This was the year that Al Jazeera English made its mark in the U.S. with its coverage of the Arab Spring, says the Huffington Post. It was also a terrible year for NPR, as top bosses were ousted and the network got a big story terribly wrong–falsely reporting the death of Arizona congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords.

Biggest interview scoops of 2011? HuffPo gives credit for most of its top 10 to TV networks, with ABC in the lead for snagging the first interview with Giffords, among others. Also on the list, NBC’s Bob Costas’ interview with ex-Penn State coach Jerry Sandusky, which Costas later said came as a complete surprise and was set up at the last minute by Sandusky’s lawyer. Maybe it belongs in a different category: scoops that fall in your lap.

In television, it was a year of departures, says Tom Jicha of the Ft. Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel. In TV news, he highlights the end of Katie Couric’s less than stellar five-year run as anchor of the CBS Evening News. I’d add a few more.

• Meredith Vieira stepped down from NBC’s Today Show, also after five years. “It wasn’t working for me in terms of my personal life,” she said.
• Christiane Amanpour was eased out as host of ABC’s This Week just over a year into her tenure with the broadcast still mired in third.
• Keith Olbermann, unceremoniously dumped by MSNBC, found a new home for Countdown, doing the same shtick for fewer viewers, on Current TV.
• Glenn Beck, boycotted by advertisers, parted ways with Fox News and started his own Web channel.

So many anchors and reporters left CNBC this year, one critic wondered about “brain drain.” And there was one more memorable departure–Andy Rooney, the longtime curmudgeon-commentator for CBS’s 60 Minutes, died in November.

Broadcast-related entries on Mashable’s list of top digital journalism events include the rise to Twitter stardom of NPR’s Andy Carvin and a new emphasis on mobile delivery, calling CNN’s acquisition of the iPad app Zite ”arguably the biggest mobile move by a news organization.”

The list of biggest journalism gaffes of the year, courtesy of HuffPo, includes several recent whoppers, including Fox News’ use of an Obama photo to illustrate GOP poll results and NBC’s Chuck Todd flipping the bird on air. There were plenty of local screw-ups too, including the Minnesota anchor whose slurring newscast video went viral who was later arrested for DWI. And the Minneapolis station “investigation” that claimed dog meat was for sale in New York’s Chinatown apparently based on a reporter’s having misheard the word “duck.”

For my in-depth take on more serious trends in local TV news, you’ll have to wait just a bit longer. I’m writing that chapter again for the Project for Excellence in Journalism’s annual report, The State of the News Media, due out in March.

Every reporter eventually runs into a story so important that it’s worth getting the information on a confidential basis. But you’d better understand your news organization’s position on unnamed sources before you make any promises.

Many newsrooms require a supervisor’s approval before confidentiality can be ensured. That usually means the boss will need to know the source’s identity, and the source should be aware of that before making any deals. But how many others in your news organization will be told the name of your source? And how far will your bosses go to support a confidentiality agreement? Will they protect you from having to turn over notebooks or raw tape? Will they pay for your legal defense if you’re found in contempt for not disclosing the identity of a source?

At a recent IRE workshop, Josh Meyer of the Medill National Security Zone emphasized the importance of establishing ground rules up front that apply to both journalists and their sources. “Let them know that if you find at any point that they have lied to you or misrepresented the facts, the deal may be off,” he said.

Lawyer Bert Bruser, counsel to the Toronto Star, advised journalists to avoid leaving any paper trail that could identify a source. Don’t write the name in your notes, he said, don’t mention it in email, and get rid of any documents with the source’s name on them.

Better yet, don’t quote or refer to unnamed sources in your stories. Instead, “use anonymous sources to point you toward key documents, data or story ideas,” panelists said.

One other obvious piece of advice: make sure you and your source agree on what you mean by the words you use when discussing ground rules. I’m always taken aback by the number of journalists and officials who think “background” means “off the record” and vice versa. This glossary of interviewing terms covers the most common ground rules.

Be aware, too, of the perception by some PR professionals that there really is no such thing as “off the record” and who may be counseling the people they advise not to provide any information on that basis.

So says Laurie Oakes, political editor of Australia’s Nine Network, in a media lecture that’s full of interesting stuff. His comment struck me, in part, because I’d just finished reading a Q-and-A in SPJ’s Quill Magazine with ProPublica’s Jesse Eisinger, winner of the 2011 Pulitzer Prize for his series on “The Wall Street Money Machine.” Eisinger was asked how he overcomes roadblocks when people don’t want to talk to him.

I’m very clear and up front with people, and I lay out what I’m working on very clearly to them. I have an excess of disclosure and explanation of what I’m doing with them to reassure them that I’m serious and careful. And I think that persuades people. I think that they have a bad idea of what journalists are up to, and if you emphasize and then show them that you are extremely careful and you want to be fair and accurate, I think that builds trust with them even if they know that you’ve got evidence of things that don’t make them look good.

