John Tedesco

Last week the New York Times ran a story about Internet companies selling imaginary things:

These so-called virtual goods, like a $1 illustration of a Champagne bottle on Facebook or the $2.50 Halloween costume in the online game Sorority Life, are no more than a collection of pixels on a Web page.

But it is quickly becoming commonplace for people to spend a few dollars on them to get ahead in an online game or to give a friend a gift on a social network.

There are several companies that sell virtual goods — one of them being Zynga. The Times story mentioned Zynga and quoted its CEO. But the story paid scant attention to recent blog posts by TechCrunch’s Michael Arrington, who revealed Zynga was making gobs of money from unwary people, often kids, who unwittingly subscribe to deals they don’t want.

The omission outraged Fake Steve Jobs, AKA Dan Lyons, who claimed the story is Exhibit A in the case of the dying mainstream media:

Um, New York Times? If you guys are still wondering why people are dropping their subscriptions and getting their news from blogs instead of you — this is why.

And to all those people who go around wringing their hands and saying what are we going to do when the “real newspapers” all die and we have to get our news from Gawker and HuffPo and TechCrunch? Friends, I think we’re going to be just fine.

The usual suspects such as Techdirt applauded this post. But they all missed the point.

The lament about the decline of newspapers is not really about the loss of a physical paper. It’s about the loss of institutions that pay people a full-time salary to look under rocks and share important stories with their communities.

It’s awesome TechCrunch uncovered the shenanigans at Zynga. Other blogs like the Consumerist and The Smoking Gun have produced fantastic, public-service journalism here and here.

But such in-depth coverage from these blogs is uncommon, even though they are among the top-ranked blogs on Technorati and actually make decent money. The vast majority of bloggers don’t enjoy the luxury of a sizable paycheck. For most bloggers, it’s a hobby. And it’s difficult, if not impossible, to do the grunt-work of journalism on a part-time basis.

I would love to hear Fake Steve Jobs explain how a blogger with a day job is going to find the time to stake out a grand jury at the courthouse, or dig up details about a crooked land deal being hatched at City Hall.

Who’s going to work on these local stories for readers in San Antonio — TechCrunch?

Newspapers, despite all their faults and foibles, are still the ones doing most of this valuable work.

Fake Steve Jobs fell for the old fallacy of newspapers vs. bloggers. I’m sure I could find plenty of stories where the Times routinely scooped TechCrunch. But this kind of tit-for-tat tally entirely misses the point. The real problem is finding new economic models that support full-time journalism. That’s why it’s interesting to watch experiments like the Texas Tribune, ProPublica and nonprofit news organizations in other parts of the country. These organizations are paying people to work full-time on important stories.

Fake Steve Jobs — that’s the real issue.

(Photo credit: Tripsspace)

Randy Bear, one of the more thoughtful bloggers in the San Antonio area, lamented the slow decline of newspapers and cautioned his readers yesterday that blogs aren’t authoritative:

Bloggers such as myself don’t have the time to invest in vetting stories to make sure the information is completely accurate. In many cases I rely on traditional media to do that work and just add a perspective on the story. I also don’t have the skills reporters are taught in school and on the job about reporting as accurately as possible.

You don’t read commentary like this very often in the blogosphere, and frankly, Randy is selling himself short here. I for one find his blog interesting. But he hits on a key problem for bloggers interested in digging up the truth: Time — or the lack of it.

A reporter has the luxury of getting paid to work full-time at uncovering information. Not a whole lot of bloggers can say that, and that’s why newspapers, for all their faults, are still important civic institutions. Newspapers are able to pay many reporters a full-time salary to go forth and tell the public what’s going on in a complicated world. My bosses pay me to spend weeks, even months, to talk to sources, dig through records and analyze data to find good stories. Sometimes, those stories really make a difference.

So as newsroom budgets across the country are being slashed and thousands of journalists lose their jobs, the key challenge is finding an economic model that supports the expense of paying truth-seekers to dig up important stories.

