Bringing the public into the conversation

Debates are easy. Civic engagement is hard.

That might be the lesson of last night’s multimedia mayoral debate in New Haven, sponsored by the New Haven Independent, a nonprofit news site, and La Voz Hispana, a Spanish-language newspaper.

As with several previous events organized by the Independent (most notably an education forum starring school-reform critic Diane Ravitch last November), the debate featured several different ways people could watch and participate. You could just show up, of course. But you could also watch one of two different livestreams, one provided by NBC Connecticut, the other by the New Haven Register, the local daily; post comments in real time; or add your thoughts after the debate. As of this writing, 15 comments have been posted at the Independent and 20 at the Register’s website.

Four candidates are running against Mayor John DeStefano, who’s been the city’s top elected official since 1993, and who may be vulnerable this time around because of budget problems, a rising crime rate and a sense that the electorate may be experiencing what might be called DeStefano fatigue.

But with five candidates on the stage, five journalists asking questions and another four journalists live-blogging the proceedings and interacting with those posting comments, keeping track of what was going on proved to be a bit of a challenge. (Fun fact: One of my colleagues at Northeastern, journalism professor Laurel Leff, has been working at the Independent this summer and was one of the live-bloggers.)

And though the hall itself was reportedly packed, it’s unclear how many people were watching at home. About 20 members of the public posted comments to the “Cover It Live” section during the debate, not counting me.

Of course, it would be easy enough to put together a more streamlined debate, but that would involve nixing the civic-engagement part of it. And getting people interested in local affairs is a key goal at the Independent — as it should be at all news organizations, since people are not going to pay attention to the news if they fundamentally don’t care about what is happening in their communities.

In fact, the Independent recently won a national award for the Ravitch event and for several issues-oriented webcasts it’s hosted in collaboration with the NBC affiliate. Yesterday, Independent publisher and editor Paul Bass spoke with John Dankosky of WNPR Radio (who also participated in last night’s debate as a live-blogger) about the New Haven mayoral race and his vision of how media technology can be used to involve the public in the conversation.

It’s something that the preening panelists at last night’s Republican presidential debate in Ames, Iowa, might think about.

New Haven Independent photo by Thomas MacMillan. Republished by permission.

How to handle comments — and how not to

A New Haven alderman and his wife were involved in a shoving match at their home shortly before 2 a.m. this past Saturday, according to police. The incident serves as a textbook illustration of how to handle reader comments — and how not to.

The alderman, Darnell Goldson, is African-American, a fiscal conservative and a high-profile critic of Mayor John DeStefano. The city’s daily newspaper, the New Haven Register, and a nonprofit news site, the New Haven Independent, published brief stories on the altercation. The Register allows anyone to post comments immediately, though offensive ones can be removed if someone complains, or if someone on the Register’s staff catches it. The Independent screens all comments before posting.

Over the past year I’ve interviewed a number of folks in the city’s large African-American community. Invariably, the Register’s comments policy is near the top of their list in complaints about the Register. The Independent doesn’t necessarily get perfect scores on that front. But because blatantly racist comments are not allowed at the Independent in the first place, black readers generally give the Independent high marks for trying to encourage a civil conversation.

Here are some of the dicier comments you’ll find about the Goldsons at the Register right now — some racially charged, some just in incredibly poor taste:

Probably a drug related incident !

Pretty rough neighbor hood. ”

…

Obviously a personal matter that was fueled by something egregious.

Common sense would dictate some type of marital discord that involves “whoopee”, “friends with benefits” or a series of one-night-stands.

No big deal as this type of behavior is quite common in Ward 30

…

Hmm,I wonder…Would you all be so quick to rush to bury this man if instead of “Darnell”, his name happened to be “Daniel”,”Christopher”, or some other, more caucasian name?Racism pervades so many comments made on this page that it makes me sick.If you are a racist loser, come right out and say it, don’t dance around the subject by negatively commenting every time someone with a name like “Jamal, Tyshawn, or Darnell” is referenced in an article!

…

Its because the ones with the names like Jamal, Darnell, Tyshawn, LaKeisha, Tyreeka, etc are the ones we hear about causing most of the trouble and committing most of the crimes in the area.

