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YouTube launched a local news feature last year, based on a simple concept. “[We] take advantage of the fact that we know where users are coming from and provide relevant content,” said Steve Grove, YouTube’s head of news and politics.

When users sign on, the site automatically pulls together the most recent news-related videos posted within 100 miles of their log-in location and displays them under the heading News Near You. The content comes primarily from local stations that voluntarily put their video on YouTube, including stations owned by Hearst, Tribune Co. and LIN Television.

But there are more skeptics than believers. Only about 325 of the 25,000 news sources listed on Google News have agreed to supply video to YouTube, according to the site’s own statistics. And it’s not hard to figure out why.

More than 90 percent of local TV stations have video on their Web sites, according to a Radio Television Digital News Association/Hofstra University study, but less than a third of those sites make a profit. Stations want users to come to them for video, in part to generate more traffic for online ads.

Jim Willi, senior vice president of the TV consulting firm AR&D, says that’s understandable. “Just like when local stations started providing news on CNN — it means we are giving away our biggest strength — localism — that drives viewers to our TV station websites,” Willi wrote on his blog. But he now believes that YouTube users are unlikely to ever visit a station’s Web site, so local television won’t reach that audience any other way.

That’s been the thinking at Hearst-owned WBAL-TV in Baltimore, one of the first local stations to put almost all of its TV news stories on YouTube, beginning in 2007. “I see YouTube as just another opportunity to find viewers,” says News Director Michelle Butt. “I wouldn’t say it’s been a raging viral success, but we’ve seen what it can do.”

While most of the station’s videos draw no more than a few hundred views, the biggest hit so far — a story about Olympic swimmer Michael Phelps — got half a million, more than five times the average audience for the station’s 11 p.m. newscast.

Putting stories on YouTube hasn’t cost WBAL any video views on wbaltv.com, says Managing Editor Chris Vaughn, but there’s no evidence that exposure on YouTube has brought the site any additional traffic, either. “On a day-to-day basis I don’t see it as a mechanism to draw people to our Web site,” Butt says. “But if this makes me top of mind for local news, it may give them a reason to come.”

YouTube’s Grove says it ought to be a no-brainer for TV stations to get on board, because News Near You makes it easy for a local audience to find their content. “Why would you not be on the most dominant video platform on the Web?” he asks. “Go to where the audience is.”

But is the audience that comes to YouTube for music videos and silly stunts captured on camera even interested in news? Yes, indeed, says Grove. Close to 10 percent of users who land on YouTube’s news and politics page click to watch a News Near You video, a rate he calls “extraordinarily high.”

Considering the size of YouTube’s audience, there’s plenty of upside potential. The site drew more than 100 million users in January in the United States alone, according to the Web analytics firm Quantcast.

And the payoff for producers isn’t just more viewers. YouTube attaches ads to local news video and shares the revenue with the stations’ parent companies. “We make money off our YouTube channels,” says Jacques Natz, director of digital media content at Hearst Television, although he won’t say how much.

News Near You is still a work in progress. My local page, for example, pulls up videos from TV stations in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, and Baltimore — not exactly news near me in Washington, D.C. And user-generated videos tagged as news can pop up as well. On one recent visit, I found a bizarre party video sandwiched between local TV news stories about swine flu and a job training program.

Grove says YouTube vets the creators of citizen videos before adding their work to the local news section, but the juxtaposition can still be off-putting. “Being side by side with amateurs with low production values is not ideal,” Natz says. “Do we like having the channel and video views? Yes. Being lumped in a category with content that’s not from news providers? No.” For now, though, Hearst remains committed to YouTube as part of its overall online strategy, as Natz puts it, “to make sure we have referrals from all over.”

So is YouTube a threat to local TV news? Not now and maybe not ever. The real threat may be stations’ inability to see the value of sharing their content as widely as possible, while the audience for their traditional broadcasts slips away.

This article was originally published in American Journalism Review, March 2010

ProPublica and the Los Angeles Times spent 18 months looking into how California regulates nurses and found breakdowns that let nurses with criminal convictions and positive drug tests continue to work. How did they do it? Their “reporting recipe” is now online. It’s a step-by-step guide that can help journalists investigate how professional regulatory boards work or fail to work in other states.

