Journalism Issues

URL: http://www.latimes.com/features/lifestyle/la-et-rutten24sep24,0,3717455.story?coll=la-home-style

September 24, 2005
latimes.com

REGARDING MEDIA TIM RUTTEN
ORIGINAL HEADLINE: News outlets get their bearings

By TIM RUTTEN
Los Angeles Times

ALONG with loss, wreckage and heartbreak, hurricanes Katrina and Rita have left this nation with a residue of sobering lessons that demand to be sorted through. While those touching on the news media hardly are the most pressing, neither are they insignificant.

A good place to start is with New Orleans' hometown newspaper, the Times-Picayune. Since that awful day on which Katrina swept ashore, the paper's staff has provided us with an exemplary primer on how print journalists can fulfill the obligation of service they owe a community in its time of need. The fact that the Times-Picayune's reporters, photographers and editors have accomplished this when so many of their own homes have been destroyed and their families and loved ones have been put in jeopardy and displaced has given their performance a heroic cast.

This, after all, is a newspaper that literally lost the roof over its head ÿÿ and went right on publishing the report its readers never had needed more. It's hard to recall a better example of what a newspaper staff ÿÿ and only a newspaper staff ÿÿ can do for its community. How the Times-Picayune accomplished this also should sober up the cyber-triumphalists whose every third item seems to be a wishful epitaph for newspaper journalism. The other two are detailed textual critiques of the papers they seem to spend hours poring over obsessively. (What they're going to rant about when all the newspapers are gone is another question.)

In New Orleans ÿÿ as in Houston, where the Chronicle began doing something very similar as Rita worked her way north ÿÿ the Times-Picayune took its regular report onto the Web. Even after it became possible to resume printing and, in a limited way, distributing a traditional paper, the staff has continued to produce a vigorously updated online edition that skillfully exploits the unlimited space available on the Web and the enhanced ability to interact with readers and their needs.

Thus, the paper's online version offers not only an electronic "front page" with updated news stories but also features for readers seeking missing persons, relief services, jobs and even lost pets. It's at once broadly contextual in the way a comprehensive news report should be and hyper-local in the way the immediate needs of the paper's readers demand. (In surveys, regular newspaper readers consistently indicate that it is local news they value most about their publication of choice.)

If you have access to a computer, take a look for yourself at http://www.nola.com . It's well worth your time because it's informative ÿÿ and it's a big part of the future. You can do the same with Houston by going to http://www.houstonchronicle.com . There, you'll find not only a traditional news report but also continuously updated, signed blog-style diary entries from the paper's staff, as well as contributions from readers, who in the newly fashionable Web patois are called "citizen journalists."

Portentous new appellation aside, these actually are unedited versions of the old man-or-woman-on-the-street story or extended letters to the editor. Noting that doesn't diminish their value or importance to the papers' report, but it's important to be realistic about the old-wine-in-new-skins aspect of what's being published. That's because what's occurring at the Times-Picayune and Houston Chronicle this weekend is an important window on the serious news media's future, which will involve not the obsolescence of traditional journalistic values but their extension onto the Web and their responsible adaptation to some of its unique attributes, like unlimited space. What the New Orleans and Houston experiences are demonstrating is the convergence of new and old media and not the extinction of one by another ÿÿ wishful thinking among the fundamentalists in both camps notwithstanding.

It's a lesson likely to be noted in ways that will resonate beyond this desperate moment. It's hard, for example, to imagine a newspaper that this year has more richly fulfilled the values the Pulitzer Prize seeks to honor with its medal for public service than the Times-Picayune. But some of the best and most urgent work the paper did in the hours of New Orleans' greatest need appeared only online and never saw print. Is that an impediment to acknowledging the journalists who did the work? Not according to Sig Gissler, administrator of the Pulitzer Prizes, who said this week that, if the paper's work is submitted for consideration, the Web-only journalism certainly could comprise part of the entry. Alongside these real-world lessons on how mainstream news organizations can put new media technologies at their readers' service without sacrificing traditional journalistic values or integrity, there's also something important to be gleaned from the change in television rati!
ngs since Aug. 28, the day before the first of these two disastrous hurricanes made landfall.

