Azstarnet.com is an online newspaper. It exhibits all the Star’s stories, plus some extra features, but in a form that indexes them by category. There is another version of the Star available that simply reproduces each page of the paper for you to leaf through as you would if it were spread out on the breakfast table.

Here at The Data Port this last form is the version we prefer. We miss fewer stories as the eye slides over every story on the page and the pages are less cluttered with visual distractions like ads and promos for other stories.

We’re long-term old-guard newspaper junkies so our preference may simply be a matter  of what we’re used to. Which you prefer is simply a matter of taste. “Ya pays yer money and ya takes yer choice.”

So…what sort of creature is TucsonCitizen.com? It is something more than a blogging platform like Blogger or WordPress. It bears the name of a major Arizona Newspaper; one which, when it ceased publication on May 16, 2009, was the oldest continuously published newspaper in the state.

The Gannett-owned TucsonCitizen.com emerged shortly thereafter as “The Voice of Tucson,” an online collection of volunteer content providers that Editor Mark Evans describes as, “ Bloggers and citizen journalists here (who) provide news, information, opinion, commentary and perspective on the issues, interests and events that affect daily life in the Old Pueblo.”

But are we a newspaper? Not yet, or not quite. We are still a fairly large and complex bulletin board. You can learn a lot about a community by reading the notices on a bulletin board. You quickly learn what the passions and interests of a fairly small cross section of your citizens are, but they are not put in the context of what else is going on in the whole community.

Context is what raises mere data to the status of news.

Newspapers struggle on the brink of bankruptcy as circulation and readership decline and as the average reader slips further away from the most desirable demographics. Journalism experiments with new strategies, the TucsonCitizen is one such, although not yet as successful as some of us hoped when it was launched.

One of the most successful of the new journalistic experiments is Forbes Magazine. Forbes.com has flourished under a model that its leader, Lewis DVorkin calls “entrepreneurial journalism.’ This is a combination of paid reporters identified as ‘staff’ and bloggers identified as ‘contributors.’ Some contributors are pure volunteers who write at Forbes.com to “brand up” their resumes but others are paid according to page views. The project has been very successful.

There’s a good article at the Guardian. Click here.

And they hope, in the end, that being read they might quit their day jobs and write full time. Writing full time is not an easy row to hoe. It’s  bloody hard work if you’re trying to do it clearly and well and  day after day.

Here at the TucsonCitizen the majority of the content providers are unpaid bloggers. (Columnists, Reporters, Citizen Journalists.) It’s always been “no pay” in the blogosphere. Bloggers have something to say that they want other people to read and for the most part have been grateful for a platform that allows them to grind their own axes without the benefit of editorial supervision. Being paid was not a primary requirement.

But…and there’s always a but…being paid is no bad thing, and not for the reason you may suspect. Being paid, even at pitiful freelance rates, keeps you working at the craft.

MS DataPort and I have been writing for pay for the best part of 35 years. Not enough to leave our day jobs, and not always the grandest material, but certainly enough to allow us to call ourselves professional writers. Here’s what we’ve found.

When an editor says, yes she’d like a piece on the latest trends, and she’d like it in two weeks, you deliver in two weeks and cheerfully do the rewriting she requires. Why? Because, even though you’re getting paid in pauper’s pence, that’s what professionals do. The promise of a buck or two keeps you writing despite the demands of your day job.

If you are only a volunteer it is too easy to put off until tomorrow what you put off again until the day after that.

Regular visitors to the Tucson Citizen may remember more than one blogger who joined us all excited  and enthusiastic only to fade from view when it turned out that blogging was harder and took more time than expected.

Two of my favorite blogs, gone but not forgotten, were  “God Blogging” and the ever conservative “Fort Buckley.” These were wonderfully written blogs…but I imagine the demands of day jobs put paid to their appearance here. I don’t know if being offered a buck or two would lure them back…but it would be worth a try.

Next: Bulletin Board or Newspaper?

During my own tentative journeys on what was then being called the “information super highway” I found that personal web sites were rare. They required a good deal of technical knowledge and most newcomers simply lacked the skills necessary to code and maintain them.

The development of blogging platforms like WordPress and Blogger opened the web to a broader public presence. The personal website was within reach of just about everyone, thanks to easy-to-use templates and simple control over how the site looked…background colors and images, type styles and sizes, and arrangement of sections of the blog on the page.

Those first blogs were intensely personal. People wrote about themselves, their daily lives and passions. Considerable attention was paid to the blog’s appearance and each blogger tried for a unique look.

Bloggers had different special interests of course…poetry, child rearing, politics, cooking and so forth…but they also wrote about themselves and the blogs were their way of telling the world what was happening in their lives.

Blogs were the first Facebook pages and it seems to me that the original, highly personal, function of many blogs has been replaced by Facebook pages.

The writers that you read here at the Tucson Citizen are called bloggers…the reason for this we’ll discuss in a subsequent post…  but as they exist, in the context of an e-journalism enterprise, they more nearly resemble newspaper columnists or freelance journalists than they do the earliest bloggers.

