“In the past, such a notion would have been unbelievable: a map was just a map, and you got the same one for New York City, whether you were searching for the Empire State Building or the coffee shop down the street. What if, instead, you had a map that’s unique to you, always adapting to the task you want to perform right this minute?”

Image via Google

This led Emily Badger at Atlantic Cities to wonder if Google’s new maps might take the “filer bubble” experience into the physical world, “We may never know what we are not seeing.” While, I share Badger’s concern, I also think that we are always already rewriting the maps we use to navigate the swiftly changing world around us. The question we should ask is do we trust the maps made by Google’s algorithm more or less than we trust those made by our hearts and minds.

In the fall of 2006 Rebecca Solnit  published an essay called “Maps for the Year Ahead” in Orion Magazine. The piece offers a number of striking observations about space, place, and land in the wake of tragedy. Looking at events like the 1906 earthquake in San Francisco and hurricanes Katrina and Rita in 2005, Solnit draws a connection between urban sprawl and the power of natural disasters to make us feel disoriented and, in a very real sense, ungrounded.

This reminded me of a friend of mine who led rafting trips. He once told me that each year, and after big rain storms, river guides have to re-learn the river because the river bed changes so dramatically. Solnit’s discussion of displacement and mapping made me wonder how often we have to re-learn our landscape and how quickly it can change.

This is from the opening paragraph of her piece, in which she is describing some of the reactions of displaced people whose communities were devastated by Katrina:

“A listener called in to my local radio station recently to describe how she and her sister set the navigational system in their car to the coordinates of their vanished hometown. They enjoyed traveling around while the car gave them eclectic, evocative directions to a place on the other side of the country that no longer exists. It was a lovely subversion of the direction-finding feature on those new cars and a brilliant way to keep their memory of a lost place alive.”

How do we map the contours of home? How much of that mapping is done with the head and how much with the heart?

The last time I visited my childhood home in central New York, the landscape had changed so dramatically that I found myself disoriented. However, there was no natural disaster to blame in this case. On the edges of the small college town I grew up in there had always been a strip of car dealerships, fast food joints, and supermarkets. It used to be that, interspersed amongst these precursors to the modern big box store, were neighborhood diners, a cobbler, and the local Salvation Army.

On my most recent trip back, the edges of the strip gleamed with tall new buildings and bright neon signs for chain restaurants, drug stores, and every big box store imaginable. Everything looked new, down to the freshly laid concrete that seemed to flow endlessly like veins of coal. The few neighborhood establishments that had held on to their pieces of land looked run down and terribly quiet.

Perhaps most troubling of all, however, was the amount of new land that had been found and lost so quickly. These new stores were built three deep, and it was only through their construction I realized quite how much land lay back beyond the old storefronts and parking lots. Vast fields, wetlands, and woodlots were discovered and disappeared almost in the same breath.

On the outskirts of so many towns and cities in America there are forgotten wildernesses like these. But once forgotten, they are quickly destroyed. It is as though I remember a landscape without ever noticing it before – a landscape only evident in its own destruction.

Of course, these new shopping plazas called for new roads, and I end up turning down one of these freshly paved side streets, lost in the valleys created between behemoth buildings. There is something deeply painful about feeling lost on the streets of your own hometown. A place just a few years ago I could have navigated with my eyes shut, looks almost unrecognizable now.

What do we lose when we lose our sense of direction, our sense of place?

I think of those maps you see in malls, with the maze of brightly colored stores. Laid out in front of you a big red arrow points, “you are here.” Looking around my hometown, I feel the weight of that red arrow and recognize that “here” is becoming an increasingly generic place, replicated a thousand times over across the country. We are here. These are the times we live in.

All of which leads me to wonder where we are going.

My home town is known for its gorges, carved over millions of years by glaciers and rivers. It’s a landscape whose features took generations to develop. Now, like the river guide, I find I need to re-learn this homeland every year because it changes so fast. Looking around at the lakes of parking and the streams of vehicles, flowing in and out of the lots, eddying around storefronts, I wonder if these gorges of steel and glass will eclipse those of rock and earth.

We have a choice of which maps to use as we move forward. How can the maps we have created in our hearts and minds of places that have shaped us, the maps that are rich in public space and open land, town squares, city parks, community gardens, how can those maps help us find our way? Perhaps we need maps of the places we have lost because they can still lead us, can still direct us, can still shape our sense of the world. The choices we make not only respond to, but also shape the maps we use.

Our challenge is to make new maps without forgetting the old ones, to chart new paths and rediscover our home anew.

…

A version of this post was originally published on this blog in 2007.

This is the first of a few posts as I analyze and extract key take-aways and concrete lessons from the collection of articles. As a starting point, for those who want to study media coverage of the Boston bombing as a case study of breaking news verification and errors, below is a round-up of some of the best articles. There are (many) others, and some good ones I have no doubt missed (add them to the comments section).

I don’t agree with all of these viewpoints, but together they present a well-rounded debate about these issues.

Guidelines and How To Posts:

Some of the best posts were the most concrete, editors, journalists and citizens discussing their best practices and guidelines for responsible reporting and careful verification. There is a lot of good advice contained in these posts. (For more concrete advice see my ongoing round-up of tools and resources for verifying social media content)

Breaking news pragmatically: Some reflections on silence and timing in networked journalism
by Mike Ananny, NiemanLab

“Last week’s coverage of the events in Boston showed how much the networked press needs to better understand two things: silence and timing. The Internet makes it possible for people other than traditional journalists to express themselves, quickly, to potentially large audiences. But the ideal press should be about more than this. It should be about demonstrating robust answers to two inseparable questions: Why do you need to know something now? And why do you need to say something now? Both questions demand awareness of what not to say, and when not to say it — knowledge the networked press is only beginning to develop.”

