Can bloggers be journalists? It’s a debate that raged for years in the U.S. (far too long if you ask me), and it can still raise hackles. In Baku, Azerbaijan, it could mean the difference between having a free press or not.

Visiting Baku this week and speaking with different groups of journalists and journalism students, the question whether bloggers can be journalists surfaces time and again. In Baku, where newspapers must be granted a media license from the government to publish, blogging is one of the only outlets for truly independent journalism to reach and audience. It’s so important to emerging democracies like Azerbaijan, formerly a part of the Soviet Union, that President Obama signed the Daniel Pearl Freedom of the Press Act this week, hoping to promote a free press around the world.

Rashad Shirin translates what I had just said for a group of journalists at the American Center, University of Languages, Baku.

“One important thing you should be teaching them is to check facts and to write balanced pieces, not propaganda which can easily be discredited,” advised Onnik Krikorian, an editor for Global Voices Online in the region, by email. “There needs to be some journalistic skills introduced into their blogging to make it more effective, especially when it comes to checking facts or identifying what is speculation, gossip or rumor and what is fact.”

The debate is different than in the U.S., where access to prominent events like the Winter Olympics seems to be the last battlefield for bloggers. Here, bloggers who would like to produce independent journalism are fearful of being misunderstood and silenced by the government. The mainstream newspapers don’t do any blogging on their websites either, so it remains a this-or-that situation, much like we had in the U.S. before about 2006. (In my presentation, I show the NY Times blog page, which has dozens of blogs, and explain how dismissive most American newsrooms were of blogging just five years ago.)

Journalists in the U.S. are concerned for the future. Journalists in Baku are concerned for the present.

I’ll be honest: When I received that first email almost a year ago from Terry Davidson at the U.S. Embassy in Azerbaijan, expressing interest in translating my book and having me visit the country, my first thought was “where the heck is that?” Azerbaijan is a former Soviet Union country near Georgia, just north of Iran, and Baku is the capital city, perched on the western shore of the Caspian sea.

I’m here this week speaking to various groups of journalists and students. And tonight, I’ll be attending a special “book launch” as the embassy begins distributing copies of Journalism 2.0 that were translated into Azerbaijani. (This is the fourth language for Journalism 2.0. Unfortunately I can still only read one.) Yesterday I spent three hours with a group of about 20 student journalists and another 3 hours with a small group of “A-list bloggers” from Baku.

The students are eager, ambitious and idealistic, just like the students I speak to in the U.S. Unlike their American counterparts, however, they have a much harder career path to travel since there really isn’t an economic model for journalism in Azerbaijan. Advertising isn’t really a factor in the media and the newspapers and TV stations here are tightly controlled by the government, which probably explains their tiny reach. In a city of about 2 million people, the largest newspaper has a circulation of about 3,000 7,000 (correction made 5/23/10).
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This week’s New York Times magazine takes a stab at “What are you really worth” this week and includes a lengthy piece on journalists. I’ll spare you the context of the how the market has devalued traditional journalism while creating new opportunities and simply recommend you read the entire article by Andrew Rice. The money quote:

… for some — possibly foolhardy — reason, a lot of people still want to work in journalism, and even amid the depths of the recession, there have been stirrings of creativity. A multitude of younger, nimbler enterprises have popped up, unencumbered by the past and ready to try anything. History suggests that few of these ventures will ultimately survive: Web start-ups have a failure rate between 70 and 90 percent. But it’s quite possible that the experiments they’re staging are already producing the kind of innovations that make for new, sustainable business models.

For continuing coverage of independent journalism startups, check out the section we developed on Lost Remote to cover this emerging sector.

Several people have asked if and when electronic versions of my new book, Journalism Next, might become available. The good news: fairly soon.

Chris O’Brien, Marketing Manager of the College Publishing Group at CQ Press sent me this update yesterday:

“The book is now in Amazon’s Kindle ingest process, which can take anywhere from two to four weeks.  As you can imagine, there are a number of variables that contribute to the timeline for this (all under Amazon’s control), but hopefully since your book has shown some nice sales so far through Amazon, it will encourage them to speed it up!”

