In writing the rebuttal, I used the criteria of the AJC’s PolitiFact column which rates public statements from pants-on-fire lies to fully true. PolitiFact says when a “statement is accurate but leaves out important details. That’s our definition of Half True.”

Half truth, that’s also my definition of this six-figure university salary investigative piece. It is accurate but leaves out important details.

I believe my rebuttal, using numbers, provides more context in helping understand who actually is getting those six-figures and why. Greater context would have enhanced the level of debate among those who think state-financed faculty, administrators and staff are overpaid and those who think they are underpaid. Instead judging from the comments of the politician in the AJC story and one of the students paying tuition, the impression was these six-figures salary are an outrage that needs to be fixed.

Half-truth journalism, because of its lack of depth, sounds much more sensational and quickly gets on the radar of grandstanding policy makers and politicians, which results in bad policy and bad lawmaking that stays in place long after those headlines disappear.

It really pains me to write this critique because Georgia is a state dominated by one party and it has a history of inequalities and many varieties of malfeasance and incompetency. Strong investigative journalism is needed. Indeed, it is essential for the long-term health of our local, state, regional and national democracies.

Many of the AJC’s investigations are spot-on and much needed. However, in its zeal to become known as an investigative, muckraking paper, some of its investigations resemble 6 o’clock TV, inch-deep investigative news rather than investigative reporting worthy of the state’s largest news organization. I am writing this in a hope that the leadership, reporters, editors and investigative units at the AJC take some time for reflection, and, perhaps, have some folks they respect review and critique everything that is pegged as investigative journalism.

I am afraid the crooked, unethical and incompetent folks who have been legitimately investigated will use my words to tar all the AJC investigations. This piece is not aimed at defending their actions nor at defending the bureaucratic systems that fail to serve us well. All of them need to be investigated, but that comes with a responsibility that requires in-depth reporting that goes deep beyond the veneer.

As readers and members of the public, we must demand it.

Leonard Witt is the executive director of the Center for Sustainable Journalism at Kennesaw State University. Its mission is to find ways to ensure that high quality, ethically journalism has an enduring place in our democracy.

Mike Schinkel took the photo below plus many more and Urvaksh Karkaria wrote a blog post at the Atlanta Business Chronicle summarizing what took place. As you will see in the Karkaria post, several of the journalists who left the mainstream are busy with alternative forms of delivering journalism even as they lament the past. Their efforts vary from investigative journalism to providing syndicated news for rural papers. Things are happening.

See below who attended for the beginning, we hope, of more informal but rich discussions.

Standing (l-to-r): Selah Abrams, John Sugg, Urvaksh Karkaria, Siddiq Bello, Benita Dodd, Jim Walls (guy with beard and hat), Tom Baxter, Jon Sinton (really tall guy), Maria Saporta, Lyle V. Harris, Leonard Witt.

Seated (l-to-r): Beth Kurylo, Amani Channel and Devin Alexander Channel and Diana Witt.

The interview is an excellent way to learn more about the new Center and what our plans for it are.

Moro is chair of the Civic and Citizen Journalism Interest Group in the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication (AEJMC).

The central tenet of journalism ethics (in my opinion) remains: Do what’s best to empower your readers with truthful information. Everything we do ought to flow from that goal.

The practice of journalism is an act of service. But if we are going to be able to continue to serve our audience, we will need to change some of the conventions and assumptions we’ve brought to our practice if they now stand in the way of our ability to serve. What good are conventions designed a generation ago to protected our public image if following them today leaves us with a shrinking audience and no advertisers to support us?

He adds:

Here are three widely quoted tenets of traditional journalism ethics that I believe journalists must change in order to remain relevant in a more competitive online information market.

The old rule: You can’t cover something in which you are personally involved.

The new rule: Tell your readers how you are involved and how that’s shaped your reporting

The old rule: You must present all sides of a story, being fair to each.

The new rule: Report the truth and debunk the lies.

The old rule: There must be a wall between advertising and editorial.

The new rule: Sell ads into ad space and report news in editorial space. And make sure to show the reader the difference.

Read the entire article so see his logic for the rules changes.

As mass journalism markets un-bundle and become niche markets, news operations – if they are to survive – will have to join the niche movement rather than fight it…

News on the recent Oregon Public Broadcasting and Representative Journalism connection:

I have been banging on PBS’s doors for a long time looking for someone to see the merit in what I am saying. Steven M. Bass, president and CEO of Oregon Public Radio, likes the idea and we are going to see if it works in three rural parts of Oregon.

The towns get very little coverage. If it works there, watch out: everyone will be banging down the Representative Journalism door.