Thou Shalt Not Stoop to Political Point-Scoring: A journalist’s guide to tweeting during a crisis
by Jeremy Stahl, Slate

“Twitter has only made the business of news gathering and sharing in the wake of a disaster more treacherous. If, as a wise journalist once said, journalism is the first rough draft of history, then Twitter is the first rough draft of journalism. During nightmarish events like today’s bombings at the Boston Marathon, the micro-blogging service is both the cause of and solution to a whole lot of journalistic problems.”

How the AP verified photo of Boston bombing suspect leaving scene
by Andrew Beaujon, Poynter

“The AP asked Green, a Florida businessman who’d completed the marathon and was watching other runners finish when the bombs went off, for a high-resolution version of his pic. The time stamp and the resolution convinced the photo department it was real.”

When conspiracy theories strike, how do you respond?
by Damon Kiesow, Kiesow.net

“You certainly can not “win” in these situations. There is no gatekeeper available to make a ruling on truth vs fiction. Some people will continue to believe whatever they want to believe. But, we can’t pretend that the spread of misinformation is not worth fighting.”

When Following Breaking News, Why it Helps to Think Like a Journalist
by Jihii Jolly, PBS MediaShift

“Breaking news creates an information fog. Mistakes are made as rumors are spread. […] So what can we take away from events like today in Boston? We can think about how we read about it. And in the era of everyone having a voice and a blog and the power to create content, it might help to think a little bit like a journalist.”

We know when Dzhokhar Tsarnaev sleeps
by Zachary M. Seward, Leo Mirani, and Ritchie King

“Where it was once only reporters and the police who dug up information about people of interest, a whole nation is at it today. And for all the myriad concerns about privacy settings, cookies, data protection, automated surveillance, and Facebook, we reveal immense amounts of information about ourselves publicly, unthinkingly, and sometimes involuntarily.”

Boston bombings rumors: Separating fact from fiction
by Ken Millstone of MSN News

“Since the tragedy on Monday, rumors and misinformation have been rampant. These are just some of the rumors that have emerged, with MSN News reporting on the validity of each.”

Separating Social Media’s Fact From Fiction Amid Crisis
by Celeste Headlee and Jeremy Stahl, NPR

“In the moments following the twin explosions at the Boston Marathon, many of the initial reports disseminated through social media proved to be false. Jeremy Stahl, social media editor for Slate.com, shares his rules for social media responsibly in the midst of tragic, breaking news.”

What Went Wrong:

These are the journalistic equivalent of autopsy reports. One of the most common kinds of article I found in my research, the “what went wrong” posts try to get a handle on, and often try to place blame, for the misinformation that spread during Boston reporting. At their best, these posts actually help clarify mistakes that were made, so we can learn from them.

It Wasn’t Sunil Tripathi: The Anatomy of a Misinformation Disaster
by Alexis Madrigal, The Atlantic

“How a terrible misidentification of two people with no connection to the Boston bombing spread so far, so fast.”

Boston bombing: How internet detectives got it very wrong
by Dave Lee, BBC News

“The only hope, he said, was that this very public and damaging mis-identification serves as a lesson to those eager to be “first” with new information online. ‘It’s been a kind of a media literacy seminar – people are learning to be less stupid. You don’t want to be the person who names a suspect who turns out not to be right.’”

Four ways the media failed in covering the Boston bombings, and one reason why
by Gideon Lichfield, Quartz

“It’s been a tiring week for anyone in the media—and a sobering one for anyone in the media with a conscience. The coverage of the Boston Marathon saga, from the bombing on Monday to the capture of suspected bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev on Friday, brought out some of the very worst features of news in the digital age. Here are the ways the media fail when they cover a big, breaking story—and a simple reason why.”

The problem with cable news: Cable news
by Erik Wemple, Washington Post

“The very idea of covering news every second of the day till the end of the world forces its practitioners to find and tout breaking news all the time, even when it’s not breaking. And long after it’s breaking. The result is occasionally pure glory, occasionally error and always a surfeit of blabbing. Never has cable news’s content problem been more apparent than it was last week, especially Friday.”

Breaking News Is Broken
by Farhad Manjoo, Slate

“Breaking news is broken. That’s the clearest lesson you can draw about the media from the last week, when both old- and new-media outlets fell down on the job.”

Citizen ‘journalism’ ran amok in Boston crisis
by Alan Mutter, Reflections of a Newsosaur

“When untrained, undisciplined or even unscrupulous people can say anything that comes to mind – as happened repeatedly during the Boston emergency – they do far more harm than good, especially in the sort of confusing and emotional situation we witnessed last week. While citizen journalists in some cases bring welcome light to matters than need attention, the overwhelming bias in certain online venues seems to be to bring additional heat to matters that are already hot enough.”

How Reddit became a national scapegoat
by Jesse Brown, Macleans

“‘Reddit’ didn’t do anything.  The site is an open, anonymous forum where anyone can say anything. It’s comprised of millions of people, using pseudonyms to link to stories, make comments, share content and rank each other’s input. […]For our purposes, in making sense of what happened last week, reddit doesn’t really exist. It’s not an organization or individual of any kind. It’s as useless a noun as ‘the Internet,’ or ‘humanity.’”

