And different philosophers said you know what you know for different reasons. George Berkeley, for example, had this whole “seeing is believing” thing, for example. If he didn’t perceive it with his own senses, it might as well not exist.

No retweets for him, I suppose. No newspapers. I seriously doubt he would have trusted cable news had it existed in his day.

(Scholarly friends: I am aware that Berkeley took the above given as step one, and then rambled off into metaphysics, yes. I am not going to go there today.)

And so we come to a few amusing events of the past week or so. I have three in mind.

1. Jason Calacanis, Web entrepreneur and investor, posts a series of tweets about the Apple tablet the night before and morning of its unveiling. Journalists at several surprisingly major news organizations repeat and report the rumors Calacanis starts.
2. Someone poses as the philosopher Jurgen Habermas on Twitter.
3. Someone pretending to be from a rich family claims to give millions to help post-earthquake Haiti.

In all three cases, [GENERALIZATION AHEAD] our desire to believe seems to have been the primary reason we did so.

You got duped by @Jason

The Calacanis story took advantage (and indeed, mocked) the breathless pre-announcement hype about the tablet. I probably saw it because someone retweeted one of Jason’s early posts claiming to have been a beta tester, and I have to ask myself why I clicked. The truth is, I was quietly reading everything I could get my hands on about the tablet, building up my own hopes and dreams of a magical and wonderful device.

Multiply me by millions, and you get an idea of what the demand was like for information, rumors, patent translations, and actual leaks about the tablet in the run up to the moment when the little heavy-thing-landing-in-a-pile-of-dust “iPad” text dropped into Steve’s slide on screen in San Francisco.

So Calacanis, just for fun (I think), provided some supply for that demand.

Was he a reliable source? Only if you’d never paid attention to him before, which really works out well for him when you do the math. There were plenty of people who had followed Jason’s work, attitude, and penchant for showmanship long enough to stay skeptical.

Of course, anyone with a search engine could also quickly become a skeptic.

The moral of the story for reporters? Consider your source’s history on the topic and motivation at all times. Then consider it again.

I got duped by @JHabermas

Look, I dropped a philosopher’s name earlier, and I’ve done bits and pieces of reading on postmodern philosophy, and I’m a big fan of Guy Debord and whatnot, but I haven’t studied Jurgen Habermas. But I do know he’s the “public sphere” guy, and when I retweeted @attackerman’s “THAT’S JURGEN HABERMAS” update, I didn’t do a whole lot of investigation. None, actually.

But, of course, someone knew better.

Jurgen Habermas’s audience knows more than I do. Follow the trail from that link and its comments, and you’ll even find someone who (claims to have) tracked down Habermas on the phone:

“He added that ‘my email address is not publicly available,’ which suggests that perhaps he didn’t quite understand what I was getting at. In fact, the father of the public sphere doesn’t seem to understand the internet very well at all, judging by his few previous references to the topic.” [The links are in the original.]

Wait, run that back a paragraph. Did you catch that little parenthetical disclaimer I dropped in?

“…someone who (claims to have) tracked down…”

Hedging my bets.

Why?

Because I don’t know the person who says they made the call to Habermas, and I didn’t take the time to even check their About page. The author did, however, include a link to an mp3 he says is the recorded conversation between him and Habermas about the Twitter account. That would be easy enough to listen to, and anyone familiar with Habermas’s voice could confirm it’s him.

But I haven’t listened, although I would be amused to hear some sort of creative remix of it if such a thing were to go viral.

Moral? If you don’t know the answer to a key question about your source, someone else probably does. Find them. And ask them.

Stefan Roberts didn’t dupe Wikipedians

A man says he’s Stefan de Rothschild, and he’s giving $2.5 million to Haiti.

Ingredients:

• Famous European name
• Unusually large charitable donation
• A few quick Web sites
• A handful of Wikipedia entries

I’m going to lean heavily on this Valleywag post to explain the sequence of events (I know, consider the source, right? But there’s lots of links in that post, too.) The important part is that the guy was a faker, and although no journalist caught it, he was busted when he caught the attention of Wikipedia reviewers who noticed he kept putting the same fake pages up on the encyclopedia I’ve linked to four times in this post.

