Getting it online, through a FOIA request, or from a university employee will simplify your document  searches, especially if you’re filing FOIA requests. For example, take a look at the University of Missouri’s record retention policy. It has an alphabetical list of every file the university produces, as well as which ones are considered confidential. Knowing the name of the document you’re looking will mean more accurate requests and interviews with sources, and it can give you ideas for stories too.

Come to think of it, this should be standard practice when covering any institution.

The BBC has created a series of global journalism training sites as part of the launch of its Virtual College of Journalism, scheduled for six weeks time…The sites will give public access to BBC training resources and guides. The main BBC College of Journalism site (expected to launch at www.bbc.co.uk/journalism) will feature 250 films, 2,500 pages of articles and a range of self-testing services.

How can we be expected to wait six weeks for that? I’d recommend biding your time with Poynter’s News U.

No need for this with public documents

My tour of journalism books continues with William C. Gaines’s Investigative Journalism. Gaines is a more exciting writer than Ullman, the last author I read, and he wisely steers away from technology issues that will soon become outdated.

My favorite part of Investigative Journalism, though, is that it taught me about the 990 tax forms non-profits have to file. While journalists at public schools luxuriate in their open records requests, reporters at private schools don’t have many documents to go on if they want to see how their school operates.

Fortunately, many private schools are set up as non-profits and have to file 990s. They’re a great look into a school’s finances and find story leads.

Using Guidestar, a site that archives 990s, I found Georgetown’s forms. I’m chasing down some crazy things in them, but let’s see if I can pull the same trick at nearby Catholic University of America.

A search for “Catholic University of America” brings up a couple relevant organizations, including the Catholic University of America, the Catholic University of America Foundation, the Friends of the Catholic University of America Rowing Association, and the Concerned Alumni of Catholic University

While that last one sounds pretty interesting, the last two don’t have 990 forms. I’ll focus on the first one since it has the main university’s finances.

And it’s a gold mine! The most recent 990 provides me with a lot of things, including:

• The university’s total budget, including overall expenditures and investment gains, losses, and dividends.
• A list of the university’s highest paid non-board members (great for seeing which professors are worth more than you think, or finding a ghost payroller).
• A list of major university’s biggest contracts. If it’s with a government agency, an open records request could be filed on it. Alas, that doesn’t happen on this form.
• The amount the university spends on lobbying. While Catholic doesn’t spend anything on lobbying, Georgetown’s reported lobbying sent me to Open Secrets for more detailed lobbying disclosures.
• A list of board members, paid and unpaid. This includes the salaries of the university’s highest-ranking employees, like President David O’Connell ($283,333).
• A list of scholarships given out and how much money each one is worth.
• Budget items for tax-exempt functions like the university press, and how much is spent on each.

So! Students at private universities have a little paper trail to follow after all.

• Journalism (especially the newspaper kind) operated on unrepeatable profit margins.
• That situation can never happen again because of the internet.
• Ads will mostly come back, but they’ll continue migrating online. Legal ads and real estate will follow.
• None of the new business models will be as successful as the pre-internet one, although they will be able to support many organizations.
• The worst of the recession will be over in a year or two (otherwise–who knows what’ll happen to anything?).

All these changes will combine to make the journalism job market a lot more competitive, but some jobs will still exist. It’s just that primarily-online organizations will have far smaller profit margins. They’ll need to hire a reporter who can do the work that five used to do–in other words, pretty much newspapers the year before the recession.

I was trying to find an analogy in the past, and I think any situation where technological efficiency eliminated some but not all positions in a line of work is an appropriate comparison. To stick with newspapers, think about newsies. There used to be lots of them on street corners, hawking the daily paper. But the invention of the car meant newspapers could be delivered far faster with a fraction of the previous delivery team.

Some newsies (or their occupational descendents) stayed in the newspaper delivery business, but there were fewer openings for those who wanted to deliver papers. Some doubtless starved, some migrated to the newsie-equivalent of PR (milk delivery?), and some managed to hang onto transformed jobs.

The questions every Politico reporter is supposed to be considering about their story:

a) Would this be a “most e-mailed” story?

b) Would I read this story if I hadn’t written it?

c) Would my mother read this story?

d) Will a blogger be inspired to post on this story?

e) Might an investor buy or sell a stock based on this story?

f) Would a specialist learn something from this story?

g) Will my competitors be forced to follow this?