More on the recent $250,000 Kennesaw State University grant from the Harnisch Foundation:

That’s actually ongoing funding: Ruth Ann Harnisch, the foundation’s president, has been an advocate and an inspirational force for the Rep J concept…

The latest installment will be used to advance research aimed at discovering innovative ways to produce financially sustainable, high quality and ethically sound journalism.

It will allow us to help underwrite more applied research, build collaborations and advance innovative projects around the USA and maybe the world to test the viability of citizen-funded journalism.

Will people pay for news?

…as more and more newspapers sink, there will be less and less journalism. If you want it, you will have to pay for it. If you don’t want to pay for it, fine, but I don’t think it will be much fun living in a free society without high quality, ethically sound journalism.

Mizzou “Lunchstorm” discussion on Dec. 5, 2008 from Bonnie Obremski on Vimeo.

• First point to remember. Blogs are simply a blank piece of paper. They can be used any way the blog publisher wants to use his or her blog. They can strive for truth, for example, PolitiFact, a project of the St. Petersburg Times and Congressional Quarterly, which parses ads for how truthful they are and how false they are.

In the past, a campaign would put out a lie. The news media aiming to be balanced would restate the lie and then get both sides to comment on it. Even a blatant lie got repeated so often, that it had traction within voters’ consciousnesses. It’s a lot harder to do so with PolitiFact fact-checking ads and talking points and then rating them with the worst offenders getting a Pants-on-Fire lie rating with a graphic to emphasize the point.

• Blogs can be blatantly partisan for example Drudge and Powerline on the right and Atrios and the Daily Kos on the left.

• Blogs can be a powerful force for justice, even if they are leaning in one direction or the other. For example, TalkingPointsMemo exposed the US Attorneys firings, which eventually meant the downfall of Attorney General Alberto Gonzales and has had ramifications directly into the more recent claims of voter registration fraud. Here are self reported facts from TalkingPointsMemo for October 2008:

Absolute Unique Visitors: 3.12 million
Visits: 15.29 million
Page Views: 30.99 million.

• Blogs can be amazing tools for mobilizing forces. For example, obscure Minnesota US Congresswoman Michelle Bachmann called Barack Obama unpatriotic on Hardball with Chris Matthews and said he that he should be investigated. Within hours the left-leaning blogosphere started a campaign to fund her fully unknown opponent Elwyn Tinklenberg. In days he receives $1.4 million dollars from independent contributors via the blogosphere. The influx of money for advertising almost immediately begins to diminish a Bachmann advantage and puts her seat in play.

• Blog sites like Pollster.com and Fiverthirtyeight.com have running commentaries on every poll and parse every number. They are all about the horse race and nothing about the issues, but they are addictive.

• Blogs allow individuals like me to be a player in a way that would have been impossible five years ago. At my blog PJNet.org, which talks about citizen media, I try to practice what I preach so occasionally I do a citizen journalism post. Here are two examples:

During the primary Rudy Giuliani came to Marietta, Ga where I live. I took out my still camera with video capabilities and went to the town square. Giuliani got met by a large Ron Paul counter-demonstration. I got it all on video and uploaded it to my site and to my blog. It received 6,700 views. I did another one last week of people waiting in an early vote presidential election line; it got 230 views. Combined those are about 7,000 sets of eyeballs diverted from other mainstream media, and I am just one guy with a little still camera with video capabilities. Multiple that times that other tens of thousands people doing similar posting and you have a real movement on your hands. How big?

• The New York Times reports :

• YouTube videos mentioning either Mr. Obama or Mr. McCain have been viewed 2.3 billion times, according to the measurement firm TubeMogul.

• “SNL” videos proved to be particularly popular online; Tina Fey’s impressions were viewed more than 50 million times.

• With 5 million views since March, Mr. Obama’s 37-minute speech about race is the most popular video on his YouTube channel. (New York Times, Nov. 2, 2008)

• A Pew Research Center survey conducted in October found that 39 percent of registered voters had watched campaign videos online.

• Four years ago in the 2004 election there was no YouTube.

So what about the overflow of information,  how can we tell the good from the bad, misinformation from good information? Part of our challenge as a university is to advance media literacy, but which is more democratic a few brand-name monopolistic media organizations dominating the news or a cacophony of voices?

Right now people are voting with their eyeballs for a cacophony of voices. Plus they are coming out to the polls in record numbers and they have a wealth of information unavailable to them in the past.

We do have some some problems looming. Much of the stimulus for the conversation comes from mainstream news sites, producing hard-to-gather journalism. The free blogosphere is undermining  the old business models that have supported quality journalism. How will solid journalism be supported in the future? We don’t know, but remember just four years ago there was no YouTube so anything is possible.

In a short essay at the Online Journalism Review Geneva Overholser asks: Did journalism’s business model distort journalism’s social mission?

