As newspapers eliminate foreign bureaus, two websites sift through stories from around the world and hurdle language barriers to share them

By Leah Finnegan

Precious rosewood, also known as Sonokeling, is a reddish, sweet-smelling wood used to make the backs of Gibson guitars and sturdy fingerboards on stringed instruments. It is found in east India, Southeast Asia and Madagascar, where a government-condoned black market flourishes. A 20-foot container of Madagascar rosewood is worth as much as $100,000 and the country’s forests, which hold 47 kinds of it, are dwindling.

Flickr: Joi Ito

Madagascar’s deforestation is a topic not often addressed in the mainstream global media, and even less frequently in the country where it’s happening. After years of government censorship, Madagascar’s media now censors itself, shying away from controversial subjects. Still, in late 2009, bits of the rosewood story floated around the Internet, circulating through the Malagasy  blogosphere and websites of environmental NGOs. The Agence France-Press eventually covered the situation; The New York Times in its environmental section featured a blog post on the effects of the illegal trade. But mainstream coverage, pulled from press releases, lacked Malagasy voices.

That’s where Lova Rakotomalala came in. A Madagascar native and doctoral student at Princeton, he co-edits the Malagasy language community on the news translation site Global Voices from his computer in New Jersey.

Rakotomalala, something of a father to the small but mighty Madagascar blogosphere, teaches denizens of his home country how to blog and uses their original reportage (and that of others) to write pieces for Global Voices. He is, in essence, a meta-reporter—reporting and translating what people in Madagascar are writing about, for an English-speaking audience. That’s how he produced a layered story about Madagascar’s rosewood struggle, replete with photos, primary source links and video. “That’s my job,” Rakotomalala says. “It’s just to report what they’re writing.”

As American papers shutter their foreign bureaus, news translation sites such as Global Voices may be the putty to fill in the cracks they leave behind. Global Voices’ small brigade of volunteer translators and part-time editors cherry-pick stories from a host of local and national sources worldwide, including blogs, newspapers and websites, and aggregate and translate information and source material for publication on the site. Each country represented on Global Voices is essentially its own bureau and nothing is too small, or too big, to be covered. The site itself is run as a multisource blog—the most recent post, no matter the country, tops headlines, and there are su

bpages for each country’s news. Users can search for stories by country or topic. And through the site’s Project Lingua, people can read a selection of news stories in their original languages.

Global Voices was founded in 2005 by technologist Ethan Zuckerman and journalist Rebecca MacKinnon, who met while fellows at Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society. It began as a single blog and has since blossomed into a news service that represents more than 50 countries. “Basically we’re producing free, as in beer, as well as free, as in speech, content,” Zuckerman tells me, paraphrasing software freedom activist Richard Stallman. (In response to early questions about monetizing software, Stallman said: “Think free as in free speech, not free beer.”) The site has grown slowly and steadily, he says, and has garnered multiple content partnerships along the way with the BBC and newspapers in Europe and South America.

Zuckerman hesitates to compare the growth of Global Voices to that of traditional media outlets. “We’re this massively decentralized enterprise,” he says. “One of our open questions is: What are our metrics for success?”

Courtesy of Ethan Zuckerman

Success is certainly not about numbers, even though Global Voices has made its international mark, attracting readers from remote places where it might take six hours to upload a picture. According to Compete.com, the site has an average of 50,000 unique visitors a month, and Zuckerman says 30 to 40 percent of its traffic comes from non-English speakers. But the ethos of Global Voices lies more with changing the way international news is produced—bringing together as many points of view as possible, despite language barriers—than simply racking up traffic. “I’m not sure we’re looking for random eyeballs,” Zuckerman says. “Our real criteria for success is if we’re changing the way people are reporting.”

If Rakotomalala’s work is any indication, Zuckerman’s criteria are being met—though there are limitations to what he can do. Rakotomalala, who is unpaid, tries to write for Global Voices’ Malagasy site at least once a month, but sometimes that’s not possible, through no fault of his own. For instance, when the Madagascar economy falters, Rakotomalala’s usual sources work more and write less. For them, he says, blogging becomes a luxury.

But when there are posts to parse, Rakotomalala aggregates them, translates them as necessary and posts the information to the site, adding to its tapestry of international stories. Through Global Voices’ avatar-journalist approach to news, Rakotomalala is able to give a platform to whatever his bloggers produce in a way other news outlets can’t—or don’t.

Eleven thousand miles from Madagascar, the San Francisco–based Middle Eastern news site Meedan builds on the foundation laid by Global Voices by making user contributions a focal point of its operation. The name Meedan was chosen deliberately—it means town square in Arabic—and that’s exactly what the site aims to be: a bustling forum for users to talk freely about news, no matter their mother tongue. To Meedan’s shepherds and users, language barriers are weak roadblocks on the road to global communication. And its strategy is working: The site’s traffic increased nearly 1,000 percent in February—its first month out of beta—from 600 unique visitors to 6,000, and it now has more users in Saudi Arabia than America.

Meedan’s founder and CEO, Ed Bice, took an indirect route to the helm of the new media site. (When asked about what he did pre-Meedan, Bice deadpans: “That’s a good question.”) Until 2001, he was a practicing residential architect. But his personal vision has long been rooted in philosophy—while a student at Carleton College, he studied under the late liberal activist Sen. Paul Wellstone, who influenced him profoundly. Meedan, Bice says, is the result of his Wellstonian idealism, worldliness and design sense. “I kind of just had this calling to come at the emerging situation post-9/11,” he says. “I had a pretty good idea for addressing this as a media-sharing project. If the fundamental truth is that we don’t really understand people and that they, in all likelihood, don’t understand us, making media available to them … is probably a really good idea—in a non-ideological way.”

As nebulous as the Web itself—and officially based in San Francisco, where Bice lives—Meedan cannot be in specific places to cover news on the ground, nor can it translate the entirety of Al Jazeera’s or Al Akhbar’s content. But it doesn’t want to do either. Its goal is strategic, aiming to reveal discrepancies and gaps in Middle Eastern coverage by marrying journalism with technological innovation. “We’re definitely adding a twist to what the other media outlets are doing, just in trying to bring English media next to the Arab media,” Bice says. “We’re trying to look at what real-time global media looks like, and what sort of technology you need to make that happen.”

While marinating in that challenge for the past five years, Meedan has evolved its own language for looking at the world. Articles are called “events” and serve to attract readers and conversation. A hundred or so volunteer editors cull stories from English and Arabic news sites (Meedan does not officially subscribe to any monetized feeds) and choose relevant articles. The articles are translated first through an automated translation system—more on that later—or, if an editor takes an interest, he or she will translate a summary of the article manually to form the basis of an event. On the site, the translated summary sits alongside the untranslated portion.

Meedan’s chief technology officer, Chris Blow, explains the rules of engagement: “Once [an event is] out, it’s subject to feedback. The whole article could be retranslated by a better translator—so you can see every word on the article be retranslated. You can adjust other people’s words. It’s sort of like holding the water in your hand—it’s something that’s never quite solid.”

In a matter of minutes, a Meedan user can retranslate and repost the text of an event, offering a different reading, literally or figuratively. He also can add new links, new conversations and extrapolations. A recent event about Iraq’s election results accrued seven related links—and seven translated summaries of those links—in the eight hours after it was posted, each giving depth and texture to the original post. The initial event translation gave a blueprint of information—the critical who, what, why, where, when—and the following conversations extrapolated on Iraqi reaction, the possibility of election fraud and the mood of Iraqi society. It is as if the story grows bilaterally as you scroll down, in both English and Arabic. Events on Meedan are constantly published and republished. Everything is in flux.

