Cover the Planet

By David Poulson

About a half-dozen years ago I attended a conference on science journalism in Hanover. A foundation had assembled a bunch of university types and magazine editors to discuss a new curriculum for teaching science journalism at German universities.

Among the presenters was a German professor who laid out the case for establishing quote banks and description depots.  The idea was to warehouse thoroughly vetted quotes, descriptions and other elements of science journalism. Then journalists could select from these stockpiles the prefab parts needed to assemble entire news stories.

These parts could be reused in different configurations and to varying degrees, helping journalists create different stories from the same stockpile. The proponent argued that this was good for credibility. All of the material would be pre-approved for accuracy.

Many of us - well, at least many of the Americans - looked at each other in horror. I distinctly recall one of them leaning over and whispering, “That’s exactly how I teach my students not to write.”

I believed then, or at least chose to believe then, that this could never come to pass. But check out this story in the New York Times regarding the rise and fall of the media. It refers to the development of algorithms that assemble facts into narratives without the benefit of writers. Not only are the parts prefab, in this scenario robots replace workers on the assembly line.

Fine journalism crafted by real writers may not go away. But I am troubled by this sentence in the Times story: “The results would not be mistaken for literary journalism, but on the Web, pretty good — or even not terrible — is often good enough.”

Where does that leave journalists? Well, I guess we’ll always need parts manufacturers. But I sure hate to think that fine journalism ends up with the same fate as handcrafted automobiles - rare and expensive to produce.

I find hope at the end of the very same news story. It is here where reporter David Carr makes the case that young writers come to New York armed with ideas, energy and technology, and to bust down doors to a new brand of journalism.  That’s exciting.

But perhaps the true hope lies in Carr’s final sentence:

For them, New York is not an island sinking, but one that is rising on a fresh, ferocious wave.

I’d like to see the robot that can craft an ending like that.

Errr…actually not.

By David Poulson

I like to preach that journalism equals content plus engagement. I tell students that they can write an incredibly important story, but it isn’t journalism unless people - hopefully lots of people - consume it.

Important but boring is not journalism. Something no one reads but the writer is not journalism. That’s more like a diary entry - perhaps helpful to the writer but certainly not journalism.

Social media and other digital tools have given reporters new ways to escape that fate. Over at Great Lakes Echo we’re experimenting with Facebook quizzes. Recently we launched one that assesses which lake best suits your personality. The concept initially appealed to me as the engagement piece of the equation. My hope was that it would drive interest in and traffic to the site where readers could consume the other more serious content that’s already there.

But can a Facebook quiz be a self-contained unit of journalism - one with engagement and content? I asked a class that question recently. The reply: “Can reading the back of a cereal box be considered journalism?”

Maybe.

We just asked readers to help us create a new quiz: Which Great Lakes invasive species is your former significant other? Judging by private e-mails and the comments on the site we’re succeeding with the engagement piece. But just maybe we’re delivering content as well. Check out this comment on that post:

Spotted knapweed – a loner with a toxic personality – sucks the fun and energy out of life (poor palatability for herbivores and takes up all the water in the area, possibly releases a toxin that kills other plants), likes chaos and disorder (colonizes disturbed locations)

We’ll have fun with that and the other suggestions - there is a great one comparing an ex to the Asian carp poised to invade Lake Michigan:

He’s huge, gross-looking, and he frequently pops up when I least expect him too. I wish there was an electric fence to keep him away…

And we will research more ourselves, perhaps serving as a front door to more information that we link to.

It strikes me that at the same time we will be delivering serious content, perhaps raising just a bit the level of awareness readers have about important environmental issues.

I’m not exactly ready to petition the Pulitzer Committee to expand its categories to include Facebook quizzes. But it strikes me that there is something going on here that journalists should be exploring.

By David Poulson

It seems to me that two contrary attitudes sabotage the use of video on the web.

One comes from print reporters reluctant to stretch themselves. They may be spooked by the technology or baffled by a foreign story-telling technique. Either way they’re paralyzed. They don’t try, or they don’t try very hard.

Their opposites are the documentary filmmaker wannabees. Video is a tremendously complicated endeavor for them.  Breaking news? Forget it. These folks need days to edit something that meets high expectations.