Call it racist if you want, but the bad citizens in your community are the ones giving black people a bad name. The rest of us normal citizens who do work and who do stay out of trouble are just really sick of hearing black people cry racism when there are so many of you causing your own problems.

…

Cheer up everybody, the makeup sex is going to be incredible!

Please understand that I’m not saying the Register condones such comments. Its commenting policy says, “We ask that you be polite. Offensive comments will be removed and repeated offensive comments could lead to being banned from commenting. In no way do the comments represent the view of nhregister.com.” And based on what I’ve seen in the past, I expect some or all of these comments will be gone before long.

But by not taking responsibility for comments before posting, the Register opens itself up to charges of offensiveness and of insensitivity to the black community.

By contrast, the Independent’s policy begins: “Yes we do censor reader comments. We’ll continue to.” And if you look at the comments appended to the bottom of the Independent’s story, you won’t find anything remotely like what I’ve quoted above.

This has nothing to do with free speech. It’s about brand, reputation and journalistic standards. It’s also about whether you think of comments as a way to build community, or simply as a tactic to drive up page views.

No responsible editor would allow ordinary people to be quoted making such remarks, especially anonymously. Nor would an editor publish such garbage as a letter to the editor. Why should comments be any different?

In New Haven’s schools, addition by subtraction

You won’t find a better example of the difference between a reporter who’s immersed in her beat and one who’s a generalist. The New Haven Register and the New Haven Independent today reported on the latest high-school test scores — a big deal everywhere, but especially in New Haven, where a nationally watched education-reform effort is under way.

Both the Register’s Abbe Smith and the Independent’s Melissa Bailey wrote that there were some especially notable improvements at Wilbur Cross High School, which the school superintendent, Reginald Mayo, referred to as having done an “extraordinary job.”

But the Independent also reported that the number of Wilbur Cross students taking the test this year was 200 lower than the previous year, and that those 200 comprised some of the most challenged students in the system. Bailey’s lede:

Pop quiz: If test scores at Wilbur Cross High School go up, but the number of test-takers drops by 200 — or by more than 50 percent, with many low performers gone — should the district tout “extraordinary” gains?

I’m not picking on Smith, who’s a good reporter. But Bailey is immersed in the New Haven school system, having visited classrooms across the city and written dozens of stories, some of them quite in-depth. A few months ago, I had a chance to accompany her to an elementary school, where we spent the morning sitting in on a teaching-team meeting, a reading-team meeting and even a teacher evaluation, which we were allowed to attend on the grounds that we not identify the teacher.

When you’ve got that kind of background knowledge, anomalies like the Wilbur Cross scores jump out at you.

Oh, and, by the way, Wilbur Cross principal Peggy Moore seems to be a real piece of work.

Tribune outsources local journalism jobs to Chicago

The bankrupt Tribune Co. is outsourcing New England newspaper jobs to the mother ship in Chicago. Both the Hartford Courant, a daily, and the New Haven Advocate, an alt-weekly, have been affected by Tribune’s latest cost-slashing.

Our story begins last Thursday, when Boston Globe sportswriter and Courant alumnus Peter Abraham tweeted, “Two great friends and mentors were let go by the Courant today. If you need top-notch copy editors, I know just the guys for you.”

When I expressed my dismay, Abraham responded, “Seems they are now going to edit the paper out of Chicago or something. Just awful.”

Then, on Friday, the New Haven Independent reported that Joshua Mamis, publisher of the Advocate as well as two satellite operations in Hartford and Fairfield County, had lost his job. I met Mamis at a media-reform conference in San Francisco in 1996, and interviewed him in 2009 for my book-in-progress about the Independent and other community news sites. He is a good guy, and it’s kind of insane to think the Advocate papers can thrive without their own full-time publisher.

The Independent also obtained a memo that gets into a bit more detail about the Chicago connection. Here’s the key paragraph:

Other changes are a result of our on-going participation in Media on Demand (MoD), which provides fully edited and designed non-local news and features content for Tribune newspapers and websites. MoD will expand to take on copy-editing and page design for several newspapers including The Hartford Courant at a center based in the Chicago Tribune newsroom, where the content-sharing hub is located.  This approach, already implemented at the Daily Press, will enable us to improve the efficiency of operations and position us to fulfill our local mission and to meet the challenges of the future.

