Morisy.com

Edward Tufte:

Agencies, departments, and organizations don't do things - people do things. People's names should be on things to foster both accountability and pride.

As quoted by Thaler Pekar via Daring Fireball.

I'm reminded of this wonderful quote every time I come across a citation like this, from an AP article on an Oxford plan to record the audio of every cab ride (emphasis mine):

Oxford City Council dismissed concerns over privacy violations, saying the recordings of conversations between passengers would be available only to police or other authorities in connection with specific investigations.
"The risk of intrusion into private conversations has to be balanced against the interests of public safety, both of passengers and drivers," said a council spokeswoman, who declined to be identified, in keeping with departmental policy.

The irony of a spokesperson, whose entire career is to be quoted, demanding anonymity while downplaying concerns about privacy is rich, but I think this gets to the heart of an issue that has been raised by both the Tea Party and Occupy movements: Our institutions have become very large, very powerful and, perhaps most importantly, very unaccountable. Anonymity allows hydra-like staying power for institutional bad practice: Find a fall guy, shuffle some chairs and return to business as usual. Tying a name to a policy, and consistently tracking the execution of that policy, (hypothetically) ensures the risks and rewards of a decision are more evenly applied to the executor.

Perhaps what need is not more regulation of corporations, but rather a clarity of which persons these proxy persons are acting on behalf and at the behest of.

Cornell Alumni Magazine has a wonderful interview with the New York Times' Andrew Ross Sorkin and Businessweek's Peter Coy about their craft, and it's rare that I've seen two journalists open up about their inspiration, motivation and, most revealingly, sourcing.

Sorkin talks about the leg work he did to get his readers an in-the-room feel for his book, Too Big To Fail:

A lot of people do return your calls, but often people don’t want to talk to you either because the information’s too sensitive or they’re not interested. In the example Peter is talking about, there was an executive who didn’t want to talk to me. Finally I get him on the phone on a Sunday afternoon and say, “Look, I understand you don’t want to talk to me, I’ve talked to your friends, your lawyer says leave you alone, I get it.” And then I laid out for him what reporting I’d done. I said, “OK, I have you in [Morgan Stanley chairman and CEO] John Mack’s house on Saturday morning at 10:30. You’re sitting in the living room on the green couch, eating a chicken wrap sandwich his wife brought you. Your son’s lacrosse game started at 1:30, you didn’t show up until 2:30, and this is what you said.” And there’s this very long pause. By the end of the call he said, “I think we should talk.” And that’s how this happens over and over. The deeper you get in the reporting, the more other people become attracted to talk to you.

The piece's author, Beth Saulnier, did a great job getting the two to open up and parry off one another's comments, particularly in how they break down the complexity of finance. A lot of it echoed what I learned my first year on the telecom beat, so it might be particularly useful to reporters starting out: Sometimes naiveté about a subject can be your greatest advantage.

I started my first blog sometime in 2000, and the past year or so, I've been trying to dredge it up from the past. Over a decade ago! Well, I finally came close: I got the username and password to my second blog, since after I wrote some stupid things on the first one, I deleted all the entries and started anew.

Here was that first entry on that blog, posted 2001-05-07 and titled "A new beginning":

Hey everyone, this is ! Most of the people reading this understand why. Anyways, things are really busy around now, but I'll try and update this with some semblence of frequency, or at least sporadic infrequency. I'll see ya around!

I was thinking of importing those old entries here, but it's all rather unfortunate high school drama, and better left there. Still, it's comforting to know I once again have access, and I'll figure out a way to back it up at some point.

One of my first favorite apps for Android was Google Listen, a Labs project that offered a simple way to track and listen to podcasts on the go. No syncing, minimal set up, just click and listen to your favorite shows. You could search and subscribe from the app, or just add audio RSS feeds into Google Reader and it just worked great.

Unfortunately, it hasn't been updated in a year and it's gotten to be ... pretty break-y. Stuff like subscriptions not updating, not being able to download new shows and, most recently, awful blipping sounds that sound like a skipping old tape. Why an MP3 would sound like an old tape is beyond me. Some combination of clearing the cache, uninstalling and re-installing the app, and getting a new phone usually cleared the problems for a few weeks, but it was bad enough that I searched for an alternative.

