John Hamer of the Washington News Council came up with the idea as a way for journalists and newsrooms to make a public promise to their readers, listeners and viewers. He named it the Tao of Journalism (get it?) and set up a nonprofit to administer the voluntary pledge and copyrighted seal. The website’s FAQ says  ”a TAO pledge/seal is a way for journalists to publicly declare that they will live up to those basic principles as a way to earn trust.” And if they violate those principles?

The goal is to encourage the public to provide oversight and determine if TAO seal users are living up to the pledge. There will be no official oversight group, licensing body or regulatory association.

But there is a fee. The Tao of Journalism charges $25 a year for individuals and $50 for organizations to post the seal.  So far, there are 20 names in the TAO directory, almost a third of them from outside the United States. It appears that only one signatory is from a major U.S. news organization–David Horsey, the editorial cartoonist at the Seattle P-I.

Hamer told Columbia Journalism Review earlier this year that he expected journalists to be wary. “The attitude is, ‘Nobody can oversee us, we oversee everyone else.’ When you think about it, it’s just a massive double standard.”

Maybe what journalists object to is being asked to pay for a seal that certifies their support of principles they already adhere to. The cost is low compared to the annual fee for other online “seals” like TRUSTe ($299 and up) and BBBOnline ($200 and up).  But those well-established organizations require formal applications and questionnaires that have to be reviewed before a website is certified.

What’s your view of this initiative? Is it necessary? Would more journalists sign on if there were no fee attached?

Glass is the host of This American Life, now in its 15th year on public radio. The show is admittedly something of an acquired taste. But as American Journalism Review once said, the program airs “stories that are changing what we think stories are.” And Glass is not impressed by most of the stories he sees and hears on the news.

“Part of the job of journalism is not to describe what’s new, but to describe what is,” Glass recently told an audience in Seattle. “The world they describe is so much smaller than the real world.”

Glass says his goal is to add fun, joyfulness and surprise to stories, something he says never happens in broadcast journalism, which he called “a failure of craft.”

I’d say “never” is much too strong a word. Steve Hartman’s stories for CBS are built around surprises, like this piece:

But Glass is absolutely right that surprise is too often missing in broadcast news. The late journalist Alistair Cooke once said:  “To write a dull sentence, a sentence without suspense, a sentence that doesn’t make you want to know what is coming next—that is the only gross incompetence in broadcasting.”

Think about it. Does your intro or lead tell almost everything there is to know about your story? Imagine if Hartman’s story started this way: “In a surprising development at an animal sanctuary, an elephant and a dog have become best friends.” Why would anyone stay tuned for the rest?

Colorado’s Digital Media Test Kitchen looked at apps and mobile websites from CNN, USA Today, the New York Times, Associated Press, MSNBC, The Guardian, Politico, and The Huffington Post in May 2010. Most of them made it relatively easy for users to share stories via email, text, Facebook or Twitter. But only the Huffington Post app allowed users to comment on stories. In other words, organizations’ mobile apps offered less interactivity than their online news sites.

That doesn’t mean there was no interactivity. CNN got kudos for its iReport feature that lets users send information or photos from their mobile phones. The Associated Press app has a similar “send to AP” function, but neither allows users to send video.  USA Today’s app lets users vote on poll questions.

Conclusion: “Overall, compared to the innovation that’s rampant in the non-news mobile app world, the news apps we reviewed seem behind the curve.”

Among the report’s recommendations for mobile news app developers:

1. Step up the interaction component
2. Don’t just shovel; create new mobile-exclusive content
3. Ask for and accommodate mobile user content submissions

Looking ahead, the report says mobile technologies  like geolocation, augmented reality, voice-to-text and more should open new opportunities for news apps. “News applications could include augmented reality building recognition able to pull up news as the user points a smartphone at a government building,” much the way Wikitude now provides content to mobile phones.

Can news organizations afford to do all this? Maybe a better question is: Can they afford not to?

The average paycheck in local television news was up 2.5 percent in 2009 and salaries in local radio news were unchanged.  Both were down the year before–more than 4 percent for TV and almost 2 percent for radio–so that’s an improvement. Considering there really wasn’t any inflation in 2009, Papper says, “news people really did hold their own.”

Long term, however, the picture is bleaker. Over the last five years, inflation has eaten up every salary gain in TV news and more. Paychecks grew by less than 3 percent but inflation rose more than 13 percent. In other words, if you’ve been in TV news for five years, your buying power now is less than when you started out. That’s depressing.

A few job categories did better than others last year. The only TV salaries that changed much were for reporters, managing editors and art directors. All were up by about 10 percent. The biggest losers?  Sports reporters, whose average salary dropped by about the same amount. Ouch.

As always, the bigger the market the higher the salary. But this year’s data was unusual in one respect. Papper found almost no difference in salary changes by market size and staff size, which he called surprising. Basically, the salary picture was about the same across the board. Not awful. But not great.