Katrina and Rita have taken the cable news operations and the network newscasts by their collective ears and shaken them back into a sense of what they're really supposed to be about. After months of celebrity trials, missing white women, a suffocating storm surge of on-camera attitude, television news resumed being just that ÿÿ news ÿÿ and its audience responded. For example, between Aug. 28 and Sept. 13, Fox News averaged 3.29 million nightly prime-time viewers and 2.06 million over the course of the day. CNN averaged 2.37 million viewers in prime-time and a daylong audience of 1.48 million. MSNBC, which apparently couldn't attract a crowd if it broadcast the Apocalypse, reached less than a million viewers in prime-time and just over half a million during the day.

In the immediate aftermath of Katrina, Fox News' audience grew by 65% over the previous week, while CNN's climbed by 246%. In absolute numbers, though, neither of the two top cable audiences approached those of the broadcast networks' nightly newscasts. The "NBC Nightly News" averaged 9.3 million viewers, while ABC's "World News Tonight" had 8.8 million and the "CBS Evening News" 6.4 million.

Those are fairly impressive numbers for operations usually characterized as media dinosaurs. Maybe people like them better when they act like themselves ÿÿ creatures of the journalistic Jurassic, though they may be ÿÿ and less like clowns. Speaking of numbers, here's a trend that has gone all but unnoticed in the recent agonizing over the news media's future. During the last decade, only one serious news operation has increased its audience dramatically and consistently. It's National Public Radio, which has doubled its number of weekly listeners to 26 million. Since 1999, its audience has grown by nearly 9 million, which is an increase of 60%.

Radio news ÿÿ now that was old media before there was an Internet.

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Title: SignOnSanDiego.com News Nation -- Laura Bush urges nation to
confront poverty and race 'in a different way'

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http://www.thejournalnews.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20050903/NEWS02/509030322/1019/NEWS03

To hear Edward Myers explain it, many of New Orleans' residents were trapped in the ruined city long before Hurricane Katrina. He describes a community where many people are trapped in poverty, isolated by neglect and stranded by a dearth of economic opportunity.">Poor residents trapped long before Katrina: "To hear Edward Myers explain it, many of New Orleans' residents were trapped in the ruined city long before Hurricane Katrina.

http://www.mainetoday.com/editorblog/003000.html

ALEN CRABTREE BLOG:
http://news.mainetoday.com/katrina/crabtree/

September 20, 2005

Mainers in the Gulf Coast

Posted by Scott Hersey at 10:06 AM, editor of MaineToday.COM

Allen Crabtree of Sebago is a Red Cross volunteer working out of Baton Rouge, Louisiana. He headed down this past weekend after receiving some special training and now plans to stay there for a while. His job? He's going to be a reporter for the Red Cross, traveling around the area and interviewing workers and victims for Rec Cross publications. Last night, he spent the night with other workers at a church in Baton Rouge, talking with the pastor about his congregation's efforts to help.

How do I know I all this? I read his blog. Crabtree has agreed to blog for MaineToday.com while in the Gulf Coast, giving our viewers an up close and personal view of his life as a volunteer.

"With another huge tragedy facing America I resolved to do more to help with the Katrina disaster relief than I had been able to do after September 11," he wrote in one of his first entries. "Not to belittle all of the local things that need to be done but I wanted to put to use some of the training Ive had over the years as a fire fighter and emergency medical responder. I vowed to help directly if there was a way to do so. Several of my fellow volunteer fire fighters on the Sebago Fire Department felt the same way.''

Crabtree's only been in Baton Rouge for about 48 hours, and his dispatches have already given all of us a close-up view of the devastation and the ongoing efforts of Americans to help Americans who have been suffering from the aftermath of the hurricane. I expect that as he spends more time and gets out traveling around the area, his reports are going to be even more compelling.

This is a good example of the citizen journalism concept that we Internet journalists are toying with these days. With blog software and digital cameras, anyone has the tools to be a reporter. Crabtree is already showing us that he has the eyes, ears and compassion of a reporter as well. I know that his blog has become a must-read for me every day and I hope all of you reading this feel the same way.