At the risk of laboring the obvious the columns you read here are very unlike traditional blogs. Consider: Unlike free blogs they can only be reached in the context of their location in the Tucson Citizen; bloggers have very little control over the appearance of their blogs, except for the banners that head them. There is no control of typeface in the body of the article. In other words these “blogs” are exactly like news stories or opinion columns in a newspaper.

Most significantly, TC.com writers write very little about themselves. We know what interests them, or what their particular social or political concerns are, because those interests and concerns are the subjects of their articles. But if you want to know what they had for dinner or what their vacation plans are you’d better look at their social media pages.

Next: A Community of Bloggers

In no significant sense does this utterly delete it. Getting a Facebook page is like getting your ass  tattooed, the best you can do is cover it up so folks can’t comment on it. But it’s still there, festering away on Facebook’s digital rump like a boil that is threatening to erupt.

Sign in with your password and out it pops in all its former glory.

I realize that fb is supposed to have a billion users, something like a seventh of the world’s population, and the traditional wisdom is that this has enabled a wonderful growth of communication and understanding. Permit me to be just a tad skeptical. Very little real communication takes place.

The folks I followed on Facebook are, in real life, pretty interesting people…actors I have worked with, grandkids, an old high-school classmate, a newspaper guy, a former academic colleague and so on.

More often than not what got posted on their Facebook pages failed to rise even to the richness of the average tweet. Somebody went for a bike ride, someone else is appearing in a show, a third is now working for a different newspaper.

Fair enough, I suppose, but what I want to know is what they saw on the bike ride, what their play is about, and what they think of the sorry  state of journalism in the sorry state to which they have found themselves exiled. I miss the sense tat they are talking to me. If not, the rest is simply advertising.

The most active Facebook pages today are those that use Facebook as free commercial advertising sites…small businesses who ask you to like them on Facebook, or big businesses like newspapers or other national enterprises who want to create the illusion of active community and increase page views to their primary sites.  One thing that can be said about the commercial Facebook pages is that they are reasonably attractive. Not so the average personal sites that are more often than not cluttered messes that would have made old time bloggers blush.

Facebook is one leg of what we call ‘the social media’ but the concept of social communication  implies something more than my stating what I’m doing or what I like, or what I plan to do tomorrow. It implies an active connection with an “other.”

This is a large part of what I find missing in Facebook… a billion people talking about themselves and priding themselves on their “friends” doesn’t seem like true communication…It’s just so much advertising.

Thus ends the rant.

Regardless of attitudes towards the editorial policies of the daily press, the fact remains that professional news organizations staffed by professional journalists are our best, most reliable, source of major news stories. For all their alleged faults they are the only game in town.

(And what about network news programs? For the most part they seem to deliver information derived elsewhere. The exception of course are video photo-op ‘late-breaking’ stories of car crashes and fires. But the nature of the medium seems to preclude thoughtful, long-form features and backgrounders that we get in the print press.)

Bloggers would be hard pressed for the news they comment on if it weren’t for the stories developed by their professional brethren. But at the same time bloggers have held the professionals’ feet to the fire for not picking up on important, but ignored, stories.

As aggregators bloggers need stories to ‘aggregate.’ Nothing wrong with that. That function is important for bringing to the blogger’s special audience stories that might have otherwise been missed.

As news gatherers and investigators reporters have decided advantages over bloggers. In what follows I understand that there are always exceptions that prove the rule.

One of the greatest is that they are employed. Bloggers often have other jobs or full time obligations. If they don’t feel like writing, or haven’t the time, or are writing incompetently, there is no editor or publisher threatening unemployment. You can’t lay off someone who doesn’t work for you.

Reporters (providing there’s a benevolent nod from some assignment editor) have time to pursue an investigation or write a long-form feature. If they are short of ideas someone will surely ‘suggest’ that they get busy.

I believe that in journalism schools novice reporters are taught how to use all the public sources of information, and what they are…city agencies, public records like property reports, police reports, corporate records and so forth. There are lots of them. My guess is that bloggers are far from knowing them all.

Perhaps a reporter’s biggest advantage is what I think of as an “Implied Authority to Ask Questions.”  The reporter can call someone, identify himself or herself as from The Daily Blatt and at least expect to be listened to. (No answers to questions guaranteed, of course.)

If he tells the interviewed source that the conversation is “off the record” or “on background” that source has at least a reasonable expectation of the conditions being honored. But call up a possible source and say, “Hello, I’m Joe Bloggs could you comment on….” click.

For the coverage of local events bloggers may have some advantages over reporters. For the most part they write about material they already know and are interested in. They probably have sources they trust and who trust them; general assignment reporters, coming new to a topic, may may not.

Carolyn’s Community, and One Can a Week do an excellent job, as do our sports guys, Zoom Zoom Tucson, Comic Matters, Tucson Tails, and Views From Baja Arizona… to name only a few. (In my judgement Hugh Holub has provided the best coverage of the border in Southern Arizona.)

To round out the offerings we have enough cranky columnists and their annoyed commentators to satisfy just about any reader.

