The promise, risks and reasons for liveblogging

Liveblogging offers a lot of promise for a future model of journalism that features professionals, sources and citizens working together to provide a more complete picture of the world around us.

In a previous post, I discussed liveblogging and its current forms. There are three main categories: first, there’s the liveblog that covers events we can all see, televised events like a World Series game. Second, there’s a liveblog that covers events we can’t see, like a court case. Finally, there’s the “this just in” brand of liveblog for a breaking news event or a crisis, where up-to-the-minute coverage is needed.

First, let’s discuss televised events. In some cases, liveblogs here make little sense. Few people watching the State of the Union would need a separate commentary during it.  The State of the Union is an uninterrupted event, like a film.

You don’t need a reporter during a speech, just like you don’t need someone whispering in your ear during a movie. A liveblog of the State of the Union might serve for someone who couldn’t watch but wanted to keep up with it as it happened. It could also serve as a transcript for later readers. Most people, however, would probably prefer a brief synopsis.

Liveblogs hold more potential for televised events where there’s a break or a lull in the action. Baseball and football are good examples where there’s plenty of time that’s ripe for good observations about the game. If the liveblog is set up as a chat, the fans can set the agenda of the conversation, rather than just listen to the announcers; it creates a community space, like having a bunch of buddies watching the game with you.

Liveblogging’s greatest potential is for events where we can’t see all the action or wouldn’t easily comprehend it even if we could. These include court proceedings, political events, terrorist attacks, wars, natural disasters or, on the bright side, space landings and major scientific breakthroughs. Livebloggers become our eyes and ears on the ground, valued for their ability to get details and separate facts from rumors.

We’ve had live coverage for decades, in radio and television. So to imagine what liveblogs could end up doing for reporting, let’s look back at the evolution of live coverage.

One of the major events in live television coverage was the Kennedy assassination in 1963. Live reports came within minutes of the shooting. Reporters came to us by the hour with new information, but it was largely a one-way conversation, reporter to viewer. For public reactions, reporters went to the streets. Take a look at this NBC News “man-on-the-street” session after the assassination (Note: you may need to reload the clip).

With liveblogging, this type of reporting stands to change a great deal. First of all, getting people to talk about such a grave subject will no longer demand the television reporter’s awkward question, “How do you feel?” The reactions will come naturally, remotely from the audience.

Whether through liveblogs or other forums, people will send reactions in text, audio and video form. A middleman on the street will no longer be needed for such events; the audience will send their feelings and coverage themselves.

Abraham Zapruder was interviewed immediately after the assassination, but it took 12 years after JFK’s death for his film to come to light. A modern-day Zapruder could have done it with an iPhone and had it on an iReport or NowPublic within minutes. As sites allow multimedia reader commentary, such footage will become easy to add to a liveblog.

Next, let’s take a look at coverage of 9/11. Here’s CNN on that morning. Whereas in ’63, you had a one-camera shot of a reporter, here our attention is constantly divided. We hear the reporters, while we see a video image. The screen divides at times into a video image on one side and live reporters on the other, while audio of the reporters is mixed in.

Take this to the next step: television coverage may begin to rely on the Internet. Soon news coverage will feature not just windows for video images and reporters but also for tweets and liveblogs.  Already Twitter feeds get a space on many CNN broadcasts, and liveblogs will be just one more window on our screens, where users throw in their accounts, their photos, videos, audio, etc.

News organizations will need to find a way to filter it all, perhaps with a minute delay on entries to delete anything obscene and flag possibly inaccurate information or by hand-selecting which user-generated content appears.  In the end, however, interactions between readers and news agencies on liveblogs will serve both groups well.

For example, in the 9/11 scenario, notice the CNN reporters telling us they’re calling their sources and trying to get information. On-air, they struggle in their discussion with Sean Murtaugh because he can’t see certain things from his “vantage point.” In a liveblog scenario, tons of eyewitnesses could contribute their vantage point and speed up the process of information-gathering, helping both users and reporters.

