What got Jarvis so excited was a July 4 experiment in which the company’s 18 dailies published using nothing but free, web-based tools. They called this the Ben Franklin Project in recognition of both the country’s birthday and Journal Register’s liberation from ancient proprietary production systems.

More importantly, the company changed the way it reported the news for that day. Readers were actively involved at the front of the process in directing the reporting staff and looking virtually over reporter’s shoulders as stories were prepared. “The Ben Franklin Project is the beginning of a new era of an open and transparent newsgathering process,” wrote Paton on his blog. This is a company worth watching again.

He also quotes from an article by BBC World Service director Peter Horrocks that calls for an end to “Fortress journalism.” Horrocks writes, “In the fortress world, the consumption of journalism was through clearly defined products and platforms… but in the blended world of Internet journalism all those products are available within a single platform and mental space… the reader may never be aware from which fortress the information has come.”

In the world Horrocks describes, the audience pulls together its own newspaper, woven from bits and pieces assembled from various online sources. The consequence of this is that media organizations can’t afford to reinvent the wheel anymore. Each needs to focus on what it does best and pool efforts rather than duplicate them. So maybe 90 of those 100 journalists who currently attend a Presidential press conference can spend their time out in the field assessing reaction and gathering analysis rather than listening to the same thing. What a concept.

Miscellany

Advertiser optimism continues to grow. Advertiser Perceptions Inc. (API) reports that 32% of ad executives now expect to increase their ad spending over the next 12-months. That’s the largest percentage increase since API began asking ad execs about their intentions in 2007. A year ago, the figure was -5%. The 1,412 ad executives who were surveyed continue to be pessimistic about magazine and national newspaper advertising, with intentions to increase spending down 10% and 32% respectively. But even those sentiments are greatly improved over the -26%/-46% plans of a year ago. The biggest winners are digital and mobile media, with more than 60% of ad executives planning to increase spending there.

Speaking of pay walls, Time magazine now has one. Secure in its role as the only newsweekly left standing, the venerable but mostly irrelevant magazine is requiring readers who want to read online versions of its print article to subscribe to either the print or the iPad edition. They can then see the same stuff that’s in the magazine on a screen. Online-only content will continue to be free.

To test, go to gocirculate.com and create an account. The confirmation page contains a link to the toolbar software. You can then browse and add pages to the knowledge base. We were able to install the menu bar, but couldn’t log onto the site for some reason, and Circ Labs provides no means to recover a password. We guess that’s why they’re calling this a test.

And Finally…

Roy Rivenburg is still at it. The jokester who dreamed up Not the LA Times two years ago continues to tweak the nose of the West Coast’s most self-important newspaper. A recent story has Times editors arguing over whether it’s better to start articles with the time or the weather. The inspiration is this page of formulaic opening sentences extracted from the real newspaper. “If I don’t find out the time of day in the first sentence, I stop reading,” says one subscriber.

The best quotes were from Alan Murray (right), Executive Editor of Wall Street Journal Online, who at one point characterized Huffington Post and similar aggregation sites as “parasites.” Facing HuffPo Managing Editor Jai Singh (below left) at the other end of the stage, Murray one point asked, “Isn’t that the Huffington Post model? Go do something else and then we’ll let you be a journalist?”

Singh, a print journalist who was an early pioneer in digital news at CNet in the mid-90s, declined to engage in battle, preferring instead to carry the banner for a new kind of journalism. Defending HuffPo’s participative model, he remarked simply, “Community is fundamental to journalism online.” Huffington pays few of its contributors, rewarding them instead with visibility and Web traffic. Singh noted that  a blogger recently asked HuffPo to pull down a link to his sites because the traffic was crashing his servers. Murray conceded that the traffic from Huffington was gratifying.

Murray was a bit smug in pointing out that the Journal never gave away its editorial content and today generates about $200 million annually in digital revenue, or about double its $100 million editorial budget. “But how many other pubs are going to be able to get to same place?” he asked

Ellen Levine, editorial director of Hearst Magazines, didn’t seem particularly worried about that question, although she acknowledged that journalists will no longer have the luxury of being insulated from the business side of the house. “The most important thing I’ve learned in last 54 years is if you don’t understand the P&L, you are out of business,” she said.

Levine sees the market dividing into two camps, with disposable print on one end and high-end luxury magazines on the other. The disposable market will migrate quickly to readers like the Apple iPad, but Levine said luxury publications are going to be around for a while. “The day I can wrap myself in my iPad in the bathtub, that’s when magazines will be gone,” she said, drawing the biggest laugh of the session.