By the way, citizen journalism by no means replaces professional reporting. The Press Herald's Bill Nemitz and Greg Rec are also in the Gulf Coast and we expect to have all their reporting and photos here on the site as soon as they become available. Nemitz first report is scheduled to be printed in tomorrow's paper, so we should have it online tomorrow as well.

------------------------------------------------------------
Scott Hersey has been the editor of MaineToday.com since 2003. As editor
he supervises all content development and management for MaineToday.com as
well as the online editions of the Portland Press Herald/Maine Sunday
Telegram, Morning Sentinel and Kennebec Journal. He writes this blog to
help explain what's going on behind the scenes at MaineToday.com. You can
email him or call him at 207-822-4061.

Free Press : Threat to reporters privelege is 'severe'

The government threat to journalistic privilege is now as great as it has been since the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press began its annual Homefront Confidential report six years ago.

The report, which studies how the war on terrorism has affected access to information, rates several categories according to a scale that mimics the color-coded threat level of the Department of Homeland Security.

Free Press : The link between Big Media and indecency

According to Jonathan Rintels, of the Center for Creative Voices in Media:

"The data also show a repeated pattern: Following the elimination of ownership limits in 1996, a local station would be sold to a large station-ownership group, which then eliminated local content and replaced it with an edgy/raunchy show that it produced in another market, causing the station to receive an FCC indecency fine for the first time in its history."

Rather praised the coverage of Hurricane Katrina by the new generation of TV journalists and acknowledged that he would have liked to have reported from the Gulf Coast. “Covering hurricanes is something I know something about,” he said.

“It’s been one of television news’ finest moments,” Rather said of the Katrina coverage. He likened it to the coverage of President Kennedy’s assassination in 1963.

“They were willing to speak truth to power,” Rather said of the coverage.

FYI ONLY, not assignment. See below.

If you run the video, and start at 54:00 minutes into it, Barak Obama begins talking about Katrina and racism.

http://www.law.harvard.edu/news/2005/09/16_obama.php

Obama delivers keynote address at Celebration of Harvard Law School Black Alumni

Post Date: September 16, 2005

On Saturday, September 17, U.S. Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., a member of the class of 1991, delivered a keynote address following his acceptance of the Harvard Law School Association Award. The event is part of this year's Celebration of Black Alumni and can be viewed by clicking here. (You will need RealPlayer to watch this webcast.)

The Celebration of Black Alumni is a three-day celebration to honor the accomplishments of the school's African-American graduates and drew hundreds of alumni to campus.

Other highlights of the weekend included remarks by Harvard University President Lawrence Summers, an address by Dean Elena Kagan and panel discussions on subjects such as human rights and corporate practice.

Page last updated: Mon, Sep 19, 2005, 21:03:39 EDT. HLS Contact

The draft syllabus for "Issues in Journalism", English 328-31, is available here. The scheduling of classes for the rest of the semester will be done by Thursday's class.

-- bill densmore 458-8001

Class:

We will discuss this in Thursday's class. Please read before then. Questions to consider: How does the source of this report affect your level of trust that the observations are complete? (i.e., that there isn't another, rosier view of the situation in Houston). Does the lack of "official" sources concern you? Why or why not? Can you find on the web other examples of evacuee reporting that paint a different picture?What do you think the poster of this note, Aliza Dichter, means by "corporate media"?

ISSUE: How does the rapid availability of this type of "point of view" reporting via the Internet change the role of journalists generally? Does it free them to adopt other (and multiple) points of view rather than play it "straight"?