Meanwhile, when reporters contact their trusted sources, if they do so transparently via liveblogs, we as users can follow along and interact directly. Liveblogs then become a kind of online news conference where users directly address sources and reporters. After all, if Murtaugh is willing to speak on national TV, why shouldn’t he be wiling to take our questions?

At the present time, Twitter’s “direct message” feature allows us to single out a person for communication, and this is an early model of the structure for conversations in liveblogs. Imagine first a window where the reporter welcomes all his sources and readers, then sub-windows where sources either offer their own chat or readers can request a chat with them.

As news travels faster and faster, there’s an increased risk of misinformation. One of the issues that Oliver Stone’s 9/11 film “World Trade Center” captured was how quickly rumors spread on that day. With everyone on their phones and PDAs, plenty of false information spread about who was responsible and what had happened. Our urge to get information out before verifying it will only grow with the advance of technology, and it will be crucial for the reporter to become a voice of authority, while staying connected to their audience.

Despite that risk, liveblogging will allow for a much greater sense of empowerment and community among citizens in the pivotal events of the future. When we watched the Kennedy assassination and the 9/11 attacks, many of us were glued to our TV sets but felt powerless. With the integration of liveblogging technology, we will be able to air our questions and concerns in a joined forum of citizens, reporters and, hopefully, reliable sources.

Beyond crises like JFK’s death and 9/11, liveblogging has great potential in areas so far untapped. Think about liveblogging in war. So far, we’ve had plenty of live reports in war, but usually reporters answer to an anchor, not directly to the public.

If democracy keeps up with technology, liveblogs could easily arise where reporters, news consumers, parties involved in the conflict and people affected by the conflict are all converging to interact. There can be liveblogs of assaults on American forces or of other big events. War blogs will be one area where a multimedia environment will make a huge difference, as commenters can post video audio and photo with their posts.

The only thing that can prevent liveblogging from revolutionizing live coverage is corporate and political bureaucracy getting in the way. The potential is there for transparent open conversations, where those of radically opposing opinions can speak and link us to the evidence for their opinions. There will be a need to verify identities, distinguish fact and rumor and define what is too objectionable to air, but I believe this can be done while still advancing this a revolutionary and open form of reporting.

Imagine a liveblog transmitted from space years from now as we land on Mars. Astronauts, reporters and viewers will be exchanging information and questions.

Sound crazy? Maybe.

But the future is full of potential.

Blogging air travel as if it were a sport

USA Today’s Ben Mutzabaugh was presented with a conundrum several years ago: how to get people excited about a topic like air travel.

When Today in the Sky began in 2002, the editors meant it to be a light supplement to the paper’s travel section, with some helpful tips for flyers. As Mutzabaugh took charge, he had it easy in one way, because USA Today already had a known audience of travelers. USA Today is ubiquitous in every airport, train station and hotel in this country: travel is already on many of its readers’ minds.

“We knew we already had a critical mass in the brand,” Mutzabaugh said. “We just had to bring them to the online content.”

The challenge was giving the traveler audience something they didn’t already know. Mutzabaugh came up with an intriguing solution. He came from a background as a college sports editor, and he had a sense of what sports fans wanted to hear.

“I just took that same filter and applied it to air travel,” he said.

Imagining airlines as teams and passengers as fans, he then asked himself what an air travel fansite would cover. On the “team” side, he listed major rivalries between airlines, airline business rankings and regulations. Then on the fan side, the beat would include anything that affected their flying experience, such as rising costs, new regulations, new airlines, airports, routes and runways.

The concept worked, and six years later, Mutzabaugh has a passionate and eclectic readership composed of airline management, travel agents, frequent flyers and travel fans. He finds the readers discuss airlines with the same passion as sports fans, especially Southwest.

“Southwest is like the Dallas Cowboys of airlines,” he said. ‘People may love ‘em or hate ‘em, but everybody’s got something to say about them.”

Mutzabaugh says he tries to keep the content as varied as possible to match his audience’s interests.

“Blogs are a moving target,” he said. “The readers’ preferences changes day to day. In 2002, people getting bumped from flights was hot, but people got used to hearing about that. The trick is to keep your finger on what’s going on in their minds.”

