I read Janet Paskin’s story The Velvet Rope in the Columbia Journalism Review this month and couldn’t stop thinking about it. Basically, she lays out the primary reason journalists like to see their name in print — they get paid more for it. This is, for me, a point of frustration.

I like to think that good journalism is not a thing of the past. I like to think that the web is where it’s going to be at for journalism for the foreseeable future. If the industry is serious about online and good online journalism, it needs to back that up with money.

Yes, yes, I understand the laws of supply and demand. I understand that there is lots of content online that is supplied for free or cheap. News organizations are floundering to identify a business plan that works in a drastically disrupted market, and it is money that news organizations are primarily after. Good journalism, in the list of priorities, comes in a distant second.

It seems to me, though, that this is a moment in which resolve is needed. A mentality shift is needed. Instead of outlets using the online-only status of a story as a reason to pay a reporter less, they should pay reporters an equal amount. If the work is of the same caliber, why not? It does, after all, cost less to publish on the web. This shift in pay and status seems to me an important part of the necessary industry shift. Major outlets — that’s right, New York Times, Washington Post, New Yorker — should take the lead.

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
— The First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution

Or, if you prefer, in video form:

It’s Sunshine Week, a week for dialogue about the importance of open government and freedom of information. It’s a week for action. That part falls to you. Sunshine Week’s backers – most prominently the American Society of News Editors – describes this year’s worthy goals like this:

This Sunshine Week, we urge citizens to press their public officials to do more, seeking not just broad statements of support for greater transparency but specific pledges and plans of action to enhance the public’s right to know.

Sunshine Week 2011 can be a time when you as a citizen or civic organization make a difference by identifying local or state open government shortcomings and then asking your public officials to pledge and initiate specific improvements in local or state law and practice.

To assist your efforts, the Sunshine Week team presents a sample Open Government Proclamation that you, or your group, can take to your public officials to seek a commitment on open government with specific action that will lead to increased sunshine.

So get out there! Call your government to account. As a tribute (and a small push),  I offer some highlights of resources for local newsgatherers.

For Arizona journalists and bloggers alike, the Arizona First Amendment Coalition compiles great online resources. There’s a link to the Arizona Public Records Book, the Open Meetings Law, a journalist’s guide to Family Educational Rights and Policy Act. These are rules Arizona newsgatherers should know. No excuses – you can’t argue for your rights if you don’t know them. The coalition also posts a link to a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) letter generator to help you get started.

A note on public records requests: Ask for what you want firmly. In general, I am a huge fan of manners, but research shows that with records request, this approach doesn’t work. The University of Arizona’s David Cuillier publishes a study contrasting the approaches in the journal “Communication Law and Policy.” It’s definitely worth a read.

Also, a reminder: The First Amendment doesn’t mean you can say whatever you want. There are restrictions, the most famous of which involves fire and a theater. You can’t publish as fact something you know is false. Well, you can, but the trouble that will follow makes the prospect a dubious exercise in judgement. The First Amendment Center has great resources illuminating this point and others. Among my favorites are the yearly State of the First Amendment reports.

I can’t conclude this post without pointing you toward my very favorite resource for newsgatherers interested in government accountability – Investigative Reporters and Editors. Their site holds a treasure trove of tips on how to get information and how to interpret it. There are links to recent investigations, training opportunities and how-tos of many kinds. I guarantee a perusal of that site will leave you with a long list of story ideas and strategies. We will all be better off for it.

a baby, but not Facebook

Names have long been an irresistible topic for me, and in combination with Facebook and revolution, well, I certainly couldn’t pass that one up.

AllFacebook and TechCrunch, two excellent blogs on social media themes, posted today about a just-born Egyptian baby named Facebook. According to Egyptian state-run newspaper Al-Ahram as translated by TechCrunch, the father said the name was a way to “express his gratitude about the victories the youth of 25th of January have achieved and chose to express it in the form of naming his firstborn girl Facebook.”

The new father, Jamal Ibrahim, said that the girl’s family, friends and neighbors in the Ibrahimya region gathered around the newborn to express their continuing support for the revolution that started on Facebook. “Facebook received many gifts from the youth who were overjoyed by her arrival and the new name,” the newspaper reported (via TechCrunch). “A name [Facebook] that shocked the entire world.”

Allow me to paraphrase. Shock in two phases – the ousting of an autocrat 30 years in power, then the naming of a newborn babe. What a legacy! Facebook is unlikely to forget that piece of Egyptian history.

In the United States, the top baby names in 2009 were Jacob and Isabella, according to the Social Security Administration. I was once asked by an African professor to please name my children something that means something. I’m not yet a mother, but my record so far isn’t so good. My favorite stuffed animal was named Bunny.

What do you think?

