Keith Olbermann is out at MSNBC, and his Countdown show is no more.

Regardless of what you think of Olbermann, it’s hard to deny he changed the way we perceive news and the role of the journalist. He took the helm on March 31, 2003 – just 11 days after the invasion of Iraq under President George W. Bush. In the aftermath of “shock and awe” came the infamous “Mission Accomplished” speech, where Bush declared major combat operations over and the press dutifully began to cover the situation less and less, as if things had ended. The narrative, it seemed, had been complete.

Olbermann, though saw a different story and pursued it doggedly every night on Countdown. By keeping the story alive, he began to show a different picture. Not only were major combat operations not over, but the situation was deteriorating as the power vacuum made room for the Iraqi insurgency and even the creation of an Al Qaida base of power within the country.

Over time, Olbermann changed the narrative, just as some of our best journalists before him have done. The press slowly woke up to the reality, and although the first response from the administration hawks was to deny that we had a situation, Bush’s shakeup of the war management team was the result of the criticism and renewed interest. Read more

Politico broke a story this morning with news that Keith Olbermann had donated to three Democratic party candidates in the run up to the Nov. 2 elections. The donations, it reported, were a potential violation of NBC News’ ethics policy. As Politico states:

NBC has a rule against employees contributing to political campaigns, and a wide range of news organizations prohibit political contributions — considering it a breach of journalistic independence to contribute to the candidates they cover.

It sounds like Olbermann potentially violated the spirit of the rule if it’s basically trying to stop donations. He did donate to a candidate after having them as a guest on his Countdown show. Whether that counts as “covering” them or not I don’t know, but an argument could be made for it.

This afternoon, MSNBC suspended Olbermann indefinitely without pay. It certainly is their right, but I would urge them to rethink the position. Read more

Ran across some really cool news today. Huffington Post announced that it is implementing a badge system as part of a way to build up its user community. For now you have three possible badges on the site: one for having a lot of social connections across the site, one for adding a lot of comments, and one for flagging inappropriate comments that ultimately lead to deletion.

This is huge, and I can’t state this enough. It’s taking some of the game-oriented concepts found in location-based apps such as Foursquare or Gowalla and implementing them in news delivery. These simple games build on the notion that object collection in gaming can be rewarding, and by applying them to news formats HuffPo encourages behaviors complementary to what the news site wants to accomplish.

When I got to Lehigh I hardly imagined being the guy advocating gaming concepts in news, but here I go again. I have already said quite a bit about gaming and news, such as the potential with Foursquare, Gowalla, and transmedia as a way of bringing context to our news (the latter of which is an offshoot of a great panel at SXSW), but it’s emerged as a running theme on this blog over the course of the year

This is not an entirely new idea. Gawker, for example, uses tiered comments by giving the community’s best users a star icon. Gizmodo also recently unveiled a tiered system where valued users get better placement in the commenting thread. It’s a recognition of a lesson we’ve learned in blogland: comments and community are content that should be valued in a same what that the original article should be valued.

Here’s what I love about HuffPo is doing by taking this to another level: the gaming aspect has a purpose.

The third badge, called “Moderator,” is given to those who are on the lookout for comments that clash with the site’s mission of civility. The concept of community moderation in comments is not new, of course, with Slashdot being a good example of how it can work well. The badge isn’t given for random flagging, though, but rather for flagging posts that eventually get deleted. Quality over quantity when it comes to moderation.

I wonder whether in doing it this way it also helps teach the user community about the site’s values by having people flag inappropriate comments with the site’s values and mission in mind. At the SXSW “Future of Context” panel we talked about gaming as a type of learning about the news, but this could be an extension of that by showing users what it means to be a user in a news community.

At the same time, the “Superuser” badge (boo for stealing that one so shamelessly from Foursquare) is given to prolific commenters. So right away you have two badges that work together to increase comment volume while also allowing for ways to up the quality.

There are good reasons to think HuffPo’s system is going to work. Nieman Lab noted that by emphasizing quality in comments it actually led to more and better comments in the Gawker universe of products. This makes logical sense; if I think my post is going to be buried by the community, I will try to make it entertaining, witty, insightful, etc.

The one I’m excited about is the “Networker” badge because this is at the heart of the scholarly stuff I think about. My dissertation argued a new type of social capital known as Web-network social capital, which basically consists of the networks and ties created in user communities for the purposes of building that online community. The badge looks like it has potentinal to start increasing and rewarding network ties. We’ve already started seeing people thinking about Farmville and the potential for building social ties through gaming. WNSC has the potential to explain some of what we’re seeing, and sites that look to build it are helping to create something unique in the process.

