and a database. Just do it yourself. If you can fill out a form, you can create these Web forms.

You start by creating a Google Docs spreadsheet and click the "share" tab. Then under the "invite people" heading, choose "to fill out a form."

Couldn't be simpler. Google continues to make Docs useful. For me, it's more than beginning to have the features that I want from MS Office and MORE without the stuff I've never used anyway.

Seems a crime we used to have spend all that money on MS Office licenses for what, the right to upgrade to next year's version? Glad those days are over.

The tornadoes that ravaged West and Middle Tennessee left behind in the debris great gems of people telling their own stories in the tragedy.

Helen Waters at BusinessWeek noticed:

Watching the news and CNN had a piece on the tornado that went through Tennessee last night. The anchorwoman then introduced some pictures from "Facebook" (entertainingly, she said it in exactly the same way my grandmother used to say the word "Internet" -- like she was experimenting with a whole new mysterious language.) She recounted how students from Union University in Jackson had been uploading pictures of their experience of being in the storm to their Facebook group -- and then showed a few pictures that had been uploaded.

Citizensugar caught it, too:

This morning, while covering the devastation caused by the tornadoes that ripped through the mid-south, CNN relied on reporting from some very personal sources: Facebook and blogs. Using pictures of upturned cars posted on local Facebook pages and reading a posting from the blog Sassy Southerner to report the story, CNN pulled together a very eyewitness account, using no formal reportage.

Did a Sassy Southerner tell the story better than a Wolf Blitzer?

Maybe, but it was smart of CNN to pull Sassy Southerner into its coverage. Here's a link to Sassy Southerner.

Rex Hammock found bloggers and Twitter users layered in details about the news story. He pointed to a list of blog postings put together by Christian Grantham at NashvilleisTalking.

Great ways of telling the story. Can you point me to other examples?

Updated: flickr search for "tennessee tornado."

Updated: Paul Chenoweth with several examples and a great observation:.

The Union (University) disaster highlighted a role for bloggers and responsible social network users to become part of the reporting and supporting of those who are in the midst of crisis situations. The days of a single, tightly controlled message (from traditional media sources) in times of crisis...are gone.

(Some links from J.D. Lasica, image from Getty Images)

Some thoughts on Google News new localization feature, or local headlines by city, state or zip. These local news headline area been getting lots of national attention.

Your portal website doesn't matter anymore, because people are hanging out where they want to hang out and expecting us to bring our products and services to them.

-- Terry Heaton

It's not a particularly useful product. To the extent that I want location-based news aggregation at all (meet me in the next paragraph for more on that), I want it at a geographic level that's actually of some unique use or interest. Cities and ZIP codes don't fit that bill. Anything grouped at or above the ZIP code or mid-size or larger city isn't any more local than what old-fashioned local newspapers already offer, even in print. And anything more narrowly focused than that - a small town, say - in Google News' local feature returns an approaching-useless mishmash of not-local-enough content with the occasional nonsensical result mixed in.

-- William Harnett

1. It's hard to tell whether newspapers will be happy about this development or not given going local seems to be one way for newspapers to survive. If Google is providing local news, this may not be a good thing for newspapers. Or it might drive more traffic to newspaper Web sites.

More important, Google Local is clearly another way Google wants to drive local advertising. The market, so far, has been a tough nut for everyone, including Google, so perhaps this is a way for Google to drive deeper into the market.

-- Mark Evans

Google News is working hard to either kill your local newspaper or make you read it more often. While Google News has typically gathered the top stories from news sources across the web and presented the top world and national stories, you can now get local pages for pretty much any major city.

-- Brad Linder

For lots of people I know (including me, I have to admit) Google News has effectively become their online newspaper. I don't know where it stacks up in terms of news portals, and whether Yahoo News or MSN have bigger market share, but for many the day starts with a browse through Google's version of the newspaper -- and now that paper will include local news as well as world news. Can the 800-pound gorilla make local work? And does that help or hurt newspaper sites?

-- Mathew Ingram

The feature worked well when I tried it out for Orlando and a few other cities. I'd say this bodes well for small and mid-size publications, since this feature will finally let folks easily find local headlines. Before, Google News was mostly a mishmash of nation and world stories, with online editors hoping to hit on a national story that could get picked up by the aggregator.

-- Danny Sanchez

While we're not the first news site to aggregate local news, we're doing it a bit differently -- we're able to create a local section for any city, state or country in the world and include thousands of sources. We're not simply looking at the byline or the source, but instead we analyze every word in every story to understand what location the news is about and where the source is located.

The Official Google News Blog

The coming "watching web."

Writing about a new TV Web site called livenewscameras.com, former Nashville TV station general manager Mike Sechrist says:

You want news from your "hometown" from anywhere in the world?  Not a problem, it will be available on the web when you want it. The storms that hit Tennessee and other states on Tuesday night could be watched in real time anywhere with internet access as WKRN, WSMV and WTVF all streamed their coverage to the web.  These are the opening salvos in the tumultuos changes to come.

The livenewscameras site is also pretty interesting.

The New York Times has discovered Knox County politics.

Gotta say they Dan Barry nailed it. Some of the vivid observations:

It seems a catfish could have been appointed if properly connected.

Wasn't there at least one?

The county's public officials helped to propel the reform movement just by being themselves.

Most of them have a hard time escaping that.

Knox County of 2008 brings to mind the last scene of "Meet John Doe," Frank Capra's populist melodrama of 1941. The wiry newspaper editor turns to the just-thwarted political boss and, with great exclamation, says: "There you are, Norton, the people. Try and lick that!"

We'll see Tuesday.