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Why we are all reporters now
By Dan Gillmor
DeLay has been accused of laundering corporate contributionsIn the autumn of 2004, Republicans in the US House of Representatives voted to neuter a rule that had required members holding leadership positions to step down if indicted.
The ballot, held in secret, was aimed at helping Tom DeLay, a Texas representative and majority leader who was indicted last year.
By then, however, the Republicans had overturned their rule change, and Mr DeLay was obliged to leave his leadership post. This week, he said he was resigning from the House outright.
The Republicans' change of heart was not, in my view, entirely motivated by concern for public integrity.
A relentless focus on their original rule change, spurred by a prominent journalistic weblog, surely had something to do with the shift.
Joshua Micah Marshall, creator of a blog called Talking Points Memo, asked his readers who lived in districts represented by Republicans to call their representatives' offices and ask how they voted on what had become known as the "DeLay rule."
Then Mr Marshall and another blogger reported the tally. They kept up the pressure on the House Republicans, who must have wondered why people cared about their action.
Power of the crowd
The process, asking readers to help report the story, fit into a category I have been calling "distributed journalism." Mr Marshall was one of the first to see the potential.
Citizen journalism and professional journalism are not mutually exclusive concepts

Send us your commentsIf they are smart, journalists at major media organisations will recognise that their readers can be major contributors to tomorrow's journalism.
The idea isn't entirely new, of course. Traditional journalism organisations have used photographs from freelancers for decades and, more recently, have been soliciting pictures and videos from their audiences.
Typically such images have come from breaking news events where a passer-by with a camera captured the scene, most famously in the immediate aftermath of last July's London bombings.
The moves to involve citizens in journalism come amid a perverse backlash against citizen journalism by some in the traditional, professional media.
The latest attack appeared last week on the CBS News Public Eye blog, where one of America's most prominent journalism organisations discusses how the news is made.
A journalism professor and New York Times education columnist Samuel Freedman blasted citizen journalists as, among other things, mere producers of raw material rather than finished product, and opinion-givers in an echo chamber of like-minded amateurs.
Enormous opportunity
Citizen journalism and professional journalism are not mutually exclusive concepts.
We're actually heading toward an ecosystem that will support a variety of journalistic endeavours. As author and blogger Doc Searls has said, the logic we should adopt is "and", rather than "or."
Striking images of the 7 July bombings were taken by amateursWhen professional journalists ask their audiences for pictures, they are taking a useful step.
They can, and should, go considerably deeper, however, by giving audiences the tools to participate more fully in the emergent global conversation of which journalism is a vital part.
Local publishers and broadcasters should be aiming to help their communities engage in that conversation, via blogs, podcasts, discussion boards and all of the other conversational tools.
They can also emulate the Talking Points Memo method. Find a topic where thousands of people can ask a single question and report the answer back to a central person or database. The results become journalism.
Traditional journalism organisations could easily do such things. Not every investigative journalism project needs to be conducted in secret.
For example, the rebuilding of America's Gulf Coast in the wake of Hurricane Katrina is far too big a story for any professional media company to cover in a thorough way.
They should be asking the citizens of the affected communities for help, but as far as I can tell they aren't even making the attempt, and are thereby missing an enormous opportunity.
Win-win situation
Professional journalists should also be helping citizen journalists, with education and training.
Most people don't care to be journalists, but many of us can and will occasionally commit an act of journalism, and it would be useful for people to understand some of the principles that have served the professionals, and their audiences, so well for so long.
Citizen journalism won't replace the professionals, at least I hope not. We need the best of what the pros do.
Let me say that I'm not addressing the business issues here that are undermining the pros' business models. That's a separate but important topic, which I'll be addressing in an upcoming column.
But we are going to have to all recognise that the old systems are expanding. We are learning new ways to gather, sift and recombine what we know and learn together.
We can all win in that game.
(source: bbc)
Major TrendsBy the Project for Excellence in Journalism
In 2006, we see six new trends emerging that deserve highlighting and that add to the underlying trends transforming journalism we have noted in earlier reports. This year:
The new paradox of journalism is more outlets covering fewer stories. As the number of places delivering news proliferates, the audience for each tends to shrink and the number of journalists in each organization is reduced. At the national level, those organizations still have to cover the big events. Thus we tend to see more accounts of the same handful of stories each day. And when big stories break, they are often covered in a similar fashion by general-assignment reporters working with a limited list of sources and a tight time-frame. Such concentration of personnel around a few stories, in turn, has aided the efforts of newsmakers to control what the public knows. One of the first things to happen is that the authorities quickly corral the growing throng of correspondents, crews and paparazzi into press areas away from the news. One of the reasons coverage of Katrina stood out to Americans in 2005 was officials were unable to do that, though some efforts, including one incident of holding journalists at gunpoint, were reported. For the most part, the public — and the government — were learning from journalists who were discovering things for themselves.
The species of newspaper that may be most threatened is the big-city metro paper that came to dominate in the latter part of the 20th century. The top three national newspapers in the U.S. suffered no circulation losses in 2005. The losses at smaller newspapers, in turn, appeared to be modest. It was the big-city metros that suffered the biggest circulation drops and imposed the largest cutbacks in staff. Those big papers are trying to cover far-flung suburbs and national and regional news all at the same time — trying to be one-stop news outlets for large audiences. In part, they are being supplanted by niche publications serving smaller communities and targeted audiences. Yet our content studies suggest the big metros are the news organizations most likely to have the resources and aspirations to act as watchdogs over state, regional and urban institutions, to identify trends, and to define the larger community public square. It is unlikely that small suburban dailies or weeklies will take up that challenge. Moreover, while we see growth in alternative weeklies and the ethnic press, many small suburban dailies have shrunk.