Is it an honor to be named for a tool that changed the world? Or will she adopt her middle name as soon as she’s old enough to chose?

Twitter logo

A Shorty Award is to go to the best journalist on Twitter. You get to vote. Right now, William Bonner is in the lead. Interesting – a Brazilian twitteiro, even though Larry King and Anderson Cooper are suggested as popular journalists on the awards Web site.

I want to hear from you, too, though you don’t necessarily have to vote. What makes a good tweet? What makes a good tweet from a journalist? Comment here or send me a tweet @TucsonCitizen.

PBS’s MediaShift has posted a really interesting article about the current state of online people searches. I know that in my household, the past few phone books that have been delivered have gone straight into the recycling bin. As a reporter, I almost always check to see if my sources have Facebook pages or Twitter handles. Many people are easier to get a hold of that way.

But online identities have implications for privacy. In some ways, our identities are more controlled – we decide what to put on our Facebook pages and in our tweets. But we also have little control over what other people post about us online. A friend of a friend of mine couldn’t get a job after college because someone had posted pictures of her topless all over the Internet. She spent quite a sum employing companies that specialize in controlling online identities to help her scrub her online reputation.

The coverage of the Jan. 8 shooting of Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords, Judge John Roll, 9-year-old Christina Taylor Green and 16 others is a prime example of the use of social media as a reporting tool. I posted earlier about @caitieparker, but there have been others, as well, located and interviewed and, some have argued, harassed over the Internet.

Which brings us to the question: How much control should we have? How has your privacy been affected by your online dealings?

Carli Brosseau

I learned that Rep. Gabrielle Giffords and her staff and constituents had been shot while I was washing the dishes Saturday morning. I heard my friend Peter Michaels on the radio, and his voice was shaky. He sounded rattled. I believed the news because I believe Peter Michaels. I mention this not because my personal story is important, but because it is universal. We relate to friends in more concrete terms than we relate to strangers. We believe them because we know them, and in knowing them, we know ourselves. We become through reflection and refraction. We are prisms of our basic and daily interactions with the world.

My first reaction when I heard the news was to log on. I checked to see who was reporting what; I told my friends, via Facebook. I reached out to those links for confirmation that my reality was theirs. They also confirmed that I had a task. My role was as social media editor for a Web site that bills itself as the Voice of Tucson, the voice of a city to which now all eyes were turned, a city whose name will long be associated with one of our democracy’s darkest moments. My goal was to make that voice relevant and real and useful with whatever tools I had. I posted updates for more than 12 hours and woke at 3 o’clock the next morning, unable to turn off the stream of questions: What does it mean to be a part of a community where this can happen? What can I do in this situation that matters?

The posts that I and others made about the minutia of the investigation and politicians postulating were useful in the quest for information and I, as a journalist, am not one to downplay information. But in this time, I can’t help think that it’s almost beside the point, perhaps because the attacks did hit so close. In five days of reporting, I have yet to talk to anyone who didn’t at least have a friend who knew one of the shooting victims or a story about how the victims indirectly touched his or her life. Each conversation seems so fragile, each participant so vulnerable, and I remember that it is a conversation, that that’s how we relate to each other, and that those links hold us together. Those links keep us from falling apart.

It is perhaps because I had been musing on the subject of links, networks of “friends” and “fans” and “followers,” that President Obama’s speech hit me so hard. We ought to remember that we live for each other. We owe each other. We depend on each other not only for political or economic or even cultural reasons. We depend on each other to know ourselves. It was when President Obama turned to Daniel Hernandez, the intern whose quick response may have saved the congresswoman’s life, that my nose began to run. Heroes, I think, are the ones for whom the links are closer to the surface. Hernandez surely qualifies. But if we all paid more attention, we might each qualify too.

My belief in journalism, whatever the immediate state of the industry, hinges on the link idea. It is, I think, an ability to appeal to commonality and a baseline decency that makes a good reporter. You  have to be someone to whom people want to tell stories, and stories are the link. When Joan Didion wrote, “We tell ourselves stories in order to live,” it was in all seriousness. Much has been made of social media: that it is a fantastical money-making machine, that it can dismantle disagreeable regimes, that it cements the power of despots, that it increases our alienation from each other and ourselves. We don’t really know yet, but we know the secret’s in the links. May they be real and true.

I earlier mentioned the plight of @caitieparker, who mentioned on Twitter that she knew Jared Lee Loughner, the man accused of shooting Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords, killing six and wounding more than a dozen others. There have been several interesting accounts of what happened since then. Here are a few:

Seeking out sources, made transparent on Twitter

On twitter journalism, cronkite and sausage making

How incorrect reports of Giffords’ death spread on Twitter

Thoughts?

