Internship report 2/4

Week Two (May 17 to 21)  I had my act together more often, I would say. I borrowed a cell phone: a key reportorial instrument. I was promoted temporarily to a desk. I ate better, and at more body-appropriate intervals.

     Tuesday and Wednesday were my busiest days so far. As a result, and surprisingly at times, they were quite fun.

     On Tuesday, I woke up to see the story I was going to be working on that day on the cover of the GTA section of the Toronto Star.

     “Damn,” I thought. 

     One aspect of OpenFile that is constantly pointed out by the skeptics as a possible weakness of the model is the open pitching process. Story ideas aren’t secret. They are public, advertised as “open files” in a prominent banner on the front page. The openness is designed to collect public input on whether a story is worth assigning to a reporter. But even after they are assigned, the files stay in the top banner, continuing to tempt readers from other news outlets to take the story idea and develop it for their own pages. This was the pitch to OpenFile:

“Years ago, I wrote a blog post about the Joy Oil Station building restoration efforts. Fast-forward several years, and while appearing to be fully restored, they remain unused and inaccessible to the public. What is the official plan for these restored architectural relics at Lake Shore & Windermere? When will they open?”

   The last time the Star covered the Joy station story was in 2007, around the same time the blog post referred to in the pitch was published. Although the Toronto Star knew the story of the relocation and restoration of the Joy Oil building, I didn’t see why they would cover it now, a week after it appeared as a pitch on OpenFile, unless the open pitch prompted them to do a follow-up. When I saw that Star headline, I thought they’d scooped my news out from under me the day I was getting ready to publish it.

     Fortunately for me, they didn’t do much other than re-visit their old story (which far from answered the question posed in the pitch on OpenFile). The restored building façade featured prominently in the Star story art, but their source at the city didn’t know much about the future of the building. I had different sources, and they were able to tell me a little more. When I published later that day, what I was able to write had more information about how the Joy Oil building was included in development plans for the lakeshore area. My story is here. 

     But I don’t think the fact that I had better sources made mine a better story. I actually think that the open pitch process made the OpenFile version a better story. The background narrative was richer. Somebody (Jerrold Litwinenko, former blogTO editor) was publicly interested in this building. His curiosity germinated in other readers’ minds, while they, too, waited to see what the pitch would produce. Jerrold publicized his curiosity about this building on his personal Twitter feed and in other online and non-online areas of his life, I’m sure. His curiosity was mirrored. A week after his query, both the Toronto Star and OpenFile had answers to his question, and the questions of other people interested in his pitch. It all added up, and on OpenFile, it added up more completely. The Toronto Star article that day did not have a comments section. It did not have links to complete the narrative. It didn’t even have all the information a reporter could have gathered. But OpenFile linked to the Toronto Star, and to Jerrold’s old blog post, and to other relevant pages.

     So, it was a good day. The next day, my assignment was very different. I didn’t expect to break any news, that day. I covered the grand opening of the newest public washroom in Toronto. It was a media circus. Mayor David Miller cut the ribbon. In days leading up to the high-tech washroom inauguration, city PR people had been very tight-lipped about the details, and their strategy worked. The Mayor said later he hadn’t seen so many media people at one of his press conferences since he announced a budget surplus in March.

    Although the amount of press people there did not encourage me (why bother duplicating all this effort?), it was good experience in terms of observing some Toronto reporters in their natural environment. I tried to calculate how much money was being spent on these people’s salaries for the two hours I was standing there. It seemed like a waste of money. One camera crew, one print reporter, one photographer and one radio reporter could have done the job that needed doing: getting the information and putting it out there. I wish that with these types of spoon-fed stories, we could get away with that, and spend our society's journalistic resources on investigative work. But I digress. 

(though, to further this digression, I share a link my editor tweeted yesterday, containing an argument that small scale, collaborative news projects ARE the future of investigative journalism. So maybe it's all connected)

     My coverage of the loo story didn’t originate with a pitch. Because OpenFile is still in beta, the influx of pitches from regular users doesn’t yet sustain the story-producing capacity of the site. So, reporters and editors create story ideas too, like in a traditional newsroom. This story idea came from my editor, Kathy.

