So what do we do about that divide? And what if the problem isn’t evenly distributed across the landscape or within a party, but pools and concentrates in certain spots? Do journalists go to those (malignant) spots and fight?

The lines are usually attributed to Daniel Patrick Moynihan: “You’re entitled to your own opinions. You’re not entitled to your own facts.”

But suppose there arose on the political scene a practical caucus for the opposite view. We are entitled to our own facts, and we will show you what we think of your attempt to “check” us. If that happened, would the press know what to do?

We hear quite a bit about the partisan divide in Washington and around the country. We hear a lot less about the divide around Moynihan’s famous lines. Those who think you’re not entitled to your own facts vs. those who dispute the statement. Or feel unbound from it. Or they simply run right over it trying to win today’s battle or deliver today’s news.

“Hey, you’re not entitled to your own facts…” vs: That’s your opinion. Kiss my ad. Read my poll.

Evidence that others at least know what I’m talking about came from David S. Bernstein of the Boston Phoenix (an occasional critic of mine) who recently sent this plea out over Twitter:

Dear media critics: OK, entire news media called Romney’s welfare attack a lie. Campaign still pushing it. Now what?

I don’t know the answer. I do know that it’s troubling to other journalists sifting through the 2012 campaign. Two weeks ago a bureau chief wrote to me for comment on a story he was doing about the same development. My reply:

If we start back in the 1990s and read forward to the current campaign, we see distinct phases of innovation as political journalists react to misleading ads: first, the ad watch phase in the 90s; there was some mention of misleading elements, but the final tally was about effectiveness, or what I call “savvy.” The limitations of the ad watch led to direct fact-checking by the press, where actual grades are handed out. The emphasis is on judging truth and falsehood, not assessing effectiveness. So now we’re in a new phase: fact checking alone is not enough. The campaigns seem able to override it, which does not mean they override it equally or with the same vengeance. So what’s the next innovation?

He wrote back: right, well what is the next innovation? Again: I don’t know. (Hit the comment button if you do know.)

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So what is the job of a political journalist today? Is it to describe the reality of American politics, as a “straight” reporter would? Or is it to defend reality and its “base” in American politics… more like a fact checker would?

I was alerted to the find by Alec MacGillis of the New Republic. He was exasperated by this brief report in the Washington Post, which appeared at The Fix, the Post’s top political blog. If you don’t know it, The Fix is a reporting and analysis franchise built around the many talents of Chris Cillizza, a star reporter and key presence on its most important beat: national politics.

The Fix is a group blog now; the item in question carried the byline of political reporter Aaron Blake. It’s a 700-word analysis of a Mitt Romney ad that twisted some words of Obama’s into a claim that could be more easily attacked:

Context be damned: Obama’s ‘It worked’ quote should work for Republicans.

Context is dead. Long live context.

For the second time in two weeks, Mitt Romney’s campaign has an out-of-context quote it can use to bludgeon President Obama. First it was “You didn’t build that,” and now it’s two ill-fated words that Obama spoke at a fundraiser Monday: “It worked.”

As with “You didn’t build that,” the Romney campaign’s attacks on “It worked” will be criticized for being out-of-context, lowest-common-denominator politics. And as with “You didn’t build that,” “It worked” is going to … well … work.

The rest of the item runs in this vein: Scream all you want about “context” and accuracy; these ads are effective, and that’s what counts. Listen to a bit more:

Fact-checkers are great (especially our Glenn Kessler), but as long as either side has an argument to justify its attacks, the history of politics dictates that it’s all fair game.

Romney’s team is exploiting that fact — to the credit of its political acumen, if not its strict adherence to accuracy.

Some people don’t hear it, others do: the way the tone of the piece… don’t get me wrong, fact checkers are great, but… eats away at our confidence that this kind of journalism can ever be the truthelling kind. MacGillis of the New Republic heard it. “Ah yes,” he wrote. “If only there was someone whose job and calling it was to ferret out the truth of such things, to provide some context for voters. Let me think, there must be someone we can think of, a profession of some kind perhaps, sort of like a researcher but also a communicator…”

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No, they would not. This falls under: too big to tell.

The Boston Globe reports: Mitt Romney stayed at Bain 3 years longer than he stated. ”Firm’s 2002 filings identify him as CEO, though he said he left in 1999.”

Fallout. Which fits well into the controversy of the day template, that reusable campaign good.

Un-templated: Suppose a major party candidate for president believed we were in a “post-truth” era and actually campaigned that way. Would political reporters in the mainstream press figure it out and tell us?

I say no. They would not tell us. Not in any clear way.

Instead, they would do what the Globe did here: try to nail the candidate on specific misstatements that can be documented. Which is good and necessary and difficult and contentious and honorable. Keep going, Boston Globe! And don’t forget to credit others who have done similar work.

What template is there for reporting on a strategy that incorporates…

1.) Key lesson of the climate change debate: you can run a political campaign against verifiable facts, and thereby weaken those facts in the public’s mind.

2.) The Palin-ator: you can invent stuff and stick with it when it is shown to be false because culture war politics feeds off the noise and friction when fictional claims are fact-checked by the mainstream media.