The best I've found so far after playing around with about five options is ACast. It's the only thing I've found so far that fits in relatively closely as a drop-in Listen replacement:

• Syncs with my Google Reader Listen folder
• Plays podcasts without having to locally sync or tether with my computer
• Works consistently

It's also got a complicated UI and literally thousands of ways to configure it, but since I spend about 20 seconds picking a show and an hour listening, I can get past that.

I never stopped programming, not quite. It's just my code became hackier and hackier. For a non-programmer, think of it as writing a novel first by crafting letters into words into sentences but then, rushed for time, you start clipping words from other sources, ransom note style, and pasting them, collage-style, into a book. And then one day, you simply rip and re-order whole pages from Dickens, Stephen King and some cranky luddite journalist.

I would posit then that, yes, it is still possible to make great literature (I'm a huge fan of Barthelme, who consistently pushed the limits of narrative), but it's much more likely that you're cranking out something barely serviceable, and that such cranking is an ultimate disservice to your own ability to craft.

I started programming long ago. Like many others of my rough generation, I started with BASIC, which was included on Windows 3.1. It must've been sometime in the early to mid-90s. I remember distinctly hacking away at a game where you controlled a giant ape who threw bananas at another giant ape, and modifying the code to make the apes throw other objects, though for the life of me I can't remember what I so gleefully made them throw. Perhaps that's for the best.

After that, some rough scripting until Alice 3D, which introduced me to the wonderful world of Python. Alice was the brain child of Randy Pausch, who became famous when he faced death and gave his Last Lecture. I still haven't seen that lecture, to my embarrassment, but the gift Randy and Carnegie Mellon gave the world in Alice I cherish. It was an easy, non-intimidating introduction to programming that let a middle school kid self-tech himself programming in a fun way. Learn while loops by blowing up a car in 3D, for example. It's a crime that Alice 3D isn't a teaching tool in every middle school in America, and if it were our economy would be in much better shape.

And so to Python I've returned, relearning Python the hard way via Zed A. Shaw's wonderful book. Being self-taught, my education was spotty but his 210 guide has gotten me up and running again at a good pace without any stumps, while patching in the numerous holes my self-education had left.

As best I can tell, it is ending the influence and control of corporate money on politics.

Media has generally seemed to given up deciphering the goals of Occupy Wall Street protesters: Yahoo! News reported protesters have a "murky agenda", while Market Watch called it a "collective, vague effort".

Fox News picked up one list and ran with with, a list the Occupy Wall Street webmasters later distanced themselves from, stating plainly "There is NO official list of demands." To be fair, Fox did note the demands were from "an activist" and not a formal statement.

The Declaration of of the Occupation of New York City is a little more concrete and was accepted by the NYCGA, the protest's governing body of sorts, but not so much a list of demand as a list of grievances.

Looking further back, Adbusters, which was critical in building interest and enthusiasm for the protests, was insistent early on in pushing the idea of a "One Demand" message. In July, the proposed demand was "that Barack Obama ordain a Presidential Commission tasked with ending the influence money has over our representatives in Washington", which is a solid, concrete step. Whether or not you think it is a good one, an effective one, or a plausible one, it's hard to argue that it is not doable. This "one demand" was never formally or officially endorsed, as far as I can tell, with many instead opting for the idea that the one demand is a process, often manifesting as multiple, sometimes conflicting "one demands".

Given all that, it's relatively easy to see why adjectives like "murky" and "vague" are used, but I think it's a disservice to understanding the protests: In much of the literature, capital punishment, political corruption, healthcare inequality and more are treated as symptoms of the strong influence corporate money has in Washington. Individually these smaller "one demands" might seem contradictory, but it appears in much of the literature that the frustrations are all tied back to the basic belief that no matter what the individual cause is, the solution is made impossible by elected representation being deeply in bed with corporate interests.

That's a much clearer, actionable thesis, with specific remedies, than I have so far seen elsewhere, and it lends itself to debate, refinement and action. It will be interesting to see the occupiers can consolidate around that message and turn it into political action.

I should note that this has all been gathered second and third hand, from media reports, protest resources, blog posts and more. It could easily be wildly inaccurate, particularly since it applies to a very fluid situation. Adbusters has returned several times to the idea of the one demand, and they might prove as good a resource as any for following its refinement.

