Pass-Fail Enterprise: Register’s ME grades Bugeja and Chamberlin

From the series: Returning to the Digital Newsroom
By Randy Brubaker, Managing Editor, The Des Moines Register

Having Michael Bugeja and Dennis Chamberlain working alongside Des Moines Register journalists for a week was a good experience–for our newsroom, as well as for Bugeja and Chamberlain. It gave many here a chance to reflect on what we do and why we do it, and it’s always good for journalists to be thoughtfully challenged and to have to articulate our guiding principles.

Michael told me with a smile that he wanted a grade for their efforts. I responded that this was a pass-fail enterprise. And, without a doubt, they’ve passed. The story that I’ve read and edited breaks some news that the Register hasn’t previously published (and hasn’t been on television or in other newspapers around the state). We haven’t picked a final publication date, and even when we do, it’ll be subject to change based on the news of the day. But it could publish as soon as Friday or Saturday and perhaps as late as Tuesday.

I largely concur with the post-Register reflections by Michael (“Reflections on my Register Experience”) and Dennis (“What our students need”).

Michael hits the nail on the head when he says “content is still king.”

And Dennis’ analysis that today’s students need these two fundamental competencies is indisputable:

1. A familiarity with various technology that allows them to report on different platforms.
2. A traditional news skill such as news reporting, feature writing, visual story-telling, copyediting.

Read more

What our students need: speed, tools, an open mind

From the series: Returning to the Digital Newsroom
A special report by Dennis Chamberlin

I returned to the classroom Monday and was surprised by the interest my students had about the week that Michael Bugeja and I spent in The Des Moines Register newsroom and on the streets of the city. Students were genuinely curious as to whether we passed the test. The staff at The Register will have to answer that.

To be honest, we didn’t spend much time in the newsroom because we were busy searching for subjects that would result in photographs or interviews to help tell the story of “The New Poverty.” This past week was similar to working on a freelance assignment where I am able to determine the situations to photograph as long as it complements the written text. Michael built the foundation of our piece with the text and I tried to add a layer of meaning with the photographs.

The traditional tools may have changed a bit–typewriters traded for computers and film cameras exchanged for digital cameras, as well as the introduction of new recording devices and means of electronic delivery; but the fundamental purpose of journalism has not changed over the past couple of decades. It still is concerned with informing readers and telling the stories that engage people in our society.

During the week I learned that it is dangerous to make too many generalizations about convergence and new media tools. Two years ago when I spent a week following photojournalists at The Register video was the new tool that was being emphasized. Today, it seems like there is more focus on choosing the right tool for the story.

On the first day I asked Managing Editor Randy Brubaker if I should be prepared to put together a video package in addition to an audio slideshow that I was planning. He made it clear that they don’t use the tools simply for the sake of presentation. He encouraged us to use whatever technology allowed us to tell the story best.

What do our students need? I asked this question a few times during the week and the general consensus is:

1. A familiarity with various technology that allows them to report on different platforms.
2. A traditional news skill such as news reporting, feature writing, visual story-telling, copyediting.

Michael says he agrees with that assessment. He adds that if teaching basic reporting, he would emphasize speed and accuracy–timed tests and expertise with computer assisted reporting–so as to generate content on demand.

I didn’t see any evidence that expertise is needed with several digital tools but rather with just one and a competent working level with others. There is still a strong need for reporting skills. If you know how to use the tools but don’t recognize a good story, a video camera or Twitter will not do you any good. If you know how to recognize a story, but give up when you encounter source or equipment difficulties, you won’t find a place in the metro newspaper.

Something else stood out during my Register experience: You have to be open to change and be ready to adapt as the medium evolves. Those who succeed in journalism today will always be open to change. Those who want to report, shoot, edit or design they way they used to in their comfort zone, won’t make it in the fast-paced newsroom.

Part of keeping an open mind also involves the story based on access to sources, interviews and luck. You still need that nose for news, persistence and courage.

As a photographer I learned how to deal with change prior to the digital age. Our work has always been tied to the available technology and the resulting images are defined by what cameras and lenses are in your bag. Look at award-winning images from the National Press Photographers Association archives over the years and you can see the influence that cameras, lenses and new emulsions had on the best work of the time.