Here’s a quote from Valleywag’s story:

“What brought Roberts down was one of the tools he used to hoist himself up, Wikipedia, on which he posted no fewer than five fake entries: for himself, for his fake line of Rothschild family members and for one of his fake companies, Rothschild Estates. His antics caught the attention of the Wikipedia Review after editors kept deleting the fake entries and Roberts kept trying to resurrect them.”

Moral: Give a small number of editors a reliable system for tracking down claims of truth, and it gets easier to spot falsehoods, whether the editors have expertise on the topic or not.

[UPDATE: So there's a comment below that points out an important factual error I made in the Rothschild bit. In fact, it's an error that makes this "moral" have no backup in the actual narrative of the fraud and its discovery. I'll explore it further and report back here, or in the comments, about what I figure out.]

I like tools and systems and truth, so I’m going to repeat variations of the aforementioned morals-of-the-story in a real general way for a moment. Bear with me.

• If you give journalists tools to help them spot anomalies in the system of the news, it gets easier to discern what’s true.
• If you give journalists tools to help them track how truthful sources are, it gets easier to tell readers what’s true.
• If you give journalists tools to ask their sources and readers good questions, everybody wins.

Did I mention I like tools? And truth? And also, links. Feel free to suggest a few more in the comments of this post, or wherever fine links are shared.

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My advice to journalism students starts with this:

Blog.

That doesn’t mean you have to blog about journalism, or build a rabid political audience, or chronicle every step the Googles and Twitters and Apples of the world take.

It just means that you maintain a Web site where you write on a somewhat regular basis.

And by “maintain,” I mean you have the opportunity to learn as much as you’d like to learn about basic formatting for the Web. HTML, CSS, and if you’re a step more curious or industrious, blog software that mirrors (or exceeds) the functionality you’ll find in the content management systems at most professional news organizations.

That’s how I got started in this business. In fact, to be more precise, I think the first bits of code I touched had to do with making the title of my first Blogspot-hosted blog bigger, and changing its font and colors.

From there I switched to a hosted WordPress blog, learned a lot more about HTML and CSS, then decided I wanted to do more, bought my own domain and hosting (shouldn’t cost more than $10/month) and taught myself much, much more about making WordPress and similar content management systems dance.

But that digital specialty, (I can make your newspaper’s blogs look and act professional, and I can train your reporters to be better bloggers), as valuable as it was in 2006, wasn’t the only thing I learned as a journalism student.

Become an expert at one analog craft and one digital craft

An analog craft. Yes. Not knitting. Which is cool, but not what I mean, exactly.

When I say “analog,” what I mean is a core reporting skill. Those things journalism professors and newspaper editors talk about whenever the conversation about “what j-school students should learn these days, anyway” comes up. It’s very easy for me to say “well, of course you’re going to pick these core skills up along the way, right?”

But let’s get more specific.

I highly recommend that you specialize in an analog journalism craft.

Maybe one of these:

• Copy Editing
• Enterprise Reporting
• Photography
• Photo Editing
• Media Law

There are others, of course. But this is a short list of things you can pick up in school. I picked up a lot of copy editing, and some practice at what I’m ambitiously calling enterprise reporting, which I later cemented with an internship at a major metro paper.

The point: The Web is awesome, and we’ll get to those digital crafts in a moment, but you want to have more than one tool in the box. So, I recommend two diverse skills. Will Sullivan once called these “Peace Out” skills, because it makes it much easier to move from job to job as necessary, throwing up two fingers as you walk out the door.

Learn a Web craft

A long time ago in Web years, I wrote about a trinity of recommended Web skills for journalism students: multimedia, data, and community management. Learn any one, and you can get a job tomorrow.

That’s still pretty much true, but I’m encouraging you to pair that digital skill with an analog skill.

Great at video editing? Be great at photo editing for print, too.

Great at slinging XML into Flash maps? Be great at enterprise reporting, too.

Great at HTML/CSS? Be great at print page design, too.

Great at community management? Study up on media law so you can know when to cite Section 230 in the corporate lawyer’s office when the moment comes. (And it will.)