-- bill

---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Mon, 19 Sep 2005 22:29:22 -0400
From: Aliza Dichter <liza@mediaactioncenter.org>
To: acmemembers@acmecoalition.org
Subject: [ACME Member List] The first Gulf Coast report from the Hard Knock
Radio/Third World Majority/Can't Stop Won't Stop team

Dear folks,

This report below is the first in a series from a team of independent women of
color journalists covering the aftermath of Katrina:

Third World Majority
369 15th Street
Oakland, CA 94612
510.465.6941
wanda@cultureisaweapon.org
http://www.thirdworldmajority.org/

I thought folks might find this interesting, particularly as an activist media project to counteract (or at least balance) corporate coverage. See this link for more about the project:

http://www.thirdworldmajority.org/index.php?s=1&n=11

People who are doing analysis or tracking of media literacy issues related to Katrina coverage might want to contact these folks (thenmozhi@ureach.com and jeffchang410@mindspring.com) as well as the team at Youth Media Council who is monitoring, tracking and leading campaigns to hold corporate media accountable for their coverage (see: http://action.youthmediacouncil.org/index.php?s=6&n=24)

Liza

-----------------

In The Houston Astrodome, Frustration and Survival

Reported By Thenmozhi Soundararajan
and Anita Johnson
Written By Jeff Chang

To Barbara Bush, the Astrodome was a poor people's heaven. From the floor of the Dome, however, life seemed a lot closer to hell.

HOUSTON, September 13 - Outside the Houston Astrodome earlier this week, dozens of tents for State Farm Insurance, the Bank of America, Chase, Veteran's Aid, and many more seemed to promise a quick return to something like shopping-mall normalcy. It was easy to sign up for a credit card. An ATM city had sprung up, so you could slide your new card in and get cash right away, and pay the bill later.

At press briefings organized by local officials, the story was upbeat, a shining example of government, business, and charity coming together to do good. Thousands of evacuees were being processed, more than 500 children were been reunited with their families, and life went on.

But behind the doors of the Astrodome, survival and frustration were the order of the day. Jamel Bell, who fled his flooded Ninth Ward in New Orleans, found no salvation here. "Inside it feels like prison," he said. At curfew, he says, the evacuees were locked in.

News teams from independent sources, such as our own, were continuously harassed by local officials and police. Reporters from KPFT, the Pacifica station in Houston, tossed their press badges for Red Cross volunteer badges in order to do their work. In Baton Rouge, hip-hop journalist and WBAI reporter Rosa Clemente was arrested and briefly detained after National Guardsmen attempted to confiscate her recording equipment.

Despite news reports that evacuees were being moved through the system and out of the center efficiently and quickly, there were up to 35,000 evacuees daily in the building. Cots of weary people stretched across the floor. Celebrities, followed by television cameras, filed in and out. The food was terrible, the meat in the sandwiches sometimes served still frozen. Surveillance was heavy, and the tensions on the floor remained thick.

Many evacuees tried to forget the brutal images of their evacuation: skin sores on a man wading through toxic waters, a chaotic stampede of evacuees on a bridge towards a line of buses, the traumatic separation of families at evacuation checkpoints. An unnamed woman survivor told KPFT radio host Robert Muhammad that National Guardsmen had raped her friend and left her in the swamp. Amidst apocalyptic scenes that seemed biblical, Dionne Wright, a custodian in her mid-30s, tried to calm her daugher. "This is not the end," she said. "This is not the end."

Raver Price, a 19-year old woman from the largely black and poor Ninth Ward, felt she heard rumblings before the levee break, and wondered if they were the sounds of man-made dynamite. When she and her hungry friends took food from a flooded store, she encountered a Guardsman who sneered at her, "I can't wait tokill you bitches."

Among the displaced New Orleans youths in the Astrodome, some neighborhood rivalries did not go out with the tide, and fights sometimes broke out between different crews. Many evacuees said that when they went to sleep, they kept one eye on their belongings.

Before dawn, often as early as 5:30am, lines for basic services -- including those to find housing or obtain the much-desired $2000 relief check from FEMA and the $235 relief check from the Red Cross -- began forming, and processing continued until 8pm.

Many were mystified by FEMA rules. Households are only allowed to report one address for the one-time check to be sent to. But for families still in the midst of being reunited, or on the verge of being sent to another evacuation center or even another city, the logic seemed bizarre.

Yet some families left without anything. Immigrants, including many of the estimated 30,000 displaced Vietnamese Americans here in Houston, were being turned away. Even legal residents learned that their green cards are not enough to qualify them for disaster aid. These realizations invariably came after hours of waiting. FEMA and the Red Cross had no translators on hand.