Usually I start beta testing Drupal releases well before it's safe or sane, usually upgrading this site, without any real backups, to the latest, greatest and crashiest. With Drupal 7, I held off because I've been so completely swamped. I'm happy to report that the installation process has been further refined and simplified, particularly when it comes to troubleshooting what you need to jigger a little bit around to get it running properly. I've been so used to modifying sites.default.php, I actually had to go back and undo my modifications to get things up and running, but the changes are all good.

I generally also like the default modules: Drupal now seems to do a lot more out of the box, and feels more ready to go. Very heavy on the light boxification, for example, as well as built in images. The light boxification actually seems to break the ability to do things on Android's browser, but turning it off was quick and painless.

Huge kudos to the Drupal community. I know there's been a lot of high-level complaints, but this release is a huge step in the right direction.

This post is part of the monthly Carnival of Journalism.

Online journalism as a market force has clearly, utterly and totally lost the battle for online video supremacy. In the not-so-quiet armsrace, journalists and other traditional bearers of the craft were laid seige by nimbler, more driven marketing counterparties selling their services to the highest bidder.

The results have not been pretty: Ad dollars have been diverted from print to Facebook, Google, viral marketing campaigns and other online sources in droves. But there's hope: These marketing insurgents on the traditional ad spend have shown new ways of embracing the online video medium, investing the R&D and experimental spend that traditional media wouldn't and then sharing their victories with the world.

The future of online news video is a more integrated, playful medium that stops thinking in terms of play, pause and pageviews and instead engages in ways that are more educational, more engaging and more immersive than today's simple Flip Cam renditions.

Enter Subservient Congress.

During periods of rapid technological transition - from print to cinema, from cinema to television to web - the early, mass-media results are often imitation of the prior form. It's a quick yet lingering phenomenon: Think of the crashing headlines of 1940s WWII Newsreel, or the front pages of online newspaper sites that so closely mimic their print counterparts.

There's good reason for this transitional period, both in educating and easing the new medium for both new audience and new creators alike, but the mediums quickly move from transition to transformation, pushing, finding and playing with the new boundaries.

Today's newsroom video efforts are still highly imitative: Video comments at CNN iReport echo letters to the editor or, even more closely, the squawk box of talk radio. User Flip Cam videos of newsworthy events echo both the cameramen of yore (and today, to be fair) as well as as home video submissions we have seen for decades - although scaled up.

But among the rank and file, true transformation hasn't occurred: What would simply be impossible or, better yet, incomprehensible to online news videos' ancestors?

I think CNN's The Moment is an apt example: While not "video" in the traditional sense, the photo mirage captures a moment in time both individually and collectively, merging thousands of photos taken from nearly, but not exactly, the same time to create a living, breathing sense of President Barack Obama's inauguration. Such a news metaphor - capturing the moment at both deeply personal and widely collective levels through a participatory process - would simply have been nonsensical in any other medium but fluid, online manipulation.

This, then, points to the future of online newsroom video: Forms and lingo not possible with yesterday's tools, but native to tomorrow's audience. And while Microsoft's Photosynth technology is deeply impressive, this lingo is not properly and fully a technological problem so much as it is a problem of linguistics: Newsrooms only partially understand the cadence and slang of online video. Not surprising since they only partially understand the cadence and slang of non-linear textual representations, but the medium will evolve and grow over time as the innovative lessons learned elsewhere - and the lucrative loot they bring with them - are infused into the way newsrooms engage.

Think Subservient Chicken, Burger King's lightly subversive viral campaign that asked users to order around a chicken via a grainy web cam and simple text orders: Lay egg, sing, backflip.

The technology was relatively simple, but it asked users to engage with a fictional character in a way that, again, would have been incomprehensible in another medium. A similar tool, perhaps dubbed Subservient Congress if the creator was un-creative enough, could be used to both solicit feedback and educate participants about Congressional influences: A user could take a turn asking Congress to "Pass healthcare", "Show up", "Repeal Healthcare" with either a witty animation resulting or a serious response to the challenges in doing that, interspersed with information drawn OpenSecrets showing how politicians were often subservient to interest groups with deep pockets, whether in passing earmarks or rejecting unfavorable legislation.

The simple link is often trotted out as an essential defining element of the web versus legacy media, and the humble truly deserves such recognition. But web video must start to go further when interpreting what the link is, playing with its boundaries in new and creative ways applicable to redefining what the traditionally linear medium is and can do going forward.

