At Le Post, a journalist is, at the same time, a news producer, an aggregator and a community organizer. Because of the way he approaches information, he is first a network journalist. He checks first what has been said and published in other media. He aggregates the best content from different sources, including blogs, Twitter, You Tube, etc. and traditional medias. Then, on some of them, he brings complementary information, new elements, adds value and fact checks. Even the news published by other journalists. The information is a permanent conversation that is built step by step by the community of am [amateurs] and the journalists.

You are our Blog Evangelist here in Northfield, our Pro-Blogger, and First Among Bloggers and so, of course, you notice all that could be done to make blogs better -- we thank you for that. However, most of us humble bloggers learn as we go, do it on the side, do it reluctantly (me, anyway) and in a hurry. Increasing facility with the medium — blog-writing, the technology and the other multi-media aspects of blogging-- will lead to more linking and better blogging. Be patient, will ya?

I have not yet seen one publication call out another publication for not linking to the first publication’s own articles. Maybe it’s because I’m new to this, or maybe it’s because I’m from a place that is much more respectful to it’s neighbors.

Christopher,

There’s a larger context here that you’re probably not aware of.

Many people have been working on Northfield’s blogosphere and online community for the past 15 years, spending thousands of hours, mostly volunteer.  We probably have more blogs per capita than anywhere in the western hemisphere. While ‘hyperlocal’ and ‘citizen journalism’ are just getting going in many communities, we’ve got roots already.

I’ve been pushing local reporters/media organizations to adopt a ‘network journalist’ approach to both tap into and help enrich the hyperlocal citizen media that’s happening here. It’s occuring in fits and starts all over the world… media organizations of all types and sizes are trying to figure out to do it.  Northfield’s two media outfits are polar opposites on this. KYMN Radio is under new local ownership and is busting its butt to embrace citizens as partner producers. The Northfield News? Not.

I had this conversation with Doug a couple of times and urged him to adopt a ‘new journalism’ approach with his class. So when I saw Pressville launch with a complete disregard for the 15 years of citizen media growth that exists here, I got grumpy.  I felt the best way to criticize it was by being specific, explaining how these 3 articles missed the ‘new journalism’ boat and how they could have done it differently.

Yes, I thought our 2007 conversation about gay friendly Northfield should have been tapped in some way, so that seems self-serving.  But that wasn’t an article. That was local citizens talking  with each other, some putting themselves out there on a tough issue.

My other example pointed out how all sorts of other online sources in the community could have been tapped with simple links. I wrote:

Other Pressville stories exhibit the same problem. For example, there’s not a single hyperlink in the story by Leaf Elhai, Old Memorial Emerges as Skate Park Frontrunner — For Now. Why not link to some of the Northfield News stories on the issue? Why not link to some of the relevant items on the City of Northfield’s site, some of the blog posts on the Union of Youth site, some of the blog posts by Councilor Betsey Buckheit, or some of the LG blog posts?

That represents some of Northfield’s ecosystem of information and relationships that I think the student reporter needed to consider. (Or maybe better put: that I think Doug McGill should have asked the student reporter to consider.)

Replicate that disregard several times over for all the other Northfield-related stories that had been published on Pressville by the time I published my blog post and I hope you’ll start to see why I thought that Pressville’s initial approach was a slap on the face of the large online community, albeit unintentional.

After chatting with Doug for nearly two hours last night, I’m hopeful that there will be some changes in the next batch of stories that get published.

Furthermore, while blog posts are a valuable source of information, I think that relying too heavily on only internet discussions might run the risk of only allowing the “expert” voices to be heard.

Maia, I think you’re missing my point.  

My 2007 blog post wasn’t an article by an expert. I simply asked a series of questions. I tried to start a conversation. The people who chimed in are real people who live here in Northfield. Some who responded are gay. None of them are experts.

I wrote in my post above: “People who have commented there might have become good sources for follow-up interviews.” 

My blog post wasn’t a review of all of Pressville. My criticism was aimed at Pressville’s overall lack of attention to ‘new journalism’ with 3 articles as examples.

I told Doug last night that if I had to do it over again, my headline would instead read something like:

Doug McGill misses the new journalism boat with Pressville

so as to make it more clear that my criticism was aimed at him, not at the individual students.

I’m having a beer with Prof. McGill this afternoon, as soon as your class with him today is over. I plan to reply to you later tonight or early tomorrow.