She bases her question on a lecture by Adlai Wertman, a professor at USC’s Marshall School of Business. Overholser writes:

Confronted with the nation’s inability to resolve the many ills confronting it, Wertman told the Journalism School: “I think it’s all your fault. In my view, the political world follows journalism.” And journalism has led down the wrong paths in our failure to give attention to poverty, homelessness and other weighty and complex issues.

The profit model may be responsible for much of the problem: “There is a major difference between a mission-driven business and a business,” he said. Profit-seeking companies “quickly go from no social mission to no social responsibility.” The result has been, in Wertman’s opinion, a distorted notion of “what the public wants” when it comes to journalism, and a terribly inadequate news diet for a self-governing people.

So what’s to be done?

“If you are asking, ‘Can I create new models that are mission-driven in journalism, and make a living?’ Absolutely!” said Wertman. Start with the focus, he advised. The new models that seem to do well are very targeted.

“Donors want to know, ‘What are you going to effect?’ That’s the hardest part. Once you figure out your mission, you can do anything. And I teach, the narrower the mission, the better.”

He adds:

“Take the mission away from journalism and think more about journalism as a tool: We care about poverty, and how could we use journalism as a tool to make a difference.”

Update: This from an e-mail I received from Bill Densmore of the Media Giraffe project:

Geneva Overholser reports on a talk at Univ. of Southern California. If (a) one assumes that a social mission (as in fostering participatory democracy) and profit maximization (as in Wall Street-owned news organizations) are incompatible, then, Overholser suggests (b) It may be time to move toward a “niche” reporting model in which specific funders support civic journalism on topics about which they feel passion.

Densmore adds:

It’s worth comparing this insight with some of Len Witt’s work on Representative Journalism . . .. . . in which Len and some other researchers are considering whether a community (Northfield, Minn., is the test venue) might be willing to support in-depth civic journalism — a sort of geographic niche. You can follow the work of the RepJ journalist in Northfield, Bonnie Obremski, from this link.

Overholser’s idea, and the RepJ initiative are also related I think to what Paul Bass is doing in New Haven, Conn., with  his New Haven Independent local online news community. Bass runs The Independent as a non-profit 501(c)3 organization, and most of his funding comes a handful of foundations who encourage specific coverage areas such as health care. This may be to some degree what Overholser is talking about.

If this is where the funding of journalism is going, how do we find the balance between this “sponsored” journalism, and outright flackery? It seems like we can, and need, to plumb that gray area and figure it out in ethical and practical terms.

Just an aside, Densmore is the second person who emailed the Overholser link and mentioned its relationship to Rep J. The first was Michael Mansur from the Kansas City Star. So maybe the Rep J idea is getting some traction.

Through Friday, of 270 news articles published in The Times about the election since the national tickets were formed in late August, only 29, or a little over 10 percent, were primarily about policy substance. And that is a generous tally that includes some very brief items.

That count by my assistant, Michael McElroy, is similar to figures compiled by the Project for Excellence in Journalism, which has been closely monitoring election coverage in a wide range of media. The group found that only 8 percent of front-page articles in The Times from late August through last Sunday were about policy. Nearly three-quarters were about the horse race, political tactics, polls and the like. The Times numbers are about the same as for the news media in general, including cable television and blogs — not a standard to aspire to.

Apparently, that does not make the public happy; Hoyt writes:

Early this year, roughly three-quarters of voters of all political persuasions surveyed by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press said they wanted more coverage of the candidates’ stands on issues. For the most part, they were disappointed, and their satisfaction with the news media has declined, according to Pew. In February, 55 percent said the election coverage was good or excellent. By June, 54 percent said it was fair or poor.

Those interested in civic and public journalism have been taking on this issue since the public journalism reform movement began  after the 1988 presidential election. Jay Rosen has been one of the most informed critics. Here is what he said back in January, 2008. Here is what I wrote in October 2007 and if you want to keep going back, here is Rosen again in 2004 with his PressThink piece Horse Race Now! Horse Race Tomorrow! Horse Race. Forever!

If I were surveyed, I would answer that I want more issue oriented stories. However, here is a confession: I can’t help myself, apparently like a lot of political junkies, each day I visit places like FiveThirtyEight.com which provides fantastic horse race coverage, just like inside baseball. It is addictive. Here is what FiveThirtyEight posted last week about the site’s audience growth:

Seven months ago today this site … went live, with 80 visits. Yesterday we reached 693,216 … Glancing at the daily circulation figures for US newspapers, it looks like we’re at or about the top ten and rising with a bullet.

So for me I want my polls and my substantial reporting too. Right now we are obviously getting more of the former and too little of the latter and that is the big problem now, has been the problem in the past and will probably be the problem forever.