When I argued for WNSC, I was looking broadly at social networks and blogs. What excites me about gaming entering the news is that this is a further area for study and a potential growth area for news sites interested in building up communities that help serve a site’s core mission.

HuffPo says it will be adding more (my suggestion: “I’m on a boat”). Of all the new avenues I’ve seen in news this year, Gowalla tours and this effort by HuffPo are two that have my eye. Gaming holds a lot of potential for news outlets, and I hope they’re paying attention.

I just finished my fifth AEJMC convention, but this was a new experience. It was my first as a non-student and it was weird to walk around and network as a professor and not a student scholar. Two things I can say about that. First, what they say about the PhD being a union card is sort of true; it seemed like people were deferring to my alleged expertise more this year (as if somehow I’m infinitely smarter now than I was three weeks ago before my dissertation defense).

Not always, though. I like the spirited discussion and pushback I get when I discuss things in the Civic/Citizen Journalism group. Perhaps that’s a good sign it’s a good intellectual home for me and my work. I consider myself a lifelong learner and loathe the term “expert” because I don’t ever want something to serve as a turnoff to pushing back on things I say. Discussion is good.

The second thought is this new phase is going to take some getting used to. I’m used to mingling with that awesome yellow “Graduate Student” tag on my badge. It was a license to talk to all the senior folks and go total fanboy on them. I feel more restrained now without it, and I probably should be. The ideal path is to merge my work with theirs rather than simply stare and marvel at their work like a painting. At least that’s the way I visualize it.

But I sat in on a number of interesting sessions and really enjoyed the poster sessions even more than usual. Those scholar-to-scholar sessions, a veritable street market for presenting research, are always some of the best stuff at AEJ and this year was no exception.

One of the standout sessions was the J-Lab luncheon on Friday. Doug Fisher’s blog has a good recap of the presentation, which had three newspaper exects talk about content sharing among competing papers to allow for a reallocation of resources to other areas such as investigative reporting. This would allow for one reporter to do the nuts-and-bolts daily coverage and let newspapers focus dwindling resources on what they do best. Read more

Note: This is written for AEJMC’s call for responses to the question of what the future holds for journalism and mass communication. Submit your own entry by following this link, and win free registration to the convention in Boston.

The future of news is just fine. It’s the future of journalism that is so unsettled.

Since Walter Williams founded the first school of journalism at the University of Missouri in 1908, we’ve seen a lot of technological advancements that have thrown journalism, the system by which we produce news, into states of change and upheaval.

Journalism itself is undergoing change, but the basic unit of that product – news – is at its core unchanged in terms of the value it brings society. The modes of production have changed in the past 100 years, but our basic charge to teach storytelling is still central to what we do. This part of human communication is as old as time and probably won’t go away any time soon, but the ways in which people are willing to pay for it is undergoing what some call change, others call assault. Read more

Stuff I’m reading and thinking about …

USC has launched Intersections to help cover South Los Angeles, which is a terribly underserved part of the region. One of the stated goals is to “train a new generation of journalists for open-minded, culturally literate reporting.” I love the positive vibe of the way the community is presented but wonder whether it overdoes it at the risk of distortion. All things considered though, this looks like a cool project and is worth watching.

Claire McCaskill took the time to share she as a United States Senator would be interested in using Twitter. She notes, “As I am walking to a hearing, or riding the tram over for a vote, I think of what I want to tell the folks at home about my work or life. This, I believe, is a fairly decent way to stay connected.” A lot of people criticize her for not using Twitter “correctly” in that she has amassed many followers but does not follow anyone. I am not in that camp (partly because I’m not sure there’s a “right way” to use Twitter, although there are many wrong ways). Followers can still reply in real time to things she says. It’s not like she’s not hearing her constituents.

Scott Murphy thanked the users of DailyKos.com for helping him win the NY-20 special congressional election. Users were donating and phone banking on his behalf even if they couldn’t vote for him. This is partly the future of civic engagement and a major leg of my dissertation. People who want to help people or causes they care about are no longer constrained by geography.

Erica Perez at the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel had a great story about professors using Twitter in the classroom. I’ve dabbled in it a bit this spring and plan to do more with it in the coming semester. Twitter itself might be a fad, but as an instructor it’s important to find ways to better interact with students.

