Journalism law

My general Delicious links tagged for law

Reference

Berkman Center’s Citizen Media Law Project
North Carolina page at Citizen Media Law Project

Open meetings in North Carolina
North Carolina Open Government Coalition, which is also on Twitter as @ncopengov.
Knight Citizen News Network
Creative Commons licenses
Section 108 spinner for fair use and archives
British law for bloggers
Fair use (aimed at podcasting, but relevant in other context, by Lessig)

Case studies and readings

Take-down notice from The New York Times to apartment therapy
New York Times on excerpting
Will copyright become obsolete this year?
Gatehouse, The New York Times and aggregating headlines

More on Gatehouse and The New York Times

Digging further into the #snOMG hashtag: Cincinnati wins (for now?)

#snomg tag usage as shown by trendsmap.com at 1 p.m. Dec. 19

Well, shoot.
Charlotte didn’t invent the hash tag #snOMG.

The city’s forensic Twitter archivist, Blair Trosper, sends evidence that Charlotte’s hive mind borrowed the word from Tom Callinan, a Cincinnati editor. Still, it’s intriguing that the hashtag’s use exploded in Charlotte after only a few mentions, and then lay dormant until the next winter season. When #snowmageddon of December 2009 hit the East Coast, #snOMG spread, along with many other highly amusing tags.

Christmas Eve, Tom Callinan shared word that he thought copy editor Kelly Hudson first used the tag, and that started Kelly on her own investigation of her sources, @wltw and @cra1g.

Then @cra1g dug up a cute Twitpic from January 2009.
Still, that’s not definitive proof of the first use of the tag. Perhaps we’ll never have a clear answer, but for the moment, @cra1g wins. Sorry, @flc.

Anyone who has been on Twitter for a while likely has noticed a tendency for unconscious or subconscious borrowing of words and concepts from people in their Twitter stream. The speed and ephemeral nature of Twitter, though, make it difficult to pin down where exactly concepts start. But hey, this is the Internet, and computers are helping us remember things these days, thank goodness. Somewhere, buried in a server, is the first tweet to use the #snOMG hashtag. Can it be proven to be the first?

Of course, the tag is just one of many useful and sometimes merely amusing tags. WLTW even used a survey of what tag to use for Cincinnati’s January 2009 storm, and #snOMG was only one of several highly amusing hashtag nominees. I’m surprised “Bob” didn’t win.

But #snOMG’s spread can provide a snapshot of the how valuable hashtags are on Twitter and thus how semantic tagging of other snippets of information can be useful in our machine-assisted world. So many sociological implications abound too: how humor fuels the use of tagging, how the hive mind absorbs and spreads information, how the spread of a tag gives feelings of validation among users, and on and on.

And then the business applications exist as well. How valuable are the roots of a tag? Will Twitter find a way to monetize the archiving of this kind of information? Will others?

So perhaps some day a linguistic or library science student will explore the phenomenon further. In the mean time, Charlotte and the East Coast need to credit @cra1g.

And stay safe and warm as a new storm aims at the East Coast. Happy holidays.

The December 2009 snowstorm and #snOMG, a little hashtag that began in Charlotte

#snomg tag usage as shown by trendsmap.com at 1 p.m. Dec. 19

#snomg usage at http://trendsmap.com after midnight, Dec. 19.

Usage of #snomg as shown by trendsmaps.com as of 2 p.m. Dec. 18.

Editor’s note from Jan. 30, 2010: Please see an update of this post that tracks the use of #snOMG to Cincinnati.

As the December 2009 snowstorm traveled up the East Coast, a little hashtag born in Charlotte traveled with it.

In January 2009, Gregor Smith, or @flc on Twitter, came up with #snOMG, which combined “snow” and “OMG” in five characters.

When you have only 140 characters, every character counts.

The tag emerged again during a March storm. Then in December, the tag reappeared as weather reports indicated an approaching snow event. Charlotte meteorologist Brad Panovich, or @wxbrad of WCNC adopted the tag, and The Weather Channel shared it with more than 20,000 followers on Twitter.

So here’s a quick Q&A conducted via email with the tag originator, Gregor Smith of northern Mecklenburg County:

When and how did you come up with the tag #snOMG?