3.) David Frum’s observation from within the Republican tent: “Backed by their own wing of the book-publishing industry and supported by think tanks that increasingly function as public-relations agencies, conservatives have built a whole alternative knowledge system, with its own facts, its own history, its own laws of economics.”

4.) Old-fashioned secrecy, as in: don’t release information, don’t explain.

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This is my keynote address to the 2nd UK Conference of Science Journalists, June 25, 2012 at The Royal Society, London.

I think every writer, every journalist, every scholar, should tell you where he’s coming from before he tells you what he knows. I am not a science journalist, or a science blogger, or a scientist who writes. But I am interested in your world, and I try to follow developments in it. My field of study is what I call “pressthink,” which is sort of like groupthink– but for people in journalism. Lately I have been fixated on the problems of the press as it tries to adapt to the digital world. So that’s what I do. But it’s not where I’m coming from.

Culturally, I’m a secular Jew. (From New York.) Demographically, a baby boomer. Socially, I’m an introvert who has learned to fake conviviality. Politically, a liberal democrat. Musically: lost. Intellectually, I am a pragmatist. Among professional philosophers, practitioners of what used to be called “moral science,” pragmatism is sometimes called the only homegrown American philosophy. William James and John Dewey are the heroes of the discipline, and two big ideas animate us. First: the test of a good idea is what you can do with it. A thinker should try to be useful. Second: pragmatists believe that our knowledge advances not when we have the best theory, or the best data, or the best lab, but when we have really good problems.

And that’s what I have for you today: a really juicy puzzle. It begins with a distinction that I have found useful. The distinction is between tame and wicked problems. Now given what’s happened to science writer Jonah Lehrer lately I should tell you that I’ve written about this issue before and since I said it about as well as I could say it then, I am going to say it in a similar way again… okay?

Here is a problem that anyone who has lived in New York City must wonder about: it’s impossible to get a cab at 5 pm. The cause is not a mystery: taxi drivers tend to change shifts around 4 to 5 pm. Too many cabs are headed to garages in Queens because when a taxi is operated by two drivers 24 hours a day, a fair division of shifts is to switch over at 5 o’clock. Now this is a problem for the city’s Taxi and Limousine Commission, it may even be a hard one to solve, but it is not a wicked problem. For one thing, it’s easy to describe, as I just showed you. That right there boots it from the category.

Wicked problems have these features: It is hard to say what the problem is, to define it clearly or to tell where it stops and starts. There is no “right” way to view the problem, no definitive formulation. There are many stakeholders, all with their own frames, which they tend to see as exclusively correct. Ask what the problem is and you will get a different answer from each. Someone can always say that the problem is just a symptom of another problem and that someone will not be wrong. The problem is inter-connected to a lot of other problems; pulling them apart is almost impossible. In a word: it’s a mess.

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Help me figure it out. Here are five explanations, each of them a partial truth.

As you can see from the chart, the percentage of Americans who had a “great deal” or a “fair amount” of trust in the news media has declined from over 70 percent shortly after Watergate to about 44 percent today.

Why? That is my question here.

What makes it a puzzle is that during that same period, several other things were happening. Journalists were becoming better educated. They were more likely to go to journalism school, my institution. During this period, the cultural cachet of being a journalist was on the rise. Newsrooms were getting bigger, too: more boots on the ground to cover the news. Journalism was becoming less of a trade and more of a profession. Most people who study the press would say that the influence of professional standards, such as we find in this code, was rising.

So the puzzle is: how do these things fit together? More of a profession, more educated people going into journalism, a more desirable career, greater cultural standing (although never great pay) bigger staffs, more people to do the work … and the result of all that is less trust.

Why?

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A Brief Essay on the Origins of Authority in Journalism

A few months ago at PressThink, I published Voice of San Diego’s guidelines for new reporters. They say:

Write with authority. You earn the right to write with authority by reporting and working hard.

Which is true. The way I like to phrase that idea is in the title of this post: “I’m there, you’re not, let me tell you about it.” This, I think, is the original source–headwaters–for all forms of authority in journalism.

By “authority” I simply mean the right to be listened to, a legitimate claim on public attention. You begin to have authority as a journalist not when you work for a brand name in news (although that helps) but when you offer a report that users cannot easily get on their own. If we go way back in journalism history, the first people to claim this kind of authority were those who could say… I’m there, you’re not, let me tell you about it.

1.

Perhaps the first people to be employed as professional correspondents were letter writers hired by rich merchants and bankers in early modern Europe. These correspondents lived in cities from which the banker or businessman needed regular reports. Their letters conveyed much the same news that a trader would want today: prices, conditions for trade and transport, what the local authorities were up to, rumors of war, court news and gossip, business disruptions. The most famous examples are the newsletters written for the House of Fugger, perhaps the most powerful banking family in Germany in the 15th and 16th centuries.