Street photography did not come of age in the era of the Speed Graphic; it needed a smaller and quicker tool in the form of a 35mm camera. The visual records of the 70s and early 80s are defined by the possibilities of the fast telephoto and the 90s by the ultra wide angle.

What is today’s photojournalism going to be defined by? Camera phone images? Flip camera videos?

Only time will tell, and we tell time in journalism by our deadlines.

More from Dennis Chamberlin

• The Serendipitous Nature of Daily Journalism

Dennis Chamberlin is an Assistant Professor in the Greenlee School of Journalism and Communication at Iowa State University. He worked as a staff photographer for the Denver Post from 1983-1987 and his work has been featured in National Geographic, New York Times Magazine, Newsweek, Time and others. Chamberlin received his M.F.A in Photography from Indiana University in 2005 and his B.A. in English and Journalism from Indiana University in 1983. Chamberlin was awarded a Pulitzer Prize in 1983 for his contributions as an editorial staff member of the Fort Wayne-News-Sentinel during their flood coverage.

Survival Tips, New Tools & the Changing Reporter

Dennis Chamberlin, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, and Michael Bugeja, former bureau chief for United Press International, tested their journalism skills during the week of November 8 with an enterprise piece on “The New Poverty,” documenting how the failing economy in Iowa is affecting all strata of society.

Chamberlin and Bugeja blogged about their experience, reflecting on whether their skills are viable today. They’ll talk about this and more in AEJMC’s first ever LIVE chat, Thursday, November 19.

______________________________________________________________________

LIVE Online Chat

Survival Tips, New Tools & the Changing Reporter
with Michael Bugeja & Dennis Chamberlin

Date: November 19, Thursday
Time: 12pm to 12:45pm EST
Place: AEJMC Hot Topics

What changes do J-Schools need to make?
What new media tools should classes incorporate?
How does today’s reporter differ from yesterday’s?

______________________________________________________________________

About Michael Bugeja

Michael Bugeja directs the Greenlee School at Iowa State University. He is author of Interpersonal Divide (Oxford University Press, 2005) and Living Ethics across media platforms (Oxford, 2008). His research has been cited in The New York Times, USA Today, the Washington Post, the Christian Science Monitor, and The Economist, among others. His articles have appeared in Journalism Quarterly and Journalism and Mass Communication Educator, among others.
Previously Bugeja was a journalism professor at Ohio University and a media adviser at Oklahoma State University. In the 1970s, he worked as state editor for United Press International and holds a Ph.D. from OSU and a master’s from South Dakota State University.

About Dennis Chamberlin

Dennis Chamberlin is an Assistant Professor in the Greenlee School of Journalism and Communication at Iowa State University. He worked as a staff photographer for the Denver Post from 1983-1987 and his work has been featured in National Geographic, New York Times Magazine, Newsweek, Time and others.

Chamberlin received his M.F.A in Photography from Indiana University in 2005 and his B.A. in English and Journalism from Indiana University in 1983. Chamberlin was awarded a Pulitzer Prize in 1983 for his contributions as an editorial staff member of the Fort Wayne-News-Sentinel during their flood coverage.

Reflections on my Register Experience

From the series: Returning to the Digital Newsroom
A special report by Michael Bugeja

I’ve had the weekend to reflect on my Register experience without necessarily thinking about “The New Poverty,” covered in my last post, and share with viewers today the chromatic scale of emotions that colored the week.

Dennis Chamberlin has just sent me a digital contact sheet of his photographs, which he will file today, and will post his thoughts about the week tomorrow. We’ve asked the Register’s managing editor, Randy Brubaker, to comment on our enterprise work, and anything else; we hope to post that on Wednesday. On Thursday, we’ll remind everyone about the national live chat session with Chamberlin and me, set for 1 p.m. central and noon eastern at this URL, hosted by the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication.