He also makes a habit of flying regularly to keep up with what customers are experiencing. For Mutzabaugh, being a flyer himself is essential to covering his beat. He uses the experiences to gauge rumors and complaints about airlines.

“Given our name, I know that I could affect airline business if I publish something negative,” he said. “I have to be very careful not to lead readers to make decisions that are unwarranted.”

The blog allows readers many spaces to contribute besides the comments section. There’s a useful weekly series called SkyTips where Mutzabaugh solicits tips on a different theme each week, from how to kill time in airports, to writing airline complaint letters and dealing with rude passengers. He also runs a popular weekly game called Name That Airport, where readers try to identify a photo taken inside a terminal.

Then there are user-generated forums on topics such as “What Airlines Won’t You Fly, and Why” and “Worst passenger experiences,” which several flight attendants have used as a confessional for all their horror stories.

Every Wednesday Mutzabaugh also hosts a live Q&A on air travel. To say he gets a wide range of questions would be an understatement. Here are a few examples:

“What’s your opinion on the new Delta service starting in June from SLC to Midway on 737-800s?”

“My son works at AA maintenance base (MCI), and the rumor is that AA will be closing this base in the very near future. Do you know if this is true?”

“Frontier PR has put out releases regarding their 5th consecutive quarterly profit. In the latest quarter they claim an operating profit, but a huge loss due to bankruptcy related items. Isn’t that still a huge loss, however you spin it?”

“My daughter is flying to China…They return on Monday, May 18th to O’Hare at the international terminal at 6 p.m. She has a flight scheduled for 9:20 p.m. that evening to STL. Is it possible that she can clear customs in two hours to make her Flight on AA?”

“Before Five Guys opened a location in Pittsburgh, I often chose a connection in DCA over a direct flight just to get a burger and fries. Are there any airport eats for which you’d go out of your way?”

The amazing thing is that Mutzabaugh answers everything from the restaurants to the stocks and the security wait, right there and in-depth.

“I’ve always had this gift at remembering minute details, like who went to the college playoffs in 1971,” he said. “It comes in handy when you’re expected to be an expert.”

Today offers some of the most in-depth knowledge of air travel anywhere on the Web and much of the information is reader-contributed. Mutzabaugh and his colleagues have created a space where readers experienced in flying and the airline business are interacting and passionately debating their field. The news pieces meanwhile are rich in detail and incredibly varied, while all staying inside the air travel beat.

Today is one of three travel blogs at USAToday.com, along with a cruise blog and a hotel blog, each with a similar structure. Each blog is supported by both print travel reporters and online staff, working with the chief reporter.

While Today allows for a lot of reader contribution, it could use a bit more on its author. There are no links to Ben’s e-mail or even a profile of him on the site, although his name and face appear on the banner of every page. This is partially because his blog is one of the oldest on the site: newer blogs like USAToday.com’s hotel blog include such information.

Mutzabaugh says there are plans to upgrade the blog with more personal details, as part of a complete restructuring of USAToday.com’s blogs coming sometime in the future.

Columbia’s The Audit tries to keep business news honest

In a conference at Columbia’s journalism school this April, Stephen Adler, editor-in-chief of Business Week, was asked how he felt his magazine had fared in covering the financial crisis. His answer: “I’m very scared of Dean Starkman.”

Dean Starkman is editor of The Audit, a Columbia Journalism Review blog that covers and critiques the business press. It focuses on big outlets like the Wall Street Journal, Business Week, CNBC, Forbes and the other most-watched sources for business news. Starkman and his writers act as both media watchdogs and public advocates, scanning for inaccuracy and bias and calling the business media to answer first to the public, rather than Wall Street.

Starkman is a former Wall Street Journal investigative reporter, as is his colleague Ryan Chittum. Chittum writes the Audit’s daily content, critiquing business news on accuracy and detail. Starkman meanwhile focuses on long-form journalism about the business press.

