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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.

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.

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?

I have now spent a long, long time getting acquainted with the wonderful OpenHeatMap, a delightful project by Pete Warden that easily lets you map your data sets against not only maps (as the name would apply) but also time.

If you use the website's "hosted version," the whole thing is a snap. Just upload your CSV or Excel document, or link in a Google spreadsheet, tweak a few knobs, and you are off and running. If you want to host it yourself, however ... There's a few speed bumps along the way. And as far as I can tell, no one outside of Pete and myself has really done it yet.

Now first off, Pete's done a great job and the Github documentation is pretty good given the project's infancy. But I banged my head on a lot of points that hopefully others can avoid, because I couldn't find any non-Pete written documentation or reviews anywhere.

So here we go: Michael's caveats and warnings when using OpenHeatMap.

Social NetworkAbout a week ago, I met up with a former Romanian journalist who'd done a great job mapping political, media and organized crime ties in his country, and the complex relation between the three. It was a great database, but a little hard to wrap your head around because you had to do a search on an official or a company, which meant knowing where to start.

It was also difficult to get a "big picture" look at just how interwoven everything actually was. The month before, I'd been approached to pitch a similar project, that would map the ties between contractors and state officials in a way similar to how Muckety.com graphs political, business and social relationships.

I haven't had a chance to play with many options, but thought I'd collect them here and share my impressions as I get a chance.

• My.Muckety.com is in beta, is free and puts out some nice looking social graphs. You plot out the relationships in a Google Doc, upload it, and they map it for you. As far as I can tell, the free accounts are limited to one graph at a time, with up to a hundred nodes, but there's no option yet to upgrade to a pro account or anything else that would give you more access.
• IBM's Many Eyes project has quickly become the data visualization/crowd sourcing darling: Upload a data set, and let the world play and poke at it. It features social graphs, like this one of Biblical co-occurrences, as one of the many, many options. I believe it's currently free and mostly a way for IBM to show off what their BI tool Cognos can do.
• SocNetV is an open-source social grapher that has some neat tools like a built-in webcrawler.
• UCINET has a free time-expiring demo, and paid rates ranging from $40 to $250 for a full license.
• GraphViz is another open source option. The homepage says it can power web graphs, apparently through the Grappa Java engine
• NodeXL is an Excel template that makes it easy to power social graphing without much out of the ordinary software. It uses an OSI-approved open source license. There's also a free tutorial for it as well.
• Flare is a nice Flash ActionScript library that looks like it could easily create dozens of varieties of social graph visualizations with just a few clicks. The demo is incredibly smooth and impressive, and it's also open source.
• Gephi is another slick network visualization package, but doesn't appear to have a web component.
• Protovis is another open source option that sports in vogue favorites like force-directed diagrams and many, many other options. Here's a guide.

And not technically a software package, but Investigative Reporters and Editors has a social network analysis guide. Any other options I've missed? Add them below in the comments. As I get time to test out the various packages, I'll post my thoughts and link to them from here.

Note: Many of these great suggestions come straight from the NICAR mailing list.

So lately I've been super busy, with a half-written blog post about The Social Network just sitting in my drafts, but I completely forgot to mention something even more important (I know: More important than that?!): I've recently had my work features all over the place!

Most of it is due to a part-time position I've taken as web producer for the New England Center for Investigative Reporting as their web producer. It's been a fantastic experience and really pushed my web skills. Each month, I'm creating an interactive package to go alongside their hard hitting news stories. This past month, I did an interactive map that let Massachusetts residents see where construction sites falling deaths occurred, and the fines attached to those deaths.

So for a little while, my interactive was on the front page of WBUR, as well as a host of other great media organizations including the Cape Cod Times, The Worcester Telegram-Gazette and more.

I was also profiled by the Nieman Lab for the FOIA work MuckRock is doing. I've been a fanboy of Nieman Lab for as long as I've known it's been around, and I think I actually passed out the first time I met Joshua Benton, so it was a very surreal, very excellent experience seeing myself quoted by them.

CBS Evening News is what many consider a serious news show, but I wouldn't have guessed it looking at an article landing page recently:

Or more clearly ...

That's a whole 80 words of text show up above the digital fold. Count 'em.

Compare this to the gorgeous, content rich NYTimes.com article page:

And that was a really good story CBS did, but it's buried under some dreck about Dancing with the Stars, flashing ads, celebrity gossip, say-nothing teaser headlines and Katie Couric's smiling mug, not to mention free ads for Twitter, Digg and Facebook.