Major media have been heaping on the past couple days about some of the misinformation about the swine flu outbreak being posted to .

NPR, for example, bemoaned how tweets about swine flu inject “noise” into the process of informing people. CNN piled on with similar thoughts and also tied it to the loss of centralized media operations.

Some of this is a basic misunderstanding of what Twitter is, but it should be noted that the trending topic has been going for about five days solid on Twitter, and that’s substantial. But Twitter has been a source of breaking news as well. I found out from Twitter today, for example, that Missouri had its first case of swine flu and have been getting periodic official updates from . Read more

I posted a link to Martin Langeveld’s piece on the content cascade the other day and have been thinking a lot about the notion of discussion streams of late as I’m preparing to teach Online Journalism to the online master’s students this summer.

An illustration came to mind today as I was lecturing in Principles on media ethics. The case study we were walking through sketched a conflict involving a newspaper that had an ad submitted for publication from a local tanning salon. The ad made misleading claims that led the reader to believe that tanning beds are safer than laying out in the sun, whereas an advocacy group of dermatologists were upset that the ad was running because research shows the beds to be dangerous.

The reason discussion streams came to mind is that one of the proposed solutions was that instead of choosing to run or not run the ad, the newspaper could write a story about tanning bed safety and run it against the ad. Putting aside the problems that come with writing a hit piece against an advertiser right next to their ad, one thing that came to mind was the problem of time. Read more

Stuff I’m reading and thinking about …

Mark Briggs has a good post about applying the reputation economy to comments on news sites. In terms of discussion online, when I talk to folks running news sites the issue of civility is usually atop the list of concerns.

Vin Crosbie has some good thoughts about where we are in the media reorganization, calling us in the “middlegame.”

I spent some time with working professionals last summer when I taught Online Journalism here at MU through our online master’s program. I wish I’d had this piece by Martin Langeveld from the Nieman Journalism Lab when we talked about journalism and the stream of discussion.

Mashable has some good thoughts about passing the social recruitment test for prospective employers.

Lastly, congrats to my former LA Daily News colleague Matt Hufman, who was part of the team that produced a series that won the Pulitzer Prize for public service. Matt reported and wrote a series of editorials that went with the packages that were considered for the award. He’s a top-notch journalist and a great guy.

Barack Obama’s decision to release Bush administration memos that argue for the justification of torture techniques has been all over the news. Something else has raised a bit of ruckus in journalism academia circles, and that is Mike Allen’s account for Politico on how the decision was made.

Allen wrote a fairly short piece that led with the news that Obama consulted a wide range of sources before making his decision. In the fifth paragraph of this eight-paragraph story, Allen chose to “balance” the piece with anonymous quotes from a former Bush staffer who railed against the decision. The staffer accused the administration of putting America in danger, a fairly weighty claim. Read more

I’m a huge fan of The Simpsons, there’s no secret about that. One of my favorite clips, which unfortunately I can’t find on YouTube in English, comes from an episode a few years back when Homer decides to start an Internet business because he hears everyone’s making money.

The scene starts with Comic Book Guy surfing the Web for, um, adult photographs and finds the images loading too slow. He spies Homer’s “Internet King” banner ad and wonders if it’s time for an upgrade in Internet connection speed.

Cut to the next scene, with CBG visiting Homer at Homer’s “office” (his house, because, why not?): Read more

Clay Shirky’s post that examines the historical underpinnings behind the current newspaper collapse is making the rounds today on all my social media channels. It’s longish, and a pretty detailed, but if you’re concerned about collapse of this medium in your community it is worth the time.

As I read it, I am reminded that as much as I loved the good old days, we aren’t going back. The model between information access, publishing ability, advertising, and economics has shifted too radically. It doesn’t mean newspapers are going to die, but it does mean that the old business model is only going to work in some types of settings (small rural towns come to mind). By extension, though, it means that more newspapers are going under if they don’t radically shift gears. The model just isn’t sustainable in certain community types.

I am glad that Shirky offered a road map for the way forward. A cynic would say he’s being vague, but at this point I’d settle for a vague set of principles to guide innovation. We’re still at that stage. Anyone claiming to have the answer is being dishonest.

New York Times media writer David Carr penned an interesting piece that has gotten some play in media circles today. Summing up the feelings of a lot of my fellow journalists, he modestly proposes that newspapers get together and end the free ride on the Web for both readers and aggregators.

In other words, charge.