The second guide, from SPJ, is designed to help reporters navigate the tricky terrain of FERPA, the federal Family Education Rights and Privacy Act. As the guide notes, the law “has been twisted beyond recognition, keeping school lunch menus, graduation honors and athletic travel records secret.”  The new reporter’s guide to FERPA explains how reporters can “acquire school records they are legally entitled to while still protecting student privacy.”

Tons of other reporting guides are also available on line, including SPJ’s Open Doors guide to accessing government records; the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press’s guide to HIPAA, the medical privacy law; the somewhat dated but still useful journalist’s guide to covering bioterrorism from RTDNF; and the new guide to covering disasters that I helped to write for ICFJ.

What other guides for journalists by journalists would you add to the list?

While other sites, including the Huffington Post and the Drudge Report, linked to the story, mainstream news organizations started checking. Within half an hour, Radar posted an update based on “new information” that Roberts will stay on the bench. But the site continued to insist that its original story was well-founded:

Despite considering resigning from the U.S. Supreme Court, Chief Justice John Roberts will stay on the bench, RadarOnline.com has exclusively learned. As RadarOnline.com was first to report, Roberts, 55, was considering resigning from the nation’s highest court due to personal reasons. RadarOnline.com has now learned Roberts will in fact remain as Chief Justice.

That night, NBC’s Brian Williams told a black tie dinner in Washington, DC, that his network’s Justice correspondent, Pete Williams, had knocked the entire story down in about seven minutes. “Let’s just call it ‘primary sourcing,’” Williams said.

But where did the story come from in the first place? Did Radar just make it up to generate Web traffic, as some commenters on the site suggested? Not exactly. Turns out, a professor at Georgetown Law School was trying to teach his Thursday morning class something about the credibility of informants. As David Lat writes at Above The Law, Professor Peter Tague told his class they’d be hearing big news the next day from the Supreme Court about Roberts’ resignation. He also told them not to tell anyone.

“It was an exercise,” Williams said, “but in 30 minutes it had been Tweeted out of the classroom” and you know the rest. “Facts are tougher,” Williams said. “Information is easy. Facts are very tough. They’re best when they’re right. And we’ve got to get it right every day and every night.”

Is there a lesson here? I’d say there are several. 1) No story is too good to check. 2) Mainstream journalism still has standards that set it apart from (much of) the blogosphere. And 3) Primary sources beat rumors every time.

Sourced from: Advancing the Story

“It’s kind of like a bricklayer knowing he needs to bring certain tools to the job to build a wall,” Schuh said. “He doesn’t think about, do I need a trowel…do I need a mixer, my pickle bucket? No, he just brings all that stuff and then he looks at the blueprint of a job and figures out what kind of wall am I building today.” TV journalists, he said, need to be so certain about the tools of their craft–the shots and sound they need to do the job–that they can focus on simply telling a good story. As Schuh put it, “Once you’ve aced the mechanics of how you build a story, then you can worry about the story line and the plot, the quest, conflict and resolution, the reveal, all these other parts.”

With all the necessary elements in hand, Schuh has one simple goal when he sits down to write: “to get out of the way.”

Sourced from: Advancing the Story

Awkward? That would be ABC News president David Westin speed-reading his way through remarks accepting the First Amendment leadership award just a week after announcing plans for drastic staff cuts. When he stressed the importance of having “reporters out in the field doing the work that needs to be done and…the resources to support them” the silence in the room said it all.

The inspiration came later, from CBS Radio News vice president Harvey Nagler, who accepted the First Amendment service award and paid tribute to correspondent Cami McCormick, “one of the most courageous, fearless individuals” he’s ever known. And there she was among us, standing to be recognized, still recovering from the horrific injuries she suffered in Afghanistan when a roadside bomb destroyed the Army vehicle she was riding in. McCormick still faces more surgery but Nagler said she’s almost ready to return to work, which is what she wants most of all.

And the hilarity? That would be thanks to NBC’s Brian Williams, who accepted the Leonard Zeidenberg Award from his boss, NBC News president Steve Capus after an introduction that was so effusive Williams had to mock it right off the top.