(I came up with it) during the first snow “storm” of the year, which was mid- to late January. I can’t claim sole credit, it was merely a punny hashtag reply to a “snow! Omg!” tweet, so I like to think of myself as one who pushed it into the Charlotte collective. From there it wasn’t long before others took it and ran with it, making it a trending topic, which was decidedly easier back in those heady pre-Oprah days…

You tweeted: ‘YES! AFFIRMATION BABY!’ when The Weather Channel (@twci, with more than 20,000 followers) announced #snOMG as one of the “official” hash tags of the East Coast storm of Dec. 18. Is that how it feels to get wide use of your hash tag?

It was on par with having Jim Cantore (of The Weather Channel) standing at the end of Pineville-Matthews Road (in Charlotte) during the big #snOMG of March this year. As Ben Ullman (@budesigns) said then, we were close to getting #snOMG on national TV.

How much snow did you get in the latest storm? Did you go out and play in it? Did you lose power?
We got a few inches, maybe 2 or 3, and of course I went out to play in it! Being 30-plus is no excuse not to be excited by snow … . No loss of power though.

Do you use hash tags to sort Twitter? Or are they just for fun and humor?
Bit of column A, bit of column B. A lot of times, it’s for shits and giggles, the kind of hashtags some people recently said they hate, but for events it’s good to track tweets that way.

The latest storm actually got pretty intense in Asheville and points north. When an event gets serious but has a humorous hash tag, do you think the tag should be changed or not used?
People are free to use whatever tag they want, be it #snOMG or otherwise. Where I come from (Scotland), we have a pretty self-deprecating sense of humor. If you can’t laugh at serious things, then what can you?

Are you the person with the Twitter name @snOMG? If not, do you know who it is?
No, that’s the botfather. (Link might not be safe for work.)

How long have you been on Twitter?
Since September 8th 2006, seriously! I’m user ID 5,628. They are now pushing user IDs in the 100-million range.

You’ve had some life-changing experiences with Twitter. What’s the best lesson you learned?
Don’t talk about work on Twitter unless that’s part of your job. Some over-zealous employers will “dooce” you for that.

Further links:
#snOMG in March 2009
Dan Conover on hashtags
Standardize basic hashtags for Charlotte.

Building an open Carolina news network

Chip Oglesby's Publish2 links for Boeing

Warning: News geek alert. I hope this post will be of great interest to a small group of people, but I’m throwing out ideas that might be filled with jargon.

The recent rains that paralyzed Atlanta taught a lesson: Building a network before critical need arrives can make the sharing of news and information faster, more powerful and effective.

In the case of the Atlanta flood, local leaders in the Twitter community brought together people by advocating the use of a tag on Twitter that was easily searchable.

But we have more network tools than just Twitter, and the principles of networking apply across social networks.

One emerging news tool is Publish2, which is a for-profit company that allows journalists to bookmark links and tweets and share on their websites with widgets. The company also has widgets that allow website managers to add a request for tips from readers.

The New York Times uses Publish2 to aggregate “What we’re reading” posts. The (Columbia) State’s Chip Oglesby used Publish2 to aggregate stories about the Boeing move from Seattle to South Carolina, including posts from Seattle that gave a different perspective on the move. The screenshot above shows his work.

But Publish2 also has the ability to let journalists collaborate across newsrooms, building lists of links about a particular topic in newsgroups. Then different newsrooms (or blogs) can share the crowdsourced links with widgets on their own websites.

That’s a powerful tool, as illustrated with the crowdsourced use of hashtags on Twitter during emergencies and breaking news. And in the Publish2 case, the crowdsourcers are all pre-approved, theoretically “reliable sources.”

Another example: The hearings about former N.C. Gov. Mike Easley have generated widespread coverage, and interest, across the state. Mark Binker of Greensboro is generating amazing quick coverage on Twitter, and the Greensboro News and Record is using Cover it Live to aggregate those tweets. Raleigh is taking a different approach, using live video, live blogging and comments on the News and Observer site.

News organizations across the state have interest in the hearings but can’t always afford to staff them. Publish2 could help them work together to aggregate coverage and link out to original sources from their own websites.

