Inviting the public into the newsroom

On Saturday, April 7th, the New England News Forum held its first conference in Lowell Massachusetts. After registration, coffee and initial networking, the participants headed off to several different breakout sessions. The first session I attended was “Letting the Public into the newsroom: Joining, shaping the conversation.”

The panel was made up of Steve Fox, who is working with newassignment.net, Rory O’Connor and Mike LaBonte who are hosts on NewsTrust and Jon Greenberg of New Hampshire Public Radio.

I’ve been a volunteer host on NewsTrust for quite a while and have been doing some paid freelance programming for them, so I’m well acquainted with NewsTrust. I had a wonderful discussion with Jon about what NHPR is setting up for covering the New Hampshire primary during the networking prior to the session, and while I hadn’t met Steve Fox before, I’ve been following newassignment.net very closely. I’ve written about it on my blog, in particular about their planned collaboration with Huffington Post.

The session started off by going around the room and everyone introducing themselves. There were editors, producers, professors, and wonderfully wise group in the audience, the sort of audience that is a good reminder of why it is so important to invite the public into the newsroom.

During the introductions, Arnie Arnesen, of Political Chowder framed the discussion very nicely with the question, “How to raise the level of curiosity in our public discourse?” Jon Greenberg spoke to this a little in terms of touching on how news is relevant to the lives of the readers.

With the introductions and initial framing out of the way, we launched into learning more about newassignment.net, NewsTrust and NHPR’s Public Insight Network.

Steve started off by talking about newassignment.net and posing the question, “Are bloggers journalists? Are journalists journalists? Are crowds journalists?” He spoke finding that a lot of people don’t understand how complicated it is to be a journalist. It seems to be a recurring theme, from my experiences blogging the Libby trial, the experiences of many of us as we become involved in NewsTrust, and the experiences of the folks at newassignment.net. There is a lot that goes into writing, or even appreciating good journalism. Efforts like newassignment.net and NewsTrust are providing an important service in helping people become more media literate, more media savvy, and in understanding all that goes into writing a story.

Steve spoke about this when he commented that people working as editors at newassignment.net are finding themselves taking on more of a mentoring role and less of a line editing role. Perhaps this, as opposed to the crowd sourced journalism, or the reviews of quality journalism will end up being one of the most important benefits of projects like newassignment.net and NewsTrust.

Rory and Mike then spoke about NewsTrust. The discussion centered around how NewsTrust worked, efforts made to protect the system from being gamed, and research showing that regular people were very effective in spotting quality journalism. There was a lot of interest in this and it took up a large amount of the time available.

Jon then spoke about the role of public insight in journalism. He raised the questions, “What is on the news agenda? How do we get more citizen input in shaping the stories?” He spoke about the efforts in Minnesota, and then went on to describe details of what is now being done in New Hampshire.

He spoke about the initial survey they did on how people have seen aging affect what is happening in their workplace and community. He mentioned promoting this extensively on the air, to the point where people started complaining. In the end, they had around 160 people participate in the survey from people in their 30s to people in their 80s.

He spoke about the efforts to reach out to people, to stay in touch with them, and to build a relationship that can be drawn upon for future surveys. He spoke a little about the plans for expanding on the public insight model in coverage of the New Hampshire primaries.

At one point, Mike LaBonte, who is not a media activist, was asked why he became involved with NewsTrust. Why didn’t he simply send letters to the editors all along?

It seems as if a theme from all of the presentations provides the key to what got Mike and others more involved in the journalistic process. They were asked. Newassignement.net, NewsTrust, and all the public insight efforts, such as those illustrated by the New Hampshire Public Radio efforts are driven by these groups going out and asking more people to get more involved.

Perhaps that was the most important part of the discussion. It isn’t about letting people into the Newsroom, it is about inviting them in.

Part II

Even the Costa Ricans want universal broadband

Back in March, Gov. Jim Douglas of Vermont addressed the Freedom to Connect conference in Washington, DC. I wrote about his talk briefly in a previous blog post. David Weinberger, Tom Evslin, Steve Smith and others have all written about the talk. It was a pretty geek audience and Gov. Douglas showed that he could keep up with the geeks.

At lunch at the New England News Forum conference, Gov. Douglas spoke to a crowd much more interested in the implications of his initiative to media and politics. Lynne Lupien live blogged some of his talk, and I want to add my own insights here.

Back in 2003 and early 2004, I followed around a previous Vermont Governor as he spoke about his vision for our country. My wife and I heard the stump speech so many times that we could recite it pretty well, ourselves. So, it was no surprise when I heard Gov. Douglas speak about the four doctors from Boston. They needed to be able to get back to their hospital within four hours of an emergency. They went up to Sugarbush to ski, only to find that there wasn’t cell phone coverage there. They said they could not ski there again, until that problem was fixed.

He told the story of a business in northeastern Vermont where there was no broadband access that was now being required by its suppliers to place its orders online. To these stories he added the public safety aspect, mentioning the story of a Brooklyn, NY man who froze to death when is car went off the road in the Adirondacks in an area where there was no cell phone coverage. He spoke of the ‘creative economy’, noting that Vermont has more authors per capita than any other state. Yet artists living in Vermont suffer from having to send images of their paintings to galleries over dialup connections.