The Daily Press is located in Newport, Va. And here’s more from the Courant.

This is terrible news. Shipping local journalism jobs to Chicago is malpractice. Rather than pillaging its properties to pay down its $13 billion debt, Tribune ought to get out and let an unencumbered owner operate them.

Here is a column the New York Times’ David Carr wrote earlier this year on Tribune’s implosion. And here is a piece I wrote for the Boston Phoenix in 1999, shortly after the Advocate papers were sold to Times Mirror, which was later acquired by Tribune.

Nowhere to run, nowhere to hide (III)

The New Haven Advocate, the city’s alt-weekly, has a nasty, brutish and short profile of Chris Hoffman, the spokesman for the New Haven school department who was the reluctant star of a video last week by Melissa Bailey of the New Haven Independent after he barred her from entering a school meeting.

The headline: “The Dark Side: From Journalist to Mouthpiece for Those in Power.” Ouch.

Nowhere to run, nowhere to hide (II)

The New Haven Board of Education met last night to consider turning over the management of one of its public schools to a for-profit company — and had to postpone its meeting after the New Haven Independent’s Melissa Bailey pointed out that the board had not given 24 hours’ notice, as required under Connecticut’s open-meeting law.

This time, Bailey video-records Mayor John DeStefano to get his take on the various forms of transparency. And Abbe Smith, covering the story for the city’s daily paper, the New Haven Register, credits Bailey and the Independent for shutting down the illegal meeting.

Nowhere to run, nowhere to hide

A reporter shows up to a meeting of parents and officials from a for-profit company that may be contracted to take over their kids’ K-8 school. The school department has promised “transparency,” but the department’s spokesman bars the reporter from attending. What would you do?

Here’s what Melissa Bailey of the New Haven Independent did: She pulled out her pocket video camera and trained it on the spokesman, Chris Hoffman, for more than three minutes as he tried to explain the meaning of “transparency.” To Hoffman’s credit, he didn’t turn and run. The result, above, is highly entertaining. Here is Bailey’s story.

Bailey, in an email exchange with Media Nation, confirms that the meeting did not fall under the purview of the state’s open-meeting law, and so she did not have a legal right to be there. By barring Bailey, though, school officials managed to keep the public in the dark about an initiative that promises to be both consequential and controversial.

Oh, and be sure to check out the comments. Will Clark, who accuses Bailey of writing a “sensationalized story,” is the school department’s chief operating officer.

Taking a look at Connecticut budget coverage

Compared to Greater Boston, the decline of traditional news organizations in Connecticut is considerably more advanced. The Hartford Courant, a venerable statewide daily that traces its founding to 1764, is owned by Tribune Co., which is in bankruptcy. As a result, the Courant has had to cut back on its Statehouse coverage in recent years. Other largish dailies, such as the New Haven Register, no longer even have a full-time Statehouse reporter.

Yet Connecticut has also proved to be a place where digital-media experiments have arisen to fill in some of the gap. Two that are focused on state government are the Connecticut Mirror, a well-funded non-profit, and CT News Junkie, a scrappy for-profit that also functions as the Statehouse bureau for the non-profit New Haven Independent.

With Gov. Dannel Malloy having reached a tentative agreement with the state’s labor leaders on Friday, a deal that could prevent the layoff of nearly 5,000 employees, I thought this was a good time to check in on how the old and new players covered it.

Hartford Courant

• Lede: “Capping months of secretive talks, Gov. Dannel P. Malloy and state-employee union leaders reached a deal Friday to save $1.6 billion over the next two years in exchange for a promise not to lay off unionized workers for the next four years.”
• When: Time-stamped at 10:11 p.m. on Friday; published in Saturday’s print edition
• Length: About 1,600 words
• What: A densely reported story that is full of details but is a little bewildering if you’re not an insider. Perhaps the one-must read if you’re a stakeholder, but loses points for quoting the chairman of the Republican State Committee as calling the budget “unconstitutional” without offering (or demanding) an explanation.
• Reported by no one else: “At the end of his prepared remarks in announcing the deal, Malloy’s speech said, ‘Finally … so much for Friday the 13th being an unlucky day!’ But Malloy never delivered that line.”