The Pressure to Be the TV News Leader Tarnishes a Big Brand
by David Carr, The New York Times

“The pressure to produce is ratcheted up accordingly. Editors and producers begin leaning on their reporters, and they, in turn, end up in the business of wish fulfillment, working hard to satisfy their audience, and meeting the expectations of their bosses. It creates a system in which bad reporting can thrive and dominoes can quickly fall the wrong way.”

Three things that Reddit did right during the Boston bombings and why that matters
by Mathew Ingram

“While much of the attention during and after the Boston bombings focused on how one Reddit thread got things wrong, there were other important parts of the community that were doing good — and even doing something approaching journalism.”

Shameless paper in mindless fog
by Jack Shafer, Reuters

“Curiously, the Post’s extreme, almost defiant inaccuracy has united America’s armchair media critics like little else. It can hardly be denied that the racy Post has pointed the way for decades toward an info-entertainment hybrid that many have followed. This week, at least, in its stunning contempt for fact, it has defined the basement into which no media outlet that wants respect wishes to descend.”

The Boston Manhunt and the Limited Wisdom of Crowd-Sourcing
by New York Magazine

“We need to get smarter about the vectors of time and information flow. We know what the hurry is, of course. It is devoutly felt at CNN and Fox News that prestige or viewership or both depend on being the first, even if only by seconds, to announce practically anything. […] It starts to feel as though we’re Pavlov’s dogs—subjects in a vast experiment in operant conditioning. The craving for information leads to behaviors that are alternately rewarded and punished.”

Boston bombings: Social media spirals out of control
by Ken Bensinger and Andrea Chang, Los Angeles Times

“Monday’s bombings, the first major terrorist attack on American soil in the age of smartphones, Twitter and Facebook, provided an opportunity for everyone to get involved. Within seconds of the first explosion, the Internet was alive with the collective ideas and reactions of the masses. But this watershed moment for social media quickly spiraled out of control.”

Debating Fixes:

These posts don’t offer the kind of concrete advice or training the earlier “how-to” articles do, but they do contribute helpfully to the debate about how we should address misinformation and verification. They represent an interesting set of ideas and considerations for new ways news organizations and citizen journalists can approach breaking news.

The One Function Twitter Desperately Needs
By Mat Honan, Wired

“Twitter shouldn’t have to make sure everything crossing its servers is factual or true, but it is in Twitter’s interest to themselves to give us the tools to clean things up. Otherwise it risks becoming a cesspool of untruths and rumors. Twitter needs a way to reel bad information back in. It needs a way to let us flag things that we’ve said that turn out to be wrong. Twitter needs an edit button, a correction process.”

Twitter, Credibility and The Watertown Manhunt
by Hong Qu, Nieman Reports

“Finding and vetting reliable sources is the ghost that haunts investigative journalism past, present and future. Tools and processes for assessing source credibility need to catch up with ever evolving social media technology and culture, especially in dangerous environments in which the public relies on reporters to provide actionable news updates with minimal misinformation and fallout.”

And now the news: Here’s what we *don’t* know at this hour…
by Jeff Jarvis

“We’ve been told over and over this weekend that we had a big problem with misinformation after the Boston Marathon bombing. Breaking news, haven’t you heard, is broken. So I see an opportunity, a big journalistic opportunity. If I ran a news organization, I would start a regular feature called, Here’s what you should know about what you’re hearing elsewhere. […] The What We *Don’t* Know News, the only news show you can really trust. It doesn’t ignore breaking news or what you’re hearing. It adds value to that flow of both information and misinformation.”

Can Social Media Help Us Create A More Informed Public?
by Andy Carvin, Keynote at the International Symposium of Online Journalism

“When a big story breaks, we shouldn’t just be using social media to send out the latest headlines or ask people for their feedback after the fact. We shouldn’t even stop at asking for their help when trying to cover a big story. We should be more transparent about what we know and don’t know. We should actively address rumors being circulated online. Rather than pretending they’re not circulating, or that they’re not our concern, we should tackle them head-on, challenging the public to question them, scrutinize them, understand where they might have come from, and why.”

When Everyone is an Eye-Witness, What is a Journalist?
by Mark Little, Storyful

So many media failures this past week were driven by the ‘scoop’ mentality, a dangerous relic of the past. […] The greatest threat to ‘True Journalism’ is not social media but an outmoded concept of breaking news. The anonymous Twitter user rushing to name a suspect or the TV reporter breathlessly quoting unnamed sources are cut from the same cloth. This is ‘Me First’ journalism, powered by vanity and self-importance, and it is the greatest threat to ‘True Journalism’.

The Wise Way to Crowdsource a Manhunt
by James Surowiecki, The New Yorker

“If Reddit were looking for a model to follow, it could use NASA’s Clickworkers experiment, which in 2000-01 let tens of thousands of amateurs look at photos of Mars in order to identify craters on the planet and classify them by age. That study found that the aggregated judgments of the amateur ‘clickworkers’ were ‘virtually indistinguishable from the inputs of a geologist with years of experience.’”