Sneaky, Eisinger is not. But is it ever OK for a journalist to be sneaky? It probably depends on what you think that term means. As far as Oakes is concerned, he says he was being sneaky when he asked a question of a source that appeared to be based on hard information but was really just conjecture about a pending appointment.

“When will Gair take up his diplomatic post?” Shocked silence at the other end of the line. Then: “How did you know about that?” Bingo. Sure it was subterfuge, but subterfuge in the public interest.

That doesn’t strike me as underhanded. He’d identified himself as a journalist and was just fishing for information. So if that’s the definition of sneaky, I guess I’m for it. How about you?

“It’s expensive, difficult and risky,” Fager told the Excellence in Journalism conference in New Orleans yesterday. But it’s been the key to what he called “our renaissance.” When Fager took over at 60 Minutes in 2004, he says, the program was losing audience at the rate of 10% a year. “We were in a rut, putting stories together that could hold, that were evergreens.” John Stewart even joked at the time that the program’s slogan was “may cause drowsiness.” Not any more.

Fager didn’t pull any punches when talking about CBS or its competitors. He frankly admitted that the documents CBS 60 Minutes 2 used for its now-discredited story about George Bush and his National Guard service were “questionable.” Worse, he said, the reporting of the story was flawed from the start. “They had their minds made up before they want out to report the story,” he said. “When you do that, you tend to leave mitigating factors out and that spells disaster.”

Asked about news organizations paying “licensing fees” for video and other material, Fager said CBS doesn’t do it and won’t. And he took a direct swipe at ABC News for paying $200,000 for video and photos from murder suspect Casey Anthony. ABC said there was no connection between the payment and any interview with Anthony. “That’s insane,” Fager said.”If there is any suggestion that we have to pay for a story, we walk away.” ABC quietly got out of the business of paying news subjects this summer.

He was equally skeptical of claims by British newspaper editors that they were unaware that reporters were getting information from hacked cell phones. “I ask several times a week, ‘How did you get that?’” Fager said. “And they didn’t know?”

As Fager tries to “trickle down” what’s good about 60 Minutes’ to the rest of CBS News, he plans to share more stories online and more about those stories, the way 60 Minutes does with its Overtime section. Will he put every story they’ve ever done online? Nope. “They’re not all that good,” Fager said.

In Warco (short for “war correspondent”), players document a conflict that echoes recent events in the Middle East. Each scenario has different story elements and the player decides what elements to capture and how to combine them in an edited news story.

“It’s both a story telling engine and an action adventure with a new perspective,” one of the developers told Wired Magazine. According to the write-up, the game will force players to make tough ethical choices, “navigating through a morally gray world and making decisions that have human impact.” Sounds just enough like real journalism to have some potential as a training tool.  Here’s hoping the folks at Defiant Development get the project to market.

Check out the trailer and see what you think:

http://youtu.be/sQlkYY88wLM

Like small newspapers–and, I would add, radio stations–hyperlocal sites don’t just cover the communities they serve, they’re part of those communities. That affects how they handle everything from police reports to online comments. A few of the key takeaways:

Police news

Most sites won’t publish many of the names and photos in police reports. Thanks to search engines, these reports can follow someone forever. Says Liz George of Baristanet, “We do really have a lot of Google power and we don’t want to use it to ruin somebody’s life.” One site has a policy of deleting all police items after six months.

Social media

Many sites treat Facebook profile material that’s “friend only” as private information. Most view tweets as public information and use them accordingly. Says Mike Orren of Pegasus News, “In our shop we had clear rules: It was fair game if you could access their page without being their friend.”

Comments

Most sites try to require commenters to use their real names. Many review all comments before publication. Their thinking is much the same as that of large news organizations that have switched to Facebook Connect for comments: it keeps conversations civil. “The comments on the other TV, print, paper websites are sort of like the sewer,” says Paul Bass of the New Haven Independent. “They don’t want to spend the money [to moderate comments].”

Advocacy

Most sites do not subscribe to the concept of impartiality, choosing instead to promote certain issues or even crusade for specific causes. “If we can do anything to make Telegraph Avenue less crappy, I don’t see that as abandoning our position above the fray,” says Lance Knobel of Berkeleyside. “I see that as we’ve done something great for the city we live and work in.”

Business and advertising

One of the biggest challenges isn’t unique to online sites–it’s how to keep the journalism and the business side separate when one person or a few people do it all. “There’s a constant tug of war,” says David Boraks of Davidson News.  ”We write about advertisers on our site. It’s inevitable in a small community. I try to make sure that I write about all the businesses here, not just the ones that advertise with me.”

