In my post, I wrote about the potential uses for Twitter in the future, such as helping out in emergency situations or facilitating co-working for remote teams. One year later, I’ve found that Twitter has gone above and beyond my original expectations in terms of usefulness, allowing me to obtain and share information efficiently. But Twitter has also proven to be a tool that should be used with caution lest it become the opposite of useful: a time suck.

Last year, I was skeptical about Twitter becoming more than just something I used for fun, or perhaps to meet a few colleagues. But after I wrote the first story, quite a few people began to “follow” me (Twitter-speak for adding people as contacts). I have been adding everyone who added me, and to this day I only know 8 of my 867 “friends” in real life. As my circle of Twitter friends began to grow the service became more useful for me, because I could learn more about what friends were doing or reading, and I could share the same with them.

Perhaps the most surprising and important use I’ve found is for reporting. When I write stories here on MediaShift, I almost always turn to Twitter to cull opinions and find interviewees among my group of contacts. With reporting, the more friends you have the better, because if you put out a question to 800 people someone’s bound to have an answer; and if they don’t, they usually know someone who does.

I’ve found Twitter to be much more useful than Facebook’s “Questions” application, specifically built for putting out queries to your social network. More people seem to respond to “tweets” than to questions. In fact, while reporting on a story about Facebook, I found more interesting responses to my questions on Twitter than on Facebook itself. Other writers and bloggers have also found Twitter to be a powerful reporting tool as well.

More Useful Than RSS?

If I had the time to sit around and read Twitter updates all day long, I think I might find that they are more useful than the ridiculous number of RSS feeds I subscribe to for keeping up with news. When sifting through news every morning, my impartial feed reader provides no indication of what’s important and what isn’t. But on Twitter, if it’s hot news you’ll hear about it first. As humans are the best editors, it’s almost like a filter for what I need to know now.

Watching Twitter users on the East Coast react as the news of the Spitzer scandal got out was like being able to watch a rumor zip through a village. And like in whispered private conversations heard in a cafe or bar, you’re likely to find out about things you’d never hear about otherwise. If many people are talking about the same thing, you’ll quickly find out why.

Plus, there’s the network effect of Twitter, helping connect me to more knowledgeable people and more diverse sources of information. When I see an interesting tweet from one of my contacts to one of theirs, I often click (via the @username formula) to see who my contact is talking to. More often than not, it’s someone with similar interests who has a blog about topics I’m interested in.

And then there’s the social usefulness. Twitter seems to have been created to help people who already know each other to stay up to date on what everyone else is doing. For me Twitter is proving useful for making contacts and friends I wouldn’t have otherwise met. I’ve caught up with old co-workers from a past job, followed contacts in San Francisco and Europe with whom I’ve met up with in person, and been invited to events and to participate in interesting projects thanks to my Twitter circle of friends.

Twitter’s Greatest Hits of Usefulness

One year later, Twitter has lived up to some expectations around its usefulness and even outdone some others. For instance, when many bloggers speculated that Twitter might be employed for use in emergency situations, we couldn’t have known how it would play out in real life one just months later. Twitter users in Southern California during the wildfires used the tool to do local reporting for the benefit of neighbors. Even for people who were evacuated and didn’t have a computer, they could follow the updates on their cell phones. Twitter users were also able to broadcast live updates on the Minnesota bridge collapse just minutes after it happened and before many news outlets could get the details out to the public.

The Iowa Caucuses were also covered by citizen journalists via Twitter, filling in the gaps left by local and national coverage. It also proved to be a good way to keep up with the results on Super Tuesday. We’ve also seen mainstream media embrace Twitter and other new media tools for reporting on important, time-sensitive stories.

More recently, Twitter was at least partially responsible for the release of a young journalist jailed in Egypt, who used his cell phone to send a one word cry for help: “Arrested.”

The Twitter Time Suck

But in all its usefulness, Twitter still does live up to some of the initial takes people had one year ago. It’s still pretty useless if you don’t have friends on the service. And if you have too many contacts, it’s most definitely a time suck for those who don’t have the discipline to stay away from it. In speaking to a friend last week about his Twittering boss, he told me “I just don’t have time to Twitter. I have to work.” Indeed, in signing on to Twitter and seeing some of the most well-known names in technology shooting off an inane missive every 30 seconds, one has to wonder: Does anybody work around here?

Last year, in a post here on MediaShift about social media and privacy, I wondered if an added disadvantage to the service might be the fact that anyone who takes you seriously, such as a boss, might be put off by the fact that you are online all day updating people on the minutiae of your life. I still think this could be a problem, as could all of your other activity at all the various social networking sites.

Speaking of wasting time, a lot of time is wasted — both suffering from and talking about — Twitter’s frequent outages. A big geek event like MacWorld can take Twitter offline from conversation overdose, causing a few users to call for a decentralization of the service.

And then there’s the amount of useless conversation hurled at you. On the flip side of Twitter acting as a filter for important news, if you pay too much attention to it and attempt to follow every conversation, you’re are bound to get lost. At first I followed the path that other bloggers were saying was best for getting the most out of Twitter, and reciprocated every follow I received. For a while this was working quite well. Most of the people I was following were updating less than 10 times a day, so the conversation was easy to keep up with.

At about 100 followers/followees, I started to feel a bit overwhelmed as it began to get chaotic and I was losing track of the conversations from people I was more interested in. Now I am tempted to not follow anyone else, or be a bit more selective about whom I add, since the more conversations I follow, the more tempted I am to waste more time on the site.

Last month, blogger and cartoonist Hugh McLeod made the decision to drop out of Twitter, leaving many in the blogosphere surprised and the story was widely circulated. But McLeod’s reasoning was that it was apparently distracting him from his real work, and he needed to delete his account to avoid wasting time.

I can relate to his reasons why, but I can also see why he came back only a couple of weeks later. It’s addictive because it’s fun, and while it may not save the world, it can be useful, especially for those of us who rely on fresh information for our jobs. In the end, like other technological obsessions, it all comes down to discipline and getting the technology to work for you, not against you.

What do you think? One year later, has Twitter changed your life or invaded it? Do you think Twitter is useful or has your interest in it petered out? What do you use Twitter for or why don’t you use it? Share your thoughts in the comments below.

Jennifer Woodard Maderazo is the associate editor of PBS MediaShift. She is a writer, blogger and marketer, who covers Latino marketing at Latin-Know and Latino cultural issues at VivirLatino.

The younger generation will be our future leaders. We hear that a lot in politics, but it also applies to media companies wondering who will be leading them into a digital future. National Public Radio has two programs — Next Generation Radio (NextGen) and Intern Edition — aimed at training young folks to do quality radio reporting the NPR way. Not surprisingly, those twentysomethings have also pushed NPR further into the digital realm, creating an eye-catching blog and using Public Radio Exchange (PRX), an online marketplace for radio reports, to get wider distribution for their work.

Both training projects are run by NPR’s Doug Mitchell, a veteran at the public broadcaster of 21 years. With NextGen, Mitchell travels around the country, training college students to do radio reporting with intensive one-week courses. Recently, he was in the San Francisco Bay Area training a group of Mills College students while working in conjunction with local public radio station KALW. (A previous NextGen project with Mills and KALW can be heard here.)

For Intern Edition, Mitchell gives NPR interns a 10-week training course, in which they produce a half-hour show and various audio pieces — along with a project blog. That means that the interns do more than just report stories. They’re also shooting photos for the blog and uploading audio there. This spring the interns used great black-and-white drawings to illustrate the site, the stories and even for their own headshots. Where did the drawing design come from? Two interns, Ariel Kitch and Lindsay Trotty, spearheaded the effort.

“When we started doing this about eight years ago, it was all about the story, getting opportunities to tell stories and learn the equipment,” Mitchell said. “Now, this particular group was amazing, because in our first meeting they said, ‘Let’s come up with a theme.’…So they started pitching ideas and two of the students started talking about web comics. And they said they could draw. ‘You can draw?’ I asked. ‘Yeah, we can draw.’”

Not only does the site have a web comics feel to it, but there’s also a two-part story about Katsucon, a Japanese pop culture convention, and a story told through a comic strip. This is not your typical NPR blog.

While NPR has made an effort to do more blogging and incorporate photos and video online, its next generation of producers and reporters will be more adept at a multi-tasking, multi-platform approach to news and features. Mitchell noted that the online audience for NPR.org skews younger than the over-the-air listening audience, and that the staffers who do digital work also are younger than their radio counterparts.

Plus, Mitchell and his team are developing a plan to incorporate more online elements to both training projects. For an upcoming NextGen project at WUNC, there will be a dedicated student web producer for the first time.

PRX, an online exchange for radio producers and programmers, has played an important role in giving wider exposure to the young radio journalists. Jake Shapiro, executive editor of PRX, told me there are about 128 NextGen stories up at PRX, and they’ve been licensed more than 60 times by stations that ran the content.

“We made a concerted push to help get NextGen pieces on PRX, partly because too few of them saw the light of day on NPR programs and they are excellent pieces that stations have found lots of opportunities to air,” Shapiro said via email. “We also see great alignment between NextGen’s goals and PRX’s mission to help surface new voices and cultivate new talent…There’s a lot more that we could do together as part of a vital pipeline for new and diverse talent in public radio/media.”