Why We Should Judge Breaking News Like Baseball
by John Dickerson, Slate

“There’s been a lot of discussion about where traditional media and new media failed in their coverage of the Boston Marathon bombing. Good. We should call out the bad ones so that standards will be higher and celebrate the good so we’ll all know where to tune in next time. But as we figure out who to listen to in the future, we should also think about a way to process these breaking news developments.”

In defense of journalistic error
by Jack Shafer, Reuters

“Screwing up has been integral to the reporting of timely news for a long time , no matter how sterling a news organization’s standards […] Error tallies, such as the one above, don’t demonstrate that news reporting is a particularly error-prone enterprise but that the business and its customers have come to an unspoken agreement of how perfect the news product must be.”

Big Picture Discussions and Debates:

These articles provide a broad overview and explore overarching themes from the Boston bombing coverage. These meta-pieces tend to take a step back and look at the bigger themes at play. Many include useful comparisons between coverage of Sandy Hook and Boston.

Covering the Coverage (Infographic)
by Chartgirl

Highs and lows in a week’s worth of breaking (broken?) new coverage of the Boston Marathon attack.

Wrong narratives may outweigh wrong facts, but reporting with respect means getting both right
by Caroline O’Donovan, NiemanLab

“Tragedies like the school shooting at Sandy Hook and the bombings in Boston are an opportunity for local news organizations, however stretched and strapped, to recommit to those communities. The power of a journalist’s training isn’t in the medium, but in the respect and diligence in the reporting they do.”

News Media and Social Media Become Part of a Real-Time Manhunt Drama
by Brian Stelter, New York Times

“The close interaction of reporters with the unfolding events underscored the complex relationship the news media have had with law enforcement authorities this week. News organizations have been both scolded for irresponsible reporting and employed to relay information to the public, sometimes at the same news conference.”

Lesson from the manhunt: We’re all journalists now
by Monica Guzman, The Seattle Times

“News became a little less of an industry and a little more of a living, breathing organism Thursday night. It’s not a new direction. For more than a decade now, ever since anyone with a thought and an Internet connection could so easily provoke his species, news has become less controlled. More vulnerable. More, well, human. It has not, though, become easy. In fact, news demands more from us now than ever.”

Boston: just another day in the news revolution?
by Charlie Beckett

“This means that journalists (and that includes those people on Reddit) have to develop a new language of what we know and don’t know that makes Donald Rumsfeld’s famous ontological aphorism look positively simplistic. They have to explain to a public who have access (potentially) to everything why their version of events is partial. There’s no shame in being open in a transparent world.”

Reddit + Boston: Journalism gets better when more people are doing it
by Mathew Ingram

“While both Twitter and Reddit have come under fire for distributing incorrect information about the Boston bombings, mainstream outlets have done so as well. In a real-time news environment, having more sources is ultimately better.”

Boston Marathon Bombing Media Errors Pile Up, as Does the Outrage
by Michael Moynihan, The Daily Beast

“The reporting errors out of Boston after the marathon blasts are piling up—and so is the finger-wagging on Twitter. But isn’t the outrage here a bit selective and dishonest?”

The Media Doesn’t Own The Story Anymore
by John Herman and Ben Smith, BuzzFeed

“With a 17-year-old implicated for the Boston bombings and then exonerated by the internet in mere hours, it’s time for the press to start guiding readers through the sea of information — and stop pretending there’s only one narrative.”

The social media tail mustn’t wag the MSM dog
by Felix Salmon, Reuters

“There’s an art to working out where to find fast and reliable information, and to judging new information in light of old information, and to judging old information in light of new information. And there’s an art to synthesizing everything you know, from hundreds of different sources, into a single coherent narrative. It’s not easy, it’s not a skill that most people have, and it’s precisely where news organizations add value.”

In moments of profound change and transition we tend to reach back to old clichés and familiar metaphors to help make sense of the tumultuous world around us. Debates about the future of journalism are no different.

I’ve heard this moment described as trying to leap between two moving trains, as one slows down and the other one speeds away. This is journalism as a leap of faith.

I’ve heard this moment described as trying to move out of one house and into another, as the old house falls apart and the new one still isn’t finished being built. This is journalism as a fix-it upper.

And I’ve heard it described as the dying of an industry and the rebirth of a network. This is journalism as a Phoenix, rising from the ashes.

Each of these metaphors capture a piece of the incredible change we are witnessing in our media, but none quite does it for me. All of these descriptions portray the changes in journalism as something happening to us, a force outside our control – moving trains, collapsing houses, engulfing fire. We are left with no agency and no responsibility to create the future of media in these scenarios.

In Between Stories

When I think of our current moment I always come back around to a quote from cultural historian Thomas Berry, who wrote “We are in trouble just now because we do not have a good story. We are in between stories. The old story, the account of how the world came to be and how we fit into it, is no longer effective. Yet we have not learned the new story.”

Longtime newsrooms, citizen journalists, investigative reporters, coders and hackers — we need to come together to write that new story, to debate and discuss, to test and imagine, to instigate and conspire. We have to embrace our agency and our responsibility to write journalism’s next story.

With that task ahead of us, here are a few things I think we need to consider. This list is not comprehensive by any stretch of the imagination, but instead represents some overarching themes that we at times neglect, or take for granted.

The Public

I hope that the new story of journalism will be organized around the public – not institutions, not advertisers, not platforms or apps, but the public. I believe that whether your business model relies on pay walls or donors, journalism will rise and fall with its communities.