Admittedly, Publish2 is a for-profit company. Where this goes, I’m unsure. Perhaps Google Wave will make this collaboration easier in a different form in the future. But not yet, and hey, Google is a for-profit company too, just like Twitter (some day).

It’s past time to try out Publish2 collaboratively and learn some broad principles that can apply to networking the news. Let’s build a North Carolina network and a Carolinas network before we get hit with a hurricane or some other big news event that will need all our resources, collaboratively.

Perhaps some day, we’ll find similar tools that are open source and free.

Let’s experiment and iterate now. I’ve created the groups and seeded them with some Carolinas journalists on Publish2.

I have to acknowledge this: I’m throwing out this idea from outside any legacy newsroom, and I understand the heavy competitive pressure within those newsrooms. Perhaps this idea won’t fly in those newsrooms. But then, it might fly among the growing ranks of independent journalists. And as we experiment, other projects like the J-Lab Networking the News effort are encouraging cooperation among independents and legacy newsrooms in two N.C. cities, Asheville and Charlotte.

Ryan Sholin and Greg Linch of Publish2 are behind this idea and willing to help.

If you’ve already used Publish2 and want to join the North Carolina or Carolinas networks, let me know. If you want to be an administrator, let me know. If you think it’s a dumb, stupid idea, let me know.

Update from comments: If you’re not already on Publish2, send the email address you want to use to sign up in a direct message to Underoak on Twitter (me), or email it to me at akrewson45cATmacDOTcom. It looks like that method will automagically put you in the newsgroup or groups.

Try. Try again. Repeat.

Standardize basic hashtags for Charlotte

Statistics from what the hashtag wiki for #chs

“People want to slice information for local cultures; this means that the local cultures need to be able to do the slicing rather than rely on institutions that are more likely to create universal organization schemas. No organization has the diversity necessary to build all of the different glocalized systems that people desire.”
danah boyd, 2005

It started with #tacos and #pbr08.
Charlotte people on Twitter early used hashtags, those words preceded by the # mark, to make jokes and organize drinking parties.
It evolved into #snOMG, a snow event in pre-Oprah 2009.

Now Dan Conover and others in Charleston have shown a way forward, a way to filter the noise of Twitter, from the beginning of the message, enabling better manual search and better search on clients like Tweetie and HootSuite. It’s a folksonomy, or agreed-upon naming convention for tags, which helps people find and share specific information. In this case, keeping it local is key.

Don’t let “folksonomy” scare you. It just means keywords that a community chooses. Charlotte already has #charlotte, used in at least one RSS feed on a commercial website for tweets from Charlotte. It used #cltgas during a shortage in the fall of 2008, borrowing from Atlanta, which invented #atlgas and, most recently, #atlflood.

Charlotte also has #cltcc for the city council, although perhaps it’s sometimes overused by some candidates running for election. It was documented by Brandon Uttley on what the hashtag.

Of course, Twitter itself is working to enhance filtering, creating lists, in which people will be able to group sources together.

Even so, power remains in shared, collaborative keywords, first developed on Twitter during the San Diego fires of 2007 and popularized after a post by Chris Messina.

Conover’s story shows that a filtering method is available now, controllable in a shared way by individuals. He told the tale at Columbia’s Social Media Club on Thursday about a hashtag summit, in which local media representatives and bloggers met at a bar and agreed upon basic hashtags for the Charleston area. And they discussed principles, like uniform length (short) and amount of total tags.

As of Friday night, the basic tag, #chs, has been used in 722 tweets, with 242 contributors, for an average of 103.1 tweets per day, in the past week.

Conover made it sound so simple, but I suspect it was more like herding cats, in a day when many people are seizing branding opportunities in social media. Getting competing media to agree on using standard hashtags isn’t necessarily easy. Conover and others in Charleston deserve credit for a strong example of cooperation.

“During the boom, there was a rush to get everything and everyone online. It was about creating a global village. Yet, packing everyone into the town square is utter chaos. People have different needs, different goals. People manipulate given structures to meet their desires. We are faced with a digital environment that has collective values. Nowhere is this more noticeable than in search. For example, is there a best result to the query “breasts”? It’s all about context, right?”
danah boyd, 2005

Conover said cities like Louisville, Ky., and Vancouver have adopted similar practices since Charleston’s effort. And in Charleston, “even the police use it,” he said at the social media summit. On the panel with Conover, discussing the future of journalism and social media, was Charlotte’s Jeff Elder, who took this video afterward of Conover explaining Charleston’s efforts.