Here’s a sample:

Insolvencies at the Exchange at Antwerp
From Antwerp, 9th December 1570

Here the Genoese have arranged a competition at the Exchange & because of it two Genoese houses have gone bankrupt this week: they are Giovanni Grimaldi & then Pedro Francesco et Pedro Christophoro Spinola, who have behind them all the Germans here. It has always been regarded as a well-established business, & has long traded in this town. The creditors kept of good cheer. It is, however, to be feared that it may be with this as with other bankruptcies. At first there is ever enough on hand, but in the end no-one can obtain anything…

This bankruptcy has put an end to credit among the Genoese. Within the space of a few years many bankruptcies have taken place, but I have never seen such excitement on the Exchange as there is regarding this. They are owing a large amount, but no-one knows how much, for their books have not as yet been balanced.

It will probably not end with these two, but they will drag others down of their nation with them.

What is this, but a dispatch from 442 years ago on the difficulty of valuing toxic assets? “I’m in Antwerp. You, the Fugger family, are not. Let me tell you about two big bankruptcies.” Reporting! At a minimum, it involves a correspondent, an event, and a report, but also—and this is the part we tend to overlook–recipients who have a stake but can’t be there themselves to see how their investment fares.

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It now commits itself to avoiding the worst excesses of “he said, she said” journalism. It says to itself that a report characterized by false balance is a false report. It introduces a new and potentially powerful concept of fairness: being “fair to the truth.” My verdict: Bravo, NPR.

Within the world of pressthink there are occasional “events,” things that happen and by happening bring to light shifts in thought. It happened last week when NPR released a new document, an ethics handbook headlined: This is NPR. And these are the standards of our journalism.

Much of what’s in the handbook is Journalism 101. Much of it resembles an earlier document, The NPR Code of Ethics and Practices, which I reviewed in the writing of this post. (The new handbook replaces that earlier code.) But there are some crucial differences, and some of them speak directly to earlier posts at PressThink about the troubles at NPR.

In my view the most important changes are these passages:

In all our stories, especially matters of controversy, we strive to consider the strongest arguments we can find on all sides, seeking to deliver both nuance and clarity. Our goal is not to please those whom we report on or to produce stories that create the appearance of balance, but to seek the truth.

and….

At all times, we report for our readers and listeners, not our sources. So our primary consideration when presenting the news is that we are fair to the truth. If our sources try to mislead us or put a false spin on the information they give us, we tell our audience. If the balance of evidence in a matter of controversy weighs heavily on one side, we acknowledge it in our reports. We strive to give our audience confidence that all sides have been considered and represented fairly.

With these words, NPR commits itself as an organization to avoid the worst excesses of “he said, she said” journalism. It says to itself that a report characterized by false balance is a false report. It introduces a new and potentially powerful concept of fairness: being “fair to the truth,” which as we know is not always evenly distributed among the sides in a public dispute.

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Professionals in crisis communication will be talking about this interview for years. Watch the clip. (It’s excruciating.) Read my analysis, which won’t capture everything. Then add your observations in the comments.

Andrea Mitchell of NBC News interviews Nancy Brinker, CEO and founder of the Susan G. Komen for the Cure Foundation, about the foundation’s decision to stop funding Planned Parenthood’s breast cancer screening programs:

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Brinker was completely unprepared for this interview. She was placed in a situation that she seemed not to understand. Her estimation of her ability to re-describe an event that began two days earlier was wildly off base. To the degree that she had one, her message might be summarized as: “Forget what we said earlier, ignore what’s happening out there, for this is what I am saying now.” From her first words (“It’s a mischaracterization of our goals, our mission…”) Brinker communicated that she did not understand the forces that had brought her to MSNBC’s studios and put her in that chair opposite Andrea Mitchell.

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A young journalist for the Tribune Company becomes a product manager and money maker by acting entrepreneurially inside a large organization. Her big idea: Teaching the Web to the people formerly known as the advertisers.

“Where’s the money going to come from?” has been the top question in journalism for several years now. Over the past four years, Tracy Samantha Schmidt, 27, has been on a journey into that question. She’s moved out of the expense column and into the revenue stream.
In 2008, Schmidt was a reporter with community manager duties at TribLocal, the Chicago Tribune’s hyperlocal play. (Before that she was a reporter and web producer at Time Magazine.) She became editorial director of ChicagoNow, the Tribune’s community blogging platform, in January of 2009. By November of 2010 she was brand manager and lead trainer at 435 Digital, a Tribune subsidiary. (“We help businesses grow through online marketing.”) There, she developed a series of classes in social media that made money. They also made customers for other Tribune services, which is called lead generation. In September, 2011 she was named manager of educational programs at Tribune Media Group; she is now developing classes for both Tribune readers and advertisers on a range of subjects.

A few metrics: ChicagoNow launched in August 2009. By May, 2010 it was doing 20 million page views monthly. That spring, ChicagoNow was named one of five “innovative websites that could reshape the news” by Mashable and Poynter. Today ChicagoNow is a network of more than 350 local blogs. Schmidt began doing social media classes for the Tribune in March 2011. Since then, she’s taught more than 2,000 people in classes and private seminars nationwide.

Journalism is going to need a lot more like her if it’s going to secure itself as a business. But I think they’re out there: talented young journalists who can help with the revenue puzzle, and who want to help solve it because they want journalism to survive. I was interested in how Tracy’s thinking had evolved and what she had learned by moving from a reporter’s role to a product manager’s, so I caught up with her for this interview.