The blog was started by Herbert Winokur, Jr., a former member of the Enron board of directors. Winokur wanted to make sure the media didn’t miss a future conspiracy like Enron, and he created the Audit to be an advocate for better business reporting.

Starkman was hired in 2007 to head the Audit, after having spent eight years at the Wall Street Journal as an investigative business reporter. From 1996 to 2004, he saw the Journal go through cuts that hurt their financial reporting. He wrote in a 2009 Mother Jones piece that the Journal’s reporters were hit with “low morale, lost expertise, and constant cutbacks..[which] do not produce an appetite for confrontation and muckraking.”

Yet Starkman saw issues that demanded confrontation. After leaving the journal, Starkman spent a year researching how the insurance industry responded to the claims of Hurricane Katrina victims. He found that $100,000 claims were sometimes getting back just cents of compensation from insurers, and regulators were turning a blind eye. Starkman was appalled, and he soon began to see the Katrina debacle along with predatory lenders as part of a growing corrosion of America’s financial services.

But he didn’t see the mainstream media covering this. Outlets like CNBC were focusing on stories easy to sell to Wall Street: deals and mergers and acquisitions. They were treating the audience as “investors rather than citizens,” Starkman said.

“M&As were sucking the oxygen out of the business press coverage, and I wanted to push back against that,” he added.

The Audit was the perfect vehicle to do that, a business press watchdog hosted by a respected non-profit read by journalists all around the country.

However, Starkman underestimated the need to feed the blog daily. As an investigative reporter, he wasn’t used to putting out daily posts. So he hired Ryan Chittum, a former colleague of his at the Journal, to be the daily blogger.

In his daily work, Chittum critiques business news reports in the outlets that he and Starkman think are the most read and watched, like the Journal, the New York Times, magazines like Fortune and CNBC. The writing mostly is a fact-check with occasional snark thrown in. In one piece, he slammed a WSJ op-ed as “one of the more disappointing pieces I’ve read in this crisis — and that’s saying something.”

Becoming a critic has been a challenge for Chittum, after years as a news reporter writing in a neutral voice. It’s also been awkward to write about the work of ex-colleagues.

“Some people in the business…get ticked that I don’t call them before writing something. But that’s not my job,” he said. “Does A.O. Scott [NY Times movie review] call up Wes Anderson to ask why the forty minutes of The Darjeeling Limited are ponderous and self-indulgent? No. He reviews as a moviegoer who happens to know a lot about the business. That’s how I think of what we do at the Audit, only we review business journalism.”

At the same time, Chittum says it’s not right to blame individual reporters for bad journalism.

“Many of the journalists I criticize are better reporters than I ever will be,” he said. “There’s a whole ecosystem responsible for how a story comes out.”

With editors, corporate bosses, advertisers, newsrooms and audiences all having an influence on the product, there’s plenty of ways good business reporting can go bad.

“It’s not about an individual’s shortcomings in a piece so much as it is about the institutions and what kind of sausage they’re squirting out,” Starkman said.

These days, Chittum writes two or three posts a week, and he’s established a rapport with his readers. With about 4-5 comments a story, he has time to e-mail them and often get helpful tips. Chittum says he appreciates every comment, whether harsh or approving.

“Every journalist can sometimes feel like they’re working in the middle of nowhere, especially in the field of criticism,” Starkman said. “Every love or hate letter helps you to know where you stand.”

Chittum says that dialogue is only possible because CJR readership is more select, which is exactly what they wanted.

“We never wanted it to get a million hits a day,” Chittum said. “We wanted to hit an influential readership.”

Chittum came to the business beat from an impoverished youth in Tulsa, OK, which offered him a unique perspective on the mortgage crisis in 2008. In Oct. 2008, he wrote a piece called “My Foreclosure” about his family’s experience of losing their home when he was a teenager.

“I’ll bet that very few, if any, business reporters working today at major media outlets have personally been through a foreclosure,” he wrote. “I’d go as far as to bet that, unfortunately, a surprisingly small number of working business reporters have even interviewed anyone going through a foreclosure. Sometimes I wonder if we had been in better touch with regular people outside our circles, we might have been more attuned to the perilous state of the American middle class and what the effects of the lending boom might be, and thus might have provided better warnings.”

