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MySpace is the talk of the Web again, this time for speculation that it's stepping into the news biz.

Although MySpace reps haven't commented, the New York Post and MediaPost ran stories Monday saying the social networking site will soon launch its own news service.

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The service would be a news aggregator, similar to Digg, where MySpace users can rate and comment on articles, and post them to their personal pages.

I'm already wondering how this would affect sites like Digg and Reddit, as well as news organizations' sites. "It doesn't take a genius to figure out that this is not good news for those of us in the news business, unless we view it as another way to get our content onto yet another platform," said blogger Terry Heaton, who broke the news last week citing "inside sources."

MySpace has the audience in place -- more than 100 million accounts, says the Post (which has the same owner as MySpace -- News Corp.). Now I'm wondering how that audience would use the service -- especially with the option for posting articles to personal pages.

What kind of news would the largely young audience post? Would the service, as Heaton predicts, help us understand what kind of news they're interested in? Would it help engage young people in the news?

The Post's article says MySpace (obviously) aims to keep users on the site for news instead of going elsewhere. That also begs the question -- would the service divert traffic away from news organizations' sites or increase it? How are aggregators out there now, like Google News, affecting news sites' page views?

It seems we could learn a lot from users' interactions with the news service -- not just for getting a better picture of news consumption habits, but for generating story ideas as well.

What would people in your coverage area post? How might that influence your coverage? And if they could author their own work, as Heaton reports, what would they write about?

Howard Finberg, Poynter's director of interactive learning, took a stab at answering what this combination of social networking and news might mean. But I guess we'll have to wait to find out for sure -- until "early 2nd quarter," according to Heaton's blog. Until then, tell me what you think.

By Pat Walters
Naughton Fellow

CORRECTION: Appended.

In mid-January, a video crew visited washingtonpost.com.Newsweek Interactive in Arlington, Va., to capture a behind-the-scenes look at this most innovative of major American newsrooms. They interviewed the guys who run the joint -- Jim Brady and Tom Kennedy -- as well as some of the other folks who build and maintain the stuff on The Washington Post's Web site. Here's what they came up with.

The video crew could have been from ABC, NBC or any of the major news networks. In fact, had it come a week earlier, it would have been there at the same time as a crew from PBS. Frontline was there working on "News War."

But this particular group was from Apple.

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By the middle of last week, the video, which was posted Feb. 23 on the Pro section of the company's Web site, had made its way onto a number of popular journalism Web sites. The Apple flick generated buzz among journalists in large part, I think, because it gives us a peek into a newsroom that is on the cutting edge. And what it reveals is very cool.

Lively video shows staffers zipping through a brightly lit newsroom, no doubt moving so quickly because they're working on groundbreaking multimedia projects. All of this action plays to an edgy digital sountrack that makes me feel more like I'm shopping at American Eagle than taking a tour of a newsroom.

It's no surprise that the film focuses on video production, a strength that both Apple and the Post are happy to show off. Last year Post videographer Travis Fox won an Emmy for his coverage of Hurricane Katrina, beating out MTV and National Geographic. Earlier this month, the Post launched "onBeing," an innovative video project that takes a stripped-down approach to telling the stories of interesting local characters.

As we watch the Apple piece, we learn the Post has 50 reporters with video cameras. We see them using those cameras and editing their footage back in the newsroom. It's a sweet setup. And the film makes the newsroom look fast-paced, innovative and generally cool. As the camera pans across a Macbook Pro -- with Final Cut Pro splashed across the screen -- Tom Kennedy, managing editor for multimedia, narrates:

"In the last couple years we've just really taken off with our video editing," he says, "because we've been able to do laptop editing in the field with Apple products."

And with that, we come to understand just what this little film is. "Oh yes," I remember telling myself the first time I watched it, "this is an ad." Apple, Apple everywhere.

To be fair, it isn't quite a commercial like we might see on television. The Pro section of Apple's Web site, on which this video appears, is a showcase for interesting Apple users. The miniature documentaries feature people like music producer Machine and pop musician Duncan Shiek.

And then, of course, there is the Post.

It felt strange watching Post staffers -- professional, mainstream journalists -- endorse Apple products.

Did I say endorse? I meant promote. Or acknowledge.

Here's executive editor Jim Brady:

"It wasn't an endorsement, it was an acknowledgement that ... we use Apple products," Brady told me on the phone last week. "Our entire multimedia department looks like an Apple superstore.

"Our editorial board endorses political candidates and policy changes," he continued. "If [this] were seen as an endorsement, that'd be a problem."

I could be alone on this, but I saw it as an endorsement. When I told Brady that, he didn't sound happy, but he also didn't sound entirely surprised. One thing about the video that irked him was the editing. It was "unfortunate," he said, that certain Apple-friendly quotes made the final version. When asked if he expected that Apple would spin the film to advertise its products, Bradly said he didn't.

"From our perspective it was like doing an interview," he said. "I sat there for an hour and nobody asked me about Apple at all."

Brady wasn't asked about Apple, and he didn't talk about it. But Kennedy did. And so did vice president for product development Rob Curley.

The Post wouldn't be the first media company to endorse a vendor -- see this year's Super Bowl issue of Sports Illustrated for a two-page Canon ad that features a few of the magazine's staff photographers.

But what makes this case particularly interesting is what it says about our relationship with our audiences.

More and more news organizations are finding ways to give audience members a peek inside the newsroom. The Spokesman-Review in Spokane, Wash., broadcasts its news meetings live on the Web. KPIX-TV in San Francisco recently started a similar practice.

These videos are usually raw, brimming with banter, laughter and foul language. They show us as we really are. Sometimes we look good. Sometimes we don't. But if nothing else, we look real. And sometimes that means we look biased.

Critics will no doubt use the film to take shots at the Post's coverage of Apple. "Ah-hah! I knew your coverage of that iPhone thing has been unfairly favorable," the Windows fans might say. "It's not that cool."

It might be more productive, though, to ask a question. What can we learn from the film? Here are a few things. One -- The Post uses lots of Apple products. Two -- Those products work well for them. Three -- Post staffers like them.

And here's a fourth.

Whether or not you can imagine letting a video crew turn your newsroom's love of Apple -- or Canon or Marantz or any other vendor, for that matter -- into a promotion, the Post did just that.

There could be a lot of reasons for this. For one thing, the film is as much an advertisement for the Post as it is one for Apple. But I think it also suggests that we're all getting a little more comfortable with exposing ourselves to our audiences. More than ever before, the people we serve want to see us, to know how we do what we do, to understand what we like and dislike. They want to know we are real people. And we're showing them we are.

Maybe handing the task of self-documentation over to a vendor isn't the best idea.

But watch the Apple film again, take note of what it tells us about how the Post produces its Web site and try to imagine some ways you might turn the camera around and point it at your own news organization.

CORRECTION: The original version of this story attributed Tom Kennedy's comments on "apple products" to Jim Brady.

UPDATE (3/7/07): Since I posted this story Tuesday, a couple particularly sharp readers have pointed out that the Apple piece isn't really a video at all. If you watch it again, you'll notice that it's done in still images. I, of course, didn't notice this, and called it a video. My editor did the same thing. And so did a slew of bloggers who linked to the piece.

So, if it's not a video, what is it? I'm told that in order to be called video, a sequence of still images must be moving at 30 frames per second. The Apple piece falls well short of that, even at its most frantic moments.

Any ideas?

By Pat Walters
Naughton Fellow

Lots of political blogs run on punditry. One voice, one viewpoint. All text.

AirCongress is a little different.

First of all, it features hardly any original content. No overbearing voice. The site touts itself as the nonpartisan "online voice of Capitol Hill, the one place where people can go to hear and see the latest news of, by and about Congress."

Instead of text, this blog features audio and video. Like Google News, AirCongress is an aggregator. Instead of pulling together text news reports, it gathers segments from radio, television and, quite often, politicians' Web sites.

But unlike Google News, which is run by a computer, this site is maintained by a person, a journalist named Danny Glover.

Glover has worked in Washington, D.C., for 15 years. For a time, he wrote for Congressional Quarterly. Currently, he works for National Journal, editing Technology Daily and writing Beltway Blogroll.

For AirCongress, Glover functions strictly as a gatherer. He does not produce any of the audio or video that appears on the site. He collects a lot of it from YouTube, and tries to post 10 times a week. The tenor of the posts ranges from White House official -- a press briefing -- to grassroots critical -- a critique of online campaign video.

Glover says that he would eventually like to produce original content for the site. Now, he just doesn't have time. He says he generally spends 10 to 15 hours a week working on the site, making most of his posts during evenings and weekends.

Still, Glover has some ideas for expansion. Launch an online radio show. Ask college students to interview their local Congressmen on behalf of AirCongress. Hire someone to work on the site with him.

These things cost money. That's something Glover says he doesn't have a lot of right now. It's clear that despite his refreshing approach to covering Washington, Glover faces the same financial challenges as any other independent blogger.

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In the blogosphere, popularity, more than anything else, generates revenue. With the site's launch a few months behind him, Glover says about 300 people visit AirCongress each week. "It's a very narrow audience, I think," Glover says. "The C-SPAN kind of audience."

Traffic spiked modestly, Glover says, when the site was recommended on the popular blog InstaPundit.

Affiliate ads flank the blog content on AirCongress. They plug hotel rooms, rental cars and books. But Glover says they've yet to yield a check. Even though he has decided not to spend any money on marketing the site, Glover expects his audience to expand slowly but consistently. By May, he hopes a thousand people will be coming to the site -- and seeing his ads -- every week. By November, three to four thousand.

Glover hopes the site will one day make some money. But right now, he says, it's not about turning a profit. Or even covering costs.

"You have to invest money and you have to invest time to make it work," Glover says. "And right now I don't have a lot of either. It's a labor of love."

In a news environment inundated with the war in Iraq, it's easy to glaze over the basics: Who is Shiite, who is Sunni, and what is the difference?

NPR's Mike Shuster has taken that step back for listeners with a week-long package called "The Partisans of Ali."

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The series, which ran on "Morning Edition" from Feb. 12 to 16, starts with the death of the Prophet Muhammad in 632. You'll learn how Muhammad's death sparked the Sunni-Shiite split in Islam, how these two groups interacted through the years, and why Iraq and Iran are now dominated by Shiites, who make up just 10 to 15 percent of the world's 1.3 billion Muslims.

The series is a great example of explanatory journalism. Understanding the two groups is a must for understanding today's news. And from the feedback Shuster says he has received so far, listeners are grateful for the context.

"I think we tapped into a kind of thirst in some of our listeners to have a slightly fuller understanding of what's going on in Iraq," he said. "It helps them sort through what they're hearing every day."

Shuster, who has been a foreign correspondent for more than 17 years, says he's wanted to do a project like this for a couple of years. He noticed that the coverage on the war seems to lump together Shiite and Sunni militias and organizations.

"It's been muddy and murky and difficult to understand," Shuster told me on the phone Friday. "I don't think, until now, there's been an attempt to fully explain who the [Shiites] were."

Shuster knew for sure there was a need for an explanation when he read a small news item during his most recent stay in Iran. (He's been to the country seven times.) He read that Silvestre Reyes, the newly appointed Democratic chairman of the House Select Committee on Intelligence, incorrectly identified al-Qaida as a Shiite organization.

When a member of Congress appointed to lead a committee on intelligence gets it wrong, Shuster thought others could use a little help as well.

"I figured there must be a great deal of confusion in our country about this," he said.

Friday's installment makes the connection between Islamic history and today's war in Iraq. You'll find that the scholars Shuster talked to pointed out some interesting contradictions in U.S. foreign policy. They also agreed that the U.S. government has ignored the history of the region.

As helpful as Shuster's series may be, it hasn't gone without criticism. The New York Times on Wednesday ran a column pointing to several elements the series lacks. The most compelling? A reason to care.

The Times has a point that the story sometimes reads like a "memorizable fact sheet on Shiism." An audio slideshow explaining the split demonstrates Shuster at his most engaging moments. But the story's fact-heavy nature doesn't outweigh the benefits of listening. When we lack an understanding of the people and places in our news every day, that's reason enough to care.

Gannett just announced a new program that could be a pretty sweet deal for students. Mainly because it ends with a job offer.

Starting this year, the company will recruit 30 graduating seniors to participate in a new talent development program.

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In June, those selected will begin a 10-week training program at Gannett newspapers and broadcast stations across the country. Once the graduate finishes the program successfully, he or she is guaranteed a position in the company.

"We want the best people we can possibly get," Tara Connell, vice president of corporate communications, said in a phone interview. "[The program] is one of the tools we have to get an innovative, creative, smart, talented pool for Gannett."

Students will learn how to deliver news in the company's new 24/7, multi-platform environment -- called "Information Centers."

Gannett is also recruiting advertising students for the program. They'll learn how to use audience-based selling techniques across news platforms.

That means students will learn to go to advertisers and say, for example, "You want to reach 19- to 25-year-olds? We can tell you what publications they're reading on what platform at what time."

"It's a whole different way of approaching ad sales, much more attuned to what the customer wants," Connell said.

Gannett hasn't cut any of its existing internship programs as a result of the new training. But Connell said there's a good chance some of its papers and stations might switch their resources to this program.

"It's too early to tell if we're spending more or less," Connell said. "We're using resources we have already."