PressThink: When you joined the Tribune Company you must have been aware of its perilous financial state. Thinking back to when you worked at TribLocal, what was your view then of “the business model” problem? Did it occupy your everyday thoughts? Or was it someone else’s problem?

Tracy Samantha Schmidt: Well, I didn’t think about the revenue model when I first got to Tribune. I was focused on content because that’s all I knew until then. I had been a journalist at Time Magazine in Washington and opted to take a buyout rather than transfer to New York. It was 2008 and everyone was talking about how journalism was falling apart. I moved back home to Chicago and learned about this incredible start-up at the Tribune called TribLocal and thought, that is the future of journalism– taking user generated content and integrating it into the printed newspaper.

PressThink: You were focused on the future of journalism, but that did not mean the future of the business?

Schmidt: It did not mean the future of the business to me at that point. I still didn’t understand how the media worked from a business perspective because I’d never been taught it, either as an undergrad journalism major or a graduate journalism student. I had a full understanding of being a reporter but I didn’t fully grasp how the paper was supported by a variety of revenue streams that were starting to decline.

PressThink: Well, what did you know about it?

Schmidt: I knew that circulation everywhere was in decline–both in newspapers and magazines–and that the media was now focused on making money online because that’s where advertisers were focusing. But that the challenge was most publications had given away so much content online for free, it was almost impossible to monetize it.

PressThink: The “when is online going to pay for my newsroom?” stage.

Schmidt: Yup.

PressThink: Editors at that time assumed that online revenue would somehow magically “catch-up.” They had not really reckoned with the transformation of advertising itself, the economics of abundance, or the unbundling of the newspaper product. I gather than none of those things were clear to you then, when you were at Trib Local, but all are front and center now. Would that be accurate?

Schmidt: TribLocal was actually a huge learning moment for me and was how I came up with the idea for what became ChicagoNow.

PressThink: Okay, explain that to me.

Schmidt: So essentially, my job at TribLocal was what we would today call a community manager. I went into the community and educated potential citizen journalists about our paper, about how they could post content and it might get published into the paper. And there was this one quilting bee in Downers Grove, IL where I explained to an audience of about 75 women that they could post their own stories, photos and event listings for free–and the best content would be published in a newspaper distributed with the Chicago Tribune.

Well these women just jumped at the thought and within a week, they were all posting to TribLocal and telling their friends. So I started thinking: how do we scale this across the city of Chicago and also scale it across Tribune Media Group, which owned the Chicago Tribune, Chicago Magazine, WGN TV and Radio and a few other brands.

PressThink: That’s partly a discovery of the residual power of a “print” brand, yes?

Schmidt: Oh, totally. I explained to these women that it wasn’t the Tribune, that it was a product delivered with the Tribune. But that didn’t matter. And I learned from our sales team at TribLocal that the small mom and pop stores wanted to advertise in the Chicago Tribune but couldn’t afford its rates. They wanted something also that was just for their suburb or the next suburb over. But they didn’t want to advertise online because they were either afraid of it or didn’t see the value, so the printed paper was brilliant because it provided ads to small local businesses.

PressThink: So this started you thinking about….?

Schmidt: So then I started thinking: could we create a social network for Tribune Media Group that would do three things. One, allow our readers and viewers to upload all kinds of user generated content (stories, photos, videos, events) that would be geotagged auotmatically. Two, could Tribune Media Group then use that content wherever it saw fit (in Tribune, in RedEye, in Hoy, on TV, on the radio) and Three, could we sell targeted ads based on what we know about the people posting and what they’re interested in. So that ultimately what we would have is a reinvention of how the company finds news, distributes content and ultimately monetizes it while engaging its audience. Also, a fourth point–it would bring about the customization of news, so that we could start creating custom products based on the data we have about individual readers.

PressThink: I want to present you with a quote from my friend Dan Gillmor: “I hope they’re going to find a way to reward the people who are doing the work. As I’ve said again and again, I’m not a fan of business models that say ‘You do all the work and we’ll take all the money, thank you very much.’” Did that worry you at all?

Schmidt: Absolutely.

PressThink: So…?

Schmidt: You can only get people submitting great content for so long. Usually they’re submitting it out of ego or to support a business or organization.

PressThink: What happens then?

Schmidt: They lose interest or they’re so great, they get jobs where they’re paid for their work. What’s more, contributors need to have a stake in it too. And what’s what we ultimately did at ChicagoNow.

PressThink: So how did Chicago Now propose to solve this problem?

Schmidt: I developed this social network idea in December 2008 and ended up emailing it to Bill Adee, then the digital editor of the Chicago Tribune. Within two minutes of my email, he wrote back and asked if I could meet him that day. I did and it turns out he had very similar ideas to my own

PressThink: That’s encouraging!

Schmidt: It was so surreal. We both had sketches of how our ideas would work and they practically matched. So within a month of our meeting, I moved downtown to Tribune Tower to work on ChicagoNow with Bill and the team he was putting together. Bill and Clark Bender, then the executive producer of ChicagoTribune.com, and I worked out the business model and the editorial policy of ChicagoNow. In a nutshell, we decided to start with recruiting bloggers to build an online community and ultimately, the site would grow into a social network over a year or two.