In her paper on “Open Journalism,” the longtime editor Melanie Sill argues that “we must reorder the fundamental processes of journalism toward the goal of serving communities” and that we should make journalism a collective endeavor, “transforming it from a product driven by factory processes to a service driven by audience needs.” In this case, of course, the public is not just people who depend on the news as consumers, but also people who are creating it as participants.

Diversity

To that end, we have to be attentive to whose stories are being told, and who has access to the tools to tell their story. Sometimes the gaps in news that our communities face are not about a simple lack of news, but a lack of voice in the news.

Right now women and people of color each own less than 8% of broadcast media in America and according to the American Society of News Editors the newsroom job cuts in recent years have hit journalists of color disproportionately. As my colleague Joe Torres has pointed out in his book News For All The People: The Epic Story of Race and the American Media community media and alternative news outlets have been a critical counterweight to the mainstream media in terms of giving voice to communities of color. As we rewrite the story of journalism in America, we must create a media system that represents the diversity of our nation.

Press Freedom for All

The Internet and new technologies have put the tools of media making in the hands of more and more people. The authors of the recent report on “Post Industrial Journalism” put it this way: “If you wanted to sum up the past decade of the news ecosystem in a single phrase, it might be this: Everybody suddenly got a lot more freedom. The newsmakers, the advertisers, the startups, and, especially, the people formerly known as the audience have all been given new freedom to communicate.”

But with all that new freedom has come an array of new threats.

Both the Committee to Protect Journalists and Reporters Without Borders declared 2012 one of the most dangerous years for journalists on record. Around the globe and here in the U.S., we’ve seen a troubling spike in attacks on the press and citizen reporters. These attacks take the form of threats and intimidation as well as the slow and dangerous creep of surveillance and secrecy. This comes at a time, of course, when more and more media outlets rely on independent journalists and citizen reporters to cover critical events around the world.

So, as we rewrite the story of journalism we also have to think carefully about how we protect the storytellers. We need to engage the legal fights, and the policy battles, and develop the structures that will make all forms of journalism not just sustainable, but also resilient. As more people have access the tools of journalism we have to ensure that their freedom to use those tools is protected.

Trust

Stories help us make sense of the world around us, and one of the side effects of being in between stories is that we can lose our bearings, it becomes harder to know who to trust. As we rebuild journalism in our newsrooms and in our communities we have to emphasize building trust. Unfortunately, our track record thus far hasn’t been so great. There are plenty of examples we can point to from the events in and around Boston last month alone, but that’s just one moment amongst many lately when the rush to be first, trumped the drive to be right.

Trust is no simple thing, and rebuilding trust is even more complex. Thankfully, there are also great examples of journalists engaging their communities in new ways, forging mutual relationships with their audience, and developing trust. Grassroots and community media have a lot to teach others in this regard.

In a time of flux, trust should be the constant we hold fast to, the guiding star we steer towards. And if it is not part of our next story then we will end up adrift.

Make the Road by Walking

So here we are: Citizen journalists, community media, daily papers, broadcast stations, online investigative sites, journalism schools. We are in between stories, but we are in this together. That means we can – and we must – rethink not just what the story is, but how we tell it. This is not about choosing the road less taken, it is about making the road by walking.

The story of journalism is up to us to write, it is what we make of it.

I was at the Boston Children’s Museum with my family on December 14, when I learned about the Sandy Hook shooting. Checking Twitter absent-mindedly while waiting in line, I saw the first tweets and news reports filling my stream. I looked up from my phone to a cacophony of kids laughing and playing around me, many of whom were the same age as the kids who were killed just minutes earlier.

Image via Flickr user Duane Romanell

On the drive home that day my wife and I were careful not to turn on NPR in the car with our two boys in the back seat. Since then, we’ve listened to a lot less public radio in our house. The Sandy Hook shooting coincided with my son turning four. While I’m sure he’s been aware of the media and discussions around him up to this point, recently he’s been a sponge for everything he hears.

For a lot of us who have children around the age of the Sandy Hook victims, that tragedy shook us to the core. But the endless media coverage of the event created new challenges as we tried to shield our kids from news of the tragedy.

This morning when I woke up, I made coffee and turned on the radio – it was tuned to NPR. My son was already eating his breakfast in the kitchen and before I could reach the dial words like “explosion” and “dead” came tumbling out. The devastation of Boston was brought into our little house so quickly. I changed the channel, I don’t think he noticed, but I don’t know. When I went to get the newspaper on my front steps images of the Boston marathon tragedy filled the front page. I folded it up and hid it from view.

I have no doubt that my sons will have to confront violence in our media and our world, but I see no benefit to introducing it at such a young age. Children under the age of six witness media coverage of disasters as live events, happening before their eyes (or ears) and so to children, the ongoing repeated coverage feels as though the disaster is in fact happening over and over again. At a time when the news stories can quickly shift from budget debates to bombings, the news is full of emotional landmines.

But turning it off isn’t always easy. I work in media and journalism, and study how the news responds to crisis. I love NPR and my local station and value their news and coverage of events just like this deeply. In addition, media coverage is part of the shared experience of this crisis for those of us who have lived in and around Boston but don’t live there any longer. Media, at its best, connects us not just to the events unfolding but also to each other.

