Inspiration.

September 3, 2009 at 5:44 pm · Filed under Blog entries

In the spirit of pure “blogging,” I just wanted to share this story with y’all about one of the few times as a journalist I can say we directly made a difference in someone’s life. It’s a follow-up to this story about a Coos Bay veteran named Stacy McClain. Long and short of it is this: he got his bennies back, after a phone call from the VA that came a day after our front-page story. It felt good to be able to help someone.

Here’s the link:

http://www.registerguard.com/csp/cms/sites/web/news/cityregion/17478290-46/story.csp

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A thoughtful reply.

September 2, 2009 at 3:24 pm · Filed under Blog entries

What follows is a really powerful reply to a piece I posted here recently about journalism. I found it inspiring, and so should you. The writer asked that I not identify her or her paper, so I bleeped a few sections.

Dear Winston,

I have been following your blog on wordpress.com for a short time now. A fellow journalist and economic casualty of the industry, I only recently started my own food blog, after being laid-off from a daily in March.

I just want you to know that your post on the disempowerment of journalists keenly resonates with me and my camp. Although I don’t have your years of experience, I have lived through the bewilderment of working very hard just to achieve full-time work, then feeling the bust of disillusionment and sorrow and bewilderment over how the world needs us but can’t seem to support us in any meaningful, i.e. paying, way.

I especially related to your words about the shift in morale within the newsroom. When I was hired to be a police reporter in March 2008, I felt like I had truly arrived. It didn’t bother me that the paper wasn’t well-regarded in the area or that the circulation was low. I felt that the work I did was important and required a certain hutzpah and braininess that only a born journalist could bring to it. I relished it even as changes in staffing produced insurmountable tensions and an overall moroseness in the office. Page counts shrank, so stories were tightly controlled and diminished. Meanwhile, editors subtly ratcheted up story quotas by making us feel that if we did not turn in literally twice what I was quoted at hire that I would be like dead weight. I was almost disciplined when one week, exhausted and fed up, I put in for overtime for five hours that I had already worked but not gotten approved ahead of time. It led to a tongue-lashing and eventually a crossing out of those hours. To me, that was the nadir. To be told that you can’t get paid for your work which so few people, generally speaking, can think to do. It was humiliating, but I went on. My editor told me that I was being selfish and that other reporters worked off the clock so why was I the only one saying anything. Besides, he reminded me, my overtime hours brought us perilously close to lay-offs. Six weeks later, I received my pink slip.

I realized that over the course of only one year, the office had nose-dived from being a fairly cordial, welcoming place into a cutthroat, back-biting environment. The layoffs only diminished the power of the reporters in the face of editors who operated frantically and tyrannically. I was displaced from my beat covering courts because one of the editors decided that it would be better staffed by a man named Frank. Frank was a man and would do better in the face of sexism within the police ranks. Also, Frank had an 18-month-old daughter and would be more loyal to the paper because he had a mouth to feed. Literally, this was the reasoning. The union has been called in to investigate this editor, but it hardly does me any good now. Frank left two months later to work for the competition.

I am 28 years old. I have broken stories of national and local significance. I was a competent and agile reporter. I have been reporting, if you include my free lance work, for five years now. I recently did the research and discovered that I have never been paid a livable wage. A few days ago, I heard an interview with author John Sanford. That’s his pen name. He started writing fiction after he won a Pullitzer Prize as an investigative journalist, and his paper gave him a $50 bonus for his efforts. This morning I fielded a call from an editor in Carlsbad, NM who wanted to know if I would move there from Branford, CT to work for $10/hour.

I realize that to the rest of the public our concerns and complaints probably register as typical recession-kvetching or as dire, unrealistic prophesying. My boyfriend is a reporter; in fact, he assumed my workload when I left. I still hear how the public’s attitude toward the press translates into daily interactions from him. Quite simply, as reporters we have both experienced what I can only call “press-bashing.” He was getting quotes from attendees at a regional dog show when a man in the crowd intervened and suggested to the woman and her 8 year old daughter that they stop speaking to him. When he produced a business card, instead of a press badge, the man suggested he could be a child molester. The woman and her daughter fled in a huff. Over and over again, my employers published anonymous posts full of the most baseless, vulgar and personal slander against us. The comments never bothered me. It was my job to expose real child molesters and people accused of wrongdoing, but I never understood how providing a medium for these comments either served our community or advanced the stories. To this day I’m not sure which I feel more greatly: a generalized betrayal by a public that, glutted from easy TV and multimedia outlets that pander to the least intellectually capable, doesn’t seem to value my work anymore or a betrayal from my employers and potential employers who expect me, in spite of all this, to produce at an inhuman pace for a subhuman wage.