Sorry, I couldn’t disable the autoplay feature on the video. I do wish embed codes wouldn’t make that automatic, don’t you?

It’s painful to see talented, dedicated professionals kicked to the curb. I can’t quite imagine CBS News without Larry Doyle or Roberta Hollander or Jill Rosenbaum, all of whom I worked with and admired in my days at the network. But it’s not the first time CBS has forced out long-time (read that “well-paid”) producers or correspondents. After Larry Tisch bought the company in 1986, there was a bloodbath of epic proportions. As the Museum of Broadcast Communications puts it:

To no one’s surprise, Tisch restructured the company into a “lean and mean” operation. Within months, he had launched the biggest single staff and budget reduction in network TV history. When the dust had settled, hundreds had lost their long secure jobs, news bureaus had been shuttered, and CBS was but a shell of its former self.

And that was well before the digital revolution made it possible for one person to the work of two or three–reporting, shooting and editing television news stories. There was no suggestion then that the cuts were about anything but saving  money.
But ABC president David Westin told the Los Angeles Times that the network’s plan to replace half its bureau correspondents with “digital journalists” who can do it all is really about doing better journalism.

“This is a way to maintain or enhance our editorial footprint and get to the stories that are really important, and in some cases, do it in a more compelling way,” he said. “In my heart of hearts, this is really about the journalism, not the money.”

That sticks in the craw of some journalists, who can’t help but be reminded of that old saw sometimes attributed to football executive George Young: “When they say it’s not about money, it’s always about money…” Former ABC producer Lynne Adrine was blunt in a Facebook post:

Everyone who’s talked to me knows I’ve been talking for years about the sea change in all aspects of journalism and newsgathering. And I’d never argue against the ways technology has freed us to get stories that may have eluded us before. But to put forth the idea that ALL stories can be fairly and accurately done with only one set of eyes is just pure BS. Don’t pee in our ears and tell us it’s raining.

There’s no debating the financial trouble CBS and ABC are in. Even if they weren’t paying their anchors multimillion dollar salaries, the outlook would still be bleak. At NBC-Universal, cable properties have helped to cushion the blow and a future merger with Comcast could provide more financial support. But let’s not forget that NBC joined the Journalism 2.0 world a couple of years ago, adding multimedia journalists and dropping veterans by offering multiple rounds of buy-outs–the latest at the end of 2009.

So yes, it’s probably time that ABC realized it has to get leaner and take advantage of the cost-savings inherent in moving to the digital journalism model. ABC has to restructure or face the possibility of extinction, as Ken Auletta told Marketwatch’s Jon Friedman. But let’s be honest. It really is about the money.

Sixty percent of Americans told the Pew researchers that they get news from the Web on a daily basis, making it the third most popular source and beating out both newspapers and radio.  About a quarter of those surveyed say they read news on their cellphones. And the vast majority of news consumers get their information from multiple platforms every day. Only 7% rely on just one type of source.

But according to the poll, television news remains considerably more popular than news on the Internet, especially local TV news.  The Pew study found that almost 80 percent of Americans get their news from a local TV station’s newscast every day; almost three-quarters said they watch network or cable news.

That’s surprising, because other surveys and ratings reports have shown a steady decline in viewership for both network and local news over the past 20 years. The Pew Center itself reported in 2008 that just over half of those surveyed reported watching local TV news daily; 40% said they watch cable news and 30% watched network news. It doesn’t seem possible that daily viewership could have almost doubled in two years, does it?

Some Western participants worried about the credibility of anonymous blogs and the vitriol they often spread. But participants from majority-Muslim countries like Indonesia, Pakistan and Egypt saw the blogosphere as a “safe space” for debate and discussion. Topics you can’t even discuss in person are all over the Internet, said one participant from Jakarta. An entry on the conference site by a group of participants noted that blogging “increases the number of voices in the public debate”:

Blogging…is certainly important because in societies where there is not much freedom of expression, opinion allows more voices to enter the public arena and allows more people to see a side of reality that is not seen by the mainstream media. Provocative statements and insights often raise questions and start debates that can lead to positive change.