Check out the dimensions of the flooding in Pakistan or the Gulf oil spill, then plug in your zip code to see how extensive the damage would have been closer to home.  It’s a great example of how making data visual can help tell a more complete story that people can relate to.

The BBC is still beta-testing the project, but the site says that eventually it hopes to make the technology publicly available. Now that would be even cooler. (Hat tip to Mindy McAdams for sharing the link.)

Shapira is no rookie; he’s been at the Post for 10 years and was the lead reporter on the team that won a Pulitzer two years ago. But he’s brand new to audio and video, and he’s still discovering the different skills he needs to tell stories with these new tools. No, he’s not the first print reporter to go through this learning curve, but he may be the first to write candidly about it and share his student work on his own paper’s website.

On the Post’s StoryLab page, Shapira writes of his experience shooting a profile of a veteran DJ:

My transition from writer to video journalist has not been comfortable. I constantly fumbled with the tripod — right in front of my subject — which was about as embarrassing as getting caught with one’s fly open. And I spent so many hours late into the evening with the video editing software Final Cut Express that I wondered whether I was even doing journalism anymore, or computer science.

The video Shapira produced isn’t brilliant but it does show he’s trying. He ’s also experimented with audio slideshows on his class blog, Curb Your Journalism. And he’s opened himself up to being critiqued in public; I hope he pays attention to the useful comments on his video.  But as he struggles to learn a new medium, Shapira wonders if it’s worth the trouble:

Does it even make sense for writers like me to learn how to shoot and edit video? For video journalists to become writers? Shouldn’t news organizations such as The Post invest in more specialists? Or, given our industry’s financial upheaval, is a more versatile staff better?

You can probably guess where I come down. Yes, it makes sense for journalists to be more versatile.  And as Shapira’s learning, getting there is not a snap. How would you advise him?

According to a new report from the consulting firm AR&D, the vast majority of visitors to local TV sites–90 percent–are already fans of the stations, so they’re not reaching a new audience online. And only half of any given station’s “fans” visit its website.  ”Stations are only playing to their on-air audience and not even doing a very good job of that,” says AR&D senior analyst Rory Ellender.

At least part of the reason is the type of news and information stations put on their sites. “We consistently hear that most people see local TV websites as just a rehash of what the station does on-air,” says Earle Jones, AR&D’s senior vice president of research. “Also, the URL’s most stations use (call-letters.com) suggest something much more narrow that a community information portal.”

The AR&D study is based on 2,200 interviews with consumers in a range of markets and some of their comments are sobering.

“It’s the same on TV as it is on their website. Why get the same thing twice?” said one woman, who described herself as a regular local TV news viewer who rarely or never visited local station sites. “If I can’t get all the info I need from the news when it is on, then there’s not any more info on their web site. It is just a summary of the story you see on the news,” said another.

Another frequent complaint was that sites aren’t user-friendly. “They are usually poorly designed and they make it difficult to simply find the specific news story you came to read about,” one man said. “They could vastly improve their websites by having an actual working search function.” In 2010, it seems to me that falls into the category of “duh.”

These dispiriting results echo the findings of the RTDNA/Hofstra survey announced earlier this year, which found that while traffic was up at local station websites, there was little change in the number of unique visitors from the year before. As we wrote then, TV has a long way to go online.  Still true.

Having the jitters about an assignment increases the odds that it won’t go well. So if you’re concerned about sitting on the set, a little preparation will improve your chances of success.

One obvious step is to take a test run in the studio before you do it for real. Get comfortable with the teleprompter, especially if you have to run it yourself. Have someone talk to you on the IFB while you’re reading. If you don’t have your own earpiece, make sure there’s one available that fits you well so it won’t pop out on the air.

Randy Tatano has some additional, excellent advice on his blog at TV News Grapevine, including this tip:

Make sure you have plenty of breaks in the first newscast. Packages and vo/sots give you a chance to regroup. Nothing is worse for a rookie anchor than to have two straight minutes of copy at the top of the newscast, because if you stumble out of the gate you’ll be a snowball going downhill.

Tatano also suggests meeting with the director before the newscast to make sure you’re both on the same page. And one last useful bit of advice: Have water on the set. “Cotton mouth is a really common problem among rookies,” he says.

If you’ve found other useful ways of preparing to anchor for the first time, please chime in with a comment.

Sourced from: Advancing the Story

That’s what multimedia guru Stephen Quinn believes. Quinn, who teaches at Deakin University in Australia, shared a bit of his enthusiasm about mobile journalism at the World Jounalism Education Conference in South Africa.

Quinn calls mobile phones a “Swiss army knife” option for journalists.

“They’re compact, light and discreet,” Quinn said. “Using cell phones forces journalists to think differently. This new notion of mobility changes the way you perceive and operate in the world. It’s all about connection. Reporting involves thinking about how to find WiFi, you have to be thinking about battery power. And ourconcept of news is broadening – if I can get there, it’s news.”