This morning, another local station was paying tribute to the events yesterday by playing all music from Boston artists and songs about Boston and Massachusetts. I was grateful for this subtle acknowledgement of the tragedy and appreciated the chance to process all the complex emotions I have been feeling through song lyrics and familiar tunes. And when Sweet Baby James came on the radio my son and I sang together about driving from our home near Stockbridge to Boston, and I held him tight in my arms.

Resources for parents and kids dealing with disaster, crisis and the media:

• WBUR - How To Talk With Children About Boston Marathon Bombs (Seemed fitting for the first link to be to public radio)
• PBS – Talking With Kids About the News
• National Child Traumatic Stress Network – Tips for Parents on Media Coverage (PDF)
• PBS MediaShift – With Small Kids: Consider a Media Blackout During a Crisis Like Sandy Hook
• American Academy of Pediatrics – Talking to Children About Disasters
• NYC Health – Protecting Children from Disturbing Media Reports During Traumatic Events (PDF)
• FEMA – Coping with Disaster, section on Kids and Media
• Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration – Tips for Talking With and Helping Children and Youth Cope After a Disaster or Traumatic Event (PDF)
• Red Cross – Helping Children Cope with Disaster (PDF)

Image via Flickr user PaulSteinJC

In a settlement released this week, New York City agreed to pay the livestream collective Global Revolution TV $75,000 for damage done to their equipment and an additional nearly $50,000 to cover the livestreamers legal fees. (Notably, the settlement also calls for NYC to pay $47,000 for books that were destroyed when police dismantled “the people’s library” in Zuccotti Park.)

Global Revolution TV was one of the most active livestream groups covering Occupy Wall Street and found themselves targeted by police on more than one occasion.  Just a month and a half after the Zuccotti raid, Global Revolution TV’s Brooklyn studio space was also raided. Six members of the Global Revolution TV team were arrested at the time for refusing the vacate the building they were using as studio space.

While livestreaming has been an important part of protests and movements for at least half a decade, Occupy Wall Street took livestreaming mainstream. Over the last two years with the rise and spread of Internet connected phones and cameras, more and more people have taken up livestreaming from sporting events to political rallies.

In the face of this democratization of the tools of journalism and broadcasting, the courts and the Department of Justice continue to assert people’s first amendment right to record. While this settlement doesn’t speak to First Amendment issues, it is a reminder of the central role livestreaming played, and continues to play, in protests worldwide.

Shells has created a series of official-looking street signs quoting rap lyrics that mention parts of the city – intersections, buildings, parks and other landmarks. He then posts the quotes at those locations, grounding the lyrics in the place that inspired them and creating a hip-hop geography of the city.

The video is masterfully produced, layering clips from the songs on top of video of the places, as Shells attached his signs.

I love this project on so many levels. It’s a great example of placemaking, of connecting cultural production to concrete community, and a kind of rap history all rolled into one.

Where I grew up we heard more bluegrass than break beats, but the summer camp I went to was a huge mix of kids from cities across New York state – from Rochester to Albany, Syracuse to Binghamton. As such, my introduction to hip hop came in the backwoods of central New York, not the street corners of Brooklyn or the Bronx. We listened to Tribe Called Quest in our tents, blasted KRS One from our cabins. Later we swapped bootleg mix tapes and tried to trace samples back to their source like a scavenger hunt. There was rarely any hip hop on the radio around me, so everything I knew about rap was literally word of mouth.

But my listening to hip hop was always removed from the geography of the music itself. The places rappers mentioned in their songs were abstract names to me, places I couldn’t picture. The songs gave them life, and animated my imagination, but there was something about seeing them chronicled in this video that I found really powerful.

Below are a few of the signs, but check out all of the quotes on the Animal site.

I have been collecting these links for awhile, but a recent study profiled over at Poynter inspired me to post my list here. The study  showed little consistency in how journalists approach assessing the accuracy of social media content. The links below are presented in no particular order, but are organized into three categories: How-To Guides, Case-Studies, Discussions and Studies. A note on scope: The resources below are specifically and purposefully limited to verifying social media and user generated content. General reporting accuracy is not covered in depth here.

Thanks to Steve Buttry and Craig Silverman who have also done great round-up posts in the past (linked below).

It’s a big web out there, so if you know of resources I have missed, please leave them in the comments section and I’ll continue to update this list.

How-To Guides: Blog posts, reports and papers outlining tips and techniques for social media verification.

• Patrick Meier: “How to Verify Social Media Content: Some Tips and Tricks on Information Forensics.” (see also this Google Doc where people have expanded on Meier’s blog post with additional tips and discussion)
• Steve Buttry: “How to verify information from tweets: Check it out” a great set of tips specific to Twitter verification and a rich list of links at the end.
• IJNET: “Storyful’s best practices for verifying social media content.” By Margaret Looney
• Craig Silverman. “B.S. Detection for Digital Content.” A slide deck from his presentation on this topic.
• Josh Stearns: “Trust and Verify: How I Curate My List of Journalist Arrests” Specifically focuses on verification of social content during breaking news.
• IJNET: “A journalist’s guide to verifying images.” By Jennifer Dorroh
• WITNESS: Verifying Citizen Videos and More. Good video tutorials on social media verification.
• Mandy Jenkins: “Accuracy and accountability checklist for social media.” A handy stripped-down checklist. Post it by your computer.
• CJR: “Best Practices for Social Media Verification: Some tips and thoughts from the experts.” By Craig Silverman. A good round up of advice from others.
• Storyful: “The Human Algorithm.” By Mark Little. Especially good on verifying video content.
• Journalism.co.uk: “How to verify content from social media.” by Rachel McAthy
• PBS MediaShift. “How to Verify User-Generated Video in a War Zone.” by Jenny Hauser.
• Nieman Reports. “Finding Wisdom in the Crowd.” by Mark Little (good checklist for verifying video and photos)
• Slate. A journalist’s guide to tweeting during a crisis. Good thoughts by Jeremy Stahl.