The following is an edited transcript of my discussion with Mitchell and NPR NextGen technical advisor Tom Krymkowski, both in person and over email.

How do you see NextGen changing to go beyond basic radio training?

Doug Mitchell: The next step is to adjust our approach to training. Not by throwing gear at people and giving them a week or two to learn it. Rather, examine what made us popular in the first place, examine our methods, question them, and then apply some new thinking toward the creating of content and give people a chance to learn new ways of creation or invent new ways or give them opportunities to ‘fail’ and start over.

Secondly, much of this new content needs to reflect the people who we serve and do not serve, with an emphasis on the people who are not there. There are millions who are not listening/consuming because we don’t talk to them on the air. So, put new perspectives on the web. That’s programming. And from where I sit, diverse programming starts with hiring people who are different from those who do the hiring. It’s training a wide swath of people. Different educations, economies and cultures and then encouraging those who rise to the top (for a variety of reasons) to stick in the public radio system and/or NPR.

The system needs to reach beyond traditional radio.

Do you think it will be easier to train young radio journalists in doing new media than veteran journalists?

Mitchell: The Knight Foundation has people inside NPR for several weeks, training selected staff members to think differently about their jobs and then their content. This week, Kim Perry from Knight, my executive producer and managing editor and I will meet and talk about shifting the thinking as we go into the Intern Edition process [for the summer].

Kim opened my thinking a bit about where to begin changing minds and that place is [with interns]. There’s no ‘legacy’ to concern ourselves with because Intern Edition starts completely from scratch each term with a room full of strangers and me as the continuity and institutional memory. What better place to develop new thinking about media, development and consumption than where nothing truly exists. Yes, we have past programs. But, each group wants to make their own mark, distinguish themselves from previous groups. You can see that over the life of the program.

Young people with no habits should be much easier to bring into the new realities (if they are not there already) than we who have been doing it a certain way for so long. Also, I have a student working as a web producer on our WUNC project next week. I have realized that we should open a space for converged media on our NextGen projects.

How will the web producer change what you do with NextGen?

Mitchell: This is an experiment. I can see the producer picking out a couple of the stories we are working on and looking for another way to tell the same story and do it exclusively online. That’s where I am with it now.

Tell me more about what happens with Intern Edition.

Mitchell: It’s a 30 minute show, and it’s done inside the building and it’s an event — it’s not about the radio. It’s about their web presence. If you go back to spend more time on [the site], you can see that for each headshot [of an intern], if you click on them, there’s a drawing beneath it.

Now I can take this [website] to the next set of interns and say, ‘Here’s what they did.’ And they’re very competitive people. It’s their site, so they can do what they want. I got about five or six emails from NPR staff who were at the event saying, ‘I wish our shows sounded like that.’ They could, but there’s all kinds of reasons that prevent this kind of creativity from happening.

How did the web presence for the spring Intern Edition evolve?

Mitchell: It came in a concentrated fashion this time. [“All Things Considered” intern] Travis Larchuk had done some of the legwork, and got it on the content management system of NPR and it’s done on WordPress. The blog started that way, our blog editor Meghan Forbes was an intern based in L.A. She didn’t need to be in DC to manage the blog. I told her to do interviews, write things, do whatever you want the blog to be. Then the other interns will see that, and they’ll get competitive and start doing the same things, too.

There are several entries with audio on them. Not because it’s cool to have audio there, but because it enhances what they’re writing.

We had a couple things come up over who owns what. One of our interns got so excited about a story he took it to our local station, WAMU, and they aired it on their local show. I hate to sound like the Gestapo, but I told him, ‘That’s our product, you can’t just take it somewhere else and repurpose it. It’s OK, but I have to know.’ When you create something inside our building, it belongs to NPR. You always have to make sure that you can repurpose your work, and you have to figure out the financial considerations.

This shows the evolution of the program. It started out with us trying to put shows together and that could get exhausting. But with PRX, it became less about the shows and more about the sections, because you can put segments up on PRX. Radio stations mainly download pieces and stations make decisions on whether those pieces make it into their own shows.

Tell me more about how PRX has helped you and the trainees.

Mitchell: When we were in Austin at KUT…they packaged a program together on these pieces [done by NextGen], and the theme was ‘the next generation,’ here’s what the next generation is doing. They put it on their HD Radio channel and on their website and I put up three pieces on PRX, and one of them already got rebroadcast on a station in New York.

PRX has been great because I’ve had pieces run in many places around the country, where I would have never got them on before. [Station managers] are looking through PRX and seeing NPR so that’s giving the students a leg up.

So web training is not something that’s been part of your formal training?

Tom Krymkowski: Not yet. Right now, we’re drawing on the experience of people who have been [in radio] for awhile. With newer media, there’s a smaller group of people who can offer that. And in a short time frame, I believe students are going to need to learn about that side of it, but I don’t think one week is enough to introduce that to them. They need to learn reporting and get that covered. So if we could do another week, we could say, ‘You’ve got your work done, now let’s learn what to do next with it.’

I have a friend who’s a reporter here in the Bay Area, and she’s also a photographer for AFP and does convergent media, and we talk about the practicalities of reporting. How do you write about something while supplying photos while you’re Twittering and blogging? How do you file your photos? There are physical limitations to what you can do with the technology now. Until we have that core group of people who have learned [convergent media], then you’re not at the same level with writing, recording, mixing — that side of the storytelling process.

Mitchell: We are very good at what we know. We’re in the process of figuring out what we don’t know, learning it and then teaching it.

Do you sometimes feel that the NextGen students or NPR interns are more adept at new media than the other people working at NPR?

Mitchell: I sit where the new media NPR staffers are, and the average age is well under 40, and you go downstairs and the age goes up — for the listenership, too. The people we [train] are like my daughter, doing 10 things at the same time. I don’t know how she gets straight A’s doing all that stuff at the same time. But she can talk on the phone, do instant messaging, be online all at the same time and that’s the way it is for her. She doesn’t think anything of it. I’m the one who’s fascinated.

For somebody who is a millennial, these are the people who will run media in the future. We have to make sure to hand off what we’re doing to someone else. Think qualitatively. Is the photo taken well? Is the audio done well? If you take a very fundamental approach, get the basics right, then you can put it wherever you want.

Krymkowski: The rate of change is changing faster. People who have been doing this the longest, they’re used to a certain process and approach. They usually don’t take the next step to ask, ‘Where is this going?’ So when we do these projects, we try not to be stuck. We’re keeping each other up to speed on where this is all going. I work freelance on other projects, because you can’t learn it all in one place, in one institution. I work in other mediums other than audio. There are things you can bring over from other mediums.

When learning or teaching convergent media, I always stress that you have to get the basics down…If I was in charge of teaching convergence radio, I would want to teach the basic audio concepts, the basic photography concepts, the basics — and then take it to the next level.

*****

What do you think about NPR’s programs to train young radio journalists? How do you think they should incorporate multimedia and online journalism into their training? Share your thoughts in the comments below.

What a weird way for this entire drama to end — if it is indeed over. Most people expect this to be a very bad week for Yahoo on Wall Street, with Silicon Alley Insider’s Henry Blodget predicting Yahoo’s stock will “drop at least to the low 20s.”

That makes sense. But what about in the long haul? Everyone believes Yahoo will need to combine with AOL or MySpace or Facebook or someone somewhere. But what if Microsoft’s takeover attempt — especially now that it failed — has actually woken up Yahoo after years of slumber at the wheel of the top-trafficked web network? What if this was the best thing that could have happened to it?

Almost no one has faith that Yahoo with its current leadership in the current competitive landscape (with Google crushing all comers) can actually turn itself around on its own. And why not? Yes, it has squandered its brand, reputation and huge popularity by moving too slow or awkwardly in social networking and video, and not integrating its new purchases such as Flickr and del.icio.us very well.

But Yahoo at least has done some soul searching and found the courage to stand up to Microsoft and CEO Steve Ballmer, and start shaking off the cobwebs and fight. There are a few signs, albeit not revolutionary ones, that the company can chart a new course that gives it some momentum:

> The move to outsource some of its search ads to Google shows that it can work with rivals in a time of distress. Remember that Microsoft threw a lifeline to Apple Computer, helping by investing in the company when it was in the doldrums in 1997.

> The same is true about Yahoo talking to others such as AOL and News Corp. Even if they didn’t — or don’t — make a deal with them, at least Yahoo is out exploring the marketplace. These talks might lead to better alliances or other cooperative deals outside of mergers.

> Yahoo has finally embraced a more open strategy to its platforms. At the recent Web 2.0 conference, Yahoo CTO Ari Balogh said that “Yahoo Open Strategy” would mean outside developers could play more in Yahoo’s sandbox, and Yahoo planned to unify all the profiles for users of all its various properties.

> Yahoo has improved its mobile offering, adding voice search to its OneSearch 2.0 features. While Yahoo has made inroads in mobile content with 29 deals with cell carriers, it could still be undermined by Google’s Android operating system for cell phones.

