This past weekend, while at a San Francisco journalism conference, a colleague took me aside to show me the website of the mysterious Franklin Center, which describes itself as “a non-profit group dedicated to providing investigative reporters and non-profit organizations at the state and local level with the training, expertise and technical support necessary to pursue journalistic endeavors.” Pretty innocuous, right? Wrong.

In fact, digging a little deeper, the origins of the site become a bit clearer. (Or murkier depending on how you look it.) The Franklin Center is supported by the Sam Adams Alliance, a free-market communications and advocacy group. I was intrigued and put it on my list of “things to look into more.” In a happy and lucky coincidence, The Washington Monthly published a piece today by Laura McGann that profiles this new group and related conservative media endeavors.

The article is appropriately and succinctly titled, “Partisan Hacks.” Here’s the crux:

But with Democrats back in power and the fourth estate in shambles, conservatives are starting to discover the virtues of shoe-leather reporting, and are throwing their organizational savvy and financial clout behind sustained investigative ventures. The Franklin Center, which is run by a Republican political consultant with no journalism background, supports ten state-level investigative news sites under the moniker Watchdog.org. Meanwhile, free-market state-based think tanks have begun hiring reporters to work in-house, focusing on local and state spending—in the last six months alone, they have brought at least eighteen reporters on board.

Conservatives are investing (key word: investing) in “reporters” on a local level to influence local/statewide politics and move stories to the national level. This is a warning for all funders and donors of non-profit journalism and progressive causes. Conservatives are building the next evolution of its noise machine. If we don’t invest in quality journalism AND strategies for operating in a networked media environment, we’re going to lose any foothold we’ve gained in the media and political space. McGann gives a perfect example of how this conservative strategy works:

In at least one case, the Watchdogs have also broken a major national news story. Last November, the New Mexico site reported that millions of stimulus dollars allocated to the state were disappearing into nonexistent congressional districts, a fact editor Jim Scarantino unearthed by poring over data on Recovery.gov, the federal government’s stimulus-tracking Web site. The national Watchdog site followed Scarantino’s lead, reporting that nationwide more than $6.4 billion was going to such “phantom congressional districts.” The story spread from conservative blogs to regional newspapers, and eventually TV news; ABC claimed the scoop was a network “exclusive.” By the first week in December, the story had gotten so big that it inspired a satirical segment on the Colbert Report. At a moment when local newspapers across the country were cutting newsroom budgets or folding altogether, the story offered a flicker of hope: perhaps even a small, online-only news operation could hold the federal government accountable.

The only problem: the story was, at best, misleading. In a “fact check” feature on Watchdog’s scoop, the Associated Press’s Matt Apuzzo took the step that the Watchdog reporters had not: he checked to see what was happening to the money. As it turns out, the funds were going exactly where they were supposed to go, not vanishing into black holes as the Watchdog sites had implied.

The right knows that it doesn’t always take big operations and a large readership to influence the increasingly under-resourced traditional news shops. Slap the brand “investigative reporting” on it, connect it to a smart communications strategy and these stories will start influencing more traditional reporting and punditry on a local level. Push the stories out to conservative bloggers, and you have a national meme.

The left has grown a great network of local and statewide blogs. But quality local and statewide news sites are few and far between. The American Independent News Network has websites and reporters in states including Colorado, Michigan, Iowa, New Mexico and a few more. My home state, has the excellent Progress Illinois. (By the way, Progress Illinois is extremely transparent that it’s major source of funding comes from SEIU. More on why that is important below.) But if there are other examples of progressive local news sites, let me know, because I can’t think of any.

To succeed in this new media environment, we’re going to have to get more strategic on both the reporting that needs to be done on the local level and how to connect the dots of these local stories on a national level through established progressive media organizations.

On a more journalism specific note, McGann also reports that The Franklin Center won’t discloses its sources of funding and support. Jason Stverak, director of The Franklin Center told McGann that the center’s credibility speaks for itself. Um, what? As a non-profit news organization, if you are not transparent about who gave you the money that funds your reporting, you shouldn’t have that credibility. For example, if Haliburton is giving your organization money and suddenly you’re churning out a lot of pro-Haliburton and government contract stories, that might be important for your audiences AND other media outlets to know. Just sayin’.

I’d go on, but I think McGann has the perfect wrap up for the story.

But in reality, Stverak appears to be banking on exactly the opposite being true—that in the age of a twenty-four-hour news cycle, cash-strapped news outlets will eagerly latch on to the scoops his team delivers and won’t spend too much time questioning the underlying reporting or the bona fides of his organization, which looks more like a political attack machine than a traditional news operation. That kind of ideologically motivated, willfully misleading muckraking may be a well-worn strategy among partisan operatives. But it isn’t journalism.

I highly recommend you read the whole piece.

Priceless:

From YouTube’s new reporter training center; I like their final point about organizing:

I was in DC much of this week, speaking at and attending different future of journalism summits. There were many things I agreed with and others, profoundly disagreed. Top disagreement: “Bloggers give great opinions. But they are not reporters.” Um-then what do you call this?

The Hillman Foundation has announced their 2009 honorees, including, Marcy Wheeler of EmptyWheel/Firedoglake.

