Real Political Journalists on the Beat

Want to see what real reporters look like when they're working? Pierre Kattar and Jill Drew followed three political journalists -- Don Gonyea of NPR News, Mark Leibovich of The New York Times, and Alexander Burns of Politico -- "as they scour the country for insights into Congressional candidates and their campaigns."

Here's their resulting video snapshot for Columbia Journalism Review: "The Buzz and Beyond: Reporting the 2010 Midterm Elections."

The Buzz and Beyond: Reporting the 2010 Midterm Elections from Pierre Kattar.

Columbia Journalism Review Discovers Videojournalism

Columbia Journalism Review devotes a zillion words to the state of videojournalism in its October issue, quoting the usual suspects, and not adding much to the conversation except the need to improve video search capability -- a point we've been making for more than two years.

Virtually all the worthy videojournalism examples cited in See It Now! by Jill Drew have been previously showcased on KobreGuide.com and KobreChannel.com (though both are blatantly overlooked in this report).

We suppose we should be grateful that the publication is paying attention at all ... but why does the article feel like old news already -- too little too late?

If you missed the advent and struggle of online videojournalism for the past two years, here's as good a place to start as any. For those in a hurry, here are the money grafs:

For candid video to move to the forefront of online news and address a rising generation of news consumers, several things have to change: online video journalists need to develop their own storytelling styles, breaking with the anchor-centered conventions of broadcast. Newsrooms need to better integrate and bolster their multimedia and video staffs, and create career paths for visual journalists that extend right to the top. Great video needs to be promoted just as big text stories are.

Video stories need to be judged like all other stories -- by how good they are, not how many clicks they get. And at the same time, media companies need to push search engines to focus on creating better tools to highlight well-produced, unique video stories.

Tellingly, no video accompanies this text story.

Nieman Journalism Lab's New Free App

Harvard University's Nieman Journalism Lab released a new app this week (for iPhone/iPod/iPad) that it touts as "the best way to keep up with what's happening with the future of journalism. It brings you all the latest news from the Lab along with the best from around the web: new startups, innovation at established news organizations, and new ways to do great journalism online."

Here's what it features:

— In the Lab: The full text of all our stories here at the Lab, in mobile-friendly form. Scroll through what we’ve been writing, click through on our links — and when you’ve read a piece worth sharing, it’s easy to post it on Twitter, email it to a friend, or open it in Safari.

— On Twitter: Our Twitter feed, updated throughout the day, is an essential guide to the most interesting links on the traditional journalism world, new startups, advertising, marketing, and social media.

— Hot Links: We’re excited about this one. We’ve curated a list of the most influential corners of the future-of-news Twitterverse and, using the web service Hourly Press, scan through them for the links they’re talking about most. This list of 10 links, updated hourly, is the purest jolt of future-of-news talk online.

— Friends of the Lab: Here you’ll find the latest from our sister projects — Nieman Storyboard, Nieman Watchdog, and Nieman Reports — plus some of our other friends from Harvard. Plus, we give you quick and easy access to the public RSS feeds of some of the best sources of journalism news: The New York Times’ media coverage, paidContent, Poynter, MediaShift, Romenesko, Columbia Journalism Review, and Mashable. As always, tap on the headline to get the full story.

— Search: Curious what we’ve written about The Guardian, aggregation, Bill Keller, or MinnPost? We’ve got full-text search of the Lab’s archives, so you’re just a few taps away from finding out.

Download the free app here. And here's a video demo:

Nieman Journalism Lab iPhone app from Nieman Journalism Lab.

CJR: The Reconstruction of American Journalism

"The Reconstruction of American Journalism," a comprehensive, in-depth report by Leonard Downie, Jr., and Michael Schudson, for the Columbia Journalism Review, is mandatory reading.

Leonard Downie Jr. is vice president at large and former executive editor of The Washington Post and Weil Family Professor of Journalism at Arizona State University's Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication. Michael Schudson is a professor of communication at Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism.

The report proposes "new steps for maintaining a vibrant, independent press, with special emphasis on local 'accountability journalism' that is essential to civic life."

(Commentary from five responders, and a podcast with the authors, can be found here.)

Some highlights:

What is under threat is independent reporting that provides information, investigation, analysis, and community knowledge, particularly in the coverage of local affairs....

Reporting is becoming more participatory and collaborative. The ranks of news gatherers now include not only newsroom staffers, but freelancers, university faculty members, students, and citizens. Financial support for reporting now comes not only from advertisers and subscribers, but also from foundations, individual philanthropists, academic and government budgets, special interests, and voluntary contributions from readers and viewers. There is increased competition among the different kinds of news gatherers, but there also is more cooperation, a willingness to share resources and reporting with former competitors. That increases the value and impact of the news they produce, and creates new identities for reporting while keeping old, familiar ones alive. “I have seen the future, and it is mutual,” says Alan Rusbridger, editor of Britain’s widely read Guardian newspaper. He sees a collaborative journalism emerging, what he calls a “mutualized newspaper.”