Chamberlin and I had something to learn and something to prove. We learned that digital journalism is part of everyday journalism, but not nearly as much as educators have made that out to be, as most of us, even me, are so accustomed to living technologically now via e-mail, blog, cell phone, camera-phone, text, tweet, html (or Website application software), Google, YouTube–you name it–that focusing on “new media” seems technostalgic.

Indeed, anyone still touting these tools as the means to secure employment in the digital newsroom should return to the newsroom to see why content is still king.

There are reasons. While advertisement sales may be down from previous highs in the print business, they still generate plenty of pages to fill, and most publishers want to fill them with local news. Also, we heard more than once in the Register newsroom about editors’ no longer relying on the Associated Press to generate local content to supplement the news budget, even in a city as large as Des Moines.

Increasingly, my wire service contacts affirm that the trend has been for them to disseminate local news generated by subscriber partners while their employees focus on all those other premiums that newspapers need, from sports scores to national and international news.

In fact, the Tribune Company, owner of the Chicago Tribune and Los Angeles Times, is dropping the AP for a week to see how much they actually need it. Read about that here.

During my Register week, I observed reporters creating as much content as possible. Sure, the digital news editor, Web site developers and designers, along with support personnel, focused on what we in academe still label “convergence”; but they would have little work to do without others filing stories, photos, opinion and more from dawn to midnight.

That is what I learned, and perhaps Chamberlin will affirm or refute that. Read more

Final Draft Filed, Ending Register Week, What’s Next

From the series: Returning to the Digital Newsroom
A special report by Michael Bugeja

At 6:11 p.m., I filed an 1856-word story in narrative journalism format to Randy Brubaker, managing editor of The Des Moines Register. I also filed a sidebar, “Struggling with Unemployment?” featuring Douglas F. Steenblock, M.D., president-elect of the Iowa Psychiatric Society, along with tables showing dramatic rises in unemployment claims (183% more than last year at this time) as well as record levels of suicides in Iowa.

These and record numbers of need at the Iowa Food Bank may not correlate entirely with “The New Poverty,” as so many factors can influence those data; but they certainly suggest that Iowa’s legislators have more work to do than cutting budgets, promising not to raise taxes and planning their 2010 campaigns.

They had better start focusing on restoring economic wellness because the social infrastructure has changed, requiring leaders to come up with new economic solutions. Otherwise the solution is new leaders.

IN OTHER NEWS relating to this blog, I’ll file any afterthoughts about my experience on Monday. Dennis Chamberlin will do so Tuesday. I’ve asked Brubaker to evaluate us by Wednesday as an ultimate measure of assessment, giving him the last word. Read more

Back in the Newsroom, Out in the Streets

From the series: Returning to the Digital Newsroom
A special report by Michael Bugeja

Dennis Chamberlin and I didn’t sleep much last night in anticipation of our first day at The Des Moines Register, which turned out better than we could imagine, not only in discovering that journalism hasn’t changed much since our time (although people’s reaction to street journalists has), but also in seeing reporters and editors putting in extra hours to get out the news across several platforms.

Again, as a former wire service reporter, that’s not news to me. It was like being back in the bureau again.

Our day began at 7:45 a.m. as we headed out on Duff Avenue, Ames, spotting a man in a yellow bird costume beckoning us to get an “early bird special” at Jiffy Lube. So naturally, we had to stop an interview Marvin Lewis, 50, originally from Chicago who says he was out early to show members of his “Young Men of Integrity” chapter that the early bird gets the job.

You can read about that national group here.

Lewis, a groundskeeper for a local properties management company, said, “I came to Ames from the inner city, Chicago, and got in so much trouble”—indeed, court records verify that; “but then I learned that it’s all about surrounding yourself with the best people. I never had that before.”

He wants to pass on that experience to youth in our hometown.

About 45 minutes later, we arrived at The Register. Managing Editor Randy Brubaker gave us a tour, temporary press passes and a parking spot. We also got Register coffee mugs, and went straight for the coffee machine, lured by the scent of burnt coffee in a pot that hasn’t been properly washed in a decade. Read more

Deadline Every Login: What has and hasn’t Changed in Newsrooms

From the series: Returning to the Digital Newsroom
A special report by Michael Bugeja

A famous statesman asked, ‘When is your–what do you newspapermen call it? Your deadline.’ The reporter sighed. ‘I’m from the United Press,’ he replied. ‘Our deadline is now. Someplace around the world at this instant a newspaper is going to press. We’ve got a deadline every minute.’