Small papers and radio stations learned long ago that digging up dirt on anyone in the community, especially advertisers, will make them angry and you’ll hear about it directly. But as Don Heider, founder of the Center for Digital Ethics and Policy at Loyola University in Chicago, notes, “they’ll get what you’re doing overall, eventually, if you’re fair.”

Read more about how some of these hyperlocal news sites do their jobs in American Journalism Review.

The guide doesn’t go very deep, either. Despite the teaser that the guide will help you verify facts, there’s almost nothing in it about verification. A better source on that comes from from Craig Kanalley of the Huffington Post, creator of Breaking Tweets, who posted this tips on his Twitter Journalism blog in 2009.

So by all means take a look at Twitter’s guide but don’t stop there. Craig Silverman of Regret the Error has an excellent best practices guide for social media verification in CJR.  The Knight Digital Media Center published its own Twitter for Journalists guide a week ago that’s also worth a look. It includes links to some newsroom guidelines for using Twitter and other social media. If your newsroom doesn’t have guidelines, I strongly recommend that you consider developing some.

Among other things, you might want to consider how to handle tweets that turn out to be wrong, like this one:

Is it enough to tweet corrected information without mentioning the earlier error? Should erroneous tweets be deleted? Whatever you decide, it’s a good idea to explain your policy and why you chose to go that way.

As for all the tips on verifying information from Twitter, I think it’s most useful to remember some basic questions you’d ask about information from any other source and consider them in a social media context:

1. Who says? Check user bios, websites and blogs to see if they are who they say they are. Look at their associations–who follows them and who they’re following.

2. How do they know this? If locations are enabled on tweets, make sure they’re coming from where they say they are. Check links for details and photos that could establish location.

3. Who else knows this? Look for multiple different sources, not just retweets of the same information or the same information being shared by people who know each other (see #1).

That’s not enough, of course. You have to do your own reporting. If you can’t send a reporter to the scene, use social media to question what you’re reading. Send an @reply or ask your followers to help you. That’s basically how NPR’s Andy Carvin helped to uncover the gay girl in Damascus hoax. The lesson? No matter how many cool tools we have at our disposal, it’s still journalism, folks.

Elected officials often don’t like the way they’re covered but they usually put up with it. After all, they’re on the public payroll and media coverage goes with the territory. But last week, in a 24-hour period, politicians on both coasts had it out with television journalists who cover them.

In Seattle, KOMO reports that the mayor’s office sent an email to the local television stations telling them not to crowd around the mayor at press events or try to reach him at home.

The email was sent shortly after a group of reporters and photographers approached McGinn at a Friday morning event to ask him about his appointment of a bicycle club leader to fill a $95,000-per-year transportation policy post. That impromptu question-and-answer session came the morning after a KOMO News reporter and photographer went to McGinn’s house at 9:05 p.m. to see if he was available to talk about the surprise appointment.

The email included this screenshot:

That’s helpful, right? My guess is that most people who saw the email had a good laugh and went back to work. But what happened in Georgia wasn’t so funny.

According to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, the governor’s press office was angry about a story by WAGA’s I-Team that a fundraising firm hired by the governor was connected to his daughter-in-law. So the next day, state troopers blocked a WAGA crew from covering a public bill signing.

Both the mayor and the governor may have legitimate complaints with their local stations, but their reactions seem out of line, don’t they?

Bubba the Love Sponge, formerly known as Todd Clem, exemplifies the latest effort by television stations across the country to attract more viewers for their local newscasts. Commentary, once shunned by local stations as too controversial, is now seen as a way of drawing attention in a crowded media marketplace. In the past couple of months, it’s popped up in newscasts from New York to Kansas City.

WTSP, the Gannett-owned station in St. Petersburg, Fla., brought Bubba on board in February, not coincidentally in the middle of sweeps, and he’s still going strong.  His commentaries air three times a week at 11 p.m. While the newscast is local, Bubba’s commentaries frequently aren’t. He’s weighed in recently on Libya, violent video games and Donald Trump.

It’s an odd alliance, to say the least. Bubba hosts the top-rated morning radio show in the market and boasts on the Web that it delivers “a good ball-busting.” WTSP is affiliated with CBS, the network with the oldest lead-in audience for the late local news. What are they thinking?

“We were looking to provide thought-provoking commentary but do it in a way that is different from other stations,” said Peter Roghaar, WTSP’s news director.

Different, it is, especially compared to what local newsrooms used to do. Decades ago, on-air editorials were commonplace but rarely contentious. Back then, stations took pains to avoid ruffling feathers for fear of driving viewers away. Today’s commentaries are all about stirring the pot.