So for those of you who graduated this winter, or are graduating this spring, check out more details here. The scramble to find a job can be scary. Look at this as one more opportunity.

By Leann Frola
Naughton Fellow

The beginning of 2007 brought a new face to our TVs, computers and print media: Ashley. The 9-year-old who will never grow up.

Ashley is developmentally and physically disabled. She has static encephalopathy [PDF], a condition that is the result of severe brain damage that will not improve. At her parents' request, doctors removed her uterus and breast tissue and gave her hormones to keep her small. Her parents say she will be easier to care for that way.

As coverage continued, the debate grew fiercer and the sides more polarized with this basic question: Was it right to stunt her growth?

But now the flurry of coverage has slowed. So I wondered -- how can journalists use what's been said to broaden the discussion about children with disabilities like Ashley's? What follow-ups could be written? How do we dig deeper than Ashley?

To find some answers, I turned to Arthur Caplan, Ph.D. He is the director of the Center for Bioethics at the University of Pennsylvania and a member of Poynter's national advisory board.

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In the following Q&A, Caplan shares what he thinks journalists have been missing and where to go from here.

How do we go beyond what's already been covered about Ashley?

I think Ashley's an interesting case. The policy questions are some of the things we need to be focused on, not just the odd or freakish nature of, "Is it right to keep somebody small?"

Is what's right for this family right for other families? What's the context? Is this a trend or just the weird, odd story of the week?

Families often can't get any home-care aid, but they wouldn't send their kid to a horrible institution. So a journalist could just ask around locally, what's going on?

What might be causing the lack of home-care help for those with severely disabled kids? Is it a lack of money, lack of resources, lack of knowledge about how to access resources, or what? What needs to be done so that these families do get more assistance?

And what happens to kids like Ashley if their parents abandon them or when the parents are too old to be able to care for them?

Journalism is attracted to wonderful stories and human interest, and that's what the Ashley story has. But it shouldn't be just that. Your second-day story should be these policy stories. Otherwise, there's a risk of turning the Ashley case into a kind of voyeurism.

What else hasn't been covered?

This is a good example where there's all kinds of voices that haven't been heard from yet.

There are various disability groups that have positions on what was done to Ashley. Most of them don't like it -- independent-living groups, disability organizations ... I haven't seen many voices from the disabled community on this case.

All kinds of professional societies -- not the same as the patient-advocacy groups -- they're people who are going to make a living studying something as opposed to having that condition. I didn't see much from them. What does the AMA (American Medical Association) think or NAMI (National Alliance on Mental Illness) about all this?

Then there are different caregiver groups, some of which deal with severely disabled children or elderly patients -- people who've had strokes or aneurysms. It'd be interesting to hear what they have to say.

Another issue that did not get much attention: What's the simplest way to keep somebody small?

Just don't feed them as much. Caloric restriction is a way a lot of people have dealt with the problem Ashley's facing. Then there's a fine line between keeping people well nourished and starving them.

I haven't seen one word about caloric restriction, which means journalists haven't been digging that deep.

So that tells me that when people run into these kinds of stories, they tend to be completely dominated by the people who are blogging and by the charms or failings of the particular family. But there's not a lot of context given in that kind of coverage: Have other families dealt with this? What do disabled people think about this? What do doctors and experts think about this? What is the cheapest place to care for an Ashley? What if the parents abuse her if she is at home -- will anyone know? So it's been a very narrow slice on the Ashley case.

There's also some other things that've been said. The parents want to keep her home. Keep her home from what? An institution? What I'm getting at there is, are institutions for kids like Ashley horrible? Wonderful? Fine? Cesspools? Snake pits? You know, what are they? Do they vary from state to state?

It's a hard question to ask, but it's one a good, enterprising journalist would ask: Is it better to keep her at home? And what are the institutional options that are out there? What's out there for taking care of severely disabled kids like Ashley?

What's at cost? Do we want someone like Ashley to stay home because it'll cost the rest of us a whole lot of money? Is it cheaper if her parents are willing to take this on? What's the financial side of all that anyway? I haven't seen anybody raise one word about money.

Conversely, or related to this, when the parents of kids like Ashley [die], who takes care of them then? Does it matter if they're smaller? In other words, there's another issue out here. Are these kids going to be just kept small while their parents are there? But what happens to them when their parents are gone? What happens to them?

The parents, one of the things they said, they didn't want her to have breasts. How often are people who are in institutions attacked? If it is the case, that might be worth a little investigative story -- is it right to worry about it? Is it really the case that patients are assaulted by their caregivers? Do they screen people for sexual crimes?

So future coverage ideas:

• Look into the status of home care and institutional care for the severely disabled.

• Look into the financial burdens families face who try to care for a child at home.

• Look at the impact of having a severely disabled child on marriages and on siblings.

What do you think of the coverage so far? What's been done well? What needs work?

I think the core debate over her has been well-covered -- the pros and cons. We got both sides of the ethics of the procedure. I think people have a good idea of why the parents did what they did. I think their story has been told pretty well. I don't think it's entirely clear what was done to her -- with hormones and things. It's not that journalists didn't try, it's just you really gotta stay with that one.

I think the coverage was also pretty good of the thoughtfulness of the parents. Journalists acknowledged it was hard for them to present and were sympathetic to that idea that it's tough to tell your personal story of life with a disabled kid. But they might have ignored that question of what's the best place for a severely disabled kid to be. That's the tougher question to ask.

How do you cover the complexities of a story like this one while still making the information understandable?

I don't think that's so hard here. I think people get it. Here you're asking about institutional care -- what do other people who are disabled think about it. I don't think this is a technical thing.

How does running photos and videos of Ashley and her family affect the story and readers' reactions to it?

It generates enormous sympathy. It's skewing the case that way. Anytime you've got picture access of the little girl, people are going to identify with that little girl -- more sympathy for the idea of keeping Ashley small. She looks cute, she's appealing.

I think you have to [compensate] for that in the text -- making those who hate what was done to her heard. That's the balance that wasn't made. Not people who are caregivers -- real people with disabilities. Most of them don't agree with what they did to Ashley, just looking at e-mails from my columns.

I got a fair number of people who don't like what's going on with her, and they tended to be disabled. People who supported the family tended to be parents. It was strongly divided that way.

Ashley's parents blog about their daughter's condition and their decision to keep her small. How influential were blogs in disseminating information about Ashley? How did audience interaction affect the story?

They certainly made a difference on the story. There's a huge amount of blogging going on. But more than other stories, I don't know. They have a very big impact to drawing attention to the story, and seeing people debate it. It got a lot of people to vent their opinions ... and a lot of positive impact. Just people talking back and forth on what they thought.

I think most people got their facts out of the news, then they just used the blogs to vent an opinion. I don't think they learned about it from blogs.

How can journalists avoid exploiting or giving the appearance of exploiting someone like Ashley -- a developmentally and physically disabled child?

She's completely incompetent. You really can't get away from some element of exploitation. That's just going to be a part of that story. A 9-year-old, severely disabled girl who can't give permission ... there's no other way to get around it. You start talking about getting more pictures, more balance, but no, I think you're just stuck. You're going to take advantage of her, and that's just how it is. And I don't think people were put off by it. I think people were pretty tasteful and respectful about writing about it.

What advice do you have for journalists covering a story like Ashley's who have a strong opinion about it?

Drop the strong opinion. This is a very complicated issue, and you cannot bring any ethical or ideological baggage to it.

You've written a column for MSNBC.com about Ashley, saying that you do not agree with her parents' decision to prevent her from growing. To what extent would you encourage other journalists who might not have your bioethical background to also write opinion pieces?

I would encourage them. Once they learn about the story, they can surely make sound arguments pro or con, and this is a subject that is so new that it can greatly benefit from debate.

Where can journalists covering Ashley and related stories turn for resources?

Lots of places, but a good start are children's hospitals, state departments of disability, parent groups at public schools, and clergy who may have counseled families with severely disabled kids.

Taking a step back to bioethics in general, what issues do you see brewing for 2007 that journalists should be aware of and plan ahead for?

Watch out for the possibility of another face transplant this year. And keep an eye on avian flu -- that story will be coming back again.

---

Editor's Note: These responses were gathered from phone and e-mail interviews and edited for clarity.

By Pat Walters
Naughton Fellow

The Internet has given readers new -- and sometimes nasty -- ways to interact with writers.

We're in the midst of a "reader revolution," a time in which every reader is a writer, Gary Kamiya argued in a Salon.com essay Tuesday. It takes little more than a mouse click -- no forethought required -- to lash out at a public figure, an aquaintance or another writer. Maybe one day, Kamiya imagined, readers and writers will play nice, or at least adhere to some rules of decency. It isn't clear whether or not he really believes such a day will ever come.

Despite his concerns about the current state of the dialogue, Kamiya concedes that the Internet -- specifically, blogs, e-mail and blog-style story comments -- has given journalists an enriched understanding of their readers. I've noticed that many news organizations have even been finding ways to use reader input as content. Some newspapers, for instance, quote from comments left on stories by readers.

www.sfgate.com

Using reader-generated content is not a new practice. Newspapers have been printing letters to the editor for decades. But the practice is changing.

One particularly interesting development appeared at the San Francisco Chronicle a week ago. The newspaper started podcasting messages left on reporters' and editors' voice mailboxes. The feature is called "Correct Me if I'm Wrong ..."

The first one, posted last week, is absolutely hilarious.

Listen to it here.

Readers or, rather, listeners, have responded enthusiastically. One called in to leave a voice mail in response to the podcast. Another listener remixed the podcast and posted it on YouTube. Someone else cut it up so snippets of it can be played on a cell phone.

Judging by the reactions of my coworkers, my response was typical. I laughed. Really hard.

But after I wiped my eyes, I started asking questions.

When is the last time a newspaper Web site cracked me up? What's the point of this podcast? Is it good journalism?

In Tuesday's New York Times, executive editor Phil Bronstein said he came up with the idea, and explained its purpose in this way:

"This is about listening to your readers ... Newspapers used to be a lot more lively than they are now, and they could definitely stand some of that."

Agreed. Energy is refreshing, particularly when it shows up in the newspaper or on its Web site. But still, I wondered: What exactly does this kind of content do for listeners?

When I called Bronstein Tuesday, he told me the point of the podcast is to "add to the conversation" between the newspaper its readers.

"I think there are letters to the editor, that run in the paper," he said. "And there are comments, that go on the Web. And, I think, 'Correct me if I'm wrong...', these go somewhere in between."

Bronstein said letters to the editor and, to a lesser degree, online story comments, are often written guardedly. Sometimes this caution results in a thoughtful piece of criticism. But it also has a tendency to snuff out whatever fervor prompted the reader to respond in the first place.

Voice mails, on the other hand, aren't always so well thought out. They're different, Bronstein said. They're passionate.

"Because this is an audio feature, I think [you get an added] intensity and uniqueness," Bronstein said. "These are not things that you'll hear in the normal course of the day. ... [They're] unpredictable. ... In audio, you can sort-of hear how people feel ... Whether they have conspiracy theories, or they're complaining about a headline."

Speaking of conspiracy theories, a Washington D.C. lawyer named Brian Lehman claimed on a blog that last Friday's voice mail podcast was a hoax. He argued that the story the caller was complaining about didn't exist, and that the complaint itself was carefully orchestrated by none other than Matt Groening, creator of "The Simpsons."

It turns out that the story in question does exist. Richard Geiger, library director at the Chronicle, dug it up for me Tuesday -- an August 2005 Associated Press piece. It's not clear why Chronicle staffer Ken Howe, who received the voice mail about the piece, saved it for so long. As for Lehman's Groening claim, I'll defer to the readers of the Freakonomics.com blog.

Bronstein acknowledged that the Chronicle makes no effort to determine if callers really mean what they are saying. "We're presenting it as it is," he said. It's a voice mail to a reporter or an editor.

For the sake of this discussion, let's assume that the voice mails are genuine. Imagine you are a reader of the Chronicle. As you drink your morning coffee and read the paper, you notice that a certain reporter is sprinkling semicolons all across the page. This gratuitous use of punctuation angers you, and you call the writer to express your rage. You leave a voice mail. Maybe you get a little out of hand. Okay, a lot out of hand.

The next day, you're clicking around on SFGate.com, and you find "Correct me if I'm wrong..." Click to play. It's a familiar voice. It's your voice, railing about semicolon addiction.

Should you have expected the voice mail you left to have been saved and broadcast?

Bronstein would say yes.

"You are calling a newspaper, a media organization, and our role in culture is to publish," he said. "You are leaving a general voicemail, a recording of your comments."

Any messages that contain confidential information, news tips or what Bronstein described as information intended "for a specific reporter about a specific story" won't be broadcast.

The point, Bronstein told me, is to present people's opinions, general comments about the news, the paper and life in general.

"[Listeners are] able to hear what other people are feeling and thinking," he said.

Is broadcasting a voice mail legal? Looks like it. Poynter Online associate editor Meg Martin and I checked out California's wire tapping laws. While it is illegal to record a telephone conversation without alerting the person on the other end of the line, that doesn't seem to cover voice mails.

"Please leave your message after the tone." Okay. I consent.

We found nothing that indicated it might be illegal to broadcast a legally obtained recording.

But the more important question, I think, is not whether this practice is legal, but whether it is ethical.