Blow calls events “units of aggregation” and to him, they’re close studies of how media works across oceans. Usually, he says, five to six articles cluster around an event, and the conversation—and collaborative translation—builds from there. “That’s our primary pivot,” he says, “to be able to show different points of view between Western press and Middle Eastern press.”

In addition to hundreds of volunteers, Meedan employs about 30 paid editors and translators scattered across the globe (“This project wouldn’t work without Skype,” Bice says). Deena Hassan, 31, is one of Meedan’s paid English translators; she started working for Meedan a year and half ago. The Cairo-based Hassan works 40 hours per month translating Meedan’s events and comments from Arabic to English. (On top of her Meedan duties, she works part time for an embassy and does other freelance jobs to make ends meet.) She translates two or three events per Meedan shift, she says, and usually she works 16 shifts per month. “The best part is that I feel that my work is meaningful,” Hassan said in an e-mail. “It is part of a great process; bridging gaps between civilizations. The work team is also great and cooperative.”

The human work team, that is. In the early stages of Meedan’s development, Bice and company worked with IBM to develop an automated translator. Machine Translation allows Meedan users to translate text in real time and also allows them to converse more easily and freely. Variations in dialect and slang remain a challenge, of course. “MT is never sufficient,” Blow says. “Sometimes it’s decent, but it can be misleading, or it can be confusing—and that’s not something that we’re aiming for with a global dialogue project.”

Despite some garbled automated interpretation and server overload issues, Bice is pleased by the way the site has been received by the global community since its official launch in February: The Guardian wrote it up and Saudi Arabia’s Oprah, Muna AbuSulayman, mentioned it on her Facebook page. And the quality of Meedan’s contributors and users has remained stable—“Amazingly, we’ve not been badly spammed,” Bice says—allowing it keep to its promise of cultural unification.

The site’s ambition can perhaps be best boiled down to a statistic on its About page: A Zogby poll once noted that 70 percent of Moroccans, Jordanians and Lebanese would “like to know” an American. Meedan provides a starting point.

Bloggers still dream of the ink-on-paper deal

By Frances McInnis

Brenna Ehrlich is still recovering from her date with a listless Williamsburg type. Ehrlich, who looks like a doll with her huge eyes, tiny face and masses of dark wavy hair, drags herself out of bed early, even though she got home late. Wearing a David Bowie “Glass Spider Tour” T-shirt and a pair of shorts, she pours a bowl of Life cereal, grabs a can of Coke and sits down at her computer. She begins an e-mail to her friend Andrea Bartz. “Let me introduce you to a new brand of hipster,” she writes.

The I-don’t-like-anything hipster, she explains, abhors concerts, the Internet, talking about himself and talking about other people. He loathes Facebook, Duane Reade and birthdays. After a dreadful evening with one such fellow, Ehrlich is convinced she has found the new extreme on the hipster apathy continuum.

Photo: Tala Al Ramahi

The friendship between Ehrlich, 25, and Bartz, 23, is built on daily e-mails that wittily dissect their romantic misadventures on the Brooklyn scene. The friends from Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism, whose propensity for plaid shirts and grandpa sweaters suggest that they blend in among the wannabe artists and musicians in Williamsburg, have collected quite a few anthropological observations in the year or so since they moved to New York from Chicago. (Ehrlich is originally from Mystic, a small town in Connecticut, and Bartz is from Milwaukee.)

That particular e-mail triggers something. After reading it, Bartz, the more outspoken of the two, suggests that they turn their e-musings into a blog. Five minutes later, she receives another e-mail from Ehrlich containing the link for their new Tumblr blog, which Ehrlich has entitled “Stuff Hipsters Hate.” From that moment on, they are no longer casual anthropologists. They are bloggers.

Ehrlich and Bartz say they’re no more tech- or Web-savvy than the average urban twentysomething. Both specialized in print magazines at journalism school, and Ehrlich, who loves long-form nonfiction, took a book-writing class as well. Bartz, who is tall, rosy-cheeked and has a close-cropped cap of brown hair, works as an editorial assistant at Self magazine. Since arriving in New York, Ehrlich has done stints at Esquire and Heeb Magazine. The blog that they started last July was a foray into a new medium, and they were gratified when Stuff Hipsters Hate generated some online buzz. As soon as people—“people who weren’t related to us or our friends”—started reading it, the two thought book deal.

***

Photo: Tala Al Ramahi

Ehrlich and Bartz hardly fit the stereotype of the print-hating blogger. While traditional publishers fret about American readers’ eyeballs turning to the free content online, many of the bloggers who pose the perceived threat are focused on scoring an old-fashioned, ink-on-paper book deal.

Of course, for many bloggers-cum-authors, the book deal represents their first opportunity to make money from the content they’ve posted. The dream is to replicate the $300,000-plus deal Internet copywriter Christian Lander netted for his blog Stuff White People Like (an obvious antecedent for Stuff Hipsters Hate). Certainly, that figure isn’t the norm, but even a modest book deal is still more lucrative than most Web advertising. “It is up to the blogger whether or not they want to run ads on their site and only rarely, with very high traffic sites, is this revenue enough to be a considerable slice of their monthly income,” says Kate McKean, a literary agent at the Howard Morhaim Literary Agency. Ben Huh, one of McKean’s clients and the mini-mogul who spun books out of Internet phenomena like I Can Haz Cheezburger and FAIL Blog, agrees. “It takes a lot of page views to equal one book sale—I’ll leave it at that,” he said in a Mashable story (written by Ehrlich shortly after she scored her own book deal). Huh is right. While online ad pricing varies widely depending on the location and size of the ads and the blog’s brand strength and reader demographic, a blogger might need 500 or more page views to earn the dollar or two that an author makes for every book sold.

In addition to fantasies of financial rewards, many bloggers have romantic notions about the printed word. “No matter how much blogs are taking off, books are still the ultimate for any writer,” says Bartz with certainty. “If you want your work immortalized in a tangible way, every author wants a book.” Ehrlich adds, “It’s not as transient or ephemeral. It’s going to be in bookstores for awhile.”

Other bloggers agree. Josh Wilker, whose blog Cardboard Gods was published as a book by Seven Footer Press in April, says that although he likes that blogging allows him to experiment and receive feedback from a community, “there’s always a danger of just kind of cranking out stuff. With a book, there’s more of an impulse to make each sentence as good as you can before sharing it.” And as a reader, he picks paper over screen: “Reading stuff online, it doesn’t really get into my bones.”

Photo: Tala Al Ramahi

Pamela Slim’s blog was published last April as Escape from Cubicle Nation: From Corporate Prisoner to Thriving Entrepreneur. She says a book deal signifies that editors and publishers have recognized a writer’s merit, and a book generates more business opportunities than blogging. “As much as we all talk about the downfall of modern publishing,” she says, “it really does make a difference in terms of avenues you can explore.” If your book is in bookstores all over the world, “it’s a different kind of access than tripping over a blog from Google.”