At many old-media companies, though not all, the decades-long battle at the top between idealists and accountants is now over. The idealists have lost. The troubles of 2005, especially in print, dealt a further blow to the fight for journalism in the public interest. “If you argue about public trust today, you will be dismissed as an obstructionist and a romantic,” the editor of one of the country’s major papers told us privately. An executive at one of the three broadcast networks told senior staff members in a meeting last year that “the ethical anvil has been lifted,” meaning the producers could dispense with traditional notions of journalistic propriety. One of the most celebrated editors in the country, John Carroll of the Los Angeles Times, stepped down in frustration in 2005, but only after taking weeks to persuade his successor not to join him. The most celebrated journalist still at ABC, Ted Koppel, left for cable, but only after announcing that neither cable news nor network news was amenable to the long-form work to which he aspired. The most cogent explanation for why journalism in the public interest has lost leverage was probably offered by Polk Laffoon IV, the corporate spokesman of Knight Ridder. “I wish there were an identifiable and strong correlation between quality journalism … and newspaper sales,” he said. “It isn’t …that simple.” From here on, at many companies, the fight on behalf of the public interest will come from the rank and file of the newsroom, with the news executive as mediator with the boardroom. There are some notable exceptions, and journalists who work in those situations today consider themselves lucky. Meanwhile, at many new-media companies, it is not clear if advocates for the public interest are present at all.
That said, traditional media do appear to be moving toward technological innovation — finally . In earlier reports, the real investment and creativity in new technology appeared to be coming mostly from non-news organizations like Google. Traditional news outfits, in practice if not in rhetoric, treated the Internet as a platform to repurpose old material. While the evidence is sketchy and the efforts are frustrated by newsroom cutbacks, in 2005 we saw signs that the pattern was beginning to change. A big reason was that much of the revenue growth in these companies is now coming from online (and from niche products such as youth newspapers). In network television, for instance, viewers of ABC News can now watch an evening newscast from that network online three and a half hours before one is broadcast on television. In print, various papers announced reorganizations of online operations. An internal memo at the Los Angeles Times was fairly typical, calling for “a different kind of online news operation, one that recognizes the changing expectations of readers.” In that transition, several big questions remain unanswered. One is whether younger audiences care anything about these traditional news brands. Another is, even if these legacy media do finally try to move online seriously, can they change their culture, or will they succumb to the natural tendency to favor their traditional platforms?
The new challengers to the old media, the aggregators, are also playing with limited time. When it comes to news, what companies like Google and Yahoo are aggregating and selling is the work of others — the very same old media they are taking revenue away from. The more they succeed, the faster they erode the product they are selling, unless the economic model is radically changed. Already there are rumblings. One thing to watch for in 2006 is whether old-media content producers demand that Google News begin to pay them for content. Another option for the aggregators is to begin to produce their own news, and already we are seeing baby steps; in 2005, Yahoo announced it would hire some journalists, but the effort is still minimal. Can the new rivals become more than technology companies? And if they do, will they have more than rhetorical allegiance to the values of public-interest journalism?
The central economic question in journalism continues to be how long it will take online journalism to become a major economic engine, and if it will ever be as big as print or television. If the online revenues at newspapers continue to grow at the current rate — an improbable 33% a year — they won’t reach levels equivalent with print until 2017 (assuming print grows just 3% a year). Realistically, even with the lower delivery costs online, it will be years before the Internet rivals old media economics, if it ever does. Fledgling efforts to get consumers to pay for online content edged forward in 2005, but only marginally. All this only adds to the likelihood that the next battleground will be producers of old media challenging Internet providers and Internet aggregators to begin compensating them for content, the model that exists in cable.
Those trends are in addition to others we have identified in earlier years. Among them: that the traditional model of journalism — the press as verifier — is giving way to other models that are faster, looser and cheaper; to adapt, journalism must move in the direction of making its work more transparent and more expert and widening the scope of its searchlight; those who would manipulate the press and the public are gaining leverage over the journalists who cover them; convergence is more inevitable and less threatening the more one looks at audience data; the notion that people are gravitating to a partisan press model, or red news and blue news, is exaggerated
News styleNews style (also journalistic style or news writing) is the particular prose style used for news reporting (ie. in newspapers) as well as in news items that air on radio and television. News style encompasses not only vocabulary and sentence structure, but also the way in which stories present the information in terms of relative importance, tone, and intended audience.
News writing attempts to answer all the basic questions about any particular event in the first two or three paragraphs: Who? What? When? Where? and Why? and occasionally How? (ie. "5 W's"). This form of structure is sometimes called the "inverted pyramid," to refer to decreased importance of information as it progresses.

Already Chewed NewsWhat my beloved newspaper has been reduced to serving.By Jack ShaferPosted Wednesday, Aug. 22, 2007, at 7:21 PM ETThe more I graze the Web for news, the less compelling I find the four daily newspapers that land on my doorstep.
Like you, I visit various news sites during the workday for breaking stories. "Visit" understates the case. I live on news sites during the work day. I monitor my e-mail for news alerts from CNN.com, MSNBC.com, and WSJ.com and follow the links. The drill continues when I go home, as I ignore my fatherly duties to sneak peeks at my computer. Blessed with insomnia, I rejoice when I wake up at 12:30 a.m. because I know that the complete Page Ones for the New York Times and the Washington Post will be awaiting me when I sneak downstairs.
I noodle around on those pages, check ESPN.com for the baseball scores and Associated Press write-up of that night's Detroit Tigers game, flip over to LATimes.com for the left coast's take on events, and after saying goodnight to the BBC, the Washington Times, BoingBoing, the Guardian, McClatchyDC.com, and a couple of blogs, I tiptoe back to bed.