It may look nice. But the effort often fails to justify the benefit.

There is a happy medium that cures paralysis while putting this storytelling tool to work fast. Check out the video toward the end of this story.

It’s a scant 26-seconds long. There’s no sound. It was taken with a point and shoot camera. A few sentences in text provide context. It doesn’t divert the reader - it augments the story.

This is a good cure for video paralysis. And while hardly a documentary, the effort to benefit ratio is extremely favorable.

It’s effective. You know how I know?

I itch every time I watch it.

By David Poulson

In the midst of a headlong rush to develop slick new journalism tools, maybe we need to take a step back once and a while.

Don’t get me wrong. I think coming up with new ways to do journalism - especially environmental journalism - is an exciting challenge. But it makes some sense to spend some time applying the new stuff that gets invented instead of always looking for the next breakthrough.

MAPLight and the Open Secrets offer tools that are great for peering into the murky waters of federal campaign contributions. Both are great advances in government transparency.

If there is a knock against them, I’d have to say it lies in the overwhelming amount of data that they collect and make publicly available. Taking it all in is not unlike drinking from a firehose. But they’re powerful and exciting tools. And now that some smart visionaries developed them, perhaps the task of reducing that torrent of information to a manageable stream should fall to some of the rest of us.

At the Knight Center for Environmental Journalism we tried to do that recently with our Great Lakes Echo environmental news service.  Echo reporter Andrew Norman, fresh off an internship at Congressional Quarterly, took a small slice of all that data to deliver a focused news story.

He examined Congressional campaign contributions in relationship to a key climate change vote. He targeted just representatives of the eight states that Echo covers. It was a single issue with a geographic focus.

And it took the new media tools developed by MapLight and CRP and APPLIED them.

Check out the story and see what you think. It shows that House members from those states on average got significantly more campaign cash than the national average from advocates of the climate change bill. This has much more to do with the 125 Great Lakes representatives’ memberships and chairmanships in key committees than it does with proximity to fresh water.

That’s interesting stuff. It took a little while to figure out how to get there. But with practice, I’m betting we’ll get better, faster and find even more significant stories.

The best part is that Andrew didn’t have to invent new media tools to do it. He just had to be savvy enough to apply those developed by others.

And that, I would argue, has to be at least as significant as creating them in the first place.

By David Poulson

Blogs are great tools for journalists to use to explain how they chased a story. There is nothing the matter with letting readers in on the process.

The downside is it takes time. It’s like reporting and writing the same story twice, but with different perspectives. But the payoff is that it builds credibility if you explain how you got onto a story, the twists it took and even the the missteps that you made and corrected.

Jim Bruggers, who covers the environment for the Louisville (Ky) Courier-Journal, did exactly that with a confusing story involving mountaintop mining. In the heart of coal country perhaps no other environmental story sparks as much controversy. So it was a big deal when it appeared that the Obama Administration was cracking down on the practice Tuesday.

Jim has an excellent blog called Watchdog Earth. On Wednesday he used it to describe how the mountain top mining story developed and the faulty assumptions made by both sources and journalists.

Check it out for an excellent example of how to build credibility and understanding through transparency.

By David Poulson

Today the Knight Center for Environmental Journalism launched a new environmental news service called Great Lakes Echo.

We’ve been fooling around for quite some time with news aggregators and even wikis - trying to play an active role in figuring out the future of environmental reporting. The new Great Lakes Echo draws upon a number of lessons we’ve learned. It concentrates environmental news reported in the Great Lakes states and provinces. And it allows users to categorize that news by topic or region.

We’re enhancing searchability with tags for hot topics. And readers can comment not only on stories, but on links to stories that appear elsewhere.

Perhaps most exciting is that we’ve built in a provision for original news reports. Initially these stories will be reported by students here at Michigan State University. We hope to recruit the efforts of students at other Great Lakes regional universities. The service certainly can play an educational role. At the same time students provide a service while pushing innovation.

But we also look at this as an opportunity to build a proof-of-concept for attracting funding to support nonprofit environmental reporting. I’d like nothing better than to have a full-time staff of professional journalists covering the most important beat in the middle of one of the nation’s most sensitive regions.