There are two other parts of the full memo (PDF) that are worth considering. First is the Politico’s early publishing time–5 AM–intended to get on the morning meeting agenda of DC power brokers. Interesting because conventional wisdom is that ideal time to publish is around lunch or right after work to maximize traffic.

Second is the typical, incredibly important to get a story out as soon as possible: “Speed kills. Velocity - SPEED + POWER”. If there’s anything I learned in the shit, it’s that whatever you don’t cover the competition will do the day after you put it off. That’s a lesson I learned from Lee Abrams, but that’s a story for Friday.

I’m a sucker for internal media memos, as the best ones give away the recipes after you’ve eaten the cake. My favorite is this Gawker memo and anything by Lee. If you have any others, for my sake, leave them in the comments.

Via Romenesko

Bring your books because you’re gonna get schooled!

The best part about study abroad at the American University of Cairo is the awesome collection of journalism books in the library (that and, you know, culture or whatever). Georgetown doesn’t have many books about reporting, since we don’t have a journalism major. But AUC does, requiring two shelfs full of books, and I get to wallow in them.

So far, I’ve only read John Ullman’s Investigative Reporting: Advanced Methods and Techniques (out of print). His computer-assisted reporting stuff was enthusiastic but out-dated, but I appreciated his advice on interviewing.

Interviewing is always tricking for me because I’d much prefer to be dealing with documents. I don’t have to worry about looking nervous in front of them, and I don’t have to dress up to get information out of them. But Ullman’s tips have me itching for some interviews. Some of my favorite tips:

• A question: when interviewing someone hostile to the subject of your article, ask what the subject does well. If your interviewee is sympathetic to the subject, ask what they do poorly. That way you can gauge the interviewee’s objectivity and get a new angle on the subject.
• A pregnant pause: When an interviewee dodges a question, don’t move onto the next question immediately. Hopefully, they’ll be so uncomfortable in the pause that they’ll volunteer more information.
• A why?: Ullman says to keep asking why the interviewee did something. At least it’ll get away from yes-no questions.
• A controversy: Ask the interviewee how they react when other people complain about what they do (presumably, what you’re interviewing them about). That way, you don’t seem like the one bringing the issue to their attention.

While the computer-assisted reporting and database stuff is behind on technology, Ullman’s chapters about interviewing and using detective skills in investigations are worth your time. So pick up Investigative Reporting (published by St. Martin’s Press) if you see it in a library or used book store.

Oh f*ck

Terry Heaton posited that the internet means advertising will never achieve equilibrium. It pointed the way for where news sites need to start looking to stay solvent (hint: not display ads).

The most sobering part of Heaton’s post was the above chart. For a while, I have been hanging my hopes on the LA Times, where online revenues are now enough to fund all of editorial. If a massive organization like the Times can fund its content-production with online ads alone, then it makes sense to drop the print edition and smaller outfits can actually make it. But if Heaton’s chart is right (a big if), then sites need to find other, more reliable avenues for ads.

Fortunately, Heaton knows the segments of advertising that he thinks will keep growing: paid search, direct e-mail, and streaming audio and video. Fortunately, news sites can get involved in all of these:

• Streaming audio/video will be the easiest, as news sites are already producing video and podcasts. Some come with a specific newspaper flavor, and others are good enough to run on TV. The trouble here is finding a marketable topic for content and getting local advertisers used to buying online video or audio ads. The newspaper might have to create the ads themselves if they’re not working with savvy buyers.
• Direct e-mail is exciting too, and by direct e-mail I’m assuming Heaton means something cheerier than just spam. Idea: put premium stories behind a wall, but not a pay one. Instead, require users to make free accounts and accept cookies (like the Washington Post does). Get them to agree  to periodic e-mails from advertisers, and taylor those e-mails based on the cookie results. I don’t know how many of those e-mails would be deleted unread, but there’s got to be something there if this category is booming.
• Paid search is putting results at the top of a search , as opposed to Google Adwords search-sensitive display ads. Sites could run these on their archives, although it would be difficult to find enough advertisers to encompass even the most popular search terms, and sites would have to identify the paid links.

Whatever you think of Heaton’s predictions, there’s going to be a gold rush at the intersection between media and advertising, and I appreciate that Heaton is giving us pans. Still, wouldn’t it be so easy if display ads worked?

Using Publish2’s free system, individual websites can easily let users submit information about projects. Some might be whistleblowers – imagine a Citibank secretary who didn’t think the company should be buying a new jet – while others will simply have questions they think should be asked. Sites can also solicit success stories, tales of stimulus spending that’s working.