“Just last month, Marcy Wheeler made the front page of the New York Times after she became the first person to notice that a newly-released Justice Department memo revealed that Khalid Sheik Mohammed had been waterboarded 183 times in one month. Last year, Wheeler’s groundbreaking investigative work on the CIA leak case also made the front page of the Times. Her early and powerful reporting about malfeasance by Attorney General Alberto Gonzales helped to propel him out of the Bush administration. And her live blogging from the Scooter Libby trial in 2007 is widely regarded as one of the seminal moments in online journalism. Wheeler also produced outstanding coverage of the American auto industry crisis. Combining her background in the industry with a deep commitment to American workers, her depth of analysis was unrivaled.”

The lines between blogging and journalism will continue to blur and you’re going to find more and more bloggers taking on independent reporting. Why? Because it responds to the needs of their audiences, helps them gain recognition/impact when they want to pontificate and drive action. It is also in direct response to perceived poor reporting and cut backs by the establishment media.

Jane Hamher of Firedoglake is fundraising to bring Marcy and another reporter on full-time at FDL. Check it out and give a couple bucks.

P.S. We talk a lot about the blurring lines b/w journalism and blogging in our book, Beyond The Echo Chamber, coming out this fall!!!

The right wing built up a powerful echo chamber over the last few decades. In contrast, progressives have built dynamic networks of information and communication over the last few years.

For the past two years, several hundred left-leaning bloggers, political reporters, magazine writers, policy wonks and academics have talked stories and compared notes in an off-the-record online meeting space called JournoList.

Proof of a vast liberal media conspiracy?

Not at all, says Ezra Klein, the 24-year-old American Prospect blogging wunderkind who formed JournoList in February 2007. “Basically,” he says, “it’s just a list where journalists and policy wonks can discuss issues freely.”

But some of the journalists who participate in the online discussion say — off the record, of course — that it has been a great help in their work. On the record, The New Yorker’s Jeffrey Toobin acknowledged that a Talk of the Town piece — he won’t say which one — got its start in part via a conversation on JournoList. And JLister Eric Alterman, The Nation writer and CUNY professor, said he’s seen discussions that start on the list seep into the world beyond.

Oh my god–Toobin used a conversation he was involved in as the genesis for a news piece? Stop the presses! Liberal Media Conspiracy Alert!

Seriously folks, how do you think half of journalism, reporting and analysis occurs? From conversations, information sharing, bouncing ideas off each, arguments and more. J-list is great for all those things. It’s not an “echo chamber.” No one on this list serve is telling anyone what to write about. No one is planning out how talking points are going to be distributed and bombard the public from all angles.

The list serve is just a small, small example of how today’s media system works. It’s a network. There are private and public networks forming, connecting, dissolving, and reforming every day. Some are sustained, others serve their purpose and disappear. It’s part of the media ecology that we now live in for people to connect, share, and discuss. It’s not a conspiracy, it’s human nature.

In this case, J-List is a private conversation among as diverse a group you can get of political journalists, professors and bloggers. And if I find them too inside-the-beltway one day, I turn to my other networks: Facebook, feminist list servs, and Twitter to get other perspectives and ideas. Progressives have been much more quick to adapt and integrate these different online networks into their daily lives, making it seem far less sinister than others would perceive them.

Calderone, of course, hits up the right for their take on J-list and gets a quote from “Michael Goldfarb, a former McCain staffer and conservative blogger.”

“There is nothing comparable on the right. E-mail conversations among bloggers, journalists and experts on our side tend to be ad hoc,” Goldfarb said. “The JournoList thing always struck me as a little creepy.”

Creepy?? The right created, built, and implemented the very definition of a political echo chamber over the last few decades. That’s creepy. Maybe the fact that they don’t talk to one another and share ideas is one of the major reasons the GOP is in a state of collapse. Maybe they should try it out. These are smart people, surely they can figure out how to set up a google group list serve, right?

This article by Alyssa Quart for Columbia Journalism Review is hitting on something that I’ve been thinking about for a while.
A) Laughter always wins over screaming (see our MSM pundits)
B) Laughter/Light Sarcasm provides an easy accessability point to new audiences.
C) One of the big future trends for media will be a melding pop and politics

I’m still pondering, but I wanted to share some highlights:

Maddow’s mocking on-air demeanor reminds many people of what they liked most about college. But she’s not just clever: she’s a tough-minded Rhodes Scholar, former aids activist, and an out lesbian. Her very existence as an anchor on cable television defies a number of different common wisdoms.

That’s all remarkable unto itself. But to my mind, what really makes the show special is how it embodies the rise of what I think of as sarcasm news. More and more news programs are likely to go absurdist in the coming months and years.

What has caused sarcastic news to flower? For starters, today’s bloggers and YouTube snidesters see parody as information and information as parody. This is not entirely a mistake. Now, the news-with-satire approach can seem like the only thing that makes sense, since at least these shows are in on their own jokes. Even politicians sometimes embrace the idea of themselves as caricatures. They show up on Saturday Night Live to rap, or to meet their comedy doubles. They import self-parody into their own campaigns, as in Hillary Clinton’s faux Sopranos video on YouTube.

And Quart continues:

Also, the proliferation of niche audiences spurs sophisticated and partisan humor because these smaller groups of viewers have very particular tastes, identities, and affinities. They are thus more likely to share a sense of what’s funny.