I won’t belabor the non-profit model of journalism here. I’ve already written about that concept and noted examples.

This is hardly a solution for replacing the environmental and other reporting we are losing with the decline of mainstream media. But I think universities have a role to play in the creation and distribution of knowledge. And they certainly have a role in innovating and figuring out the structures that tap the digital revolution while supporting quality work.

Stop by and take a look. We appreciate your suggestions here at CoverThePlanet or over at the Great Lakes Echo as we figure out how to further develop this experiment.

By David Poulson

Researchers are using climate change to study how news Web sites can use Facebook to reach young people.

Hot Dish is a Facebook application just launched by Jeff Reifman, founder of the news aggregator NewsCloud. It features environmental news delivered by Grist.org.

TechFlash reports that the experiment targets 16- to 25-year-olds with incentives to encourage them to interact with the site. Readers in that coveted demographic earn points for activities like posting stories, volunteering for an Earth Day activity, using energy-efficient lights.

The grand prize is an Arctic expedition for two.

Reifman says the effort will be studied by University of Minnesota researchers looking for ways to use social networks to engage young people in current events. The software that results from this experiment will be released as open source.

This sounds a lot more like social activism than journalism. But maybe the research leads us deeper into the frontier of new media. It apparently has journalistic implications as it is funded with a $249,000 grant from the John S. And James L. Knight Foundation, the nation’s leading supporter of journalism research, education and outreach.

Knight officials note that the proportion of young people who receive no news has increased from 25 to 34 percent since 1998.

“It’s important that we find new ways to reverse these trends by engaging young people where they increasingly spend time – online in social networks,” said Gary Kebbel, Knight Foundation journalism program director.

I’m not disparaging the effort. Heaven knows we need frontier-busting journalism experiments. And I’m intrigued because of the environmental news angle and the use of social media - something that I find increasingly fascinating.

But I’ll admit that I remain a bit puzzled about where this might be going. That’s not a bad thing - there are worse things nowadays then throwing stuff against the journalistic wall to see what sticks.

But I sure am interested to hear what you think. Check out Hot Dish and let me know.

By David Poulson

So Al Gore is backing a move to create a new top level .eco domain name.

This strikes me as an environmental communications disaster - and an excellent example of why we need journalists who report on the environment.

The folks pushing for the annointing of .eco say it should be

“…established for individuals to express their support for environmental causes, for companies to promote their environmental initiatives, and for environmental organizations to maintain their websites in a namespace that is more relevant to their core missions.”

They say their goal is to  “…increase awareness of ecological issues and to fund scientific initiatives and research related to the environment.”

Maybe. But here’s my gripe: Just whose awareness are we increasing? This sounds an awful lot like preaching to the choir. Like it or not, you slap “eco” on anything - let alone something as high profile as a top level domain - and you’ve immediately polarized your audience.

It has a tremendous appeal to certain consumers of news and information. For others, it inspires eye-rolling disdain for yet another “greenie” initiative - one now linked to the even more polarizing Al Gore.

How many people suspicious of the legitimacy of environmental issues will turn to a .eco domain for information?

That’s why journalists who cover the environment are needed more than ever.

I’ve chosen my words carefully here. We need journalists who cover the environment, not environmental journalists. The environment is too important to leave to a dwindling caste of environmental reporters, regardless of their significant skills. The environment transcends society. It should also transcend beat structure.

If you’re a reporter of any kind, you need to include the environmental angle of what you cover. It is too important not to.

Journalists of all stripes work at the interface of advocates and eye-rollers. We evaluate information and stitch together our best shot at truth, accuracy and a full accounting of what’s at stake.

Heaven knows we fail. And certainly there are well-documented cases of the dangers of attempting to inject a false and misleading balance into what we do. I don’t endorse that.

But if the environment is as important of a beat as knowledgeable people claim, then news of it can’t be confined to those who already get it.

The role of the journalist is to chisel away at barriers to understanding. The Internet wonderfully makes available a tremendous amount of information which should enhance that understanding. But it also allows us to select news and information that comfortably reinforces our pre-conceived notions.

Journalists afflict the comfortable.

Creation of a .eco domain strikes me as yet another exercise in comfortable high-profile silo building.

Journalists should be in the business of tearing those down.