I will say this, though: unsolicited redesigns are terrific and fun and useful, and I hope designers never stop doing them. But as they do so, I also hope they remember it helps no one — least of all the author of the redesign — to assume the worst about the original source and the people who work hard to maintain and improve it, even though those efforts may seem imperfect from the outside. If you have good ideas and the talent to execute them and argue for them, the world will still sit up and pay attention even if you take care in your language and show respect to those who don’t see things quite the way you do.

This was the incredibly gracious and graceful response of Khoi Vinh, former design director of NYTimes.com, to Andy Rutledge's widely blogged redesign.

When reporting it's a useful frame of mind to assume good faith going in, and then reality check. People are rarely villains in their own minds, and talking to them like they are rarely produces results. In his own mind, Bernie Madoff was the victim of small mistakes, compounding on top of each other and burying him deeper.

I've learned that rule the hard way over several years, but I'm still struggling with it as a business owner. I'm quick to dismiss, even on this site, ideas that seem superficial, poorly thought out or driven by flash rather than substance. And I'm often dead wrong as the project evolves. Hopefully this post will serve as a reminder to myself to show some of Vinh's restraint.

Tried upgrading the site to Drupal v 7 tonight, and made a few mistakes (some in full knowledge) while doing it:

• Backed up nothing, relying on luck and my occasional SQL database dumps
• Didn't read the requirements: Drupal 7 needs a later version of PHP than Drupal 6
• Randomly deleted and added files when trying to get it to work
• Tried and failed at doing an Ubuntu distro upgrade

The real show stopper is the PHP requirement, which took me way too long to figure out. Once I did, I tried upgrading my Ubuntu server but it's having trouble extracting the latest update, so I've reverted back to 6.22 and this ugly Garland theme until I have some time to figure out what's going wrong.

The Drupal 7 installation screen, however, looks really nice.

Editor's Note: I apologize for calling Garland ugly. It's obviously not, and Stefan Nagtegaal and Steven Wittens are both incredibly talented designers. It's just the default and not my theme, which is what bugs me. Wittens, by the way, did the wonderful and thought-provoking TermKit. Check it out if you're geeky.

This Month's Carnival of Journalism Question: What qualities should awards like the Online Journalism Awards endorse in an era of such tremendous change in the news industry?

I recently had a chance to help out the Nieman Lab crew when they were prepping their Future of News Encyclo for launch and one thing struck me: How few of the wildly-hyped news launches ever did much for very long. Many of them held one or more of ambition, pedigree or money, and not unusually had all three. Sometimes the founders would make off quite well, particularly when AOL was involved, even as their innovations would die, fallow on the vine.

It gets you thinking, and it certainly got me thinking about what's worthwhile in the online news arena. And so I humbly (with much to be humble about) present the categories and runners up for what awards I would suggest the industry should be giving out:

Sustainability

A media curmudgeon recently wrote, as he was making his transition from print to web, that little of sustained value was produced on the web. On its face the statement is clearly rubbish but I thought it could possibly be resuscitated into a slightly more useful discussion: How can we ensure that we're building not just news for today, but a valuable asset for tomorrow, next year and next decade?

YouTube and Hulu embeds, for example, look great in our quick hit blog posts, but they slowly fall victim to widget rot (with Hulu in particular, given studio's byzantine licensing rules), tearing apart archives slowly and surely as moths in a linens closet. Go through the CNN archives and the pages are static HTML copies of what CNN looked like 10 years ago. Non-semantic markup, the embrace of widgetization and other live-for-today web strategies are undercutting long-term value and even survivability of media.

The sustainability award would go towards media that exemplify and lead in planning for long-term success, both editorially and on the business side. Innovative funding strategies that are showing real promise (i.e., not spending buck fifty to make a buck) would also be eligible.

Runner Up: Still Kicking

When I worked at the New York Daily News, a lot of the veteran reporters had little stickers, holdovers from the lengthy strike that almost killed the paper: Too tough to die.

Sometimes, that's what it takes: The simple refusal to quit. Whether it's a one-woman operation or a collaborative project that extends continents, some projects deserve recognition not because of a sexy new profitable model but simple because they have paved a path on how to balance passionate projects with the realities of modern life. These are typically privately owned by the founders rather than venture-backed or corporately-owned, but there are many variations on the theme of the news projects that just refuse to quit, steadily staking out a quiet claim in the news landscape of yesterday, today and tomorrow.