Of course, the cloak of anonymity has also made it possible for radical Islamic and right-wing groups to use the Internet to advocate violence. But Egyptian columnist Mona Eltahawy told the conference that Muslims are also using blogs, Facebook and Twitter to challenge authority and bring up issues the mainstream media can’t. In a piece she produced for Time.com, Eltahawy argues that the Internet has actually dealt a blow to radical violence by giving anyone online the chance to answer back.

Western and Muslim participants differed sharply on the ethical standards that should apply to journalists who blog or use social media. One Muslim participant said it’s a good thing for journalists to express opinions on their blogs; if they do, he said, they’ll be less tempted to editorialize in their news coverage. And the concept of a news organization setting policies for their journalists’ use of social media rubbed some Muslim participants the wrong way. “They have no right,” said one, “unless I abuse the platform I work on.”

Blogging and social media use is growing in the Muslim world, but limited access may mean they have limited influence. Indonesia, the largest Muslim-majority country in the world, has 200 million people but few of them can get online. In Pakistan, one participant said, most blogs are in English and most Pakistanis can’t read them. Some participants doubted that blogs can act as a tool of social change across cultures. “They remain a great way of gathering opinion leaders and fostering debates in the circles of elites,” one group wrote on the conference blog, “but as mainstream dialogue with the capacity to reach out to grassroots there may be quite some way to go.”

California Watch, an investigative start-up based in Berkeley, recently did a little experiment that forced journalists to meet up with people in public. The idea was born out of necessity, says multimedia producer Mark Luckie, when the group moved to a new office. For one day, everyone had to work somewhere else–in his case, a neighborhood Starbucks.

Only a few people stopped by to talk about journalism, Luckie told me by email, but he still thinks it was worth it.

I definitely felt proud about doing my work in public for a change instead of hiding in the confines of the newsroom. Doing work among the people we report about made me feel a greater connection to my stories and I definitely want to do it again soon.

California Watch editorial director Mark Katches says he hopes to hold more open newsroom days, at least once every three months. “It’s a way to connect with readers and communities,” he says.

A European news group has gone that idea one better. PPF’s Nase Adresa (Our Address) publishes weekly newspapers and hyperlocal Web sites in the Czech Republic. And their newsrooms are permanently located in or adjacent to coffee shops. So far, the group has coffee shop newsrooms in three regions; the city of Olomuc alone has seven. As Roman Gallo, director of media strategies at PPF told the New York Times. “It’s a feeling for the reader that you can touch your editor and tell them what you want.”

With many newsrooms now expecting reporters to shoot, edit and file from the field, I’m wondering if any of them have set up a semi-permanent office at a local coffee shop. If you’ve done it or you know someone who has, please let us know!

Amy Webb at IJNet says many reporters were ill prepared to get to work immediately when they arrived in Haiti. At a minimum, she says, journalists need to carry the right equipment and know how it works. Here’s part of her gear list:

• Laptop, additional laptop battery, as well as the laptop’s power supply with international adapters, if necessary.
• Mobile phone – with data plan – that’s capable of taking photos and video. You should already have your email accounts set up.
• Additional mobile battery or battery pack, as well as the phone’s power supply and international adapters, if necessary.
• A digital camera capable of taking high-resolution photos, along with an extra memory card and a card reader (or necessary cables) for your laptop. Extra batteries for your camera.
• An extension cord and portable outlet strip.

Notice the emphasis on batteries? Without them, you may be out of business, says Webb, so “recharge and refresh often!” She also has these good suggestions for how to report in a crisis situation:

• Aim to report in small chunks, to keep yourself (and your notes!) organized. Don’t wait until the end of a long, traumatic day to start piecing together what happened in the morning and the interviews you conducted. Have a good process in place and use it.
• File short stories immediately, and when you’re ready write or produce the longer features or analysis pieces.

There’s a lot more advice on how to cover disasters in a manual I wrote for the International Center for Journalists that’s just been posted online. Co-author Sherry Ricciardi of Indiana University provided the section on dealing with trauma. You can read it below, download it for free, or embed it on your own site. Take a look now so you’ll be prepared when the next disaster hits.