Just a shame, that's all.

Since joining TechTarget, I've gotten occasional e-mails from the ASBPE. None have really been notable, until I was invited to hear ASBPE's "Ten Trends that Could Make (or Break) Our Editorial Careers" (emphasis mine):

Among the 10 trends to be covered:

1. We and our publications will be measured.
2. Our content will become "co-creative" with our audiences.
3. Editorial content will focus predominantly on analysis and exclusives.
4. We are in the entertainment (and information) business.
5. We (not publishers) will be the primary marketers of our content.
6. No one will pay us or our publishers directly for our content.
7. The fading "bright line" between editorial and sales may grow dimmer.
8. Content will be read on mobile devices as often as on computer screens.
9. Print content will go the premium route.
10. The Millennials will want our content, but in different packages.

Event details:
Date: Thursday, April 29th, 2010
Time: 12:30 to 1:30 pm EST
Location: Your desktop computer.

Cost: $20 for members, $45 for non-members

I'm not saying it's a bad value, and the topics certainly seem worthwhile, but there is something delicious about charging people $45 to tell them to give their content away for free.

What, exactly, is a news nugget, and what's in it?

Dave Winer suggests a nugget-of-news is 185 characters, on average. I was skeptical: He came to this number by taking the average New York Times Headline + Summary Description. That's not a news nugget: That's a news pointer.

In programming, a pointer is a reference that tells you where to look for the data, and what kind of data to expect. Kind of like the shortcuts you have on your desktop: They're not the actual documents, web pages or applications you use, but they tell you what you're going to get and take you to it.

Headlines and descriptions aren't the news: They tell you what the news will be, but the news itself is the facts, quotations and new information that make up the article. And while you'll see a lot of headline pointers being passed around on Twitter, any "social media expert" who salivates over Bit.ly statistics will tell you that including these facts, rather than just the headline, will boost interest.

In addition to here and the IT Watch Blog, I'm now blogging at MuckRock, a site dedicated to web-enabled citizen journalism tools. I'll be writing about, er, citizen journalism, freedom of information laws, and any other little thing that strikes my fancy.

Danc over at Lost Garden recently wrote a great essay about "manufactured" gaming heroes, the public faces marketing teams come up with and trot out to promote a new product.

It's a great read, not the least of which it could be applied so much more broadly:

The game media, trained to vacuum up press releases and pre-packaged interviews, never asks the probing question "What did you actually do?" or "Well, if you didn't, who did?" Marketing handlers merely selects a plausible face and media blindly crowns them as worthy creative visionaries.

Idols, even false ones, fill a uniquely human need for worship. Both gamers and journalists are desperate to adore, to celebrate, to follow the brilliant individuals that birthed our favorite games. When presented with the mechanistic, faceless truth of modern game development, we reject reality and seek something, anything that fits our preconceived notions of creative genius. A paper hero constructed of marketing materials fits the fan's need and is gladly assembled for each game launch.

But do we really need to settle? Are artificial heroes necessary? What if there were real gaming celebrities out there who are actually worthy of our veneration?

As an IT reporter, I've definitely (rarely, but definitely) run into situations where the spokesperson and particularly the customer interview never worked directly with the product.

Let that sink in: A company puts forward as a customer testimonial someone who has never, ever actually used the product.

There's a whole lot wrong with the idea of news as a video game, but there's probably a whole lot more right at this point. Patrick Smith does a smart summary of some key concepts, including people will pay for interaction, new as gaming and reader rewards. It's all stuff I thoroughly believe in, but it's just not as inspiring as trust, justice and the American way, you know?

Patrick also has a blog post that lambasts papers for giving away updates: Why create an iPhone app that just drives marginal traffic when, in theory, you could make it a profit center?

Level upLately, I've been reading a lot more about game mechanics in media sites. They can be addictive, even with little else compelling to offer: I get very little out of FourSquare since almost none of my friends have accounts, and of even those few none actively use it.

But I still have compulsively checked in 84 times over 32 nights, earning badges like "Explorer," "Bender" and "Local." I'm not even that much of a collector personality, but I imagine this age will take much advantage of those poor souls.

But fly-by-night Web 2.0 services shouldn't be the only ones letting the games begin: As the Guardian has shown, game elements can be useful in encouraging your readers to help effectively dig through mountains of public documents.