Bartz and Ehrlich were initially elated with the few dozen readers wandering in from Google to read paragraph-long posts about why hipsters hate children, contact lenses, full-time jobs and boot-cut jeans—1,000 visitors in a day was cause for major celebration. Word grew, their social networking efforts paid off, and sites such as TheFrisky.com, Buzzfeed.com and HeebMagazine.com began linking to the site. On August 21, 2009, Gawker took notice and sent Stuff Hipsters Hate 60,000 hits in a single day. “Andrea had a bottle of $500 scotch that some PR person had given to her at Self,” Ehrlich says. “So we drank that out of tumblers.”

They were then contacted by Jason Ashlock, 29, who started Moveable Type Literary Group (no relation to the content management system) last year. A former Ph.D. candidate in American literature, he was not one of those agents who specialized in chasing down bloggers, but he found Stuff Hipsters Hate when another author he represents sent him a link. “It was very clear to me that whoever was writing it was a very good writer,” Ashlock said. “The voice was spot-on and the humor consistent.”

Ehrlich and Bartz had not yet outed themselves as the writers of the blog, though there was much online speculation that it was written by a balding, bitter ex-Williamsburger who had moved on to Bushwick. “Some girls were even really flirty,” Ehrlich says. Ashlock e-mailed the anonymous author. Within an hour, Ashlock heard back and learned that Bartz and Ehrlich were behind Stuff Hipsters Hate, and that they had already started working on a book proposal.

After they signed with him, Ashlock suggested some changes to their proposal, including the addition of graphics, charts, essays and chapter openings. Before he could even start circulating it, publishers were contacting Ehrlich and Bartz, especially after the pair formally introduced themselves on their blog. Ashlock sent the proposal out to about a dozen publishers before Thanksgiving, took it to auction after two weeks and two weeks later closed a deal with Ulysses Press. They met at Bartz’s Spanish Harlem apartment to sign the contract, and in that moment they made the leap from bloggers to authors. They won’t share the specifics of the deal, but Ehrlich explains, “Let’s just say we still need to work. Gone are the days of $350,000 advances, à la Stuff White People Like, sadly.”

Successful blog-to-book tales might prove a lifeline for a teetering book industry. Hardcover sales—a common industry index—were down 13 percent in 2008 versus 2007, and declined by 15.5 percent in the first half of 2009, according to estimates from the Association of American Publishers. “The question is, how do we reach those readers more prone to acquire content on the Web and screens?” Ashlock asks. “How do we keep those people putting money into publishing?” He believes using blogs as the raw material for books is one answer. “It’s not such a far leap to get eyes from the screen to eyes on the page,” he says.

The genre has certainly spawned some bestsellers. All together, the five books in the Six-Word Memoirs series, compiled from user submissions to SmithMag.net, have sold more than 100,000 copies, as has Huh’s I Can Haz Cheesburger, which features pictures of cats with ungrammatical captions. Lander’s Stuff White People Like sold more than 300,000 copies. With those recent success stories, there is suddenly a lot of competition among literary agents, who first began mining the Web for clients in the early 2000s. “Often new, hot blogs are up for [just] a few weeks … before an agent snags them,” McKean says.

“We are always on the lookout for good up-and-coming blogs that are generating buzz and that we can picture turning into a viable book,” says Kelly Reed, the acquisitions editor at Ulysses who acquired Stuff Hipsters Hate. A successful blog is a godsend from a publisher’s perspective: Much of the content has already been produced and market-tested, and it already has a loyal readership. Working with bloggers involves less risk—and less work, frankly—than taking a chance on a totally unknown writer with a book proposal and sample chapter.

***

It’s a sunny Saturday and Bartz is sitting on her couch with a big green blanket on her lap, enjoying the Latin music floating in through the open window of her first-floor apartment on East 105th Street. She looks relaxed in dark cuffed jeans, a white-and-gold striped T-shirt and some orange and pink bangles, and she has her feet kicked up. With her roommate out of town for the weekend, Bartz’s papers and books have colonized the coffee table, loveseat and kitchen counter. Her laptop is open and she is writing new posts for both the blog and the book, as well as editing the chapter introductions Ehrlich frantically wrote when they still thought they only had 45 days to write the book. (They had misread the contract—they actually had about three months). Bartz says she has more of an editor’s mindset, while Ehrlich does the bulk of the writing.

They both do a lot of fretting. “One day, I was writing for three hours in a cafe and I called Andi and said, ‘We have to write a book!’” recalls Ehrlich, imitating her own panicked tone. Bartz says the anxiety stems from their desire to make something that will outlast their blog posts. “An actual good book has a shelf life, as opposed to something you give for Christmas, and then hits the sale rack,” she says.

They have decided to write the book as an anthropological guide, which means changing the tone of the blog posts they want to reuse from snarky to satirically pseudo-intellectual. “It’s a lot of going through what we’ve already done,” says Bartz. They are also working on making complementary graphs, illustrations and charts, she says. “We can just play a lot more with the format than when we had a cursor and an entry field.” After a quick break for some leftover stir-fry, she gets back to work.

Ehrlich, meanwhile, sips an iced coffee while availing herself of the free Wi-Fi at El Beit, a cafe on Bedford Avenue packed with bearded twentysomethings with scarves and dirty hair. She blends in with a blue-and-red plaid shirt, blue nail polish and lots of jewelry. Ehrlich often writes at El Beit after work. She spends her days at home writing for Mashable, and says she needs to see people in the evenings—even if it’s just sitting with her silver MacBook at a communal oak table.

Ehrlich got the Mashable gig in part because of the success of Stuff Hipsters Hate. Though she’s now a tech blog writer, she insists that she became interested in technology fairly recently—only after grad school. On the table next to her sits a brand new Droid phone that she is still trying to figure out. “I still kind of hate my private Twitter,” she admits with a laugh. She says she prefers person-to-person contact, though she has become a savvy social networker after months of promoting Stuff Hipsters Hate. While Bartz and Ehrlich have received offers for both online and print projects, she says, they’d prefer to focus on writing more books.

***

Bartz and Ehrlich are holding a true hipster-style book party at the Glasslands Gallery by the East River in Brooklyn. The crowd skews young and scruffy, heavy on the toques, beards, colored tights and ironic glasses. They drink domestic beer and share shouted conversations over the impressively loud alternative metal band onstage. Puffs of tissue paper lit from behind in sunset pinks and blues send a glow over the stage and musicians. Those tissue clouds, along with some scattered green bulbs and the Christmas lights over the bar are the only sources of light in the warehouse-like space. The floor is uneven and a little bit sticky.

Around 1 a.m., Bartz, in a sequined mini-dress, and Ehrlich in a short satin skirt and tank top, stand in the middle of a circle of well-wishers. “This is insane!” says Bartz, talking animatedly to a friend from Northwestern who came from Chicago to congratulate her. Ehrlich is yelling into the ear of another friend and laughing hysterically.

There is no well-heeled crowd of editors, publishers, authors and press, and the bar is serving Pabst Blue Ribbon and a shot of whiskey for $8 rather than Champagne or wine. But the blowout accomplished what any more traditional book party seeks to do: toast the hardworking and lucky writers who’ve managed to get their words into print.

The added bonus? With so many Brooklynites attending, there’s plenty of fodder for future posts.

“This kind of music sort of sucks,” says a guy in a grey-and-red flannel jacket to the girl standing next to him. She nods languidly.

“Yeah, me too. I hate it.”

Hipster Hate with Andi And Brenna from Frances McInnis on Vimeo.