> Yahoo didn’t buy Facebook for a gazillion dollars. While the Yahoo considered the purchase a year or two ago, and most people slammed them for not pulling the trigger, the current trouble News Corp. is facing with MySpace could have happened with Facebook in Yahoo’s hands. Spend a ton of money and then see a tiny stream of revenues.

> Yahoo launched new labs in India and Israel. Not a bad move if you want to harness the intelligence of programmers and researchers in tech-savvy places abroad.

> Yahoo finally apologized for its terrible behavior overseas in helping Chinese authorities identify dissidents and eventually jail them. This has been a longstanding problem that Yahoo stonewalled on and wouldn’t even discuss for years.

OK, these are not huge, earth-shattering moves. But is that really what’s necessary to turn the tanker around? Can’t the company just decide to focus like a laser on mobile, aggregation, social media and new forms of advertising and succeed there? Then, perhaps, build on that and consider what they might add through mergers or buyouts that fits the focused strategy.

It’s interesting to take a gander at Yahoo’s Press Room to see what it trumpets as “Our Purpose”:

Powering communities to create indispensible experiences, built on trust.

If the company can just deliver on two of those promises — building communities and trust — it will be halfway home.

What do you think? Did Yahoo make a mistake by pushing Microsoft away? Do you think it can turn itself around or should it merge with another company? Share your thoughts in the comments below.

But the conference I attended the last couple days, NewsTools2008: Journalism That Matters, is trying to be part of the solution. Put on by Bill Densmore, who runs the Media Giraffe Project at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, the goal of NewsTools2008 was to bring together journalists, web developers, entrepreneurs, academics and students to discuss technology’s disruption of journalism — and collaborate on ways to harness it for good.

Initially, I was hoping to live-blog the conference for MediaShift, but a couple things changed my mind on that: 1) I could not get Internet access at the conference, despite it being at Yahoo’s Sunnyvale, Calif., headquarters; 2) there were so many breakout sessions it was impossible to cover them all. Instead, I think it’s worth giving you an overview of my experience after the fact. (Note: The conference continues today, Drupal Day, and on Saturday, but I won’t be able to attend. There’s a live video stream here.)

Usually, I go to conferences like this as a reporter/blogger, hoping to sum up what people say, do a few interviews and come up with more story ideas. But this time, I shifted gears and found myself actually participating in the conference as someone who wanted to learn more. The high quality of the attendees and the almost spontaneous ways that discussions took place made it much more valuable than the usual four-people-pontificate-from-a-dais format of most conferences.

Let me explain. I had been at “unconferences” before such as BloggerCon, where the group discusses things and there is one moderator for the discussion. However, NewsTools2008 took on the BarCamp format for discussion, allowing any participant to create their own discussion topic, post it on a whiteboard, and then have a group of people stop by to chat. There were anywhere from 15 to 20 discussions going on throughout the day, on topics ranging from “What tools or technology are getting in your way?” to “I have a great idea. How do I fund it?”

Turning Around Early Expectations

On Wednesday night, the conference tone was set with a chat by Dan Gillmor of Arizona State University, Mary Hodder of Dabble, and Bill Gannon of LucasFilm. Hodder talked about the importance of “metadata” (descriptions of content) and “microformats” (open formats of our personal data so that any software can read it). Gannon praised Yahoo News, where he used to work, saying that “aggregation is creation” and that everyone should be linking and doing aggregation — even original news sources.

Then, with 60 second intros, people jumped up to announce the 10 topics for breakout sessions that evening. It was very difficult to follow who they were and what they were going to discuss. Even titles such as “data mashups and portability” were hard to comprehend — although that was the one that I attended. It was a little hectic and rapid-fire.

That night over drinks with a few attendees, I looked at the schedule for the next day. There was a three-hour slot with this vague description of what was happening: “Throughout the day, session topics will begin and end at times established by the convenors.” Huh? I wondered whether the conference was too technical, and too difficult for me to follow as a reporter or live-blogger.

But what other people told me was interesting. If there was an open slot on the schedule, I (or anyone) could simply post a discussion topic and then convene with other people to discuss it. Some startups decided to demo their sites. Others wanted to talk about burning topics. The point being: You couldn’t really complain about this type of unconference because you are the one in charge of its content.

On Thursday, the setup was a bit more organized, with topics posted on a huge whiteboard so you could find the topic you liked, and then find where they were meeting. I decided to skip doing any live-blogging, and not be my usual voyeur at this conference. Instead, I followed my own interests and went to sessions that might help me improve MediaShift and Idea Lab.

The first session I attended was called “Building the Audience,” focused on how sites can bring more traffic, add conversation and build a loyal community. The mix of people was great, with a few site publishers, someone from Yahoo and another from DailyMe, a personalized news aggregator.

Among the advice given for building audience:

> Use social media buttons on your site, but also seed Digg with suggestions.

> Syndicate your content outside of your site. Get it out on RSS, widgets, badges — let people run headlines from your site on their site.

> If you do an audio or video podcast, break it up into 5 minute chunks, and you’ll get people to consume much more content.

> Include text descriptions of what’s in a video or audio piece.

> If you want to reach a larger audience, try out new marketing messages that resonate with the new audience — without alienating your current base.

Later, I attended a session called “Student Stringers” about having students help with sites as freelancers or interns. That’s something I’m considering at MediaShift. That group included professors, media outlets that had intern programs, as well as three students. The discussion was led by Michael Melillo, CEO of SocialChord, a site that’s trying to set up social networks for towns.

Melillo wanted to have a group of local high school and college students in New Jersey do a collaborative news story on the way their town was being gentrified. There was an issue around ethics that came up a few times: Shouldn’t the students be paid fairly for their work?

The students themselves had this to say about what internships they would want to take on: The jobs had to provide exposure, or decent pay, or mentoring by helping them learn more. One exception was if the project was something aligned with the student’s passion — then students would be more than willing to give their time without pay.

One student was more focused on technology than journalism, and said passion was not a driving factor for him. He was more interested in learning a new skill or being challenged by a tech project — not just doing data entry or other grunt work. Of course, if a big media organization was the one calling on them, they would be open to doing just about anything to have that outlet’s name on their resume.

*****

Later in the afternoon, I spent some time out in the hallway chatting with people and met Scott Karp from Publish2, someone I had corresponded with but hadn’t seen in person. I had that experience multiple times at the conference, especially with the high number of Idea Lab bloggers who were there. Karp told me that he was just sitting out in the hallway lounge area on his computer, and a different group of people would stop by and start discussing things. He was running his own virtual discussion group with a rotating cast of participants.

I think that was the strongest point of NewsTools2008: If you can get a great group of people to attend a conference, and then let them discuss matter that they think are important, you can satisfy a lot more people. I noticed that the discussion groups were pretty good about allowing everyone to bring up their own situations and issues, with a very collaborative feel for solutions.

I often prefer the unconference style to the more formal conference, and this newer way of doing discussions was something I really enjoyed, especially the way it tended to include people rather than exclude them. And when you have a lot of smart people in a room, it’s better to harness all their intelligence than cede it to a select few who end up hogging the microphones.

What do you think? Did you attend NewsTools2008 or watch the streaming video online? What were some of its strengths and weaknesses? How do you think tech folks and journalists should collaborate? Share your thoughts in the comments below.

Photo of sign by Wayne MacPhail via Flickr. Other photos by Mark Glaser.

With search engines ranking as a top traffic driver for many blogs and content sites, optimizing a site for search engine exposure is an increasingly critical component of any online marketing effort. Search engine optimization, or “SEO,” means using technical and not-so-technical techniques to make sure that people searching for topics you write about will find your site.

Over the next few months, I’ll be redesigning MediaShift in conjunction with adding new video and audio features. One of my goals for the redesign is, not surprisingly, to increase traffic; and with nearly 50% of MediaShift traffic coming from Google, getting more traffic means doing more SEO.

So I did some online research and contacted Aaron Wall, a young SEO expert who wrote SEO Book and consults for websites that want to improve their search optimization. Plus, I queried Poynter’s Online News email discussion list, and received some great tips from other site managers.

Wall agreed to give me advice on how I could improve the SEO for MediaShift, and I’ve distilled those tips into some basics that are relevant to any content site that wants more search engine traffic. There are a few caveats, however. As Wall told me, MediaShift is not typical of new sites or blogs because it already has a strong PageRank (authority) with Google, and has built up “social trust” by getting so many links from other sites. Many sites just starting up would have to focus more than I do on getting incoming links, which is how Google ranks sites (more inbound links = more authority).

Another caveat: I noticed that SEO experts often recommend certain writing styles including particular ways of writing headlines and captions. I’d personally caution against writing for search engines at the expense of writing for people, since people are the real reason you are doing what you do, and they are more apt to return and become loyal readers if the writing suits them. Of course, different publishers have different goals for running their site, so they should consider balancing business and advertising needs with keeping readers happy.

Finally, it’s important that in seeking increased traffic, you don’t go overboard with SEO-motivated site changes: For example, if you create dummy pages and links just to increase your site’s exposure for a particular keyword, Google will catch on and lower your ranking.

With these caveats in mind, here are nine SEO tips to consider:

Tips on Improving SEO

1. Get inbound links and link out as well.
As I mentioned above, Google ranks your site according to the amount of inbound links it has from other sites — and gives more weight to links from other authoritative sites. I don’t have as much of a problem with this at MediaShift, but it is important for new blogs or news sites.