When I worked at United Press International in the 1970s, we’d often remark how we wished we had the schedule of the typical newspaper reporter who had time to develop stories as well as relationships with his sources.

Our motto, borrowed from International News Service, which merged with United Press in 1958, was, “Get it first, but get it right.”

Our mantra then is chanted now in the typical digital newsroom.

Indeed, many working reporters and editors responding to this blog noted the quicker pace as being the biggest change in today’s newsroom since Dennis Chamberlin and I worked in one decades ago.

There’s even a texting-like rule to symbolize that pace–4/5, 24/7–or four paragraphs online within five minutes of knowing something, around the clock.

In the wire service, we called this “A Deadline Every Minute,” the title of the 1957 book by Unipresser Joe Alex Morris who, like Chamberlin, worked at the Denver Post before joining the wire service in 1928.

A colleague of Walter Chronkite, Morris was foreign editor during World War II for United Press.

The quicker pace hardly will be new for me as a former UPI bureau chief (or as director of a bustling school of journalism and communication).

In preparing for our Register experience, I emailed several working reporters and editors, asking what Chamberlin and I should anticipate after our long absence from daily journalism.

The replies were illuminating. Read more

The Serendipitous Nature of Daily Journalism

From the series: Returning to the Digital Newsroom
A special report by Dennis Chamberlin

When I first heard about the opportunity to participate in this project there was no hesitation on my part. I spend most of my time in the classroom these days and, to be honest, I miss the serendipitous nature of daily journalism.

What I miss, in particular, is the days when you head out with an idea in mind and experience along the way how things change. The story might become difficult to complete, or an even better story might fall in your lap. It is all about observing what happens around you and knowing when to pause and ask a few questions.

Last week I made a visit to a local organization that helps people with housing problems. I showed up unannounced and left a couple hours later with a few story ideas that excite me.  Stories to be told in my community are better than what I might have conjured had I been a novelist.

For the past couple of semesters I’ve assigned my photojournalism and multimedia students topics about the economy. I was surprised how the first round of stories turned out. Despite my prodding and feedback students mostly gravitated toward stories showing people doing just fine. If you analyzed the complete class output you might think all is splendid in our small Midwestern town (despite having the second highest poverty level in Iowa).

I couldn’t fathom why students were not going deeper into the story. The answer turned out to be that they were afraid to talk to people from a different demographic–a telling characteristic, which prompted me to reflect.

My first four years as  journalist at The Denver Post were far more instructive than I ever could have imagined as a student. I have just completed four years as a professor on the tenure track at Iowa State University, providing me with an opportunity to observe our society through the eyes of my students–an  experience no less instructive than my years at The Post.

My photojournalism students submit their entire material to me so I can see how they approached the assignment. One of the unexpected elements of this requirement is that I can see how the photographer interacts and relates to the subject.

My students, like ones who came before them,  mirror the concerns of their peers but more important also are products of our society, reflecting values within all of us. Looking at the out-takes from their assignments I see that we prefer to take refuge in our immediate circle of friends, family and self than wander in diverse or uncertain realms.

The world out there is full of unknowns.  It can be scary. It requires us to interact with people who may be different in lifestyle, social class, ethnicity or culture. That can unsettle newcomers, especially if we send them on street assignments in unexplored locales.  But this experience is perhaps the single most important thing we as journalists do to uncover stories everyone needs to hear.

Beginning journalists have a responsibility to get out of the confines of the classroom and even the comfort of the newsroom and learn about the world first hand. They cannot do it vicariously through YouTube videos or Google searches.

By being journalists, students have an alibi to walk into the lives of others in ways that most of us are afraid to do.

That is why I’m looking forward to next week at The Des Moines Register. I want to get beneath the surface of my community and tell stories with my camera and audio recorder (my new tool) reflecting what is happening in these uncertain economic times.