How journalists deal with the new sounds of silence

By Sommer Saadi

Nowadays, it takes renting a movie to remember the paper-stacked, smoke-filled newsroom of the olden days: Reporters climbing on top of each other, banging away at typewriters and bellowing “Copy!” The constant babble of conversation and the clucking telephone operators fielding nonstop calls provided just the right soundtrack to the production process. Today’s newsroom, by contrast, is eerily quiet. Walk into most offices and everyone’s wearing headphones, a sea of heads bobbing to different tunes. Above the click-click-click-click of computer keyboards, you could hear a pen drop—if anyone had a pen. These days, colleagues sitting side by side revert to chat rooms instead of real-life chatting. Although the goal of publications then and now is the same—to produce a quality news product—today’s newsrooms couldn’t be more different.

Jack Schwartz, former features editor, The New York Times

Photo: courtesy of Jack Schwartz.

Jack Schwartz calls himself an old-school journalist. He worked for 48 years in the business, spending time at five New York dailies, and retiring in 2005.

I’ve only been back once [to the new Times office] and honestly, it’s sort of enough. From what I hear, there is a sense of isolation. When you walk through the place now, you could be in an insurance company. There is nothing that says, “This is a newspaper.” When I came into the Times, we had these desks. This is before the computers came in, and there were these giant gray desks. It was all a little grade school, you know—just rows and rows of these desks. And you’d pull open the desk and there’d be a typewriter. And people would leave funny jokes and stuff. There was a real sense of conviviality and camaraderie.

[Now] if you’re talking to somebody, you’re a little more careful with what you have to say. And I’ve seen this. Not getting up from your desk to talk to someone and make eye contact … alters your relationship somewhat between you and your colleagues. I don’t want to sentimentalize this, because there were a lot of things that weren’t so great about it, but I think that there is no question that people could just come over and say, “Let’s get a drink or a sandwich.” And now the impulse is to just communicate by digital.

When people retire, they might say they remember covering one or two major stories or being there for 9/11 or being around for an election or this or that. But most people say what was really important was the people. That’s what they miss. But part of that is actually being able to communicate. I couldn’t imagine not knowing who my boss was. I remember my first story: I was working for The Long Island Press. The pay was so low, it might as well have been foreign currency. It was this completely dopey story about some guy who was trying to hold his breath underwater or something, trying to set a world record. But I wanted to come up with a great lede, you know, the world’s best lede. And I’m sitting there and I’m very, you know, kind of tense. And the city editor kept looking at me. And I just want to hide under the desk. And he sees that I’m nervous and he says, “Kid, don’t think. Write. Type.” But he could see me. That’s the point. And of course, I did that. And I banged out some lede and that was that. The rest is history. And I didn’t go into dentistry. And that probably can’t happen now.

Hillary Busis, intern, Slate

Hillary Busis, 22, is a senior majoring in English and history at Columbia University. She’s done her fair share of journalism internships at news organizations ranging from AOL and Cosmopolitan to CJR and Newsweek on Air. Now, she’s at Slate.

Photo: courtesy of Hilary Busis.

I want to be a journalist, and I think that it makes sense to try to look at online options rather than just trying to get something in print, because wherever I interned in print probably won’t exist in the same form in five years.

The office at Slate is organized so that there are clusters of four cubicles in a pod, and those are scattered around the office. I sit right behind my immediate editor, and when I have a question for her and when she has a question for me, we e-mail each other. We don’t talk, even though we’re sitting really close to each other. I guess that’s standard? And I mean, the office is pretty quiet.

Well, people definitely do talk. People will walk by and chat for a few minutes, but then go back to their own desks and kind of keep to themselves—people aren’t pitching ideas to each other aloud. It definitely seems like it would have been a more dynamic place to work back in the day, when people weren’t glued to their computer screens.

I think that [the digital nature of the newsroom] has helped me. We have this e-mail alias called “Slate Discuss” where people just send weird stuff they’ve come across on the Web for the entire office to see, and then we post it to the Slate Twitter [feed]. As an intern, in meetings and things, I don’t really talk, because I am pretty intimidated by the fact that I am surrounded by all these people whose work I admire. But if I’ve come across something funny, I’ll send it to the alias and make a joke about it. I feel like I am much less afraid to do that and tell a joke by writing it than I would be to say something aloud in a meeting, because it is a lot easier to put it in writing and send it off than it is to say something when there are people right in front of you. So in that sense, it might be better for building relationships, just because I am not as scared to speak up through e-mail as I would be otherwise.

But also, I don’t know people. I mean, I know people’s names, but I don’t know if I can put names to faces as well as I could if there was more verbal communication. And in that sense, I guess relationships are harder to form and maintain.

Leslie Eaton, deputy bureau chief,
The Wall Street Journal

Photo: Mark Vamos.

Leslie Eaton began her long tenure as a journalist in 1977 with her first newspaper internship. After stints at Barron’s and The New York Times, Eaton is now two years into her role as deputy bureau chief in Dallas for The Wall Street Journal.
Almost since reporters have had access to things like instant messaging, they’ve loved it. There was a computer system adopted by a lot of papers called ATEX, and it had an instant-message function. There were some people so crazy about it, they’d message the person sitting next to them instead of just talking to them. And I think that’s part of how journalists tend to communicate with their fingers. It was, and it’s always been, a big temptation. And the other thing is, you could do it without anyone necessarily knowing what you were doing. It was a way to have a little bit of privacy, so you could make the snarky remark about your boss without having everybody know. I think reporters have always liked that ability.

One of the things that has changed is that people are having to turn out so much copy these days. And if you’re blogging, you don’t have time to talk to anybody. You don’t have time to shoot the shit with the people around you. And I think that is too bad, because sometimes the way you figure out your story is by telling it to somebody—by talking about it. So that can be a problem. But if you’re trying to turn out huge amounts of material really, really fast, you’re not likely to be communicating with a lot of people.

The Journal is a BlackBerry culture. It’s much more like working on a political campaign. Everybody expects to get in touch with you through the BlackBerry. The idea of instant response is different for me, and it makes it
really hard to concentrate on anything. I think it’s less of a problem for reporters than it is for editors. If you’re a reporter pretty much all you’ve got to worry about is what your boss is looking for. If you are an editor, you have a dozen people who work for you, and you have a dozen people you work for.

And the e-mail traffic … I found it really overwhelming when I first got here. And there are all sorts of management people who say, “Oh, you should only look at your e-mail every half hour.” But if some crazed, lone gunman opens fire at Fort Hood, you can’t really wait half an hour. I personally am still trying to find a happy medium that allows me to be monitoring the things I need to without feeling compelled to answer every single thing every second, because it does make it really, really hard to keep a train of thought going.

Adam Clark Estes, citizen journalism editor,
The Huffington Post

Adam Clark Estes is the citizen journalism editor of The Huffington Post in New York City. His staff is made up of citizens spread out across cities. His newsroom is virtual.

Photo: courtesy of Adam Clark Estes.

The department that I run now started up about a year ago. Right after Obama’s inauguration, the campaign was obviously over, but we had all these people excited about being a part of The Huffington Post, so in a sort of turn-key motion, that network got absorbed into what we called “Eyes and Ears.”

Now, 50 percent of what I do is not totally dissimilar to what a regular metro editor would do. I assign a lot of local reporting. We have an assignment desk every week. We’re doing this now in three of our local sites: Chicago, Denver and New York. And we put up a post every day and it’s like, “There are five things happening in New York that we want reporters to cover.” Because I want to treat them like journalists. I want them to get the assignment, the proper press credentials, talk to [publicists], interview relevant people.