The book will also be available a la carte in electronic form on CQPress’s new custom publishing website, hopefully within the next month.

Still think NPR is a cute little public radio station? Think again.

The same technology that brought Google Maps to so many websites – the Application Programming Interface (API) – is now enabling NPR to become a distribution juggernaut. The news organization distribute the same content in many forms to many destinations with hardly any extra effort. This is the scale that publishers have longed for: create content once and see it published anywhere that can be imagined.

The NPR API delivered more than 1.1 billion stories last month and almost 5 million total in the past six months, according to a blog post today by NPR Director of Application Development Daniel Jacobson.”The big jump in total API requests from July to August are due to the launch of many new products in July,” Jacobson wrote. “Among them are the new NPR.org, the NPR.org Flash Player, the NPR News iPhone app, WBUR’s new web site, and Minnesota Public Radio’s new site.”

“While some media companies, such as News Corp, attempt to block their content from distribution, the NPR API seems to be making access to its content widespread,” Mike Melanson wrote on ReadWriteWeb.

Indeed, this strategy and execution is impressive. The combined reach through all the different channels that NPR content flows does nothing but build audience and brand loyalty, critical pieces of the NPR model.

Jacobson also posted an amazing slideshow (embedded below) that illustrates the life cycle, distribution and some key metrics for an NPR story. This is the way all new publishers should be producing their content and organizing their workflow.

By Jake Batsell

Landing a plum newsroom job straight out of college has never been an easy feat. But this year’s journalism graduates face a double-barreled challenge: an unusually stingy job market and a growing perception that their generation has a “lax work ethic,” as a Washington Post headline declared last week.

The Post’s story was pegged to the Pew Research Center’s new project on millennials. If you spend time sorting through the Pew research, you’ll find that it even-handedly portrays millennials as “confident,” “connected” and “open to change.” Still, the “spoiled” tag persists. Having spent my 20s trying to defy the Gen X slacker stereotype as I worked to prove myself in metro newsrooms, I can relate to millennials who feel frustrated by pop-culture labels.

I’ve worked with millennials for the past two years teaching digital journalism at Southern Methodist University and advising the SMU Daily Mustang. Newsroom bosses, listen up – here are some things you need to know about your latest crop of entry-level hires:

They respond well to clear expectations.

“Got it.” Those are my two favorite words in the millennial lexicon. When you offer clear instruction to a young journalist and hear those two magic words, you can take it to the bank that they’ll follow through. This is not a rebellious generation. Pew’s research shows that they respect their elders. But if you fail to communicate your expectations clearly and assume they already know things that you take for granted, you could be in for a long day.

They’re creative and adaptable.
It’s a myth that all millennials are technical whizzes – every semester in my digital journalism class, there are a handful of self-proclaimed technophobes. Sure, they live on Facebook, but that doesn’t mean they all know how to write a <div> tag in HTML. That said, these “digital natives” are quick studies who love to try new things. This week, I was delighted to discover that two of my students took the initiative to post an instant video report from spring football practice from an iPhone, using free Qik software.
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Thanks to jthomas100tube for recording and publishing video from my talk at the South by Southwest Interactive Conference in Austin last week. As I mentioned in the introduction, there were thousands of acts of journalism at SXSWi but thousands of people. This is just one example.

The videos are broken up into several parts (even though the talk only lasted 20 minutes). To see the other parts visit here.

By Rick Martin

As a part of the planning process for a local site I’m soon launching, I’ve been knocking around some ideas on Google Wave with some friends on how to set up some revenue streams for a website. Yes I know what you’re thinking– it’s going to be one of those ‘monetization’ posts. But stick with me here. I’m pretty sure that there’s at least one idea here that you might not have heard before.

Geo-targeted advertising

My apologies, because you’ve undoubtedly heard this one before. ‘Geo-targeting’ is a big buzz word for 2010 and we probably won’t know for a few years whether it’s the silver bullet many people expect it to be. I can’t help but think that news sites who only sell ads site-wide without looking at the user’s IP are not really trying. Ideally, of course, you want to show different ads based on location. If bloggers can implement this kind of a strategy using common solutions like Wordpress and Drupal, there’s no reason why a news site can’t do the same. Those of you shackled by legacy CMSs, message me your address on Twitter so I can send you sympathy cards.