My boyfriend just completed a historical account of the porn industry at its heyday, The Other Hollywood by Legs McNeil and Jennifer Osborne. I suggested that the parallels between our industry’s decline and the porn industry’s were striking. He agreed and we might collaborate in an essay about this.

At this point, I am perilously close to getting another job in journalism. I still feel a sense of duty and a calling. But I get very angry when bank tellers suggest that I “go into TV.” Even my grandmother, whose husband was a publisher and vice president of Morris Communications, suggested this because “that’s where the money is.” I don’t know what the answer is, but I am close to believing that massive reform of copyright laws is necessary. The AP should pay you generous service fees every time they pick up a story. (I was shocked to learn, incidentally, that they only have 2 reporters in the entire state of CT.) Journalists are usually the first to strike down ideas about internet regulation but at this point we’re falling on our own knives, or pens, as the case may be.

Anyway, keep up the good work and know that your words are well-received here. You may publish this or edited excerpts on your blog, but I ask that you not use my name or my former paper’s name.

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Wow.

July 15, 2009 at 12:07 am · Filed under Blog entries, Social networking, Web work

Here’s to the democratization of the web. A few key people tweeted this blog posting about The Next Twitter, and the story that never got published now comes up more often in searches associated with my name than anything else. I’m not sure what to make of it, really, except to be humbled. We who once called ourselves “gatekeepers” in the media really have lost our keys, it appears.

Here’s a sample of some of the stuff I saw:

http://twitter.tweetmeme.com/story/109651010/the-next-twitter-%C2%AB-winston-ross/

There’s a lot of irony here for me. A story about the power of Twitter that I couldn’t successfully sell I then sort of self-published and it got a lot of attention. But what it didn’t do is draw a paycheck, which is fine except I would never have put the effort into the story that I did if I didn’t think it was already pretty much sold. So, back to the future of journalism, then. Sure, we can disseminate information widely and quickly today, but who will create original content, invest the kind of time and energy involved in doing the kind of meaty reporting that doesn’t just involve aggregating someone else’s content or retweeting someone else’s post? It’s great that a bunch of people passed my piece around, but it also reminds me that paid journalism practitioners are increasingly scarce.

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Raised amid squalor and suspicion (Part two of “A Violent Life.”)

July 14, 2009 at 5:57 am · Filed under Investigative/Project work, Register-Guard clips

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On empowerment and journalism.

July 14, 2009 at 1:35 am · Filed under Blog entries, Editorials, Scrawl

I ran across this cover letter I drafted awhile back, that was way too long to send. It’s not, however, too long for this here blog!

It used to be so much more empowering, being a journalist.

From the time I first turned teenager and maybe before that, I regarded the people who scoured for and then disseminated the news as citizens of the highest order. It was sports columnists at the San Francisco Chronicle at first, then my peers and teachers as I began to study the craft myself.

The journalism I learned was empowering partly because people feared it, because you didn’t have to have any status of wealth or even education to be a reporter and ask difficult questions and let people know about something they wouldn’t have otherwise, something that might even outrage them, or force a call for change. It was a tool of democracy, a nearly unrestricted guaranteed American freedom whose loud voice called attention on corruption and oppression and unchecked power.

There are and have always been poor examples of journalism, of a tool used to influence and control people, to spread propaganda, to sell useless or harmful things. Journalism can be unethical, careless, low-budget and gaudy. Freedom of the press and freedom of speech are rights so inalienable that they are open to abuse.

But these flaws are tolerable, and well worth the result of an unfettered network of inquiry and information. Journalism is often the public’s last hope of stopping the greedy, powerful and inept from doing something bad.

It used to be so much more empowering. In junior high and high school, I worked for newspapers full of people who believed in what they were doing even if they theoretically had little real power or sway. But that belief led the writers and editors at these publications to act as if what they did mattered, and because of that, what they did mattered. The stories we wrote were picked up by regional media and paid attention when they ran. Most of the campus’ students picked up the weekly issues of the Berkeley High Jacket when I worked for it, though in the interest of full disclosure I should admit that we ran a free personals section that allowed students to send each other all manner of messages.

At college I found a similarly inspired group of colleagues, who put out a newspaper as students that competed with the town of Columbia, Mo.’s other daily broadsheet. We similarly reached out for impact, for stories that were new enough and interesting enough that enough people would read what we wrote for it to matter. And it did. Several years after I graduated in 1999, the paper uncovered a group financing terrorists that was posing as an Islamic charity.