Investigative Journalism Under Siege

One thing all  panelists agreed-is that investigative journalism is under severe pressure because of lack of funds and reader preference for quick-hit sound bites. Investigative reporting “has been most challenged by the collapse of business models,” Murray said. “A team can work six months on a story and it will never be paid back.” Few viable alternatives to newspaper-sponsored investigative journalism have arisen. At the moment, ProPublica’s nonprofit approach appears to be working, but Murray questioned its scalability.  “ProPublica sets up investigative journalism as the equivalent of the opera or the symphony,” he said, choosing examples of organizations that are known to appeal to small, elite audiences.

Singh agreed. “Much of the news is commoditized. Investigative journalism is where the value is,” he said. But publications no longer get the mileage out of in-depth stories that they once did. Singh cited Rolling Stone’s blockbuster account last week of Gen. Stanley McChrystal’s insubordinate remarks about the Afghanistan war as evidence that exclusivity has almost ceased to be meaningful. “The Rolling Stone story was picked up by Time and Politico before it was published in Rolling Stone,” he said. Huffington Post has created a modest investigative journalism fund to help fill the gap.

Panelists agreed that it’s no longer viable for 100 newspapers to maintain Washington bureaus just to report the same news. “When I ran the Washington bureau [of the Journal] during the Clinton administration, there were 150 reporters chasing the same ‘blue dress’ story,” Murray says. “What’s killing the metro dailies is that they had monopolies. You can’t just differentiate by geography anymore.”

Investigative reports used to help sell magazines by enticing readers who were interested in one story to subscribe, Levine said. “That doesn’t work anymore. People just print out the article that interests them.”

Singh saw possibilities in that fact. “There is an opportunity to create products for people who just want to read one article,” he said. The others nodded, unclear about what that product should be.

Television journalism, which was never much to write home about in the first place, has become a pale specter of its former self as talent has fled the budget-strapped industry. On Tuesday, we chatted with Marijane Miller, who is one of those refugees. Miller is now a producer at WhatGives!?, a media company that creates programming to promote charitable causes. She spent more than 20 years in broadcast television, much of it producing documentaries and educational programming, and she worked on some pretty visible stuff.

Now Miller travels the country with a Sony videocam creating her own mini-documentaries of people doing work to make the world a better place. Miller said she became demoralized and frustrated during her last few years in commercial television as quality documentaries gave way to low-budget reality TV and voyeurism. Reality TV is anything but real, she told us. People who do stupid and outrageous things in real life are often only too happy to reenact their absurdities in front of the TV cameras. The sad thing is that many television producers these days are only happy to oblige.

The last straw for Miller was working on a reality program in which a person did something truly revolting. We won’t go into details, but Miller characterized the act as “sick. I thought they were going to throw the person off the program,” she said. “Instead, they asked him to reenact the scene.”

The happy ending is that Miller described WhatGives!? as a bit of a throwback to the golden age of television. “They just tell me to go out and find good stories and tell the truth, and” she said. “I haven’t had this much fun in years.”

This week the organization that is doing so much to advance the cause of innovation in journalism unveiled its list of a dozen winners of the Knight News Challenge, a contest that “funds ideas that use digital technology to inform specific geographic communities.” Not all the winners are focused on geographic applications (one proposes to combine reports from journalists embedded in Afghanistan with Facebook updates from soldiers in the field), but there are some innovative ideas in the group that will get enough funding to at least get off the ground. The best part is that the winners of the $2.74 million in grant money must make their inventions freely available.

You can read all the details at the page linked to above or watch the short video below, which quickly covers each project. What we like about all these ideas is that they’re doable with today’s technology (several are live  today) and they bring focus to the overused concept of “citizen journalism.” Most are also oriented toward leveraging geographic communities, which is where newspaper publishers absolutely must focus. We particularly like these brainstorms:

Pew gathered a year’s worth of data on the top stories discussed and linked to on blogs and seven months’ worth of comparable data from Twitter. The findings: The news that people discuss in social networks is a lot different from what the mainstream media discusses. Also, the type of media makes a different. Topics that are talked up on Twitter aren’t the same as those that get chatted about on YouTube.