Bronstein said the voice mails the Chronicle is broadcasting are coming from folks who want to be heard. They're opinionated people, the kind you might find on Speaker's Corner in London, standing on a soapbox, shouting into crowds. They want to be broadcast.

But what about the readers who aren't career blowhards? What about the person who comes unhinged in a voice mail simply because it's a voice mail, a message she assumes will remain between her and the journalist she's calling. "It's not like I'm writing a letter to the editor," she might tell herself.

If she's calling the Chronicle, she'd be wrong -- it is like writing a letter to the editor.

Listen to the Chronicle's second voice mail podcast here. This guy thinks Bronstein is controlling his brain. He raves about it until the machine cuts him off at two minutes.

It's pretty clear that these podcasts are designed to entertain, and to do so by making fun of certain wacky readers. The written introductions to each installment are snarky. And both blog-style postings are tagged only as "comedy."

For the journalists who listen, the podcasts give particular gratification. "Ah, I've totally heard that guy before," we might think. Or worse: "Hah, take that. Last time you'll to call in and yell at a reporter. Jackass."

In certain ways, this podcast works. It clearly attracts readers. And it gets them involved with content, talking about it, writing about it and playing with it. But what does it actually do to further the mission of the newspaper?

We're journalists. Everyday, we set out to tell stories, true accounts of people, places and events that might help our neighbors better understand the world. Interacting with those neighbors, particularly the ones who read our work, is becoming increasingly important, a challenge that is at once simplified and complicated by the Internet.

I think back to Kamiya's hopes for a world in which writers and readers interact peaceably. Harmony between writers and readers, categories that increasingly overlap, is dependent on respect. But when a reader calls to leave a voice mail, are we responsible for warning her that the recording she's about to leave might be broadcast to a million people?

Should the content of a voice mail -- serious news tip, grammar rant or personal tirade -- affect the way we treat the caller who left it?

At what point does our struggle to be popular with readers start to pull us away from our comittment to informing, teaching and inspiring them?

You tell me.

I've set up a voice mailbox to catch your calls -- leave a message at 727-456-2357.

Give a call. Tell us what you really think. But consider yourself warned.

We might just publish what you say.

By Leann Frola
Naughton Fellow

Forget the clinking crystal, white tablecloths and dimmed lights of the restaurants you're used to reading about.

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"Chain Reaction" columns By Kevin Pang "Precocious palates" By Kevin Pang Sign up to receive About the Job by e-mail: Click here (sent Mondays and Wednesdays at 9 a.m.)

Kevin Pang, a Chicago Tribune features writer, approaches dining critiques from a different angle -- one we journalists, and our readers, are all too familiar with:

The fast-food industry.

WE STAND IN LINE WE DRIVE THROUGH WE SAMPLE THE LATEST IN FAST-FOOD FARE

That's the motto of his monthly column "Chain Reaction."

"I just think that everybody eats fast food, so why not write about it?" Pang told me on the phone.

Some of his past stories:

• A review of the Pizza Hut's Sicilian Lasagna Pizza. Here's a sample of what he had to say about it:

"It suffers from identity crisis. Like a "woe is me" high school freshman, this aspires to look and taste like something it's not. Just be yourself, pizza. We like you just the way you are."

• A story about "kid foodies." These are "kids who are eating foie gras instead of chicken nuggets," Pang said.

When one of the kids Pang interviewed was asked by a waitress if he wanted ketchup, he replied: "I don't eat ketchup. I eat olive oil."

The kid was 5 years old.

"He's got a palette that puts mine to shame," Pang said.

Pang said he tries to emulate the writing of Calvin Trillin and Jeffrey Steingarten. They have a more personal approach to food writing, Pang said, that uses all the senses.

"You're following them throughout their adventures," he said. "You really live vicariously through them."

Here's a peek at what he's working on now:

Pang tells me he's on a mission to find the spiciest food in Chicago. He's also trying to learn about the chemical compound in peppers that makes you sweat (a chemical called "capsaicin.").

"It's not only talking to people with a bottle of Pepcid AC," he said. "I'm also talking to nutritional biochemists and scientists about what happens when you're eating spicy foods."

So what's your paper doing to follow the eating habits of your community?

Pang's been on this issue for about two years -- and said it hasn't been easy being the "go-to guy for fast food."

"It requires a lot of extra work on the elliptical machine at night."

By Pat Walters
Naughton Fellow

[UPDATE -- 7:15 p.m. -- Rob Curley calls in. See below.]

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Poynter's Amy Gahran reported on Studio 55 just before it launched this past spring. American Journalism Review discussed Studio 55 in a story about innovation in journalism this past summer. Fast Company magazine profiled Curley and Studio 55 in November. Sign up to receive About the Job by e-mail: Click here (sent Mondays and Wednesdays at 9 a.m.)

Self-proclaimed "Internet punk" and local-journalism innovator Rob Curley has been at Washington Post.Newsweek Interactive since October, but still gets e-mails about work he did in Florida, where, for 14 months, he worked his magic at Naples Daily News.

That's where he helped establish something called Studio 55.

It's a vodcast. Don't worry, I didn't know what that was until recently, either. Studio 55 describes it this way:


The concept seems straightforward enough, and the result is super cool. Check it out here. How, though, did the Daily News pull this off?

Questions like that one seem to be driving the e-mails Curley still gets about the project. And it looks like he's planning to give us some answers. In a blog post Monday, Curley wrote:


Now, there have been times that Curley has let weeks go by between posts. I'm not saying he doesn't have plenty of good reasons. He's an extremely busy guy.

But the site says that when Curley does post next, he will write about a few specific aspects of the Naples vodcast:

• The strategy/thinking behind Studio 55

• The equipment used to produce the project

• The production process and staffing

Some questions to Curley: How did you (and your team) do it? What's the audience for this kind of thing? How many people are watching it? How much does it cost? And is it making money?

Can't wait to see some answers.

[UPDATE -- 7:15 p.m.]

Just heard from Rob Curley.

He told me he expects to post the first of three pieces about Studio 55 by mid-afternoon Wednesday.

Will we see anything about the economic viability of the project? Not likely. Curley did say, however, that newspapers' online ventures generally take about 18 months to catch on with readers. Studio 55 launched roughly nine months ago.

"I mean, the bottom line is this: People don't look at newspapers and think, 'Oh, my God, they probably have a television show.' So, we have this huge learning curve to overcome," Curley said on the phone.

Curley's choice to write about Studio 55 now is not an indication that he is hanging on to an old project. It's just the opposite. Within weeks, Curley's new employer, Washington Post.Newsweek Interactive, will launch its newest project.

Curley is writing about the vodcast now so that he can begin to devote space on his Web site to discussing the projects he's doing for the Post as they launch.

The newest Post project will feature video and will "definitely be something that's a little unusual for The Washington Post," Curley said.

"It's definitely not video interviews with Donald Rumsfeld," he said. "It has absolutely nothing to do with Capitol Hill ... I'm really excited about it."

Me too. So, keep an eye on Curley's site for some reflections on Studio 55. And get ready for something new from the Post.

If it's as cool as Curley told me it is, it'll be work a look.

By Leann Frola 
Naughton Fellow

Now there's a way to tap Google's resources when you're out on assignment. No Internet required.

If you're not sure how to get someplace or need a phone-book listing, Google has provided another option for you besides the traditional 411.

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Sign up to receive About the Job by e-mail: Click here (sent Mondays and Wednesdays at 9 a.m.)

It's called Google "Short Messaging Service." Basically, you send a text message to Google, and it texts you back.

Thanks to my reporter friend Betsy Lee at the St. Joseph (Mo.) News-Press, I discovered you can get not only phone book listings and driving directions, but movie showtimes, weather, dictionary definitions, product prices and answers to basic questions -- like a population count or an author's name. It doesn't cost more than a normal text message.

Dial 46645, or "GOOGL." Go to Google's interactive demo to practice typing in key words.

You'll receive up to three text messages. The results are text-only, so there won't be any links or Web pages.

I just tried it to find grocery stores here in St. Pete. I typed in "grocery stores, st. petersburg, florida," and received two text messages after about a five second wait. Both texts had a store's name, address and phone number.

It helped me to go to the interactive demo before trying it. The demo gives you blurbs on how to type in your request correctly. Here are a few that Google lists:

• To get business listings, enter what you want to find and include a city and state, or zip (ex: pizza 10013, Blockbuster boston ma)

• To get weather information, enter 'weather' (or 'w') followed by a city and state, or zip (ex: weather 10013, w New York, NY).

• To get driving directions, enter your start address then 'to' followed by your destination address (ex: 94040 to 94043, pasadena ca to los angeles).

Visit the help center to learn more about the basics.

The one frustration I found with this, however, is that it only gives selected information. I knew there were more grocery stores in the area than the ones that popped up on my screen. (And I also prefer talking to a person.) But it at least gave me some options if I hadn't known the area. And you can get way more information from it than 411.

If your fingers get tired from all the typing, send a text message requesting shortcuts. Send "tips" or "shortcuts" to 46645.

Here's one tip I already found on the site: It doesn't matter if you enter "D" or "d," or "PIZZA" or "pizza." UP, down, it makes no difference.

Google lists a few more tips on the help center:

• period between the business name and the location to make sure you get business listings ('pizza.10013' or 'pottery barn.boston ma')' Use 'D' or 'Define' before the word for dictionary definitions ('D prosimian').
• before the product, or 'price' or 'prices' at the beginning or end of your query to find prices using Froogle ('F Sony Handycam' or 'Sony Handycam price').
• 'W' or 'WX' followed by a location to get the latest weather conditions and four-day forecast for a particular U.S. location ('W dallas tx').

There's also a Troubleshooting section if you're having any problems.

Is this the best way to get information out on the field? That's up to you. But at least it's another option.

By Pat Walters
Naughton Fellow

Among the competitors that newspapers have blamed for their tanking ad revenues, craigslist is king. Classified ads, once a key piece of the newspaper business model, are migrating to the Internet, where it is easier, cheaper and increasingly more effective to post ads. What's good for craigslist, the logic goes, is bad for newspapers.

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Sign up to receive About the Job by e-mail: Click here (sent Mondays and Wednesdays at 9 a.m.)

But the problem, I think, is not that craigslist is bad. It's that the newspapers don't own it. Craigslist is very good, especially for reporters.

More than anything, the site is a killer place to find story ideas.

Newspaper reporters have long been gleaning story ideas from the classified ads in their publications. But the ads are cumbersome on paper. They appear in brain-numbingly small print. Most of them are short, and few have headlines that give readers a quick idea of what the ad is hawking. And, hell, paging through newsprint gets your hands dirty.

Enter craigslist. The site -- which is available in 450 cities worldwide, including locales in all 50 states; Washington, D.C.; Puerto Rico and Guam -- has been around since Craig Newmark built it in 1995. According to the site, it draws more than 5 billion page views a month, or 15 million unique users.

But let's get to the good stuff: the ads themselves. Each month, the site registers 14 million new classified ads. And wrapped up in lots of them are story ideas.

Admittedly, this idea does not work everywhere. If you live in the boondocks, it might be a while before craigslist makes it to your town. But if the site continues to grow, as it has over the past 10 years, you won't have to wait long.

I grew up outside Philadelphia, so we'll start there. I'm writing this on Tuesday afternoon. I'll start in the upper left-hand corner.

In what appears to be an effort to stay true to its anti-establishment vibe, the site is kind of a mess. But it's messy in the same way my desk is. I know everything is there, and if I shift things around long enough, the bits I'm looking for will, without a doubt, appear.

I look in "lost+found." Sadly, someone's dignity is missing. As is a member of the Yoder clan's birth certificate. And, of course, cameras, dogs and more dogs are lost, too.

Those ads were all listed today. The rest I will link to, though, will span the last few days. I love this. If I miss a day of the newspaper, some of the previous day's ads might disappear. On craigslist, they simply move down the page. I can scan weeks of old ones.

In addition to "lost+found," the site lists "personals" (very fun to click through), "housing" (less fun) and "jobs" (somewhere in between). My favorite ads, though, generally pop up in the "for sale" section.

I'm not saying we want to write about every petty sale that happens in town. But sometimes the stories behind these transactions are fascinating. Let's take a look.

In "general," I find a beast of a kegerator that makes me wonder who has parties that demand the simultaneous attention of three kegs and a collection of wigs that the seller claims will "knock the socks off your partner." In "collectibles," I turn up a 1902 Navy anvil for sale. And in "household," I discover a collection of albums on the block.

I ask not that we write about the things themselves, but the stories they tell us. Like the tip of an iceberg, all I see is a 1902 Navy anvil. What is the story that lingers beneath it?

We find those stories by asking questions about the things. Which ads prompt some of the strangest questions? My vote goes to the "wanted" ads.

What kind of person wants to buy a typewriter these days? Why doesn't the Air Force ROTC provide drill rifles to its students? Why is someone collecting hotel soaps? And why does this character want "an insanely weird job?"

And, of course, there are more.

Each of these is just a start, a nugget that prompts questions, and lets you know, without even leaving your desk, what people in your community are thinking, talking and caring about.

So, next time the business side knocks craigslist, keep in mind the story it helped you find last week. Let it be a reminder that we're in this business to tell stories that connect our readers to the human experience. Craigslist is doing just that.