The Connecticut Mirror

• Lede: “Negotiators for state employee unions and Gov. Dannel P. Malloy tentatively agreed Friday on a two-year $1.6 billion package of concessions and other labor savings that will help Malloy balance the $40.1 billion biennial budget without 4,700 announced layoffs.”
• When: Posted on Friday with no time-stamp, but first comment posted at 2:29 p.m.
• Length: About 1,400 words, plus a 1,100-word sidebar analyzing the implications of the deal for future budget planning, posted later on Friday
• What: As with the Courant, the Mirror’s main story is densely reported and filled with details of interest mainly to insiders. The sidebar, though, provides needed perspective by demonstrating how difficult it will be for Malloy to hold on to savings in the face of demands that he undo program cuts.
• Reported by no one else: “With over $19 billion in bonded debt, Connecticut ranks among the top three states in the nation in terms of debt per capita, and debt as a percentage of the taxpayers’ personal income.”

CT News Junkie

• Lede: “Gov. Dannel P. Malloy said that after months of negotiating he has reached a deal with labor that saves the state $1.6 billion over the next two years and $21.5 billion over the next 20. However, at a 3 p.m. press conference there was little Malloy could say about the agreement until negotiators have had time to brief union members.”
• When: Friday at 6:12 p.m. (final update); initial post at 2:20 p.m.
• Length: About 900 words
• What: As the site’s name suggests, CT News Junkie is mainly geared toward political junkies and insiders. It doesn’t get any more insidery than this: “Also the retirement age will be raised from 60 to 63 for Tier II employees and 62 to 65 for Tier IIa employees, however, those changes won’t kick in until 2022.” But the shorter length makes for a somewhat zippier read without sacrificing much in the way of needed details.
• Reported by no one else: “In 2009 the last time a the [sic] SEBAC contract was reopened it took the state employee unions three weeks to complete the ratification of the contracts.”

The New York Times

• Lede: “Threatened with nearly 5,000 layoffs, representatives for 45,000 unionized state employees agreed Friday to $1.6 billion in concessions over two years to help balance a budget that Gov. Dannel P. Malloy says includes pain for everyone: record tax increases, substantial program cuts and worker givebacks in health care, pension benefits and wages.”
• When: The Web version of the article says it was “published” on Friday; it appeared in print on Saturday
• Length: About 900 words
• What: The Times covers major Connecticut stories as part of its New York local report. The story, which cites the Courant for some details, offers a more sweeping view than the others, going with fewer details and seeking to place Malloy’s conciliatory approach with the unions in a broader political context.
• Reported by no one else: “And while the confrontational approach has made Governor Christie of New Jersey a hot property, there is no early indication that what Mr. Malloy calls ‘shared sacrifice’ is working as well for him. A Quinnipiac University poll in March put his approval rating at 35 percent.”

Indies fight back against Patch

Thirty independent community news sites have banded together to tell the world, in effect, “We are not Patch.” The project, called Authentically Local, includes such well-known sites as Baristanet, based in Montclair, N.J., The Batavian, of Batavia, N.Y., and the New Haven Independent.

In a statement posted online, Baristanet founder and editor Debbie Galant says:

The Authentically Local campaign seeks to illuminate the difference between authentic local businesses and those that are just cashing in — before every town in America becomes one giant strip mall. This is not just about us, the owned-and-operated sites that write about place. It’s about place.

The alliance includes both for-profit and non-profit sites. Its motto, “local doesn’t scale,” appears to be aimed squarely at AOL’s Patch.com sites, a network of hyperlocal sites that are a key part of AOL’s efforts to reinvent itself.

Recently Galant compared Patch to Wal-Mart, saying, “The profits are going to a corporation. And so it’s difficult. It makes us understand what the local merchants are dealing with on a regular basis, for different local hardware stores to be competing against Home Depot. It’s basically the same thing.”

Patch has emerged as a real hiring engine for journalists at a time when the news business continues to shrink. So I’d like to see both Patch and the independents thrive. To the extent that Patch poses a threat to the indies, I hope Authentically Local helps them compete on a level field.

Police officer vows to defy First Amendment

Last fall, the New Haven Police Department came under criticism after officers were caught harassing people trying to video-record them while they were making arrests during a crackdown on rowdy bars. In one instance, according to an internal report, a commanding officer went so far as to confiscate an iPhone and order another officer to erase the video.