Twitter is the techiest of the platforms. During the period measured, an astonishing 43% of news topics on Twitter related to technology, compared to just 1% in traditional media. On the flip side, mainstream media spilled 10% of its ink on the economy, compared to 1% in the Twittersphere.

Bloggers most closely matched mainstream media in the topics they discussed, but even they have a techie orientation. During the week of May 24-28, when most of America was riveted on the oil spill that threatened the entire Gulf Coast, bloggers talked mainly about Facebook privacy. Meanwhile, on Twitter the talk was all about Apple surpassing Microsoft in size.

The research draws some interesting contrasts in the styles that dominate these social media. In the year studied, “bloggers gravitated toward stories that elicited emotion, concerned individual or group rights or triggered ideological passion,” researchers said. On Twitter, in contrast, “The mission is primarily about passing along important — often breaking — information in a way that unifies or assumes shared values within the Twitter community.” There’s a narcissistic fascination with Twitter itself in much of this news. Still, Twitter was the only medium of the four studied that devoted significant attention to the Iranian election protests.

Pew also remarks on the attention-deficit style of consumption that dominates the Internet. Stories quickly pass from prominence into obscurity. “On blogs, 53% of the lead stories in a given week stay on the list no more than three days. On Twitter that is true of 72% of lead stories, and more than half (52%) are on the list for just 24 hours.”

Blogs shared the same lead story with traditional media in just 13 of the 49 weeks studied. On Twitter, it was just four of 29 weeks studied; just 5% of the top five stories on Twitter remained among the top stories the following week;More than 99% of the stories linked to in blogs came from legacy outlets such as newspapers and broadcast networks. On Twitter, the ratio was considerably different, with only half of the links going to legacy outlets;YouTube is the most international of the four platforms studied. One quarter of the most-watched news videos on YouTube were of non-U.S. events.

A few other striking findings:

What can we learn from this? For one thing, it appears that, when left to their own devices, long form social media practitioners gravitate toward a mainstream media model. The profile of blog content is remarkably similar to that of traditional media. This is probably a matter of the blogosphere reflecting its sources of information rather than the other way around, because, the survey also found that mainstream media reflect very little of what starts in the blogosphere. It does indicate that the topics covered by mainstream media match pretty closely the interests of people who care enough to compose thoughtful commentary about the news of the day.

It’s also clear that bloggers need mainstream media, although maybe not as much as media professionals would like to believe. The research found that 80% percent of the mainstream media citations from bloggers went to just four outlets: the BBC, CNN, The New York Times and the Washington Post.

Twitter and YouTube are not cast in the same mold as blogs. Those outlets reflect a specific set of interests, most notably the digirati who use Twitter. It’s also interesting that the research found such a small percentage of content devoted to technology on YouTube, but that may be due to the nature of the medium. Most computer stuff isn’t very visual.

There’s nothing in these results to indicate that blogs are going to replace mainstream news anytime soon. “Bloggers gravitated towards stories that elicited emotion, concerned individual or group rights or triggered ideological passion,” the survey authors wrote. In other words, blogs are commentary, not news.

Miscellany

Yahoo is continuing its slow crawl into the world occupied by news outlets. In the past year, the company has hired several editors to staff a fledgling news bureau and acquired Associated Content. Now TechCrunch says Yahoo wants Huffington Post. The two are in a content syndication deal and Yahoo may even try to acquire HuffPo, although the price is probably prohibitive.

Huffington Post is now the biggest blog on the planet, TechCrunch says, with more traffic than NYTimes.com. It’s on track to generate $100 million in revenue next year, making it a pricey acquisition for the struggling Yahoo. Meanwhile, Google continues to insist that it’s not interested in getting into the original content game, indicating that Yahoo may be the bigger threat to traditional publishers.

The article quotes Sambrook as saying that Edelman realizes its clients can now take their message directly to the consumer. “”The walls of the traditional box of PR are falling away and Edelman is taking the opportunity to move into new territory,” he said. “We are at a moment when a lot of the traditional lines between PR and consulting and advertising and broadcasting are blurring.”

This trend may make a lot of traditionalists cringe, but it’s clearly gathering momentum. In recent weeks we’ve talked to several business bloggers who are refugees from flailing media operations. The question is whether businesses have the guts to let these journalists do what they do best or if they will try to box them into the traditional role of corporate shill. It’s unlikely that people like Sambrook will tolerate the latter approach, which is why his hiring has considerable symbolic importance.