We might as well find a way to be friends.

By Pat Walters
Naughton Fellow

Temperatures dropped below freezing in New York City this morning, prompting residents to don heavy coats, wool scarves and winter caps.

Is that news?

This week it is.

The Weather Channel reported that this past weekend's balmy weather broke temperature records in cities throughout the Northeast. The weather was front-page news. Winter-related business tanked in Poughkeepsie, N.Y.; allergy season struck early across the Northeast; and the director of the Coney Island, N.Y., Polar Bear Club has thought about cancelling this year's season of winter swimming.

RELATED RESOURCES

National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration Web site on El Niño NOAA Northeast Regional Climate Center NOAA on climate change This El Niño caused 1997 to become the hottest year on record. Poynter's Scott Libin on local televisioin and weather reporting Sign up to receive About the Job by e-mail: Click here (sent Mondays and Wednesdays at 9 a.m.)

Explaining this kind of weather to readers is tough. It turns out the winter warmth was mostly the fault of El Niño, a warming of parts of the Pacific Ocean that causes widespread, but temporary, changes to weather patterns in the Western Hemisphere. It generally strikes every five to seven years.

But many reports cited a contributing factor, a larger, longer-term and politically charged one: global warming. A group of British scientists predicted last week that a combination of El Niño and global warming might make 2007 the hottest year on record.

The science of climate change, though, has produced far more questions than answers. And fortunately, I didn't see a single report that claimed a warm weekend definitively proves that global climate change is happening and is caused by people. I did, however, see a few man-on-the-street quotes that drew that line.

Here, then, is the challenge: How do journalists write about the relationship between strange weather and climate change without exaggerating or oversimplifying the issue? How do we contextualize weather events and keep our reporting accurate and nuanced?

First, understand that weather and climate are two different things. Joel Achenbach, a staff writer for The Washington Post who also writes a science column for National Geographic magazine, makes this clear in a really fine piece of analysis that ran in Sunday's newspaper. Near the middle of the piece, he writes:

Denver got four feet of snow in December. The third big storm blew in Friday. Snowdrifts of 10 feet! An automobile-snuffing avalanche in a mountain pass west of town! In Denver, January is still January.

Because what we are experiencing and what Denver is experiencing are both part of a thing called weather, not climate. Climate change is real, but it's a background phenomenon, the cicada-song white noise on the horror-movie soundtrack, distinct from the thuds and screams and moans of specific weather events.

Like all good science writers, Achenbach used metaphor to illustrate this complicated idea.

Paul Douglas, chief meteorologist at WCCO-TV in Minneapolis, a city that, by the way, is in the midst of one of its warmest winters in history, offered this description of the relationship between weather and climate:

"Weather is whether you'll need shorts or long johns today," he said in a telephone interview. "Climate is the ratio of shorts to long johns in your closet."

Andrew Revkin, a science writer for The New York Times who has written extensively about climate change, told me the connection between any weather event and climate is a matter of statistics, and that it is essential for reporters to acknowledge this in their coverage.

"There are certain boilerplate sentences you can use," he said in a telephone interview. "[For example:] Rising global temperature [is projected to cause] stronger, whatever, hurricanes, downpours, fill in the blank; that sort of ABC pick one [sentence]. [Another is:] No particular weather event can be attributed to human actions. In fact, I have that sentence. I just cut it out of different stories.

"Once you have that in, you can go on about how wacky and weird, strange and fantastic the weather is."

If establishing the distinction between weather and climate is the first challenge, detailing that distinction is the next one.

These days, Achenbach told me, climate change is as much a political story as it is a science story. Within hours of his Sunday piece appearing online, it had received mounds of criticism from across the political spectrum. Climate change is a minefield for reporters.

"Everything that's written about [global warming] will be taken to have some subtle political message," he said in a telephone interview.

Politics may be hard to avoid when writing about global warming, but Revkin said it's important to try to keep it out of explanatory pieces.

"If you're writing about a science question, make sure you're asking scientists about it," he said. "There's plenty of room for advocates, on both sides, in a policy story."

Achenbach pointed out that a scientist's background is an important factor in analyzing the things he tells you.

"Climatologists and meteorologists don't sing from the same hymnal," he said. "They're really from different camps."

Climatologists, he said, are more inclined to explain weather as a manifestation of climate patterns. Meteorologists, on the other hand, often see weather as a set of isoloated events. Talk to both, and pair the interviews in your story.

Revkin threw some contacts my way. It's important, he said, to find someone who doesn't have an axe to grind. Here are his top four organizations to contact for information about climate change.

• American Meteorological Society

• National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration
  

• Penn State University Department of Meteorology
  

• Real Climate

All this explanatory reporting, of course, takes up valuable page space, or, for the people who bring us our local forecast every evening, air time.

"[Global warming] is one of the most complex issues of our time, and it doesn't lend itself well to ten-second sound bytes," Douglas, the WCCO-TV meteorologist, said. "It's hard to give this the context and perspective it deserves, certainly, in a regular two- or three-minute weather window."

Recently, though, Douglas has been doing longer pieces. He said he has been getting out from in front of the weather map, tromping into the field to tell stories about the tangible effects of climate change. He tries to show how things are changing.

So far, he said, viewers have responded well to the coverage.

It's impossible, the Post's Achenbach said, to write about weather without writing about climate change. It's what people are talking about. Right or wrong, when it gets warm in January, people blame global warming, not El Niño.

"If you're gonna write about the weather today, you have to learn to write about the climate, too," he said. "It should be part of your basic intellectual arsenal when you sit down at the keyboard."

So study up. Find some scientists who you think will tell it to you straight. And be willing to make it clear to your readers that even the scientists don't know everything yet.

Yesterday, Achenbach blogged about the connection between El Niño and global warming. So, could global warming cause El Niño to occur more frequently? Achenbach: "That's unclear. Dare we say, no one knows."

By Pat Walters
Naughton Fellow

Audio slideshows seem to be showing up on more and more news Web sites these days -- and not just on sites produced by national news organizations. From what I can tell, much of the growth is being driven by smaller newsrooms, with many of the collections created by one program. Soundslides.

Joe Weiss

Joe Weiss, who created Soundslides, visited Poynter last month to train faculty and staff in using the program. I sat down with him to discuss the software and its impact on photojournalism and online storytelling. 

Weiss began working as a photojournalist in 1996. Since then, he's worked in photojournalism and multimedia at The (Raleigh, N.C.,) News & Observer, The (Durham, N.C.,) Herald-Sun and MSNBC.com. His work has earned him a number of online journalism awards, and he has served as a judge for several journalism competitions.

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"Creating Multimedia: A Novice Shows the Way," by David Shedden Learn more about Soundslides here. Learn more about Joe Weiss here. See some great examples of Soundslides projects here. Sign up to receive About the Job by e-mail: Click here (sent Mondays and Wednesdays at 9 a.m.)

Soundslides, Weiss told me, was inspired by his work in 2002 on the staff of The Mountain Workshop, an annual photojournalism workshop run by Western Kentucky University.

By the end of the weeklong workshop, Weiss and his fellow staffers were faced with producing some 50 multimedia stories, with eight hours to do it. He needed a tool that would enable him to quickly and artfully build audio slideshows. And he wanted other journalists to have it, too.

So he made Soundslides.

What follows are some excerpts from a recording of my conversation with Weiss. The order and content of these passages have been edited for clarity. Weiss' words reveal a journalist whose skill as a software developer appears driven by his passion for innovative and powerful storytelling.

Weiss on the inherent value of still and moving images:


On the time and amount of staff it takes to make a good Soundslides project:


On possible challenges and pitfalls:


On his programming background:


On becoming a journalist:


On why journalism really seized him:


On getting started in multimedia reporting:


On what multimedia tools existed when he released Soundslides in 2005:


On pricing the $39.95 program:


On the attention Soundslides has brought him:


On people getting excited about using Soundslides:


On the value of the audio slideshow despite the widespread presence of online video:


On learning audio slideshow skills, and the value of the struggle:

When big newspapers lay off staffers, recruiters at other newspapers pay attention.

The Philadelphia Inquirer became the focus of that attention earlier this week when it laid off 71 newsroom staffers. Many of those journalists were young; I suspect all of them were highly qualified. Recruiters reacted, making calls to staffers, sending e-mails to them and, in at least one case, posting a comment to one of their blogs.

Wait, a comment on a blog?

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"Greetings!" it reads. "The Virginian-Pilot, based in Norfolk, Va., is a 200,000-circulation daily newspaper serving residents ..." The ad goes on to list four job openings -- a copy-desk chief, a sports editor, a designer and a reporter. A Business Week blogger who noticed the comment called it a "silver lining" to a sad situation.

Denise Bridges, director of newsroom recruitment at The Virginian-Pilot in Norfolk, said she posted the job ad as soon as she saw the blog entry.

"When I saw that blog in Philadelphia, I thought, 'Oh, great, here's a way I can get the word out to people quickly,' " Bridges said in a telephone interview Friday.

In the wake of other big layoffs, Bridges said, she has called reporters directly, sent e-mails and posted ads to journalism listservs.

"I post job openings pretty much anywhere I can," she said.

Makes sense, right? More job ads mean more potential applicants. And, unlike formal job-listing options, posting a comment to an entry on a popular blog is free.

But this is a tough time for Philly's journalists, and I wonder if a tactic like this one is too aggressive. When, after a lay off, can you recruit without being insensitive? What rules of taste should recruiters follow to keep their work both rigorous and gentle?

For some reflection on those tough questions, I called Joe Grimm, recruiting and development editor for the Detroit Free Press, who writes Poynter's "Ask the Recruiter" column.

Recruiters must consider tone, Grimm said, when working in the delicate climate that follows a big layoff.

"You want to do it in a way so that you're seen as helpful," he said, "rather than as a predator."

Grimm said that once he finds out who's been laid off -- which is a challenge in and of itself -- he prefers to e-mail journalists who appear to fit the openings he might have. Doing so puts control in the hands of the potential applicant. It gives him or her the chance to respond on their own terms.

Getting a phone call from a recruiter immediately after being laid off, Grimm said, can be jarring.

So, what about posting a job ad in a comment to a staffer's blog? Too aggressive? Or a smart and innovative recruiting method?

"I think that this is fine," Grimm said. "It's just a little bit stiff. ... It's all about how you write it."

The ad does feel as though it's been used before. Next to each opening is an identification number, not something that is likely to make the recently laid-off journalist feel welcome. But the tone of the message is friendly, and Bridges is, after all, offering jobs.

So far, Bridges has received two responses to the job ad. Both were from journalists who wrote to tell the recruiter they thought that posting the ad on the blog was nice. Neither of them works at the Inquirer, and neither is looking for a job at the Pilot.

Is posting a job ad as a comment to a blog a novel idea? Definitely. A nice one? Maybe. An effective one? It might be too early to tell.

By Leann Frola (more by author)
Naughton Fellow

Ask any journalist what journalism is really about. Chances are, he or she will mention the word "watchdog."

Keeping the government and powerful corporations in check, most journalists say, is one of the reasons they wanted to go into journalism.

No one fulfills that duty more than the investigative journalist. Yet with the industry's squeeze on costs and time, the beat arguably most sacred to journalism is often the one to feel the pressure.

"I can't think of a time when investigative reporting has faced more pressures than right now," wrote Al Tompkins, a former investigative reporter who now heads the broadcast/online group at Poynter, in a column last week.

Newspapers have cut back staffs, television stations rely less on sweeps periods, and commercial radio rarely does investigative journalism, he wrote.

Yet good investigative journalism continues.

But how exactly has cost-cutting affected investigative journalists' work? How do they start an investigation? Where do they find ideas? What ethical dilemmas do they encounter?

To find out, I interviewed six journalists honored for their investigative work. From different media, market sizes and locations, they each provided perspective on how to produce good investigative journalism despite industry pressures. Click the picture to find out what they had to say.


This project uses several Flash components. If you do not have a current Flash plugin, you can download it here. Click "Get Flash Player."

Just a few of the things you'll learn:

• Subscribe to investigative listservs. Investigative Reporters and Editors (IRE) has some good ones.

• Read trade journals. They often "talk behind the public's back." -- Roberta Baskin, investigative reporter

• Check IRE's Extra!Extra! to read about the latest investigations from journalists all over the country.

• There are always too many ideas. Weigh public importance, degree of difficulty, and timeliness when deciding which ones to pursue.

• Most of these journalists are in favor of a national shield law.

• Keep your editor informed. But do some research before you pitch an idea.

• Use anonymous sources sparingly.
  

• The best ideas come from "intense curiosity." -- Stuart Watson, investigative reporter; WCNC-TV
  

Update: Leann Frola's investigative Q&A will be posted Wednesday (Jan. 3) instead of today (Dec. 29) due to breaking news on Saddam Hussein's execution.


By Al Tompkins (more by author)

I can't think of a time when investigative reporting has faced more pressures than right now. And yet, once again, in 2006, journalists in print, broadcast and online newsrooms have managed to tell remarkable stories:

• The Dallas Morning News completed a year-long investigation of the trucking industry.

• WSMV-TV in Nashville, Tenn., broke stories about a failed 911 system.

• The Charleston (W.Va.) Gazette spent the past year looking at coal-mining safety after the Sago mine disaster a year ago.

