From a drop in the ocean to a hurricane, bloggery encompasses the masses

How should newspapers approach blogs? How close should the relationship be between blogs and the print edition, bloggers and editors, stories and opinion, comments and posts? 

"Blogging between the lines" addresses those thorny issues, after a Poynter Online discussion led to the establishment of some guidelines. The point is blogs are now and have been for a few years an inevitable part of newspapers and it's time for the uninvolved ones to stop pussyfooting around and get with the program. You better start swimmin' or you'll sink like a stone, as Bob Dylan sings. 

The discussion didn't result in any hard and fast rules but did offer some suggestions:

"But most of the guidelines she's crafted (left) largely rely on common sense: Be brief and informal. Vary your topics. Don't write anything you wouldn't want your mother to read in the paper. Incorporate interesting, provocative reader e-mail. Be quick to correct yourself."

Blogs attract a different audience than print newspapers and they should be treated and executed as such. In other words it's not effective to translate the tone and feeling directly, but rather inject some informality, brevity and commentary to blogs. That's hard for journalists to shrug off, especially if objectivity has been beaten in their heads their whole lives. Perhaps the best way for the fogies (both old and young) to become more adept at bloggery is to start small. I mean, blogs as a whole aren't weighty things and shouldn't be treated as such. Let the Wall Street Journal and New York Times stay as they are in terms of their reporting excellence and credibility, but for the blogs that mingle in the minutiae, the pointless and the irreverent: bring them on. I've been blogging for six years now, and my first blog was indeed pointless. I hesitate to admit this to my classmates / relatives / friends / Bralapistas, but I have a tail-less manx/angora cat named Baxter. He looks and acts like a rabbit, including his little hop. Anyway, he "wrote" a blog detailing his life, and it was called "Baxter News Daily." Posts were short, quippy and involved his perspective on life, the universe and everything, and I'd need to spend a while looking for them, but my friends, and anybody who knew Baxter, was a fan. I'm admittedly a cat person, but I get along just as well with dogs. BND, as the hipsters called it, lasted only a few months, as most blogs do, but writing BND got me into writing a personal blog, which connected me with my friends while I was away at college. As if it's that far, but Facebook didn't exist back then. 

Baxter gets intense with his paper bags, and his alter-ego, Bagster, is ready to save the world from mischief and mayhem. 

We're all mojos

Why can't I do this everyday ??!

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In the past year or so, online readership of the Reporter has more than doubled, and it's interesting to note a few things: not much has changed on the website (though it was put on the College Publisher network Sept. 2006) in terms of technology -- still no videos, podcasts, etc.; the Reporter has been online since the early part of the decade; and advertising remains sparse. 

I think more people are accepting online newspapers and feel more confident getting their news from the web rather than a hard copy. You can tell by the numbers: the site frequently gets more than 1,000 page impressions per day, while last academic year it went over that mark only occasionally. We haven't hit 2,000 impressions yet, but I suspect that'll happen by May. I doubt the primary reason has to do with quality and the news that's happening; rather I think it has more to do with an overall acceptance of news in other mediums, and the comfort level readers have achieved. Pero qué sé shyo, maybe in fact all the little fill ads in the print edition for "www.msureporter.com" or "paper-cut free news" are effective ... ¿ ?

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Kevin Sites' journey to war-torn countries is inspiring. Being a journalist in any developing country is risky; to be an American journalist in a developing country is even scarier; and to travel to countries affected by war is terrifying. Instead of trying to capture an overall picture of what's happening in each respective country, Sites goes personal and in-depth, interviewing the people affected and getting to know them. Sites was on the cutting edge more than two years ago; blogging and video casting while traveling (see below). I remember three years ago MSU alumnus Aaron Doering came to MSU to talk about his amazing journey: he went to the Arctic Circle on dogsled and blogged and uploaded videos, using a solar-powered satellite to upload videos. He integrated the trip with classrooms across the country. While this was more of a cutting-edge learning tool, it speaks enormously of how powerful the technology is and how conducive it is to citizen journalism. The other day I was going to do an interview, wearing a pair of khakis, and I thought of all the equipment I was carrying: voice recorder, pocket Canon Elph digi-cam, broadband cell phone, and of course a pen and notepad. I'm not rich by any means, and all of those items are under $300, but essentially I had the equivalent of a printing press in my pockets. That's not including a laptop; I could've gone out, interviewed my subjects, written the story, typed it (tediously) on the cell, uploaded it to a blog, uploaded both the audio clips and photos via their USB ports (there's got to be some cable or adapter out there that lets you do that). How powerful !!! And having a laptop would've exponentially made it easier and even more advanced. I'd have access to dozens to potentially millions (or billions !) of viewers / readers / listeners, through all the mediums: Facebook, the Reporter website, Flickr, MySpace, my blog ... and that's just to name a few. I could become a member of Oh My News, or even write stuff on CraigsList (they've got a news section). Johannes Gutenberg is spinning in his grave. 