And in Asheville, Jeff Fobes of The Mountain Express announced a change on Oct. 7 from branded #mxnow tags to community centered #avl tags. The Mountain Express is a weekly paper that embraced hashtags early on its website, allowing community members to tweet information and have it appear on the site easily.

To be effective, the hashtags need to be well-known, documented, shared and short. Getting buy-in from others also seems to require a bottom-up, collaborative approach. So, to get things rolling, I’ve added to Uttley’s documentation of the #cltcc tag on what the hashtag, borrowing liberally from Charleston.

Here are Charlotte’s proposed tags, many of which are already in widespread use but weren’t necessarily documented previously:

• #clt A short general tag for Charlotte. It’s been around awhile and echoes the airport code. Use of it doesn’t mean #charlotte goes away, especially if RSS feeds have been built on the longer tag. But it’s a suggestion for a shorter, standard tag that already gets used fairly often, going forward.
• #cltvote A tag for tweets about voting and elections in Charlotte.
• #cltwx Proposed tag for tweets about Charlotte weather. Local TV weather guy @wxbrad is promoting the use of the tag #severeweather, but #cltwx is consistent with others’ use, could provide more geo-specific information and be shorter.
• #cltbrkg Proposed tag for Charlotte breaking news, copying Charleston’s similar tag.
• #clttrfk Proposed tag for Charlotte traffic.
• #clteats Proposed tag for food and drink in Charlotte.
• #cltdeal Proposed tag for deals in Charlotte.
• #cltbiz Proposed tag for business news in Charlotte.

Remember, what the hashtag is a wiki, so if you think that list excludes a tag you want to see, you can add it yourself. In addition, you can edit existing entries. Certainly it seems Charlotte needs a documented school board tag, and it would be great to create #cltneeds to help with efforts like Mission Possible. I suspect we need to add tags for Ballantyne, Plaza Midwood, the Eastside, Uptown, etc.

Hashtag conflict.

Of course, the shorter the tag, the more room you have for your tweet or other tags. At the same time, the shorter the tag, the more likely it will conflict with someone else’s use.

Specifically, #clt appears to be used in India as well. What the hashtag makes a graph of the number of times the tag is used and who’s using it, so the wiki can be used for data analysis and conflict resolution as well as documentation. And sometimes collisions happen: #cbj apparently stands for the Columbus (Ohio) Blue Jackets as well as the Charlotte Business Journal. But that’s why a wiki matters: It can help sort out conflicts.

Few of these tags should be static; our world is constantly changing. We can at least begin. If you want to talk more, I plan to be at BarCamp Charlotte on Oct. 17.

“It’s important to realize that Web2.0 is not a given – it is possible to f*** it up, especially if power and control get in the way.”
danah boyd, 2005

Further reading: danah boyd.

What is journalism, and how to pay for it

Journalism is like a fully loaded hot dog at Fenway Park.

Or at least that’s how one friend and “citizen journalist” described it for a paper I wrote in late 2007. I  interviewed some new “citizen journalists,” surveyed the history of the business of journalism and looked at some new experiments in paying for journalism.

Now, two years later, we’re still asking the same questions: What is a journalist? What is journalism? How do we pay for it?

Instead of referring folks to a PDF, herewith is the analysis section of that paper. It’s still relevant, and it’s interesting to see where progress has been made, and where we’re still struggling.

Analysis

“Something is happening out there, and if we don’t understand it, it’s not just the newspaper business that is in peril.”
Bill Keller, editor of The New York Times, in the Hugo Young lecture in London in late November 2007.