• WTHR-TV in Indianapolis found significant problems with the community's tornado-siren system.

• The San Antonio Express-News found vets euthanizing hundreds of racehorses in Texas. Raced too early and too often, the horses were breaking down on the track.
  

• Scripps Howard News Service tracked the story of more than 500 private contractors in Iraq and Afghanistan who have died on the job.

• The Charleston (W. Va.) Gazette ran a series about methadone overdose deaths nationwide. Six months later, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration issued a public health advisory for the drug and strenghtened the warnings on its package insert.

• In Miami, CBS4 reported on the brutal conditions of mentally ill criminal defendants in the Miami-Dade Pre-trial Detention Center.

• The Associated Press published a series, "Inquest for a Warrior," examining the April 2004 death of Pat Tillman in Afghanistan:
• Startling findings in the Tillman probe
• Pat Tillman's last day, reconstructed
• Penalties resulting from Tillman's death
• Charges possible in Pat Tillman's death
• Sources used by the AP in Tillman probe

• An ongoing special report by The Washington Post investigated federal agriculture subsidies, which totaled more than $25 billion in 2005.

• The St. Louis Post-Dispatch reviewed thousands of records from the Department of Mental Health and found that the state's mentally ill and mentally retarded "have been sexually assaulted, beaten, injured and left to die by abusive and neglectful caregivers in a system that for years has failed at every level to safeguard them."

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In all of the years I have worked in and around investigative reporting, I have heard journalists say every year, "It is getting harder and harder to do our job." It is more than a feeling these days.

We will begin 2007 with many new pressures. Newspapers are laying off staffs. TV stations are changing from measuring households to measuring individuals with "people meters." As this new technology moves into the ratings systems, sweeps periods that TV stations used to measure Nielsen ratings are becoming a thing of the past. Pushing up ratings during sweeps periods has long been the reason many broadcast investigative units existed. But with sweeps periods gone, every day will be a ratings day.

Commercial radio has all but ceased investigative work, except in a handful of markets where radio news has managed to remain strong. Public radio and television have stepped forward to fill the need for thoughtful and in-depth reporting on complex issues.

So, how do great investigative journalists still do what they do? Poynter Online's Leann Frola interviewed six investigative reporters and editors to find out how they do their jobs in these days of cost cutting, homeland security and new pressures on journalists to give up confidential sources. Check back Tuesday to see what they had to say.

Scott Waldman is 31 years old. He has been working as a journalist for two years. A little more than a month ago, he was on a military base outside Baghdad, clad in a Kevlar helmet and body armor, reporting on the war.

In my last column, I described my effort to answer a question: How might a young journalist prepare to report from Iraq?

Stay home, I was told. Iraq, I learned, is a place in which it has become nearly impossible to do journalism. The risk of being kidnapped or killed, Wall Street Journal reporter Farnaz Fassihi told me, has begun to outweigh the benefits of reporting the story.

www.goerie.com

The evening I posted that column, I received an e-mail from Waldman, a reporter at The Erie (Pa.) Times-News. He told me he had recently returned from an embed in Iraq. "There's a lot I wish I knew going into this," he wrote, "but it's not an impossible task to pull off."

Waldman's e-mail reminded me of something Reuters editor Paul Holmes had told me the day before. As an embed, he said, "you are actually able to function pretty well as a reporter." The assignment limits a reporter's work, but keeps him comparatively safe.

I called Waldman to ask him about his recent trip to Iraq.

It was August, Waldman told me, when he asked his editor if he could go to Iraq. The editor showed interest but wanted details. For the next two weeks, Waldman did research.

During an embed, he learned, the military provides everything you need to survive -- food, shelter, transportation and, of course, protection. There is no fee. But other expenses, Waldman found, would be plentiful.

By Nov. 1, Waldman was on a plane to Kuwait City. His destination: the 329th Medical Company, a U.S. Army Reserve unit spread across several bases in the area surrounding Baghdad. Of the 70 soldiers in the unit, roughly 40 of them were from the Erie area.

By Nov. 3, Waldman was in Baghdad. The round-trip flight to Kuwait cost the newspaper $1,200. Renting a satellite phone was another $400. He borrowed a Level 4 Kevlar helmet and bulletproof vest -- a set he said was worth upwards of $2,000 -- from the local SWAT team. The paper supplied him with a Dell laptop, an Olympus digital-audio recorder, a Nikon D200 SLR digital camera and a Sony Handycam.

In all, Waldman estimates the trip cost nearly $3,000.

By the standards of this war, his trip was cheap, and his mission was simple.

As a reporter for a local newspaper, his focus was on Erie's soldiers. He wrote about their lives. He wrote about the things they saw, the things they heard about and the things they did.

"The things The L.A. Times and The New York Times are doing are important, but there are all these other little stories, too," Waldman said. "The focus really was, 'Here's what Erie folks are doing in this war.' ... And, to me, I haven't seen a lot of that coverage."

Waldman kept a grueling schedule, generally reporting two stories and a blog entry each day. He made pictures, edited them and wrote cutlines. He recorded audio and video, as well.

"You have to learn to have the endurance not to sleep," Waldman said. "I had to drink a lot of coffee and stagger my caffeine intake strategically throughout the day."

It was exhausting work. Waldman rarely showered or changed his clothes. But he was safe.

"When you're in the bases, you feel pretty secure," Waldman said. "They lob mortars in all the time. ... But the bases are so huge. ... It's like throwing pennies into a cornfield."

RELATED RESOURCES

Check out Erie (Pa.) Times-News reporter Scott Waldman's Iraq project here. Read over the rules on embedding the military provides to its Public Affairs Officers here. See some of Leistner's pictures and learn more about the book, "Unembedded," here. And if you still haven't seen it, spend some time with CJR's oral history of journalism in Iraq here. Poynter's Aly Colon wrote about embedding in 2003. Read his work here and here. Sign up to receive About the Job by e-mail: Click here (sent Mondays and Wednesdays at 9 a.m.)

Most embeds, even those with combat units, are relatively safe assignments, Holmes told me.  Soldiers protect the reporter and, if needed, provide medical attention. But in exchange for safety, what does a reporter give up?

To answer this question, I found Canadian freelance photojournalist Rita Leistner. In 2003 she embedded with an American cavalry unit in Baghdad. In 2004 she returned to Iraq and worked independently.

An embed, she told me, provides safety but presents serious limitations.

Leistner said her embed was informal. In 2003, she entered the country alone, crossing the Turkish border illegally with the help of a smuggler. Before long, she was spending the afternoons with an American cavalry unit. And, eventually, she said, the soldiers invited her to live with them at their base. She spent three months with those men, composing a photo essay about the unit. Leistner said their story was important, but it was not the only one she would tell.

When Leistner returned to Iraq in March of 2004, she did so alone, again. But this time, she said, she continued to work independently. She was unembedded.

Leistner photographed a face of the war that she said often goes undocumented. Her pictures illustrate the destruction and death of the war, at close range. Some of them show the war as it was seen by the insurgents.

Leistner and three other independent photojournalists recently published some of their work from Iraq in a book called "Unembedded: Four Independent Photojournalists on the War in Iraq." The pictures in the book are striking. Check it out here.

Making those pictures was extremely dangerous. But, to Leistner, telling the stories was worth the risk. They were pictures she could not have made if she had been embedded.

"You can get a great close-up of a soldier firing a missile off of a tank, but the missile is going to land a mile or two away," Leistner said, describing the work she and her colleagues did as the city of Najef was being attacked by coalition forces. "Who's going to take a picture of where that missile lands?

"Whoever you're with," Leistner said, "that's who you're taking pictures of."

Leistner's work highlights the limitations of embedding reporters with military units. But they are limitations about which Waldman did not have to worry. He was sent to write about American soldiers; and that's what he did.

The embed, then, as a reporting tactic, did little to hamper Waldman's objective. He told me he was given 24/7 access to the soldiers. He ate, worked out, slept and traveled with the soldiers he was reporting on.

But that, it turns out, can present another set of challenges.

"It's really difficult to be living with the people you're covering," Waldman said. "I mean, everyday these guys would be reading these things as soon as I posted them online."

Sometimes, he said, the military reviewed his copy before he posted it, a sacrifice military rules required Waldman to make.

Waldman often received letters from readers back in Erie, parents of the men and women about whom he was writing. They were happy with his work. And that worried him.

"You have to ask yourself, as a journalist," Waldman said," 'Just because the families are writing and are pleased, does that mean I'm doing my best job?' "

The potential for a reporter to be influenced by his relationship with the soldiers he is reporting on is great during an embed. It is a concern, Holmes said, that every embedded reporter must deal with. It's something editors should look out for, too.

"If you're living in difficult situations with people, and they're getting shot at, and you're getting shot at, it creates a bond," Holmes told me. "And I'm not saying that's a bad thing. ... But [sometimes] you can't see the woods for the trees. Your field of vision in a military unit is really limited to your immediate surroundings. ... I think it's important to realize that when you go into an embed."

There's a trade-off, then, I think, between journalistic independence and safety. Leistner said she was spied on, harrassed and shot at when she was working independently in Iraq. Her life was constantly at risk.

Waldman, on the other hand, said he felt safe.

Leistner told me she has not been back to Iraq since 2004. It is too dangerous, she said, a statement that sounds strange coming from a woman who has endured such terrifying danger. She plans to spend the winter in Syria, learning Arabic.

Waldman's work shows that, under certain circumstances, a young journalist can report safely from Iraq.

He knows the pieces he wrote do not tell the whole story of Iraq.

But does the public? As more and more journalists are forced off the streets of Baghdad into bureaus and American military units, I wonder how it is affecting our understanding of this war. It scares me to think that, at some point, stories from embeds like Waldman might be all we have left.

By Pat Walters
Naughton Fellow

For young journalists anxious to cover what many regard as the biggest story of our time, the temptation to go to Iraq is real.

There appear to be jobs available. As far back as Jan. 2005, the Chicago Tribune reported it was having trouble finding people to send to the war. Earlier this month, the Los Angeles Times posted openings in its Baghdad bureau.

But what training does one need to report on this war? What does it take? What would I need to do, I wondered, if I were interested in going to Iraq?

RELATED RESOURCES

Read "Into the Abyss," CJR's oral history of the journalists who have covered the Iraq War. The magazine interviewed 47 journalists about their experiences of the war. It is well-worth exploring, particularly for those of us whose understanding of the war exists only by way of the stories told by the courageous journalists featured in this project, and others like them. Sign up to receive About the Job by e-mail: Click here (sent Mondays and Wednesdays at 9 a.m.)

The beginnings of an answer came in the pages of the most recent issue of the Columbia Journalism Review.


These words belong to Wall Street Journal reporter Farnaz Fassihi, whose private e-mail in 2004 about her experiences covering Iraq generated a wide discussion about the war and about the relevance of the personal opinions of reporters covering it. Her most recent views are included along with those of other correspondents in CJR's extraordinary oral history of the journalists who've covered the Iraq War.

I've thought, but never very deliberately, about what it would be like to travel overseas and write about war. I am young, driven and physically able. But the thought is more a dream than a practical aspiration.

A remark by another journalist, this one an editor, struck me as an echo, and an extension, of Fassihi's message.

Paul Holmes, who is editor of politics and general news for Reuters, told CJR that he advises young reporters to stay out of Iraq.


Perhaps this man knows the answer, I thought. Exactly what sort of experience would he say qualifies someone to go to Iraq? Again, I asked myself, what does it take?

The question, I soon discovered, evades a simple answer.

Holmes -- who has reported from Bosnia, Croatia, Israel, Palestine, Afganistan and Iraq, to name a few -- told me the conditions in Iraq are profoundly worse than he has ever encountered.

Fassihi, the Wall Street Journal reporter, agrees. She spoke with me Friday from Beruit, where she is on leave, working on a book about Iraq. In previous conflicts, she said, journalists enjoyed a degree of immunity; in Iraq, it is gone.

"It doesn't even compare," she said. "Iraq is another planet compared to anywhere else ... In Iraq, it seems all bets are off. For the sheer fact that you are a foreigner, or work for a foreign [news] agency, you are a target."

You cannot simply walk out onto the street, approach an Iraqi and talk to him, Holmes said. You might be shot, or kidnapped. As for your prospective source, he may be beaten or killed, simply for speaking to you.

"I think some people have this view that Iraq is this big story out there that has to be told," he said, "but the fact of it is that you, as a non-Iraqi, are hugely constrained by the danger and the circumstances of it."

So you stay inside. Holmes told me Reuters rents a house in Karada, a neighborhood, across Tigris from the Green Zone, that has become a nest of foreign news organizations. The BBC, Holmes said, sits across the street from Reuters. The New York Times and the Associated Press are just up the road.

The neighborhood is relatively safe, surrounded by walls, barbed wire and checkpoints manned by armed guards, Holmes said. The buildings are secured with similar caution. Sandbags, barbed wire and armed guards protect the journalists inside.

But it is isolating. Some journalists, Holmes said, particularly those who lack experience, cannot handle such conditions. Long days are spent inside, working hard, alongside the same people with whom you socialize, eat and sleep.

"For most of your six weeks there as a Reuters journalist," Holmes said of Reuter's regular rotation, "that's your world."

Fassihi's take: "In Iraq, as important as the story is, it's not particularly a satisfying place to work, journalistically. The conditions are very grave ... The risks are starting to outweigh the benefits."