He went beyond the issue of broadband and took up eGovernance. A few years ago, Vermont was fiftieth amongst the states in eGovernance. It has made great efforts to make registration of businesses, getting hunting and fishing licenses, dealing with the Department of Motor Vehicles all possible online. Through these efforts, they have climbed to 41st. During the question and answer period, he was asked about efforts to get more records online. He noted that he had been Secretary of State for many years and recalled the excitement about being able to get records on microfilm. He spoke about being able to check legislative bills online as well as press conferences online, but he spoke about difficulties with the legislature in getting addition information online.

He noted that the Vermont Open Meeting and Public Records law starts off with a preamble which recognizes both the difficulty and the great importance of making public records more accessible.

During the questions and answers, issues of regionalization also came up. Gov. Douglas is currently the head of the New England Governors Association. He noted that for the first time in three and a half years all six New England Governors attended a meeting of the association. As I listened to this, my thoughts went back to a former Vermont Governor, who had been chairman of the National Governors’ Association. My thoughts went to the section of Boys on the Bus by Timothy Crouse, talking about the best presidential campaign reporters being those that show up at the regional governors associations during off years. Does Gov. Douglas have his eyes on something larger? I must say that for a Republican, he’s done very well at the two conferences I’ve attended.

The discussion of regionalization went beyond New England, Gov. Douglas and others talked about the relationship between New England and the southeastern Canadian provinces.

Gov. Douglas spoke clearly and wisely about the need for state governments to embrace changing technology. The devil is always in the details and one must wonder if his proposed private/public initiatives will do more to improve access of the citizens of Vermont than it does to line the pockets of large corporations. One must worry about if he will find the balance necessary to move Vermont forward, yet not do it in the way that West Virginia has by changing the state from ‘Wild and Wonderful’ to ‘Open for Business’. Gov. Douglas’ efforts must be watched closely to make sure that they don’t get derailed and so that we can all learn from and emulate the best parts.

Part III

Shield Laws

Last May, Connecticut passed a reporter’s shield law, and the law came into effect on October 1st. There are now over thirty states with shield laws in effect and Massachusetts is currently working on a shield law.

At the New England News Forum conference on Saturday, shield laws were a hot topic. The panel, “Does journalism–or blogging–merit a shield?” explored this is detail. Jeffrey Newman, a lawyer at Prince Lobel Glovsky and Tye has been leading the charge to bring shield laws to Massachusetts and moderated the session.

Jim Taricani described his experiences of being found in civil contempt, and later criminal contempt for not revealing who provided him with a tape that was aired tied to the “Operation Plunder Dome probe”. A judge had ordered that the tape not be shown, yet the tape was shown on the NBC affiliate in Rhode Island. Initially, Taricani was fined $1000/day for civil contempt, which NBC covered on his behalf. Later, he was found in criminal contempt and sentenced to six months home confinement.

It is worth noting that the day after Taricani was convicted, Sen. Dodd from Connecticut proposed a federal shield law for reporters.

Sarah Olsen spoke about the U.S. Army subpoenaing her to testify about her article concerning Lieutenant Ehren Watada. Lt. Watada had spoken with the press about why he was publicly refusing deployment and was charged with conduct unbecoming an officer for speaking with the press. Olsen refused to cooperate with any prosecution that would impede a soldier’s freedom of speech. She also spoke about Josh Wolf who has recently been released from prison after refusing to testify before a grand jury about tapes that he had shot as an independent videographer.

Not everyone was a supporter of shield laws. Bill Ketter, editor of the Lawrence Eagle-Tribune spoke up against shield laws, arguing that he didn’t want laws that give an opening to not upholding the first amendment. He sited a recent case where a reporter for the Mankato Free Press in Minnesota was ordered to give up notes about a phone call made during a police standoff. Minnesota has a shield law, which had been very strong and would have protected the reporter. However, the legislature subsequently softened the shield law to a point where the judge asserted the revised law does not protect the reporter.

One of the big issues these days is, to whom should shield laws apply? The purest would argue that they apply to everyone. In Connecticut the law applies to people working with (as defined by a long string of legalese) the “news media”, also defined by some long string of legalese. Robert J. Ambrogi, a Massachusetts lawyer and journalist writes,

It is not clear whether this definition would include bloggers. At first glance, it would appear to exclude bloggers who are not working for a media organization, but perhaps one could argue that a blog is a “periodical” or “other transmission system” and therefore covered.

The proposed Massachusetts law defines a covered person as follows:

“Covered person”, a person who engages in the gathering of news information and has the intent, at the beginning of the process of gathering news or information, to disseminate such news or information to the public.

This is a fairly broad definition that would appear to cover much of blogging.

While we can argue about the best ways to protect the Freedom of the Press, it does seem clear that, as one speaker put it, “for every story that doesn’t get told, it is the public that loses”.

– Aldon Hynes

Popularity: 1% [?]