Reporters will be able to search a sophisticated database of all the reader submissions – for instance, zeroing in on a particular region, or a certain company, or an individual government department. The system will let them query their readers to solicit feedback and information on specific stimulus topics.

All this money needs a lot of eyes on it, and it’s good that Publish2 is on the case. I’m still a little confused about it, but I’m sure Karp and Co. will pull it out like it looks like they’re doing with Publish2.

Soon, you’ll be slinging information like this guy

Brian Murley at Innovation in College Media is trying to put together an informal list of online journalism ideas that could help improve a college paper’s website (or any news site, really).  They’re arranged in descending order of difficulty.

He hasn’t added resources for implementation yet, so I’m electing myself for crowdsourcing and doing it myself. Here are some tools to pull off each of Murley’s ideas (except for Second Life, because whoa). Some of the links here are shamelessly cribbed from Tools for News, and I combined “video” and “video story” since my links overlapped. I don’t have experience with all of these, so please leave your suggestions and experiences with them.

Hyperlinks

• This doesn’t require any special technology, since many content management systems have a button for creating links. If yours doesn’t, just use the HTML tag <a href=”url”>Link text</a>, where “url” is the web address and ‘link text’ is the text you want in the hyperlink.
• But how should a news organization use links? Liberally. Read Jeff Jarvis’s on the power of linking. It’s not about losing readers–it’s about giving them the news they want, whether you produced it or not, and doing what you’re best at.
• ICM’s Lauren Rabaino had a crafty idea for integrating links into articles–having reporters save all the links they use while researching a story, then sending that list to the people who put stories online.

Comments

• Many CMS’s like Wordpress come equipped with comments. If yours doesn’t, get them immediately with something like Disqus.
• Whatever you’re using, moderate your comments as lightly as possible. Sites that reject critical comments quickly lose the trust of their most active readers (the ones who probably had their comments deleted). Also make sure you respond to all comments–there’s nothing sadder than a comment thread ignored by the original poster.
  

Facebook Page

• A Facebook page is an easy way to get your paper some cheap buzz on Facebook newsfeeds or let loyal fans show their affiliation, but I haven’t found another compelling use for a Facebook page. Know one? Comments!
• Still, there’s no reason not to have one. Go to Facebook, click on applications, then Page Manager. From there you can create your page. Make sure to promote it on your site and your print edition, if you have one.
• It’s important to not just make a regular Facebook account for your site. That’ll keep it locked inside a network when you want everyone to be able to see it.

Twitter

• Twitter is the hottest thing in journalism right now, and it’s hard to understand why if you haven’t tried it (and maybe even after that). Essentially, Twitter allows you to get and receive 140 character messages from people on your computer or on your phone.

• But the service really comes into its own when you get off the site and start using a client that connects to Twitter, like Twirhl. Then you can go about your business while Twitter updates stream in, and respond to them without having to return to the Twitter site. Using a desktop client like Twirhl or Twitterific lets you use Twitter much more naturally, in the same way that you would IM or email, liberating you from site refreshing.
• Twitter can also be monitored for breaking news. For example, Benazir Bhutto’s assassination was discussed on Twitter, as are local traffic conditions.
• If you use Twitter, please don’t just use a plug-in to feed posts from your site into your Twitter feed. That’s what RSS is for. Twitter interesting articles from your publication, to be sure, but people come to Twitter for the human touch.
• More advice from journalists for journalists on how to use Twitter. If you’re in college media (or love those who are), here are some college papers on Twitter.

Forums

• This item and the two below it were suggested by photojournalist Joey Baker. Maybe he’ll chime in with more advice, because I don’t have any experience using forums for news. UPDATE: Indeed he did! See his comments on several of the items here.
• If you need to,  though, you have a couple options, installing one using PHP or on Wordpress.
• I think you’re better off just creating a social network on Ning.
  

Facebook Connect

• Facebook Connect allows users to sign in and comment on your blog using their Facebook accounts. To understand its feature, see the Facebook post about it.
• Mashable has a useful post on how to install Facebook Connect on your blog.
• I admit that I don’t have any experience using Facebook Connect–can someone in the comments suggest more resources or ways to use it?
  

“Share This” Links

• These are the buttons next to articles and blog posts that invite you to share the article on a myriad of social media sites or email them friends. I don’t know how much people actually use them, but they can’t hurt.
• On Wordpress, use the ShareThis plug-in.
  