“My Foreclosure” got Chittum the most responses of any piece he’s ever written for the Audit, and some of them were furious. One woman called Chittum an elitist, writing “Poor is a tarpaper shack and starvation, not renting.”

The Audit crew has also received criticism for ignoring blogs in its focus on mainstream business media. In a 2009 letter to Starkman, financial blogger Barry Ritholtz wrote that his blog, The Big Picture, along with Calculated Risk and Naked Capitalism were reporting the meltdown but were not getting heeded by the mainstream. He wrote to Starkman, “The story you missed was that the smart reporting and commentary was not being done by MSM [mainstream media], it was being done by others… Traditional reporting left a vacuum, one that was quickly filled.”

Starkman said he and Chittum would like to give more time for blogs, but besides lacking the resources, it’s also not their main concern.

“LA Times, Wall Street Journal, Forbes, Fortune, Business Week — for better or worse, they set the financial agenda for the country,” Starkman said. “They need to be reckoned with and by concentrating on them, we can have the most influence on the agenda.”

March 2009 brought the Audit its highest audience ever, with 73,000 page views. Starkman hopes to add more original reports and an archive of business articles from over the last few years, for students and others who might want to investigate the origins of the financial crisis. In that spirit, Starkman is working on a review of financial journalism from 2000 to 2007 that Columbia Journalism Review will publish later this year.

The different styles of live blogging

Live blogging has helped transform how journalists — particularly print journalists who had to report yesterday’s news tomorrow — cover events and give commentary in real time.

A live blog is a live, online update of an event, via a microblogging service like Twitter or a dedicated live blogging service like CoveritLive. We’ve been researching live blogging habits and trends, and live blogs tend to cover standard fare: breaking news, politics, sports, entertainment and business events. Beyond that though, live blogs on the web are so varied that it’s hard to see them all as one style of journalism.

The differences in live blogs can be narrowed down to three main areas:

• Style
• Frequency and length of updates
• Level of interactivity with readers

A live blogger’s writing style can vary from straight-laced news reporter, to snarky know-it-all commentator or rapid-fire text messenger. When Kate Phillips covered the State of the Union for the New York Times, she did so as a straight-up reporter at the event, with knowledgeable entries that covered all the bases. When “Political Doctor” covered the same event from her TV, her writing went with a dose of sarcasm. Meanwhile, when covering the Independent Spirit Awards, Spout just sent in Twitter messages of 140 characters, essentially fun blips to her audience.

Live blogggers vary widely as to how often they check in during an event. While most announce major developments, some take it to the extreme: When FiredogLake covered the Scooter Libby trial, it read like a transcript of the entire trial. Their team of bloggers rotated simultaneous blogging in the courtroom and hardly missed a beat. On the other extreme, there are live bloggers who just contribute when they feel like it, regardless of the event, like this casual Oscar live blog from the South Florida Sun-Sentinel.

Then there’s how the blogger uses the readers’ feedback. In that Oscar blog from Florida, comments were in their own separate section below the blog post. In other blogs, comments are mixed right in with the bloggers’ writing, which makes it more of a conversation than a report. Some bloggers use their position to act as a voice of authority to readers asking questions: The Sioux City Journal’s live blog of Lawrence Harris’ trial read like a radio call-in show. In contrast, when The Uptake covers the Coleman-Franken hearings, everybody’s got an opinion, and the hosts tend to fade to the background.

Some live blogs use tools like instant polls to interact with readers Though perhaps gimmicky, the polls at least make participants feel valued. Other live blogs utilize links, which can be helpful to provide more info. But in the case of a fast-breaking story, who has time to be reading other links?

Underlying every one of these questions is how the blogger conceives of the audience. If they think their readers are watching along with them, as with the Oscars or the State of the Union, then the blogger can afford to miss details and chime in at will. In other events though, especially court cases, the live blogger is the only eyes and ears for their audience.