Lewis Dvorkin of True/Slant

They range from Demand Media, which generates assignment lists based entirely on search terms, to Global Post, which hopes to charge readers for direct access to its foreign correspondents. A few themes are apparent through many of the business models. One is their reliance upon search as both a guide and a source of revenue. New-age publishers see Google as the pulse of reader interest and have tuned their models to respond, in some cases, in near real-time. Another is that they pay very little for journalism.

Rice visits True/Slant, an operation that uses a digital speedometer to match content on its site to trending topics on Google and Twitter. Thousands of writers contribute to the service, which posts about 125 articles a day. Journalists are paid a fraction of what that would make at traditional media organizations, but at least there’s a little money in the work. True/Slant has only five full-time staff and about 300 contributors. “It’s not so much a unified publication as a loosely connected commune of bloggers, who generate a continual stream of content with minimal editorial intervention,” Rice writes.

The 125-story-per-day figure may sound like a lot, but it’s a pittance compared to the daily output of Huffington Post (500) or Examiner.com (3,000). These publishers produce news in the kind of volumes meant to serve picky advertisers, who only buy proximity to certain keywords. Since advertisers don’t have to waste money on audiences they don’t want any more, the publishing model being built by these new companies is to churn out huge quantities of content and serve lots of niche advertisers.

Everything is search-optimized and, in some cases, search drives the boat. Demand Media actually assigns stories based upon search popularity. Freelancers pick from a list of topics culled from popular search queries and turn out articles and video that post to sites like eHow, which has a revenue-sharing agreement with Demand. No story is assigned unless there’s a high probability it will pay for itself.  Demand “says these mathematically generated ideas are 4.9 times as valuable as those devised by mere human brainstorming,” Rice writes. Journalists get $15 to $20 per item and Demand Media booked $200 million in revenue last year.

The new economics of search-driven publishing have thrown open the question of how much journalism is worth. Contributors to many of the sites Rice describes are paid anywhere from $10 to $25 per contribution. Search advertising is such a low cost-commodity that one publisher estimates a journalist needs to attract 1.8 million monthly page views in order to earn a $60,000 annual salary.

If all of this makes you slightly nauseous, you’re not alone. Many of these emerging business models play to popularity as measured by search volume. Nor surprisingly, sex and sin sell. “Writers and editors know that click-driven Internet economics tend to reward lowbrow gimmickry. They have to decide whether to work around that or to embrace it as a fact of life,” Rice writes. Some new models play directly to the will of the crowd, such as Henry Blodget’s (yes, that Henry Blodget) gossipy Business Insider and Demand Media.  Other new operations, like GlobalPost, The Politico and Awl, are attempting to produce thoughtful journalism and make money at it, mostly through creative use of alternative funding sources.

The elephant in the corner is the rising interest of businesses in inserting themselves into the media stream. Nearly everyone Rice interviews agrees that the companies that pay the bills want – and deserve – a role in determining  content. True/Slant, which is run by 57-year-old former newspaperman Lewis Dvorkin, gives its advertisers the same tools to contribute to the news stream as its reporters. “It’s the way the world is moving,” Dvorkin says.

Garfield was interviewed at the South by Southwest conference in Austin, where the people who are incubating the changes he describes have gathered for their giant annual mind meld. Running time: 19:17.

Bob Garfield on Media in Chaos from Newspaper Death Watch on Vimeo.

David Cay Johnston

We don’t get a lot of e-mail from Pulitzer Prize winners, so we were pleased and intrigued when David Cay Johnston sent a lengthy response to our recent comments on the shortcomings of American journalism schools. Johnston is a reporter’s reporter in the classic mold of “comforting the afflicted and afflicting the comfortable.”

In his career, Johnston has certainly done plenty of afflicting. Starting with a staff writer job at the San Jose Mercury in 1968, he progressed through reporting positions at the Detroit Free Press, Los Angeles Times, and Philadelphia Inquirer before landing at The New York Times, where he reported on economics and tax issues until his retirement in 2008. He was awarded the 2001 Pulitzer Prize for Beat Reporting “for his penetrating and enterprising reporting that exposed loopholes and inequities in the US tax code, which was instrumental in bringing about reforms,” according to his Wikipedia bio.  He was also a finalist for the prize in 2000 and 2003. Today, he writes, teachers and consults.