PressThink: What’s the difference between “an online community” and “a social network?”

Schmidt: I think a social network is where users have a lot of functionality–they can have full profile pages, they can friend each other or follow each other, etc. An online community is more a classic blog structure, where one person is leading the conversation by posts and everyone else can login to post comments to the original post.

PressThink: Okay, so you began with that aspiration at Chicago Now, and what did you learn?

Schmidt: So much. My job was to find and recruit bloggers to join the network. In the first three months, I personally interviewed over 100 bloggers. Bill and I did this together, actually, and what we learned was that the bloggers wanted full ownership of their content, they wanted to be paid, they didn’t want to be censored and they wanted to be published in the Chicago Tribune.

PressThink: Important lessons.

Schmidt: Very. So Bill and Clark put together a great contract with our lawyers that essentially gave the bloggers these things. The bloggers would be paid based on pageviews, but only local pageviews. That was key because from a business perspective, ChicagoNow was being created by Tribune to reach local audiences.

PressThink: Because there is traffic and there is traffic that has value.

Schmidt: Yes. And we had enough national traffic to provide our advertisers, but we needed content that was both local and by vertical. So we incentivized the bloggers to build local audience however they saw fit.

PressThink: Did it work?

Schmidt: It did. As in, the bloggers did a good job of creating local content and building a following here in Chicago.

PressThink: But…?

Schmidt: Well–

PressThink: What I have seen (I am involved in a hyper-local product, The Local East Village) is that the advertisers in that model need a lot of hand holding. And they may not be users of online news and information themselves. This presents special difficulties. Does your experience match that?

Schmidt: Yes, absolutely. And that’s what ultimately led me to my next position with 435 Digital.

PressThink: So explain how that happened.

Schmidt: At ChicagoNow, we saw that advertisers were very interested in a product that was so cutting edge. But they didn’t understand how it would help them get more customers. In several cases, advertisers didn’t even have websites to point customers to. How could they advertise on ChicagoNow? So Bill and another colleague, Bob McDonald, ended up creating a new business, 435 Digital, which is an in-house agency that provides websites, SEO and social media consulting for businesses.

PressThink: You realized you needed to teach the people formerly known as the advertisers. Correct?

Schmidt: Yes. So Bill asked me to move over to 435 Digital in October 2010 to work on its marketing campaign. He wanted me to write a blog about best practices for small business in the areas of SEO and social media. The blog was rolling along great. Meanwhile, I had been teaching several graduate classes at DePaul University on the intersection of social media and journalism. And on occasion, I would do a workshop for business people about understanding and using social media. So Bill asked me to test the concept of holding a class at Tribune Tower for our clients. Well, the classes started selling out.

PressThink: At how much a pop?

Schmidt: I started with very basic classes–like Intro to Facebook and Intro to Twitter. At the beginning, it was $50 for a 2 hour class held in a conference room at Tribune Tower. I literally brought the coffee in from Starbucks across the street and plugged my computer into a projector and put up Facebook and we walked through the site. Attendees asked for more classes on advanced topics– specifically using it for their businesses. We had no idea if it would work, or what it was, but by May, two months after I started, I was teaching two or three classes a week.

PressThink: So you just began somewhere and iterated, correct? Which is the definition of a start-up.

Schmidt: It wasn’t quite a start-up, though. Again, I had the credibility of Tribune, and could run ads in our paper to promote the classes. I use that example to explain that print is not dead; 95 percent of people came to class because they saw an ad in the newspaper. So by May, I had developed four different classes: Intro to Facebook and Twitter, Facebook for Business, Social Media for Business, and Create Your Own Blog.

PresThink: And they were all making money?

Schmidt: Yes, each class was making about $800-$1500. Bill then sent me to other Tribune markets to teach those classes for their readers and clients. What’s more, each class acted as lead generation for 435 Digital.

PressThink: Other markets like…. where?

Schmidt: Baltimore for the Baltimore Sun and Ft. Lauderdale for the Orlando Sentinel.

PressThink: How did the classes turn into lead generation?

Schmidt: Well, business owners came to the classes because they knew that they had to understand what social media was. After taking a class, they would come up to me and say they needed more help: could they hire someone to set up their accounts or actually do the work of running a profile for them? So then I connected them to our sales team and the team took it from there.

PressThink: That’s a great discovery. Then you knew you had something, yes?

Schmidt: Yes. I also started getting asked to do private seminars for businesses that I would customize to their needs and deliver. So I did that throughout the summer of 2011, including for the National Association of Realtors and the National Association of Broadcasters.

PressThink: One part I want to zero in on is not only that these classes were a hit, and generated revenue and developed into lead generation, and also a second business providing private seminars, all of which is interesting and relevant, but also… how is it that you, Tracy, former reporter, knew enough about social media or Facebook to teach these classes? Where did that come from?