Then in nine years of reporting for mid-sized dailies in the Pacific Northwest, the real world set in. It wasn’t so much the reality of discovering that corrupting powers were omnipotent in government and the deck would always be stacked against change. It was the diminishing power of journalism, the change I saw take place during a relatively short career so far.

At my first newspaper, we competed against a glorified loudspeaker for a North Idaho real estate magnate. Maintaining the moral authority came easy. Matching the competitor’s pandering to the area’s powerful interests proved more difficult. As the years went on, we increasingly fought the pressures to dumb down our coverage or crank out as many minor stories as our lesser rival did. Imagine the Washington Post trying harder to emulate USA Today. The more we emulated the Coeur d’Alene Press, the less time we spent investigating more important stories or spending time perfecting and completing the ones we decided to print.

Then came the cutbacks, as declines in newspaper readership caught up to advertising rates, and the Internet competition from free providers of everything from classifieds to news made every dollar we earned that much harder to find.

Then came more cutbacks, and the people I worked with started to get picked out of my bureau, one by one, until half the office was empty.

That meant we had to choose among two options, both of which would degrade the quality of the journalism we produced and the empowerment I once felt as a reporter: either we’d produce more stories with less time spent on each one, increasing the chances for an error or a critical missed piece of information; or we’d do fewer stories altogether, giving our competitor fewer reasons to stay sharp, giving the power brokers more control over information and the voiceless fewer people to hear them.

I left the paper because so much about it had changed during the three years after I came to work there. We were once a loud, spirited, hilarious crew that reveled in telling one another about a good scoop, or reading aloud a crisp lead. We all talked about the story of the day and we celebrated with one another when we beat the competition or won some other small victory in the Battle for the Right to Know. We had become a quiet, surly shell of what once was, in a tomblike office reminiscent more of Steve Carell than All the President’s Men.

Then I got this job, writing about the Oregon Coast from a home office in a tiny town of 8,000 people, writing about a place that is off the grid for most Americans as anything but somewhere to go on a pretty drive. The stories I write usually get picked up by the Associated Press because I am the one of the only reporters at an AP-member newspaper to find them. I’m not changing the world, necessarily, but I reveal a part of it that often goes ignored. There’s something empowering about that.

Meanwhile, my newspaper is bleeding. Having lost $5 million last year, the publisher has been forced to slice millions from this year’s budget. The unions that represent many of our employees agreed to concessions to stem much of the damage, but the newspaper laid off 7 percent of the workforce in June.

And we are less empowered. The staffers who have left put more pressure on the ones of us who are left behind to produce.

We still have it better than most newspapers our size. The Register-Guard is family-owned, which means only the company’s earnings, not its stock price, determine our fate. We won’t get sold or closed by a corporation like Gannett because we are the least profitable in the chain. We either make enough money, or we don’t.

We also have excellent market penetration, as much as 75 percent in Lane County, which is as big as Rhode Island, if not as populated. We reach more people on our web site than we do in print. If anyone is poised to help advertisers find people in this region, it’s us.

But we haven’t figured out a way to make the transition from the increasingly expensive and decreasingly profitable paper product to, maybe, one that exists solely on the web, or at least competes with the web for advertising dollars. The ads we sell online are worth about a tenth the comparable price they would fetch ROP, or “run on press.”

There are all kinds of opportunities to catch up, it seems like. We could reach into the Web’s bag of tricks at targeting ads to certain users, linking them to relevant stories, tracking the identities and habits of our customers and using that information to sell more successful ads that make more money.

But we’re squeamish about that. Newspapers are quasi-governmental, often referred to as the fourth branch of government. We have a certain power in society, and we have to be above reproach in order to keep our credibility intact, a statement that will draw snickers from some thanks to the poor examples some lazy and glory-seeking journalists have set. We’re leery of anything that crosses the line between the ad side and the content side, because we don’t want businesses to have any interaction with the reporters who are supposed to write neutrally about them. And there are ethical issues about sleuthing out information on web sites, as far as we’re concerned.

So what do we do? We shrink, which may make us less valuable to the readers we have left and the case more difficult for paying a costly subscription, especially as free content abounds on the web. As our money and influence shrivels, so does our clout, and the ability of nefarious people to accomplish nefarious deeds gets a jolt.

But won’t we all just be replaced by bloggers and twitterers? Isn’t the media being democratized in the same way that the media democratize society, by providing voices to people who didn’t have them before, by diversifying the sources of information such that no one from one big newspaper owned by one big man can control what the world knows?

On the surface, yes. Bloggers have called attention to stories the mass media have stupidly ignored, and that’s a valuable thing. But this is a parasitic relationship. Bloggers tend not to do their own reporting. So if they cause the death of the medium they criticize and replace because their content is free, they ultimately hurt themselves, too. With fewer people gathering the news, there’s less unearthed material to discover and shout into cyberspace. We are eating each other alive.