    The timing worked in our favour on this one. Kathy had the idea a week before the press conference, while the PR people were being tight lipped. But we were able to write something that drew on earlier stories from several similar interviews Toronto’s street furniture manager gave in early May to a variety of outlets. So, we had a story the day before the grand opening, hinting that the next day (May 19) would probably be the big day.

     And so, on Wednesday, when I went to the press conference, we already had a file started on the site. By the time I got back to the office after the event, all I had to do was plug in some new info, use the old story as a nut graph, add the photos I took, and the file was ready, and updated, way before many of the other print/online stories were.

    The TV stations had been broadcasting live, even before the first flush, but when TV viewers went to the internet to find more info, OpenFile was best prepared to capture those clicks. Kathy pushed this story on Twitter quite a bit, and it ended up getting three times as many page views as the Joy Oil story.

     So, even though I’m doing the same kind of reporting I would do if I were interning for a newspaper or a radio station, I’m learning different ways to use the internet to build and acknowledge the existing community around a single story.

     I’m also learning about Toronto, as a side-effect. Torontonians are starved for good public washrooms. Torontonians are proud of their neighbourhoods. Torontonian transit drivers won’t stop the streetcar unless you pull the yellow lead, even if you’ve made it abundantly clear you want to get off at this corner, through other cues. I have two more weeks to go. (edit: one and a half) 

     So far, so good. 

My internship report, first of four

I've been extremely lucky to find myself amongst the furor of the first week of OpenFile's live website launch. Up until May 11, OpenFile.ca consisted of a blog with idealistic but vague posts, and links to Facebook and Twitter pages. Things quickly got more interesting when, on my first day in the office, their beta news site went live.

     If you haven't been keeping up with the buzz, you might need to know that OpenFile is the newest guess at what the future of journalism will look like. They are betting that it will look local, with an open and collaborative story development process, and that the stories will be community driven, freelancer-produced and curated by experienced old-media talent.

     So, what sets this start-up apart from all the others who are claiming to have divined the future?

     Well, first of: they pay freelancers really well, and really quickly. As a result, they are building a fan base amongst the unemployed writers, photographers and media people in Toronto (and even some of the employed ones) whom they will need in order to build up the story stable on the site. 

     Secondly, they have some money. And they have enough for three years, apparently.

     But that's not all. Word of OpenFile has spread thanks in part to the brand-value of the people associated with the project. Kathy Vey, the EIC, is a well-known Toronto Star alumnus. Wilf Dinnick was a TV correspondent for all the big North American stations. The only name I knew before applying for the internship, and the most well know in the internet world, in Craig Silverman, whose 2,200 Twitter followers certainly haven't hurt the start-up's efforts to get the word out about themselves. 

     Also, OpenFile have, in a way, combined the buzz concepts of the current online world, and successfully conceptualized how these concepts (open processes, discussion, conversation and crowd-souced information) could fit into a journalistic model. Silverman wrote about how a tipster, a reporter (me) and an editor carried this off in his second blog post after the launch: File Function. 

     During my first three days there, OpenFile has garnered the coverage they were coveting.  There were upbeat articles about them in some prestigious publications. The Globe and Mail article was the first, and might have prompted many of the others (that's the thing about old media: influence). Every time another article about them broke, the small staff would chatter gayly with each other, levy violent threats in vain at anyone who dared say anything negative, and give each other virtual high-fives in Twitter-land. (edit: it was stimulating event to be around. I wish I had ownership over a new project I was this excited about. Tune back in to my life the the new Dalhousie Gazette gets started in September.)
Here is a round-up of the kudos:

National Post

Globe and Mail

Business News Network (one and two) -- these are good clips to watch if you want to know about how the money aspect works

Nieman Journalism Lab

And more bloggy-type coverage:

Techvibes

Torontoist (which included a very nice photo gallery in which I appear - take it as proof that I'm attending my internship, perhaps)

blogTO

Toronto Life

J-source.ca

Mondoville (who've exhibited a bit of snark and a lot more skepticism than the other sites)

Predictably, a lot of the positive response to OpenFile has come from journalists. Some of the more personal responses, emailed directly to the editorial team instead of expressed publicly on Twitter or Facebook, were unexpected.