You can read much more about his accomplishments in the biography accompanying his book, Free Lunch: How the Wealthiest Americans Enrich Themselves at Government Expense (and StickYou with the Bill). It’s one of three bestsellers he has authored, a list that also includes Perfectly Legal: The Covert Campaign to Rig Our Tax System to Benefit the Super-Rich–and Cheat Everybody Else and Temples of Chance: How America Inc. Bought Out Murder Inc. to Win Control of the Casino Business.

Although Johnston considers himself to be an optimist, he’s anything but cheerful about the state of American journalism and its culture of celebrity-mongering, lightweight lifestyle pieces and regurgitation of factoids spoon-fed to junior reporters by executives and government officials.

“Young journalists need to learn techniques for getting people to open up and especially to check, cross-check and re-cross-check facts; they need to learn how to mine documents which J schools do a lousy job of teaching; they need to become adept at numbers, which goes virtually untaught; they need to learn the underlying principles of whatever issue they cover,” he commented in his e-mail to us. “Use your independent judgment and you stop letting sources tell you what is news.”

This 24-minute audio interview covers the decline of investigative reporting, hopeful signs from early philanthropy-backed experiments and the passive culture of many American newsrooms that has contributed to a dumbing-down of content. “I’ve discouraged a lot of young people from going into journalism,” he told us. But he also noted that if you can make a living in the field, “It’s fun, there’s a lot of freedom and a cachet to it.”

Right-click and save to download.(24:43)

Zachery Kouwe (right) walked the plank after editors at the Wall Street Journal complained that passages in a post on the Times’ DealBook blog substantially duplicated material published in the Journal a couple of hours earlier. The Times published a correction and later suspended Kouwe. He resigned on Tuesday.

In an interview with The New York Observer, Kouwe apologize for the transgression but explained that it was an honest mistake brought on by the need to respond to a rival’s story combined with the relentless pressure to produce weekly output of about 7,000 words. “I was stupid and careless and fucked up and thought it was my own stuff, or it somehow slipped in there. I think that’s what probably happened,” he said.

There’s never an excuse for plagiarism, but an understanding of the environment in which young reporters like Kouwe work can at least explain his acts, if not excuse them.

Deadlines in Minutes

It wasn’t long ago that reporters at a big paper like the Times had the luxury of turning out a story a day or even less. Print deadlines measured in hours offered an opportunity to check sources and rewrite notes in a timeframe that seems positively leisurely today. A few skilled professionals, mostly wire reporters, excelled at deadline reporting. Their expertise in synthesizing and contextualizing large amounts of information, often in chaotic environments, was the product of years of experience.

Today, everyone who writes news online is a wire service reporter. Deadlines are measured in minutes and anyone who wants to compete has to put speed at the top of the agenda. Not everyone is good at working under that kind of pressure, so it’s not surprising that the quality of deadline news reporting is becoming more erratic. Budget cuts at newspapers have also forced a lot of young, relatively unseasoned reporters to the front lines where their work nevertheless carries the moniker of a 150-year-old trusted brand. Such was clearly the case with Kouwe who, at 31, has developed his journalism skills inside the culture and pressure of the Internet.

The craft of note-taking has also changed. In today’s cut-and-paste world, journalists assemble background information from snippets published elsewhere. Notes are typed rather than hand written. In a document made up of first-person interview notes mashed together with clips from other sources, it’s not surprising that the origins of information can become confused. That’s not an excuse for shoddy note-taking, but it is an explanation for how errors can happen.

Changing Views on Copyright

The standards of intellectual property ownership that have been broadly accepted for so long are also growing fuzzier. Many bloggers don’t even post copyright information on their sites or they choose from one of an assortment of Creative Commons licenses that can themselves be confusing. The nonprofit culture of the blogosphere largely looks the other way when people lift content from each other. Many people use blogs as essentially online notepads, posting everything up to and including their shopping lists. Even if they cared about plagiarism, it’s difficult to spot violations and usually not worth the trouble of chasing the offenders. This works okay in the blogosphere because few bloggers practice their craft for money. In some cases, theft of content is actually considered a compliment to the author.

Then there are the proliferating forms that online communications take. Are Twitter messages copyrightable? If so, then isn’t the coveted retweet a form of copyright infringement? Google Voice has a feature that transcribes phone messages and makes it easy to embed those transcriptions in websites. Is that also a legal problem?

Finally, software tools now enable  someone to republish entire articles on multiple sites without even copying and pasting. Posterous is just one that makes this process automatic. A person using this feature may be violating someone else’s intellectual property without even knowing it.