I feel less empowered as a journalist today, and it makes me sick to see people in this country celebrate the demise of my profession as a moment we deserve because of the mistakes we’ve made as the vice has tightened on our temples. These celebrations are ignorant, but by the time anyone realizes that, it’ll be in a few paragraphs of a history book, or maybe a Flash-powered history computer game, in the chapter on extinct forms of communication, if not of government. For every day that I am less empowered, so is this democracy of ours. So are you.

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The Next Twitter?

July 13, 2009 at 5:53 am · Filed under Scrawl, Social networking, Web work

By WINSTON ROSS

Facebook is for photos of the kids, Twitter for blurting out pearls of marketing wisdom to his 613 followers, Linkedin for electronic schmoozing with potential business partners, Myspace for teenagers and rock bands.

Jascha Kaykas-Wolff understands as well as anybody what each of the Big Four social networking sites means to him. It’s whoever can figure out a way to combine all these bookmarks into one place, so he’s not leaping from one cyberspace hub to the next; whoever can help him root out new groups of potential clients for Webtrends, the Portland, Ore.,-based company at which he works as vice president of marketing — that person may have discovered the next big thing in social networking, while at the same time relegating some current online behemoth into Friendster oblivion (remember Friendster?)

Such is the dynamic, even frantic world of communication on the web in 2009. In January, the blogosphere, social media nerds and your co-workers could not shut up about Twitter, even if they were only complaining about the frequency of banal 140-character updates from people who thought it worth sharing with the world that they’d just returned from lunch.

By April, Twitter had nearly 20 million unique visitors, up from 1.5 million a year before that. Now the web is abuzz with speculation that Twitter is nothing more than a passing fad, a theory supported by the latest round of Nielsen research that shows 60 percent of its users don’t return after their initial signup.

Maybe that news will make Facebook less desperate to catch up to Twitter. In its own bid to avoid obsolescence, Facebook cranked out a jarring revamp to the way people use the site in March, moving this over here and that over there in what seemed to some outraged users to be an attempt to copy Twitter’s fluid, micro-blogging format and to others just a way to mess with their minds.

The thinking among social networking entrepreneurs seems to be this: change, quickly, or die. Already, bloggers around the world are proclaiming the imminent demise of Myspace — a site that once dominated all chatter about social networking — even though the reports of that demise are, at least statistically, greatly exaggerated. Myspace still sees 55 million unique visitors each day.

“Nothing bad happened to Myspace; it’s still one of the most popular social networks on the web. There’s a class division, a stereotype that Myspace is trashy,” said Justin Kistner, a Portland, Ore.-based social media strategist. “But most of America is trashy.”

Changes in social networking come at breakneck speed, and the spoils clearly go to they who can adapt the quickest. But what is the next Twitter? Will it kill off the old Twitter? What’s the difference between a fad and a long-term trend in a medium whose “storefronts” can disappear as quickly as a site administrator decides it’s time to pull the plug? What do we want from these web sites today, even if we don’t know we want it?

The answer to those questions could mean money out of thin air for the next savvy entrepreneur. Myspace may have lost 9 million unique visitors in the period between April 2008 and 2009, but its founders had already walked away from the site with $580 million, after selling it in 2005 to Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. There’s serious cash involved in the business of connecting people on the web.

But how? To this point, the tack most developers seem to take is to create huge amounts of hype, draw in millions of users and then figure out how to make money off of it. This is a delicate dance, because what sells is also what sells out. If you haven’t checked Myspace in awhile, you might be surprised at how bombarded you get by hi-def trailers for Terminator Salvation or a push to check out Electrik Red’s “exclusive” album premier. The login is almost an afterthought.

“A lot of the things these sites have to do to make money are the same kinds of things that drive users away,” said Ian Muir, a web developer with Manchester, N.H.-based Amplified Studios. “Part of the reason Twitter has so many users is there’s no ads, no noise. They’re also not making any money. Facebook, as they’ve brought in more ads, they make more money per user but their growth rate has slowed way down.”

The challenge, say experts in the field, is for social networking sites to keep users loyal, adapt to what they want and turn a profit, without any one of those goals mucking up the other. That in mind, here’s what you can expect in the next wave of pokes and tweets and annoying quizzes:

One site to rule them all: Or at least, check them all. Tweetdeck, an application that lets you scan Twitter and Facebook feeds in the same glance, is a start in this direction, as is Friendfeed, a real-time aggregator that combines news feeds, social networking updates and blog entries into one platform. OpenID looks promising too, in that it lets people create a single login and password to gain access to myriad different sites. But there’s not really a widely used monster aggregator program or site or application out there at this point that lets you pull up one page and see on it everything you want to see at once: your email, your tweets, your favorite Newsweek correspondents, etc.