Some specifics to take away: Drupal-heads out there can give the Ad GeoIP module a try, while Wordpress users might look into this geo-targeting script (although I have to admit that I haven’t tested the latter). The rest of you check out this post on Programmable Web, or perhaps go have a discussion with your programmers.

Sell ads against specific tags or categories

For local websites, this could means selling ads against content tags corresponding to a geographical location. For example, if the New York Times had a ‘Manhattan’ tag, maybe businesses in that area would buy ads against that content. In a way this is also geo-targeted advertising, just of a different sort.

Stack Overflow is one site that’s giving this a try. Granted they probably have Jedi programmers on the case, but that’s no reason not to try it ourselves. Theoretically it could be done with Drupal by restricting an ad block to show up only on a specific tag page. This isn’t very elegant however, so I’d love to hear if anyone has a better suggestion.

Using content to pimp your services

No, not those kind of services (although pimpin’ is certainly one way to make your site turn a profit). What I meant was, try use your content as a means of publicizing media services that you can provide. Sacramento Press are smartly doing social media consulting (it’s not their primary gig, so it’s excusable!) and NewsPepper.com is doing event coverage.

Seriously, why not try this avenue rather than beating your head against the content monetization wall?

Spotlight sponsors as community supporters

If yours is a community information website, don’t be afraid to take advantage of the fact that you’re serving the local area. Similarly, any sponsor that supports your efforts is indirectly supporting that community as well. Be sure to publicly thank them for doing so, and encourage other potential advertisers to throw their support behind you as well. The Batavian is a good example of a local site that has successfully brought in local sponsors, and has appropriately thanked them in plain view on their ’sponsors’ page.

They could take it one step further by pointing this out on their ‘advertise’ page as well, saying something like ‘Show some love for the community by supporting the Batavian‘. Businesses generally don’t allow you to tug at their heartstrings, but if you’re lucky you’ll find at least one exception.

While none of these ideas alone are likely to solve all your problems, I’d speculate that a local news site that implements all four should be a little more capable of financially supporting itself. If you have any ideas to add to this, I’d really love to hear ‘em.

Rick Martin is a Tokyo-based freelance writer. Read more from Rick at www.1rick.com/blog and follow him on Twitter at @1rick.

I’m heading to Austin this week for the South by Southwest Interactive conference and couldn’t be more stoked. I’ve wanted to attend for years. This year, I’m not only attending, I’m speaking. I’ll be doing a “book reading” on the Day Stage on Tuesday, March 16 at 10 a.m. But I won’t be reading from my book (since that would be boring.) I’ll be giving a short presentation on the future of journalism and it would be great to see you there.

Another opportunity for journalists at SXSW to gather will take place on Sunday at 5 p.m. A group of journalists who are speaking at the conference will be getting together for happy hour at a local watering hole and you’re invited to join us if you’re in town.

Sunday, March 14, 5 pm
Opal Divine’s
700 W Sixth St.
http://www.opaldivines.com/

By Matt Neznanski

There’s a lot of hope for newspapers in capturing some of the emerging (exploding?) mobile market in the coming months and years as phones get smarter and people begin to rely on them more and more for information.

But despite the best of intentions, most small newsrooms aren’t prepared to go mobile and no amount of technology is going to get them there. The biggest impediment is the single-deadline mindset of publications that still cling mightily to shovelware posted after print pages are sent to press. It hasn’t ever fit the Web and it’s even more glaring in a mobile world.

Shoveling content to the Web in the middle of the night is, sadly, still the norm for lots of newsrooms. My organization is still one of them even though we’ve made a major effort to train everyone in the newsroom to post their own work and keep hounding everyone about it.

For us, the biggest reasons that shovelware has such a grip include:

• perception that posting to the Web is yet another duty tacked onto an already overworked staff
• resentment about the Web stealing circulation from print, so the online effort is half-assed at best
• fear of technology and content editors that enable the technologically challenged to remain that way

Aside from institutional inertia, I also think there’s a lack of understanding in how different the experience of news is online and in print.
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