This is not an excuse for Kouwe’s transgressions. A professional reporter should understand the fundamentals of the craft. However, the freewheeling nature of the democratized information landscape creates all sorts of gray areas. Journalism schools and editors need to do a better job of giving young journalist the tools to living with the growing pressures of deadlines and information overload without violating basic principles of ownership.

New Image Protection

Photographers have a particularly difficult time tracking copyright violations. Search engines don’t index images and the content embedded within tags gets lost as pictures are copied and redisplayed around the web. Watermarking affords some protection, but it also can make the image unattractive to potential publishers.

PicScout is trying to do something about this. Founded in 2002 to market an image recognition and classification technology, the company has a new platform that analyzes images and stores ownership information in a registry. That information travels with the image wherever it’s reproduced, thanks to technology that is capable of recognizing certain patterns within the bitstream. With one click, a potential user of the image can be connected to the license holder to work out terms.

License holders can upload their images to PicScout for indexing. The service then continually scans the Web looking for reuse of that content. License holders get a regular report on potential violations, along with company name and a screen capture. Users can download a free plug-in that alerts them to images that are listed in the PicScout database. The company just signed a partnership deal with PhotoShelter, a website for professional photographers and enthusiasts, that will automatically include PhotoShelter images in the PicScout registry.

Miscellany

If you think the demise of newspapers has killed good journalism, take a look at the list of the 13 winners of George Polk Awards for 2009. The awards, which have been administered by Long Island University for more than 60 years, cover a wide range of national and international accomplishments, ranging the New York Times reporter who documented his seven-month captivity by the Taliban to a ProPublica journalist who reported on the dangers of a natural gas-drilling process that yields carcinogenic byproducts. While the honorees include the usual lineup of mainstream media sources, a few surprises crept into the group this year. They include a team of Stars and Stripes reporters that unearthed a Pentagon campaign that profiled journalists in order to steer them toward positive coverage of the war in Afghanistan and a group of Bloomberg reporters who documented abuses of the government’s bank bailout program.

And Finally…

“There is nothing more frustrating than having a perfect comment for a conversation the two strangers in front of you are having.”

“It’s never more important to me to look my best than when I’m gonna be around someone I can’t stand.”

“I don’t understand the purpose of the line, ‘I don’t need to drink to have fun.’ No one does. But why start a fire with flint and sticks when they’ve invented the lighter?”

Those are just three of the gems from Ruminations, a website that accepts short, funny, original observations or anecdotes and then encourages its members to vote them up or down the popularity scale.

Reading Ruminations is like listening to a nonstop Steven Wright standup routine. Many of the contributions are hilarious, but some of them make you ponder the odd, illogical and bizarre things that humans do. “How many times is it appropriate to say ‘What?’ before you just nod and smile because you still didn’t hear what they said?” asks one contributor. The site was started by author and comedian Aaron Karo (above), who has a newsletter by the same name.

With his characteristic eye for detail, Mutter figures such factors as the self-employment tax and capital expenses in his calculations. The sample shows a fictional reporter charging about 55 cents a word to cover his/her fully loaded costs figuring an average pay rate of about $30/hour, which is union scale in Pittsburgh. Your mileage may vary, of course.

If journalists “don’t put a value on what they do, then no one else will, either,” Mutter declares, noting that media organizations are using the explosion of blogs and citizen media operations to “pick off writers, photographers and videographers on the cheap.”

We have enormous respect for Alan Mutter, but we find ourselves in complete disagreement on this one. In our view, journalists who draw lines in the sand and start charging only what they think they’re worth will find themselves practicing a lot less journalism.

Are media organizations taking advantage of plummeting freelance rates? You betcha. Is what they’re doing wrong? We don’t think so. Supply and demand is the underpinning of a capitalist economy, and if the rules have changed in a way that devalues quality journalism, well, those are the cards we’re dealt. It sucks, but it’s how the system works.

Journalists can try to charge what they think they’re worth, but they’ll ultimately live or die by what the market is willing to pay. With the arrival of Web 2.0-style publishing, millions of people have started playing at journalism and it turns out some aren’t half bad at it. The trouble is that many of these casual journalists don’t make a living as reporters. Their journalism is a sidelight to their day jobs. They may be happy to work for a vague reward defined as “exposure” if it pays off in speaking jobs, consulting work or book contracts.