Even now I’ve notice how I have begun to come out of the cocoon I unconsciously built during the past few years, preoccupied with work and family responsibilities. I now have a reason to strike up conversations with people whom I see everyday, but never took the time to know, listening to and documenting their stories.

Good journalism demands that we become engaged members of society. You can learn to understand others, and as a bonus you can learn more about yourself.

Dennis Chamberlin is an Assistant Professor in the Greenlee School of Journalism and Communication at Iowa State University. He worked as a staff photographer for the Denver Post from 1983-1987 and his work has been featured in National Geographic, New York Times Magazine, Newsweek, Time and others. Chamberlin received his M.F.A in Photography from Indiana University in 2005 and his B.A. in English and Journalism from Indiana University in 1983. Chamberlin was awarded a Pulitzer Prize in 1983 for his contributions as an editorial staff member of the Fort Wayne-News-Sentinel during their flood coverage.

Street Reporting: Can it Work in the Digital Newsroom?

From the series: Returning to the Digital Newsroom
A special report by Michael Bugeja

Watergate-era reporters and photographers were energized by the street reporting of Bob Woodward, Carl Bernstein and Alfred E. Lewis at the Washington Post–so much so, in fact, that we typically embraced a romantic vision of journalism that may be at odds with the digital newsroom.

Dennis Chamberlin and I belong to that generation of journalists. We admit that we may have glorified those times with the questionable belief that any person, employee or official on the spot of a story–from crime scene to courtroom–was placed there serendipitously for the sole purpose of our assignment.

That is why we called it “spot news.”

The googlization of news is hardly romantic. Often it is the chief tipster in the digital newsroom, providing databanks and open sources that kill as many ideas as the search engine spawns.

Case in point: In researching crimes associated with the new poverty, we theorized that domestic violence statistics in Iowa would have spiked in the past, difficult year of recession. Financial hardship is often the cause of divorce and abuse. But the state Department of Public Safety reports that such abuse actually declined by 3.2 percent between 2007 and 2008.

To be sure, latter months of 2008 might yield more abuse instances on closer inspection because the subprime scandal and market collapse happened then. But that is not the point; such theorizing is a vivid example of computerized thinking.

Watergate-era journalists would search out domestic abuse data in person, meeting with and interviewing state officials after visiting shelters for victims and other venues and learning anonymously or on record about their plight or situation.

By doing so, we will not have googled a false but a telling lead, recording personal narratives, perhaps that of a white-collar spouse hiding from an otherwise prominent person furloughed under the budget-cutting directive of Gov. Chet Culver. We’ll be looking for that spouse and that official not only at shelters and unemployment or public safety offices but also at Des Moines parks, bars and lonelier places whose visual backdrop provides the theme to make memorable powerful enterprise.

And even if we didn’t locate such a spouse or official, street journalism would all but ensure we’d still come away with anecdotes from shelters and other venues as well as interviews and photos at 215 East 7th Street, Des Moines, with the public safety official who compiles, stores and/or has an opinion about the data or our anecdotes.

The googlization of news suggests that state officials providing online data are only good for that data. Street journalism believes those officials have something to confide that nobody took the trouble to ask. By the mere act of showing up to gather statistics, a reporter might earn the story of a lifetime.

If that sounds romantized, read my account “Flu Deja Vu” in the online Washington Post of how I broke the 1976 story out of Pierre, S.D., of all places, concerning the swine flu vaccine causing Guillain-Barre syndrome. I showed up at the state Office of Communicable Diseases to get the latest data on the number of South Dakotans immunized and was approached by an employee who gave me the scoop off the record, all of which eventually checked out.

Had Google existed back then, and I thought about reporting as many of our high-tech student journalists do, I’d have accessed the data without the visit and overlooked what the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention had kept hidden.

I can hear the demurs already about how new media journalists using e-mail, blogs, Web sites, Twitter, Facebook and iPhones are accessible 24/7 to the news-tipping public. Yeah? Try contacting a reporter managing all those marketing applications and gadgets in addition to processing leads via Google and then compiling, interviewing and composing stories in a productivity model that rewards the number rather than quality of reports.

