Life in the Newsroom: October 2005 Archives

Today is Halloween. The weather started out sorta gray and dismal, but now it looks like the trick-or-treaters will be able to go outside without getting soaked.

Halloween is such a fun holiday. I saw on Fox news this morning that more candy is sold on Halloween than on any other holiday including Valentines' Day and Easter. KUJH produced several Halloween-related stories today, and we were able to snag some cute video of the little kids trick-or-treating in Allen Fieldhouse.

There are always some people who really get into Halloween. Roger Martin happens to be one of those people. He was "in character" and right-on with his original costume... but tell me, does anyone know who or what he is supposed to be?

This summer when I worked for Mcgraw Millhaven at KTRS radio, we tried a few different things to make his Web site more appealing, which he plugged shamelessly on the show. After a balking on putting up regular podcasts and a failed attempt at a daily blog, I had become pretty familiar with site. But one thing always confused me. If his site sucked so much - and it does - why the hell is he still supporting and plugging it? Of course, in the back of my mind, I knew the answer.

Money.

Before the show one day, he showed me an earnings history that Google had sent him for using AdSense. He showed me a grid that literally counted how many clicks each of the ads that had placed on his site and how much he made from each one. Initially, I was stunned by the amount of people that actually clicked on the ads. But then a sobering realization came to me: why McGraw was doing it. It wasn't that my humble boss was a money-hungry man. It was that while his intentions as a journalist and talk show host were usually pure, he does have bills to pay and the glitz and glamour of talk radio don't always pay that well.

From what I gathered on the grid, McGraw made something like 20 cents on every unique hit to one of the ads on his page. The ads were designed well, not too flashy, and he actually had the opportunity to semi-custom-choose them to match the look of his pages.

Later on, I did a little of my own research. Turns out that AdSense is the simplest, easiest, cheapest and most efficient way to generate ad revenue on a Web site. Hell, it's backed up by what is arguably the most intelligent and efficient company on the Web. The program is smart enough to understand what your pages contextually mean and match it with the most compatible advertisers in its database. Now that's innovative.

I know this may sound like a commercial for AdSense, but I've been sold on it for months. Craigslist is cool but it doesn't hold a candle to this. And who would expect it to? It's run by 18 people in an old house in San Fransisco. Not to mention, half the posts are from scammers and cheats.

A SWOT analysis of AdSense only yields one real weakness or threat if we were to try AdSense on the TV site. It looks cheap. It gives us the image that we are stooping to the common man's method of generating some cash for our "prestigious" news site. We're better than that, right?

Wrong. We're not making any money yet. That makes us look cheaper than anything.

I've never paid for any content on the Internet, and I never intend to. Maybe it's because I'm a poor college student. Maybe it's because I have come to expect everything on the Internet to be free, but the minute I see that something costs money, I hit the back button on my browser and search for someone who will give me what I want. Free of charge, of course.

From news, to clip art, to PowerPoint templates, we expect to be able to type in our search and have the world at our fingertips. Why we expect to have this sort of convenience at no charge is something I can't understand, but I know the feeling is real. So, when I discovered that some guy named Craig had created a Web site that offered free classified advertising, I wasn't really surprised.

Apparently this was a shock, or maybe just a punch-in-the-gut to newspapers everywhere. Newspapers across the country are commissioning researchers to study the effects of Craigslist. Many people are downplaying the effects of Craigslist, saying that it is primitive in design and behind the times, but that does not seem to diminish its effects. One comment on the Poynter Institute Web site said, "The question is, if Craigslist is so primitive (and I agree that it is somewhat), why do people flock to it? Why is it so successful that newspapers are commissioning studies on it? Something to ponder."

Indeed. With all of the free options available, why would anyone choose to pay for anything? Grey Garvin, another contributor to the Poynter comment site seems to suggest that it's more than just the fact that it's free.

"Craig's list readers are cool...they have the same values...you feel like you're among friends on Craig's List," Garvin wrote. "A newspaper...why anyone could be there."

Maybe it has nothing to do with the cost. Maybe it has more to do with being different or being a trendsetter. The New York Times recently carved itself out as a trendsetter when it launched its TimesSelect subscription package. The new idea is to continue to offer the daily paper for free, but charge for the archives and the coveted New York Times Editorials.

What else are papers supposed to do? With Web sites like Craigslist taking away the last big revenue source available, the NYT had no choice. Steve Outing of Editor & Publisher put it well when he said, "As more readers -- especially younger people -- shift their reading habits to the Internet and move away from print, the digital side must bear more of the weight in paying the costs of the Times' journalism."

The online section of the Times is going to have to pull a lot more weight than it is now. According to the State of the News Media 2004 Annual Report on American Journalism said that the online portion of the Times only accounted for 1.7 percent of the total revenue. It looks as though they have a lot of catching up to do. Maybe TimesSelect will help that cause. Either way, I think we can expect to see more models like this popping up as newspapers try figure out how to survive in an online world.

Source: State of the News Media 2004

My boyfriend interned at a small town newspaper this summer. He called me more than once complaining of how the newspaper allowed their advertisers to dictate the news by doing things like refusing to run a news photo with a business in the background that didn't advertise with the paper. He couldn't believe that journalists, even in a small town, would let the green of advertising revenue shade their views of the news.

It is pounded into our heads from the beginning of our time in the journalism school. The chasm between the news side and business side of any media outlet exists for a reason. There is an ever-present danger of generating revenue at the price of sacrificing the integrity of the news and how it is reported.

When I read through Google's introduction to AdSense the thing that struck me was that with the service there is no need to maintain advertiser relationships. Google acts as a middleman. To me this seems like a gigantic benefit for news media websites. For one thing, you can have customized ads to fit the content of you site and thereby generate more revenue. But more importantly, with Google acting as a buffer between advertisers and news organizations, reporters don't have to deal with pressure to censor or alter the content of their news stories either from those on the outside (advertisers) or from people within their own news organizations whose job it is to maintain those advertising relationships.