Case-Studies: Articles about verification projects or processes at other newsrooms and organizations.

• Columbia Journalism Review on Storyful: “Unknown Quantities: How social network verification can show us what we don’t know.” by Craig Silverman.
• GigaOm on the BBC’s verification desk: “Future of Media: Curation, Verification and News as a Process.” by Mathew Ingram
• Storyful. “Journalism, social media & verification.” A Google Hangout.
• Patrick Meier on five case studies: “Information Forensics: Five Case Studies on How to Verify Crowdsourced Information from Social Media.” An expanded 20 page paper with case studies and tips.
• Josh Stearns: “Lessons From the Fake New York Times Wikileaks Op-ed” a Storify of tips and links on how to spot fake websites and more.
• The Atlantic: “Sorting the Real Sandy Photos From the Fakes.” By Alexis Madrigal and team.
• Andy Carvin: “Israeli weapons In Libya? How @acarvin and his Twitter followers debunked sloppy journalism.” A Storify documenting Andy’s process.
• BreakingNews.com: “A look at how we confirm stories in real time.” by Cory Bergman.
• BreakingNews.com: “How We Balance Speed with Rumor Control“ by Cory Bergman.
• Poynter. “How CNN’s iReport verifies its citizen content.” By Craig Silverman.
• Poynter. “Editor Fergus Bell explains how AP verifies user-generated content from Sandy to Syria.” By Craig Silverman.
• Poynter: “How should journalists handle incorrect tweets?” by Mallary Tenore a review of a livechat held after the Tucson shooting.
• CJR: “Meet Andy Carvin, verification machine.” By Craig Silverman.

Discussions and Studies: Good debates about verification and studies that explore key aspects of this work.

• “Verification As A Strategic Ritual: How journalists retrospectively describe processes for ensuring accuracy.” By Ivor Shapiro, Colette Brin, Isabelle Bédard-Brûlé and Kasia Mychajlowycz (behind a paywal).
• IsTwitterWrong – A Tumblr detailing a long litany of fact-checks and debunking of images and “news” that gained traction on the site.
• “How many fake Sandy pictures were really shared on social media?” a data driven look at the spread of fakes by Jean Burgess, Farida Vis and Axel Bruns in the Guardian.
• Poynter: “In real-time journalism, declaring what you won’t report can be just as important as what you will.” By Craig Silverman
• GigaOm: “It’s not Twitter — this is just the way the news works now.” By Matthew Ingram. On the misinformation that flowed out of Sandy Hook during and after the shooting.
• Dan Gillmor’s entire book Mediactive discusses this issue, but his chapter on “Principles of Trustworthy Media Creation” is particularly good.
• NiemanLab: “Truth-o-Meter, 2G: Andrew Lih wants to wikify fact-checking” By Megan Garber
• CJR: “The Challenge of Verifying Crowdsourced Information: A better way to sift through a river of data” by Craig Silverman.

The Sound of Words Colliding
by Josh Stearns

My son sees every bookcase as a ladder and climbs with fists full of pages. The books – just pulp for chewing – old limbs to gnaw on. Sharp teeth and quick arms remind me he is more an animal than I, still close to something I have lost. Some beating, some rhythm, some heat.

He snaps the bindings, strings and glue bending as he twists the covers, and the signatures come tumbling out on the floor like broken wings. He tests them carefully with outstretched fingers, their newly white shapes overlapping, stacked and spilled there. They belong here, he’s sure of it.

The surfaces buckle as he flexes his fingers, full of pages crackling. I imagine this is the sound of all those words colliding. Letters, those atomic elements of language, crashing into each other. It’s the sound he’s been looking for, and it fills his eyes with wonder.

…

Now, three decades later, a range of nonprofit journalism organizations are facing a similar threat from the IRS. A new report out this week from the Council on Foundations highlights the many challenges nonprofit newsrooms face at the IRS and suggests a possible way forward.

As the Mother Jones case illustrates, this is not a new issue, but the changing media landscape has brought the issue to the fore. In our 2009 report, Saving the News, Free Press noted that out-of-date tax policy could hinder growth and innovation in the future of news. We called for a range of changes to update tax policy with an emphasis on supporting the critical accountability journalism that our communities and democracy need.

The importance of nonprofit news as a core part of the future of journalism was later reaffirmed in reports by the Knight Foundation, the Federal Communications Commission, and journalism programs at theUniversity of Southern California and Columbia University.

The Internet has lowered the bar of entry and helped catalyze a new generation of local news and investigative watchdog sites, many of which are rising up to fill the gaps created by massive cutbacks at commercial news operations. As applications for nonprofit status spiked, the IRS put on the brakes and signaled that the law may not allow journalism to be conducted as a nonprofit activity.

