Late last year, the board that oversees the journalism prizes named after newspaper publisher Joseph Pulitzer changed the definition of its “breaking news” award to stress the real-time nature of the category. This led to speculation about whether someone who used Twitter as a reporting tool — the way that Andy Carvin of National Public Radio did during the Arab Spring revolutions in Egypt and elsewhere last year, for example — might be eligible for one. But a spokesman for the Pulitzer board said on Monday that he would not, because Twitter is not considered a news entity for the purposes of the prize. But should it be?

Just to recap, the Pulitzer board changed the “breaking news” award definition in what appeared to be an attempt to stress the real-time nature of the category (and also perhaps because there were no winners of the award in 2011). Instead of mentioning the use of various tools, as the previous definition did, the new version simply said that the award should be presented for a distinguished example of breaking news that:

[A]s quickly as possible, captures events accurately as they occur, and, as times passes, illuminates, provides context and expands upon the initial coverage.

Real-time news, but must be on a website

In discussing the changes, the Pulitzer board also said that “it would be disappointing if an event occurred at 8 a.m. and the first item in an entry was drawn from the next day’s newspaper.” As Justin Ellis of the Nieman Journalism Lab noted at the time, these changes seemed tailor made for a nomination that might include the use of Twitter — such as live-tweeting a breaking news event. Although the specific award is intended for what the board calls “local reporting,” I thought the same description could more or less cover what Andy Carvin did during the revolutions in Egypt.

But when I asked Sig Gissler — the administrator of the Pulitzer Prizes since 2002, and a faculty member at Columbia University’s graduate school of journalism — he replied via email that what Carvin did wouldn’t be eligible for a prize because:

[E]ntered material must appear on an eligible news site — meaning a site operated by a U.S. news organization that publishes at least weekly during the calendar year and that adheres to the highest journalistic principles.

Gissler also noted (as Carvin himself did in a response on Twitter after the changes to the breaking-news award description) that Pulitzer prizes are typically only awarded to newspapers, not broadcast entities such as National Public Radio. But the main point seemed to be that reporting a news event using Twitter wouldn’t be enough to qualify unless that reporting appeared on — or was associated with — a “U.S. news organization that publishes at least weekly… and adheres to the highest journalistic principles.”

Journalism no longer occurs only in newspapers

Obviously, the Pulitzer board is entitled to award its prizes in whatever way it sees fit. But will it be overlooking some potentially game-changing and arguably historic examples of breaking news journalism if it sticks to that definition? I think so. Whether Carvin fits the traditional definition of a journalist or not, the reporting that he did around Egypt using only a Twitter account — and tools such as Storify for collecting that reporting — comes pretty close. Some have criticized his work as being just aggregation, but the reality is that Carvin verified and reported and did all of the other things that journalists do.

In effect, Carvin did all of the same things that the BBC does with its “user-generated content” desk, which tries to filter, verify and then report what comes in via Twitter and other social tools like Flickr and YouTube — but he did it single-handedly. Should he be penalized for that, or watch some other outlet get credit for embedding his Twitter stream on their newspaper website? Should Brian Stelter of the New York Times get more credit simply because his Twitter coverage of the tornado in Missouri happened to be associated with a newspaper, even though it appeared on his Twitter account and his Tumblr blog?

Like many other traditional journalistic institutions, the Pulitzer board is eventually going to have to come to grips with the fact that journalism is becoming a much more elusive concept than it used to be — not only is it no longer confined to the simple boxes labelled “newspaper” or “broadcast,” but some of those engaging in it don’t fit the traditional labels either. That doesn’t mean they aren’t committing acts of journalism, just that our vocabulary hasn’t kept up with the changes in the industry.

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr users Rosaura Ochoa and Yan Arief Purwanto

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The ripples continue to spread from a recent Oregon court ruling involving a blogger who was sued for defamation, and argued that she should be covered by the state’s “media shield” law. The judge decided that she didn’t qualify as a journalist, which in turn reignited the old debate over whether bloggers are (or can sometimes be) journalists. Some have argued that instead of this question, it’s more important to define what journalism is, and ensure that it remains protected. But in many ways, that is even harder to define than who qualifies to be a journalist.