That said, mobile technology would have made reporting much easier in my era. Dennis Chamberlin and I hope to use it in our enterprise about “The New Poverty,” or how this recession has decimated the ranks of white-collar workers, as much as blue, and employees with seniority as well as new.

Terry Anderson, former hostage and Iowa State University journalism alumnus, teaches at the University of Kentucky and plans to bring digital natives to Lebanon to show them how to street report more accurately than is being done now in the typical newsroom. See this article about that in The Huffington Post

Anderson, one of my best friends, wished he had cell phones when he served as the Middle East bureau chief for the Associated Press in the 1970s. Often he remarks how he had to run back and forth from the bureau to the scene of spot news. Doing so he missed some aspects of the story. Had he a cell phone, or the visual components of an iPhone, he would have been even more accurate in documenting news.

(Anderson and I were brought together by the poetry of journalism, which you can view in my interviews with him on YouTube.)

What puzzles me in this tweeting age is how we waste time in what passes now for spot news, informing others where we are and what we are doing, moment by moment, play by play, rather than dictating stories to the desk (assuming, of course, the editor there hasn’t been furloughed).

Bill Elsen, an editor at the Washington Post for 33 years, now retired,  once told me that good reporters “see stuff that wouldn’t have happened if they stayed in the newsroom.” He often recalls Alfred E. Lewis, the Post police reporter known as “Uncle Al,” who helped break the Watergate story.

“Some reporters never wrote stories,” Elsen said in our interview. “They just dictated them. ‘Uncle Al’ probably never wrote a story in the Washington Post, and yet you’d find hundreds of his bylines. He would say, ‘Get me rewrite.’ He’d wear a police sweater and wander around police headquarters, and everyone thought he was a cop. So during Watergate, when everyone was being briefed about the break-in, Al wanders into the Watergate building – right past the cops and the crime-scene tape – and calls in with more details than anybody except the cops.”

The online era has its own romantic features. You can read Uncle Al’s notes compliments of the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas-Austin, documenting what he found sidling into the Watergate hotel, including “6 mace guns (pocket pencil variety) … one set of blank keys plus a number of other keys … 15 lock picks … key wrench tools … a lock, rubber gloves, batteries, flashlight, bugging devices.”

Lewis’ also got a quote from an FBI source about how the arrests unfolded, thanks to the unsung hero of the break-in, 24-year-old security guard Frank Willis, who contacted police. I’m sure that Uncle Al, as well as Elsen at the copydesk, believed Willis was the source placed serendipitously at the scene so that the Washington Post could scoop The New York Times.

Dennis Chamberlin and I don’t know if “the digital street” contains such magic anymore. We’re about to learn that lesson next week at The Des Moines Register.

More from Bugeja:

• Returning to the Digital Newsroom (SERIES)
• The Economics of Curricular Convergence
• Ethics are easy when nothing is at stake
• Discussing JMC with… Michael Bugeja, Iowa State University

Michael Bugeja, who directs the Greenlee School at Iowa State University, is author of Interpersonal Divide(Oxford University Press, 2005), which won the Clifford Christians Award for research in media ethics, andLiving Ethics across media platforms (Oxford, 2008), which calls for a moral convergence to accompany the technological one.

Bugeja’s research has been cited in The New York Times, USA Today, the Washington Post, the Christian Science Monitor, The Futurist, The International Herald Tribune (France), Toronto Globe & Mail (Canada),The Guardian (UK) and The Economist, among others. His articles have appeared in Journalism Quarterly, Journalism and Mass Communication Educator, New Media and Society, and Journal of Mass Media Ethics, among others.

Bugeja also writes professionally for such publications as The Quill, Editor & Publisher and The Chronicle of Higher Education.

Bugeja became director of the Greenlee School in 2003. Previously he was a journalism professor at Ohio University and a media adviser at Oklahoma State University. In the 1970s, he worked as state editor for United Press International and holds a Ph.D. from OSU and a master’s from South Dakota State University.