TweetGeist

Today we will provide no links to information about the iPad's April 3 on-sale date and no links to stories about Twitter's ten-billion-tweet milestone. Instead:

"Recipe" for an investigation: ProPublica drops gumshoe kimono

Investigative reporters have always been highly competitive. So ProPublica's decision to publish a highly detailed "How we did it" explanation of the approaches and techniques reporters Charles Ornstein and Tracy Weber used in their long investigation of California's nursing oversight board is an extraordinary and forward-looking act -- and was greeted as such.

@mthomps This @ProPublica post on their reporting techniques is blowing my mind - http://bit.ly/bHYLVS. EVERY SERIOUS NEWS STORY SHOULD HAVE THIS.

@chanders It's amazing that a practice common for hundreds of years - transparency of method- should feel so impt. http://bit.ly/ayHDFk Yet it does.

ProPublica's editors explained their thinking:

We believe that healthy competition among proud journalists brings more news to light. But in this era of shrinking resources, there is clearly a role for new forms of collaboration....We hope that others will use the techniques created by Ornstein and Weber to hold local officials accountable. Reporters who look into the local boards that oversee nurses or other health professionals will make new discoveries, some of which will undoubtedly go beyond what we have found. That, in turn, will help others push the story ahead. We hope statehouse reporters, beat reporters, general assignment reporters, bloggers, citizen journalists and others will use this road map.

ProPublica's Amanda Michel tweeted a reminder that the entire "recipe" was published under Creative Commons license so the information could be easily republished.
 
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Emanuel vs. Obama: Post's shadow play

An inside-the-Beltway kabuki spilled into public view last week at the Washington Post. First there was a column by Dana Milbank blaming problems in President Obama's first year on the president's failure to do what his chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, wanted.

Then the Post ran a lead story by Jason Horowitz, "Hotheaded Emanuel may be White House voice of reason," echoing Milbank's column.

Finally, David Broder's Thursday column declares the obvious:

It sounded, for all the world, like the kind of orchestrated leaks that often precede a forced resignation in Washington. Except that the chief of staff doesn't usually force the president out.... But, as one White House staffer said to me, "Rahm likes to win," and when the losses began to pile up, he probably vented his frustrations to some of his old pals in Congress. It's clear that some of them are talking to the press.

Jay Rosen commented on Horowitz's piece:

@jayrosen_nyu This appears to be about Rahm; but it's really about the worldview of the savvy. And one of the best texts I have found. http://jr.ly/xsad

To which Blake Hounshell responded:

@blakehounshell @jayrosen_nyu Your church of the savvy shtick is really just a plea to make journalists toe a more liberal line.
 
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Pew study: Net overtakes print

"The Internet has surpassed newspapers and radio in popularity as a news platform on a typical day and now ranks just behind TV." So says the latest study from the Pew Internet & American Life Project. "People's relationship to news is becoming portable, personalized and participatory."

The title of the report -- "Understanding the Participatory News Consumer" -- contradicted itself in a way that illustrates the complexity of the landscape it describes. If news "consumers" are now "participating" in the creation of the news, isn't calling them "consumers" a little behind the curve?

At GigaOm, Mathew Ingram noted that Pew's conclusions aren't exactly "earth-shattering" but that they confirm "what anyone who has been paying attention to the industry -- or even to the behavior of their friends and relatives -- instinctively knows: news consumption has become mobile, cross-platform and social."

CJR: Magazines' Web practices are all over the place

Another new study from the Columbia Journalism Review assesses the state of print magazines' websites.

The proprietors of these sites don’t, for the most part, know what one another is doing, that there are no generally accepted standards or practices, that each Web site is making it up as it goes along, that it is like the wild west out there.

It was against this background...that the Columbia Journalism Review undertook the first comprehensive study of online practices of print magazines. The survey had various goals: to identify some best (and worst) practices; clarify journalistic standards for new media; and guide journalists and media companies towards a business model that allow revenues not only to be allocated more efficiently, but also channeled back into the kind of news-gathering operations that are essential for democracy.
 
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Who reports the Google news?

Jonathan Stray of the Nieman Journalism Lab performed a detailed data analysis of 121 pieces in Google News that covered a specific event -- "last week’s story about tracing Google’s recent attackers to two schools in China." Stray concluded that only 13 (11 percent) of the pieces "included at least some original reporting," and "just seven organizations (six percent) really got the full story independently."

On the one hand, Stray's analysis supported the conventional wisdom that most news stories break as the result of work by traditional news organizations. On the other, it also suggested that the vast majority of traditional news organizations devote most of their energy to repeating one another's headlines.

@joeybaker @cshirky re: Google/China isn't the fact that there are 13 reporters working on one story something to be marveled at?

@cshirky @joeybaker Not if those 13 reporters are being copied 787 times. Problematic for the newspapers "bloggers as free riders" critique.

In a Nieman Lab followup, C.W. Anderson widens the analysis and offers these conclusions:

• Most “original reporting” (as traditionally defined) is still done by large news institutions.

• Most traditional news institutions are regurgitating the work of other news institutions, rather than adding anything new.

• An additional, smaller set of online web-sites are also doing original reporting, but this reporting often gets overlooked in studies of where news comes from, mostly due to boundary-drawing issues. And it also gets overlooked by news organizations themselves.

• Aggregation, curation (or whatever) is something unique and valuable, but it isn’t quite reporting and we don’t quite know what to call it yet. In fact, it might be better for democracy to link to a really smart blogger than it would be to call up a source and get the same meaningless quote that 1000 other journalists have also gotten.

• Online, news often originates and moves in a “blippy,” heartbeat-like fashion, but we can only see this if we take aggregation seriously as a journalistic form, and only if we include “obscure bloggers” in our data-set.
   
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60 Minutes insufficiently skeptical of Bloom Box?

BoingBoing's Rob Beschizza takes CBS 60 Minutes to task for a piece on the Bloom Box "power plant in a box" that was, he argues, insufficiently critical of the seemingly miraculous product:

The Box hasn't been thoroughly tested and its hype adopts the same template as countless failed entries in the 'free energy' stakes. And this story offers only a single quote from a token scientific skeptic as it cheerleads onward through four pages' worth of promotional copy.

News as software?

Andrew Spittle makes the case for news organizations to think of what they're producing as something more like software than like static information:

Software provides a sense of utility to users. It does something for them. More importantly it does that function over and over. Granted, this would be difficult to do but the first step is to break down the idea that news arrives in an organized package.
 
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