To recap the case, Crystal Cox — who refers to herself as an “investigative blogger” — was sued for defamation as a result of some blog posts she wrote about a company and its CEO. The judge who heard the case looked at Cox’s blog and ruled that she wasn’t a member of the media, at least for the purposes of Oregon’s media shield law, because she wasn’t affiliated with any traditional media outlets. This caused a wave of outrage in the blogosphere from many (including me) who believe that bloggers can be journalists regardless of whether they work for a mainstream media entity.

We shouldn’t be protecting journalists, but journalism

In the wake of the ruling, several bloggers — including Kashmir Hill at Forbes and David Carr of the New York Times — noted that Cox’s behavior went way beyond what most journalists (professional or not) would describe as journalistic: among other things, she created domains aimed at tarnishing the reputation of her targets, and then apparently sent an email to the company offering her services as an SEO consultant to repair the reputation she helped destroy.

As Rebecca Rosen at The Atlantic pointed out, this allowed journalists everywhere to heave a sigh of relief and say to themselves: “She’s not a journalist; she’s just a crazy lady with WordPress! We don’t need to protect her.” But this avoids the real question, said Rosen — not who is or isn’t a journalist, but what is journalism and how do we make sure that it is protected? The framers of the U.S. constitution weren’t concerned with journalists, she said, because they didn’t even exist yet as we know them. Instead, they wanted to protect free speech regardless of who engages in it.

Journalism professor Jay Rosen has made a similar point: we should be talking about protecting journalism, he says, not just trying to figure out who is a journalist. But how do we define what constitutes journalism? The judge in the Oregon case tried to come up with some qualities that he said Cox didn’t exhibit, including:

• proof of adherence to journalistic standards such as editing, fact-checking, or disclosures of conflicts of interest
• keeping notes of conversations and interviews conducted
• mutual understanding or agreement of confidentiality between the defendant and his/her sources
• creation of an independent product rather than assembling writings and postings of others
• contacting “the other side” to get both sides of a story

All of these are excellent examples of things that some journalists do — but there are plenty who don’t, and practices are all over the map. The point about confidentiality alone is probably ignored by more journalists than adhere to it (not to mention the confusion over the exact meaning of phrases like “off the record,” “on background” and “not for attribution”). Should licensing bodies be giving tests, the way they do for doctors and lawyers before they are accredited? Some think they should. Josh Stearns of the non-profit group Free Press, who has been tracking journalists arrested during the crackdown on the Occupy movement, argues that actions should speak louder than labels.

How do we classify “random acts of journalism?”

Andy Carvin of National Public Radio, who has been using Twitter as a one-man newswire about the revolutions in Egypt and elsewhere, noted that he wouldn’t meet many definitions of a journalist because he isn’t actually a reporter — and I doubt that he maintains detailed notes of the conversations he conducts with people in the Arab world over Twitter, or discusses confidentiality agreements with them in depth. He also does a lot of “assembling the writings and postings of others,” as the judge put it. But I don’t think anyone would argue that what Carvin is doing isn’t journalism.

When a Pakistani Twitter user posted observations about the Osama bin Laden raid while it was happening, a debate sprang up about whether what he did qualified as journalism, and Carvin argued that there are more and more examples of what he called “random acts of journalism,” where someone happens to be in a certain place and provides on-the-scene reporting — or takes a photo of a plane that has landed in the Hudson River, for example.

Are these people journalists? Not really. But what they are doing is clearly one of the crucial elements of journalism now — as journalism becomes an ecosystem that anyone can become part of, rather than a static concept associated with a specific group of professionals and a specific group of platforms. Learning how to work within that process, to add journalistic skills (however we define them) to the streams of information that are flowing over us, is more crucial than ever, regardless of what we call the people who do that.