“One of the things that drives Google rank is links, both internal and external,” said Kevin Anderson, blogs editor at the Guardian. “Blogging is all about linking, although any good web journalism should be. When I’m being honest, as a journalist and blogger, I’ll admit that blogs have higher Google rank than sites with similar traffic based on the high level of linking…It’s one of those slightly counter-intuitive things that traditional journalists and media managers don’t seem to understand. Linking is not only good web journalism, it’s also good for SEO, hence site visibility.”

Terry Heaton, senior vice president of AR&D, notes that internally linking is also important, and is something the top newspaper sites do well.

“The main reason Wikipedia links always appear near the top in Google is because their Google Juice is rich with links from and to themselves,” Heaton said. “The ‘weight’ of a link is measured, in part, by the source. Wikipedia gets a ton of traffic, so a link from them is ‘worth’ far more than a link from, say, any TV station in the country. Hence, Google ‘sees’ the links and values them accordingly, which raises Wikipedia’s search results…Internal linking, therefore, always reaps SEO rewards. Moreover, the reason we link out, is to encourage linking in. Again, we want and need links. It’s job one.”

2. Headlines and title tags should have key words up front.
As you consider SEO for your site, think about the important “key words” that people might search for in Google that would bring up your site. For MediaShift, those key words might include: blogs, podcasts, wikis, online advertising, newspapers, TV, and online video. And each blog post has its own key words that describe the content to people.

But I often fail to put the key words up front. For instance, in a recent post about The Smoking Gun, my headline was: “Public Documents + Shoe Leather Reporting = The Smoking Gun’s Staying Power.” I noticed that when CyberJournalist.net linked to my blog post, they headlined their post, “Smoking Gun: Still hot after 11 years.” That headline gets the key words “Smoking Gun” up front much better than mine. The same goes for “title tags,” the code in web pages that brings up titles at the top of your web browser.

“Search engines tend to put more weight on key words earlier in the page title,” Wall said. Wall also recommended having headlines in MediaShift link to the “permalink” of the post, something I had eliminated when I had trouble getting indexed on Google News. One fallout of having these key word-filled headlines is that you can’t be as creative as tabloid newspapers can be. The Guardian recently lamented the loss of tabloid headlines in the move to an online environment heavy on SEO.

3. Web addresses for your blog posts or articles should include key words.
Similarly, it’s important that the URL for each story contains the key words from your headline and even the category for the story. So if you have a sports story titled “Giants Beat Rockies on Good Pitching” your URL should likely look something like this:

http://www.[site name].com/sports/giants_beat_rockies_on_good_pitching324.html

Dutch SEO expert Joost de Valk wrote up a great overview of SEO for newspaper sites, and he noted that Google News requires that article URLs include at least three digits. As for putting key words into URLs, de Valk says, “Seriously, it helps too much.”

4. Page descriptions should be unique or eliminated.
Each web page has a “meta-description” tag in its code, and search engines sometimes use that description as the blurb that runs under the link to your site in search results. So when I do a search for “smoking gun mediashift” on Google, I get the following result at the top:

The problem is that all my meta-descriptions are the same for all my site pages, a generic explanation: “MediaShift is a weblog that tracks the way the Internet and technology are reshaping the mediasphere, with a focus on how blogs, podcasts, wikis, and citizen media are changing culture and society.” That description often comes up in Google searches, but that means there’s less content that’s relevant to the search. In other words, the blurb below the link is more about my blog in general than about Smoking Gun.

“If you grab the first sentence [of your story] or use the same meta-description on every page, it’s nowhere near as relevant as the description that Google can pull itself from your site,” Wall said. “So if your description is the same on all the pages, you are better off removing it and letting Google auto-generate snippets. They will anyway, but anytime they don’t, your listing would look less relevant than your competitor’s.”

The High Rankings blog offers a helpful rundown of the various ways in which search engine results will display blurbs for your site.

5. Highlight your best content on every page.
One feature that is common on major news sites is a list of “Most Popular Stories” or “Most Emailed Stories.” On MediaShift, I have a set of “Buzzworthy Posts & Comments” that highlight the best of the blog over recent weeks. I also have a Top 5 that links out to stories and happenings on outside sites.

Wall believes that I should offer up a “Best of MediaShift” with a list of the Top 10 best blog posts of all time. Having that list in a prominent place on my site — on all pages — would bring more traffic (and inbound links) to MediaShift’s best content, and serve as an entree into the site for people who just came to read one post.

“Many readers bounce [leave the site] after reading only one post,” Wall said. “If you make it easy for them to find some of your best work then they may stick around and read more. Some will subscribe to your blog feed if they find your content compelling enough.”

6. Create theme or category pages, and run more special series.
SEO experts say that it’s a good idea to have special topic pages that aggregate all your posts on one page. That might explain the thinking behind the move to have Times Topics at the New York Times, aggregating all the newspaper stories, blog posts, multimedia and more on each topic.

While I do have pages on MediaShift by category of posts, those pages could do a better job of capturing search engine traffic, according to Wall. He told me that I should include explanatory text on those pages; this would help both search engines and human readers more easily navigate MediaShift’s offerings.

Wall also suggested more “theme weeks” during which I post various reports on one topic. That’s something I’ve done in coverage of conferences; I’ve also had a Wikipedia Week and Twitter Week. While it’s not something I should do every week, doing it on important topics could build my authority on that subject and improve my ranking in search results related to those key words. Wall also recommends sending out notices to bloggers that specialize in those subjects to get more inbound links from them.

7. Limit tags and categories to the most important ones.
Another issue I have on MediaShift is a plethora of categories for blog posts. The list on the lower left navigation bar is very long. Wall suggests highlighting only the most important categories and putting the rest on another page, with a link to “See More Categories.” The same goes for tags, which I don’t use on MediaShift but do use on Idea Lab. Too many tags causes there to be links that aren’t very useful. It’s better to limit tags to the most important key words on the subject.

Plus, Wall believes I should use the “rel=nofollow” code to tell search engines not to count links to pages without improtant content for search engines, such as the MediaShift Feedback page or the PBS Privacy Policy. This strategy would put more “link equity” in my links to content pages, in turn strengthening MediaShift’s association in search engines with the topics those pages cover

8. Create a Google News sitemap and optimize images.
Google recommends that publishers submit special “sitemaps” to help the search engine to index your pages. Damon Kiesow, online managing editor for the Nashua Telegraph, explains:

“Sitemaps are dynamic XML files (more or less a custom RSS feed) that you submit to Google and are used by their spider to index your content,” he told me via email. “The XML files are set to a Google specification — and they usually poll ours once or twice daily. They have web, news and mobile sitemaps — all of which are meant to help their spiders find your most recent and relevant content.”

Along with sitemaps, it also helps to get your images onto Google News. Lisa Barone, a consultant at Bruce Clay, explains how to optimize your images. Among her tips: Use a descriptive filename for your photos; keep the file name path to the photo simple; and provide a distinct URL for each photo (like this).

9. Get into offline conversations as well as online ones.
Sometimes we get tunnel-vision when trying to promote our blogs and sites online, and believe the only way to get attention is via emails, Twitter, Facebook and other online hangouts. But Wall notes that networking in real life can help bring attention to your content online.

“Mingle offline. Many of the link-based relationships that occur online are built through offline networking,” he said. “One of the most effective ways to build online authority is to integrate yourself into the conversation wherever it occurs offline.”

As I begin work on revamping MediaShift, I will try to address some of these tips; I’ll be sure to report back on what works and what doesn’t — right here on the blog.

What advice do you have for boosting search engine optimization? What tricks have worked for you? Or do you believe that optimization isn’t worth the hassle? Share your thoughts in the comments below.

I will try to bring up that point when I am a questioner on the web panel.

The first two panels, newspapers and broadcast, are now doing a Q&A with the audience. I jumped in with the first question: How much are you willing to do crowdsourcing and involve the audience in your investigative work?

Bill Keller, NY Times: We have done some of that and I’m sure we’ll do more. When Elizabeth Edwards was diagnosed with cancer, we had so many heartfelt, amazing comments online, that we did a story the next day based on their comments. Our story wouldn’t have been as good without those comments. I think we’re going to do more of that because we’re lucky, our audience is very smart.

Len Downie, Washington Post: We have done some polling on readers, and they sometimes allow us to contact them. It helps us decide on stories that are interesting to people, using that polling. I don’t know if you consider that crowdsourcing but we are doing some of that.

David Fanning, PBS Frontline: When we do a follow-up to the film, “Growing Up Online,” we are going to use the web to get lots of input for the follow-up to that. It makes sense for us to go online to get that input.

Q: Why do mainstream newsrooms not hire many minorities, I don’t see that many of them here.

Laurie Hays, WSJ: What do you suggest we do in order to get minorities?

Questioner: You could send minorities out to schools so that students see that minorities can get jobs. It would help break down the walls.

Brian Ross, ABC: We have hired some minorities into our investigative unit, and it has helped get us access to stories we wouldn’t have had previously. So it is a good thing to have minorities on our staff.

Q: Would you consider doing work with some non-profits who are doing investigative work? Partnering with them?