What is the best way for societies to pay for their journalism?
And what is journalism anyway?
Here are a few juicy words from John McBride, who produces the “Under the Water Tower” blog for a small Charlotte neighborhood.
He’s also a co-worker at The Charlotte Observer focused on technology development for newspapers. He’s also a father and husband of a teacher:

“I would make a distinction between journalism and community or other information. Journalism is information with extra value. Kind of like a hot dog with sauerkraut and spicy mustard at Fenway Park on a warm summer night instead of just a hot dog. The first one isn’t by definition better, but it allows for a more fulfilling experience.
“Anybody can recite information about what the city council did last night. A journalist will add value to that information, enriching it with context and perspective. But there’s another requirement to journalism.
“Plenty of people online enrich information with context and perspective. Too many of them don’t go to the council meetings and don’t talk to council members and don’t talk to city policy stakeholders. You have to be a player to do journalism. Not that distant observers can’t add context and perspective. But if all you have is distant observers your diet will be just a hot dog.
“In a perfect world the practice of journalism would be protected from corrupting influences by being placed in a trust of some kind. I don’t know the details or how to get there, but something like the arrangement the St. Petersburg Times publishes under.
“Capitalism is a wonderfully efficient economic system. But like teaching children, the practice of journalism isn’t necessarily improved by the capitalist model. I’d like to see journalism (and public education) protected from bottom-line mentality somehow.”

These days, consumers don’t rely solely on traditional media monopolies for information, and that’s a good development. But some of the new alternative voices bubbling up from “citizen journalists” lack traditional journalism training and also face the same funding questions that traditional media face.
Many sources are experimenting with new methods of crunching data and funding their reporting. The data is ubiquitous; adding analysis and meaning to that data is the hard part. Actual old-fashioned feet-on-the-street work and interviews with hard questions for sources seem to be rare, while easy opinion flourishes from numerous sources online.
Owning a printing press is no longer an obstacle. Finding the time and having the guts and experience and intellect to ask hard questions is.

From (David) Boraks, the local news blogger at Davidson News:

“One final thought: The operational expenses side of the equation here is very simple. It costs practically nothing to run this site, apart from human capital. My costs for domain names, web hosting, site tracking, possibly eventually an email service will never be more than a hundred dollars a month.  It’s my time and the time of my associates that is the big expense.
How long we do this is entirely depending on how energized or weary we become about it.”

Here are some recommendations, for organizations and individuals:
1.  Look for partners and multiple sources of information. New media organizations can learn from the traditional news organizations, finding out more about reporting and hard questions, in exchange perhaps for the technical tools that the new groups are so good at developing. Perhaps traditional media can exchange information or tools with newcomers, instead of spending too much time trying to catch up on the technical side. And traditional journalists should find more ways to pass on the long-term values of truth, fairness and balance to organizations using new methods of sharing information. Consumers should remember to get information from multiple sources. If one only relied on email bulletins from Outside.In from certain neighborhoods, the crime coverage would overwhelm other news and skew one’s perspective on reality. One prolific source feeding an aggregator can skew the headlines. Be aware of that and holistically examine information from providers.
2.  Carefully examine the background and funding of partners and sources of news. Journalism has always had to worry about losing credibility through guilt by association, whether it comes from a newspaper owner or a blogging individual or a nonprofit foundation. Beware conflicts of interest, even if it’s just making news judgments about a story from which you can later benefit
personally.
3.  Avoid partnering or gleaning all your information from sources that seem to have a political stance. Or balance them with other partners or sources that lean the other way.
4.  Find multiple methods of funding. Other businesses from freelancers to large companies know the axiom that one main income source weakens one’s independence and sustainability. It’s past time that traditional journalism
organizations learn that lesson and actively, consistently broaden their income
base beyond advertising.
5.  Consider broader sources for information and encouragement of the people that produce it. The federal New Deal model during and after the Depression is inspiring for the history it recorded and the creativity it harnessed. Find a way to encourage that kind of explosion of creativity now, everywhere, without making it too dependent on one particular political party, government entity or new-media business. Perhaps fund young people studying abroad more deeply and pay them for their writing and photography.
6.  Keep a close eye on the new experiments, to find out what works, what doesn’t work and where individuals’ money – and taxes – should go.
7. Remember that quality counts, and reward it. From Picard: “Protestations of journalistic purity and piety will produce few results unless they are accompanied by true commitment to producing quality material that serves more important interests than titillation, voyeurism and sales.”