Last week, Craigslist reprimanded Internet company Oodle, a vertical search engine for online classifieds, for using its ads on a web site and only linking from the ads to Craigslist. This process is called "scraping." Of course, with this call Craig upset Oodle, especially because he still lets other sites use his material in a similar way. But for how long? Is Craig, after all, not a selfless Web hippie, but just a hippiecrite?

Despite, or maybe because of, its growing success, Craigslist seems to refuse being used commercially. Professor John Lavine from Northwestern University said that in only three markets Craigslist charged for ads. He added that the mysterious Craig was a normal, nice, somewhat geeky guy. Well, did you really expect anything else? But Craig's recent, somewhat mysterious, actions against Oodle may point in another direction.

Craigslist's appeal and Web cred lie in its simplicity. The site seems cheap and not to be looking for great profits. From the company structure and the cheap site, it becomes very obvious that Craigslist certainly doesn't have the best revenue model. It's clever, but under its current conditions it could never create gigantic profits because it is not designed that way.

During my research I looked at Google AdSense for the first time. Now that seems more promising. I mean, how can you go wrong when you combine online advertising with the best search engine out there? It's almost scary how intelligent a silly-named Internet tool can be. And according to Brian, AdSense works damn well.

And then I found out about Housingmaps, a blend of GoogleMaps and Craigslist. With one click on a map users can find houses, apartments and rooms in their preferred areas. Housingmaps still lacks elaborateness, but once it really gets going, I am not sure what all it will be able to do. Maybe we will be able to not only find a place, but look at its inside, our potential neighbors, crime stats in the area and the likelihood of good dates in the area. Exciting, isn't it?

I don't think the question should be who has the best revenue model. AdSense and Craigslist, as well as Housingmaps or Oodle, function very differently and follow different missions. While I hope that Craig remains the cyberspace philanthropist, Google just seems to be once again so far ahead of the curve that I won't try to speculate what their next genius, huge-revenue creating, idea will be.

Last week, Al Gore spoke at the We Media conference in New York about the state of the mass media. In his speech, Gore promoted not only his TV station, Current TV. He also said that marketplace was in grave danger, and with it American democracy. The reason, he said, was the still-no.1 medium in the U.S.: Television. Instead of enhancing political discourse, Gore said, television disables it because television "is accessible in only one direction; there is no true interactivity, and certainly no conversation."

Gore went on to say that the real purpose of television was the advertising of products. Viewer-created content played no role in the broadcasting world, although it is the foundation of individually satisfying media consumption.

Gore has got a point there. Clearly, there still are mass media left; the biggest being television. But the problem is: Television networks are owned by huge media conglomerates, and the hurdles individuals have to take to get their faces and opinions on the screen are basically insurmountable. The days of public discourse in the mass medium television are over. If they ever existed in the first place. With 4 hours and 28 minutes per day (according to a study Gore cites), television is still by far the most frequently used medium in America.

The Internet could be the way out of this critical situation. It is interactive and gives (almost) all users the same possibility of obtaining information and expressing their ideas. The significantly bigger impact of the Internet during the last presidential election -€“ compared to the one in 2000 -€“ indicates a positive change. Media consumers are now turning toward a medium that satisfies their diverse individual needs instead of delivering the same generic newscast to everyone.

Despite the widespread nervousness about the increasing influence of the Internet, I hope that 10 years from now the Internet, not TV, will be our most prevalent mass medium. If we use its capacities responsibly, the Web could help us to revive the open marketplace of ideas.

Oh, Facebook. Why are you so compelling? Yes, even I, your friendly neighborhood "Irish pirate" curmudgeon, have fallen prey to the charms of the Facebook. I know, I know. But there is much to be said for this networking tool, most of which has already been said.

My current Facebook photo

I have found old friends lost long ago due to cross-country moves and new friends that have added me to their list after only one meeting. It is truly fascinating to sift through the social networks of my friends and acquaintances, playing a personalized version of six degrees of Kevin Bacon. Facebook provides your degrees of separation automatically.

Old friends and new

While this seems like tons of fun, I do think there are dangers to be found in this form of social networking. I think it is idiotic to post your cell phone number on any website, yet many do just that on Facebook, Friendster, etc. The danger most apparent in Facebook, though not unique to Facebook, is stalking.

Many people on Facebook list their class schedules. This is a powerful tool for getting to know other people in your classes and can prove very helpful with missed classes, homework and the like. But it also tells the weirdos out there exactly where you will be at a certain time. Not the most appealing thought.

Keeping this in mind, I think it is unavoidable that such networks will continue to grow. We have all "googled" our friends, both near and far. But unless that friend has a web presence or celebrity status of some sort, they are not likely to be found on google. Facebook fills this void in the social networks of college students and staff. Friendster, et al., do the same for the rest of the world. MySpace has even launched some music careers.

People my age (I am 26) are just beyond the grasp of Facebook. The vast majority of my friends from my undergraduate studies are nowhere to be found on the Facebook. The ones that are there are now staff at other universities. Yes, this makes me feel old. My point is that my 16-year-old sister is an online maven, unlike my friends. She and her friends have run through their xanga phase and now eagerly await the high school version of Facebook.

Whether Facebook is the end-all, be-all of communities remains to be seen. It has the potential, through the "alumnus" option, to maintain itself as one of the elite communities. But I don't think it will take over the world, if for no other reason than the fact that it can only go forward, leaving most of us fogies in the dusty shelves of yearbooks past.

