07newsroom

Labor Day Look Ahead: Sparking Conversation

What does Labor Day  mean to your audience? In Pennsylvania, it means you don't have to pay for a fishing license:  Fish for free on Labor Day. In Cleveland, it means the Air Show.

Around the nation, as we approach this Labor Day (Monday, Sept. 5) columnists will point to stagnating wages for the average worker, as this Roanoke writer did in 2006: There's not much to celebrate on Labor Day - Roanoke.com http://bit.ly/qYKl3K

Ideas for prompts for your site, Facebook page and Twitter feed that will spur reader engagement (short url's included to make sharing easier):

*Ask for nominees for the oldest worker. Five years ago, a nonprofit identified what it said was the oldest worker in each state, including  Louise Carpenter, 91, in Pennsylvania - Philly.com http://bit.ly/pdPzcz

*Ask what bosses are doing for the day -- or what they should do for workers. Ernst & Young, with 140,000 employees around the globe, is giving its US workers an extra day off as a Labor Day celebration (in addition to the usual three-day break). The company announced this with a tweet: http://bit.ly/mQd7ZT

*Are gas prices leading families to alter plans for a road trip? Gas prices are up over a year ago but down about 3% in the last month: Daily Fuel Gauge Report--national, state and local average prices from the AAA http://bit.ly/mXfFZj

*History: do readers know what worker conditions were like 120 years ago, when the holiday started?Federal Department of Labor has this history of the holiday: The History of Labor Day http://1.usa.gov/qLMohg

Ask workers if they or their families are better off, the same, or worse than they were five years ago.Is there a family in your area with three generations of union members? Four generations? Five?

*Politics of Labor Day range from national (Obama To Attend Labor Day Festivities In Detroit http://cbsloc.al/oFD5Qa) to very local. In Wasau, WI, the fight is over a move by parade organizers to bar Republican office holders from marching in the town's parade. The mayor threatened to withhold city funds and now Republicans are invited, too | Wausau Daily Herald |  http://bit.ly/pivh9K

Is there a parade in your area: ask readers if they plan to march or attend the parade? Do they have a favorite part of the celebration?

What works for you? How have you sparked a conversation with readers about Labor Day?

Shining A Light On Government

Anthony Dixon grew up in Montclair, N.J., the town where my wife and I raised our children. Anthony later joined the military and was in a transport vehicle in Iraq when a roadside bomb exploded. Shrapnel pierced the floorboards, killing the 20-year-old soldier. When I was deputy managing editor for news at the Philadelphia Inquirer, we published an investigation showing that too little armor protected military vehicles in those years. Our reporters tracked down proof that steel companies in Pennsylvania and vehicle assembly lines in Ohio operated as directed by the military on a normal schedule, with weekends off, even while Pentagon officials were saying they were doing everything they could to safeguard the troops.

One order from Washington, one more shift at the assembly plant, one more armored vehicle in Baghdad, and Anthony would be alive today. Lawmakers, families and military officials read our articles and changed policies. Today, troops in the field are better protected.

Nothing can bring about positive change more quickly than quality journalism. Journalism is also the sector of our economy undergoing the most profound disruption. While others may lament the uncertainty and the erosion of incumbent business models, the same technologies that have been so disruptive also provide new opportunities --  opportunities for more people than ever before to use more powerful tools to create and distribute quality journalism.

A friend and neighbor, Steve Engelberg, spoke recently about his work as managing editor of Pro Publica, the non-profit newsroom based in New York that produces powerful investigations that serve the public. Steve talked about the intense data crunching that produced Dollars for Docs, a single database that lists doctors who received a total of $258 million from drug companies promoting pharmaceutical sales. Is your doctor on the list? Now you can find out with one click. 

Steve noted a stark example of what happens when news organizations are not providing scrutiny. He discussed the case of city employees in Bell, Calif., who were each paid many hundreds of thousands of dollars a year in salaries. Eventually, two reporters at the Los Angeles Times, Jeff Gottlieb and Ruben Vives, uncovered the sky-high payments and a web of corruption in the town. No community newspaper revealed the story for the simple reason that there was no community newspaper in Bell.

Terry Francke, an open government consultant, described the long decline in his article, Why the Bell Scandal Happened and What Can Be Done:

These multi-community publications attempted to be the same watchdogs over local councils and school boards that their individual predecessors had been but were spread far more thin.

The former Industrial Post (last known as the Community News) went through several chain companies' hands until disappearing as even an independent name. And whatever close coverage of local news it had into the 1990s has been gone for the past decade.

Some newsrooms are taking an important step and developing ambitious goals for local coverage, with rollouts planned nationally by Patch and MainStreetConnect, state efforts from Oregon to Texas, and more focused efforts dotted across the nation, from Philadelphia to San Diego. 

