“In terms of reporting technique, interviewing sources within Second Life often means people will be more at ease, versus having to meet face to face with real-life journalists or even talking on the telephone. The extra sense of anonymity can compel some sources to open up. Since Second Life’s chat feature retains a log of exchanges, sources may be less worried about being misquoted.”
—Second Life Herald Managing Editor Pixileen Mistral to Editor & Publisher, February 2007
Journalism’s revolution will be digitized and, in fact, much of it already is. Newspapers offer web exclusives and supplement stories with audio, video and interactive polls. Internet portals let users customize news (real-time stock updates and the latest headlines and sports scores all on one page.) Blogs and podcasts empower untrained journalists to add their voices to the news dialogue. Hyperlocal coverage (journalists with laptops blanketing neighborhoods within a community) is redefining the “beat reporter” concept. Reuters and CNET even have bureaus in the virtual world of Second Life.
With all this going on, what’s left to do? How much different will journalism look five, 10, 15 years from now? Will newspapers finally be put out of their slumping-revenue/sagging-circulation misery? A group of UNLV students and professors have $230,000 and a few months to find some answers.
UNLV is part of a seven-college collaborative sharing $25 million awarded from the Knight News Challenge, a global contest run by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation. (The other schools are the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Michigan State University, the University of Kansas, Kansas State University, Western Kentucky University and St. Michael’s College in Vermont.)
“The goal is to find new ways to gather and distribute news with a focus on creating community in a specific area,” says Gary Kebbel, journalism program officer for the foundation. “The impetus for the program came from Albert Ibarguen, president of the foundation. He’s a former publisher of the Miami Herald. He recognized that good newspapers create a glue for that community and help unite and define the community; they tell people on the north side of town what it’s like to live on the south side of town. As readers transfer to the web and digital and mobile media and as newspapers lose readers, he asked if these mediums could be used to define and unite communities the way a newspapers used to do.”
The winners are working in interesting ways: rewriting journalism publishing software and creating city-specific websites allowing users to search public records. MIT is using its $700,000 to create Knight Mobile Youth Journalists who file weekly reports via cell phones, texting and other media on topics like the environment and sexual health. Northwestern University’s journalism program will use its $639,000 to fund nine journalism scholarships for students studying computer science. The seven-college contingent, which includes UNLV, is creating an incubator/think tank to generate a web-based tool for newspapers. In August, the college collective will present their ideas to the Knight Foundation, and the top three will then be presented at an Online News Association conference in October.
No idea will be out of bounds, says UNLV assistant journalism professor Charlotte-Anne Lucas, who’s overseeing the project. It could be “geo-tagging”—aggregating all the news within a half-mile radius of the user in a digital format—or improving the functionality of a news site’s digital menu. Or the news can be city-specific: Lucas gets photo and news feeds about her hometown of San Antonio; in one week, she received alerts about the San Antonio Spurs winning the NBA championship and flooding in the city.
“It’s about other ways of getting news, and we’re trying to get the students to be innovative,” Lucas says. “They may use Instant Messenger or Second Life and other tools to help solve the issue of how to collect and provide news for a specific community: say, people interested in issues related to Darfur or cell-phone users interested in the latest traffic information, like tie-ups in the Spaghetti Bowl.”
I chatted with three UNLV journalism students about this project and the changing paradigm of their chosen industry. Heperi “Hepi” Mita is a 21-year-old junior from Auckland, New Zealand. Rob Ponte is a 25-year-old junior who was reared in Reno. Kristin Dero, 24, is a senior from Idaho. (Other student participants include Jenna Kohler, Lauren Johnson and Johann Castro.)
A big part of digitizing the news industry relates to citizen journalism. But there are concerns about the professionalism of untrained, or citizen, journalists.
Mita: “Just because community or citizen journalism is created by amateur journalists doesn’t mean it’s not journalism. Their opinions are just as valuable as those of professional journalists. We must apply the same ethics to regular journalists as well as citizen journalists.”
Ponte: “The more people we have practicing citizen journalism, the better it will get. All the good stuff floats to the top and bad stuff to the bottom.”
Some would argue that citizen journalism isn’t new, just an evolved form of the ubiquitous letter to the editor.
Ponte: “We’re more interested in two-way communication between journalists and audience, more of a conversation. So, yes, digital journalism is journalism. At this moment in history, I’m more skeptical of mainstream journalism than citizen journalism.”
Mita: “It does evolve from letters to the editor, but journalism itself is a very big concept. What journalism is to me, it may not be the same for another person. Newspapers are supposed to be the watchdog of the government, but they’re not doing it. Citizen journalists have the freedom to say what they want.”
Dero: “There will always be an audience for citizen journalism. We would direct people to journalism sites that only publish good examples of citizen journalists. Besides, mainstream journalism is more concerned about celebrity news and circulation.”
Are Second Life, Instant Messenger and texting valid mediums for journalism? I, myself, like using the phone or doing in-person interviews.
Dero: “News is becoming a lot more personalized and specific to the individual’s interest. Journalism is communication; it’s about community. Second Life and other mediums are communities and can be valid forms of communication. Of course, there are pros and cons to everything. With Second Life and blogs, etc., there’s a lot of discussion about how your opinions are based on experience not on age. But it also hinders communication.”
Ponte: “Right now Second Life is so new that the jury’s out. It’s a big chat room right now, so it’s not a terrible thing.”
As for my own foray into futuristic journalism, it didn’t go well. In Second Life, I couldn’t get my avatar to walk, talk or find people. Even though she walked me through the process of creating an AOL Instant Messenger account, my planned IM interview with UNLV journalism professor Charlotte-Anne Lucas never went off. Growing fan of “inbox journalism” that I am, I resisted the e-mail interview because its benefits (hard-to-reach sources tend to respond faster and with better answers) don’t always outweigh its drawbacks (inability to discern nuance such as the tone of a person’s voice, what they’re wearing, the ephemera in their surroundings, how they react to a question). And I nixed the idea of texting the entire interview. It seemed cutting-edge, but it would’ve also been arduous. All that texting and scrolling and then transcribing the interview on the computer. Plus, my phone plan only allows 160 characters at a time.
So what, specifically, are UNLV students working on?
Dero: “Our task is to create a web tool for usage of other media. We can’t tell you the specifics, but it will be a new application that gets people involved with news, that helps them create their own community of news.”
Ponte: “A lot of our ideas are graphical, things you can only do online—flash tools, calculators, stuff you won’t see in a newspaper.”
Where do all these technological advances leave newspapers?
Mita: “I really don’t think there will be a time when we don’t have newspapers. TV was supposed to kill radio, but it didn’t. The Internet won’t kill newspapers, but they’ll be more of a niche product.”
Ponte: “They will still make newspapers for those people who like opening them up in the morning.”
Can you foresee a marriage between mainstream and citizen journalism, a day when average citizens get news stories published in the paper or online?
Ponte: “I hope to someday see them on equal footing with equal respect, but I’m not hopeful that this will ever happen.
Dero: “We’ll see this online before we see it in newsprint.”
Damon Hodge is a Las Vegas Weekly staff writer.
Photograph by Richard Brian