Today, we're pretty lucky with the avenues of connections and communications that are available to us. From phones to computers the world and everyone in it is at our fingertips, whether we like it or not. I will admit, I am really starting to enjoy it.

I came to Kansas to escape all that was my small private school and suburbia. I wanted nothing to do with the familiarity my friends were searching for. I wanted something new, something that no one else wanted. Now, I find myself searching for long lost friends and making those connections that I ran away from a little more than 3 years ago.

It's amazing how Facebook brought me a sense of nostalgia that I swore I'd never miss. I find myself browsing my friends and reminiscing about old times. It's difficult for me to sit at my desk and write on my laptop sometimes because Facebook seems to call my name. I've even had to take out my wireless card so that I'm not distracted Facebook is addicting.

Facebook brings a sense of freedom that some sites do not. I belong to the groups I want to belong to and I am friends with the people I want to be friends with, even if I have no idea who the heck they are. According to Facebook, I am friends with Baby Jay, Kirk Hinrich and Beer. Who knew that Beer could make its own Facebook profile, amazing for a domestic brew. Check it out and Facebook me!

Along the lines of Facebook, I've recently fallen victim to podcasts. I discovered podcasts this summer and podcasting is crazy. Apple allows me to listen to anything I want, at anytime. Don't they know that is dangerous? How's a girl supposed to get anything accomplished with this luxury around?

For me, these podcasts are dangerous this time of year. It's baseball season, and the Cardinals are in the playoffs. I've listened to almost every ESPN Radio Daily episode that mentions my home team, and I know there will be plenty more.

Just like Facebook, the podcasts allow me to choose and express my personality. One day I'm listening to country, the next it's sports. Finally I will admit that, yes, I did listen to a podcast with the Spice Girls. Who knows? Maybe one day we'll be listening to my blog, as we all know I'm better at speaking my mind than writing what's on it.

It's risky that I can decide what I want to listen to and when, but it's also invigorating. Sometimes the radio just doesn't do it and sometimes the news is overwhelming. It's nice that I can decide what my podcast of the moment is and it's nice that I can join a Facebook group that shows what interests me.

For me, to make the choice of what I want to listen to and when enables me to search out the news of the world and see more viewpoints than ever before. Without the podcasts I listen to, I may have thought that the College Soccer Championships coming to St. Louis was a rumor my dad made up. Without the Facebook group, Cardinals Fans, I wouldn't have a venue to show my redbird spirit in the land of the Royals.

I can't hold out any longer, the temptation has become too strong, on go the Ipod headphones and off I go to the world of Facebook.

"My name is Jesse Newell, and I've been a Facebook-aholic for over a year now."

I still remember when the sports editor at the Kansan first asked if I had the Facebook. I said no.

She became friend No. 1.

I still remember what she said to me that day: "You tell yourself that you won't like it, but it will become an addiciton. I promise."

And of course I didn't believe her. I had to believe I had more self-restraint than that. It really wasn't that cool anyways. Why all the fuss for some strange online directory?

Two-hundred fifty friends later, I know why.

I never thought it would happen to me. I guess it happens with us all.

We think of ourselves as independent -- as an individuals that won't jump at the latest trend or the newest technology. For about two years in high school there, I had truly convinced myself that I didn't need a cell phone like everyone else.

Then, eventually, the new gadgets or devices are something give in to. And never, ever get out of.

I am officially a Facebookie, checking the site around five times per day.

Excessive, yes. Out of the ordinary for a college kid like me: not really. According to a Wired news article, more than 60 percent of the 2.8 million people on Facebook.com log on at least once daily.

How has this changed my generation? The simple answer is that we are never letting go of the technology -- or each other.

I am truly amazed what percentage of people talk on their cell phones on the way to class. It's somewhat disturbing. It makes me long for the days when people did not need entertainment on their 3-minute breaks between English and Biology 101.

But then again, I 'm just as bad as anyone. I'm now a multi-tasker like everyone else, checking scores while talking on instant messenger while checking friends on Facebook while missing out on listening to the Royals on the radio that I was quite content with for the first 14 years of my life.

My facebook profile is not reflecting my personal self any more -- it is becoming my personal self.

And while gaining so much with technology, it feels like all of us are losing a part of ourselves.

We are increasingly living in interconnected worlds. We get a lot of our news from Facebook and cell phones and not from TV news stations and newspapers.

Everything is changing. Everyone is connected.

And all of us are guilty, though back at friend No. 1 I never would have believed it.

Remember what the year 2005 was supposed to be like when we were kids? Your childhood view may have varied from mine depending on age, but I definitely remember watching Back to the Future part 2 and eagerly anticipating the day that I could ride my hover board to school and drive a flying, time-traveling car. Unfortunately I'm STILL eagerly anticipating that day. It turns out that humans are not so great at predicting the future. Enter the REAL 2005, where we journalism students are apparently 100% sure that mass media has one foot in the grave. Soon, we say, every individiual will receive customized content thanks to the internet, marking the demise of mass media as we know it. My response: malarky (hogwash, if you will).

How different is the news overall today than it was twenty years ago? I personally prefer to gather my news online, but I seem to be in the minority. An annual report on American journalism called "The State of the News Media 2004" revealed that newspaper readership is declining, but certainly not in dramatic fashion. And a recent study released by Ball State University shows that television viewership is at an all-time high. However, network television news ratings are dropping. Network viewership is down in both rating points and share thanks to substantially more channels to choose from than ever before (more than 100 on average).

This graph, based on statistics from the Ball State study, shows computer usage is quite high, with Americans spending more time on the computer than anything but television. However, Howard I. Finberg points out that 18 to 24 year-olds have some of the lowest numbers for computer usage in his article "Our Complex Media Day". This leads me to believe that the generation most likely to push for a change aren't even spending as much time on the computer as older people who tend to get their news from more traditional media. Don't be get too excited while anticipating a big change in news presentation. I'd expect to see a flying car before I see a huge change in mass media.