Consistency

The online media landscape is littered with journonerd All Stars, rightfully recognized for excellent one-off projects. Much rarer however are models for, year in and year out, providing consistent access, coverage or analysis of issues. PolitiFact is one, but projects that regularly and consistently update databases, news guides and other ambitious projects show a committment not just to exciting launches, which are arguably the easy part, but supporting them for the long-term, creating a deeper relationship between online news organizations and the readers that can come back and now what they're getting.

Impact

Journalists are, on the one hand, often told to be impartial scribes, the impartial scribes of the first draft of history. On the other hand, I've rarely seen a paper resist, upon the resignation of a scandal-plagued politician, gleefully injecting the fall was "as a result of allegations first reported by ...".

I think the rush of new analytics has somewhat obscured other, more traditional if less "hard" data points as well as other new potential data that could be analyzed and used as goal markers of "success". Forget, for a minute, the page views and imagine there was a Google Analytics that could measure anything you wanted: Corruption exposed in dollars, civic engagement per page view, reduced childhood obesity, or any other metric.

Let's look more holistically at these sorts of impacts, and reward the innovators.

Reproducible Innovation

Bad artists copy, great artists steal. Let's acknowledge the great masters who came before. Sometimes the sites might be obscured by time and the hype cycle of new, new, new, but before Reddit (was big) there was Digg, and before Digg, Slashdot, and before Slashdot ...

Who are the other progenitors? While the print canon is, I believe, fairly well understood, I think the collective memory of online news would be well served by enshrining and remember those who came before, even as many of them still linger or even thrive, quietly, in their own corner of the Net (See Sustainability). Too often, I think there's a very real lack of "canon" in terms of what people know about the history of their own craft, although projects like Encylo and CJR's news frontier database are helpful.

Runner Up: Falling (And Failing) With Style

A regular feature of my journalism talks these days is embracing a culture of productive failure. New initiatives should generally be mapped out: What will this cost if we succeed? What will it cost if we fail? And how can we benefit and grow from either scenario?

One thing I've taken from heading out to a few Lean Startup meetings is to treat initiatives like hypothesis. For MuckRock, that hypothesis might be that news organizations are under more pressure to produce more with less, and outsourcing menial investigative reporting tasks is a valuable proposition. Another is that applying public pressure can help reform open records compliance.

But like a good scientist, a good online news organization should be fully prepared to make as much use, or even more, use of a negative finding than of a positive one. How are news organizations taking gambles where they have a Heads I Win/Tails You Lose Scenario? These examples should be highlighted to help foster low-cost, sustainable innovation throughout the industry.

What other awards would you like to see created, and more importantly who would you grant these awards to? Leave your thoughts in the comments, or e-mail me at morisy@gmail.com.

A big piece of the story we tell ourselves about who we are, is that we are willing to invent. We are willing to think long-term. We start with the customer and work backwards. And, very importantly, we are willing to be misunderstood for long periods of time.

-Jeff Bezos, Amazon CEO, at GeekWire

There's a great piece at Fortune from Netflix Co-Founder Marc Randolph about the thin line between pure spin and believing in your product. My favorite part, though, was Netflix's original name, Kibble:

First, pick a name that's so bad, that you won't even be tempted to use it when you run into difficulties finding your real domain name. Second, pick something meaningful. It's a great way to start aligning everyone around what you think is really important."
So I called it Kibble. Kibble.com. Like the dog food. Unlaunchable name? You betcha!

First off, Kibble is a great name, if a bit generic for an "online video rental service." But I liked the piece because it reminded me of something I forgot about: Why we named MuckRock, MuckRock.

Mitch and I have kicked around a lot of bad names, a tradition that goes way beyond the first seeds of MuckRock were sown, probably starting around 2006. I actually bought up a bunch of domains with the -rant suffix to build a media network on (IvyRant, CollegeRant, IthacaRant, etc.), and I still think that was pretty good as far as naming things goes. The worst, I think, was Kadada. I don't even know if we came up with the name first, or the awful Latinate bastardization of what it was supposed to stand for, which was something like "long tail" (this was a big deal back then).