And vice versa.

Get the idea? Don’t be one-dimensional. You probably aren’t.

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I spent most of last Thursday through Sunday at the 2009 Online News Association conference in San Francisco, and if you follow me on Twitter or spotted a short post on my blog over the weekend, you know that Publish2, my current employer, was honored with a rather pleasant award on Saturday night at the Online Journalism Awards.

And earlier that day, I helped lead an unconference session on “Context and the Coming Link Economy,” which turned out to be one of my favorite conversations of the weekend, with help from Matt Thompson, Elaine Helm, Jay Rosen, and other journalists who turned out to talk through the ideas we had in mind.

Meanwhile, I caught a few excellent panels each day, including one about the Journalist as Entrepreneur moderated by Mark Briggs of Serra Media and Journalism 2.0.

Mark was one of many people I was excited about meeting for the first time in person at ONA, and we had a good time and a managed a solid conversation or two, but I think we both saw something had changed in the attitudes we saw from the journalists in the room, or at the very least, that there was something different about this conference.

He was using the word “swagger” to describe it. In this post, he outlines exactly what he means:

“Instead of simply feeling positive about the future, many people I talked to had confidence that their organization was on the right track. Even people who were looking for jobs didn’t seem to be scared.”

That’s a shift. A big shift.

The time of handwringing has past. Anyone still tearing their shirt over what comes next for the news business should take note: The news business is moving on. It’s time to get on the boat. Train’s leaving the station. Put up or shut up. Demos not memos. Your metaphor of choice, but the message is clear:

It’s time to get busy building a new ecosystem for news.

Some of us have a head start.

Hence, swagger.

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Because it’s fucking important.

Thanks to the News Challenge, I’ve had the chance to meet Brian and Ryan and hang out with them a bit. Frankly, they’re excellent at what they do, and they have the ideals to match. So, who will have the vision to hire these guys? A major metro in Chicago? (And should they take a job at a major metro?) Non-profits digging through public data like the Sunlight Foundation? (Gordon reports that Boyer has a temporary gig at ProPublica for starters.)

Gordon asked the two graduates the important question that other programmers/coders/developers should consider:

“Why should someone with solid programming skills consider a master’s degree in journalism?

Mark: Because journalism needs them. There are so many tech-capable people in journalism, but few who have logged the time to understand computer science and software development. A person who does not want to just write code for whoever pays them, and actually come up with and execute interesting software projects, the journalism experience will help you. This program got me out of my element and gave me first hand experience that will help me relate to others in the field when i’m not elbow deep in code.

Boyer: Because it’s fucking important. Cable television and the Web disrupted the business models of the big, important journalism organizations: newspapers. Now, the importance of a daily paper is debatable, but that democracy requires journalism to function is not. And so, for the sake of democracy itself, it is imperative that more nerds join the fight to save the news. We need to invent new business models, reinvent the newspaper, and create new forms of media. Plus, an all-expense-paid trip to graduate school in sunny Chicago, Illinois, is also a very nice way to weather a recession. And the smart, passionate classmates make for some pretty good parties and great conversation.”

I’m psyched to follow where these two land, and what the next group of programmer/journalist grad students builds.

Think you’ve got the chops to help save journalism?  Apply.

[I posted pieces of this as a shared Google Reader item last night when I saw Rich's post. You can see all my shared stuff and notes about it over on FriendFeed if that's what you're into.]

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Marshall is moving on to other endeavors:

“As we reach the end of 2008, I wish I could say that things have gotten easier for journalists. Of course they haven’t. But after producing this blog for three and a half years, I’m heartened by the tremendous stories we’ve had the honor of showcasing, from the first News Gem about nola.com’s coverage of Hurricane Katrina to brave reporting of the Iraq War to groundbreaking investigative scoops and beautiful profiles, narratives, photos and videos. I worried at first that there wouldn’t be enough good stories to fill the blog on a regular basis. I’ve had the opposite problem: too many great stories and not enough time to highlight them all.”

Read the whole thing.