James Brady, Executive Editor of the washingtonpost.com was the keynote speaker at the Media Convergence conference at BYU this week. I thoroughly enjoyed his presentation, which reaffirmed a lot of what we are doing and what I believe is the future.

For example, Mr. Brady talked about "content orbiting" the washingtonpost.com's policy about linking to related content from multimedia. It's about creating links between content for the reader. This is good for two reasons, that I can think of. One, it provides a context and historical reference for news and information. Two, it keeps the reader on your site.

Another bit of insight from Mr. Brady...Here's what you need to know, future online journalists. You do need technical skills. You need to know how to edit audio/video, how to create maps and other interactive pieces in Flash... and understand the meaning of deadlines. Brady said that he makes an effort to hire developers who are journalists, and journalists first, because trained journalists understand the business and the meaning of time. Forget the software development life cycle, this is news, and news churns out by the minute. That means, if there is a database to be queried, and an interactive map to be created it needed to be done yesterday. Welcome to the biz.

Our presentation went off without a hitch, or so I think. Listen to Blogs - not just for blogging, technically speaking (mp3) and see for yourself. We also put our paper online.

Conference tidbits:

George Daniels, University of Alabama, talked to us about the ongoing struggles between broadcast and print. He said there are jobs now for content producers, people who don't report but instead think laterally and across a variety of media. I couldn't agree with George more.

Tony DeMars, Sam Houston State University, talked about computer-assisted reporting. Reaching citizen journalists, using databases to make connections, organizing and analyzing information from blogs and podcasts. Shouldn't this be part of the reporting process for today's multimedia journalists? DeMars thinks CAR classes can be part of a convergence curriculum. I agree. Let's do it. Think of all the interesting and relevant story ideas could come from these "alternative" sources. For example, the Future of mp3 Players III:Pez?.

Janet Kolodzy, Emerson College, told us not to forget the audience. She said, it's not pandering, it's reaching people with stories so they can improve their lives. Convergence is a strategy to do that. Not the only strategy, but one strategy. Her definition of convergence is using all media to their fullest potential to reach diverse and diffused audiences.

Some excellent examples of "random acts of journalism" (a phrase coined by one of Kolodzy's collegues)

• H20town documents Town Hall Meetings
• Backfence provides an outlet for citizen journalism
• News-Record.com Town Square
• Kids news from the BBC

Unfortunately, this conference has now made me obsessed with metadata and video files. Like I need something else to research. Metadata, I love that word. I am such a geek. But seriously, journalists are supposed to be master communicators. They should be able to categorize data and accurately and meaninfully label it. It's important not only when producing content, but also when you are searching and researching a story. This will only become more important in the information saturated world we are building.

I could go on and on about the things I learned at this conference. Instead, I urge you to listen to the conference podcasts and visit the conference blog.

In my profession as a sports writer, often you have to become a jack-of-all-trades, master of all.

For the Lawrence Journal-World, I often cover five different sporting events in a week. My bosses ask me to be a miracle-worker when one day I'm an expert at tennis and the next I'm expected to be a guru at cross country.

But this past weekend was unlike any other for me. It was then that they sent me to cover NASCAR in Kansas City.

Now I must start out by saying that NASCAR is an overwhelmingly popular sport. It is currently second only to football in terms of overall TV ratings.

Problem is, I knew nothing -- absolutely nothing -- about it.

After learning the ropes quickly -- like you must do in this position -- I was writing a story after Saturday's race. After reading through it, I stood extremely proud of myself.

"That is one fine NASCAR story," I said, complimenting myself on sounding somewhat competent in a sport (Can we call it a competition? What do they really do athletically?) I knew nothing about.

But then I stopped the gloating when reality hit me. How could I know a good NASCAR story from a bad one? I thought of the 100,000 crazy race fans in front of me and was suddenly almost certain that all of them could read my story and "just tell" that I was a novice because of the way it was written. They probably knew to get their information from a quality source such as nascar.com already.

That's the way my job goes, Sometimes as a "sports" writer, I am sent to cover events, like NASCAR, that I don't even consider sports.

But because I work for a newspaper, one that is more of a mass medium and covers everything, I am expected to do this as part of my job.

I'm not so sure it will be that way in the future.

As people become more specialized with their news content, choosing it on the Internet instead of filtering to find it in a newspaper, beats will also become increasingly specialized to meet knowledgeable readers' increasing demands.

Reporters who haven't covered NASCAR won't be asked to do it. That'll be reserved for the NASCAR "expert" writers, because so many of the readers on nascar.com will expect good, informative, well-focused stories.

And that's where we're headed. Do I like it? It sounds good at first. Seems like I won't have to step out of my comfort zone in the future.

Then again, there is something to be said about accomplishing what you never could, experiencing what you never have, and going where you never would have otherwise.

As a whole, I did not enjoy NASCAR this weekend. But I learned. God, did I learn.

And sometimes, that's enough to make you want to keep experiencing new events -- at least every once in awhile.

We learn by trying. That's what much of this 694 class has been about.

But then, we accomplish by doing. That's what the weekend was for me.

After all, I still am a jack-of-all-trades. But now, I am a master of one more.

Anyone that follows my musings on this site is going to be aware of my penchant for dissent. So when I tell you that I think the mainstream media (MSM) is floundering as a group, it should come as no surprise. In fact, it is likely to arouse some (gasp) skepticism. There's no need to fear, the blogosphere is here to back me up.