I've embedded a video of Kevin Sites' introductory video to his year-long project. Though you can find them all on Yahoo, skip straight over to YouTube. His videos on Yahoo are irritating to watch, since they put mandatory commercials at the beginning. YouTube doesn't have all his videos, but at least they're commercial free. 

Anyway, watching a few of Sites' videos, I am reminded more that I hate the fact my life is so easy. Despite a stressful, intense job, and mounting debt, and the fact that five dozen eggs now cost $10 when they cost $5 a month ago, and the fact that a gallon of gas is about $3, I have an easy, happy life. I have little reason or right to complain — about anything — because somebody out there has it worse off than I do, and they're surviving just fine. Mexico was a humbling experience. I think every college student should be required to study abroad. And I'm not saying that in a self-righteous, pretentious manner, but in sincerity. It should be a requirement, despite the major, especially for mass comm students. Some universities already do it. Even better in the third world. I don't know if I'd have the motivation, but I'd like to work in a field picking fruits for a year in Mexico, earning $2 a day.  Honestly, though, I have talked to very, very few students who regret studying abroad, while many who never did regret not doing it. What do you think -- should it be required ?

After half a century of scholarly work, new documents about the lives of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg have been made public.

"Certainly, after 50 years, the unique historical value of these records outweighs any secrecy rationale," said Thomas S. Blanton, the director of the National Security Archive, which filed the petition, with support from more than a dozen scholars. The archive, based at George Washington University, is a nonprofit group that uses the Freedom of Information Act to challenge government secrecy.

Among the historians were John Lewis Gaddis, the Robert A. Lovett professor of military and naval history at Yale, and Ronald Radosh, adjunct senior fellow at the Hudson Institute in Washington and past president of the Historians of American Communism.

The 11 layers of citizen journalism, and that's just the beginning.

Steve Outing presents some interesting facets of citizen journalism in his article, "The 11 layers of citizen journalism." Media are now a two-way street, and with internet and blogs around it can't be denied that the line between citizen and journalist is blurred. 

Among the most interesting of Outing's article was the fifth part in which he writes about a reader blog-ombudsman hybrid. An ombudsman is someone independent of the newspaper who criticizes and commentates on content, in attempts to keep a check on the paper's ethics. Anyway, I found it interesting because most media websites have some way or other for readers to make comments in response to stories, but there's often no way to critique the paper as a whole. That's where a reader-blog would come in handy. Of course, there'd still ideally be some editorial control over it, just to make sure comments are moderated and no one is libeled, but otherwise it should be fair game for readers. 

I wonder how familiar readers are with ombudsmen. It speaks mountains of the organization if it's willing to openly accept critique; it shows that outlet is listening and wants to know what the public thinks, what should change about its reporting. Allowing comments to be posted on stories is one thing, but I don't think that goes far enough.

For it to work properly, the media outlet could select a few ombudsmen from different areas -- maybe experts in education, government, criminology, etc -- and have them critique stories and write commentary, spurring reader comments. I don't know if it would be a good idea allowing Joe Citizen access to post his own full-length blog, but what about taking a look at some of the social networking sites and adopting their use of "walls", encouraging users to give feedback.