Schmidt: Well, I grew up with Facebook. It came to campus when I was in my third year of college. And as a reporter at Time in 2006, I used Facebook to find story ideas and promote my stories once they were published. I ended up even writing a few stories about social media and Facebook’s rise for Time, and I also used Facebook as a tool to find sources during breaking news stories, most notably the shootings at Virignia Tech in April 2007. I had also designed graduate classes around using social media as a reporter.

PressThink: It seems to me that if other news organizations are going to follow this model, and find a new source of revenue (one of many that they will need) then the key to it is to find an operating style, a way of doing business, a way of doing news and information, that teaches people in the organization skills that can then be sold to the people formerly known as the advertisers.

Schmidt: Yes! And that’s my current role. We realized that the social media classes were a hit at the Tribune. And then we said: well certainly there are a lot of experts in our company with knowledge to share on everything: market research, mobile development, graphic design, photography, writing and editing. Could we create a program that would deliver classes to the public–both readers and advertisers of the Tribune–on what are our “core competencies.”

PressThink: And could you?

Schmidt: So now my job as Educational Programs Manager at Tribune Media Group is identifying and executing classes on a range of subjects using our employees as the experts. Ultimately, we’d like to deliver the majority of these classes online.

PressThink: Right, so the question there is: does the Tribune Company, by operating as a 21st century media company, build up domain knowledge that is valuable to the people formerly known as the advertisers, as well as the public? And your guesstimate is…. that it does?

Schmidt: Yes. But then again, any company that has a strong brand and credibility has the capacity to offer these classes to the public. What is unique about the Tribune is we can reach massive audiences easily. What I can tell you, too, is that this model also can act as a lead generation for our entire company, in that someone might walk in the door and learn something, i.e. social media, and realize they first need a website to execute their social media strategy. And the Tribune can build that website for them. So you could apply that to all kinds of things and it has a big potential to scale. Also, another revenue model is attaching corporate sponsors to these classes. And that’s an avenue we’re exploring with lots of interest from advertisers.

PressThink: How does that work?

Schmidt: Well, an advertiser wants to reach 100 small local business owners, they can sponsor the class and have their brand attached to signage and handouts. And maybe get 5 minutes during break to tell the audience about their company.

PressThink: An advertiser like… who?

Schmidt: In Ft. Lauderdale, we did a six-seminar series over the course of three days for readers and advertisers of the Orlando Sentinel. Our colleagues at that paper secured a sponsorship from Comcast Business Class for all six seminars.

PressThink: Have you been watching what other media companies have been doing in these areas? The New York Times has classes, and others like The Economist are trying to generate revenue from events.

Schmidt: Yes, the New York Times is a leader in the space. And we’ve been offering classes like that for almost a year now with some of our columnists. Part of my new role is also scaling that program and offering it online as well.

PressThink: Where the costs are lower?

Schmidt: A bit lower but probably not by too much since we hope to allow participants to ask questions in real time. I should add, though, that I see big demand for social media classes in person. It’s hard enough to learn social media in person; through a computer it’s even harder.

PressThink: “Presence” counts. That is one thing we have learned.

Schmidt: Absolutely. I’m interested in how media companies can take advantage of the “experience economy” and create live experiences that educate or entertain their readers. In the last two years, the Chicago Tribune has created an entire live events program. One about policy issues, one about sports, and another a live radio show done in conjunction with Second City.

PressThink: Taking all of this in, what does a news brand turn out to be? What have you learned about the “hidden” value of a news brand?

Schmidt: A news brand is about credibility and trust. When readers, contributors or advertisers hear that the Chicago Tribune is attached to a new product, they know that it will have integrity. And they at least consider the product, even if ultimately they decide it’s not for them.

PressThink: Well, that’s the way we have always thought about brands.

Schmidt: I think that it’s important to still put out the product the brand is known for. In our case the Chicago Tribune is our anchor, and it gives us the freedom to explore other ways of distributing the news and monetizing it.

PressThink: Looking back now over the whole story, from when you were a reporter for Time living “off” the business model without worrying about it, to the present, where you are directly involved in generating revenue, how has your view of journalism changed as you have moved from one responsibility to another?

Schmidt: I still think like a reporter wherever I go. I ask hard questions and look at things from different angles. That helps a lot in thinking up new ways of doing things. But it also makes me think about integrity and ethics in business. As in, if we made a business decision and it was a bad one, how would that affect the integrity of the work our colleagues are doing in the newsroom? I still don’t disclose my political beliefs on Facebook, for example. I suppose I could now that I’m no longer a practicing journalist, but I don’t think I will.

PressThink: That’s an argument for sending more journalists over to what used to be called “the business side.” Isn’t it?

Schmidt: Absolutely. One idea I’ve toyed a lot with lately is how do we reinvent journalism schools.

PressThink: They need it!

Schmidt: We could we create an apprenticeship program within media companies wherein college students learn the trade and they teach older employees about technology and social media. So it’s like a generational exchange. Journalism students absolutely need to learn about the business side of the media. I wish I had learned it in school myself.

PressThink: Some of my own graduate students in Studio 20 gravitate to these management puzzles. They want to learn how to sustain journalism by being responsible for the business. Tracy, thanks for taking the time.

Schmidt: Thank you, Jay.