Bill Keller, NY Times: When I first heard about ProPublica, I was actually open to working with them. I think it depends if I can trust the person doing the work, and I could trust them, I know them. We would not want it to replace what we’re doing. But there are advantages to doing the work at big news organizations, because you are in touch with beat reporters who can help spark new stories, plus you have the backing and resources of a big organization and its legal help.

Jeff Fager, CBS: It works really well if you’re collaborating at an early stage. We had a great collaboration with the Washington Post in the fall, and it made all the difference.

Len Downie: I think the challenge for the non-profits is how can you get the partners involved at an early stage. We would ask, “Who are your sources? What is their credibility?” The challenge is seeing how those relationships are shaped that way.

Q: I am a lawyer, and I’m concerned about the Wall Street Journal’s direction and the recent takeover by Rupert Murdoch. I heard he doesn’t like stories that jump from page one. How will that square with long investigative reports?

Laurie Hays, WSJ: We do have a tradition of running fairly manageable, tight stories that tell a great deal. We have run recently a very long investigative piece on Merrill Lynch on how they doubled down in this mortgage crisis and got themselves in trouble, and it was very well received. Not all great journalism has to be long. Another story broken that week was about manipulation by London banks, and it was a 1,000 word story and it had tremendous impact and led to investigative reports. Not all hard-hitting journalism has to be long or take forever to get done.

The Journal is in transition, so keep watching.

The Web Panel

Last panel for today (whew) is the web panel, where I will be questioning panelists and trying to live blog and Twitter. The panelists are: Paul Grabowicz (UC Berkeley and Idea Lab), Jonathan Landman (NY Times), Sharon Tiller (PBS Frontline/World), and Jeff Leen (Washington Post).

Steve Talbot of Frontline is the moderator.

Talbot anecdote: You are mid career journalists and probably worried about your future. The technology drives so much of this. Whether we like it or not, we are in a digital age. If there’s a future, it will be online. My dad went off to join a circus as a magician’s assistant, and he traveled doing tent shows in the ’20s. But they were driven out of business by the advent of movies.

Warner Brothers were desperate for actors who could talk, for the new medium. So then he had a long career there. But then when Hollywood had its own depression in the ’50s, he went into a new medium in television and had a long career in there. Later in life, he went into theater when there was a revival for the theater. But none of those mediums went away. The world is changing and you can’t get in the way of technology.

Q: What can you do online that you can’t do in other mediums.

Paul Grabowicz, UC Berkeley: I think the Internet is a brand new medium, and we’re not pushing it far enough or fast enough. We’re seeing decimation on the regional front. What we see online is someone taking the print story or broadcast story, and put that online, and put up an extra video with a boring narration. That’s what we view as multimedia.

On the Internet, we have to think about breaking the story up, because people want to have that choice. With investigative reports, they usually end, but online, they go on and should have context — with other stories, whatever. Communities, we need to do this ahead of time. You can get the community engaged beforehand even telling them just the general topic of the story. What we need to think of databases as a way to make sense of the data, and give them contexts.

We also need to think about games, you might think it’s heresy. But when I hear about how reporters come up with a story, we never tell that to readers. So we could construct that as a game, and let people follow along on how the story was made.

Jonathan Landman, NY Times: Things are going well online. There are lots of opportunities and places I’d like to see us go. We need to go beyond getting tips from people online. We can do it in a more focused way, get networks of people who know something about a subject. it mimics the way a beat reporter gets sources.

Sharon Tiller, Frontline: All of our experimentation is going onto the web. So everything becomes an experimental part of our series. It’s very hard to do investigative reporting, to have experience with it. So we realized we needed partners and are doing work with the Center for Investigative Reporting.

Jeff Leen, Washington Post: A brief history of investigative reporting at the Post on the web. I’m a dinosaur who wants to crash onto the web. Eight years ago we wanted to do a collaboration with NBC News. I called Lowell Bergman to find out about it, and he said, “Why are you worried about that? You’ll be broadcasting with Washington Post TV on the web in a few years.”

Another idea came to me about games. I was investigating a murder at Starbucks and it was an 18-month hunt for the killer, and I got tapes from the interrogations, and thought I could almost do a game with that material. But I pulled back from it by the editor who didn’t want to lose it from the magazine for the web.

When we were doing the Citizen K Street series, we wanted to do it on the web because we had unlimited space. We could do 260 parts! That is the opportunity and the challenge. Next time, we hope we get more hits. We also have an investigative blog, and are trying to have a conversation with the reader. What online lacks is its Woodward and Bernstein, a breakthrough project.

Q: What about Wikileaks?

Jeff Leen: It doesn’t compare. Josh Marshall, a lot of what he did was aggregation, just too many blog posts to get through it. Josh describes it as an omniscient way of looking at things. We are thinking about doing that at the Post, but everything requires tremendous resources. We added a blog without adding staff, which is very hard to do.

David Washburn: My question is so much of what works online, citizen journalists, crowdsourcing, runs counter to what our grizzled editors say. Keep your stories to yourself. Are we rushing too much to go on the web?

Jonathan Landman, NY Times: I’m all about thinking things through. If you do, you can mobilize your readers, and think about how you do it, but do it in a way that doesn’t just throw things out there. Wikileaks is a good example of that. Our job is to add value. I don’t think these are things to consider.

Jeff Leen: I think the jury is still out about crowdsourcing, I still don’t see the Pentagon Papers. If it was the be all end all, we would all be doing it. Everyone talks about the Ft. Myers sewer project, and I can see that, but I don’t know if that can be done on bigger projects.

[UPDATE: See NYU’s Jay Rosen comment responding to Jeff Leen in the update appended below.]

Paul Grabowicz: An investigative piece can be broken into pieces, with links to more information online. You can do much more

Jonathan Landman: It’s easy to get carried away with these things. And I usually waggle my finger at everyone in the newsroom about digital things. If you are somewhere interviewing someone, and you have a videocamera, why not do that. It’s simple.

Steve Talbot: Yes, people complain about having to do video, photos, audio, but it’s very rare that someone can do a one-man band. It takes a special skill to do video, and there’s a lot of bad video online.

Sharon Tiller: Everyone coming out of Berkeley has at least two skills. They are video reporters, or most of our broadcast stories are done by two people — one reporter and one video producer.

Q: Can the web bring in money for your operations?

Jonathan Landman: Well yes, it’s making money for us, but you have to be careful with that because the costs are still going to the newspaper. And it’s not self-sustaining, it’s not even close.

Paul Grabowicz: It’s very troubling, looking at the way newspaper companies are not making as much money. The nationals are not looking as bad. But in the regional metros, they are getting killed. And E&P had a view of time spent on newspaper sites and they were largely flat or down.

Landman: I would caution about that metric, because if someone is searching and searching on a site, they might spend more time, but it’s not a good experience. So measurement is still in its very early stages, it is very primitive.

Steve Talbot: This has been a surprisingly good discussion. [audience laughs]

*****

Unfortunately, on Day 2 of the conference (really just a half day with one panel), I wouldn’t get online to live blog. However, I did manage to send a lot of micro-blog posts to Twitter. You can check them out here (anything with an April 27 date on it).

This panel was about the non-profit model for investigative journalism, and the main attraction was Paul Steiger, formerly of the Wall Street Journal, who now has raised $10 million to start ProPublica. The non-profit will have a newsroom of reporters who will produce material that will be initially given away to big newspapers and other outlets with a goal of getting the widest distribution possible.

Lowell Bergman, the ringleader of the conference, was the moderator of the panel. He noted that one of the biggest things to come out of the conference was both the New York Times and Washington Post publicly promising to work more collaboratively with each other and competitors. In other words, if a Times piece follows on original reporting from the Post, it would mention the other work (maybe even link to it online?) and build on it.

This type of collaboration happens all the time online among bloggers, so it’s nice to see that mentality seep into mainstream media work.

Overall, I thought the conference included some of the leading lights in investigative journalism, both editors and reporters and non-profits. Having Google CEO Eric Schmidt and Craigslist founder Craig Newmark there as audience members helped lend even more star power to the gathering.

Could the group have used a bit more new thinking from innovators who are on the edges, independent and doing things differently than the big boys? Definitely. As Bergman told me during the dinner on Saturday, “I had asked Josh Marshall [of TalkingPointsMemo] to join us, but he was about to have a baby — or at least his wife was — so he couldn’t come.” Maybe next time they can rectify that missing element.

UPDATE: I heard from NYU’s Jay Rosen via email, and he responded to Jeff Leen’s comment about crowdsourcing:

So crowdsourcing isn’t the Pentagon Papers. But who said it was? Is that really an attempt to understand something? It seems to me an attempt to ward something off. Even more odd is, “If it was the be all end all, we would all be doing it.” Who said crowdsourcing is the “be all and end all?” Who even suggested it?

No one really suggested it. I think it was a way of dismissing crowdsourcing, similar to the way he dismissed TalkingPointsMemo as not really doing investigative journalism. I think Leen and others would prefer things to be the way they always were. Anything new and different is often looked at as being “not good enough” and not matching a standard from the past. Why can’t new forms of journalism, like crowdsourcing, ciitizen journalism, and the like, exist alongside traditional methods? Can’t both work and be valid?