In the meantime, if you or anyone else from your class has comments or questions, feel free to post them here or blog them elsewhere with a trackback here.

PS to Rob: Shit! I suppose this comment puts me back over 60%, doesn’t it?

I have not yet seen one publication call out another publication for not linking to the first publication’s own articles. Maybe it’s because I’m new to this, or maybe it’s because I’m from a place that is much more respectful to it’s neighbors.

Either way, I feel that comments or e-mails directly to the authors of the articles would have been much more fitting. To publicly call out students who have just begun to immerse themselves in this journalistic world is flat out rude and not at all professional.

This article is an attack initiated out of annoyance to a lack of acknowledgment of your own article. Next time it’d be nice to see a little more encouragement.

I do thank you, though for letting us know of your frustrations with the way Doug is conducting his class. The more feedback, the more successful he will be in giving us a more detailed understanding of this very, in my opinion, abrasive field.

If you feel that I have not met the mark with my own articles feel free to contact me personally. Meeting for lunch, maybe. I’ll show you the respect I’ve been taught to give.

Thanks for raising an important point about my article. Perhaps my article would have been enriched by included the link to the 2007 blog post (available here: http://locallygrownnorthfield.org/post/1394/).
There are many interesting comments and good questions raised on the blog post.

However, the purpose of my article, and I believe part of the larger purpose of our class endeavor is to go BEYOND the blogosphere, and engage actual people in the real world. I believe a much more significant loss to journalism than not providing weblinks to every reference is to forget how to interact with one’s fellow citizens, to engage them in conversation, not online, but in person. And I think my- and Debbie and Leaf’s articles- did accomplish that.

It’s easy to pose theoretical questions from the safety and isolation of your laptop, but it takes courage to go up and talk to someone you don’t know and see how they feel about a given subject! I’m proud of myself and all the other Pressville bloggers for doing exactly that…

Furthermore, while blog posts are a valuable source of information, I think that relying too heavily on only internet discussions might run the risk of only allowing the “expert” voices to be heard. In our class, we talked about three overlapping publics: the informed public, who already knows a lot about and has many opinions about a given subject, the interested public, who may not know as much about the topic but still may have some awareness of it, and the uninterested public, who knows little about the topic. We established in our class and readings the importance of engaging all three of these overlapping publics, and I think that using only the voices of those who are already blogging about a certain topic confines the debate to the realm of the “interested” public only, which could mean that other slightly less vocal citizens are not getting heard.

My article was in no way intended to be an overarching summary of every Northfielder’s views; instead, it was supposed to give a snapshot of Northfield- its political climate, and its citizens, going about their daily business.

That’s what the technology is partly used for, ie, to allow cross-blog conversations on the same topic to happen. 

So by turning it off, you and Pressville are signaling to the blogosphere that you’re not interested in collaborative conversations, that you want all comments to be posted to your own blog.

You may not be intentionally sending that signal, or you may have it turned off because of trackback spam (which used to be a problem but is now manageable) but that’s the net effect.

So I tried.  And I went further. On Oct 11, a week before my critical blog post, I added a comment to the 2007 comment thread, linking to both Debbie’s and Maia’s stories.

Why did you not write comments on the articles you found at northfield.org and pressville and link to the 2007 article yourself?

That approach would provide value to the community and enrich the stories.

Complaining about it here doesn’t provide a mechanism for the readers of those original articles to learn about your 2007 post.

So I’ll ask Debbie and Maia: if you had known about that 2007 blog post and comment thread, How gay-friendly is Northfield? would you have read it? Linked to it? Quoted from it? Tried to contact anyone from it?

And if you now judge something to be of value in that post or attached discussion, what then?

Your stories on Pressville and Northfield.org can both be edited/updated. Both have comments turned on and it’s perfectly legit to comment on your own blog posts like I’m doing here.

You might want to do this but you might not have time since that darn Professor McGill keeps piling on the work. Well, now you face the same situation that most reporters face, ie, once their story is published, their editor assigns another one and they don’t have time for this ‘ecology of journalism’ and public interaction bullshit because they have a new deadline to get something new written or they don’t get paid.

There has to be a better way!

In the section titled The Changing Face of Journalism they talk about the “new ecology of journalism”:

Network technology may have hastened the decline in revenues to existing mass media institutions. But that same technology can lead to a new ecology of journalism in which reporters and their publics intermix in new ways.