Mark Glaser, writing for the Online Journalism Review at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Southern California, agrees that the MSM as a whole is a slumbering giant poised for rude awakening by the likes of Yahoo and Google. Yahoo scored a major success with the introduction of Kevin Sites as the anchor to its original content aspirations. Google is changing the rules with each of its innovations, including Google Video and the entangled Google Print.

Entanglements aside, these innovations in content and reporting bely the larger issue of the decline of the MSM. Americans are growing increasingly angry about the failures of the MSM to provide us with the truth of the world outside our borders. But this is a problem long in the works. Back in 2001, there were already murmurs about the lack of reality in news coverage coming out of the world's largest democracy.

Gallup polls conducted in the US in September 2004 found that 10 percent of adults felt "very confident" in the accuracy of the MSM's news stories. I am no statistician, but I know enough to tell you that such figures are not doing anything to slow the decline of the MSM. Remember, this is NEWS that we are talking about. You know, the reporting of facts to inform the public. How can you or I or your friendly neighborhood Québecois be expected to support a system that cannot be relied upon to provide simple facts? The short answer: we can't.

It's hard to believe, I know, but 62 percent of the American public never picks up a national newspaper. No New York Times. No USA Today. Nada. Zip. Zilch.

That's huge. More than half of the population never sees a national newspaper. What are these people doing? Where are these people getting their news? What are they reading?

They are reading local newspapers. According to a Gallup poll on media use conducted in December 2004, 44 percent of the American population read a local newspaper every day. Fourteen percent read it several times a week and 27 percent read it only occasionally. Only 15 percent never read a local paper.

Why are people so much more drawn to their local papers instead of national newspapers? Patrick Lafferty, a fellow graduate student, said the reason is simple. Local newspapers have coupons. While it is sometimes hard to tell when Patrick is being cynical and when he is being serious, I think that there is some truth to his statement. Coupons are a driving force in purchasing papers. I remember that every Sunday after church, my mother would purchase the Sunday edition of the Great Bend Tribune and search through the coupon section before making her weekly trip to Dillon's.

I think that the idea of coupons can be expanded to uncover a broader theme. People want information that is relative to them. They want to know who got married, who got divorced, who died and who was pulled over for speeding. In my hometown paper, The Ellinwood Leader, the most read section of the paper was the "People We Know," a section that highlighted who was having a birthday, whose family was coming to town, who's grandchild won the spelling bee and much, much more.

The taste of national news acquired through the Associated Press is enough to sustain their need to know about what is going on in the outside world. This information is nicely supplemented by their local television news stations, which draw 51 percent of the population every day according to Gallup.

We talk a lot about how someday all of our news will be customized to our liking by way of the Internet. We will log onto the web and we will be inundated by stories that we are specifically altered to our liking. EPIC 2015 does a nice job of painting this picture for us. I say this is already happening with our local papers. They are the epitome of custom content, and obviously that is what people want. The numbers don't lie.

*Graphs were created using Gallup Poll data gathered in December 2004.

For all that's said about the decline of mass media, I find myself increasingly confused. Call me crazy, but I'd say this lazy, underachieving, under-educated America is relying more and more on the media each day. Al Gore - who I have always felt gets a bad rap for being a good guy - made one of the most provocative speeches I've ever read to the "We Media" conference last week. I swear, he must have a new speechwriter, or something, because where the hell was this fight-picking language six years ago?

In the speech, Gore speaks to the sorry state of media use in America. He conjures up images of the Founding Fathers and what they foresaw as the role of media, in which a central theme is the free exchange and marketplace of ideas. But he pulls out a statistic that is quite shocking. Americans watch TV an average of 4 hours and 28 minutes a day - 90 minutes more a day than the world average. And, he claims that the broadcast industry is the least accessible medium to the viewer, meaning they have the no way of feeding back to, or interacting with, TV.

Gore thinks - and I agree wholeheartedly - this is very dangerous. To quote him, "So, unlike the marketplace of ideas that emerged in the wake of the printing press, there is virtually no exchange of ideas at all in television's domain...It is the destruction of that marketplace of ideas that accounts for the "strangeness" that now continually haunts our efforts to reason together about the choices we must make as a nation."

Ahh, but this is a class about online journalism. What about the internet? Well, why not ask the man who invented it himself?

Gore: "The internet is a formidable new medium of communication, but it is important to note that it still doesn't hold a candle to television. Indeed, studies show that the majority of Internet users are actually simultaneously watching television while they are online. There is an important reason why television maintains such a hold on its viewers in a way that the internet does not..."

Interesting. And true. I can't say with a straight face that I don't have CNN or ESPN on the tube, in my line of sight, as I'm cruising my favorite blogs. To me, the internet is almost a supplement. Moving pictures are tantalizing. And I know I can get them online now, but they're especially nice when I don't have to find them with a mouse and keyboard.

So are there any mass media left? Are you kidding me? We watch four and a half hours of TV a day for starters. Sure we're not all watching the same thing as in the days of Walter Cronkite. (I mean, can you tell me who CBS' lead anchor is now at 5:30?)

Granted, what we're watching may be worse than it used to be. But we're still watching.

The answer of why newspaper readership is on the decline was evidenced in Lawrence last Friday. The fire at the 500 block of Fireside Rd. at Broadway Apartments left the 76-unit complex destroyed. From a journalism point-of-view, it was easily the biggest news story of the day - arguably of the semester.

Mass media are still present in the form of print, magazines, TV and Web sites, but there's no doubt the latter is the most rapidly growing. Online media and newspapers are heading in opposite directions with respect to their users and their readers, respectively (link).

I heard about the fire when I woke up last Friday. The first thing I did was check the Kansan and KUJH-TV Web sites. I'm sitting here typing this on Saturday - the Kansan story is currently on its Web site. It has not appeared in a newspaper yet because the publication does not print on weekends.