The conservative movement’s warmaking around the “liberal media” is a joke to the people who are actually running for president as conservatives.

Data point 1. Vice President Spiro Agnew, speech delivered at Des Moines, Iowa, November 13, 1969

A raised eyebrow, an inflection of the voice, a caustic remark dropped in the middle of a broadcast can raise doubts in a million minds about the veracity of a public official, or the wisdom of a government policy. One Federal Communications Commissioner considers the power of the networks to equal that of local, state, and federal governments combined. Certainly, it represents a concentration of power over American public opinion unknown in history.

What do Americans know of the men who wield this power? Of the men who produce and direct the network news, the nation knows practically nothing. Of the commentators, most Americans know little, other than that they reflect an urbane and assured presence, seemingly well informed on every important matter.

We do know that, to a man, these commentators and producers live and work in the geographical and intellectual confines of Washington, D.C. or New York City–the latter of which James Reston terms the “most unrepresentative community in the entire United States.” Both communities bask in their own provincialism, their own parochialism. We can deduce that these men thus read the same newspapers, and draw their political and social views from the same sources. Worse, they talk constantly to one another, thereby providing artificial reinforcement to their shared viewpoints.

… The views of this fraternity do not represent the views of America. That is why such a great gulf existed between how the nation received the President’s address–and how the networks reviewed it.

Agnew’s speech is one of the founding documents for the conservative movement’s mighty resentment machine. The most telling words are “they reflect an urbane and assured presence, seemingly well informed on every important matter.” They being the journalists and pundits one sees on television: unelected, unaccountable, unrepresentative know-it-alls. Therefore suitable for despising and generating resentment, but also a standing reason why the rest of the country remains unpersuaded: “A raised eyebrow, an inflection of the voice, a caustic remark dropped in the middle of a broadcast can raise doubts in a million minds.” You can explain almost any defeat that way… and generate more resentment.

Data point 2. New Gingrich, speaking Saturday night in South Carolina after his victory in the primary:

So many people [feel] that The elites in Washington and New York have no understanding, no care, no concern, no reliability and in fact do not represent them at all. In the two debates we had here, in Myrtle Beach and in Charleston, where people reacted so strongly to the news media, I think it was something very fundamental that I wish the powers that be in the news media would take seriously. The American people feel that they have elites who have been trying for a half century to force us to quit being American and become some other kind of other system.

Notice how Gingrich goes beyond Agnew. “They” are not only unelected, unaccountable and unrepresentative, but un-American. And not only that, they’re trying to force America to change into something other than itself.

Data point 3. Conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt interviewing Ryan Lizza, campaign reporter for The New Yorker.

HH: …Here’s the absurdity. The Republicans are selecting their nominee on the basis of debates moderated by George Stephanopoulos and David Gregory, who are very left wing guys, and on the votes of independents in Iowa, and independents and Democrats who reregistered in New Hampshire, all as mediated through the very conservative electorate of South Carolina. It doesn’t make any sense at all.

RL: Now first of all, I would disagree that Stephanopoulos and Gregory are very left wing guys. I mean, Michael Moore is a very left wing guy. David Gregory is not a very left wing guy.

HH: No, Hugo Chavez is a very left wing guy.

RL: (laughing)

HH: When you’ve got guns, you’re very left wing.

RL: Look, the Republican Party is extremely skeptical of the mainstream media. I won’t argue there. So it is a little strange that they’ve become, in this campaign, so reliant. I think probably, I don’t know this for sure, but I’ve been trying to figure out why is it that all these candidates agreed to do so many debates. You know, you don’t have to show up.

Here we have one of the most under-covered stories of the 2012 campaign. If the Republican candidates believed the culture war wing of their own party, if they credited it with any genuine insight, if they respected its critique of the journalistic profession, if they thought there was a solid core of truth there, they would not have agreed to participate in debates where the questions are asked by such ideological opponents as Wolf Blitzer and John King of CNN, Diane Sawyer and George Stephanopoulos of ABC, David Gregory and Brian Williams of NBC, John Harwood of CNBC and the New York Times and on and on. As Hewitt said: Hey, these guys are left wing! It doesn’t make any sense!

Unless… the candidates see the culture war wing of their party as a useful idiot– wrong about what journalists are up to, but valuable for keeping the press in line. Then the debate thing does make sense. The candidates participate because they can predict the questions. They know they’ll be able to get their message out and reach people who don’t watch Fox. And the resentment machine is right there at their fingertips: just attack the questioner and score some points. Notice, then, how conservative culture warriors wail about it, but don’t try to explain this basic weirdness: candidates vying for the title of head conservative voluntarily submit themselves to questioning from the enemies of the conservative state!

My view: even Newsbusters knows their critique is a joke. They’re just working the refs, and raising money off their Agnewisms. And it’s a pretty sweet gig. Brent Bozell’s 2010 salary: $423,000. He should be raging at the Republican candidates for legitimizing the David Gregorys and John Harwoods of the world. That’s what a real activist would do. Instead we have Hugh Hewitt whining to a New Yorker writer: It’s absurd!!