“It’s definitely social plumbing,” Kistner said. “The universal communications client that exists a layer above Facebook and text messaging.”

Smart filters — Twitter lets people barf out 140 characters to as many people as are willing to listen. What it doesn’t do is allow the tweeter to send messages about the Cubs to a subgroup that only cares about the Cubs, a dispatch from the Britney Spears concert to followers who couldn’t afford tickets. The next Twitter will use technology to allow sects of the population to isolate themselves and talk only to each other.

“What we want right now is a way to more intelligently sort through everything,” said Caroline McCarthy, who writes about social media and digital advertising for CNET News. “I think a lot of the big developments are going to come in the space of technology used to filter all this information.”

Community puberty — That’s Kistner’s term for the growing pains of a social networking site. This is a field once dominated by America Online, then Geocities, then Yahoo, then Friendster. As the pre-eminent devices of putting people in touch with each other, all of these efforts have gone extinct. But that’s not to suggest that current social networking giants are doomed. At some point, suggests Brett Atwood, assistant professor of journalism and new media at the Edward R. Murrow College of Communication at Washington State University, people will decide they’re tired of signing up for new web sites. They’ve got 1,000 pictures and 500 friends on Facebook, which they spent years accumulating, and the same kind of equity built up with Linkedin, Twitter and Myspace. If the existing powerhouses can continue to refine their offerings to make users at least marginally happy, they could survive indefinitely. Most people still buy software from Microsoft and conduct web searches via Google, even years after those companies mounted their respective thrones. At some point, it’s possible for a site to get too big to topple.

“Once you have that critical mass of community, people invested in the creation of original content, they become nested,” Atwood said. “It becomes more difficult to unseat the leader.”

There are also plenty of opportunities to expand a web site’s reach abroad. Friendster may have gotten outgunned in the U.S., but it’s still huge overseas, with 90 million users. Ninety percent of its traffic comes from Asia.

“In China, Facebook isn’t among the top 10 of their social networks,” said David Alston, vice president of marketing and community at Radian 6, a social media monitoring firm based in New Brunswick, Canadaa. “In Brazil and India, they’re much more into Orkut.”

Platform-free networking — The next time you log into Etrade to buy some stock, head to Amazon for a book or iTunes for an album, imagine if what popped up alongside the product description was a list of your friends who’d bought the same thing. Did they lose money on the stock? Stop reading the book halfway through? Pass the album onto their teenage daughter?

Maybe you want to know more about what made them love or hate that particular online offering, and since they’re available for an instant messenger conversation at that very moment, you can click a button and ask them. Welcome to social networking everywhere. Every web site compiles profile information from every one of its customers, then uses the Facebook-like technology to bring us all together, the way you might bump into someone you know in a supermarket.

“Social communities aren’t going to be something you go visit,” said Steve Rubel, senior vice president and director of insights at Edelman Digital, which advises clients on technology, online and consumer trends. “They’ll be embedded into every online experience. That’s where the next war will be fought. The next social network is the web.”

The same kind of ubiquity can come about with the help of email providers such as Google, Yahoo and MSN. For years, they’ve been storing up the addresses and other contact information of millions of people. With just the right release of that data into cyberspace, this whole concept of ubiquitous social networking can be pulled off even more seamlessly. Google search for something, anything, and if anyone you know has some kind of connection to it, you’ll find out, pronto.

Something different altogether. Of course, it’s entirely possible that some completely newfangled concept will emerge in social networking that not even the cleverest, future-predictingest soothsayers can now imagine. Social networking for dogs? Social networking and time travel? Scratch ‘n Sniff social networking?
Plurk.com is a Twitter spinoff that allows users to limit messages to certain groups of friends. Jyte.com lets users make “claims,” like “I’d rather have a goat in office than our current president,” and others can vote on whether that claim is valid.

The appeal behind a brand-new site is pretty simple: it’s not already dominated by Ashton Kutcher and Oprah.

“Any time you have a new community, there’s a chance for you to be the king of it,” Kistner said. “It’s hard to be king of an existing, established community. You’re not going to unseat Ashton.”

The key is to tap into what people want, McCarthy said.

“We may not see what the next big thing is until it’s already been out for months, evolving under our feet,” she said.

Trashy America is always eager to embrace a new distraction.

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The Devil’s Staircase.

July 13, 2009 at 5:44 am · Filed under Published photography

IMG_2049

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