I’m intensely old-school about the way I get my stories. I’ll get people who send me stories, and I send it right back to them and tell them to write me a pitch instead. Sometimes it’s a really good idea that could be better executed, and I want to hold their hand through the process and make it something of professional caliber.

I’m a big fan of really getting to know these people and establishing relationships with them. I’ll be on Gchat with some citizen journalists all day, just talking about whatever. Most of them I’ve never met personally. I was on the phone for probably an hour recently with this guy in California who sent us a video, just talking about where he was and just getting the story straight.

The most challenging part about it is staying in touch. I have a few people I am on IM with during the day pretty frequently. And that’s pretty good, because they’ll get a tip and they’ll IM me and I can talk them through it. But I’m anxious about that problem—about losing touch with people. You know, losing a person through the cracks who could potentially be a really good reporter and contributor to The Huffington Post if nurtured appropriately.

I’m really a fan of the direct one-on-one contact. And I’m really a fan of conference calls and meet-ups. So we had our first Huffington Post happy hour recently, and it was my idea of one way we could bridge that gap between someone’s username and somebody’s face in real life. It felt natural.

It’s funny how natural it feels to meet people online these days. It’s surprisingly not awkward, because I’ve been in touch with these people, and I have a taste for their personalities. But I’m constantly searching for ways to promote conversation amongst the contributors.

I would like the citizen journalists to talk to each other and share tips and work together on stories. And I think that is a longer-term goal that is going to take some time to develop.

Journalists, don’t be afraid, here comes everybody.

By  Tala Al Ramahi

If the Internet had an outreach director, it just might be Clay Shirky. This author and professor has dedicated his career to delving into the possibilities of Web 2.0, wikis and social networks. His 2008 book, Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations is a must-read for media-ites, and his musings on the media landscape have gained him a cult-like following and a calendar full of speaking engagements. When he’s not consulting for the likes of Nokia, the BBC and the Library of Congress, Shirky teaches in Tisch’s graduate Interactive Telecommunications Program at NYU. His much-anticipated book, Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age, hits the shelves in June.

Nothing excites Shirky more than the idea of the Web as the ultimate social network—and he has little patience for those who don’t see it that way. There is possibly nothing that annoys him more than journalism traditionalists who constantly fret about the fate of their profession.

And so, when Link asked him to what extent journalists will lead the media conversation in the future, Shirky responded, essentially: Cut the narcissism. (Ouch!)

Though Shirky didn’t really answer that particular question, we’re grateful he answered several others.

Photo: Kris Krüg for Pop!Tech/Flickr Creative Commons

Link: You say that the Internet is not a decoration on contemporary society but a challenge to it. What is the most challenging thing about the Internet for journalists right now?

Clay Shirky: Depends on how you define journalists. If you mean “people paid in print ad dollars,” the most challenging thing is that that kind of cross-subsidy is going away.
If you mean “people trying to report on events in the world,” the biggest challenge is dealing with the proliferation of new opportunities to gather information, interview people and otherwise track those stories, opportunities that are dramatically much richer than they were even five years ago.
Journalism is undergoing a shift from a data-poor activity, where talking to three sources counts as reporting, to a data-rich activity, where the number and volume of sources of information and observation have exploded. What journalism becomes in a world where the information reporters and analysts have access to has grown a million-fold is anyone’s guess, but figuring out how to manage data-rich journalism is one of the great challenges for our generation.

What do you think is the most useful social feature for journalists on the Internet now?

Access to lots (and lots and lots) of other people, all over the world. Reporters can now find and interview ordinary citizens halfway around the globe, can observe what they are saying to one another in public and can see with the aggregation of thousands—or in some cases millions—of minds, with tools for trend and sentiment analysis.
Who do you think is making the most imaginative use of social media in the current digital landscape?
“Most” is a hard call—the two things I’m watching most closely are GitHub, a site for social sharing of open-source software, which I think is going to transform the ecosystem of programming by making new work much more visible, accessible, assessable and useful. The other is Patients Like Me, which is aggregating patients with similar (and often rare) diseases, and asking them to publicly share their information. Patients Like Me isn’t just trying to help its users; it is trying to do nothing less than shift health care culture to a collaborative model between patients and among patients, researchers and doctors.

If there is one rule that every news media organization should follow online, what would it be?

Make sure cash out doesn’t exceed cash in.

What Web trend should journalists pay attention to right now?

Those days are over. The Web is not a place, or a space separate from some “real world”—it’s the backbone of connected societies. Journalists should only be chasing “trends” if their beat is trend-watching. Otherwise, they should just be getting on with it, whatever their version of “it” is, and using the Web to help them get on with it.

So many creative people make their work available online for free. How do you think journalists will be paid  in the future?

They’ll be paid the same way they are now—when someone thinks their work is valuable enough to pay for. Increasingly, though, I believe that more of that pay will come from nonprofit models, as the aforementioned accident of advertising cross-subsidy shifts to its new, lower-equilibrium state.

What worries you most about current trends on social networks?

Right now, Facebook has an incentive to drive use of the site, and to limit sharing from the site to the outside world. This leads to designing the interactions to encourage more, shallower interactions, while keeping even content the user would be happy to make public within the walled garden. This hollowing out of relatively personal, intimate space is a classic market failure, and it’s not clear that there is any reasonable remedy.

What are you most optimistic about the current trends on digital and social networks?

Sites where people are trying to use these tools not just to create value for the members, but to create a civic model of global sharing—Patients Like Me, Responsible Citizens, Ushahidi, Wikipedia.

Finally, is there something I should’ve asked about but didn’t? Or something you’d like to add that you feel needs to be addressed?

I’d love to see a set of questions about the future of journalism that wasn’t secretly about the anxieties of the people paid under the old system.

By Alex Abu Ata

Monday morning, 7:30 a.m. Andrew S., a journalist at The New York Times online, wakes up to the sound of a smooth feminine voice coming out of his wall: “It is 7:30, Monday, the 9th of March. The weather for today is sunny….” Meanwhile, the curtains silently open, letting in the sunlight. Andrew gets up and heads to the bathroom. While brushing his teeth, he touches a screen disguised as a mirror. Two messages glow in red, indicating a high priority: One is about a job opening with AP-Thomson, the world’s largest wire service. The other is from his boss asking him to cover a demonstration scheduled at 9:00 a.m. in front of the Chinese consulate.

2020: what will the future hold for journalism? Art by Oleksiy Golovchenko

After a quick shower and breakfast, Andrew leaves his apartment on the 126th floor. The door knob scans his fingerprints and locks the door automatically. During his ride on the magnetic levitation subway, Andrew, like the majority of the passengers, turns to his iLife, a touch screen the size of a small notebook permanently connected to the Web. As his fingers move quickly across the screen, he accesses his personal files—documents, media, electronic records—all stored in a virtual server and available from any location. After retrieving his resume, Andrew sends his application to AP-Thomson. He then glances at the headlines and scans his colleagues’ pieces of the day, some of them still being updated as he reads. Suddenly, his boss’ plump, bald head pops up on the screen: “Andy, this demonstration is huge. Make sure to get some good shots, and send me your piece as fast as possible.” His head vanishes into the background, while the iLife saves a copy of the video call and sends it to Andrew’s virtual server.