Source Documents

• Source documents can be anything that was used in reporting a story–a press release, a pamplet, or document obtained through open records reqeusts. By putting them online, you earn readers’ trust, let them investigate the story themselves, and maybe let readers find things you missed the first time through.
• Documents that are in plain text, like emails, can just be posted that way. But if you are posting PDFs, you’ll need a way to embed them, like Scribd.
• If your source documents didn’t come electronically, you’ll need to use a scanner. If you’re not sure how, check out this BBC tutorial.
• If you’re hungry for documents of any sort, check out my post about easy Freedom of Information Act requests.

Audio

• With the internet, sound no longer has to be the domain of radio and television. You can record audio, edit it,  and post interviews or podcasts on your site.
• For audio editing, I recommend the free program Audacity.
  

Audio Slideshows

• Soundslides is the program of choice for this, although you can create similar products with much more effort in Flash or Final Cut. You’ll also need to know audio editing and photography to put together a quality one, but Soundslides is generally intuitive.
• For slideshows that are more interested in conveying bullet points than a general feeling, you can use Slideshare.
• If you want inspiration, see the Las Vegas Sun’s slideshows. If you want a plug, see mine on saving classified ads and Washington City Paper.
• Soundslides files require hosting space.  Learn how to get free hosting for them and how to turn them into embeddable files.

Photo Gallery

• Interactive photo galleries come in a variety of forms, but one of the easiest ways to implement one on your site is using this Flickr plug-in. It pulls selected Flickr photos and makes it easy for users to click between them without leaving your site.
• For an example of how this works, see these Georgetown basketball photos.
  

Video Story

• The internet and the availability of free internet hosting means presenting video stories on your site is easy, once you have a camera. For that, I recommend the small, relatively cheap Flip Mino, but you some digital cameras can shoot video too.
• Video editing gets tricky if you don’t have iMovie for free on the Mac. There aren’t many free video editors, but Videospin can do in a pinch.
• Now that you’ve put it together, you need hosting and an embeddable player, you can use old standby Youtube, challenger Vimeo, or a variety of other sites. Youtube videos are likely to get more views because of that site’s higher traffic, but Vimeo features a better (to my mind) embedded player and higher video resolutions.
• For sharp thinking and motivational talk about online video, read Michael Rosenblum’s blog. Rosenblum is a prime mover in the grab-a-camera-and-go school of video journalism, and that’s exactly what you need to be doing to get video on your site.
• Shooting online video is a whole new game in journalism, especially if you’ve never done video before. Get advice from the experts:  some British journalists, USA Today (PDF), the St Louis Post-Dispatch, and the BBC. For more video tutorials than you’ll ever need, check out my “video” tag on Delicious.

Calculator

• A calculator can be used to illustrate the personal effect in a story involving numbers. For example, Barack Obama’s campaign used a calculator to show voters how Obama’s tax plan would affect their taxes, while the Las Vegas Sun created a flight delay calculator (via Mindy McAdams).
• I’m having difficulty finding a calculator solution that doesn’t require some coding knowledge (some help, commenters?). Until then, here’s one you can make in PHP if you know it.
  

Timeline

• An interactive timeline can help readers understand an article with interlinked events. There are several embeddable options, including xTimeline and circaVie.
  

Map

• The easiest map to use maps in journalism, Google Maps, offers ways to create maps both for the tech illiterate and programming wizards. For the former, you can just go into Maps (while signed into your Google account) and make a custom map. From there, just grab the premade embed code and embed it on your site. For an example of this kind of map, see this map plotting a criminal’s spree in one neighborhood.
• If you know Javascript, you can use the Google API to set up something more advanced. Google Maps mash-ups are everywhere–see Yelp and 50 Things to Do With Google Maps Mash-Ups.

Liveblog

• Liveblogging is posting rapid blog posts, often with minutes of one another, commenting and covering an event while it happens. Some liveblogs just use updated posts, but services like CoverItLive create embedded environments where users and creators can interact during the event.
• The kind you want to use it up to you. If it’s an intense event where getting news out quickly is important and where there won’t be enough time to gather readers, you might want to just keep updating a post manually.
• For examples of both ways of liveblogging, see this Georgetown press conference and the GW Patriot’s student government liveblog.
  