Rylan Howe, Kansan photographer and fellow 694 producer, was at the scene of the fire. He was able to get this shot that went up on the Kansan's Web site.

Not only do online outlets get breaking news stories up faster than newspapers, but they are more convenient to the reader. Moreover, they have unlimited space to post more pictures and fewer words. Poynter's Monica L. Moses said 90 percent of readers enter pages through large photos and artwork.

The fire, of course, is a localized example. The same is the case in world news though. Take the tragic London terrorist bombings this summer, for example. What if you were curious to view pictures to get the idea of the seriousness of the tragedy? Interested in getting up out of your chair and buying a newspaper? I could save you time right now and refer you to a BBC slideshow from the bombings in London.

Convergence is the future. It was rumored that Apple would come out with a video i-Pod as soon as this week. In the next year, a journalist could broadcast a newsworthy event, take his/her own photos and get video for the story all with one device.

Better yet, if it were a breaking news story, the journalist could snap extra photos and extra video for the Internet, and not have to wait out a night of production to get the information out -€“ talk about bringing a new meaning to the word "scooped."

Online -€“ it's timelier, more visual, has unlimited space and easy to access -€“ yes, mass media are changing.

As a kid, I would spend spring break with my grandmother in Belgern, a 3,000-person town in east central Germany. To occasionally call my mom, I had to go across the street and ask the neighbor whether I could use her phone. She was the only person with a phone on the block. We were living in the communist era, and having a phone was a privilege.

In those days, our world ended at the GDR border; our social networks were cut off by a wall that divided Berlin and made former neighbors citizens of different countries. In those days, my grandmother could not visit her brother, my parents their uncles and aunts in West Germany without month-, sometimes year-long waiting periods.

The day the Wall came down, Nov. 9, 1989, I was at home with my mom, listening to the radio. Guenther Schabowski, member of the Communist Politbüro, hastily replied to a journalist's question that with immediate effect GDR citizens could travel across the border without a visa. In complete disbelief, my mom burst into tears of joy and tried to reach my grandparents. Of course, she still had to call their neighbor.

Today, the world seems borderless. I live in a country that I once learned was our imperialist archenemy. I can get in touch with my family, 5,000 miles away, through a mouse click. I read political magazine from Germany while I listen to a Lawrence, Kan., radio station and watch the world's latest news, everything online.

More so than cell phones or instant messaging, the Internet has created countless platforms for people to obtain information and socially interact. One click on Friendster, Facebook or Myspace, reveals our digital social networks. Suddenly, I am second-degree friends with a broker in Malaysia, not the kid who lived two floors down in our concrete apartment building during communism, a home assigned to us by the state's administrative officials. Today, even people in my grandmother's small town, Belgern, can find their next date on the Web.

The specificity with which Internet users can find information and like-minded spirits has led to an extreme fragmentation of audiences and a connectivity that spans the whole digital universe. Digital media let us get and stay in touch regardless of space and time differences. They have helped us tailor our consumption habits to our personal needs. We can now choose more precisely than ever what it is we want to see and hear, and we can get most of those needs fulfilled instantly.

Leipzig, my hometown, was the birthplace of one of the most significant revolutions of the 20th century. It was in downtown Leipzig where every Monday tens of thousands of citizens peacefully protested, my parents among them. The Internet and its countless networking possibilities have bridged borders and brought people together, in a different way. Sure, there are downsides to unlimited information access; but for me, it is a 21st-century version of a peaceful revolution.

An article recently posted to PoynterOnline by Steve Outing delves into multiple layers of citizen journalism. After reading the article I found myself thinking about a variety of things. For the most part, I wondered if I would someday lose my job to some lucky, or unlucky, citizen with a cell phone camera, who happened to be two rows behind some terrorist bomber on a subway train. That's a little extreme, but it's what came to my mind first. As an editor, and I am one for the University Daily Kansan, I would have no problem using a citizen's photo of a newsworthy event if that was my only viable option, and if it wasn't a blurry piece of crap. But, I wouldn't publish someone's blurry, grainy photo over my own photojournalist's professional work.

I currently manage a staff of 10 staff photographers and seven backup photographers. To put that in perspective, there were only two full-time photographers, one part-timer, the photo editor and myself during my internship at The Hutchinson News this summer. If you haven't added that up yet, it's 17 versus 5. In Hutchinson, we all had an ample amount of work each day, but at the Kansan I struggle to find work for everyone on staff. So, do I really need citizen journalists to help me do my job? The short answer is no, absolutely not. A more complicated response would be to say my backup photographers function as citizen journalists, or citizen photojournalists, if you want to be more accurate.

I'll give you two examples to illustrate first the short, and then the more complicated response.

As editor last spring I encountered a random student who constantly asked me if I wanted to use a picture that he had taken outside his scholarship hall. Apparently, he thought his photo illustrated a story that we had previously ran about a homeless person living near a scholarship hall. Also, he apparently thought that a homeless person could fit inside a pipe that ran about one foot in diameter. Neither of his assumptions were accurate, yet he badgered me with emails and even stopped by the newsroom to ask me why I never used his photo. I was cordial with him, but in my mind I responded, "Because you took a snapshot of an exhaust pipe protruding from a brick wall and it in no way illustrated the story that we ran five days ago!"

This semester I had a transfer student come into my office and ask if I had any room for another photographer on staff. I told him no, but that I would love to include him when I could. He seemed really eager and I wanted him to feel comfortable enough to come back and apply for a position at the end of the semester. Shortly after, he started emailing me questions about covering the club hockey team. I told him to go for it and he came back with photos and a game story for the sports section! I'll tell you a secret. Before transferring, he was editor, photographer and designer for the paper at the junior college he attended. Citizen journalist indeed!