Au Huynh came down from Philadelphia to help in the relief efforts. "I was a refugee, I came here in 1989," she said. "I don't think there is a political mark on being a refugee. (Being a refugee means) being displaced because of political reasons or environmental reason. It's important to recognize the rights of refugees, it shouldn't be based on being a citizen in terms of getting relief."

Huynh had called the Red Cross to volunteer as a translator, but they said they had no need for her. So, through the internet, she found a small Houston group called Save The Boat People SOS that was setting up relief efforts. The organization is one of the Asian American community organizations working with a network of Buddhist temples in Houston on an extraordinary parallel relief effort.

With most Asian American evacuees being routed away from the Astrodome, volunteers took them in at the Hong Kong City Mall. In the parking lot, there are piles of donated clothing. At a card table, volunteers work on their own personal laptops and cellphones to find shelter, make urgent medical referrals, and reunite families.

Some 50,000 Vietnamese worked the Louisiana coast as fisherman and in New Orleans in the service and manufacturing sectors, alongside a large community of Filipino American shrimpers, the oldest Filipino community in North America. So the volunteers at the Hong Kong City Mall expect many more evacuees.

But these efforts are short-term. Houston officials have been pushing to move all the evacuees out of the Astrodome and the Reliant Center by Saturday into the Reliant Arena. They say that they might not be able to complete the efforts until next week.

Meanwhile, the evacuees wonder and worry about their future. Many want to return, and most believe they will be able to do so in a week or two. But while New Orleans Mayor C. Ray Nagin has allowed the homeowners and business owners of the Garden District and the French Quarter to return this week, there are still no dates set for poor, largely African American neighborhoods like the Ninth Ward to reopen.

Evacuees are being shipped off all over the country -- San Francisco,
Michigan, and New York -- with no return ticket. As pundits and planners across the country have begun to call for neighborhoods like the Ninth Ward to be bulldozed and permanently abandoned, many evacuees have begun to ask if there is an agenda afoot to eliminate the city's poor and people of color. Organizers from the New Orleans organization Community Labor United have begun calling for "evacuees from our community to actively participate in the rebuilding of New Orleans."

In the Astrodome, Dolores Johnson has another cold sandwich and shakes her head. She asks, "We are able-bodied. Why can't we be involved in the process to rebuild our homes?"
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Please read this story. We will be talking about "citizen journalism"
during October. Consider: Are these citizen reporters really "journalists?
Why or why not? Can readers "trust" their work?

-- bill

ORIGINAL URL:
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2005/09/18/MNG7LEPL151.DTL&type=tech

POSTED: Sunday, September 18, 2005

By Vanessa Hua
San Francisco Chronicle Staff Writer

Seoul -- The staff at OhmyNews fills only two floors of a small office building in downtown Seoul, but it edits stories from thousands of "citizen reporters" across South Korea.

The 150 or so stories posted on the site each day range from breaking news about huge protests to sophisticated political analysis, from hit pieces to tales of the daily ups and downs of people who feel ignored by established media.

OhmyNews readers can offer instant feedback online and -- if they really like a piece -- monetary tips. Readers poured nearly 30 million won ($30,000) into columnist Kim Young Ok's account in increments of $10 or less in one week after he criticized the constitutional court of South Korea last year.

"They're like street musicians or performers," Jean Min, director of the international news division, said of the citizen reporters.

OhmyNews is much more than a soapbox, though. It is a cross between an online news site and a sophisticated blog. Koreans flock to it. The site gets 1.7 million to 2 million page views each day, a number that shot up to 25 million during the December 2002 presidential election.

When reformer Roh Moo Hyun won the tight presidential race, he granted his first domestic interview to OhmyNews -- a slap to the conservative corporate daily papers that supported his rival.

The privately held Web site has been profitable since September 2003 and is projected to pull in $10 million this year, Min said. By contrast, Salon.com in San Francisco pulled in $6.6 million in fiscal year 2005 and had 1.1 million average daily page views in July, according to market research firm comScore Media Metrix. The DailyKos, a popular liberal blog written in Emeryville, had 96,774 average daily page views, and conservative blog Instapundit had 32,258 in July. The success of OhmyNews can be attributed in part to the high level of public engagement in this heavily wired, young democracy, where less than two decades have passed since military rule ended. Street protests are common, and citizens are eager to speak out online.