So when we came up with the idea of FOI-as-a-service, we wanted something:

• Pronounceable
• Easy to spell
• That vaguely explained what we were doing, without confining us too much

MuckRock was the least awful idea we had after a few weeks of brainstorming. I really liked it at first:

12:28 PM me: http://paidcontent.org/article/419-local-online-the-hyperlocal-rev-model-sell-services-not-just-ads/
12:30 PM domain name: muckrock
2:29 PM Mitchell: muckrock?
2:30 PM me: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muckraker
2:31 PM Mitchell: i know what a muckraker is
are we muckrockers?
is the domain avilable?
2:33 PM me: a) ideally, or at least promoting citizen muckrackers
b) more pertinently, yes
2:34 PM Mitchell: ok, can we get it in .biz and .info, i heard those are more important than .com
2:35 PM me: it's true, they're mroe descriptive and they stand out
2:36 PM Mitchell: try to get a .gov also
2:37 PM thatll give us double reverse street cred

And then I grew to kind of hate it for a while, but we were so busy trying to actually build the site that there wasn't really a lot of time to stop course and think of something less gimmicky. And at first, it was surprisingly useful: People came up to me at little journalist parties and said, "Hey, I've heard of you!" They were always, always, always confusing us for MuckRack for the first few months, but by then they'd already heard our elevator pitch and were kinda intrigued, so I didn't mind the confusion. Plus, hey, the domain was available!

Update: The original post insinuated that MuckRack was done by a PR firm. It was actually done by the fine folks at Sawhorse Media, which does all sorts of lists.

The following entry is submitted as part of this month's Carnival of Journalism, tackling the subject of failure.

I know the stories I want to tell. About the web show that was canned, just before finally getting its footing and a decent audience. Or about the first newspaper site redesign I managed, which managed to squeeze in more Drupal modules per square inch than quite any other site on the Internet. Or any one of the other comfortable failures I trot out when asked to talk about MuckRock's design philosophy and building news projects.

But the truth was, none of those even felt like failures at the time, much less with the comfortable warmth of hindsight, despite spectacular flameouts and crushed databases. And then I wondered why.

In 2007, a series I'd worked on won the Pulitzer Prize. My articles on then-President Lehman's sudden resignation won the New York Press Association's article of the year award. I was about to graduate to a world of possibility, and my dream job, writing A-Heds for the Wall Street Journal, seemed like a not-too-distant possibility. But things didn't quite turn out like that.

For starters, I didn't graduate. At least, not immediately. Two classes shy of finishing my language requirement, all the rumors of "flexibility" on this matter were quickly dispelled when it came down to the wire. And then when I did complete those two requirements, the dean who had signed off on the program resigned, and my file's paperwork was "lost," leaving me to spend four more months fighting just to get my diploma (Keep copious records, it pays off).

And then the interviews. The economy, for journalists at least, had already started to tank. Maybe they were the canaries in the proverbial coal mine, or maybe just the largest dinosaurs after this meteor we call the Internet struck, but I knew things when a veteran editor who had been mentoring me, virtually, posted a farewell to her industry on New Year's Eve, finding neither consolation for her career nor her country anywhere in sight.

I did have interviews lined up, of course, and promises (always promises) of a shoe-in at the Daily News, or possibly a copy boy job at The Times. I should have taken that as a warning sign that I was told I was copy boy material at the Albuquerque Tribune (once a mighty fine paper), much less the Times, but the possibilities seemed real, and endless.

But they weren't. Three interviews with Dow Jones were cancelled after the hiring managers were laid off. Two more interviews were put off, indefinitely, due to heart attacks, and I was left, finally, hoping and praying for a callback from an editor at The Monitor in McAllen, Texas, a small border town. I knew neither Spanish nor much about Texas, but I knew I desperately, feverishly wanted that job, that $20k-per-year job far, far away from everything I knew, because it was a newspaper job, and hadn't I at least earned that?

Despite repeated calls, I never heard back. Not from them, nor the dozens of other papers I'd applied to. I don't blame them. Maybe the clips didn't pass muster. Maybe the positions, like so many others in those years and the ones that followed, simply no longer existed, my resumes left simply to call out to ghosts of a career.

Whatever the reason, my ego was stung, and I felt the hot breath of failure, particularly as the months dragged on. It's hung with me ever since, but its lessons have changed over the years.

I eventually realized that no one owes me anything, much less an increasingly coveted job in an increasingly shrinking field. Over drinks with some veteran Timesmen around this time, an older recruiter told me that companies were always hiring, even in hiring freezes, when they found the right people. Since I didn't have a job, I wasn't the right people ... yet. And so I wrote, a lot, but more importantly doubled down on the skills that I thought were going to shape the industry for years to come, skills journalism schools still weren't (and aren't) teaching, such as project management, development, user interaction and, first and above all, serving a customer.