I guess my point is that, while I can see the benefits of citizen journalism and why it's a hot buzzword right now, I haven't seen any benefits in my personal experience, nor do I think the Kansan will in the near future. Unless you want to apply that label to J415 correspondents and backup photographers. Who was I kidding in that first paragraph? My job is nowhere near in jeopardy.

I love these kids.

At about 2 a.m. this morning, after last call at the bars, J694 class member Rylan Howe's phone rang. A friend told him that Boardwalk apartments, northeast of 6th Street and Kasold Drive, were on fire. Rylan lives in what we in the multimedia newsroom sometimes call the "convergence house." Rylan, photo editor for the University Daily Kansan, is roomates with KUJH-TV producer and sports director Adam Sechrist and KUJH sports anchor Jimmy Chavez. As luck -€” and the gods of journalism -€” would have it, multimedia newsroom coordinator Staci Wolfe was also hanging around their house at 1326 Massachusetts after a night out with the boys.

The 1326 Mass news team sprang into action.

Rylan cruised by the Kansan to pick up his still cameras and Adam grabbed a KUJH video camera. Then the whole multimedia newsroom gaggle rode toward the glow of flames in the sky. It was one hell of a fire; one that destroyed 76 apartments and sent dozens to the hospital. The news team hiked through back yards, shot some killer sound bites from eyewitnesses and had the story posted, with Rylan's slide show and a full text story, by about 5 a.m.

Meanwhile, journalism student David Heller was hanging out of his Boardwalk apartment window, hoping to be rescued. Heller was supposed to show up for his first day of KJHK radio news training at 9 a.m. KJHK had already led the 7 a.m. and 8 a.m. newscasts with the fire. Radio News Director Audrey Esther was in the Dole newsroom to walk Heller through his first newscast as anchor. Heller showed up about 8:15 a.m. with a story on a piece of paper about escaping his flaming apartment by jumping out his window. He had lost everything, he told her. Rather than have him do the news, Audrey put together the 'cast and interviewed Heller on the air at 9 a.m. You can see Heller's story on KUJH-TV.

By about 10 a.m. J694 student and associate editor for the Kansan's Jayplay magazine, Brian Wacker, was on the newsroom phone. He had a friend who had shot home video of the fire. It was stunning stuff, he said. And it was. Wacker knew citizen journalism when he saw it. Staci and Adam, who caught about two hours sleep, are back in the newsroom editing citizen video right now.

I feel great. Nobody told these kids to do converged news. They just did it. And, damn, I am proud of them.

I'd love to write this blog, but I am just too damn distracted right now. Right now, in the other tab of this Firefox window, I have the messages page from my facebook account pulled up because I'm waiting to hear back from a friend about how her weekend was.

As I write this, I am holding two different conversations on AOL Instant Messenger with friends of mine from other schools who want to know how I'm doing since my ex-girlfriend and I broke up last weekend. All the while, my cell phone is sitting right next to my keyboard as I'm awaiting (and dreading) another phone call from my mom wanting to make sure I'm not suicidal.

It kind of sickens me that it's what I'm doing right now. Gossippy conversations and mindless chatting have stolen the stage from me on a day where the Internet should really be offering me infinite resources into important things.

Just look at the news and you'll see exactly what it is that I'm missing. For only the fifth or sixth time in my lifetime, a Supreme Court justice was nominated today. The Iraq body count is creeping up on 2,000 pretty quickly. Judy Miller is out of prison and just signed a book deal. The Gulf region is still a mess in the wake of the worst natural disaster on American soil in my lifetime. And good ol' Tom Delay is in as big of a political pickle as anyone in recent memory - and that includes Slick Willy.

This is a time of unparalleled importance in terms of politics and the role of the mass media - both of which are very important to me. And what the hell am I doing? I'm checking to see what my friend Craig's away message says on AIM. (In case your wondering, Craig is "snoozing cuz [he] has a chem test tom.")

Which brings me to my point. When the deluge of information provided by the mass media is available on the same medium as my friends' personal information and that medium provides me with direct communications to those friends, my friends are gonna win. As much as I want to be well-read and well-informed about current events, there is something inside me (and I assume inside other people my age as well) that makes my friends more important. It's more relevant, I guess. It's much more immediate.

As someone who usually finds himself above such sophomoric and trivial behavior, that's hard for me to admit.

I have 90 friends on Facebook. My friend Robert has 364 friends. He must be three times more popular than I am. Or, maybe he is just ridiculous. I mean, come on, he is friends with "Beer."

It would appear that Robert is much more connected than I am. Maybe he is, but if he looks at his friend's profiles as much as I do (almost never), he's no more connected to these people than he is to the people listed in the phone book on his desk.

Facebook has become a hobby, a way to pass time and an obsession for many people. They spend hours looking through profiles and updating their personal information. All the time formerly spent with friends and family has been replaced with scanning profiles of people in cyberspace.

Some argue that the invention of Facebook, AOL Instant Messenger, chat rooms and more have helped us to become more connected to other people than ever before. To some extent, I disagree. Sure, we are able to communicate with people all over the world. We are able to make connections that we were never able to before. But this new form of connection has replaced the personal connections that we used to have.

I am just as guilty of this as anyone. Just the other day, I sent an instant message to a girl in my hall that lives next door. It would have been just as easy to pick up the phone or even walk the 10 feet to her room. But why? I could see from her profile that she was online. We ended up having a 10-minute conversation.

I think the lack of personal interaction is taking its toll. I see it everyday in my scholarship hall. The women sit in their rooms with the doors closes and their computer on. The decline in community is sad. I am sure that professors see it too. There's no need to have a meeting with a teacher when it is so much easier (and less threatening) to just send e-mail.

These inventions have made our lives more convenient. They have helped us to connect to the outside world. At the same time, they have isolated us and have helped us to take up permanent residency in cyberspace.