BERKELEY, CA — I am blogging live from the conference, “Crisis in News: Symposium on Investgative Reporting,” at UC Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism. It is perhaps the most beautiful day outside here, with glorious blue skies, but investigative journalists are like vampires, hiding out in dark spaces when it’s warm and sunny outside. So here we are in an auditorium talking about the very serious subject of what’s going to happen to investigative journalism with newspapers cutting so many jobs.

The first panel is about newspapers and print, and includes some heavyweights: Bill Keller, New York Times executive editor; Len Downie, Washington Post executive editor; Laurie Hays, deputy managing editor at the Wall Street Journal; David Boardman, executive editor at the Seattle Times; and Clara Jeffery, co-editor of Mother Jones. Here are some highlights from the panel:

Bill Keller: There aren’t that many people doing exclusive web stuff, there’s Josh Marshall and Smoking Gun, but you need lawyers to help you. There can be great reporting done by one great reporter on a mission. I don’t see it as a threat I see it as a good thing. We will treat them as partners.

Larie Hays, WSJ: Our new owners are intensely interested in beating the sites and doing investigative stories. The investigative things are great, because stories can go on the Internet and newspapers don’t have to wait for the presses to run.

Len Downie: We’re getting much better at linking to outside sources, including competitors as well.

Bill Keller: We’ve come to take journalism schools more seriously. [audience laughs] No, we used to hire people according to clips and the academic background isn’t as important. I didn’t go to journalism school, there used to be a grizzled editor who would help young reporters figure it out, but those grizzled editors are gone now so the schools are more important.

Clara Jeffery, Mother Jones: There used to be more beginning positions at newspapers and smaller magazines have scaled down their staff jobs. All these places that feed the Pulitzer winners at bigger papers — those sources are drying up, and I find that worrisome.

Q: How willing are people on the Internet to read long-form 7000 word pieces? How do we do these long features?

Len Downie: Pew found that people will follow to the end of stories online. The story has to be compelling enough to get people to keep going, and we found that was the case with Walter Reed. We did a 27-part series on washingtonpost.com about how a lobbying firm operates. It wasn’t our most read piece on the web, but in the community of lobbyists it was intensely read, and people argued about them in comments. We have another experiment like that coming that will be even more read.

You can do other things on the web, we did a series on IEDs, and it included video interviews with soldiers in Iraq, very dramatic, how you approach buildings and not get blown up.

David Boardroom, Seattle Times: I think longer stories actually are better in print. We want people to read the story in print and then to go online to the web to read more, to read the whole thing.

Len Downie: Getting people to go back and forth between the mediums is hard to do. We have a lot of print-only readers who resent it when we send them to the web. But we do have the opportunity to get web readers to start reading print again.

Q: Investigative reporters have to be very enterprising. What happens when they spend a lot of time on something that doesn’t pan out. Can that continue in this day and age?

Bill Keller: It is continuing. People who do this drill a lot of dry holes. The economic forces and dismissive attitudes about attention spans of American readers, and they hit you saying ‘Can we afford to have that staff?’

Len Downie: It is a problem now because you need to figure out whether to keep going on a story or not. This tension was always there. I remember as a young investigative reporter in the ’60s I had to convince my editor to keep going on something.

David Boardroom: It does require us as the leaders of newsrooms to impose more discipline. We have to pick our spots. We have a relatively small group of people who specialize in this and we make a discipline of picking the right stories.

Clara Jeffery: We wanted to do 24/7 coverage on the web, but you might go down rabbit holes and the story might not materialize, and that was a crucial decision for us adding more staff reporters.

*****

Interestingly, the big newspaper editors (NYT, WaPo, WSJ) didn’t seem to think there was much of a crisis in investigative journalism at newspapers — at least in their houses. I’m not going to make it a drinking game, but Keller did throw out the first comment about there not being very much investigative journalism online. He must have missed my post yesterday with the big honking list of what’s happened online.

Again, I’ll be one of the questioners for the web panel here, so if you have burning questions to ask, I will pass them on the panel. Drop the question in the comments below.

Broadcasting Panel

Up next: Broadcasting Panel, with Jeff Fager of “60 Minutes”; David Fanning of PBS Frontline; Brian Ross of ABC News; Daniel Zwerdling of NPR; and Anna Werner of KPIX in San Francisco.

Intro for David Fanning: He won 41 Emmys among other awards. Wow.

Google CEO Eric Schmidt is in the house? Why? He was out in the hallway talking to Bill Keller of the New York Times, bad-mouthing Microsoft, from what I overheard (and Twittered as well). I wonder if Schmidt is hoping that by being friendly with investigative types they won’t go after Google? Hmmm.

Now the Broadcast Panel:

Q: We’ve all heard the woes of investigative reporting. What is the biggest hurdle? Financial? Political?

Jeff Fager, CBS: It’s amazing how many less people are doing this at other networks. There’s Brian Ross at ABC and I don’t know who’s doing it at NBC. It’s very expensive and very hard. It takes a long time and there’s not a lot of patience or money in TV news. It’s amazing how much celebrity and crime has become part of the news. We are doing less celebrity coverage now [at “60 Minutes”] because it’s being done everywhere else. A lot of broadcast investigative reporting, if it isn’t done well, it doesn’t keep the viewers. I think the risk involved is huge as well. Every network has been hit with a mistake.

It’s amazing what happened with Lowell Bergman at CBS [with the tobacco report being smothered]. I haven’t had that experience at CBS.

Brian Ross, ABC: The biggest obstacle for me is legal. The investigative reporting is what sets us apart and gives us value.

Daniel Zwerdling: Investigative reporting has not been a big part of NPR, but my bosses, I’m happy to say, now want to do more investigative reporting. So far it’s been the exception to the rule. I was often in my cubicle, going off doing my projects, but there’s been pressure for me to fill the airwaves. When I was gone for a month, there was pressure building for me. Then the VP of news said he was getting rid of my position about 5 years ago, and they wanted to become the CNN of radio.

There was a staff rebellion. They hired a new VP of news, and then he got fired, and finally, for the first time, my boss, Ellen Weiss, told me I could take off for five months. And when the stories came out, they used them to make money, it was a profit-making venture. Oh, I forgot! And then Joan Kroc gave us a quarter of a billion dollars. [audience laughs] We’re taking baby steps, but it’s an exciting time at NPR.

It was a cultural and financial problem at NPR.

David Fanning: The difficulty for us is we haven’t been as good of an investigative unit as we could be. The commitment to do the long haul reporting in TV is very hard to do. It’s financial, and we have a reportory company and they have to turn around and do more films, so we’ve been aware that we’re reaching a crisis point and the budget for individual films has dropping. So we set up an enterprise fund so we can go drill wells [go for deep stories], and we can partner with regional newspapers who can spend a few months digging then come back and do the film.

Jeff Fager: The tobacco story [by Lowell Bergman] was the lowest moment in the history of CBS, but I don’t see it happening now with the current ownership. No, it couldn’t happen now. We are incredibly independent. We don’t ever get a call about content. And we do tough stories about our own advertisers.

Brian Ross, ABC: If you tell a source you will keep them confidential, you can’t really back that up. We have confidential sources and you can make the promise to keep them confidential, but you won’t be able to keep them. The Federal Shield law, now John McCain and Obama and Clinton all say they would support it, and that would be a great day if it happened.

Q: More people get their news from local television. I looked at the top stories, and they were about UFOs, bank robberies and underaged stripper spurs national interest. [audience laughs] News directors around the country are hit with this kind of data. I know the issue is time. When you ratchet it down to 3 minutes, trying to tell a complex story, how do you get that up to 4 and a half minutes?

Anna Werner, KPIX: It’s a process of negotiation, and you have to show that you have the goods. Fortunately our news director was the former managing editor at the SF Chronicle, so he likes real news. He likes investigation and has kept the investigative unit despite the financial pressures. You have to have a good story told well. Some stories, follow-up stories, are 2 and a half minutes, even shorter if it doesn’t merit the time.

Q: NBC has a series called “To Catch a Predator.” What do you think about that?

Jeff Fager, CBS: It’s disturbing on many levels. There are legal issues, and there was a case involving a suicide. I think the problem is that they are doing police work, and it would be a problem for us.

David Fanning: It’s voyerism it’s not journalism. And they are using an outside group to do the work. The issue of predators turns out to be a tremendously exaggerated threat. The real threat to teenagers is among themselves, bullying and other things. The whole premise of the NBC show is built on a false assumption. Teenagers are the ones who say that they rarely pursue these [enticements].

Brian Ross, ABC: NBC could not sell it, the advertisers didn’t like that. They were so close with law enforcement. The correspondent had done some good work, but he doesn’t identify himself as a reporter, he waits 15 or 20 minutes. When we watched that, we thought our people could never do that, we would identify ourselves. It was the arrangements for the raid, and who was calling the shots, and it appeared to be the correspondents as much as the local police. And NBC wanted to get the arrest done quickly so they could get out of town and lower costs.

*****

Check out my continuing coverage of the “Crisis in News” conference in my next blog post, “Are Veteran Media Execs the Ones Who’ll See the Future?”