The new Council on Foundations report summarizes five key problems with the current IRS approach:

1. Applications for nonprofit status are processed inconsistently and take too long. Some journalists have been forced to wait as long as three years – threatening their sustainability.
2. The IRS approach appears to undervalue journalism. The IRS has gone so far as to require news organizations to take “journalism” out of their by-laws because it is not understood as “educational.”
3. The IRS approach appears to inhibit the long-term sustainability of tax-exempt media organizations. The IRS has argued that nonprofit news and for-profit news be distinct in their mode of content distribution, which is untenable as everything moves online.
4. Confusion may be inhibiting nonprofit entrepreneurs who are trying to address the information needs of communities. The field of nonprofit news has been in a holding pattern waiting for clarity from the IRS, slowing the growth of this critical new media sector.
5. The IRS approach does not sufficiently recognize the changing nature of digital media.

I would add to this last point that the IRS approach does not account for the dramatic shifts in the news industry. In fact, the Digital Media Law Project at Harvard has written a detailed analysis of the complex and contradictory precedents that the IRS is using to judge nonprofit news, and they all date back to an earlier era of journalism. In a 2009 report on nonprofit journalism for the Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard, Marion R. Fremont‐Smith points out that “[revising] prior precedent due to changed circumstances is the essence of charity law.”

The new Council on Foundations report recommends taking just that approach, revising the process inside the IRS and clarifying a few key issues, to clear the way for nonprofit journalism. Their recommendations include establishing journalism as an educational activity and shelving old guidelines related to operational similarities between commercial and nonprofit newsrooms.

Instead, the report argues, the IRS should focus on “whether the media organization is engaged primarily in educational activities that provide a community benefit, as opposed to advancing private interests.” Finally, the report says that nonprofit journalism should meet all current requirements of other nonprofits, including that it cannot endorse candidates for public office or lobby lawmakers.

There is more background and nuance underlying each of these points in the full report, which acknowledges that other issues remain to be addressed, such as an examination of for-profit news organizations that wish to transition to a nonprofit model and how best to support innovative hybrid or “low-profit” journalism models. Both of these issues would demand legislative interventions.

This administrative fix will not be easy in a bureaucratic agency unaccustomed to public pressure in its rulemaking, but given the gridlock in Congress, it is likely the path of least resistance. In the long term, the tax code may need to be amended (as it has been many times before) to codify these changes. However, in the near term, journalism organizations, foundations, and First Amendment groups should come together to take this first step.

[This post originally appeared on the Harvard Law and Policy Review]

Over at the Huffington Post, Michael Calderone has a good piece on where journalists are turning for details and in-depth information on drones. Calderone’s article focuses on the work of Bill Roggio at The Long War Journal and his work tracking drone statistics, but the story is part of a larger trend of individuals bearing witness and becoming sources for newsrooms that increasingly have less capacity for the long, sustained work of tracking these kinds of details:

“While the use of drones is perhaps the most controversial foreign policy issue of President Obama’s second term, major media outlets have been outsourcing the collection of strike data to three lesser-known news-gathering entities. The covert U.S. drone war in Pakistan and Yemen has been notoriously difficult to track over the years, making The Long War Journal’s statistics -– along with those compiled by theNew America Foundation and The Bureau of Investigative Journalism -– essential for news organizations that haven’t been independently tracking each strike or number of suspected militants and civilians killed.”

In October of 2011 I began tracking journalist arrests at Occupy Wall Street protests when New York Times journalist, Natasha Leonard, was arrested on the Brooklyn Bridge. By the end of the month ten journalists had been arrested, and a month later that number was over thirty. Police interference with press around the US became a major story for much of 2011 and the first half of 2012.

My chief concern when I started tracking these arrests was to create a detailed account of each arrest, collecting as many facts and details I could, in an effort to highlight what I saw as a troubling trend. I developed sources on the ground in key cities and focused on transparency and verification, making my work as public as possible. Initially, I felt responsible to the journalists being arrested, to tell their story as fully as possible, but as the list became a source for journalists, lawyers, researchers and advocates that universe of responsibility expanded.

Since 2007 Erica Smith has tracked newspaper layoffs and buyouts on her blog Paper Cuts. Her work has been cited widely by journalists, academics and advocates. Poynter called her maps, “the de facto standard source for tracking newspaper layoff numbers for the past couple years.”

“I started out because I was curious about the number of cuts. Now it’s because I have too many friends who’ve been laid off,” Smith told the American Journalism Review in 2009. At that time, Smith said it took her 10-12 hours a week to keep her maps up-dated. This was on top of her job as a graphic designer for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. Like Smith, my tracking was a work of passion, something that spilled well beyond my day job into all hours of the night.

In an era where we face a flood of information, these kinds of tracking efforts, that take a laser focus on one issue and cover them with depth and on-going attention, are growing more and more popular and important. Sites like Homicide Watch in Washington, DC, Gun Crisis News in Philadelphia, PA, and Shine In Peace in Oakland, CA are all tracking gun violence and homicides outside the bounds of newsrooms. Inside newsrooms data journalists are doing terrific work turning government data into stories that go far beyond the numbers. What unites these very diverse projects is that they are being approached with the rigor and values of journalism, regardless of whether they are located inside a newsroom or not. Sorting through the flood of information, from government data to social media, is another way journalism is become more of a service than a product.

…

Disclosure: I have ties to two of the organizations mentioned in Michael Calderone’s piece. I am on the board of directors for the Freedom of the Press Foundation, which is currently raising money for The Bureau of Investigative Journalism. I also work with staff at the New America Foundation on projects related to media policy and the future of journalism often.