I think we have to resist the temptation to restrict our definition of journalism, just because there is some bad journalism out there (something there was plenty of before the internet and blogging came along). As Jay Rosen argues, journalism gets better when more people do it, and we should think about how to make that easier, not harder.

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr users Yan Arief Purwanto and Petteri Sulonen

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Many newspapers and other traditional media entities still think of themselves as delivering their content in a specific package, although most are trying hard to build an online readership as well, or experiment with iPad and Facebook apps (not to mention paywalls). But few are thinking about their businesses in radically different ways — as content-generating engines with multiple delivery methods, or as platforms for data, around which other things can be built. USA Today  appears to be moving in this direction, by opening up its data for others to use and even commercialize, following in the footsteps of The Guardian and its ground-breaking “open platform.”

USA Today has had an API (an “application programming interface,” which allows outside developers and services to access its content) for some time now, as many other newspapers such as the New York Times  do. But like most of those other media outlets, the terms of the USA Today content API said it could only be used for personal or non-commercial uses, which meant the range of applications that could make use of the paper’s content was extremely limited. Now, the Nieman Journalism Lab notes that the newspaper has changed the terms of its API, and will allow commercial licensing of its data, with no rate limits or data caps for these “premium” licenses.

Opening up a relationship with outside developers

The paper’s APIs include one for all of its news articles, one for reviews of books, movies and other entertainment, and one for its census data — which is made up of public data, but has been collected by USA Today and made available in a more usable format than the original government version (although most of its APIs require non-commercial use, the New York Times allows commercial use of its government-info API, which is also made up of public data). Stephen Kurtz, VP of digital development at USA Today, told the Nieman Lab that most of the developers interested in using the paper’s APIs for commercial use are “mom-and-pop” shops, or a couple of guys in a garage, mashing up the content they get with other sources — such as combining USA Today movie reviews with data from Netflix. Said Kurtz:

We encourage that, and they give us good feedback of what they’d like to see and how they would like the API to grow. So for us, it’s very symbiotic.

This is a smart way to think of what an open API accomplishes. It’s not so much that it’s going to generate huge sums of money for a newspaper that offers it, but it allows for experimentation outside the traditional confines of the publication itself — and that can generate valuable ideas and feedback. For The Guardian, which launched its “open platform” approach last year, the opening up of its API was very much an extension of editor-in-chief Alan Rusbridger’s belief in what he calls a “mutualized newspaper,” one in which readers and those outside the publication help on both the journalistic side and the development side.

Those outside the paper have good ideas too

As Chris Thorpe, then the Guardian‘s developer advocate, described in an interview with me last year when the open platform launched, the paper’s API allows for access on several levels: one is the original free level, which allows anyone to use the data for personal or non-commercial purposes; the second is a commercial license, which allows developers to make use of the API provided they agree to accept advertising within the content; and the third is a “bespoke” arrangement, in which developers can request specific data and work with the paper to build a service or app — and then share in the revenue generated from it.

The British paper has been inviting outside developers to make use of its APIs through a series of “hack days,” and they have come up with some interesting ideas. For example, Thorpe has a prototype of a site he calls the “Later Today” Guardian: the site takes the newslists that the newspaper recently made public, which detail which stories it is working on for a particular day, and then maps them against the stories that the paper actually produces. Not only that, but it also notes which ones are in the process of being updated, so readers with useful information can contact the author via Twitter or email.

It’s great that newspapers like the New York Times have “labs” like Beta620, where their staff can experiment with different formats and services based around their content. But one of the driving forces behind the Guardian open platform was the idea that the paper itself couldn’t possibly think of or develop every interesting or worthwhile project involving its content — so why not “crowdsource” that effort via the API? That’s a worthwhile attitude that more traditional media outlets could benefit from. Embedded below is the video interview I did with Thorpe when the open platform launched.

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There have been plenty of obituaries written for the newspaper business, most of which have a kernel of truth to them — but is journalism as we know it at risk as well? Dave Winer, a programming guru and visiting scholar at the New York University school of journalism, says it is. In a blog post on Friday, Winer argued that “journalism itself is becoming obsolete” because now anyone can do it. Is he right? In some ways, yes. One thing is for sure: Journalism is being transformed by the web and by real-time publishing networks and what Om calls the “democracy of distribution.” Whether that’s good or bad depends on your point of view.

Winer’s post was actually about the recent kerfuffle over TechCrunch founder Mike Arrington’s launch of a venture-capital fund, a topic that has received more than enough coverage already elsewhere. But in the process of talking about that issue — and how Arrington has never made any claims to be a journalist — Winer said that as far as he is concerned, journalism as we know it is becoming obsolete, in part because non-journalists can do it just as easily as journalists can. The bottom line, he says, is that journalism itself was “a response to publishing being expensive.”

It cost a lot of money to push bits around the net before there was a net. They had to have huge capital-intensive printing plants, fleets of trucks and delivery boys with paper routes. Now we can hear directly from the sources and build our own news networks. It’s still early days for this… but in a generation or two we won’t be employing people to gather news for us. It’ll work differently.

If it’s important, the news will find me

Winer is certainly right about the fact that the way we consume “news,” and even where that news comes from, has changed dramatically in just the last few years. For many people, as we’ve described before at GigaOM, news now comes from their social graph via Facebook, or through a Twitter stream — possibly read in a news-curation app like Flipboard or Zite, or through an aggregator like Techmeme or Memeorandum, which collects news hits published on blogs by people who may or may not even see themselves as journalists.

But is it right to say that journalism was a response to the fact that publishing was expensive? Not really. Newspapers and their whole business model, which involved becoming a mass medium in order to aggregate eyeballs and then sell them to advertisers, was a response to publishing being expensive. And many of the things that are most criticized about the newspaper approach to journalism — including what NYU journalism professor Jay Rosen calls the “view from nowhere,” and the omniscient tone that many journalists take — are definitely an outgrowth of that model.

But none of those things are really journalism, which is why media theorist Clay Shirky says that rather than focus on saving newspapers, he would prefer to focus on saving journalism. And what is journalism? Everyone has their own definition, but I think it’s fundamentally about a spirit of inquiry, of curiosity, of wanting to make sense of things. It’s something like the spirit of scientific inquiry, as Matt Thompson noted recently in a post at the Poynter Institute. It has very little to do with specific tools or specific methods of publishing.

Random acts of journalism

Winer is right about journalism changing because anyone can do it, however, as we’ve also described a number of times. That trend, which has turned sources of news into publishers (allowing them to “go direct” as Winer likes to say) began with blogs and has continued with Twitter and Facebook and other tools. Andy Carvin, who has become a one-man newswire by curating news about the Arab Spring on Twitter, says he prefers to think of journalism as an act rather than a profession. So people like Sohaib Athar, a Pakistan resident who live-tweeted the raid on Osama bin Laden as it was happening, engaged in what Carvin calls a “random act of journalism.”

Instead of saying journalism is obsolete, I would rather say it as evolving and expanding — and I happen to believe that’s a good thing. What does it consist of now? Most of the things it used to, as well as some new ones: building connections with your reader community is a journalistic skill, and curation of the type Carvin does (and the NYT is experimenting with via its @NYTlive Twitter account) certainly is. And we still need people to confirm facts and ferret out misinformation when news is breaking, which is what makes Snopes one of my favorite non-journalistic journalism sites.

We need people who can interview other people and make sense of what they say — which is why Reddit has some aspects of journalism to it, and Quora does too (Winer recently asked why a newspaper like the New York Times hasn’t adopted an approach like Quora). All these skills and more are required — and the ability to aggregate things in a smart way, and the ability to understand and make sense of large amounts of data.

Will journalism as a whole suffer because some people engage in conflicts of interest or abuse anonymous sources or break any of the other so-called rules of journalism? Not really. Most of the popular newspapers and media outlets of the last 50 years have done all that and worse (yes, even worse than News Corp.’s phone hacking). Newspapers may come and go and bloggers may rise and fall, but journalism continues — not so much as an institution, but as a state of mind and a series of beliefs, and a way of behaving. There are just more ways to do it now, rightly or wrongly.

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While some in the media sphere are consumed by the desire to redesign the way news websites like the New York Times look, others are thinking about redesigning how we write about the news online — including Vadim Lavrusik, who handles journalism outreach for Facebook, and wrote a recent post for the Nieman Journalism Lab on the topic of redesigning the news story. But the reality is that these two things are closely connected: most news websites look the way they do because most news organizations still approach journalism in a fairly traditional way, and until that changes and media outlets embrace the idea of “news as a process,” the way that their websites look is unlikely to change.

That’s not to say that news sites like the New York Times haven’t made concessions to the real-time nature of news, or the fact that many stories no longer have a defined beginning or end — something Paul Ford wrote about for New York magazine recently, describing traditional media as the “epiphanator” because of its love of tidy endings. The NYT often posts stories that are time-stamped, so that readers can see when they were created, and on some of its blogs it occasionally posts updates that have time stamps on them as well, so that it’s obvious when new information was added.

The news, frozen in time

Those kinds of concessions are few and far between, however. In many cases, both on the web and in the NYT’s iPad app, the impression given is that the news displayed is frozen in time, a snapshot of reality taken at a particular moment — in some cases the previous day, and in other cases a time that is difficult to pin down. It’s not just the NYT, obviously: Other news outlets suffer from the same problem, in many cases because their publishing systems are set up to pump out newspapers, not websites. But it’s also a symptom of the way that many media outlets think about what they do.

Media analyst and journalism professor Jeff Jarvis has written about the idea that the story format is an antiquated model that no longer serves the purposes that real-time and digital media require, and there is a lot of truth to that. My response to Jeff’s original piece — where I tried to defend the need for curation and analysis as well as real-time streaming of news — seemed to rub Jeff the wrong way, although I don’t think those two things are mutually exclusive. But how do we blend them together? How does the real-time nature of journalism and the explosion of sources change the way that news organizations publish?

In his Nieman Lab piece, Lavrusik talks about some of the elements that media companies need to consider when designing the future of the news story, including the need for context, which is what I was trying to get at in my response to Jarvis’ piece: it’s great that Andy Carvin of National Public Radio is curating thousands of tweets from the Middle East about the Arab Spring, and that one-man newswire is hugely informative — but how do we make sense of that for people who aren’t connected to Twitter all the time?

Curating the curator

Ideally, someone would have an army of reporter/editors “curating the curator,” by pulling together stories (or whatever we want to call them) from Carvin’s stream, or anyone else who is doing something similar. Storify and Storyful provide tools for doing this — something I’ve argued is becoming a crucial part of what journalists do in this real-time, digital age — but so far not many traditional news organizations have made use of these or any other similar tools. The New York Times and other newspapers have done their own live-blogging of news events, but it is still relatively rare.

Brian Stelter of the NYT provided a great example of how real-time journalism occurs when he used Twitter and Tumblr to report on the tornado in Missouri earlier this year. Not only did his use of those tools allow people to see what he was experiencing behind the scenes as he reported, but readers could effectively see the story taking shape in front of them as it occurred, instead of reading about it in pre-packaged story format later. But while the tweets and Tumblr posts and photos contributed to his eventual story, none of that content appeared on the NYT site while it was happening.

Why can’t we see the evolution of the story?

It’s great that the New York Times allowed Stelter to experiment with Tumblr in this way, but why couldn’t the paper make more use of that content somehow on its actual website? I don’t know exactly how it would do that — maybe a Twitter module that updates in real time, or an embedded Tumblr stream of some kind, or a Storify widget that some editor puts together based on Stelter’s output. On a related note, why has no one experimented with former Salon editor Scott Rosenberg’s idea of story versions, so readers can see which parts of a story have changed over time?

As Lavrusik notes in his piece, user contributions are another huge element of the news that few organizations are really taking advantage of. Many newspapers have the occasional feature where readers can contribute photos, and most have comments — but those comments are often hidden or dumped in a heap at the bottom of a post, where they seem like an afterthought. When everyone can be a publisher and anyone with a smartphone can function as a journalist, how do we incorporate that into the way a modern digital-news organization functions?

Maybe somewhere there is a newspaper or web designer who is thinking about a new kind of site that can incorporate these kind of real-time elements. I hope so, because the way that most news sites function has to change if it’s going to adapt to the way that the news works now — instead of trying to patch and tweak a decades-old publishing model. Meanwhile, if you’re looking for more links about the evolution of the news story, Associated Press editor Jonathan Stray had a great roundup in a recent post.

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The Knight Foundation, a non-profit entity that is one of the biggest funders of media-related projects in the United States — including the new MIT Center for Civic Media, which we wrote about earlier — announced the winners of its annual .7-million News Challenge on Wednesday. There’s s a theme running through most of the winners: namely, data as journalism. Just as tech companies of all kinds are focusing on what we at GigaOM call “Big Data” as a tool for new services, the media industry is (hopefully) starting to understand that data can be useful for its purposes as well.

The Knight Foundation noted in a blog post announcing the 16 winners that data and the use of it for journalism was a big theme among this year’s contestants. When the Knight competition first started five years ago, the idea of a “hacker/journalist” who developed applications and journalistic tools around data was unfamiliar one, but the foundation noted that this is now an established position at some media outlets.

Among the newspapers and media entities that have been at the forefront of this data-journalism wave is the New York Times, where Aron Pilhofer and a team of developers and programmers have created a number of groundbreaking news features. Not surprisingly, perhaps, Pilhofer is also involved in one of the winning entries in the Knight News Challenge: DocumentCloud, which allows media outlets and journalists to upload and share — and annotate or collaborate on — a variety of documents, won 0,000 and will use the funds to add the ability for anyone to edit or contribute to documents.

The other data-related projects that got Knight funding include:

• SwiftRiver. SwiftRiver, which got 0,000 from the news challenge, was developed by the founders of Ushahidi, an information network designed to allow rescue workers and other volunteers to find and share information during a crisis or disaster like the recent earthquake in Japan. SwiftRiver is a series of tools that allow anyone trying to make sense of that information — including journalists — to filter and determine the accuracy of those real-time reports.
• Overview. Developed by a team of journalists at The Associated Press including Jonathan Stray, this project got 5,000 to develop visualization tools that will help journalists explore large data sets. In one early prototype of what the project hopes to do, Stray created a visualization of all the text in the Iraqi war logs.
• PANDA. Developed by Brian Boyer of the Chicago Tribune — another prototypical “hacker/journalist” — along with a team of other journalists from Chicago and the The Spokesman-Review in Spokane, Wash., the PANDA project plans to use the 0,000 it won to create easy web-based tools that even journalists at smaller newspapers and media outlets can use to analyze data and organize it.
• ScraperWiki. Based in England, this project allows users to create their own custom “scrapers” that go out and automatically aggregate data from websites and web-based services, based on whatever parameters the user defines. The 0,000 grant from the Knight challenge will be used to build a “data on demand” feature that will allow journalists to create their own profiles and be alerted when data related to a specific search or topic changes somewhere online.
• OpenBlock Rural. Developed by the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, this project — which received 5,000 — is designed to help rural news outlets aggregate and make sense of local information from government and public records. This approach is very similar to that developed by Chicago-based startup EveryBlock, which was funded by a Knight Foundation grant and later acquired by MSNBC.

In the end, data and the tools to manipulate it are the modern equivalent of the microfiche libraries and envelopes full of newspaper clippings that used to make up the research arm of most media outlets. They are just tools, but as some of the winners of the Knight News Challenge have already shown, these new tools can produce information that might never have been found before through traditional means. We hope some mainstream media players are paying attention, and/or getting ideas of their own.

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr user David Reece

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