At the Chinese consulate, thousands of protesters are attempting to block the entrance gate. Andrew takes out his camera, a small cube not much larger than a die, and activates the microphone function on his iLife. Suddenly, the consul’s armored car lurches around the corner and slows before reaching the crowd of protesters. On foot, the consul, surrounded by bodyguards, attempts to muscle his way through the crowd. Andrew, too far away to see well, turns on his camera and the objective, composed of five high-density lenses, stretches out like an inverted telescope, allowing a 100x zoom. Andrew films the chaotic scene in high resolution; the video is automatically uploaded to his online storage account.

Suddenly, a protester throws a well-aimed tomato at the consul’s face. Andrew grins: This tomato will make his piece a Web sensation. After the incident ends, Andrew looks at the video he just shot and freezes the image of the tomato hitting the consul’s face. With a few quick finger movements, he crops the image, zooms in on the face and saves it. He then dictates his article to his iLife, which transcribes it flawlessly. After a quick proofread and minor changes, he logs onto The Times online and uploads his article and picture. D-zine, the design software adopted recently by The Times, automatically creates an optimal layout for the article. Andrew, who rarely disagrees with the program, confirms the proposed layout. Seconds later, his colleagues’ faces appear on his iLife. “Good stuff!” says his boss. “What happened to the tomato thrower?” asks Annie, the reporter in charge of monitoring global warming.

On his way back home, Andrew stops at a newspaper terminal—one of a handful, preserved as historic landmarks in New York City’s midtown—and buys an electronic copy of The Times. Paper copies are also on sale, but cost more than $50 apiece to comply with the 2018 Ecology and Paper regulations. A quick fingerprint scan and the purchase is debited from his bank account. The article, he notices with satisfaction, already has more than 10,000 views. Thousands of readers, most of them from China, have already left comments on the picture. Within hours, spoofs of the video have appeared online: Some have replaced the tomato with other objects. Others have cropped the consul’s tomato-stained face and pasted it on someone else’s body.

Back at home, Andrew, too tired to cook, swallows a couple of nutrient pills before grabbing a beer and collapsing on his sofa. Debating between a 3-D movie and a game, he opts for the latter and calls out loud: “Playstation, on.” His Playstation-TV, a second ago camouflaged flawlessly in the same shade of green as his wall, displays a large, bright Sony logo and greets him. A list of contacts displayed in a corner of the screen shows him which game his friends are playing. John, one of the names on the list, calls him, his avatar’s head popping up on the screen: “Wanna play CounterAliens?” Without waiting for an answer, he sends Andrew an invitation to his game’s server.

A few thousand alien kills later, Andrew yawns, logs off and heads to his bedroom. “Wake me at 7,” he says to the wall. As he lies down, the lights turn off and the curtains close. He drifts off to sleep, dreaming of a Pulitzer.

By Lauren Dockett

It was the day before Thanksgiving 2008, and only a few staffers were still kicking around the spacious new offices of The New York Times. Rob Mackey, a Web producer who had spent years fact-checking and filing the occasional story, was working the international desk. Late that afternoon, the wires lit up with reports of bombings in India’s commercial capital, Mumbai. The website editor grabbed Mackey and told him to figure out what was going on and then blog it—live.

Photo: Sam Petulla

The wires were reporting casualties and coordinated attacks. Mackey’s first move was to share this information with readers of the news blog, The Lede, and post a call for eyewitness accounts. He got them. The blog’s comment section also came alive with links to Twitter feeds and live blogs from the scene. All the while Mackey scoured Web content, social media sites and news reports. Within an hour of his first post, Mackey was linking live video from Indian news websites to The Lede. Authenticated first-person accounts and photos from blogs, Twitter and Flickr followed. For the next five hours, his updates came in a tumble, some of them just minutes apart.

Mackey logged out and went home around 10:30 p.m. that night. He wouldn’t be tapped to write about the bombing’s aftermath—other contributors would—but he had impressed his editor, who was looking for someone to take over the blog on a permanent basis. Mackey had had his eye on The Lede since its inception two years before. He was no stranger to the blogosphere—already maintaining a personal blog that featured his multimedia and written work—and he thought the Times had gotten it right with a daily, flexible news blog. At the time, he felt it was the kind of move the paper needed to make to stay relevant in a changing game.

During the next month, Mackey was asked to contribute more to The Lede. He filed posts about the killing of a karaoke singer who was hogging a microphone in Borneo; election fallout on the tiny, formerly feudal, English Channel island of Sark; and the bailout of Italy’s Parmesan market (a gleeful, pun-laden story). By January, he had a new assignment: permanent news blogger for the biggest newspaper site in the country.

Despite the sizable audience he reaches and the rather plum position he now finds himself in, Mackey didn’t start out hoping to work at the Times. Documentary film was his dream. He dropped out of NYU film school to work on humanitarian projects overseas, and got an early gig making an informational film for a non-governmental organization in Cambodia, followed by a U.N.-sponsored television program covering the wars in the former Yugoslavia. After that, he spent time at a London television news agency that became part of the AP TV network. “Working at a news agency, you’re under incredible deadline pressure all the time,” Mackey says. “And the cycle of television news is similar to working on a website.”

Eleven years ago, Mackey returned to the States and got a job as a part-time fact-checker for The New York Times Magazine, a position he went on to hold full time for five years. He says fact-checking is “inadvertently, extremely good experience for blogging. That kind of reading around a subject leads you to lots of other interesting tangents.” But it’s not just the skill of looking outside the story that’s helped him blog. What Mackey calls his fact-checking “paranoia” has translated into a skepticism that he thinks is essential when working on the Web. “We do a lot of live updates on breaking news events, [and] it’s just a really good mindset to be in,” he says.

I met Mackey at the Times’ offices, where we took over one of the fishbowl conference rooms that line the building’s sunny central atrium. He was wearing dark jeans and a black and grey sweater, an outfit that put him squarely within the paper’s relaxed-adult dress code. Mackey has closely cropped hair that is salting gray and a polite, professional manner. Just short of lanky, he leaned back in one of the office’s ubiquitous moss-green chairs to accommodate the frame of the Flip camera I trained on him, and talked for longer than he should have—a generous move for someone on a live-news clock.

At 43, Mackey is practically a senior citizen in new media terms. But what he’s definitely not is a midlife journalist bemoaning the digitalization of print. He’s comfortable with the idea that producing and publishing news online has become a kind of shared endeavor with other news sources, and he understands that reader and viewer loyalty is a fading reality. “I think an old way of thinking about the newspaper is, that’s really ‘your’ audience,” he says, “But that’s not really the case anymore.”

Photo: Tala Al Ramahi

Mackey has been working for the Times long enough to have witnessed the Gray Lady’s first tentative steps into the blogosphere. In late 2005, a real-estate blog and Carpetbagger, David Carr’s film and awards-show blog (now written by Melena Ryzik), made their debut on NYTimes.com, which had just opened itself to reader comments. The Lede launched the next year.

Jon Landman, deputy managing editor for digital journalism at the paper, sent a memo to staffers noting this new day and saying, “We’ll use the technology our way. Our bloggers will have editors. They will observe our normal standards of fairness and care. They won’t float rumors or take journalistic shortcuts. Critics and opinion columnists can have opinion blogs; reporters can’t … We’ll encourage readers to post their thoughts, but we’ll screen them first to make sure the conversation is civil. Some bloggers will accuse us of violating blogospheric standards of openness and spontaneity. That’s life in the big city.”