I am going to be a “questioner” on a panel titled, “Investigative Reporting on the Web?” (Funny that every panel’s title and even the conference’s own title has a question mark in it, as if there are more questions than answers.) My gut feeling is that this will be a room full of skeptics when it comes to doing investigative journalism online. “Is anyone really doing that, and how can they support it?” they will grumble and harumph.

My panel will include: Paul Grabowicz (UC Berkeley and Idea Lab), Jonathan Landman (NY Times), Sharon Tiller (Frontline/World), Jeff Leen (Washington Post), and David Washburn (Voice of San Diego). If you have a burning question you think I should ask them, please leave it in the comments or drop it in the Feedback form and I’ll try to ask them at the conference tomorrow. I’ll report on how they answered you, too.

In response to the expected question — “so who’s doing investigative journalism on the web?” — I’ve decided to put together a big honking list of all the investigative reports that have happened online. I will include mainstream media reports, as long as they started online or are completely contained on the Net, as well as citizen journalism or ad hoc crowdsourcing efforts. I invite you to help me update this list with anything I’ve left out — again, use the comments below or the Feedback form.

Examples of Online Investigative Journalism

> Murray Waas did a five-part investigative series in Salon in 1998 called False Witness, about how indendent counsel Kenneth Starr was misled by corrupt witness David Hale in his Whitewater investigation.

> Typesetting expert Joseph Newcomer, along with various conservative bloggers including Powerline, debunked documents used by “60 Minutes” in a report about President Bush’s National Guard service.

> The Center for Public Integrity has done numerous online-only reports on the influence of money in politics, and won a Polk Award for its series, The Windfalls of War, about the influence that contractors have had on military spending in Iraq and Afghanistan.

> The Center for Public Integrity just recently released a five-part series, Stealth Campaigns, about the influence of independent committees such as 527 groups on the presidential campaign.

> The Smoking Gun followed the paper trail to find out that author James Frey had made up most of his best-selling work of “non-fiction” titled “A Million Little Pieces.”

> NewWest dug into the seemy underworld of meth and prostitution in Montana in a six-part series called Sex, Money and Meth Addiction that won an Online Journalism Award.

> TalkingPointsMemo helped expose the scandal of various U.S. attorneys being fired, leading to the resignation of Attorney General Alberto Gonzales and a Polk Award for TPM for its investigative work (a first for a blog). And TPM had its audience help sift through documents at one point, a great example of crowdsourcing. (Hat tip to Jay Rosen for providing the link in the comments.)

> ABCNews.com’s The Blotter blog ran a story about a teenaged congressional page receiving inappropriate text messages from Rep. Mark Foley (R-Fla.), eventually leading to his resignation.

> The DallasFood.org blog ran a 10-part report on the high cost of Noka Chocolates, finding that they mark up the price 1,300% without good reason.

> Entrepreneur Mark Cuban launched Sharesleuth, a blog dedicated to investigative reports about fraudulent companies. The site has only done a few reports so far, including one on the corporate malfeasance at energy company, Xethanol. Cuban actually shorts the stock of companies covered on the site in order to fund the work.

> Matt Foremski, along with various bloggers and the L.A. Times, helped track down the real identity of videoblogger Lonelygirl15 as actress Jessica Rose.

> ePluribusMedia, a citizen collective, ran a four-part series about the politics of post-traumatic stress disorder called “Blaming the Veteran.”

> An ad hoc coalition of bloggers created Porkbusters to try to eliminate wasteful spending in Congress. The group joined with the Sunlight Foundation and TPM to find out who was putting a secret hold on the Coburn-Obama bill to create an online database of earmarks. The bill eventually was signed into law.

> Wikileaks.org has been an anonymous database of sensitive documents, and now includes 150 censored photos and videos from the recent Tibetan uprising in China. The site has secret documents from Guantanamo Bay, Scientology and from banks that provide safe havens for tax evaders.

> Newsweek.com produced a special six-part series called Voices of the Fallen, telling the story of the Iraq war through the voices of soldiers who had died. The multimedia online includes slideshows of their pictures as well as their voices.

> At the prompting of skeptical bloggers, Stinky Journalism investigated whether a Reuters photo during the Southern California fires was staged in a home, with the photographer possibly entering the house without permission.

Two from Paul Grabowicz:

> There was the Fort Myers (Fla.) News-Press investigation of the huge bills homeowners got for new utility lines, in which citizens drove most of the story. Here’s a Wired story on this.

> The infamous Kaycee Nicole hoax (a girl who supposedly died of leukemia) back in 2001, which was exposed by the work of online communities and bloggers. Here’s a Guardian story summarizing what happened.

From Kyle in comments:

> Justin McLachlan (also a contributor to the last Sharesleuth piece) does investigative work at Where Doubt Remains looking at wrongful convictions.

From Jay Rosen in comments:

> The Smoking Gun recently did a report refuting documents in an L.A. Times story about the shooting of Tupac Shakur. The Times ended up retracting the story. As Jay says: “Of course, the Smoking Gun guys would say they are merely doing document-based investigative journalism of the old fashioned kind, and that there is nothing new media or bloggy about it.”

From Ellen Miller at Sunlight Foundation:

> Is Congress a Family Business, in which Sunlight Foundation tracked down which Congressional spouses are on their payroll and why. They found that 19 spouses were on payrolls, making more than $600,000.

> Sunlight Foundation also did an investigation of the content of Congressional websites. With help from citizen journalists, Sunlight found that “372 congressional websites failed to provide basic information on what the member does in Washington, from providing the name or names of committees served on to the bills they sponsor.

> Sunlight also did “Where are they Now” http://wherearetheynow.sunlightprojects.org/ to find out if former Congressional staffers were now working in the lobbying industry.

Also, a big hat tip to NYU’s Jay Rosen for pointing out many of these reports in his great piece in the L.A. Times about bloggers doing journalism.

Any others? Please share in the comments, and be sure to check back over the weekend for my live reports from the conference.

In a world of social network widgets, videoblogs and Web 2.0 gewgaws, sometimes it’s the simple things that work best. That’s the lesson of Web 1.0 startup The Smoking Gun, a simply designed site that relies on public documents and criminal mugshots to bring in boatloads of traffic.

If a prominent politician or celebrity has run afoul of the law, chances are good that The Smoking Gun will have a mugshot, lawsuit brief or other document to provide the gory details. New York governor Elliot Spitzer caught with a prostitute? They have her photos. NBA star Carmelo Anthony busted for drunk driving? They have the mugshot. Google Street View cameras going up someone’s driveway? Photos here.

Plus, The Smoking Gun has gone in-depth on a few occasions, taking down author James Frey’s “nonfiction” book “A Million Little Pieces” as a con job, and refuting R&B star Akon’s exaggerated criminal record as bogus. The site also took on the Los Angeles Times for a report based on false documents about the shooting of Tupac Shakur — forcing the newspaper to retract its story.

The Smoking Gun started 11 years ago as a side project for Village Voice organized-crime reporter William Bastone, who had his wife design the site. In 2000, it was sold to Court TV, which itself was sold to Turner Broadcasting (part of Time Warner), and Court TV was renamed TruTV, with a couple shows using The Smoking Gun brand name. Over the years, the site has expanded to include an entertaining Backstage Pass section on what musical stars want in their dressing rooms, as well as a video archive of strange public domain videos. But its core mission and staff size hasn’t changed; it’s still three folks running the show, hunting down incriminating documents and digging up dirt.

“I realize it’s still the infancy of the Net, but it amazes me how few places are doing this sort of stuff, at least that aren’t tethered to huge news organizations,” Bastone told me. “There are a lot of people commenting on stuff and riffing on things and blogging, but actually reporters breaking stories on the Net — there are a lot fewer than I would expect…Even though we’re no longer running the site out of my living room and sold it, we’re still a three-person outfit. We’re the smallest division within the Time Warner monstrosity. We’re still three guys in a room who generate every story we do…We still maintain a shadow of our indie cred.”

The key to the site’s success is its focus on finding documents and mugshots — and broadcasting them to a massive audience online. Bastone, 46, told me that last month the site logged 5.7 million unique visitors and 58.8 million page views, thanks to the double-whammy of stories on Tupac Shakur and Elliot Spitzer’s call girl. He said the monthly numbers are usually around 3.75 million uniques and 45 million page views. While every large news organization is trying to figure out a business model for online reporting, The Smoking Gun has proven that small and simple can work.

“Much has been said…about how the emerging digital economy has decimated the business model of journalism,” wrote New York Times media columnist David Carr in a recent story about The Smoking Gun. “But the same digital technology has made each remaining journalist several times more powerful. As working reporters, we are able to get information — through the public and government web databases and proprietary digital sources — that our ancestors in the business would not have dared dream of. I know because I’m one of the ancestors.”

In a wide-ranging phone interview, Bastone told me how the staff chooses stories for the site, explained why he wouldn’t want to do crowdsourcing, and said he hoped to add a blog-like news column to the site for stories that don’t have documents. The following is an edited transcript of our conversation.

How have things changed for your site since you launched it 11 years ago? Do you have more competition, more resources to do your job, more respect?

William Bastone: Comparing now to the early days, we’re obviously a known quantity. People have great confidence in the stories that we do. We have a lot more sources, we know how to do this a lot better. The core of what we do is the same. We’ve never changed how we go about getting documents and doing stories. That has been a constant.