The bloggers also have to decide if they’re writing for insiders or the general public. Newcomers to The Uptake’s coverage of Coleman-Franken may feel lost at first, because essentially the blog is an ongoing chat room. It’s great for insiders but hard to navigate if you don’t have the background. In contrast, the Philadelphia Inquirer’s coverage of the Vincent Fumo trial gave constant updates but was also written to be accessible to readers with only a passing awareness of the case.

In the end, these questions of the audience are far more important than the event is in deciding a live blog’s content. The blogger who stops and thinks about their audience, tone and the other issues we’ve raised will probably create far better and more popular content.

In our research we noticed a few trends in live blogs. We hope these sites broaden your understanding of this fun and evolving reporting style.

Continue…

Niche social networks can be a great tool for journalists

Every journalist has at least heard of the big-shot social networks like Facebook and MySpace and many journalists have signed up for accounts.

But one of the great strengths of the Internet are all the niches it allows to flourish. These niches can be great for journalists, and sites like Ning make it easy for people to setup niche social networks. Gina Chen, family life editor at The Post-Standard in Syracuse, N.Y., has found great success leveraging niche social networks for her parenting beat. On her personal blog she gives this advice about niche social networks:

If you write about education, and you want to find people really interested in education, for example, a niche social network might help. You won’t reach as large or as broad and audience as Facebook, but a smaller audience that is super interested in your blog topics or stories is better in a way than a larger audience that isn’t.

In particular, there are two niche social networks that Chen has found really useful: Cafe Mom and Twitter Moms. Chen says they help “me connect with moms both in my geographic coverage area and throughout the world who may be interested in the parenting tidbits on my Family Life blog.”

These social networks have allowed her to connect with moms for stories and posts and have allowed her to build her network of sources. Once a journalist joins a Web site, Chen recommends they immediately let people know who she is, and Chen also recommends promoting that she is on a given social network:

You’re expanding your community two ways: widening the circle to include people outside your geographic area and engaging those people who already read you. In time, your regular readers will join the site you’re on. You’ll have access to them in a new way. You’ll be able to chat with them, find out what they think you should be writing about, even ask them to write for your blog or your newspaper. They’ll become your inner-circle of advisers.

Chen has worked hard forming connections with her readers on her Family Life blog, and that can mean off-line work too. When she first began working the family beat, she set up meetings with mothers’ groups in the area, visited local mothers’ homes and met their children.

“Nothing can take the place of that personal connection,” she said. “You’ve got to have it both face-to-face and online. Online readers want to connect to the writer, and if journalists don’t provide that, the reader will go search for it somewhere else.”

At the same time, Chen says blogging can’t be done lazily.

“You have to contribute something to the debate,” Chen said. “It’s not enough to just post a link you like and say, ‘Check this out.’ The reader will check out that link, but can forget you. Unless your blog presents an aggregation of links, or some extra commentary and reporting, readers won’t have a reason to come back.”

Chen created the blog to give more exposure to parenting issues. She and many of her readers felt that many mothers’ concerns weren’t getting enough coverage in the paper.

Last February, for example, Chen investigated a series of day-care center closings in Syracuse and found they were all related to a lack of state subsidies for child care. Along with a feature story, she also ran a blog post, which allowed her to add a ton of useful links for needy families. In addition, she gave her personal take on the story and a video looking at the crisis.

For Chen, blogging is not just a fun side job — it’s a necessity. She estimates 70 percent of her work is on her blog and in social media, (check out her daily online routine) and 30 percent is spent working outside on her beat. She’s by no means alone in blogging at the paper: Chen estimates about 50 percent of the Post staff are active bloggers.

Chen advises sticking to topic-based blogs. A general assignment reporter should avoid a blog on their daily reports, given the variety of topics that’ll come up, he said.

“A general assignment blog can easily lead to disaster,” she said. “Blogs are about targeted niche audiences.”

She recommends such reporters blog on a topic they’re passionate about, even if it has nothing to do with the job.

“You could blog about old movies and bring a readership to your paper that has never come to it before,” she said.

I mentioned my biggest concern about blogging, the fear that the more wired I get, the less time I’ll be reporting out on my beat. Chen took issue with that.