Some journalism organizations are already using network technologies to address cuts in coverage of local news. Among the most exciting aspects of the technology revolution is the opportunity it creates for emerging concepts like networked journalism and open source reporting.28 We have already seen the rise of “citizen journalists.” These are nonprofessionals who use commonly available text, audio and video tools to create their own news stories or contribute to others. There are likewise “citizen editors,” bloggers who collect news stories created by others that they believe are most interesting and relevant to a potential audience. A next stage is emerging with new forms of collaboration between full-time journalists and the general citizenry.

Networked journalism allows news enterprises to reorganize so that full-time staff members act as nodes for networks of citizen participants who cover every “beat” conceivably relevant to the news organization’s audience. Through networked journalism, technology can enable a diffusion of the news-gathering functions, creating greater coverage of local affairs. Technology also permits new depth in local news. In “open source reporting,” reporters, editors and large groups of users all work on the same story.

An interesting observation:

Instead, what happened at InBerkeley.com is that the people thought we were running a news organization, and they did stories the way reporters do them. That can’t possibly work, imho — for the same reason the news industry is in crisis.

FYI, I found out about this via a Jay Rosen tweet.

Will you post this comment as a complete article with a scrolling headline on Locally Grown that says “Pressville Hits Journalistic Bullseye — New-Style or Old”? Otherwise your piece with its factually-sounding and definitive headline runs and people see that, and never read this response. Where would the fairness, and the journalistic progress, be in that?

Huh?  Locally Grown is an opinionated blog.  A blog headline that reflects an opinion is no different than an opinion/commentary page where the column headlines often do likewise.

For example, NY Times columnist Paul Krugman had a column last week titled: Misguided Monetary Mentalities.

That’s a “factually-sounding and definitive headline,” too, isn’t it?

I’d love to have you do a guest blog post here on LG and appear on our radio show/podcast discussing your experiences with Pressville and your criticism of me.

Want to do that soon or towards the end of your course?

My biggest concern is that in the rush to innovate on the Internet a certain Utopian fervor gets whipped up sometimes. It’s like an impatient sense that Internet-powered journalism will solve all of society’s problems, if only journalists move fast enough to drop their attachments to conventional story structures; to start Twittering; to link every sentence; and to regard every story as part of an endless conversation with readers.

That’s quite an overstatement of my position but I don’t understand how you square this with your later paragraph:

Equally important, some of Pressville’s first stories drew reader comments, including one from a Northfield City Council member, and another from a former chairman of MPIRG at the University of Minnesota, who saw a Pressville piece about MPIRG and commented.

Are comments significant or not?  Or are they only important if they’re attached to one’s own blog post, and then only in a score keeping sense?

The two Pressville comments you mentioned:

http://pressville.org/?p=161#comments

http://pressville.org/?p=210#comments

and another on Northfield.org

http://northfield.org/bloggity/on-national-coming-out-day-northfield-reflects-its-gay-friendliness#comments

thus far have no follow-up comments from you or the student authors.

You’re flipping on a Web 2.0 tool (comments),  celebrating its use, and then directly or indirectly teaching your students to ignore the people who respond because it’s not a fundamental part of journalism, that such an endeavor is a blogger-like tendency where they treat “every story as part of an endless conversation with readers.”

If you’re not going to make handling reader comments part of your course, then I think you should turn off the comment feature of the Pressville blog. You can’t have it both ways.  Plus, I think it’s disrespectful to not even acknowledge the substantive comments from a Northfield City Councilor and the person who had heavy involvement with MPIRG.

I think linking is fundamental, not a nice-to-do-if-you-have-time-for-it option.

For example, let’s say you proposed to Doug McGill that you wanted to do a story about streets around Northfield that lack sidewalks. He says to go for it and you publish your story without links and without any research of local online sources.

And then you find out that St. Olaf sophomore Sean Hayford O’Leary had just published a comprehensive blog post about the lack of sidewalks in Northfield a month ago.

Would that matter to you?  Should it matter to Sean?

If you printed out your story, handed it to Doug for grading, and then he shredded it, maybe not.  But if you published it on the web, I think it would be irresponsible.

Here’s a great 4 minute YouTube video of NYU journalism professor and blogger Jay Rosen talking about the ethic of the link: