One of the roles of media is to help people understand the world so we can make informed decisions – and then take action. The daily flood of news and information from all the big media institutions we love and love to hate is one approach to learning, sifting, filtering and evaluating all this information. Longer form magazines, books, documentaries, films, formal education and art are another. Talking and listening to friends, family and people we trust is yet another. It’s all so … much. What if you could put all of that wisdom and process in a blender and turn it into some sort of info power drink?

Technorati Tags: wikis, wemedia

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Each month I have dinner with good friends who happen to be editors at three of the nation’s leading news organizations. Given our friendship and a common kinship to newspapers, conversation invariably turns to journalism and its current woes. As a recovering journalist turned digerati, I am left to defend “Dale’s Internet” during spirited after-dinner dialectic and wine tasting.

This month’s debate: Who screws up the most?

The debate begins with the claim “you can’t trust anything on the Internet.” The new twist is that my friends are convinced that Google, Wikipedia and a gazillion bloggers are not only spreading bad information but instilling bad habits in good reporters.

Reporters have become poor spellers who don’t check things, they contend, because they rely so much on that insidious web of misinformation and opinion. The editors worry that professional reporters are beginning to perform like the unskilled and distrusted amateurs of the Internet.

My friends are also upset with the error surcharge. They complain that newspapers and broadcasters pay a far higher price for making errors or expressing opinion than do Internet sites.

I wanted to tell them that the public expects more – perhaps too much – from professional news organizations and their promise of rigor, objectivity, and truth to power.

I also wanted to explain how the Internet itself acts an editing mechanism where editorial judgment is applied at the edges, sometimes after the fact, not in advance.

Instead, I yielded to the wine, the time and a respect for dedicated friends doing the hard work of a good profession

Then came the NBC Nightly News with Brian Williams. Near the end of the broadcast, Williams paused to announce a correction. The previous week, NBC reported that Russia had planted a flag on the seabed directly under the North Pole in a move seen as a symbolic claim on the resource rich region. NBC ran video footage from Reuters called “Russia plants flag under N Pole.” Reuters posted the story and video on its news site on August 2.

The problem was that a 13-year-old boy who saw the footage on NBC thought the Russian MIR submersible in the video looked a lot like the submersible used in the search for the Titanic more than a decade ago. Which it was.

Blaming Reuters, Williams acknowledged the error. Poof. It was gone.

Reuters merely posted this clarification above the story on its site: “This story contains file shots of Russia’s MIR submersible. The story also contains video of a submersible which was shot during the search for the Titanic in the Atlantic.” Poof.

The bad video tumbled without correction from one medium to the next. CNN, MSNBC, Fox and other stations ran it for days. Dozens of newspaper sites linked to it.

On the Internet, an error gets around like a lobbyist in Washington. Reputations are shaped by how quickly peers, critics, friends, experts and, yes, editors correct it. Participation in the process of setting the story straight is part of the currency, as well as the sport, of the Net.

It used to be that journalists were expected to be an expert on something. Today some 13-year-old probably knows more about the thermal tiles on the space shuttle than a reporter covering NASA. Chances are the 13-year-old is communicating with a larger network of readers on My Space. So why not use their knowledge network, even if the kid (or the reporter) may misspell “Endeavour.”

That’s the promise of We Media – the media environment where shared or connected knowledge is an opportunity, not a threat. As great as the promise of “truth to power,” interactivity and communications technology enable citizens to spread knowledge,

“Who screws up the most?” is not the question we ought to be asking at dinner parties, in newsrooms or on the Internet. We ought to be asking how skilled journalists can collaborate with connected, informed citizens to better make sense of a complex world.

Editors might help everyone with their spelling. Or they could blame an algorithm.

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A friend at a relatively large media corporation recently asked me to evaluate one of that company’s newspaper web sites. I removed any references to the specific paper/company not so much because I’m avoiding picking on them, but because most of the things I list I’ve seen elsewhere and I want more people at more companies to understand what to look for and why I feel they are important.

It’s very fun these days to obsess over various Web 2.0 technologies and how to integrate them into your existing site. But keeping up with the items listed below can do a lot to help companies grow and maintain readership.

Here goes nothing:

Improper copyright year in the footer – If the reader thinks you don’t know what year it is, it doesn’t do much to help credibility. I subsequently found this in a lot of places. When this extends into the second quarter of the year (as it now does as of this posting), it looks much worse than seeing it in Jan. and Feb.

Contact info without a means of communicating via the web — The site listed a collection of phone numbers for News tips, Classifieds, Display advertising, and Subscriptions. But there was no link to pages for these departments or Web-based email forms. This can frustrate the reader and cost your company a good chunk of change in the man hours needed to answer all those phone calls.

Articles with no comment functionality – I had the chance to integrate Topix.net into the iFocos site and was impressed with how easy the integration was. Such a service, or others like it integrated into the bottom of each article, could both enable reader feedback and expose the article to a wider audience. Also this wasn’t a matter of the site not encouraging any comments, as it’s blog had them fully enabled.

Registration requirement — I think the ESPN.com’s Insider approach is much better than preventing a user from seeing anything at all. If you’re going to require registration, I feel you should give the reader a tease of the first two or three grafs.

Hiding back-door views of your site — I’m a view-source kind of guy. I deleted some of the URL for a blog post, down to http://www.DOMAIN.com/CATEGORY/ and found a “test page” was exposed. This should probably be an inventory of all the company’s blogs. I also noticed that it said “Powered by Movable Type 3.16″ Much has happened to Movable Type since version 3.16. Keeping on such an upgrade path can sometimes uncover new publishing, revenue and social networking opportunities for your company.

Make your headlines clickable – Not everyone instinctively knows to click on a “permalink.” Having both the word “permalink” and the headline clickable could result in increased page vews.

OK, I lied. I am now meandering into some more Web 2.0 territory. But don’t worry, none of this requires a computer science degree or anything …

Google maps indexing – I started playing with integrating Google maps into Movable Type recently for a client. I think this is an amazing opportunity for companies to explore. What I envision is a Google map that, when you click on a specific region, your last X number of articles, blog posts etc. that relate to that area show up.

Very targeted advertising could be integrated as well in the pop-up windows in the map. When users mouse over one of the markers on the map. Constructing such a map is no more complicated than creating specialized RSS feeds.

Go where the high school kids are — Why not create an account on MySpace that features links to your latest content? You could get thousands of potential young readers to be your paper’s “friend” and communicate with them on a level newspaper execs haven’t even let themselves ever dream about.

Recruit and host guest bloggers, and make them a real part of your publishing effort – Several news sites are warming up to the idea of “guest bloggers” as part of a citizen journalism effort. However, the areas these fine folks often post into is not always fully utilized by the newspaper company. Including small widgets showcasing “Latest headlines” or articles and features related to what the guest is blogging about seems to be a natural fit that would enhance the user’s experience with the guest blog and the company’s ability to reach a larger audience.

Speaking of reaching a larger audience … claim your blog on Technorati! – Once you’ve created these blogs for guests, take the next step and get them on Technorati’s radar. Make sure the ping settings in your publishing system are correct, and embed the little bit of HTML that enables visitors to make that blog one of their favorites on Technorati.

This is obviously just a small snapshot of opportunities and mistakes out there. We’d love to hear other from you. Comment below and get those gripes off your chest!

Chad Capellman is an occasional contributor and site constructor for iFocos. His LinkedIn profile can be viewed at http://www.linkedin.com/in/capellman

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Last night at a Miami/We Media bloggers dinner (hosted by Alex deCarvalho of Scrapblog)  Andy Carvin and I got into a discussion about how we got blogging…which got us thinking:  how do bloggers get to be bloggers?  Why do we take up self-publishing?  Where did the passion for media–that’s evident in so many of us–come from?

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