“If I’m a court reporter with wifi access on my laptop, I can be  live blogging and twittering while on site, without ever having to go back to the office,” she said.

Though aware of blogging’s complexities, Chen has little patience for reporters who resist it.

“I would ask them, ‘Have you noticed how our industry is doing lately?’ Newspapers are crumbling. If we don’t change, we will get left behind,” Chen said. “Blogging is now a matter of survival.”

Jane Stevens: Mini-metros will replace metro newspapers

Jane Stevens predicts residents of at least one metropolitan area will wake up sometime with the next 12 months and realize that the daily newspaper that they received news from for years is no longer there.

In its place “mini-metros” will form where metros once reigned supreme, Stevens said. These mini-metros will be niche products run by a small team that focus on part of a metro area. These products will focus heavily on core local issues like schools, government, roads and health. Perhaps the biggest change from the metro model will be how these mini-metros will incorporate beat blogging as part of their core product.

They won’t just report on the community — they’ll be apart of it. Input and information from citizens will be vital to the success of these mini-metros. They’ll be built around a collaborative model.

For Stevens, Web journalism demands a greater degree of interactivity, and larger papers that fail to deliver this will fall to those that are more interactive, often being local and/or topic-based.

Stevens highlighted four elements that news organizations will need to be relevant in the future: creative storytelling, social networking, beat blogging and basic essential information, such as schedules, maps, and other need-to-know information, depending on the topic.

She cites the example of West Seattle Blog, a site run by former print journalists that welcomes contributions from readers and is ultralocal in its coverage.  These blogs include “serial” reporting on certain issues: they’ll update every hour on a certain event as things go on.  They can serve their communities well on local issues of schools, roads, health, local arts and public policy.

They can also serve their community’s small businesses by providing advertising space.  As many of the larger papers have become corporatized and bought out, Stevens noted that small businesses have often gotten priced out of advertising space to larger corporations like Budweiser. Local blogs like West Seattle can give the little guys better attention.

Stevens has been covering computer innovations for decades, and she headed the San Francisco Examiner’s computers column when it first began in the early 1980s.  Over the years, Stevens stayed up to speed with new media and she became dissatisfied with how news organizations used the Web.

“They just took everything that they had put in print and copied it onto the Web,”  Stevens said. “It was shovelware.”

Stevens didn’t understand why news sites were creating separate sections for multimedia content. She believed then and now that all possible media — text, video, audio and more — should be weaved together as the story demands.

“With web journalism it’s all about the storytelling, not just the writing,” Stevens said.

She noted Luis Sinco’s “Marlboro Marine,” a commendable portrait of an Iraqi Marine veteran struggling with his demons online at mediastorm.org.

“You figure out the best medium or mediums for the story, and if your story’s good enough, they won’t even be conscious of the medium when they’re watching it,” Stevens said.

Interweaving media is one of many benefits Stevens sees in online journalism.  On her site rejurno.com, she spreads a positive view of the future of journalism.  She says the future belongs to “jurnos,” an Australian term for journalists that Stevens has appropriated for the future journalist.

“A jurno goes beyond the traditional I write-you read kind of journalist,” Stevens said. ” They’re part storyteller, part community manager, organizer, watchdog, fact-checker and mythbuster. They are really there to serve their community, whether it’s a topic-based or geographical community.”

This year, Stevens is working at the Donald W. Reynolds Journalism Institute (RJI) in Missouri on two major projects: first, her team there has created the RJI Collaboratory Network, which Stevens describes as an “incubator” for start-up news organizations that want to use social networking and beat blogging technology.  Second, her classes are constructing a health site for the city of Columbia, Missouri. Rather than just looking for trendy health stories, the site will examine the major public health risks in Columbia and investigate the residents’ biggest health concerns, using all the media and interactive technology at their disposal to make the site creative and relevant.

Stevens is optimistic about the future of journalism.  She sees the Web as forcing us to be intimately involved with the people we serve, and that intimacy forces us to be public servants as much as creative artists.