The Internet has made all this possible, but it also has undermined the traditional marketplace support for American journalism. The Internet’s easily accessible free information and low-cost advertising have loosened the hold of large, near-monopoly news organizations on audiences and advertisers. As this report will explain, credible independent news reporting cannot flourish without news organizations of various kinds, including the print and digital reporting operations of surviving newspapers. But it is unlikely that any but the smallest of these news organizations can be supported primarily by existing online revenue. That is why—at the end of this report—we will explore a variety and mixture of ways to support news reporting, which must include non-market sources like philanthropy and government....

What is bound to be a chaotic reconstruction of American journalism is full of both perils and opportunities for news reporting, especially in local communities. The perils are obvious. The restructuring of newspapers, which remain central to the future of local news reporting, is an uphill battle. Emerging local news organizations are still small and fragile, requiring considerable assistance—as we have recommended—to survive to compete and collaborate with newspapers. And much of public media must drastically change its culture to become a significant source of local news reporting.

Yet we believe we have seen abundant opportunity in the future of journalism. At many of the news organizations we visited, new and old, we have seen the beginnings of a genuine reconstruction of what journalism can and should be. We have seen struggling newspapers embrace digital change and start to collaborate with other papers, nonprofit news organizations, universities, bloggers, and their own readers. We have seen energetic local reporting startups, where enthusiasm about new forms of journalism is contagious, exemplified by Voice of San Diego’s Scott Lewis when he says, “I am living a dream.” We have seen pioneering public radio news operations that could be emulated by the rest of public media. We have seen forward-leaning journalism schools where faculty and student journalists report news themselves and invent new ways to do it. We have seen bloggers become influential journalists, and Internet innovators develop ways to harvest public information, such as the linguistics doctoral student who created the GovTrack.us Congressional voting database. We have seen the first foundations and philanthropists step forward to invest in the future of news, and we have seen citizens help to report the news and support new nonprofit news ventures. We have seen into a future of more diverse news organizations and more diverse support for their reporting.

All of this is within reach. Now, we want to see more leaders emerge in journalism, government, philanthropy, higher education, and the rest of society to seize this moment of challenging changes and new beginnings to ensure the future of independent news reporting.

Read the entire report here.

Bookmark This: Journalism About Journalism

If you're looking for journalism about journalism, Alltop's "Journalism" page is your one-stop destination, with links to the top 5 daily stories at nearly 100 top online publications and blogs that cover every aspect of journalism.

From the Columbia Journalism Review to Editor & Publisher and Poynter, they're all here.

Mouse over each link, and an internal popup provides the first few sentences of what awaits at the destination, enabling you to better decide if it's worth clicking.

If that selection is still too overwhelming you can slim it down for your own use, by creating your own MyAlltop page. That, in fact, is Alltop's strength -- selectively aggregating quality content, and providing a self-controlled filter to prevent information overload.

MyAlltop enables you to create a “personal, online magazine rack” of your favorite websites and blogs. You can create a personal collection from over 32,000 information sources—if you’re interested in something, we probably have it covered.

You'll even get your own customized URL -- http://my.alltop.com/yournamehere -- that you can share with others.

We’ve subscribed to thousands of sources to provide “aggregation without aggravation.” To be clear, Alltop pages are starting points -- they are not destinations per se. Ultimately, our goal is to enhance your online reading by displaying stories from sources that you’re already visiting plus helping you discover sources that you didn’t know existed. In a nutshell, Alltop is an information filter to help you find your nuggets of gold.

If you're looking for the Web's best videojournalism, then of course KobreGuide is still your single best online destination.

CJR Does the Math: Kindle Doesn't Add Up

The Columbia Journalism Review did the math and demonstrated that there's no way that Amazon's Kindle DX is going to save the newspaper industry -- corroborating our previous thoughts on the subject.

Then CJR re-did the math the next day, taking into account the previously overlooked fact that a whopping seventy percent of revenues will go to Amazon and also to the wireless service that powers the whole concept ... and found that the results were even more dire than they had calculated. If a reader pays $14/month, the newspaper pockets only $4.20 of that.

CJR also factored in a Bloomberg report about a visionary Knight Ridder experiment conducted in 1992, designed to culminate in its own portable newspaper-reading device intended to boost readership and revenues. After three years, the project fizzled and the 10-person lab was shut down.

A key flaw in the Kindle plan is the absence of any way to display full-color non-text advertising -- a necessary source of revenue. But others are undeterred.

Gannett Co., which stopped home delivery of its Detroit Free Press four days a week, said it will distribute the newspaper on another e-reader being developed by Plastic Logic Ltd. ... Hearst Corp., which owns the Houston Chronicle, also invested in a company developing a reader.

[But] the Kindle just looks like another way for newspapers to turn profitable customers into unprofitable ones.