Consider Joann Augello, “the real housewife of Bensonhurst,” who’s become a regular fixture on WNYW, the Fox-owned station in New York City. The 10 p.m. newscast features her in a segment called City Rant, and rant she does, about everything from sky-high electric bills to the lack of parking spaces in her Brooklyn neighborhood. “Park the car on the roof! Where the f— else are you going to park these cars?” she screeches. Good thing Augello isn’t live so the station can bleep the obscenities.

Not all local commentaries are quite so off-the-wall. Gannett stations in Atlanta, Columbia, S.C., and St. Louis all started running segments this year called “I’m Just Sayin’,” featuring politicians, newsmakers, local celebrities and just plain folks weighing in on the issues of the day, from tax rates to Kobe Bryant’s use of a homophobic slur.

“We’re always talking about having a conversation with the viewer and this is a way for them to talk to us,” said Marybeth Jacoby, news director at WLTX in Columbia. “It really does help up understand our community better.”

Does she ever worry that a commentary will go too far and offend the audience? All the time. “Evoking emotion is good but we don’t want to disparage anyone,” Jacoby said. To play it safe, a station committee approves all commentary topics in advance and scripts are reviewed before segments are taped.

At WTSP, Roghaar admits that Bubba’s in-your-face style has irritated some viewers admits, but on balance he believes adding the segments has been a plus, especially considering the free publicity the station gets when Bubba promotes his TV appearances on his morning drive radio show. “The commentary has helped us retain our audience through the [11 p.m.] newscast and has recruited new viewers to our newscast,” he said.

With Fox News and MSNBC thriving in prime time thanks to sharp-edged opinion programs, it was probably inevitable that local stations would turn to commentary in the hope that ratings would follow. After all, as the comedian Fred Allen once said, imitation is the sincerest form of television.

There’s no doubt that too many local newscasts are clones of each other, with look-alike anchors and predictable stories. Commentary can help a station stand out from the pack, but there’s a fine line between clever and cheesy and stations cross it at their peril. Trying something different may get people talking, all right, but will it really make them watch?

That’s debatable, of course. I’m not sure most online journalists have that much more time to shoot stories than their TV counterparts. And letting stories “run as long as the streaming platform will allow” doesn’t strike me as good practice, even though it’s technically possible. But even if you accept Westbook’s premise, there are good arguments in favor of keeping at least some of the conventions he wants to scrap.

Take the way interviews are typically framed–the “three-quarters shot,” as Westbrook describes it. Instead of having interviewees talk directly to the camera, they’re positioned so they face the person asking the questions. Multimedia journalist John McQuiston of WWSB in Sarasota, Florida, says it has nothing to do with speed.

Reporters realized that if you make the interviewee part of a conversation instead of a television production, the person will be more comfortable and more candid. It is the rare subject who is not immensely relieved when I tell them, “as best you can, ignore the camera and just talk to me.” If I do my job well, the camera becomes just another piece of furniture in the room. This cannot happen if you ask the interviewee to address the camera.

Westbrook also slams the convention of using cutaways to “splice an interview together without distracting the audience with your edits.” He calls that misleading and proposes replacing cutaways with flash wipes or dissolves.  Now, I’m no fan of cutaways or reversals. My rule of thumb is to shoot them and use them only rarely, not because they’re misleading but because they’re boring. Even Westbrook admits you need to do something to cover jump cuts that could be distracting to the audience.  I don’t see how flash wipes or dissolves are any less distracting.

A third TV “convention” Westbrook wants to dump is the use of voice-overs. He contends TV never does stories without them, which is demonstrably untrue. (Check the stories on this year’s winning NPPA Television News Photographer of the Year entry.) Westbrook is right, however, when he says voice-over is used ”to cover gaps in narrative and explain complicated things in a short space of time.” And that’s a good thing. As McQuiston points out, “summarizing is the essence of a reporter’s job.”

There is another reason for voice-overs: It’s easier on the viewer. A reporter who has had time to reflect and write something should be able to explain something more concisely than an interview subject speaking extemporaneously. This is true even if your medium theoretically allows you all the time you want to tell your story.

It’s hard to argue with Westbrook ‘s final two points. TV news should be more transparent about the source of video. A lack of transparency is what got a Minnesota station in trouble with the FCC, after running a video news release without identifying the source. And TV news should do more than scratch the surface. With fewer time constraints, online video stories can go deeper. But as McQuiston points out, “Don’t mistake having time to go in-depth for an excuse to bore someone with an unfocused narrative that doesn’t justify the time you ask them to invest in watching it.”

In the end, McQuiston argues, the things that make video worth watching on television, including steady shots and good lighting, still apply online.

The people telling you how new and different online video and one-man-band reporting are are trying to sell you something. And it’s a bag of excuses why their video doesn’t look as good as it should. It’s not unconventional; it’s crap.

Westbrook’s original post has drawn a lot of comments. I suspect this one may, as well. Feel free to weigh in. (No personal attacks, please.)