Mutter is outraged that people contact him asking “to commission an article or reprint a post in exchange for the ephemeral compensation known as ‘exposure,’” but the reality of the market is that a lot of people are willing to work for that (full disclosure: we recently approached Mutter about contributing to a for-profit website in exchange for a modest fee; he politely declined). For example, many book authors write extensively about their expertise for free in exchange for exposure in major publications.

We sympathize with journalists who have seen the market value of their work collapse over the last couple of years. We’ve experienced some of that pain personally and we have many friends and colleagues who are suffering because of it. However, the market has spoken, and the solution to collapsing fees isn’t to insist on getting a rate that employers will no longer pay.

Is there a solution? Well, journalists who specialize in everything from geography to gastroenterology can still command higher prices than general assignment reporters. Also, a lot of journalists work for commercial clients on the side so that they can afford to practice their craft. There’s money in speaking, consulting, writing books and corporate ghost-writing. Some of that work may be distasteful, but at least it pays the bills.

That doesn’t solve the problem of who is going to embed in Iraq for six months at 25 cents a word. That’s a much tougher issue and we wish we had better ideas how to solve it. But drawing lines in the sand is career suicide.

Miscellany

Opponents of government subsidies for media organizations overlook an important detail: US media has been subsidized for 200 years, reports The New York Times. Citing a report released last week by the Annenberg School at the University of Southern California, the Times notes that government support of newspapers has actually been declining in recent years as mailing discounts have diminished laws requiring businesses to buy newspaper ads for certain kinds of legal notices have been dropped. In fact, the study’s authors estimate that annual government support has declined from more than $4 billion in 1970 to less than $2 billion today.

The Haitian earthquake is a vivid example of how the world still relies upon the mainstream media to tell the stories that no one else will. The news media is often guilty of overkill, such as when Tribune Co. sent 14 reporters to cover a Super Bowl in which none of its hometown teams played or when reporters jam-pack a Presidential press conference to report on the same thing everyone can see on TV. Haiti is different. A natural disaster needs to be told through many images and personal accounts. There can’t be enough reporters in that devastated region right now.

Who’s going to fill that role as news organizations shrivel? We have more information available to us today than ever, but we rely on organizations with fewer and fewer resources to tell us about important events like the Haitian earthquake. Few bloggers are going to travel to an impoverished and devastated region on their own dime and the participants in the tragedy are too focused on survival to tweet what’s going on around them.

Calculating Media’s Value

A new research study dramatizes the continuing value of mainstream media, albeit in a small domain. The Pew Research Center Project for Excellence in Journalism looked at the news ecosystem in Baltimore for one week last summer and followed six major narratives that dominated the headlines. It concluded that while there was lots of chatter going on, eight out of 10 stories merely repeated or repackaged information published in mainstream media and 95% of all new information came from traditional media sources.

The most important source of original reporting was the Baltimore Sun, which contributed nearly half of all original news reported in the area. However, the study also found that the Sun produced 32% fewer stories than it did in 1999 and 73% fewer stories than in 1991. The good news is that researchers found 53 different outlets disseminating news. Unfortunately, “83% of stories were essentially repetitive, conveying no new information,” said Digiday Daily.  “Of the 17% that did contain new information, nearly all came from traditional media either in their legacy platforms or in new digital ones.” Radio accounted for if a pitiful 7% of all original news.

Perhaps news organizations in the future will mobilize groups of stringers to cover momentous events while cutting back on pointless trips to political conventions. Or perhaps they won’t. A 2008 survey found that, faced with shrinking staffs, newspapers were actually consolidating their coverage on fewer stories and shedding the special interest stuff that didn’t draw large audiences.

An interesting side note is that the Pew study also found that 63% of the stories were initiated by government officials, most notably the police. Since those institutions generally don’t talk to anyone but the traditional press, perhaps a bigger issue is how to democratize access to the sources of information.

Public relations blogger and new media expert Shel Holtz contributes some interesting perspective. He points out that while social media is serving as an effective means of accelerating knowledge of a news event, “it’s not panning out as a replacement for professional journalism.” Social media has had considerable value in the Haitian disaster as a fund-raising vehicle, but not as a primary news source.

The Newspaper Association of America might consider how it could use the public’s fixation on the Haitian disaster to tactfully point out that it was mainstream media that brought this story to the world. Perhaps the industry can use events like this to warm consumers to the idea that these services have value and deserve to be supported.