To go to Iraq alone as a freelancer, lacking protection, Fassihi said, is suicide.

What, then, can an ambitious young journalist do? Stay out of Iraq, Holmes said. And let him send you someplace else.

"They need to gain [the] experience of covering action stories of some sort or another," Holmes said. "Not necesarily stories where you're getting shot at ... but things like demonstrations, disasters, riots."

He sends less experienced reporters to Jordan. He sends them to Israel. And he send them to Afghanistan.

"Kabul is actually a good place to try someone who has promise," Holmes said. "People will talk to you."

You must become street savvy, resourceful and independent, Holmes said. You must be able to work on your own. One place you can learn this without going overseas: New Orleans.

"We send people in there for a month," Holmes said. "And it really helps less experienced reporters get a grip on developing their own stories ... They have to be self-starters to make it work."

Nothing but experience, Holmes said, can prepare you for Iraq. Even some of the best, most experienced war correspondents have said they are hindered by the conditions there. For this reason, both Holmes and Fassihi said, the help of professional and trusted Iraqi journalists has been critical.

"I think that it's fair to say that without an Iraqi staff and Iraqi journalists we couldn't do our work," Fassihi said. "In most other conflicts -- in Afghanistan -- I can hire a driver, a fixer, and work like that. In Iraq, you can't just hire someone off the street."

Of the 70 journalists Reuters has working in Iraq, Holmes said, only seven of them are not Iraqis. The local journalists working for Reuters ask that their names not be attached to their stories. They fear for their lives.

"What I'm telling you now relates to Iraq in late 2006," Holmes said. "It hasn't always been like that since the beginning ... There was a time that reporters could go and walk around and talk to people."

I would like to think that someday reporters will once again walk the streets of Baghdad. That they will talk casually and candidly to the people who live there. But even if that day comes soon -- and I hope it does -- I suspect I'll stay here.

I am young. I am not prepared to work in a place like Iraq. More than anything, I have a lot to learn, and I think I ought to learn some of it here.

I've walked too few of these American streets, talked with too few of my neighbors, I think, to leave them, and their stories, behind.

By Leann Frola (more by author)
Naughton Fellow

It was the day after Katrina hit when the hospital's backup generators went out. A young man gasped for air in his bed. Another patient's clear plastic tube, attached to his bladder, filled with blood. Their mothers watched, helpless. Charity Hospital's backup power system was under water -- cutting off hundreds of patients from their machines.

This scene sets the stage for a 22-part series that ran in The Atlanta Journal-Constitution earlier this year. The series documented the struggle of those trapped in two New Orleans hospitals after the hurricane. Reported by the AJC's Jane Hansen, the series shows it's possible, despite privacy laws, to get the story and still respect the patient.

RELATED RESOURCES

"HIPAA: What Is It and Where Can I Learn About It?" By Leann Frola The Association of Health Care Journalists' HIPAA overview Radio-Television News Directors Association's Guide to Health Coverage Under HIPAA "HIPAA Horror Stories," by Al Tompkins Sign up to receive About the Job by e-mail: Click here (sent Mondays and Wednesdays at 9 a.m.)

For Hansen, HIPAA -- that "H-word" dreaded by journalists that stands for the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act -- didn't stop her from getting what she needed. In part, because the hospitals were in such dire conditions that few people cared about the law. And, in part, because she found ways around the law when it did come up.

What helped her most, Hansen said in a phone interview, was going directly to the patients and their families. Once she got the OK from them, the doctors gave her information freely.

Getting the patient's approval is necessary even if you can get information without it, New York Times health care reporter Richard Pérez-Peña said in an e-mail interview. Privacy laws are there for a reason, he said. And even if they weren't, you should respect the patient's privacy.

"The problem you encounter is that doctors, hospitals and other providers act as though the privacy laws exist to protect them, not the patients," he said.

Sometimes hospitals turn reporters away without asking patients for their approval to be interviewed. Or, they discourage them from cooperating, Charlie Ornstein, a health policy reporter at the Los Angeles Times, said in an e-mail interview.

"In a couple cases, I have had signed consents from patients, authorizing the release of personal information, and yet hospitals still somehow have found ways to resist," he said.

Ornstein, who is also vice president of the Association of Health Care Journalists, recommends bringing HIPAA tip sheets (like the ones you can find here) to explain the details of the law to a health care administrator.

Hansen said she encountered problems while gathering information on the patients who died at Charity in the days after the storm. Medical personnel gave her conflicting information, so Hansen tried to corroborate the patients' names with a Charity administrator. The administrator told her the hospital couldn't release the names because of HIPAA.

"I said, 'Look. I'm not going to use this name. I just want to make sure what I've written about him is accurate,' " Hansen said.

Once the administrator understood that Hansen only wanted verification and wouldn't use the patients' names, she gave her the information. In one case, when another hospital administrator wouldn't talk, Hansen read him a sentence that she believed to be true and asked if it'd be accurate if she were to publish it.

"We spoke a little in code," Hansen said.

When you're trying to find a patient with a specific disease, Ornstein said to browse Internet chat rooms and advocacy groups, in addition to hospitals and physicians' offices. After contacting the patient, ask him or her to sign a consent form that will provide the hospital or physician with the patient's permission to discuss his or her case.

"Be persistent," Ornstein said. "Explain exactly what you are looking for and why it is important that you have the information."

Patients have also called Ornstein directly to ask him to investigate problems with their care. Other times, he has located patients using anonymous tips. In these cases, Ornstein asks the patients to request their own medical records. Then he reads them and passes them on to medical experts to review. Only after that does he approach the hospital for a response.

If a health care provider won't cooperate, ask around, Pérez-Peña said. It often takes several tries, but eventually you'll find a provider who's willing to talk with patients about getting their permission for an interview.

When you're focusing on a particular provider, it can be more difficult, he said, "especially if that provider is afraid of scrutiny." So talk to people entering and leaving the business, until you find someone who will cooperate. By hanging around, you might see and hear things you normally wouldn't. If you can't hang out in the office, you can always wait outside the building.

And sometimes, Pérez-Peña said, people just blurt out what you're looking for.

"The fact is (I shouldn't admit this), when you don't directly ask people for information, they're often pretty sloppy about safeguarding it."

Ever try to use your laptop in the car? I have. I set mine on the dashboard once to track down unsecured wireless networks in the town I was covering -- for a story, of course.

It was a pain in the neck.

What for me was an annoying afternoon is, for Chuck Myron, a normal one. A story in Monday's Washington Post tells me that Myron is a mobile journalist, or MoJo, at The News-Press in Fort Myers, Fla. He's just one of a fleet of journalists thrown into an experiment by parent company Gannett. He and other MoJos cover local news to the extreme, writing brief dispatches about everything -- from a minor traffic accident to a cat in a tree -- and posting them to zoned sections of the newspaper's Web site.

The Post story, written by reporter Frank Ahrens, came to me via an e-mail from a friend. Preceding the story was a note from one of her colleagues. "If this is the future of journalism," it read, "I better cash in my 401(k)."

RELATED RESOURCES

Sign up to receive About the Job by e-mail: Click here (sent Mondays and Wednesdays at 9 a.m.) Read News-Press executive editor Kate Marymount's Dec. 10 reaction to Ahrens' story.

There are lots of reasons to be concerned about the MoJo experiment. Most of the content created by MoJos wouldn't meet the standard definition of news. Much of it appears only online. And, according to the Post story, little MoJo content is proofed by an editor.

Ahrens tells me he likes the idea of getting reporters out of the newsroom and into the communities they cover. In some ways, he says, it's good, old-fashioned shoe-leather journalism. But, based on what he saw in Fort Myers, the experiment has a long way to go.

"At times it seems like there's a lack of discrimination in the material," Ahrens says. "It doesn't matter if it's a school lunch menu or a city council meeting."

No doubt, there are flaws. MoJo journalism does "some things that really stick a thumb in the eye of journalism orthodoxy," Ahrens says. But he is quick to point out that this is an early edition of an innovative project. In essence, it's a draft.

One of my colleagues, Poynter Online associate editor Meg Martin, wondered what difference there is between a MoJo and a citizen journalist. The MoJos are, of course, paid by the newspaper. But despite their expensive college degrees, they produce content that, for the most part, requires very little in the way of journalistic training.

What if a news organization were to turn the Gannett formula on its head? Instead of paying professional journalists to produce basic local content, locals could be paid to do it themselves. According to a Gannett news release, that's part of the plan -- MoJos are expected to spend half their time training locals to post dispatches of their own to the newspaper's Web site.

But to find an example of a full flip of the formula, we need only look to a recent move by Yahoo News and Reuters. According to a story in Monday's New York Times, the two news organizations have partnered to place user-submitted photographs and videos throughout their Web sites. If Reuters decides to distribute one of the photographs to the subscribers of its news service, the Times reports, the citizen photojournalist will be paid accordingly.

"This is looking out and saying, 'What if everybody in the world were my stringers?' " Reuters media group president Chris Ahearn tells the Times.

Despite the flaws inherent in experimentation, one thing is certain: It is not going away. As circulation and ad revenues continue to fall, news organizations will continue to seek ways to pull them back up -- and to find entirely new ways to make money.

Most editors agree that enhancing local coverage is key.

Ahrens, the Post reporter, knows that. On his washingtonpost.com blog Monday, Ahrens wrote that his newspaper recently underwent an attitude adjustment, shifting its unspoken slogan from "If you don't get it, you don't get it," to "If it's important to you, then it's important to us."

At The News-Press, that means deploying a team of MoJos armed with laptops, cameras and recorders. At the Post, Ahrens says, it means hiring newspaper Web site designer Rob Curley, known nationwide for his groundbreaking work in creating an intensely local and interactive Web site for the Naples (Fla.) Daily News and the Lawrence (Kan.) Journal-World. And, across the board, it might simply mean that regular reporters start to act a little like MoJos.

Look, for example, at the image of Myron, the Fort Myers MoJo, that ran alonside the story about him. It wasn't made by a photojournalist. Ahrens did it himself.

Ever make it past page 10 on a Google search? If not, you might want to reconsider. Some of the best untold stories of your coverage area could be buried beneath those top pages.

At least that's what my friend, a young journalist on her second newspaper-reporting job, has found. She often uses Google searches when struggling with a story idea or finding sources.

RELATED RESOURCES

"Keeping Up With Google" By Sree Sreenivasan "Searching Blogs" By Jonathan Dube "Better Googling: Things You Didn't Know Google Does" By Sree Sreenivasan "Best Tips of the Year" By Jonathan Dube

"Skip the first 10 pages or so," Betsy Lee, a reporter for St. Joseph News-Press -- a 40,000-circulation daily newspaper in northwest Missouri -- said in an e-mail to Poynter Online. "You can find information and people that are not on the radar screen."

Lee started using this technique for her first journalism job. She compiled a folder of information about the community she was covering that went beyond the well-known institutions.

"When I got past the Chamber of Commerce Web site to the more personal pages, I found real people with interesting stories," Lee said.

She uses this type of searching as a starting point -- and to save time on deadline. Earlier this year, Lee had to quickly turn out a story on emergency contraception becoming available without a prescription. She wanted to talk with someone who had experience with the drug. So she typed several combinations of the topic and her city into Google:

• "plan b" and "St. Joseph, MO"
• "ec" and "St. Joseph, MO"
• "emergency contraception" and "St. Joseph, MO"

Once she hit results, Lee scanned for personal Web pages, blogs and MySpace pages. She found a young woman who had used emergency contraception and had posted her experiences on a personal Web site. After e-mailing her and getting a response, the two chatted over the phone.

"People are often extremely honest online," Lee said. "She wrote that using the emergency contraception pill was like 'having her period times 100' -- a quote she repeated later when we talked."

With the same technique, Lee also found a business owner to interview when reporting a story about Voice over Internet Protocol, a technology that allows you to make calls using a broadband Internet connection instead of a regular phone line. She typed in "Skype," a popular VoIP program, and different cities in her coverage area. After scanning business Web pages, she found her source. People often include their name and contact information on their sites, she said.

Lee gave me another hint: Make sure to click on the "cached" version of the page, which highlights the words you typed into Google. That way, you don't have to scan the whole page.

"You can just zip down to the highlighted words to see if the page is helpful."

An experienced beat reporter's inbox is a magnet for useful information. It collects praise, criticism and, most importantly, story tips. Sometimes it even pulls in a joke or two.

Here's one from a recent e-mail to Washington Post military correspondent Tom Ricks.

No, I did not sneak into Ricks' office over the Thanksgiving holiday and read his e-mails. He gave me this one. In fact, he gave it to everyone who reads the Sunday edition of the Post.

About two months ago, Ricks, at the suggestion of an editor, started giving his readers a peek into his inbox.

In a regular Sunday feature called, simply enough, "Tom Ricks's Inbox," the Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter reprints an excerpt of a recent e-mail or e-mail exchange. Recently, most of the published messages have been coming from Iraq. They range from odd, like the one I link to above, to somber, like this one.

Former Washington Post Outlook editor Susan Glasser, recently promoted to assistant managing editor for national news, gets credit for the idea. Its beauty lies in its simplicity. The feature creates a nearly direct link between the source -- who, in this case, is often overseas -- and the reader.