Up to that point, the Times had resisted blogging—and the possibility of validating non-journalists’ musings—citing its high standards for authenticating stories and verifying sources. Some staff also found the idea of linking widely, especially to competitors, discomfiting. But today, the paper has upwards of 70 blogs. “A few years ago, some people were loath to link to other places,” Mackey says. “But that’s pretty much gone.”

Started by Tom Zeller (now an editor for the paper’s Green Inc. blog), The Lede was conceived as a blog that “remixes the day’s top stories.” This remixing happens via links to other news sources, citizen journalist accounts and a variety of social media. Mackey explains that the blog’s name “is kind of an old newspaper-y term that you know has something to do with the beginning of a story but also the lead story in the paper.” The focus is on “trying to find more information—other things to say to help contextualize the stories on the homepage of the website, which are more or less the things that are heading toward the front page of the newspaper,” Mackey says. “But the other way that it exists is when there’s a big breaking news story. It fills the gap between when we’re hearing information but there hasn’t yet been time for someone to get to a location or to write an article.”

Mackey is aware that he’s closely read by other bloggers, often a fairly critical bunch. Mostly, he finds that bloggers and sources are grateful for the exposure they get via links from The Lede. After all, the Times site boasts the largest Web audience of any American newspaper.
NYTimes.com draws between 14 and 20 million unique visitors each month, almost twice as many as USA TODAY and The Washington Post.

The Lede’s live nature has enabled striking crisis coverage. It provided impressive real-time video, photos and eyewitness accounts during the Mumbai bombings and again during the Iran election protests—when Western journalists were forbidden to file stories and nearly all the information came from covering bloggers and social media. The blog is also a perfect platform for human catastrophes such as the Haiti and Chile earthquakes, when breaking information and community input are vital.

But perhaps most chilling for the Times, reporting in real-time has meant accepting a new model of publishing—one that involves the occasional correcting of work after it’s already been seen. Mackey is philosophical about a recent slip, when both the blog and the paper mistakenly reported that Army Major Nidal Hasan, the alleged killer in the Fort Hood shooting that left 13 dead last November, was himself dead.

The base commander had reported Hasan’s death in his briefings shortly after the murders, Mackey recalls. “I think it was around 9 o’clock or a little bit later, the [base commander] came out and said, ‘He’s not dead; the shooter’s not dead.’ I just turned on the computer again and took off my coat and wrote an update.” Mackey thought about going back to earlier posts and correcting the error. But, he says, “That would actually be kind of wrong. That would be like going into the archives.”

Photo: Sam Petulla

The error will stand, just as it did in the print edition the next day. But it stings. “There was another blogger criticizing me for getting that wrong … I think on the assumption that all we’re doing is just watching TV or looking at Twitter. But the audience has to be aware that this is sort of like reading the wires—this is sort of like being let into the newsroom—and we can tell you what we think is true, but that, over time, it can change, as it does anyway.”

The blog is also malleable enough to drive smaller stories in notable ways. Mackey remembers posting a brief report of a death during the last running of the bulls in Pamplona. He had linked to coverage in the Spanish press, including a video of the goring. “It was difficult to look at, and I put it in with warnings,” Mackey says. “But the initial reaction from our readers was that Spaniards are crazy to have bullfighting at all, and it’s just barbaric.” The blog was flooded with comments. Some said they were glad the runner was dead.

“When you trace comments, you can start to see where other websites are linking to your post, because you start to get a different kind of comment,” Mackey says. “In this case, the Spanish press picked up on the fact that we were reporting on it, and readers from Spain started writing in and arguing with all the Americans. I did an update just to point out that this debate was going on.”

Mackey updated the story three more times that day. His final post was a picture of the bull, killed by a matador, which is another Spanish tradition. What had started as a discrete couple of paragraphs became a reader-driven feature about a deep cultural divide. “That’s an example [of] what’s amazing about the interaction with the readers,” Mackey says.

This very flexible format could make choosing stories to remix seem overwhelming at times, but Mackey believes the stories that need more context present themselves. Take the man who, in an apparent suicide mission, flew a small plane into the IRS building in Austin in February, leaving behind an anti-IRS screed. The Times’ homepage initially ran a just-the-facts AP story on the incident.

“So that seemed like a good thing to try to jump into,” Mackey says. “Literally a guy posted something on the Internet, burned down his house, flew his plane into a building and, when I was looking perhaps four or five, six hours later, someone had photos that they had taken from their iPhone and posted on Twitter. Somebody else had video on Facebook and a neighbor of the person had video on the YouTube channel of the local TV station of his house burning down. That’s the media environment that we live in.”

This media environment, when filtered through The New York Times, requires Mackey to stay hypersensitive to verification concerns and assume a high level of transparency with his readers. Such ethical considerations are not always mainstays of the blogosphere. “You have to make it incredibly clear and transparent to the reader that ‘This person recorded this but we can’t verify it,’” Mackey says.

He labels at least the first appearance of questionable material with language that implies doubt. “Someone says this is a video of a demonstration in Tehran,” for example. Sometimes he asks his readers to help authenticate material. It’s an unusually humble position for The New York Times to find itself in, but Mackey respects his audience and the medium enough to assume it. “It’s a conversation about the news,” he says, “and you’re saying, ‘Here are some things that [we] know,’ but also inviting the audience, ‘If you know something about this, if you saw this video posted a month ago so you know it didn’t happen today, if you know the neighborhood this fire happened in and you know it doesn’t look right, please tell us’ … There are a whole lot of well-informed, intelligent people out there who … want to themselves spread knowledge and refine people’s understandings.”

The litmus test for verification came three years into the blog’s existence, in June 2009, when Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was re-elected and hundreds of thousands of people took to the streets of Tehran, initiating weeks-long, anti-government protests. The Iranian government immediately cracked down on the press, revoking the credentials of foreign journalists, disallowing street reporting and trying to silence digital media. But citizen journalism prevailed, and The Lede posted hundreds of Twitter feeds, blog links and posts of YouTube videos, becoming a main source of coverage of the events.

Mackey had to defend the blog against concerns of bias, mostly leveled by pro-Ahmadinejad supporters who contended that those with access to social media in Iran are an out-of-touch, elite class. But he suggests there were other reasons to distrust the election results and give voice to the protestors. Bill Keller, the paper’s executive editor, was in Tehran and heard from a member of the country’s interior ministry that the vote was rigged. And Mackey was able to identify a lot of the Tweeters and bloggers, many of whom, he believes, would be working as journalists if the country permitted free speech.

As long as he’s done his best to be accurate, Mackey never has to worry about his right to speak freely; in fact, his job is about as secure as anything gets in today’s newspaper business.

Does he have any advice can he can share? He demurs, insisting he has no special techniques. He never, for example, uses RSS feeds. He feels the Twittersphere is often driven by what’s already been reported, and he relies heavily on plain old Google. “I think I probably should be more organized,” he says frankly, then confesses that every day at the office “feels a little bit like blogging while falling out of an airplane.”

When I ask him who he reads, he talks about getting inspired by Josh Marshall, founder of the popular left-leaning political site Talking Points Memo. “In another era, he’d be a correspondent for The New Yorker or something,” Mackey says. “But reading his blog before I started working as a blogger, you learn that part of what they’ve been so successful with is engaging with a really intelligent audience and getting not only tips but getting people actually doing work for you. They’re looking around; they’re trying to connect the dots, so to speak.”