So I say to Randy: Keep up the good work — and let’s figure out a way to make money off this Internet thing and support good journalism.

The main reason why I started this blog was to open up conversations with readers in a new way. But there’s also been a side benefit: News tips.

Thanks to Google, two tipsters recently found my Web site and gave me a call, pointing me to story ideas that certainly look interesting. If the tips pan out, these kernels of information could become great stories. So that in itself is a fantastic incentive for journalists to set up their own blogs.

To the folks who called me, thanks for the heads up.

Mindy McAdams compiled 15 blog posts into a single pdf file to create a great primer about blogging, videos, pictures, podcasting — and why you ought to be learning it all.

McAdams wrote this guide for journalists but it’s useful for anyone who wants to tell stories in the multimedia world and make connections with people. The guide includes tips from Angela Grant at News Videographer, my former colleague at the Express-News.

I stumbled across this guide thanks to a tweet sent out today by Susan Crowell. Who says Twitter is a waste of time?

(Photo credit: flickr.com/photos/alcomm)

Ben Popken and Meg Marco at the Consumerist wrote a 3,500-word muckraking blog post examining the business practices of Cash4Gold, the company that pays “top dollar” for your unwanted gold trinkets. The company’s pitch has aired in commercials nationwide — including during the Super Bowl.

Blogs are often viewed as venues that pilfer and riff off the media but don’t dig up original information of their own. Here’s an example that bucks that perception. Ben and Meg tested the company’s claims that it pays top dollar for your unwanted gold trinkets and discovered consumers can actually make more money selling their goods at pawn shops. Cash4Gold has sued the Consumerist, which is owned by Consumer Reports, but it hasn’t backed down.

It’s often more difficult to examine the practices of a company than a government agency. Open government laws apply to — you guessed it — government. Not businesses. So it’s much more difficult to get documents like candid internal e-mails that you’d usually be entitled to read at a government agency.

Ben and Meg relied partly on former employees at Cash4Gold. And they also know the activities of companies often intersect with government — and that’s where you can dig up nuggets of information. Here’s an example where they turned to government records to check the allegations of former employee Michele Liberis:

We also delved into Liberis’ specific allegations. At one point, for example, her post asserted that Cash4Gold “was temporarily closed recently due to health and code violations.” In its blog, Cash4Gold says this is “entirely false.” Yet a check with the Pompano Beach Fire Prevention Bureau turned up numerous citations at Aronson’s business location at 1701 Blount Rd., where Liberis worked. These included having no fire alarm system, fire extinguisher violations, blocked exits, exposed wiring, compressed gas cylinder violations, and items stored too close to electrical panels. Fire inspector Aaron Efferstein adds that they had three fires at the location, including one that set the roof ablaze.

The public values this kind of watchdog reporting. It doesn’t matter if it’s on a blog, a TV station, or a newspaper. Here’s a comment on the post that takes the cake:

I tried to find a more business like way to say I wholeheartedly support you guys for fighting back against Cash4Gold, but I couldn’t come up with one, so here was my first reaction:

“Fuck yeah!”

Thank you consumerist for stand up for consumers rights and not bowing down to legal pressure from Cash4Gold and other companies that deserve to burn in hell.

I love this site and it makes me proud that you guys are standing your ground and fighting for the consumers.

You guys simply reek of awesomeness.

If you were under investigation by both mainstream journalists and bloggers, who would be easier to intimidate: One single newspaper, or dozens of bloggers?

Pulitzer-prize winner Alex Jones says the downfall of newspapers threatens investigative reporting, because papers have the legal muscle to shrug off threats of lawsuits.