Quinn says these new capabilities also change audience expectations.

“They know we can get there and expect to get the info,” Quinn says. Plus, he believes it will help us reach new audiences. ”Mojo appeals to different demos; it appeals to younger audiences.”

Quinn says mojo is part of a change in visual standards, too. He believes people become more accepting of low quality video, if the content is something they find compelling.

Quinn shared a list of free software programs that mojos can use in live reporting:

• Qik
• Kyte
• Bambuser
• Shozu
• Flixwagon
• Livestream

Quinn says his favorites are Qik and Bambuser for their ease of use. He also likes the relatively inexpensive tools created by Vericorder.

When it comes to its uses and limitations, Quinn says right now the technology has not evolved enough to make mojo useful for long-form journalism. However, Quinnsays mojo is great for breaking news as evidenced by cell phone coverge of protests in Burma, elections in Iran, the Jakarta hotel bombings, Haiti quake and the Moscow subway bombings.

Still, Quinn urges journalists not to get all caught up in the “shiny.”

“Pocket journalism is powerful, but needs it still needs a brain behind it,” Quinn says.

Sourced from: Advancing the Story

The standard excuse is that everyone is just too busy to make that happen. A news director can’t possibly spare the time to help every reporter through every story every day. A chief photographer who also shoots can’t possibly help other photojournalists do better work on a daily basis. Fair enough. But managers aren’t the only people who can offer assistance. The truth is that anyone can do it, by becoming a coach in the newsroom.

Coaching basics

Coaching means sharing responsibility for what goes on the air. Photographers help reporters write. Reporters and photographers offer newscast producers material for teases and tags. Assignment editors ask questions instead of just giving orders. And it doesn’t have to take much time to help a colleague produce better journalism.

The key to a coaching culture is simple yet profound: journalists have to learn to listen to each other.

Coaching often begins in the morning editorial meeting. Instead of running through a list of “must do” stories for the day and assigning them at the start, coaching newsrooms solicit story ideas and encourage everyone present to weigh in with suggestions on how to approach those stories. At some stations, staffers share responsibility for running the meeting, rotating the assignment week-to-week. The only rule is that managers are never allowed to be in charge. “Giving people a little bit more power and control,” says photojournalist Mike Plews of WOWT in Omaha, “they really get excited about bringing stuff in.”

Coaching one-on-one

Coaching also happens outside the newsroom, often in the car on the way to an assignment. Reporters and photographers who coach each other apply what former NBC correspondent John Larson calls the rule of thirds. They can complain about the boss or the assignment or the weather, but only for a third of the time they spend driving to a story. The rest of the time they have to discuss and plan what they’ll do that day.

Teams that coach don’t practice “standing around journalism,” to borrow a phrase from Lane Michaelsen, news director at WTVJ in Miami, Florida, and a former news photographer. The reporter doesn’t wait in the car while the photographer shoots the b-roll, and the photographer doesn’t go for coffee while the reporter does pre-interviews. Instead, Michaelsen says, they stay together and talk frequently so they both know what they’re getting and what they still need to tell the story.

Reporter Kim Riemland and photographer Bill Strothman coached each other regularly when both worked at KOMO-TV in Seattle, Washington. Kim says Bill wrote the best line in one of her daily news stories about the protests against the World Trade Organization–”In downtown Seattle today, the First Amendment ended at Fourth and Spring.” Bill says Kim suggested the perfect audio transition, from the sound of a machine gun to a sewing machine, for one of his favorite long-form pieces on a woman who makes quilts for war refugees. But they weren’t just a two-person team. Each of them involved others throughout the reporting and editing process, asking for ideas and feedback from producers and editors, and sharing the compliments after a story aired.

The coaching culture

In a coaching newsroom, no one is shy about seeking the help they need and they often turn to peers to get it. When Bob Gould was chief photographer at WZZM in Grand Rapids, Michigan, he would invite other photographers into his edit bay to screen stories that he was working on as a kind of reality check, “to see if an edit works, if sound is understandable.”

Coaching newsrooms build on the positive. They may begin each morning meeting with a “daily win,” reviewing what went well the night before.  Scott Libin, news director at WCCO in Minneapolis likes to show tape from the previous day’s newscasts to celebrate successes.

Changing the culture may be more difficult in a television newsroom than at a newspaper, because the staff turnover tends to be higher. But even if only a few people are committed to the practice, coaching can take hold in what Riemland calls a “conspiracy of excellence”–a bottom-up effort that improves the product and makes the newsroom a better place to work. “When you get a few dedicated people who are committed to excellence to be supportive of each other, not only will your work be better, but others will notice,” Riemland says. “It can be contagious, and pretty soon that small core group has coached the management by example.”