Flooding in Atlanta: One search to bind them all

About 6 a.m. Monday, Steve Burns, a freelance journalist near Atlanta, sent out a note on Twitter:

“WSB: Boil water advisory in Douglas County. #atlfloods”

An hour later, Atlanta blogger Grayson Hurst Daughters tweeted from her @spaceyg account:

“Atlanta commuters: use the hashtag #atlflood for Atlanta flood condition notices.”

She followed up quickly with a note to a local TV outlet:

“@11AliveNews, please consider using the hashtag #atlflood in your Tweets! That way all the notices can be indexed/RSS’d. Tx!”

The tag set the tone for an organized, findable stream of aggregated content that helped Atlantans and their friends stay informed as the rain kept falling, killing at least 6 people, swamping interstates and causing major delays at the airport. The Georgia governor declared a state of emergency in 17 counties.

We’ve all read posts about how Twitter provides immediate coverage of earthquakes or bloody election fallout. But this moment showed how a social media tool enabled aggregation of all local news coverage through one search, quickly, in a large city, for breaking news.

Individuals shared links to stories from the established local news outlets quickly throughout the day. And a picture on Twitpic of flooding on Atlanta’s downtown connector received more than 60,000 views in about 10 hours.

Considering it a victory for untrained “citizen journalism” might be a bit misleading. Burns has newspaper experience from California, Georgia and Florida, and Daughters is a writer and corporate communication professional who worked for ABC News for six years. Also heavily involved was Tessa Horehled, a strategic marketer who advises companies about social media plans. Tweeting at @driveafastercar, she braved the rain with a video camera numerous times throughout the day from her neighborhood, and posted pictures late into the evening as a creek approached her front door.

She also created the tag #atlgas, used extensively during a gas shortage in the fall of 2008 in the Atlanta area. That tag was featured in a TED presentation by Twitter founder Evan Williams.

Certainly many other people were posting on Twitter, and local media outlets covered the story well. Ajc.com linked to a Twitter search of the tag. But because individuals used the tag while pointing to established media stories as well as posting their own observations, the tag itself served as a way of aggregating all media into one search.

But yes, there’s a drawback, in counting on the crowd to control the content of a tag for aggregation: As soon as the hashtag hit the Top 10 trending terms on Twitter, opportunistic usurpers crowded the stream and made it much less valuable. That gaming of the system shows that a tag is most useful when it’s NOT in the top 10 trending list.

About 8 p.m., one person on Twitter from Cambridge expressed frustration to Dan Gillmor, author of “We the Media,” that no national media outlets were covering the story, and he repeated the tweet. About 9 p.m., the L.A. Times sent out a tweet pointing to its story, with a dateline “Reporting from Atlanta.”

But throughout the day, the best place for aggregated coverage from both established local media and from individuals came from searching Twitter for the #atlflood tag.

Until it hit the “trending” list.

News that oozes: Finding the local implications in a national environmental project

When the water gets really low in my neighborhood creek, a lovely ooze from the creek bed becomes apparent.

I’m not sure what the ooze is or from whence it comes. Part of me doesn’t want to know.

Two sewer lines run along the creek, one at least 50 years old and one about 30 years old. The older line is slowly being replaced, and the work will arrive soon in the neighborhood greenway, ripping out walkways, trees and underbrush as the backhoes do their thing.

So when The New York Times published a massive, nationwide, data-rich
package recently, called “Toxic Waters,” I was fascinated. And when pundits on Twitter called for local news organizations or independent journalists to delve into the state-by-state data, I was further intrigued.

Dan Gillmor, who wrote “We The Media,” tried to shame local news organizations with this note on Twitter:

“Local journos in **every** state could/should folo NYT water investigation; few will because of idiotic not-invented-here syndrome in media.”

It’s not as simple as that.

Don’t discount this post as an apologia for news organizations or citizen reporters; take it instead as an acknowledgement and reminder of the huge hurdles faced when taking a huge data dump local, and the need for real, feet-on-the-street reporting. Data dumps are great things, and combined with reporting, truth will out, especially on stories that ooze, instead of break.

But we all should know by now that data can mislead without reporting.

“Numbers are an interesting thing and they can tell many different stories depending on how you look at them,” said the representative of the N.C. Division of Water Quality who responded to the New York Times package.