But despite all the hype, OpenFile has hurdles to overcome. The Halifax Daily News and the New York Times experimented with the hyper-local model, planting reporters in specific neighbourhoods and attempting to benefit from that involvement with the grassroots community. Their experiments failed. Maybe journalists don't have the most active imagination when it comes to local news. Maybe, like my prof said, there is a problem in "defining news by where it happens instead of what it is."

     I see a possible disconnect between the audience they are ultimately aiming for, and the audience they are currently reaping. They need to have a big number of unique visitors in order to satisfy their funders. They won't get those numbers by leeching from the established Toronto blogs and Twitter feeds, or by attracting only disenfranchised journalists. I don't see how the site can create a comprehensive portrait of all the Toronto  neighbourhoods without some targeted street outreach work promoting their site. 

     Another question I have is: what is their argument that the internet is the best medium for neighbourhood news? Don't people who connect to the internet generally have more education, more money, more options, and thus more of an interest in the things outside their own neighbourhood? And perhaps, is neighbourhood news not best garnered from the neighbourhood itself: the local flyers, the notice boards, the conversations at the grocery store?
     But maybe I'm destined to miss the appeal of hyper-local internet news, because I've never really felt connected to any neighbourhood. It has been 14 years since I have lived in any one house for longer than a year. I use the internet to feel connected to things I can't walk to, or call on the phone. Maybe I spend too much time with the hyper-international? So, I'm not the target audience of hyper-local sites.

       OpenFile's overwhelming strength is that they are taking it slow. They have capital funding for three years: it has taken them less than one to get where they are now. They are smart, well-connected, experienced journalists. They have fully thought-out the project they are working on, but they are not rigid. They expect to morph over the next weeks, in order to keep up with what they will need to become. They are open to suggestions. I think the bookies are still undecided on what will happen to this gamble. 

What I do

FILE FUNCTION: HOW ONE CITIZEN’S CONCERN BECAME A TIP, A FILE AND A STORY 

In short

Thanks

Good

Big

Weird

Bye

The quit

“If at first you don’t succeed, try again. Then quit. No use being a damn fool about it.” 

—W.C. Fields

It's the only decision taken in the past few weeks that, when taken, gave me a sense of empowerment. It's the only future that, when considered, doesn't suck me into some curious darkness. 


The word "quit" has such negative connotations. Perseverance is the virtuous path. "Sticking with it" is admirable in out culture. You don't know how hard it has been for me to come around to this choice. At first, I just dismissed the option. I don't quit. But the stuff kept piling on, and taking ownership of The Quit was the crutch that kept me standing. 


I have to let myself do it. Other people have to let me do it. It's a failure, and admitting that burns. But it has to be the right thing, because it feels like life again. 

as everything falls apart

life can change in a week. i remember when i used to believe in love - it wasn't too long ago. i was so cocky as to talk about love with others, compare notes and laugh about it's dark side. but now i think that when two people talk about love, they are talking about two totally different things. when you take away your insecurities, you secret hopes, your flaws, your fairy tales, your fear of loneliness, and your desires, what remains? there's nothing left behind to call "love"which is understood to be the same by both people. there is no shape for "love" in Plato's world of ideas. 

i also used to believe stuff about myself, which i don't anymore. where i was going, and what i wanted from to get from the journey. that all has to change. everything is upheaving at the same time. except in the world of ideas, i don't care about school, i don't care about journalism, i don't care about myself, whether i get up in the morning or don't. it's a struggle to care about other people, even. its a struggle to care about the dog. 

i used to think that when people screamed underwater in movies, the character did it because it made for a cool shot. but now i know: sometimes, it's the only thing left. 

Human journey

"He said, essentially, humans are alive for the purpose of journey, a kind of three-act structure. They are born and spend several years discovering themselves and the world, then plod through a long middle in which they are compelled to search for a mate and reproduce and also create stability our of natural instability, and then they find themselves at an ending that seems to be designed for reflection. At the end, their bodies are slower, they are not as easily distracted, they do less work, and they think and feel about a life lived rather than look forward to a life getting started. He didn't know what the point of the journey was, but he did believe we were designed to search for and find something. And he wondered out loud if the point wasn't the search but the transformation the search creates."

Donald Miller, A Million Miles in a Thousand Years