Who is a journalist? Ask the Census Bureau

With the rise of blogs and citizen reporters, the debate has raged: Who is a journalist?

Do you have to work for a professional news organization? Do you need to be accredited? Do you need a journalism degree?

Apparently, the Census Bureau has come up with a definition. And I don’t qualify.

Even though I no longer work for a professional news organization, I still consider myself a journalist. I have a journalism degree. I worked for 14 years in the business. I know how to dissect information and report accurately.

For the past two years, I have been working to build a community news site with the help of students and volunteers. It is an unfunded startup that has taken much effort to nurture, especially since I already have a full-time job as an assistant professor. Our independent content is infrequent, but we offer a daily roundup of the best from local media, a way to help local readers sort through the mass of news.

Years ago, as an editor, I led our newspaper’s 2000 Census coverage. So naturally, this year, I wanted to have access to embargoed data to crunch for our site’s news coverage.

But we don’t fit the Census Bureau’s definition.

Embargo access may be granted to reporters, editors, writers, publishers, editorial and news cartoonists and artists, news photographers, producers, librarians, presidents, general managers, videographers, webmasters and other editorial employees who work for qualified news outlets, which include publications, news services, broadcast outlets and news Internet sites that meet the following criteria:

• Their primary purpose is the dissemination of news.
• They are regularly issued and supported by advertising or paid subscription and operate with editorial independence from any political, governmental, commercial or special interest.

So volunteers who work for free apparently don’t qualify. What about Janis Krums, who shot the iPhone picture of the plane in the Hudson River? Though not a credentialed journalist, he shot the image used by dozens of news organizations. Or Simon Johnson, the economist whose Baseline Scenario blog is a top resource for financial journalists?

What about sites that don’t have advertising or subscriptions?  The SCOTUS Blog, which conducted the analysis of Sonya Sotomayor’s appellate case decisions, was referenced by several news organizations in their coverage of Sotomayor’s confirmation. It continues to produce some of the most thorough Supreme Court coverage available.

The Census Bureau also has other criteria for online media to become accredited. They must:

• Belong to a “recognized media organization,” with a specific address and phone number.
• Have 60 percent original news content, commentary or analysis.
• Submit two bylined articles published by the site in the previous month.
• Update a minimum of once a week.

I understand the Census Bureau has to set some standards to prevent every hack from getting access before the bureau is ready for publication. And as a journalist who used to work at a newspaper, I can respect the distinctions the bureau is willing to draw. But as professional news organizations cut the number of journalists, it is becoming incumbent on passionate volunteers to assist with coverage.

Perhaps there’s a simpler solution: Just release the data without any media embargo at all.

Carnival of Journalism #fail: The glittering allure of Web video

Note: This post is another installment for the Reynolds Journalism Institute’s Carnival of Journalism project, where people passionate about journalism are sharing ideas in the blogosphere about ways to preserve and improve the craft.

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Fear comfort, not failure.

Innovation theorists often talk about “failing fast” — taking risks and then quickly evaluating whether the risk is reaping hoped-for rewards.

This is my tale of “failing fast.”

In June 2001, I became online editor of the Springfield (Mo.) News-Leader, and I was eager to put my stamp on our Web site. One of my first major projects involved working with an assistant city editor to develop strong coordinated coverage of the Ozarks Open, our area’s premier golf event. Besides luring many rising professional golfers to the area, the event raised thousands of dollars for local charities.

Our big idea: A virtual tour of the course.

We repurposed newspaper graphics for the Web and developed individual pages for every hole. We broke down the key elements and analyzed the primary obstacles. And then, the editor — who was also a videographer — spent days at the course with the golf pro shooting videos that offered from-the-golfer views explaining how to navigate the holes.

Eighteen videos. Each about a minute long. Each about 9.8 megabytes in size.

We launched the mini-site in conjunction with coverage in the print edition and provided links from the home page. We praised ourselves for being ahead of the curve and thinking multimedia. Our site was deeper than any other — even deeper than the event’s own site.

But I failed to consider two critical details: The majority of our users connected to us via dial-up, and those who came through broadband connections typically did so during work hours.

The videos sat dormant. Views languished in double digits. Obituaries and death notices continued to be our top draws.

We had spent days of staff time and resources developing the mini-site. And no one was using it.

I learned a valuable lesson, though. From a news site, most people just want the information quickly, sans multimedia doo-dads. In many conversations with online editors since, I have found staff-produced videos typically are not major draws. It’s the raw video from breaking-news scenes or the goofball YouTube amateur that pulls in the audience.

As a researcher, I’ve investigated this question a bit further. A secondary analysis I conducted of media usage in 2009 showed that multimedia was not statistically significant in whether someone chose the Internet as his or her primary source for news. The primary factor was frequency of updating.

Indeed, my recent research at the Christian Science Monitor found that the news organization improved traffic more effectively with frequent updates than multimedia content. Videos and a weekly webcast were abandoned because they didn’t generate much interest from the audience. And the push toward regular updates, combined with search-engine optimization, helped the Monitor increase page views to more than 25 million per month.