Herewith, some hurdles for local people, in trying to build upon the excellent work by the Times:

• “Fishing expeditions” in newsrooms rarely get time and money these days. Sometimes reporting needs to happen to determine whether there is a story, and what the story is. And even for alternative news organizations like Spot.Us, time and funding for those fishing expeditions are difficult, because pitches for funding must be specific in promising certain results.
• Often, the real story is in the null spaces, the blank places on the map, the industries that are not regulated, self-regulated or unnoticed by the state agencies who shared data with The New York Times. In a quick overview of the beautiful N.C. map by the Times of regulated entities and violations, I saw no indication of violations at the Eastern North Carolina hog farms. (They might be there, but I couldn’t find them easily.) I saw no indications of violations near the coal-ash fields right next to Mountain Island Lake, the drinking supply for the City of Charlotte. Does that mean there are no problems in those spots? Only deeper, expensive, local reporting will determine that. And it’s a fishing expedition.
• Finding context and reading with a critical eye are rare skills that take time. The massive amount of work by The New York Times on this project cannot be quickly interpreted and localized because merely reading all the source material and comments takes time. It’s rare for local reporters and editors to have that time during their paid work hours, and it’s rare for “citizen journalists” to have the time either. Plus the mass of information can be intimidating. File it under “fishing expedition,” to read some day.
• Public finding and aggregation of related stories and documents is not easy for the “citizen journalists” and others who have time to dig deep. Readers of the Times’ piece on Sept. 12 contributed 478 comments so far, some with relevant links to other sources of information. While some comments are labeled “Editors’ Selections,” or “Readers’ Recommendations,” (great features), there’s no public, easy way to aggregate all those links and other related stories, such as work done by USA Today in 2008, “Overflows cost sewer system $35 million in fines.” Further, locally, N.C. documents related to enforcement are often available only in PDF, and documents and stories that give context are not readily available to citizen journalists without deep web searching, available through university databases or expensive Lexis/Nexis. This is a key point: People who work or study at universities can easily forget that the regular “citizen journalist” does not have free access to the deep databases available through universities and libraries.
• The problems and solutions for each dot on The New York Times map are complex. One example from memory and a wee bit of Google research: The tiny mountain town of Saluda was sued by the American Canoe Association in the early 2000s for repeatedly violating Clean Water Act standards. The town’s sewer treatment plant was failing, and it needed money to fix the plant. Paying big fines or court costs and settlements would not further the goal of fixing the plant. Eventually, the town received a Clean Water Bond grant from the N.C. Rural Economic Development Center to fix the problem. So questions for today: Do the bonds still exist? How many other small towns face similar issues? How much would be the total cost of fixing the state’s sewer-plant issues, where will that money come from and how will it be awarded?

A few suggestions for overcoming those hurdles:

• Citizen journos/bloggers can go on fishing expeditions, becoming the first filters through the data or on the street or by the streams. This concept is championed by the good people at The Sunlight Foundation, and they provide and fund many tools for individuals to do this work. Sadly, it appears that many passionate media consumers would rather make comments on existing stories instead of delving into the data to find trends and story leads. Over time, perhaps this trend will change.
• Public libraries could play a role in aggregation and perhaps training and access to the databases available in the deep web. While excellent tools like Publish2 have been developed, this kind of work needs to be the work of public institutions, not just private companies. How can that work be funded? Your guess is as good as mine.
• We can all acknowledge that this work takes time and a different sort of critical thinking, and our collective attention span has grown exceedingly short. Slow, deep, critical analysis of data and documents is out of style, as we all succumb to a fast-rushing stream of information through new sources of news. Gillmor’s call on Twitter for local reporting came on or shortly after the day of publication, and came amid calls by Jeff Jarvis and Jay Rosen. Their attention (and ours?) appears to have moved on.

Hope springs eternal. Many individuals have become increasingly interested in the quality of what they put in their bodies, and the long, searchable tail of the internet has given us new tools to share ideas and information. I wrote a quick post in early 2008 after hearing that Dasani had been getting its bottled water from Charlotte’s drinking water supply. That old quick post still gets readers and serves as a reminder that we don’t have alternatives for clean municipal water supplies, because the stuff in plastic bottles is actually from those supplies.