Don’t you see the comedy? This is why I say it’s a great story going uncovered. Conservative candidates treat their culture warriors as know-nothings: fools and tools.

Data point 4. New York magazine political correspondent John Heilemann on MSNBC Saturday night. (Hat tip, Balllon Juice.)

“This is the first big unexpected, kind of dramatic victory. And Gingrich is going to get so much free media attention in the next few days, it is going to be wall to wall Gingrich, and I think it is fair to say, that the “liberal media,” as Gingrich would put it, is rooting for Gingrich right now. They want this ra.. they/we, want this race to go on, so he is gonna have, he is gonna get more attention and in some ways more favorable coverage, at least for the next couple days than he would ordinarily from people who normally would give him tougher scrutiny… He’s going to ride a big wave out of here.”

Right. Because the press is a political actor whose moves are constrained by an official prohibition on acting politically. I want you to read the sentence in italics again. Go ahead, I’ll wait…

Now that we know what kind of actor the press is (one whose moves are constrained by an official prohibition on acting politically…) we can agree with John Heilemann: Gingrich will benefit from a wave of momentum-izing press attention, which could seriously affect his numbers. But it’s not that journalists have made a political judgment that Gingrich is a plausible president or bought the arguments for his candidacy. Rather, they feel fine boosting his chances–and providing him with free mind share that his competition will have to buy–because they have a sufficiently non-political reason for doing it: A surprising turn in the narrative, or as Heilman put it, “the first big unexpected, kind of dramatic victory.”

That makes it okay to root for Newt from the press box because what you’re expressing is only your love of a good story. That’s not political. It’s story logic. Therefore you can act, and tell everyone watching MSNBC that you and your colleagues are going to act in a way that could affect the race. Get it? (Update: Heilemann expanded on his observation in this piece.) To understand political journalism, American style, you need the production of innocence or your calculations will go wrong. The producers of political news need to constantly reproduce their own innocence, and a lot of what they do can be explained by this dual demand.

Data point 5. Newt Gingrich and the press: Secret pals, a story that ran Sunday on Politico.

The same candidate who on Thursday decried “the destructive, vicious, negative nature of much of the news media” shows another face to the cadre of reporters who follow his campaign day-to-day. He jokes with them, publicly celebrates their birthdays, teases them about the early hour they are often forced out of bed to cover his events.

It’s not unusual for Gingrich to chat with reporters, off-the-record, in the hotel restaurant at the end of a long day on the campaign trail — and he engages them to a degree that’s unheard of on the other campaigns.

…Gingrich acknowledged to ABC News in December that he appreciates the crew that chronicles his every move and follows the same grueling schedule.

“I actually identify with the people who are the embeds,” Gingrich said. “Also, we have really nice people. I mean all the guys who are hanging out with me are nice. I don’t know about the other campaigns.”

“I’ve just been struck with the good humor of the group,” Gingrich told ABC.

See what I mean? The conservative movement’s warmaking around the liberal media is a joke to the people actually running for president as conservatives. Yes, it brings supporters to their feet. It permits a skilled candidate ready access to Agnew’s resentment machine. It works the refs. It raises money for the cause. But to actually live by the logic of that critique on the campaign trail? That would be too costly and kind of dumb.

For these people are not adversaries. (“I’ve just been struck with the good humor of the group.”) And they are not going to be forcing any confrontations along the lines of: “Mister Speaker, do you really think that we and our colleagues in the national media are trying to force the country to become something un-American? On what grounds do you make this charge? How would we even accomplish that?” This would sound unsavvy. It would show the political world that the questioner does not know how the game is played.

Data point 6. Chuck Todd commenting on Stephen Colbert’s SuperPac. (For the background, see this.)

“Is it fair to the process? Yes, the process is a mess, but he’s doing it in a way that it feels as if he’s trying to influence it with his own agenda, that may be anti-Republican. And we in the media are covering it as a schtick and a satire, but it’s like, ‘Well wait a minute here…’ he’s also trying to do his best to marginalize the Republican candidates, in a way, and we’re participating in that marginalization. We in the mainstream media need to be careful and wonder: what is he up to? What is his real agenda here? Is it to educate the public about the dangers of money in politics and what’s going on? Or is it simply to marginalize the Republican party?

Chuck Todd, NBC’s lead guy in analyzing the 2012 campaign, is concerned that he and his colleagues are helping to legitimize Stephen Colbert and Jon Stewart. These men, according to Todd, aren’t just trying to win laughs, expose stupidity and educate their viewers about the absurdity of campaign finance. (You gotta watch these two clips…) No, says Chuck, the two comedians also have an agenda–he would never say that about a fellow journalist, would he?–and that agenda is to “marginalize the Republican candidates.”

We in the news media shouldn’t help them do that, says Todd. We should be more careful. And we should try to hold Colbert and Stewart accountable for their attempts to weaken the Republican field. No more free pass! Todd goes on to say that he “idolizes” the United States Senate and he didn’t appreciate Colbert making a mockery of the Congress by appearing before a committee in character.

So is Chuck Todd one of those “elites who have been trying for a half century to force us to quit being American and become some other kind of other system?” (Gingrich’s words.) I somehow doubt it.