Then there are the tools, new software that citizens can use to pinpoint problems in their own communities. Companies that offer such tools include CitySourced and SeeClickFix. Outside the United States, I Paid A Bribe is just one website that puts similar tools in the hands of people who want better government. President Obama praised that site during his trip to India this month. 

Even the most ordinary acts of government have an extraordinary impact on the lives of ordinary people. With the right vision and tools, journalists can continue to shine a light on these actions. One way to pay tribute to Anthony Dixon is to make sure that light shines brightly.

 

 

Do you like social networking? There is a job for you.

Forbes.com is looking for an Assistant Editor for a social networking project. Our audience and our contributors are C-suite executives around the globe, brought together through the CEO Network, Forbes.com’s “gated community” for chief executives.

The assistant editor will prompt discussion, cull the most incisive posts and comments, post timely and relevant questions; commission, write and edit commentaries, and use social networking tools to bring together the broadest possible audience of these top executives in a way that encourages them to contribute to and find value in this part of our site. You will be responsible for the day to day running of the Network and will be part of the Forbes.com newsroom, which reaches 20 million unique visitors a month. You will report to the editor of our Leadership channel.

Writing, editing and social networking skills required, as is a proven interest in the people who run companies and the issues facing them.

Send resume, cover letter and references to [email protected].

Pockets of hope

The people at the Citizen Media conference kicking off the ONA meeting in Toronto are from independent web sites and from start ups but also from big media companies. Jennifer Carroll at Gannett gets it. Rob Curley with WashingtonPost.com gets it. Steve Yelvington with Morris Communications gets it. Experiment, get a conversation going with the community, balance hot news with evergreen content, balance work by pros with work by amateurs, make the tech side highly functional. Test, teach, try something, evaluate, make it better. Hire tinkerers. Use Flickr. Aggregate. Make connections.

Raising a newsroom's digital IQ

I'm collecting some learning tools that have helped me. This video, The Machine is Us/ing Us, is a hit. Other suggestions welcome.

Stories as seeds of information

Journalism does not have to produce what we think of as stories. Using the same values and the same discipline, a newsroom can provide information in more granular form and the newsroom can produce it in a way that allows users to decide how much information on each topic they want. It can be done as a social media, using a system that encourages readers to add to the conversation. Those are some of the assumptions Hop Studios started with when they built an experiment --- Flickring the News. It's a proposal for a news site built for sharing, not telling. A key passage from the proposall:   "Users should be able to annotate stories by highlighting and linking from relevant passages, as well as by commenting on them as a whole. This functionality challenges the idea of the news story as a finished product, frozen in time. We see stories instead as seeds of information planted in a knowing community." The Hop Studios comment board is open.

From Iceland to Boston

     A publisher from Iceland is starting a free newspaper in Boston with a heavy dose of user-generated content. Writers can sign up for blogs, photographers can sign up on a designated photo-sharing service, people who shoot video will be invited to contribute, too. If it follows the plans being discussed so far, all this will bubble up from the cyber world and the editors of the print publication will harvest the best stuff each day for the fiber product. A Google news search turns up nothing, but a blog search turns up many postings. For example, the top managers are running a blogspot blog about the project, where this post says (in part): "BostonNOW wants to encourage active participation in our online and print community, so interested contributors will only need to follow a few steps to be considered for the print publication. As soon as the BostonNOW website (bostonnow.com) goes live (scheduled for Monday, April 16; the day before our first paper is published), you would create a BostonNOW account."

Are they testing a new Nokia camera phone? This post shows the view from the BostonNow office.

Steve Garfield at Off On A Tangent blogs about a meetup: "I went to a meeting tonight about the new free paper that's launching in Boston soon called BostonNow. In this picture, Editor-in-Chief John Wilpers is talking to bloggers about how they can contribute to the paper. We had a far ranging discussion with lots of ideas shared from everyone."

Newspaper Innovation has some details: "The paper is financed by Icelandic media company Dagsbrun. Russel Pergament, former publisher of the Boston Metro and Am New York is running the operation. He is also CEO of the American branch of Dagsbrun, called 365 Media USA, which has plans for free dailies in other US cities as well. Chief editor is John Wilpers (Washington Examiner, Boston Globe, the Boston Herald and Boston Metro). Wilpers to PBS: “I was the editor that took it [Boston Metro] from about 150,000 readers to 500,000″."

Studying donations for casino links

If state authorities in Pennsylvania are not analyzing campaign contributions looking for links to casino interests, could news organizations help citizens do the work?

Congressional Spouse project

Sunlight Foundation project posts Congressional data and asks citizens in each of the 435 districts to provide some analysis.

More on the Examiner Project

Insights into how The Examiner uses citizen assistance on computer-assisted projects.