So here’s hoping that individuals go forth and investigate. And here’s hoping we all acknowledge and adjust to the new reality: Many established news organizations do not have the resources to do the work for us. Perhaps we all can find ways to help.

Freelance reference, writing and visuals

Books:
On Writing Well, by William Zinsser
On Writing, by Stephen King
Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life, by Annie Lamott
Writer’s Market (annual edition), by Writer’s Digest
Writing Down the Bones, by Natalie Goldberg
The Renegade Writer: A Totally Unconventional Guide to Freelance Writing Success, by Linda Formichelli
ProBlogger: Secrets to Blogging Your Way to a Six-Figure Income by Darren Rowse
Designing with Web Standards, by Jeffrey Zeldman
graphic design cookbook, by Leonard Koren and R. Wippo Meckler
designing for interaction, by Dan Saffer
Information Trapping: Real-Time Research on the Web, by Tara Calishain

Magazines:
Writer’s Digest
The Writer
The Columbia Journalism Review
American Journalism Review

Web sites
Quick reference for just about everything, from Alex Johnson
IRS.gov
Charlotte Writer’s Club
Bloggers and Journalists on Social Media Charlotte
Writer’s Market (Paid site; Includes “How Much Do I Charge?” guidelines)
Media Bistro
Freelancer’s Union
Media Bloggers
Lynda.com
VisualCV.com
The Incomplete Manifesto (for philosophy)
Twitter, filtered with hash tags for #Editorchat, #Journchat, #Prchat, #Designchat

Business stuff
Writing a Killer Contract, with a link to a sample.
Spreadsheet to project five year financial plan, from Suzanne Yada.

Organizations
Online News Association
RJI Collaboratory (Entrepreneurial journalists in action)
AIGA Charlotte
KnowledgeWebb ($89 a year)
Society of News Design
Media Bistro

(List from Rhi Bowman of The Word Trade and Andria Krewson.)

10 more for #followwomenjournas (student edition)

Here are 10 more people for #followwomenjournas on Twitter.

These are current or very recent students. I make no apologies for the list being heavily weighted toward UNC.

I’m sure there are others out there. Find them through listening or participating in #collegejourn, a chat run by one of these students, or by looking through the following lists of these people.

I’m willing to bet I left off someone at the @dailytarheel. If so, apologies. You all deserve to be followed, to get some sleep and avoid #H1N1.

@americaarias, (America Arias): News assistant @ KABC-TV. Los Angeles. Recent journalism and political science grad from Cal State Fullerton (CSUF). News junkie, loves politics.
@ewstephe, (Emily Stephenson): UNC senior, @dailytarheel community manager, Star Heels dancer, Jane Austen fan.
@jmestepa, (Jessica Estepa): Storyteller. Student. News junkie. Multimedia editor at @UNR_Insight. Does various other journalistic things. Loves mountains, reading and you. Nevada.
@kelseyproud, (Kelsey Proud): University of Missouri convergence journalism senior (graduating in May!), behind the curtain for @Journgasm, looking for her first job.
@ljwilkinson, (Leslie Wilkinson): MBA student at UNC, recovering newspaper designer, boomeranged back to the east coast after a year and a half in Los Angeles.
@mkellen, (Kellen Moore): UNC senior and managing editor at the @dailytarheel.
@poorstudentnomo, (Jess Shorland): UNC-Chapel Hill college student from Virginia. She’s posting updates on her progress paying off $40k in student loans in 12 months. I’m not sure she’s a journalism student, but her blogging efforts qualify, for me, in this case.
@saragregory, (Sara Gregory): student at UNC-Chapel Hill. @dailytarheel’s managing editor for online. She’s quarantined from the student paper at the moment because she might have #H1N1.
@sarahsodyssey, (Sarah Jackson): Freelance writer, journalism student, info junkie, meticulous observer, curious soul. She’s pursuing a career in feature and financial journalism. Now in Surrey, British Columbia.
@suzanneyada, (Suzanne Yada). Runs #collegejourn chat on Twitter, created a semester global project for student journalists focusing on health. San Jose State University.
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