Thousands of people from Tucson and across the world turned to social media, especially Facebook and Twitter, to get the latest news about the January 8 shooting that has thus far claimed six lives. Within moments of hospital officials uttering a body count or condition update, the facts and figures would be Tweeted and Facebooked (by yours truly among many others). [As updates go, the current tally is 20 shot, six dead, one (Congressional District 8 Rep. Gabrielle Giffords) in an intensive care unit, three in serious condition and several others still in the hospital, though in hospital units that care for people who are less acutely sick.]

If it was not already obvious, it should now be crystal clear to Tucsonans how news coverage has changed. The flow of words is immediate, and that has implications, some more obvious than others. TucsonCitizen.com blogger David Morales posted a sentence to his blog, The Three Sonorans, minutes after the shooting happened. He was at a Pima County Democratic Party meeting when he got the news via text message. Two other people at the meeting got a similar message so Morales posted what he knew to his blog. “Gabrielle Giffords shot in the head in Tucson,” the headline read. The post was immediately picked up by Google News, among others, and soon TucsonCitizen.com was down, overrun by people looking for news. That was approximately five minutes after the shots.

Minutes later, NPR reported that the congresswoman had died. That news was instantly retweeted and reposted, with prayers going out across the Internet before it became clear, also through a tweet, this time from University Medical Center public affairs staff, that Giffords was not in fact dead, but rather in surgery. The AP reported that the suspect’s name was Jared Laughner, which was retweeted (again by yours truly, among others) – misspelling intact. While misinformation is transmitted within seconds, so are corrections. In my case, a commenter alerted me to the error.

And meanwhile, before it was clear what the health status was of the 20 people shot, a seemingly limitless number of commentators set in. Some criticized heated rhetoric, but plenty more dished it out. It seemed almost as likely a comment would say something to the effect of “Giffords was a bad representative” as it would communicate prayers or coordinate a candlelight vigil. Or blame the Tea Party.

At this point, almost all the information we have about the suspect, 22-year-old Jared Lee Loughner, who is now in federal custody, was discovered through the Internet. None of it necessarily communicates a motivation, though it does communicate a state of mind. Nobody has spoken for Loughner. While we could electronically look up his address and property records, his parents haven’t spoken. We’ve seen Jared Lee Loughner’s YouTube channel (“let the bodies hit the floor,” whispered, on repeat), we may have seen his MySpace page (if we were fast enough; it’s been taken down) and if we missed any of that, we can defer to Praetorian Prefect who collected a mess of Loughner-related posts. Loughner’s posts seem almost to plea for attention (“Goodbye friends … don’t be mad at me”). But what did we really learn? More importantly, what does it mean?

While words flow free and fast in the social media universe, they stick around a long time, given a shelf life perhaps unmatched to the thought put into the utterance. Written or spoken comments that might have earlier been more ephemeral are searchable, linkable and like-able. They take on a new life and a new context. The results are often eerie. For example: a Twitpic search of photos related to Giffords; Gifford’s last tweet, announcing the start of the “Congress on Your Corner” event; an MSNBC interview after Giffords’ Tucson office was vandalized in March 2010. We make meaning from the curation of bits of information gathered. This was always true, but pre-Internet there were fewer bits of personal information out there. I’m brought back to the question: how do we make meaning? How does the shifting context change things?

Then there is the issue of people found and interviewed through social media outlets. Among the most instantly famous was @caitieparker, who tweeted that she knew Loughner and then was barraged with media interviews and new followers. At last check, she had posted: “This has become something way out of hand. I’m not doing ANY more interviews, or tweets about Jared. So might as well just unfollow now ”

To end on a (slightly) more positive note: Members of the Tucson community have used social media adeptly to bring people in mourning together. The graphic at the top of the post went viral hours after the first reports of the shooting. While I haven’t yet tracked down who created it (perhaps you know), it spread from Facebook profile to Facebook profile with a simple cut and paste. An act of unity. [Ed. Note: Apropos for this story, the answer to the question has been provided via social media (and the internet) the creator according to former Tucson Citizen courts reporter A.J. Flick is Michael Joplin] for Tucsonan Diana Uribe said about 1 p.m. today that about half of her friends were using the graphic. Blogger Ted Prezelski of the blog Rum, Romanism and Rebellion created a Tumblr page that is serving as a kind of online memorial, not to mention the prayers for Gabrielle Giffords Facebook page.

That was not the way I had planned to introduce myself, but that’s the news. I’m Carli Brosseau, TucsonCitizen.com’s social media editor. I was previously a reporter at the newspaper the Tucson Citizen, and I’m a graduate of the journalism school at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. I plan to post frequently on subjects related to social media and journalism, as observed in and from Tucson. I have a lot of questions. I hope you have some for me too. You can contact me @TucsonCitizen, at Facebook.com/TucsonCitizen.com, and at carli.brosseau@tucsoncitizen.com. I look forward to hearing from you.