Another interesting aspect of citizen journalism that Outing presents is the hyper-local reporting. I don't think traditional journalism will ever die ( I mean, can you honestly replace the sweet feeling of waking up to a Sunday paper and browsing each section, sipping your coffee and munching donuts? Kindle, you have nothing on the paper copy.) In that regard, as buy-outs and mergers threat traditional journalism, it forces us to be more selective in what we cover, since there are less pro journalists, and newsworthy events go uncovered. So, we have to utilize technology to the max. The school board meeting might not take priority, even though it's important, and it affects many people, but the journalist is busy elsewhere, so why not ask faithful readers to volunteer and cover the meeting? For example, I interned last summer at the Austin Post Bulletin, and I went to a city council meeting in which one of the issues was a proposed expansion of a vet clinic, but the land was needed for flood mitigation. That story never made it on the pages. To Joe Reader, he'd say, "Why do I care that this is printed in the paper? This only affects that neighborhood." But still...that's an entire neighborhood. This type of hyper-local journalism borders on community newsletters, but hey, it's news, and it affects people, and things like these can cost taxpayers money. This is where dedicating blogs and assigning a few citizens in each quadrant to cover what goes on, would be greatly beneficial and of interest to those readers. The world is becoming more globalized, but at the same time, as a result, we crave "more local," in the mess of mass media. 

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Besides the facets Outing presents -- of which I agree with most of them -- there are many he left out. The article was written three years ago, but if he were to rewrite / update it, it might be called the 29 layers of citizen journalism. Ok, maybe not that many (or maybe even more??!), but here's what he might've included:

1. YouTube. You might've heard of it. This has revolutionized how we watch videos. The traditional tube has eroded and we depend more on viral videos for our news, entertainment, information, class lectures (you can attend U of Berkeley free!) Anyway, what YouTube does for citizen journalism is it lets any Joe Schmoe take a video of whatever, and post it online at the disposal of millions (billions?) of potential viewers. YouTube is to owning your own TV station as blogs are to owning your own newspaper. True, you don't need YT to post videos, but no other site has been so popular, accessible and centralized as YT, effectively putting you in contact with more viewers than all of the Superbowl shows combined. Want to start a group that broadcasts twice-monthly firefighter meetings in Taopi so that the rest of the 89 inhabitants of the town can see what motions are passed and find out which avenues will get new reflector signs? Easy as pie. 

2. Social networking sites. Whereas news organizations depended on exclusive databases to get their contact information for sources, they now have an insanely amazing tool to reach millions of people, especially youth and college students. Facebook, Myspace, Hi5, etc., are places you can get phone numbers, emails, interests, hobbies, religious/sexual/political preferences, etc. etc. -- basically, phonebooks, directories, databases, etc., combined into one centralized location, and Joe Citizen Journalist now has access to potentially millions of sources. I've used facebook for stories -- not necessarily for writing -- but for reporting, for finding sources and getting contact info that's unavailable elsewhere. At the same time, social networking is dangerous to citizen journalism, as anyone can make a forum, post something as if it were factual, and -- get this -- news organizations actually quote what is written as fact. Case in point: someone posted an account of what hapepned the day Rissa Amen-Reif died, and media cited the events as if they were true. Dangerous.

3. Cell phones. Most cell phones come with cameras, and this allows Joe C. Journalist to possibly take real-time video of news events. During the Virginia Tech shooting, students used their camera phones to record the action. And with broadband / wifi networking, it becomes even easier to transmit that video to a blog, post it, perhaps beating even the 4 big TV stations. 

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Those are only a few of the layers of citizen journalism; I can think of a few more, but those are probably the most important since Outing wrote his article. What have you got, Journalism U'ers ??

one size fits all

Eight months is too long to have a blog and not post. As my mass comm. professor Ellen calls it, a puppy: exciting to get, and for the first few weeks cute and fun, but when it turns into a dog, all the maintenance and attention make you wish you never got it.


My puppy is dead.

But I got a new one...kind of...in the form of a blog for a class.

At least I'll be updating more frequently this semester, since my grade depends on it.

Cheers to puppies.


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— Anyway, just in case you newbie readers are wondering, Bralapa means Bronson + Xalapa. Xalapa is the Mexican city in which I studied a year.

— Click on the ads above to help fund my scholarly pursuits. I suggest all you bloggers, especially those in my class, sign up for Google AdSense: let Google put ads on your site and you earn money when users click them. Hardly anything, but it's a nice bonus for doing homework.