"I think that, as intended, it gives people a feel of my daily e-mail exchanges about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and about general national-security issues," Ricks said in an e-mail to Poynter Online. "This back-and-forth conversation wasn't really possible in previous wars, for technological reasons. But now a lot of soldiers in Iraq have access to the Internet, and so it is possible to stay in touch with guys on the front lines."

It seems to me that this is a model other beat reporters could apply. Local government? Environment?

But connectedness is key. A lively e-mail dialogue between the reporter and readers/sources is the fuel that keeps this model running. Ricks, whose source list stretches for nearly 800 single-spaced pages, has got that.

If you do, too, see if you can find a way to make this work. To avoid burning bridges, get permission from your reader/source before putting his or her e-mail message in the paper. That's what Ricks does.

And so far, he's received nothing but praise from sources, readers and even his neighbors.

It's Sunday evening and I'm standing among words and writers on the fourth floor of The Coop. We've come to the Harvard Square bookstore to hear renowned writing coach Jack Hart read from his recently published book, "A Writer's Coach." Standing next to me is Ben Montgomery, a 28-year-old staff writer for the St. Petersburg (Fla.) Times.

Gangrey. Someone asks him: "What does it mean?" Montgomery pauses.

Of the dozen or so people who have come to the reading, most are in Boston for the same reason I am. Harvard's Nieman Conference on Narrative Journalism has drawn nearly a thousand journalists -- mostly writers, but some editors, photographers and at least one comic artist -- to this city from all across the globe. Earlier this evening, it ended.

Gangrey. Montgomery says: "It's a play off gangrene."

On June 1, 2005, Montgomery launched a blog. In those days, he was working as a reporter for The Tampa (Fla.) Tribune. On deadline, he would click to the Pulitzer Web site and scan stories by Rick Bragg and Kate Boo. Their words helped him find his own.

Some call the work Montgomery channelled -- and still does -- narrative journalism. He says that term is redundant. Any good journalist, he says, tells stories, ones that have beginnings and endings, not wholly unlike the tales that opened and closed our eyes as children.

But in that summer, Montgomery felt there was no place that gathered those stories as they were told in the newspaper each day. There was WriterL, a popular listserv that tracks narrative journalism; but it was too academic for him. So he made a place of his own.

Gangrey. Montgomery tells me on the phone: "It's a daily inventory of fresh good journalism that, at its best, sparks discussion about the craft."

Since its inception, it has lured a growing community of writers. Roughly 150 of them now visit each day. Some 20 of them regularly post responses to the things they read. Montgomery, a father or two, maintains the blog with help. Michael Kruse, 29, also a staff writer at the St. Petersburg Times, is a driving force. Two other young journalists also assist.

Each day they post links to stories, tips and ideas. On a good day, the postings draw comments. On a great one, discussion.

"It's a place to talk shop with people from all over the country," he says.

Gangrey. Gangrey. Gangrey. Like an infection, Montgomery says, bad writing is destroying the craft of journalism. The blog's humble mission: "To prolong the slow death of newspapers."

It's 11 p.m. Still Sunday. Books and pens and notes were put to rest hours ago.

In a 25th-floor hotel room, the television is on. Montgomery, Kruse, Thomas Lake (another talented young Times staff writer) and I watch football. In the morning, we will leave this city.

Despite the television, the young journalists talk about writing. They argue about nut graphs. What are they? Do we need them? Do they ruin narrative?

I sit among them and I listen, intrigued, curious and delighted at the thought of a blog.

By Joe Grimm
Recruiting and Development Editor
Detroit Free Press

A newsroom, bedeviled by missed deadlines, a short-handed copy desk and a lack of editing candidates, gets creative.

It finds a company that offers editing services. The company is overseas, perhaps in India or Singapore.

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Powered by fiber-optic connections that carry data all the way around the world in less than a second, the off-shore company offers a money-back guarantee on deadline performance. In a pinch, it could throw 30 editors at an edition, three times as many as the newspaper could ever afford to deploy in its own office.

The quality is good. Hundreds of thousands of people in India grow up in English-speaking schools, and they're working hard to build careers. The work is cheap by U.S. standards. The rate is a third less than what the American newspaper is paying. There are no health benefits, vacations or sick days, and no utility or equipment costs to the newspaper.

Could it happen? In some respects (though not yet the copy desk), it already has.

The Columbus Dispatch reported Saturday that it will eliminate 90 jobs as it shifts graphic design work for advertising clients to a group of designers in Pune, India.

The Chicago Tribune is moving the work of 40 circulation customer-contact workers to APAC Customer Service in the Philippines. The newspaper reported that this follows a similar action by its sister, the Los Angeles Times.

MAXIMIZE YOUR VALUE

Here are some areas where copy editors can maximize their value and security: - Complex local stories that require more than surface knowledge. - Legally, politically or racially charged content. -New-media skills. Technical work was some of the first to be exported, but forged with sensitive journalism, it becomes less portable. - Headlines. Although English is taught widely in many countries, idiomatic American English does not come so easily. Turn a head start on headlines into true mastery. (To learn more about writing headlines, check out the "Writing Better Headlines" course at News University.) - Page design. Although some overseas companies offer design services, it will be most difficult to provide that on pages with tight deadlines and snap play changes. - Staff-produced content. Reporters and editors will not welcome a call from the copy desk in India asking them the correct spelling of a local name. The more copy editors are valued for face-to-face communication skills, the safer their jobs will be. - Leadership. If newspapers send editing offshore, they will need editors to coordinate between those who edit in the newsroom and those on the other side of the world. To test and improve your copy editing skills, check out the "Cleaning Your Copy" online course at NewsU.

The New York Times reported that, in its last months, Knight Ridder considered whether it could consolidate copy editing among widespread papers. It's not that big a leap to move that desk overseas.

Stateside copy editors, traditionally on the right side of supply-and-demand job security, are on the wrong side of offshoring. Some of the safest jobs in the newsroom are becoming the most exportable.

One company, Hi-Tech Export, offers 40 hours of proofreading and copy editing for $295. The company, located in Ahmedabad, India, started in 1992 and did data processing for other Indian companies. It has expanded its offerings and, since 2000, has been developing markets in the United States, Canada, Europe and Australia. Its U.S. office is in Omaha.

Another company, Cicada Media in Bangalore, India, focuses on corporate and marketing communications. It offers to correct errors in grammar, spelling, usage and style, and to proofread. Sound familiar?

At The DallasMorning News recently, as people awaited word on buyouts, they griped that their in-house tech questions often were handled by techies in India.

As a recruiter, I frequently get e-mails from people in India offering to work for the Detroit Free Press. Immigration would not be an issue, as they don't plan to move. They are offering, in effect, to be trans-world telecommuters. Their pitches, naive and off-the-mark at first, are getting sharper.

Going in the other direction, U.S. companies are advertising for copy editors now on Monster India, the overseas cousin of the Monster.com job site we know here.

Hi-Tech is not the problem. Nor is Cicada nor Monster nor any company in particular. The problem is that globalization, digitization and tight supply-chain management let all kinds of companies break down jobs, divvy up the parts, ship the components around the world to the best bidders and reassemble them all by deadline. The Newspaper Guild and others have fought offshoring, but protesting won't dent the incentives.

The challenge of segmentation is also the key to survival.How can copy editors -- or any workers -- protect their jobs?

The challenge of segmentation is also the key to survival. Break down the job, analyze the components and take the parts you can do best. New York Times writer Thomas L. Friedman, who laid out scenarios like this in "The World is Flat," differentiates between high-value custom work and "plain vanilla" exportable tasks. The vanilla gets gobbled up first.

The parts of a copy editor's job that would seem most vulnerable to offshoring are also the most mundane: reading proofs and editing calendar listings. How could someone overseas have enough local knowledge to edit calendar listings? The same way someone might adopt an American name and learn a regional U.S. accent to provide more comforting service from a call center 12 time zones away. It can be done.

How about wire stories? How much better are we in my newsroom in Detroit at editing stories from Asia than, say, a person in India? We know our market better, but we are further from the story. Wire stories, which receive a couple of edits before they ever get to us, could be vulnerable to offshoring. Recently, I have seen one newsroom run a shared-content, international-news page that is put together by a nearby neighbor. It works pretty well. And it is not a huge leap to have that page put together 10,000 miles away.

In 1998, an American Journalism Review project on the state of American journalism titled a piece on dwindling foreign reporting as "Goodbye, World." What's next, "Goodbye, Work"?

Anyone with a good job would fight to keep it. Fighting change may be futile. The smarter fight lies in developing the skills required to make yourself not only more essential but more satisfied and competent in the work you want to do.

With nearly 40,000 runners and more than 2 million spectators surrounding him, Grant Burningham cut out of the pack, ducked under a police barricade and pulled out his cell phone.

www.nytimes.com Grant Burningham

The runner was eight miles into the New York City Marathon, and he desperately needed to make a call. The crowd was not cooperating. New Yorkers don't like quitters.

"There are two guys dressed up as the Blues Brothers, there's another guy dressed up as a superhero," Burningham, 26, said into the phone. "I'm holding up OK so far; my only big complaint is that I've got 18 miles to go."

Burningham, a Web producer for The New York Times, wasn't quitting; he was reporting.

As if running the 26-mile race was not enough of a challenge, the producer agreed to cover it for the newspaper. From Staten Island to Manhattan, he would deliver one-minute-long dispatches by telephone. He would also take pictures with the camera in his cell phone.

The plan was for Burningham to call at the start, at the 8.5-mile marker, again at 17.5 miles and once more at mile 21, a threshold seasoned marathoners call "the wall." In the end, there would be five reports. The last one, though, would only come if he finished.

Don't worry, he did.

Listen to the project here.

Credit for the idea goes to Web newsroom editor Jill Agostino. She shopped it around to two other Times staffers who planned to run the race. But ultimately, it landed on Burningham's desk.

It was three years since Burningham last ran a marathon. He said he was in better shape then. And New York is considered to be one of the toughest marathons in the country.

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The pressure of knowing that his voice would go from his cell phone to the Web site in minutes -- the piece was produced as it was reported -- only made things harder.

"I was really worried I was just going to fall on my face," Burningham said. "I mean, there was the pressure of getting to the next checkpoint. And then as I was running I was making a mental checklist of things I could talk about ... And then, when I'd stop, all of a sudden I'd have to articulate them."

Burningham's observations evolved as he ran, shifting from the external -- illustrations of the motley horde of runners at the starting line -- to the internal -- descriptions of pain.

And that's what makes this piece so great. It immerses the listener in the experience of the race. Burningham's vivid first-hand observations take on a striking degree of authenticity when delivered between labored breaths.

Best of all, this is an approach that you can use at your own news organization.

"It was a surprisingly low-tech operation," Burningham said. "I just had a cell phone with me."

Think of the town you cover. Where could you send a reporter armed with a cell phone? Tell us here.

The farms that surrounded my suburban childhood home in eastern Pennsylvania were small, family-owned affairs. As a boy, it was hard to find similarity between these plots and the supermarkets, Italian restaurants and tennis shops that displaced them. But farming, I learned, is no less a business than a bank.

What I've recently found most interesting, surprising and disturbing about the big agriculture business is how hard it leans on the federal government for assistance.

With Congress set to begin debating a new farm bill next year, three Washington Post reporters spent the past several months investigating federal farm subsidies. What did they find? Despite near-record revenues last year, American farmers used more than $25 billion in subsidies.

People have been debating the functionality of federal farm subsidies for years. Here's a recent piece from The Economist. This year's series from The Post, though, is particularly expansive, making it a great point of departure for reporters who've recently started covering the industry.

With nearly a billion acres of American land devoted to farming, this is a story we'd all be wise to keep an eye on.

You can find out how much money the government is sending to farms in your state or town here.

Here's a link the whole newsroom can use: PowerReporting.com.

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On one site, there are free resources for nearly 30 beats. Agriculture, food, terrorism -- whatever your area may be, you're bound to find something to aid your reporting.

The site comes from Bill Dedman, a Pulitzer Prize winner and investigative reporter for MSNBC.com. Dedman, who leads newsroom "Power Reporting" sessions on writing and editing, has compiled links to thousands of resources on this site.

Besides the beat-by-beat guide, he's got basic reporting tools -- people finders, dictionaries, maps, search tools. He also provides useful government sites and a list of journalism resources (where there's even a link to more journalism links). A good one under the journalism category is "alerts," where you can sign up for listservs according to your beat.

And don't miss the left sidebar. Dedman's "Top 100 Sites" is a compendium of resources he finds most useful from all the beats. Crime statistics ... a disaster finder ... a cost-of-living calculator ... the list goes on.

Think Dedman's missing a resource? Suggest one here.
 
 

Editors Note: Ask readers or viewers or elected officials what kind of news they're looking for these days, and you'll often hear something like: "Why don't you give us some good news for change?" Run that idea by most journalists, and you'll see their eyes begin to roll.

So what in the world is a veteran Washington correspondent like Frank Greve doing on the Good News beat for the McClatchy Washington Bureau? Poynter Online asked Greve that the other day, and he followed up with the answers (along with the questions) that follow.

Chuck Kennedy/ McClatchy-Tribune Frank Greve

What does a good news reporter do?



The same thing that every other reporter does. The only difference is that I presume good things happen and are worth writing about.