On a final note, we bloggers are expected to credit the material from which we quote. At least “A NY Times report says” and so on. The expectation doesn’t always go both ways. Sometimes we’re granted no more than “A local blog reports.” Oh? And which blog is that, and what news source is it published in? Attribution should be a two way street.

I’m pretty sure what they’re going to find; some comments are civil and the occasional comment is raunchy and offensive. Comments that violate the Star’s rules of acceptable standards are frequently removed.

It does seem to me that the denizens of the Star comment threads are a bit more excitable than what we see here at Citizen.com, but I may be prejudiced. At any rate, it’s probably best if we don’t expect too much cooly reasoned debate in a venue one function of which is to allow for blowing off steam.

I’ll be interested to see how the researchers measure civility. Will there be units of civility (Raunchies), applied according to some standard of measurement? Will we be able to say of some post, “That was uncivil to the four ‘Raunchie’ level?”

I think most people recognize when discourse becomes uncivil, and in the real world restrain themselves— from fear of public disapproval of behavior that is ill bred or boorish.

In the virtual world of comment threads there would probably be a major improvement in tone if every comment required the use of one’s real name. This could be assured by site management, which already knows the names of our commentators.

Related Posts

Civil Discourse and Civil Disobedience

Brodesky on Blogs

The Data Port Comment Policy

About The Data Port

As the number of covered communities grew, Gannett reporters assigned to individual sites sometimes had reporting/editing duties on more than one site. They did not live in the towns they were covering and their work loads increased.

While some sites got fairly respectable page hits (Freehold, New Jersey averaged about 65,000 page views a month) some of the others scored only a couple of thousand. This made it very difficult to generate advertising revenue.

Blogger participation fell off and Gannett staffers focused more on their print assignments. Pressed for time, they simply reposted their dead tree stories to the web sites. Finally it was time to turn out the lights…the party was over.

TucsonCitizen.com came on line at about the same time and with the same goal of local news coverage provided by bloggers. Some of our bloggers have trained journalism backgrounds and experience; those who don’t— my judgement call here—make a commendable  effort in the direction of fact checking and journalistic ethics.

But we’re bloggers, and we’re volunteers, which means that we write only about what interests us, and only when the spirit moves us. Some of us discover that writing well, and regularly, is harder than we thought. Readers lose sight of some less regular writers, even though the subject matter of their posts is of real interest. They tend to be pushed aside, as we fight for the equivalent of  above the fold presence for our stories on our home page  This tends to skew the balance of TucsonCitizen.com, which would profit from greater editorial control.

But when all is said and done, I think our local coverage is pretty darn good.

I really urge everyone to read this story about the demise of InJersey.

First, an observation about anonymity. Here I agree with Brodesky; it’s a curse. It is especially objectionable in comment threads, where people are able to get away with comments that they would be ashamed of if properly identified.

For all of the supposed anonymous blogging that Brodesky complains of he seems to know quite a bit about who’s blogging where. Here at TC.com most of our bloggers actually sign their blogs and the identity of those who don’t is pretty much an open secret.

One of Brodesky’s major criticisms of the blogosphere is that bloggers don’t do what responsible reporters do: get both sides of the story. Getting “both sides of the story” is what makes real reporters reliable and unbiased.

Maybe so, but it frequently leads to a failed obligation to get at the truth.

Here’s an example:

Too much political reportage takes the form of reporting candidate Jones’s assertion that Social Security is broke and candidate Smith’s claim that Social Security is funded until  the end of time. Is this enough? No. If this is your story you have failed the reader. You haven’t made any attempt to determine which one is right; or if the debate is grounded in contradictory assumptions such that the candidate exchange is simply empty.

Your story my be ‘unbiased’ but it’s less than useful. You have simply reported two opposed biases: Mr. Jones’s truthiness and Mr. Smith’s truthiness. Wow.

Art Jacobson

Two quibbles: The weather forecast default seems to be Bloomington, Illinois. You have to enter Tucson in the search option. I imagine this will be corrected.

Much more irritating to Star regulars will be the fact that the comments mode doesn’t seem to be working.

Headlines are still in blue, but the whole look of the site is clean and open. I hope we can have something like that here at TC.com.

One improvement would be to rid ourselves of the “blog” look and appear on the site simply as “columnists” or “contributors.”

Here’s an online paper where that seems to work: AnnArbor.com.

Jimmy Petrol has a funny riff on this story over at Fueled By Petrol

One paragraph in the Star story was especially interesting:

“If the FTC’s guidelines are approved, bloggers — defined loosely as anyone writing a personal journal online — would have to back up claims and disclose compensation. The FTC could order violators to stop and pay restitution to customers, and the Justice Department could sue for civil penalties.”

In the context of the article this seems to say that bloggers who boost a product would have to investigate the performance of the product advertised and pay restitution to customers for whom the product didn’t work.

Meanwhile over in the land of dead tree journalism we regularly see quarter- page ads for ‘miracle’ pills like the one that appeared recently in the Star that promised to flood my elderly brain with oxygen. We know the Star was paid for the space. But is the product safe and effective? Has the Star investigated?

Shall we call the FTC?