That's one thing that the Daily News taught me: Love thy reader. The reader is king, and despite the snickering of most journalists, your reader is not dumb, doesn't need to be protected or patronized and cares deeply about the world around her.

And after I started at TechTarget, I started valuing every single one of those readers, as well as every source, every contact and every lead.

It's not a sentiment widely shared, I'm afraid, but it's a selfish view, really: If I work, every day, to make sure I make my readers' lives easier, more informed and richer, they will keep coming back day in and day out, and occasionally even bring a friend to the party.

Having no readers for those few months of unemployment taught me how much I needed them. It also taught me that that world we call and think of as "media" is tiny, just a fraction, really, of what's out there. I know run a blog network and community forum, with a group of over a hundred bloggers, all experts in their field, who I happily go to bat for every day of the week.

I love that. And when we built MuckRock, we wanted the same relationship: Our users were are customers, and we will (and do) go to bat for them in all sorts of ways, whether it's late nights scanning in documents, borderline harassing calls to non-responsive agencies, or helping them pitch a story they've stumbled on to various news outlets. We go to bat for them, and they've repaid that a dozen times over.

It's easy to say now that not getting that job in Albuquerque, or McAllen, or even New York worked out pretty well. I have newspapers regularly pitching me now, asking to help with a project or learn more about MuckRock.

I'm not sure if that's accurate, since I will never know what could have been. But things are definitely different this way: I've learned to think like a CEO, since I am one. I've learned to manage a budget and a staff of a hundred. I've learned to program in a couple of languages and, more importantly, learned that the best code is the code you don't write.

But more important then that, I've learned that even though not everything happens for a reason, you can make a reason for everything that happens, turning failures into starting blocks for your next great adventure.

Note: This post is part of the January 2011 Carnival of Journalism, which asks bloggers to address the "changing role of Universities for the information needs of a community". Whatever that means.

I've been incredibly privilidged to work with almost every stripe of news organization in the past few years, from one of the biggest dailies to a non-profit bi-weekly. I've also been given the opportunity to work closely with the New England Center for Investigative Reporting, a Knight-funded investigative non-profit that works as a regional ProPublica, based out of Boston University.

I think NECIR is a great model of what Universities can do to help promote quality journalism: They're helping train community journalists through watchdog workshops, building partnerships with traditional news institutions and involving the student body in the production of important, meat-and-potatoes investigative work.

But this model is only a partial solution, particularly if the "creative destruction" currently going on in media remains more destructive than creative. We need to go farther in a way that is self-perpetuating, sustainable and makes an impact.

I'd suggest the following tenets:

• No more Ponzi schemes: It didn't work for Madoff, and it won't save journalism. I've seen friends enter programs where the theory seems to be: Train students to do investigative journalism, with the hopes that they'll get University jobs training students in investigative journalism. It's not every program, but it's a model I've also seen as both traditional and startup media ventures: Free labor from interns, who then get experience that will maybe land them a job relying on the free labor of interns. That's just circling the drain.
• Immitation is flattery, but not flattering: College newspapers are great. The Sun was the single most influential thing I did in college. But you're trying to shoehorn amazing resources into mimicking an existing institution, and even when the results are good, you still just get an imitation newspaper, one that is often far removed by its very nature from the community it is embedded in, even in the best circumstances.
• Play to the institutional strengths: At a research university, encourage researchers to blog their ongoing trials, creating more transparency and points for collaboration. Force students to engage with the material, creating coursework out of real-world scenarios where what they're learning actually has an application. The economic collapse has made this an imperative: So many questions have been raised not just in the fields of economics and finance, but history (How much more useful would a historical look at partisan politics be than the contextualless drivel we hear about "heated rhetoric"?), engineering, and the liberal arts.
• Checks and balances: If you follow the above, however, you are not likely to get "traditional" journalism, neatly packed, carefully cited stories that balance political hack vs. political hack. That's okay, but we'll have to have new methods for checking and balancing the news products that come out. Maybe it's a collaborative form of peer review, or more accssible primary documents (I'm always a fan) that invite readers to examine the same evidence your students and researchers did, and maybe suggest new avenues for inquiry.

So how would you do it?