Softballs, mostly?



Softballs never. Typically, it's overturning common knowledge that's wrong. For example, the marketing for Viagra and other similar drugs turns out to be based on a definition of impotence that makes the problem seem much more prevalent than men or their lovers consider it to be. Also, the number of rapes in the United States is down dramatically from the 70s, according to the best available trend data. The same goes for juvenile crime and unmarried pregnancies.

Have you ever met another good-news reporter?



No.



What got you into this?



During the last Democratic convention, I was back in Washington on what was then the Knight Ridder national desk. I had some idle time, so I scoured the wires, including daybooks and PR wires, looking for good news. I found a lot of story possibilities in stats from the National Institutes of Health and the Bureau of Justice Statistics, for example. A paper-lobbying group reported that recycling was way up, and an insurance-industry group reported that delaying the age of driver licensing, as many states are now doing, has cut fatality rates for teens. I wrote a memo saying that we should cover this realm, and as I was doing so, I realized that the job would be more fun than desk editing.


Were you right?



Absolutely. Writing good news is like hiking in virgin land. And papers eat it up.



Why were the stories uncovered?



Often, one government agency reports a statistic while another employs the experts who understand the trend. The numbers get reported as a briefable daily, if at all, and the experts never get to explain the numbers. Fully reporting both the numbers and the reasons behind them tends to be more than a daily story if you're not just kissing it off. Also, press releases tend to be badly written, which amplifies a tendency among reporters to reject anything that a PR person's written. Finally, there's manly reporting, which speaks truth to power or shouts it, and then there's candy-ass reporting, which is less pugnacious. Being pugnacious, for a lot of reporters, is more fun.

Really?



I used to be an investigator, and some of my old friends, when I told them what I was doing, reacted as if I'd told them I had cancer. Once they read the copy, most -- but not all -- of them were encouraging.

Is reporting good news hard work?



More certainly it isn't easier than other kinds of reporting. If you try to hit to all fields -- and this is a form of general assignment, I suppose -- getting up to speed for each story takes a while. That's partly me: I'm not a real quick study.

Have you ever gotten deeply into a story and decided that it wasn't good news?



Oh my gracious, yes, as Donald Rumsfeld would say. For example, there's a lot of data indicating that yanking healthy wisdom teeth of older teens is an unnecessary pain. I figured I'd earned the thanks of a grateful nation if I reported this -- until I discovered that it's an unresolved question, dentally speaking, in which the trend in recent research favors the yankers. So I dropped the story. Sometimes, if the good-news angle doesn't hold up, but the upshot seems like a strong story, I'll offer it to another reporter in the bureau.

Is there a distinctive pleasure in good-news reporting?



Yes. I'm 60, and I'm a little tired of scaring the bejesus out of people or telling them about one more Washington perfidy that they can't do anything about. I don't think watchdog reporting of that sort is in short supply, but good-news reporting certainly is. My satisfaction when I head home is less ego-driven than it used to be. There also seems to be more genuine gratitude among readers than when I used to tell them that the Pentagon was squandering their money or that their charities were cheats.

So where can I read some of this stuff?



McClatchy has a category for it called "Some Good News."

 

Most environmental reporters are as likely to be found down in a cave, out in the ocean or up in a tree as at a desk in the office.

That doesn't mean, however, that they aren't technologically inclined. Some of the best environmental reporters are the ones who depend most heavily on technology. They take their laptops with them everywhere. They navigate complex electronic databases. And nowadays, lots of them maintain blogs.

Andy Revkin is one of them. As a science and environmental reporter for The New York Times, he's been deployed three times to the Arctic, where he filed stories from his laptop via a satellite phone. While he was there, Revkin kept a blog.

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"It's an important way to convey how I do my journalism as I'm doing it, helping create more transparency and credibility, in my mind," he told Poynter Online in response to e-mailed questions. 

Blogs are central to Revkin's work. He writes them and reads them. Maybe you should think about doing likewise.

The blogosphere is expanding quickly. The founder of Technorati, a search engine for blogs, recently said that 175,000 new blogs are created everyday. That's two new blogs every second, he said. And the population of environmental bloggers is growing in stride.

A Technorati search for postings that included the word "environment" yielded 2.2 million results.  When I searched for blogs with that word in their title, I found roughly 1,700. I'll admit my methods are imperfect. Some of my results -- including a blog called Abandoned Stuff -- bore no resemblance to anything most of us might consider an environmental blog.

But the evidence serves my simple point: that there is a growing crowd of people putting their thoughts about the environment into words. On the one hand, the torrent of information broadcast by bloggers supplies an inexaustible flow of editorial inspiration. On the other, the sheer volume makes finding unique and compelling tips, trends and story ideas extremely difficult.

Before you start poking around the blogoscape like a blind mole rat -- yes, that is a real creature -- take a look at the Society for Environmental Journalists' list of environmental blogs. This impressive compilation is just one of the many resources that the SEJ -- which is holding its annual conference in Vermont this weekend -- maintains on its Web site. It's a great list, and it's worth checking out.

But it's a little long. In the interest of saving you some time, I asked Revkin to point me toward some of his favorite blogs. And I added a few that I found interesting.

"I mainly use blogs to feel out the boundaries of debate on issues where environmental science intersects with policy," Revkin wrote. Here are some of the places he likes to visit.

• RealClimate -- A climate science blog maintained by real climate scientists.
  

• Prometheus -- A science policy blog based at the University of Colorado's Center for Science and Technology Policy Research.
  

• The Gristmill -- A "source of scintillating environmental news and commentary" maintained by Grist, an online environmental magazine.
  

• ShopFloor.org -- A business blog maintained by the National Association of Manufacturers that focuses on "issues affecting manufacturing, small businesses, free markets, outsourcing, energy prices, taxes and staying competitive in the business world."

• And if you're interested in the blogs that Revkin writes himself, check out his Amazon.com profile. He blogs there occassionally while he waits for The New York Times to give him the capacity to do so on its Web site on a regular basis. The blogs from Revkin's trip to the Arctic and his visit to the 2005 international climate talks in Montreal are available on the Times site.
  

I spent an evening sifting through the blogs in the SEJ list. Here are a few I found interesting. All of them appear to post updates regularly.

• Dateline Earth -- Regional and national environmental news from two Seattle Post-Intelligencer reporters.
  

• commonground -- A frequently updated sustainability blog kept by a Southern California freelance writer.

• OneAtlantic -- An environmental news blog that focuses specifcally on the Atlantic Coast.

• Watchdog Earth -- A Kentucky-based environmental news blog maintained by a reporter from the Courier Journal in Lousiville.
  

• Enviroblog -- An environmental policy blog kept by the Environmental Working Group, which specializes in environmental investigations.

Those ten should be enough to get you started. If you're craving more online environmental edification, stop by Poynter's NewsU and enroll in Covering Water Quality: All You Need to Know. And, you know, I can't help but post these last three blogs.

The names cracked me up.

When you have a chance, check out Idealbite, Sustainablog and Gooznews.

So you cover K-12 education for your paper.

You may not know it, but your beat leaves some people out. Sure, they might be little people. In fact, they're some of the littlest.

They're the kids who can't tie their shoes on their own. And while they haven't made it to kindergarten yet, lots of them have already begun their educations.

Today, nearly 75 percent of five-year-olds and almost half of three-year-olds who are not yet enrolled in kindergarten are signed up for some type of "center based" program, according to the National Center for Education Statistics. Some of them are in pre-school. Others are in child care.

A report released by the Education Writers Association in April found that few newspapers dedicate a reporter to cover this growing population [PDF]. Most often the beat is picked up by an education reporter -- like you, perhaps -- already stretched thin by stories about elementary schools and high schools. "The pre-K beat is almost always an appendage," said Tom Linthicum, president of TDL Group, Inc., the firm the EWA commissioned to conduct the survey.

Dave Lawrence, former publisher of the Miami Herald, became so convinced of the importance of early childhood education that he's been working full-time in the area since 1999. See a Q & A with Lawrence below.

Not sure where to begin? Start with the EWA. Preschool gets its own section on the association's Web site. Learn about how early childhood education is financed, how it effects the economy and how well those who provide it are doing their job. All three of those links lead to PDF files.

Some great research can be found at the National Institute for Early Education, Child Care and Early Education Resource Connections, the Clearinghouse on Early Education and Parenting and the University of Minnesota's Center for Early Education and Development.

And here's a story idea to work on. Earlier this week, Slate.com's Emily Bazelon pointed out that some states are changing educational requirements for preschool teachers and child caretakers. Bazelon reported that these people are often paid surprisingly low wages -- rarely more than $25,000 a year. If a state mandates formal training, how will those who don't have it afford to pay for it?

What are the educational requirements for preschool teachers and child caretakers in your state? Are they about to change -- as they are in Delaware? And if the changes require more schooling, who is going to foot the bill?

For more ideas, the EWA offers links to early childhood education stories from across the country. Check out what your colleagues are writing about. And see if you can apply their findings to your work.

Covering crime and justice is often one of the busiest beat assignments in a newsroom. And it can be even more overwhelming when you're thrown in without training.

The Criminal Justice Journalists have been there. They are members of the nonprofit organization CJJ, founded in 1997 to improve coverage on crime, law enforcement and the judicial system. And they've written a little something to help you achieve this.

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On the Beat: Covering Cops & Crime NewsU Course On the Beat: Covering the Courts NewsU Course Crime & Courts Coverage Bibliography By David Shedden Tips for Covering Cops By Chip Scanlan Smarter Crime Coverage By Al Tompkins

CJJ offers a guide to covering crime and justice in nine chapters that can be read in their entirety on the Internet. The guide begins with the crime beat, works its way through juvenile justice, drug law enforcement, racial and ethnic issues, crime victims, and journalism ethics, and then finishes with three chapters on courts.

Interested in learning more about libel? Chapter six, section five. Confused about pre-trial proceedings? Chapter eight, section four.

Clicking on the table of contents is the easiest way to view all of your options. From there, click on whichever section you'd like to learn more about.

Each section also has a sidebar that offers additional resources and detailed story ideas. The first chapter on covering courts, for example, offers 20 ideas for stories -- explain how the jury pool is picked, compare reversal rates for judges by looking at appellate opinions, examine the cases where inmates have filed for DNA testing and follow up to see how many were found guilty, to name a few.

Although the guide was written in 2003, the information is still relevant. From the way the courts work to tips on whom to interview at a crime scene, the suggestions are just as useful three years later for reporting this beat. CJJ added the court chapters in 2005. 

The organization also sends Romenesko-style updates on crime and justice news by e-mail. (Click "Enter The News Center" on the right-hand side and then "News Request" at the top. Don't worry if you have trouble navigating -- so did we.) There's also a cops and courts discussion list, a crime and justice news archive, and an information center with links to related Web sites (many of which don’t work anymore). But the real jewel of this site is the link to the crime guide -- free information on all the basics, right from your computer.

Whether you're an aspiring religion reporter or a veteran of the beat, the Religion Newswriters Association (RNA) has a number of resources to make your job easier.

An especially helpful link is RNA's "Frequently Asked Questions." Answered in article form by religion reporters across the country, these questions address everything from what religion reporters do to covering a religion you don't believe in.

Here are a few things that caught my eye:

screengrab from rna.org

From spot news to weekly columns, religion reporters can do "most anything," according to Richard N. Ostling, an Associated Press religion reporter. Ostling offers specific suggestions on how to get started on the beat, including balancing hard news and features, using team coverage for national and global crises, and employing a variety of design formats.

Kim Sue Lia Perkes, who worked as religion editor for The Arizona Republic and religion writer for the Austin (Texas) American-Statesman, touches on the challenge of reporting religion accurately and ethically. She warns reporters to write with caution and care, "asking each step of the way whether your word selection, explanations and interpretations fairly represent both sides of the story."

For example, words like "pro-life" and "right-to-choose," she says, have an inherent bias:


If you're serious about pursuing religion reporting, David Briggs of The (Cleveland) Plain Dealer recommends training through a bachelor's in journalism and a master's in religion studies. He received a bachelor's from University of Missouri's journalism program and a master's from Yale Divinity School.

And Gayle White of The Atlanta Journal-Constitution ultimately reminds us why covering religion is important: It motivates, causes wars, influences politics, inspires art. "Not to cover religion," White says, "is to ignore a significant part of life."

Screen grab from Boston.com

Boston.com correspondent David Ropeik provides a glimpse of the Red Sox press corps via a visit to the locker room at Fenway Park.  It's one of the smallest clubhouses in major league baseball, and it's packed with one of the biggest collections of reporters covering the game.

Ropeik wrote his piece more than a year ago, but for anybody interested in an MLB beat writer's job, it's a worthwhile tick-tock on a day-in-the-life. Thanks to Boston.com's Job Blog for the link to the piece.

If you've got a (short) story to tell about your job in journalism, we'd like to read it. We'll post the best of them, usually not more than several hundred words at a time, on About the Job.

If you've got something that just can't be boiled down that much, let us know that, too. We'll talk. If you spot something on the Web that addresses what it takes to do a journalism job well, write us a blurb of a few grafs, along with the URL of what you've read, and we'll include that as an item on the page. In return for any and all of this, we'll thank you with a Poynter book and unlimited coffee next time you're in St. Pete.

Send your submission to me, and I'll follow up.