It’s another skill Mackey has mastered. Even if he doesn’t say so himself.

Brian Storm is determined to make long-form journalism work online

By Radhika Gupta

Of the more than 25 multimedia documentaries produced by MediaStorm during the past five years, Driftless is Brian Storm’s favorite and most recent work. The 30-minute piece about the hopes and sorrows of rural communities in Iowa stitches together scenes of local farmers facing extinction, young veterans of the Iraq war, a butcher who took over a dying trade from his father and antics at the town bar. Shot entirely in black-and-white, interspersed with haunting photographs that invoke Robert Frank and accompanied by a melancholic country-and-western soundtrack, the documentary is at once fiercely moving and unexpectedly humorous. The viewer is left challenged, with a persistent longing to visit this world.

Photo: Brian Storm

“Driftless is my favorite, because it tells the story of unseen passionate struggles,” Storm says. A five-minute section in the feature, “Harry and Helen,” is particularly touching. It is the story of an elderly married couple very much in love. The efforts of the two to salvage their heritage, a farm that they lovingly and achingly built, are complicated by the Alzheimer’s disease that has afflicted Helen. In those brief minutes of video and photographs, you are a guest in their home, listening to their story about a fragile condition, told without sentimentality.

This is digital long-form journalism as defined by Storm, the founder and president of MediaStorm.
MediaStorm has already won four Emmys and the first DuPont Broadcast Journalism Award ever given to a Web publication—all in just five years. The company formally started in 2005, although the idea came to Storm back in 1993, as a journalism student at the University of Missouri.

Then a budding photographer at the local paper, Storm was assigned to document a terrible flood. He decided to cover it through the prism of a single family who had lost everything. After spending a whole day with the family and taking countless photographs, he rushed back to his editor with dreams of a long feature. The editor shot him down: “One photo. I need one photo with a two-line caption.”

“I knew then that this type of journalism is not for me,” says Storm, sitting in his Brooklyn office, a large, quiet, minimally furnished loft bathed in natural light. Quick-and-perishable journalism holds no appeal for him. A soft-spoken 39-year-old, Storm is passionate about many things—his newborn daughter, photography, Radiohead—but mostly about the art and craft of detailed storytelling.

Storm received his master’s degree in photojournalism in 1995 from the University of Missouri, where he also headed the media lab and taught electronic photojournalism. While at the school, he started producing CD-ROMs of audio slideshows to tell stories through images and narration.

After graduation, from 1995 to 2002, Storm was director of multimedia at MSNBC.com, where he was responsible for the audio, photography and video elements of the site. There, Storm created “The Week in Pictures” and “Picture Stories” to showcase how photography can depict the news. For the next two years, Storm did a stint at Corbis—a digital media agency founded and owned by Bill Gates—as vice president of News, Multimedia & Assignment Services. He left in 2005 to start MediaStorm with another friend, Robert Browman. Both believed in producing in-depth and visually imaginative essays about social issues. (Browman still contributes to MediaStorm but is now a freelance multimedia journalist and producer based in Florida.)

Storm also believed that there was a pent-up demand for work that brought together audio, video and still photography to report on issues that had universal messages. He foresaw the democratization of media through the Internet and decided to make his work available only on the Web, for maximum distribution. Visitors to MediaStorm.org can view 25 documentaries on diverse topics such as AIDS in Africa, the war over ivory and elephant poaching, uranium poisoning of the Navajo Indians and the victims of Hurricane Katrina. All use multiple forms of media to create an original, lyrical narrative.

MediaStorm tends to favor stories about ordinary people in extraordinary circumstances, whether it is the tale of a young woman juggling her elderly father and her young children in The Sandwich Generation or the story of 20 drug addicts living together in a building in Manhattan in The Ninth Floor. Alongside these pieces are harsher documentaries, such as Intended Consequences, which chronicles children born from the mass rapes that took place in Rwanda in 1994. That film took more than a year to produce.

How is a MediaStorm documentary conceived? A media partner may suggest a story, or an idea may crop up in a newspaper article or through a photography exhibition; Storm takes great pride in showcasing the work of unsung foreign photographers that would otherwise never be seen in the West. “Photography, like art, is a very closed world,” Storm says. “Most of us never get to see even half of the fabulous work done by foreign photographers because it’s only published once in a magazine overseas.” Storm has also come up with ideas for MediaStorm projects through chance conversations with friends and at MediaStorm workshops.

Take, for instance, The Marlboro Marine. Alan Hagman of the Los Angeles Times approached Storm at a workshop and said that he would love for MediaStorm to produce a feature for the Times. He sent Storm amazing photographs about an Iraq war veteran suffering the aftereffects of combat.

Shot by Los Angeles Times photojournalist Luis Sinco, the photograph of Marine Lance Corporal James Blake Miller had been interpreted by some readers as a macho American Marine smoking a cigarette while glaring at his Iraqi enemies. But this perception was wrong. Miller is not a tough guy; in fact, he’s struggling with severe Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. We know this because Sinco spent three years with the Marine and taped their conversations. The resulting documentary—which pairs Sinco’s photographs with audio interviews with Miller—is a good example of giving a subject a voice, of telling the story behind the story, beyond the iconic image. “It was amazing journalism,” Storm says.

As it turns out, most MediaStorm projects begin with photography. First, the team meets with the photographer to hear his vision of the story. Storm then does a picture-edit, sorting through 5,000 to 10,000 images, intuiting how best to tell the story and through which media. Storm believes in giving the story—not digital wizardry—the lead role. He insists, “If the audience can focus on the technology rather than the story, then we have failed.”

Storm edits tighter and tighter, slicing away at the original reporting to focus deeply on the story the photographer was trying to tell, to find the hooks that connect viewers more intensely with the characters. The spine of the feature is the photography; audio and video are then stitched into and among the chosen photographs to help give a voice to the pictures. Finally, once a video is completed, it is posted on the website and also e-mailed to MediaStorm’s Facebook fans.

MediaStorm’s stellar reputation has led to partnerships with news organizations such as MSNBC and Reuters, as well as a client list that includes the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the Asia Society and Doctors Without Borders, among others. Many of the projects are syndicated to TV stations and websites around the world, with licensing fees shared evenly between the journalists and artists who collaborate on the pieces.

Still, although Storm’s happy to work with large news organizations, he has decided to remain independent of them. He wants MediaStorm to be unconstrained in its choice of projects and to take as much time as he and his colleagues think they need to treat a subject properly. To that end, MediaStorm has also produced commercial documentaries for private corporations like Starbucks and used the revenue to fund the editorial features that reflect Storm’s vision.

MediaStorm also makes money from its website, MediaStorm.org, which sells DVDs and books related to its documentaries. People from roughly 135 countries view the documentaries on the website every month. The site is also sponsored by The Washington Post.

Storm and his team are confident that work like theirs will always find an audience. The stories are produced with a respect and humility toward the subjects, with results inspiring to audiences—and to journalists.

On this day, many years after that fateful flood in Missouri, Storm is reaching for his camera once again—but only to take a picture of his newborn daughter. He is quick to poke fun at his own photo skills. “The world doesn’t need another somewhat decent photographer,” he remarks modestly.

But many more MediaStorms would be more than somewhat decent.