With the motto "every citizen is a reporter," 5-year-old OhmyNews has engaged its audience in ways that U.S. print and television news outlets, faced with a steep decline in readers and viewers, only dream of.

The site has a cultlike following, among both writers thrilled to see their views spread widely and readers who say they like getting an uncensored, if uneven, version of the news.

"It is composed of so many citizens. It's more free than other journals," said Kim Won Joong, 24, a journalism student at Chunnam University in Daejeon, in central South Korea. "But the opinions are scattered all over."

The site began an English-language edition in May, at english.ohmynews.com, and now has its sights set overseas. Several hundred citizen reporters have already signed up. So far, about 36 percent of English-language edition readers are from North America, 38.5 percent from Europe, and 16.7 percent from Asia outside South Korea.

For publicity, the company relies on stories in other media, word-of-mouth and the efforts of its reporters, many of whom are active bloggers, Min said.

"Our readers don't simply sit there and read. They interrogate each other," Min said during a slick hourlong presentation at the company's headquarters. One of his charts called OhmyNews a "post-modern 'we media' versus traditional 'elite media.' "

"People want to share their experience. It's more fun than simply watching television," Min said. Min and founder Oh Yeon Ho, a former alternative magazine editor and reporter, have traveled to Europe, Japan and North America for the past two years to talk about citizen journalism and OhmyNews' business model.

"So here we hoist our flag and declare war on the old media system. ... We are overthrowing the basic principles of news reporting, which for many years has been taken for granted by many of the world's newspapers," declares one of the company's brochures.

Similar to newspapers, about 70 percent of OhmyNews' revenue is from ad sales. But instead of the remainder going to subscriptions, as at newspapers, Min said OhmyNews gets 20 percent of its revenue from syndication sales, and just 10 percent from paid subscriptions for premium content.

In South Korea, OhmyNews has fast gained prominence and popularity, though critics say its reporting can be biased. OhmyNews uses emotional appeals rather than acting as a neutral forum for citizens, media observers say. Last year, the site began a reader drive to help fund the production of an encyclopedia of people who collaborated with the Japanese under colonial rule, after a columnist suggested the fundraising.

During huge protests against the impeachment of President Roh last year, 38 OhmyNews reporters fanned out into the streets and sent in photos, video and copy by various wireless connections.

The professional staff of 54 copy editors, editors and reporters -- which OhmyNews calls its "news guerrilla desk" -- reject about one-third of submissions. They fact-check and vet everything they post. For example, OhmyNews contacted Samsung for comment before publishing a Samsung worker's expose of how employees were forced to spend months of company time planning the vacation to Germany of the electronics company's chairman, Lee Kun Hee. It even considered sending a staff reporter to Berlin.

Just four lawsuits have been filed against OhmyNews over articles written by its staff reporters. None of the disputes has been resolved.

Citizen reporters receive $2 to $20 for each story OhmyNews uses, based on its merit. About 76 percent of the citizen reporters are men. Twenty percent are college students, 6 percent are small business owners, and 73 percent are 20 to 39 years old.

Min said reader response helps OhmyNews reporters improve over time. More than 70 staff and citizen reporters have landed book deals since the site opened, he said. Writer Kim Hye Won thanked her online critics for making her a better writer, even though she considered quitting after reading their harsh comments.

"I feel my limitations ... compared to professional reporters who specialize in particular areas or have accumulated tons of experience. I heard that my articles lack breadth and depth," she said in a speech at a conference of citizen reporters
in June sponsored by OhmyNews.

Harry Lee, an editor in chief of Korea Press International, an independent news service in Washington, D.C., who freelances for the English-language edition of OhmyNews, describes the site as the "Hyde Park of journalism."

"(It's) a forum where all kinds of people with all kinds of ideas and ideologies participate in all kinds of subjects."

E-mail Vanessa Hua at vahua@sfchronicle.com.