Simon Willison, creator of the Guardian's MP expense investigation experiment, told Nieman Journalism Lab that keeping research fun and competitive let the paper offload sorting through 170,000 documents in 80 hours by a team of 20,000 volunteers.

The Guardian's tools were primarily a one-off occurrence, but badges in particular can help direct desirable user/reader behavior for the long haul. For example, if you have a

There's a great post by Jeff Atwood on the importance of elevator pitch test out of which I snip the following:

Software developers think their job is writing code. But it's not.* Their job is to solve the customer's problem. Sure, our preferred medium for solving problems is software, and that does involve writing code. But let's keep this squarely in context: writing code is something you have to do to deliver a solution. It is not an end in and of itself.

Tweaked slightly:

Journalists think their job is writing articles. But it's not.* Their job is to solve the reader's problem. Sure, our *formerly* preferred medium for solving problems is the article, and that does involve writing code. But let's keep this squarely in context: writing code is something you have to do to deliver a solution. It is not an end in and of itself.

Maybe news organizations could learn a thing or two from the genteel country club: Keep the riff-raff out, a whiff of superiority in, and everyone (with a membership) gets to enjoy the greens.

Jeff Jarvis wrote an excellent post on news organizations and membership, taking to task those that were considering the "give us money and get a T-shirt" approach done so successfully by the non-profit NPR:

the membership bar has moved up. It’s not enough to let people give you money and promote you. Now you have to invite them to have a real and meaningful role in what you do, even a sense – if not a stake – of ownership and, consequently, control.
...
Note that Wikipedia is trying to figure out what value it needs to add back to its community’s product, not as a controller but as a contributing member itself. That’s part of the secret to successful networks: everyone’s a member, no one is king.

He's right, but that control means taking control on their behalf sometimes. Theories on how to deal with reader comments have varied widely over the past years, but it's widely recognized now that comments can be good, but an uncontrolled, live-and-let-die only serves trolls and isn't really good at "furthering the conversation."

Take YouTube: An infamous cesspool of ignorant commentary. But because it was free, it proved quite the quandary for other streaming video sites: Free can be quite the competitive advantage. While sites like Brightcove have tackled the enterprise market, competitors like DailyMotion seemed to be driving the market as a race to the bottom. Vimeo took a different approach.

Its front page happily proclaims their mission:

Vimeo is a respectful community of creative people who are passionate about sharing the videos they make.

They make clear who they are and who they aren't, not only with this statement but with the cheerful, quirky site design, gorgeous display and even . While there are introductory accounts, any serious users will quickly run up against their upload/download limits that push users to join up, and a lot have. But what they're really paying for isn't so much the upload capacity or even the video quality.

People are paying for the respectful community. And Vimeo knows it: Can you imagine YouTube subjecting its staff to its community the way Vimeo proudly does on its staff blog, with folksy talk and funky profile pictures? I don't think there's enough hazard pay in the world for the abuse they'd endure.

The truth of the matter is, many news organizations forums aren't much better (particularly after a Drudge link!). How valuable are the readers that sling mud back and forth, almost with disregard to the topic their commenting on? Their ad value is debatable, but their difficult to monetize at best and a worthless strain on the servers at worst. But what do they add to the community, for all the entertainment (what else could it be?) that they get?

A number of people have been openly hostile to Rupert Murdoch's talk of closing off his sites to Google's Index, as if he was not only making a bad business decision but also drowning kittens by the act of withholding News Corp. content (here's a sample). But Murdoch isn't stupid, and he hasn't always been anti-Google. As far as I can tell, a lot of the anti-Google rhetoric is simply positioning for later negotiations, either with Bing or Google later on (Paul Carr has a good piece on Murdoch's scheming). But beyond that, Murdoch's made smart moves towards openness when he thinks they'll benefit his empire: You can currently get almost any Wall Street Article free by simply Googling the title, or even by clicking through on a Digg link, both of which are special arrangements. If he really was as curmudgeonly as he's made himself out to be, neither of these special arrangements would exist.

And there is evidence that people will pay for the right community and content. Something Awful, for one. When News Corp. launches its paywall, I will be shocked if the only asset users get is the text content: They're also getting access to a community of moderated commenters (Something Awful has shown they don't even have to be classy commenters, so those Drudge trolls might yet have a home), convenience, and quite possibly more as the News Corp. empire finalizes its plans.