From the site’s birth, we ran the thing as a side project, it wasn’t our full time job. I was a staff writer at the Village Voice, so I had to be careful not to do things on the site that could be considered competition for the place that employed me. So we had some restrictions about what we could cover. I had to make sure I was breaking stories for my employer instead of for my dopey website. When we set out to produce the site full time, everything we did went on the site, but the reporting for the site hasn’t changed. I don’t think it ever will. It’s basic shoe leather reporting, hunting down sources and documents and confirming authenticity. That’s always been our thing.

As far as what you’ve covered, I know you have a mix of celebrities, public figures, and average people. Has that changed over time?

Bastone: No, I think what our site covers is a reflection of our staff’s interests. We have a fairly wide range of interests. We follow politics, crime, pop culture, sports, and celebrities. I don’t think you’d come to our site to see business stories, we don’t cover Wall Street. If we think the story is interesting or funny and it gets a kick out of us, then it’s something we do. We have a pretty good news sense and we have a good sense of what our audience would enjoy.

And then we did this thing recently about the L.A. Times [and Tupac Shakur], and I don’t think it was something our audience was looking for us to do. It’s not the biggest traffic generator for us, but it’s right in our wheelhouse, it’s what we do well. It’s not like people are writing in to us to cover disputes in the rap music world. But it was a story that worked for us on a variety of levels.

What does your audience want?

Bastone: I think they like strange crime, funny mugshots, dirt on celebrities. Days do not go by without someone writing us something like this: ‘Dear The Smoking Gun. My brother was arrested a week ago and we’re trying to get a copy of the mugshot so we can give it to him framed for his birthday. Can you help us get a copy of his mugshot?’ That’s the main concern of our fans. They do ask us to cover things, but the overwhelming majority of what we do is driven by the three of us. If there is something that other people are covering, we figure out a way in for us to find a foothold, usually revolving around a primary source document.

With the Virginia Tech shooting, we had to figure out a foothold into the story without a police report or incident report available. We try to find a little piece about it with interesting documents or images through the prism of what’s out there.

(In that case, The Smoking Gun found that the shooter had bought 37 rubber duckies on eBay in 2006.)

I noticed that you don’t use bylines. Why do you do it that way?

Bastone: When we started the site, the introductions are no more than a couple hundred words, and what we’re offering is the document that’s taking up 70% of the page. So the intro fully contexualizes it and gives you the newsy bits [from the document]. Initially it just seemed like the pieces were never long enough for taglines. Now, from time to time, we do long stories that feel like they should have names there but we’ve never done it. You can assume in almost every instance, though I write the stuff, everybody has reported some piece of it, and had some role in it. We don’t want to be faceless but we want it to come out as from The Smoking Gun guys.

We had a brief discussion before we did the L.A. Times piece about whether to put our names at the top because it involves another journalist, and we don’t do stories that examine the work of other reporters. But then we thought it would look weird because it would be the first time ever. So we sat down and let that idea pass.

What made you decide to do the Tupac Shakur story if it’s a departure from what you had done before?

Bastone: Yeah, that’s not our thing. There are plenty of other people doing that all day, sniping up in the trees at other journalists. It became of interest to us because the story itself revolved around documents, the investigative reports of which we happened to be very familiar. In addition, it involved famous people, one of whom [Sean “Diddy” Combs] was accused of advance knowledge of the shooting of one of the most famous people in hip-hop ever. It worked on a lot of different levels.

We don’t sit around trying to figure out how to [mess] with other journalists. We have no interest in doing that, but we looked at the documents and thought, ‘These things look fake.’ I reached out to [L.A. Times reporter] Chuck Philips to tell him that, and he assured me he had confidence in them. And I just thought there was no way they were real. We went down that road and lots of bells went off about the documents and the person who was the focal point of the documents and the false assertions in the 302 reports [by the FBI].

Everyone talks about investigative journalism being in dire straits with newspapers cutting back. I’m curious how you see things and whether you have any hope that there are new platforms and new ways of doing investigative reporting online.

Bastone: It kills me to see these stories about people taking buyouts [at newspapers], some of the stars of the field. The prospect that there will be publications in five years where they’re happy to have a reporter or team of reporters work on one story for an extended period of time… I’m worried that business-wise it’s not a proposition that will be supported by anyone. They will only be doing things that generate hits on a website, and for the most part, the most important stories that are coming out might not be the sort of stories that are passed around and going viral with comments on these heavy trafficked sites.

I’m talking about newspapers because I don’t think there’s much investigative journalism being done on TV; maybe in local markets, but it seems like just riffs on the same kind of story. Big, important pieces of journalism are the province of newspapers and always have been. Online, who’s taking that up? Are we going to rely on the ProPublicas of the world to do this? A not-for-profit operation? One place is going to do this? You look at the stars, the breakouts of the web, and they’re not doing anything that approaches investigative stuff. Is Perez Hilton, TMZ doing things like that?

What about what Josh Marshall is doing on TalkingPointsMemo?

Bastone: Well I think we’re doing it as well, but there’s really only a handful of places, and TalkingPointsMemo is one of them. They’re trying to do other things that are original reporting, and that’s great, that’s fabulous. I spend all of my day online, and can you really tick off, fill up your hand with places like that? That don’t just exist to riff and comment on other’s people work and have people do the same thing in the comments section?

It’s still relatively early but I don’t see a lot of places doing that. I get a kick out of the Gawkers and Defamers of the world, but how much of that is a news story, they broke a news story. It really isn’t. It’s a high profile site, but can you identify a story that they broke? If you had asked me 10 years ago, I would have thought there would be a huge scrum for [breaking news online], and it may get to that point, but I don’t really see it.

You see these people like Tina Brown having her own site, and Michael Wolff has this site. You have these main journalists/columnists migrating online, but what are they doing? News aggregators. That’s what blogs are. I’m dying to see what ProPublica comes out with because these are pros. But do we want people to come on and say they are going to point us to more stories? That’s what Matt Drudge already does or Fark.com. You’re not going to deliver me anything better than what they’re doing. I want to see you break stories and not just tell me what’s on the Washington Post. What you’re going to need soon is a news aggregator of the news aggregator sites.

What do you think about crowdsourcing, or combining professionals with amateur journalists to do in-depth reports?

Bastone: I kinda like the idea. I don’t ever want to have to do it ourselves. There are a lot of bright people out there and people who know how to dig up things. And then there are a lot of lunatics. We rely on primary source materials, and we have never taken a story off of our site, we’ve never taken a primary document off of our site. We have never published any piece of paper that wasn’t a legitimate document. We just did a story about what happened to poor Chuck Philips [at the L.A. Times] and we live in fear of something like that happening.

We have never solicited help from our audience and asked people, ‘send in your documents’ because the last thing we need is a Photoshop genius trying to pull one over on us. I like the idea of throwing something out, saying ‘help us try to figure it out,’ but it’s not something I am totally comfortable with for our operation. When CBS did the Bush National Guard record story, that may have been one of the earliest blogs doing that initially, Powerline. A lot of the analysis came in from the audience, where people were piling on about PostScript and the availability of certain typewriters. It was interesting to see. It’s pretty cool but I don’t know if I want to do it.

I don’t see the New York Times or CNN doing that, saying ‘help us report stories.’…No one’s telling me to come over to their accounting firm and asking me to help them with their taxes.

What plans do you have for the future?

Bastone: This will be contingent on our ability to hire a couple other people. They might be considered blogs or news columns. I look at Gawker as a blog and Radar magazine has a column on the front page of their site that’s called Fresh Intelligence with news stories. We want to do something similar to that, because we come across a bunch of stories that don’t make their way onto our site if they don’t have a mugshot attached to them. And in the past, we’ve just given it away to other journalists we know. So we thought it would be a good idea to keep them in-house. They fit into a more standard format with three or four paragraphs that are newsy but doesn’t have a document attached to it.

If there is any other site you’d like to run instead of The Smoking Gun, what would it be?

Bastone: For the longest, longest time, one of our favorite sites is Fark.com. I think that would be an incredibly fun operation to run and the audience is unbelievably smart, the commenters are brilliant. We know the guy who runs it, he operates from our offices when he’s in New York. I’m not a big tech person, so I don’t go to Engadget, so I like Fark because it’s across the board. It feels like that audience is totally similar to our audience. I’m a big fan of Drudge Report, we have political differences, he’s much more conservative than myself or my colleagues. But I love that his site looks the same as it looked when it started. Our site really hasn’t changed much either.

A few years ago we went to a focus group run by Court TV. They had two groups of 20 people and they had them go through our site, Court TV’s site and the Drudge Report. And almost to a person, they talked about the Drudge Report as the worst designed site they’d ever seen, and all I could think of is that it’s the perfect site for what he does. And they were crapping on it, saying ‘It’s the ugliest site I’ve ever seen.’ But it works unbelievably well for what he’s doing.

*****

What do you think about The Smoking Gun? Can their model be replicated by other news organizations looking to do original reports online? Why do you think the site has succeeded for so long? Share your thoughts in the comments below.

That idea came to me from a conversation I had a few months ago with Jason Kint, now th