Good luck to Jon, and a note to the SPJ: Don’t take down the blog, leave it up as an archive — it’s a tremendous list of stories that should stay in place.  Better yet, keep the blog going with new contributors.  I’ve enjoyed it, and learned from it.

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It’s happened in fits and starts, but Pat Thornton of BeatBlogging.org is taking on a few more tasks around the WJ network as he can, and one of his missions is going to be to gather and write some fresh tutorials.

He recently posted the first in the series, a short introduction to podcasting.

Please, add your feedback to his post, suggest additional tools, tutorials, and resources for more information.

There are more than a few ideas kicking around about where to take Wired Journalists next (online news tool database? job board? e-mail list? more grants? sponsorships?), but I’m happy to say our little community is quietly chugging along, traffic has been steadily growing for several months now, and journalists from a truly wide variety of media, locations, and status levels in their respective fields are all talking with one another.

Hopefully, they’re finding answers there.  Are you?  Let us know.

Write to wiredjournalists@gmail.com

We’d love to hear your Wired Journalists success story, if you have one.

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For one thing, Howard’s a damn fine writer.

I haven’t agreed with everything he’s said or done as I’ve followed his blog for the last couple years, but I recognized that he was someone at the pinnacle of a long career in the news business who still believed in the power of newspapers to make positive changes in our world through impassioned investigative journalism, even if it wasn’t profitable and never would be again.

And then there’s a few nods to the obvious in Howard’s send-off:  Google didn’t kill newspapers, Craigslist didn’t kill newspapers, newspapers aren’t dead, there’s more to the problem than the economy.

Howard’s an optimist, probably more than I am, about the future of print, but there’s one important paragraph near the end of his post :

“Nothing else we do as a company means much if we fail to sustain our public service journalism. The McClatchy family has not persevered into the seventh generation in order to publish successful brides magazines, or websites with comprehensive nightclub listings. We labor not to ensure we can create new blogs for pet owners, or rich vertical online sites devoted to vacation properties. All of these and much more are essential, of course, because public service journalism is an expensive proposition, but we must not take for granted the capacity or elasticity of our newsrooms.”

It would be easy to write off that paragraph as a brief rant against spending development cycles trying to build the inevitable platform for hyperlocal cat pictures, but I think he has an excellent point, which I’m about to co-opt and twist:

Spending resources on revenue-generating applications and integrating services that help us serve as a local information utility is important, yes, but if we have a mission as journalists, at some point soon, we’re going to need to funnel resources into development of applications and services that provide more of a public service for readers than a dining guide or a business directory.

Being the best source (with the best SEO) for local information, listings, and answering the frequently asked questions about our block or town or city is important, yes, of course.

But, fulfilling the mission of big-J Journalism (which I believe still can be done, whether or not it’s done by a news organization that puts out a print edition every day) — by doing things like exposing corruption in government, pointing out hypocrisy in the proverbial halls of power, and shining a bright light on the details buried deep in data sets — continues to require more than panel talks at conferences and handwringing editorials, it requires resources.

And by resources, I mean money, time, and Web development teams focused on applications for news.

Which raises the question: Is your organization willing to commit to spending those three things on news?

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This grew out of reaction to the recent closed-door API newspaper executive meeting, where, as best as anyone who wasn’t in the room can tell, nothing was achieved.

So, Jason and a group of people, all of whom work on the front lines of the changing newspaper business rather than the corner office, are planning to start gathering some alternate troops.

That would be you.  Are you in?  Check out the list of proposed regional meetups and post your feedback now.  See you there.

[UPDATE: Of course, you'll want to bang on the wiki.]

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Considering how many journalists lost their jobs today, and how many likely will lose their jobs tomorrow, and how many have lost their jobs this year, I’m betting there’s a pretty big pool of talent out there.

So before you start looking for a gig in public relations, please consider the simple idea that you need not work for a newspaper to call yourself a journalist.

This isn’t about who has the thickest resume:  You can submit your entry as a video, slide show, or plain text i that’s what you’re into.

(I’d probably go with a fast-paced screencast-style presentation, but that’s just me.)

More details about the contest and the opportunity in Scott Karp’s blog post about it.

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