Police Chief Frank Limon, in response, said publicly that citizens have a right to video-record the police as long as they don’t interfere. Officers are attending training sessions reinforcing that message. And Limon recently issued a general order putting it into writing.

So what do you do when an officer — posting pseudonymously in the comments section of the New Haven Independent, a five-year-old non-profit news site — makes it clear that he’s going to keep doing things his way?

It’s an interesting question, and one with no easy answer.

On March 3, Independent editor and publisher Paul Bass covered a training session led by Assistant Chief Tobin Hensgen. Nineteen of the department’s more than 400 officers were there. Presumably all of them will be cycled through at some point.

As it happened, I was on one of my reporting trips to New Haven, so I was there. Among other things, I got to see another dimension to the controversy: Hensgen showed a video clip of a handgun convincingly disguised as a cellphone. I can certainly understand why an officer would want to inspect a cellphone if someone were aiming it at him at a crime scene.

Coincidentally, later that afternoon Chief Limon held a news conference at police headquarters to respond to two investigations into incidents of police harassing cellphone-wielding bystanders. (I was on hand for that as well, tagging along with reporter Thomas MacMillan.) Former assistant chief Ariel Melendez was at the center of both incidents. He retired in January with a pension of $124,500.

On Saturday, a commenter who identified himself only as “J” (scroll down) wrote that he was at the training session, and that he would insist on inspecting a cellphone at the scene because of the possibility that it could be a weapon. So far, so good. Then he added this:

Also if I am conducting an investigation involving a juvenile and I find that you are filming I will ask you to stop. If you do not comply I will take your phone and place it into evidence.  The identity and image of a juvenile will be protected. Of course if you see a officer abusing a juvenile or anyone for that matter and film it this is a different story.

Bass responded in an “Editor’s Note”:

I believe you will be breaking the law in that latter case. If you do that to us, we will pursue all legal avenues to make sure you are punished. However, I agree with you that we shouldn’t film the juvenile; that is our responsibility. However again, we do feel comfortable filming the scene but leaving the juvenile’s face and identity out of it.

“J” posted again, making it clear that he understood the law, but was going to do what he thought was right regardless:

No, if I am dealing with a juvenile while conducting an investigation then the entire well-being of that child is MY responsibility, not the individual who is filming.

I completely understand that you or anyone would pursue me or any other officer legally, unfortunately that comes with this job.

If I am to be pursued legally my report will show my justification for what I have done and I will have to play the odds. I can say that anything regarding a child plays heavily on the feelings of all adults, so I would find it extremely hard for any court to find fault in what I did. I, however will sleep well knowing I did the right thing legally or not.

I guess we will agree to disagree.

Bass:

We are not disagreeing about what the law says. We are not disagreeing about what the policy is. We are disagreeing about whether you should follow the law; that’s your choice. In terms of protecting the juvenile — in the case of the Independent, we agree not to run the face of a juvenile being arrested. If another citizen or media outlet chooses to run a photo of juvenile in public causing trouble, the law is 100 percent clear that this is legal and permissible and that you are breaking the law if you try to prevent it.

There’s more, but that’s the gist of it. What’s at the heart of this dispute is a little-understood fact: that news organizations protect the identities of juveniles by custom, not as a matter of law. No one is legally prohibited from publishing the name of a juvenile charged with a crime — and, in fact, names often are published if the crime is notorious enough.

Nor do juvenile victims and witnesses enjoy any legal protections against having their identities revealed. Protecting their identities is a custom, and a good one. But making it a matter of law would violate the First Amendment’s guarantee of free speech and freedom of the press. The Supreme Court has on several occasions struck down laws that attempt to codify that custom.

What’s interesting about “J” is that he seems to be well aware of that, but doesn’t care. In part, he may be reacting to a legitimate concern about citizen journalism: though a news organization like the Independent isn’t going to publish the names of juveniles, there’s nothing to stop someone with a cellphone camera from posting a video to YouTube that clearly identifies underage suspects, victims and witnesses.

Under the Constitution, though, they have every right to do that. As the saying goes, “What part of ‘no law’ don’t you understand?”