Michael Masnick at Techdirt and Tim Lee at Bottom-up say Jones has it mixed up — newspapers dependent on advertising make ripe targets for intimidation. Lee looks at Jones’ example of a newspaper covering a Boy Scout scandal in Idaho:

Jones gets the implications of this story completely backwards. It’s only because newspapers are large, profitable, commercial enterprises that the kind of intimidation techniques he talks about work at all. Imagine it’s 2020 and the Idaho newspapers have all gone out of business, and they’ve been replaced by several hundred bloggers, most of them amateurs. A whistleblower discovers some evidence of wrongdoing by a prominent Mormon official. Is it easier or harder for the whistleblower to get the word out?

Obviously, it’s easier. She can anonymously email the evidence to a dozen different bloggers. Those bloggers don’t have to all prepare long “investigative journalism” write-ups; some of them can just post the raw documents for others to look at. Once they’re widely available, other bloggers can link to those raw documents and provide commentary. The official being criticized has three big problems. First, taking legal action will be vastly more expensive because he’d have to sue dozens of bloggers rather than just one newspaper. Second, many of those bloggers won’t have any assets to speak of, so he’s unlikely to recover his legal costs even if he wins. And finally, if he foolishly presses forward, he’ll discover our friend the Streisand Effect: the fact that he files the lawsuit will cause a lot more people to cover the original allegations.

My take: Newspapers are indeed difficult to intimidate — as long as the people at the top are difficult to intimidate. So Jones’ claim really depends on the caliber of the institution. I’ve had a good experience at the Express-News, where the publishers and editors haven’t been afraid to stand behind a story.

Masnick and Lee overlook the fact there might not be a Utopian world in the future where a dozen bloggers are bird-dogging a story. Maybe it’s just you, Mr. Part-Time Blogger with a day job and a family to feed, investigating the Boy Scouts. What do you do when you get that nasty cease-and-desist letter from a lawyer?

Even if a bunch of bloggers join the cause, following a complex story can be tricky if you have to read a bunch of posts to put all the pieces together. That’s really where newspapers shine — connecting the dots for readers with compelling writing, photos, graphics and resources on the Web.

The truth is, blogs and newspapers both have a role to play in getting information to the public. And blogs and newspapers can both be intimidated. It just depends on the people running them.

(Photo credit: Adrian van Leen for openphoto.net CC:PublicDomain)

News University gave a recent Webinar hosted by Matt Thompson about effective ways to design and write a successful blog with a robust community.

Thompson offered key tips for reporters, who are often told to go forth and blog but don’t receive much guidance about what makes a good blog. Many journalists, who have spent their whole careers striving to be fair and factual, are legitimately concerned about their opinions seeping into blog posts about topics they cover in the newspaper.

Thompson offered one solution: Give blog readers the inside scoop of what’s going on in the beat.

As an example, Thompson pointed to this post by the Dallas ISD blog at the Dallas Morning News. The post by reporter Tawnell Hobbs starts out:

DISD trustee Ron Price just told me that he was notified today that all 8th graders at Lang Middle School will have to retake the math portion of the Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills — this summer — because of a discrepancy. Price said the Texas Education Agency looked into the matter and made the recommendation.

This is a different approach from Hobbs’ news story based on the same information. Both versions are accurate and interesting. The blog post simply puts readers in the reporter’s shoes.

“Same information, totally different tone,” Thompson said. “The blog post, it’s letting you into the story. ‘Hey, Ron Price just told me this.’ That can really hook folks in.”

News University offers a bunch of online courses, some of which are free. You can check out Thompson’s entire Webinar here — the registration fee is $24.95.

(Photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/dhenriquez)

Tony Rogers at About.com wrote a good post on why journalists should make their own Web sites, and yours truly was one of the reporters mentioned.

Tony did a nice job laying out the benefits of publishing a portfolio of your best work. He found some horror stories of reporters losing years of work because their employers deleted their stories from the newspapers’ homepage.

I’m glad he mentioned how I didn’t want to make my Web site only about me. When I set up this site, I wanted a place where I could blog about the compelling work of my colleagues, open-records issues, tips for digging up information, and why journalism matters.

Thanks, Tony.