Once upon a time, in a land far, far away everyone used the Internet through a dial-up modem. It was in that era so long ago that I started an AOL Instant Messenger account.

In that time of yesteryear, at age 13, I began my foray into the world of online chat rooms and instant messaging. My screen name and alter ego, rzy300212, exists to this today, but there was a large gap between 9th grade and my freshman year of college that rzy300212 went into exile. He came back that freshman year to chat with people in the dorms who were either two rooms over or a floor down. The thought of using the instant gratification of AIM to network never sprouted in his mind. He was just too lazy to walk down the hall or pick up the phone.

After that year in McCollum Hall, rzy300212 went back into hiding and is awaiting the purchase of a new PowerBook G4 to make his glorious return to the networking game.

With the instant gratification of messenging systems such as AIM, iChat and MSN messenger, blogs, and sites such as facebook.com and myspace.com, and cell phones that do everything, it seems that everyone is walking around with one hand on a keyboard and the other holding cell phone. Students walk around campus jamming to iPods and avoiding human contact.

There was a time before the dawn of Internet that networking solely involved meeting a stranger in person and talking face-to-face. That seems to be a lost art now.

I have to be transparent and say that I have a cell phone, an iPod shuffle and a facebook account. I use facebook to keep in touch with and friends and post parties invitations. The iPod shuffle rarely makes an appearance on campus and my cell phone is muted or turned off until the late afternoon.

This new technologically advanced age we live in is exciting, but we should all take the time to talk to someone in person once in a while, shake their hand, or at least smile and nod. Push back from the computer screen and get out of the house.

One of my roommates has to say goodbye to the five people he's chatting with on AIM before the leaves the house. He made me laugh when he said, "Thank God I got a computer virus at the moment, now I don't have to talk to those people and can get some real work done."

Last year marked the end of an era. I bought -- a cell phone.

In the store I rejected the salesman's pitches for every gadget-filled phone on the market. "No email options, thank you."

"I don't play games,"

"If I want to take a picture I'll use my camera."

I only needed a phone to make calls, certainly not to do stuff.

Considering that baby's first cell phone was the kind you get free after signing the contract, I don't think I'm likely to jump the technological gap between my freebie model and the phone that has "makes calls" as number 52 on its list of features.

In fact, it never occurred to me that the seemingly frivolous features I so readily rejected for my own phone would be able to cause such a stir in the world of journalism.

The London bombings and Hurricane Katrina have proved that camera and videophone wielding "citizen journalists" can make a significant contribution to news reporting. But I'm not convinced that professional photojournalists should go running scared any time soon.

Citizen journalists have the advantage of immediacy of coverage. They are there when news happens and are able to capture the details that even the most fleet-footed photojournalist will miss in the race to the scene.

So what do professional photojournalists have that citizen journalists lack?

First and foremost, picture quality. The BBC.com citizen journalists' videophone footage that I viewed was blurry and pixilated to the point of distraction. Second, photojournalists are able to capture more subtle moments behind big news stories as well as local or "smaller" news stories that I have yet to see any citizen journalists cover.

I wrote in a previous essay that blogs are focused on the small picture while traditional news reports are focused on the big picture behind the news. With photojournalism I think the opposite is true. While citizen journalists' photos and videos tend to focus on the big picture (murder scenes, destructive bombings and life-devastating hurricanes), professional photojournalists are able to communicate the essence of the big news story and draw the viewers' attention by focusing on the small picture.

While citizen journalists' photos and video of gusting hurricane-winds and property damage are fascinating, the Katrina coverage that sticks with me are the pictures that express human drama and emotion like the photos of dazed, frail survivors in the Astrodome or crying children searching for their parents. To me, those are the kind of photos that only professional journalists, who are experienced, trained and attuned to the various layers of any unfolding news story have proved themselves able to capture.

I have always been taught one thing about photography when working for newspapers as a journalist:

Step away from the camera, Jesse. That way you don't hurt yourself or others.

And, for the most part, that hasn't bothered me one bit. There was that one time, at the Emporia Gazette, when all the photographers were gone, that I had to take pictures. The photo editor showed me quickly how to use the "dummy" focus and the "you-can't-screw-this-up" lens.

And I, so proud to be a photojournalist for one day, went out and shot over 100 pictures of a baseball game. Only to come back and realize that only about two of the shots were usable. This one wasn't focused. This one with no action. This one with not enough light.

Obviously my "dummy" focus had let me down.

From then on, I have just "stepped away" and allowed photographers to do their job. I write, they shoot pictures. They can deal with all dials they turn and two-foot zoom lenses and goofy stands -€” I'll just stand back and write my story.

And, for awhile, this seemed like great job security for photographers. There's no way just anyone could do something like that.

Enter "new and improved" 21st-century journalism.

Though I may seem a bit threatened by bloggers taking my job and doing it for free, it still seemed like photographers would get a free ride because of their specialized skills.

Sorry, Rylan. Untrained "professionals" are coming for you, as well.

With cell-phone cameras able to take pictures live from the scene, newspapers have never had such flexibilities -€” or such a dilemmas.

Should they use these grainy pics taken by cell-phone cameras? Many already have.

And what does it take to operate this device? One finger. No zoom, 2-foot lens, or 6-foot stand. Just a cell phone. And like that, Rylan could someday have all his expertise replaced by 14-year-olds.

Don't worry, Rylan. I still respect what you do -€” because I know I can't do it myself. Knowing about all those lenses and stands and foci and stuff -€” I'm sure that'll still count for something.

Proceed with confidence knowing your job is as secure as mine is in the future. Which means, if nothing else, we can at least we can save each other a spot in line at the unemployment office.

I'm sure people there will be impressed by our journalism degrees.