Carr notes that for this to work it’s going to take some collusion among newspaper companies, which is probably illegal and would require antitrust law changes to make it happen. A lot of what he’s saying is a rehash of what others have suggested, but it’s a pretty solid summary of the camp that wants to charge now and often. Read more

One of the true joys of living here in Columbia is the annual True/False Film Festival, a four-day event that brings in some great independently made documentary films. It’s a real treat to have in a place like this and draws people from all over, and the 2009 edition has been no exception.

I saw four very good films today, but the one that hit me the most was Burma VJ. Directed by Anders Østergaard, the film is the story of how a bunch of citizen reporters documented the Saffron Revolution in Burma for the outside world back in 2007 (background) using nothing more than digital video cameras and a network of delivery that could get around the oppressive military regime’s measures against dissent.

The film is unique. Rather than using documentary footage shot by Østergaard and his crew, it strings together actual video shot by the VJs (video journalists) during the time of the conflict. It uses the narrative supplied by “Joshua,” who was the leader of the network, talking about how he was responsible for getting their footage out to sources such as CNN and BBC to raise awareness around the world. Read more

It’s a sad day for those of us who care about journalism and public service. The Rocky Mountain News, a newspaper that existed and served Denver even before Colorado became a state, folded this week and published its final issue this morning.

Much has been said how we got to this point. noted that it’s remarkable the RMN lasted this long, because two-newspaper towns (The Denver Post being the competitor in this case) were a dying breed even 15 years ago. Others have lit up the boards at Poynter, blaming everything and everyone from management to out-of-touch journalists.

In some ways, this is a rehash of what we’ve been talking about for 10 years now. Read more

I had an interesting conversation with a fellow scholar who works in the organizational management and planning discipline about ways to innovate and push new media products into the market.

His analogy was interesting. He noted that Japanese auto makers such as Honda made inroads in the American car market in the 1980s by offering cheap vehicles that were high in motor quality but didn’t look that great. Slowly but surely, they added features while incrementally upping the cost. While the Fords and Chevys of the world couldn’t compete against a much cheaper product without stripping out major features, Honda slowly improved quality while keeping its image as a low-cost alternative, effectively squeezing its way into a crowded market. Read more

MU’s own Jen Reeves, one of the most innovative minds here when it comes to journalism and social media, likes to compare the journalistic value of to a police scanner. When news sources use Twitter to follow the feeds of people in their community, they can glean what is going on in communities similar to what we have in newsrooms now, where police scanners are a window into what’s going on in the police and fire arenas.

Today I was part of a beautiful example of how it works.

My wife and I were walking across the MU campus today and I remarked how it smelled like burning wood, sort of like that first winter day when everyone in town fires up the fireplace. Soon we saw random pieces of ash-like material floating to the ground every so often. It was obvious that something was burning somewhere in Columbia. Read more

About 2 p.m. I got an e-mail from a friend with the subject “Holy crap!!!!” and immediately had to open it. He recounted he was downloading the new U2 album now after it had been leaked online and wanted to pass on the information that I could get the album a full two weeks before its actual release.

A little background first. I’m a U2 nut, and not so closeted. I saw them play three times in three different cities on their last tour, and that was a down year for me. So a chance to hear fresh music from my favorite band is always enticing.

Ultimately, I declined, and it wasn’t that difficult despite the potential payoff. Just two weeks ago, I mused, I had lectured in Principles of American Journalism that a big challenge facing the journalist of tomorrow is monetizing news in an era where people expect it to be free. Read more

I’m a little annoyed with journalists today.

On the same day Joe Matthews pens a column for TNR about the loss of watchdog journalism, we get this Alex Rodriguez spectacle in Tampa. In bemoaning the cuts at the Los Angeles Times, Matthews toes the line according to the standard argument of the day, we need journalists to investigate, uncover wrongdoing, and ask tough questions.

Cut to the A-Rod news conference this afternoon and you see a bunch of journalists either afraid or unwilling to challenge a guy who’s being pretty evasive. Every answer is “mistakes of my youth” or “I was naive” and not enough insight. Read more

The Online News listserv had an interesting post about a site called Breaking Tweets, the brainchild of Craig Kanal, that culls interesting Tweets from Twitter feeds on particular topics and puts a “human face” on things going on in the news.

A good example is the coverage on the site of the Australian brushfires.

Thinkers rightly note that, as with any media that is an aggregate of socially produced content, this ultimately means more noise in the stream of media conversation. Journalists often use this as evidence that this “noise” doesn’t matter and makes it inferior to professional jounalism. Read more