Livestream

• Livestreaming streams video and sound instead of text while an event happens. Sites like Qik, Justin.tv, and UStream support streaming from  video and internet-equipped phones.
• Livestreams can also be watched after the event is over, making them an easy way to get video online permanently if you want to avoid the tedium of video editing.
  

Searchable Database

• If you can get a lot of data, you can make a database out of it. The trick is having the coding chops to put it together. To learn how to build a searchable database, you could learn Django or Drupal, two open-source programming languages.
• For some inspiration to hold you through late night coding, see Huffington Post’s Fundrace (Google Maps mash-up with campaign donation data) or some examples at Django Journalism.
  

Interactive Panorama

• I think Murley is talking about stitching together multiple photos so the user can get a 360 degree (or close) view of a place. Here’s Edinburgh Castle, and others.
• To create a panorama, just take regular photos while rotating in one place. Then stitch them together using a photo stitcher, like the freeware Clevr.
• Much of the panorama work on the internet is more from a tourist-sightseeing point of view, and might initially seem hard to apply to journalism. But once you start thinking of possibilities–from inside a large protest, on the court or in the crowd at a raucous basketball game–you can’t stop.

Interactive Game

• This is a tricky one, because it’ll almost definitely require programming skills. To get started with Flash programming, see Kongregate’s tutorials. They only teach you how to create a sidescrolling shooter, but it’s a start.
• For ideas on how games can be used in journalism, there’s this Online Journalism Review interview with the Gotham Gazette, a site that has created several games, including one about planning the rebuilding of the World Trade Center site.
  

Video Comments

• Once you’re used to being calling your work shoddy in text, have them say it to your face with video comments. The application of choice for this (for now) is Seesmic.
• There are Wordpress and Movable Type plug-ins available for Seesmic.
  

Second Life Presentation

• Murley rightly placed this in the most difficult slot, as it requires at worst experience with 3-D graphics coding and at best familiarity with a massive online world. I’m not sure it’s worth thinking about, unless you work on a campus or in a community filled with Second Life obsessives.
• But in case you do need to be in Second Life, check out Tips for Establishing a Presence in Second Life and Learning How to Build in SL.
  

If you insist on going the online game route, why not build an outpost in World of Warcraft instead? Judging from my friends, it’s a far easier place to reach college students. Thanks to Brian for inspiring this post.

I want someone to tell me I will be unemployed if I stay in journalism.

I don’t want to hear anyone else straddling the fence and saying, “No one knows what it’ll be like in the future.” I don’t want to hear optimistic but out-of-touch voices saying, “The industry will come around.” I don’t want to hear any more sarcastic, ungenuine comments like, “You’re screwed. Get out while you can.”

I’m sympathetic, although NYU Local, not Chang’s Washington Square News, is my preferred source for NYU news. I’m practically in Chang’s position, like thousands of other aspiring journalists. I’m hearing from papers that they’ve stopped offering paid internships, but if I like working for free I’m more than welcome. The others say to check back in a few years, ignorant (or pretending to be) of the structural changes that are going to decimate papers, recession or no.

It is frustrating. It’s frustrating that the only young people who get to practice journalism this summer are people with connections and money, or the very hardest-working and luckiest (well, that’s not so bad). But that’s no excuse for Alvin’s self-obsession:

It’s unfair to tell [students] that soon, the industry will turn around. [Recruiters] don’t know that. And they don’t know what the turnaround will look like — they don’t know whether that means we’ll have jobs.

They don’t know if we’ll ever get to do what we love.

Even if the industry turns around by 2010, what are we supposed to do for the next year? Live with our parents? Some publications tell us to keep in touch with them in case they are hiring in the future. But when will that be? At their convenience?

…..

Perhaps we’ll return to journalism one day when they let us in the door to the thing we love. But, at least for me, I can’t promise I’ll feel the same love the second time around.

It’s like he hasn’t heard there’s a recession on. General Motors fired 47,000 people today, and people who wanted to be bankers are even more screwed than aspiring journalists. And it’s not like the journalists Chang thinks pulled up the drawbridge after them have any job security. He wants a guaranteed job when even people with decades more experience don’t have that.

The whole situation sucks, especially if you were foolish enough to major in journalism. It’s worth cursing and crying about in private–I know I am.

But whining about it in public when people with families to support and mortgages to pay off are losing their jobs without the benefit of an NYU degree to fall back on–that’s just tacky.

For more on journalism’s martyrdom complex, Jack Shafer.

Hat tip to @10000words