Needless to say, the vegan community is really pissed off about this, including a few of my die-hard vegan friends. I’ve been eating vegan since October, but I wouldn’t call myself die-hard. As a reader of VegNews, I certainly won’t be losing sleep over the issue. But as a community journalism aficionado, I think that the editors of VegNews should be the ones losing sleep for committing the No. 1 sin of niche publications and news organizations in the 21st century: Failing to understand the needs of its community and readers.

After being called out and receiving a huge outcry from its community, VegNews released a letter explaining the situation:

Yes, from time to time, after exhausting all options, we have resorted to using stockphotography that may or may not be vegan. In an ideal world we would use custom-shotphotography for every spread, but it is simply not financially feasible for VegNews at thistime. In those rare times that we use an image that isn’t vegan, our entire (vegan) staffweighs in on whether or not it’s appropriate. It is industry standard to use stockphotography in magazines—and, sadly, there are very few specifically vegan images offeredby stock companies. In addition, it’s exceedingly challenging to find non-stock imagery thatmeets the standard necessary for publication. We would love nothing more than to use onlyvegan photography shot by vegan photographers, and we hope to be there soon.

As someone who lives and breathes news/publishing, I can have sympathy for the financial woes that have forced VegNews to perhaps cut back on staff photographers. As someone who also lives and breathes design, I understand the need to have high-quality art alongside content within the magazine and in the blog.

But even more important than those financial and design restrictions is the commitment VegNews should have to its community. VegNews staffers should know more than anyone that vegans are serious about this shit. Vegans are militant and uncompromising in their beliefs. The vegan community has more passion about their cause than I’ve seen in many religious and activists groups. Veganism, in a way, is almost like a religion.

VegNews, as a publisher of vegan content and vessel for vegan community, should know that about its readers. And they should have comprised high-quality art as a sign of respect for that community they serve, just as any news organization should. Now that the secret is out, VegNews has undoubtedly lost tons of subscriptions and reader loyalty.

So now that they’ve fucked up and been called out on it by some of the most passion-filled evangelists out there, here’s what I’d do as an editor of VegNews:

• Be very transparent about the mistake they made in deceiving their community. Part of the upside of having an extremely passionate group of readers is that they are also compassionate and forgiving.
• Discontinue the publication of real meat stock photos and establish a policy moving forward that they will not knowingly publish real meat photos and pass it off as vegan meat.
• Create a community-based system for photo submissions of vegan food, clothing, accessories, etc. They can use a service like SubMishMash to manage submissions of recipes and user-taken photos. Again, vegans are extremely passionate about their food and sharing their vegan culture. They (myself included) would gladly submit their favorite recipes alongside photos of their food for the magazine. (Just look at the results for “vegan” on Flickr. Vegans are absolutely obsessed with their food and taking pictures of it).

I hope VegNews learns a valuable lesson in the power of a community and understands that, moving forward, their needs come first and foremost.

I’m posting the presentation here so conference attendees can follow along as I go.

This month’s topic is based on a few recommendations from the Knight Commission that focus on how higher education contributes to journalistic activity, as evidenced in these two recommendations:

Recommendation 3 — “Increase the role of higher education…..as hubs of journalistic activity.”

Recommendation 6 – “Integrate digital and media literacy as critical elements for education at all levels through collaboration among federal, state and local education officials.”

So why is it a university’s role to provide info to community?

Universities are hubs for information and sources of knowledge within our neighborhoods, cities and states. They tend to reflect the intersection of demographics — young and old, rich and poor, black and white, and everything in between.  Because universities are the place where experimentation can happen in a controlled environment (i.e., if they fail, consequences aren’t as severe) they need to be the place we look to for the new standard.

But why now? What has changed? Universities have always been hubs for knowledge, so why is it now that the Knight Foundation recommends that knowledge be shared with the community?

Academia is somewhat of a contradiction. On one hand, it’s ahead of the curb in new ways of thinking. On the other — as is the case for any large, long-established institution — it’s slow in new ways of doing (execution of those big ideas they’re so good at churning up).

Traditionally, information got from Universities to communities in the following fashions:

1. Information gathered about a community or niche
2. Information shared with others in academia, other universities and research departments
3. Information released in form of studies, published in journals
4. Traditional media takes info from studies that is most universally-relevant, publishes dumbed-down versions for mass audience

What happens in this chain of command is that the information gets distilled down and the community in which the information was originally gathered doesn’t necessarily become informed.  But because of the tools we have at our dispense today, the middleman can be cut out. Much like many corporations and businesses are turning directly into publishers of niche content — “going direct,” if you will — universities can do the same. It all fits into the changing role of media.

So the new chain of command looks like this:

1. Information gathered about a community
2. Information shared with a community

Simple, right?

What kinds of information should universities provide?

The Knight Foundation recommendations aren’t directed specifically at journalism schools. This is about all facets of a university — be it the undergrad business department or the engineering master’s program — have something valuable to share, and not only in terms of publishing information.

Recommendation 7: “Fund and support public libraries and other community institutions as centers of digital and media training, especially for adults.”

A university is a community institution. Computer science departments can train children and adults on how to use digital tools. Agriculture departments can hold workshops on planting your own herbs, while business departments can help people file taxes. Everyone can find a way to give back to the community in more ways than just publishing information.

Before we can get to the actual “publishing” of information to benefit the community, we have to draw connections in the community face-to-face.  The fact that people are consuming more information than ever is not breaking news. And the fact that publishing takes place through many more mediums than newspapers and radio isn’t anything new either. After the supplies and demand for information are discovered, the true collaboration can begin.

The Big Challenge

The big challenge comes in getting universities to change the way they’ve always shared information. There needs to be incentivization.

Take a look again at Recommendation 6: “Integrate digital and media literacy as critical elements for education at all levels through collaboration among federal, state and local education officials.”

This is where journalism schools, school newspapers, communications departments, etc. are actually relevant. As universities transition to a state where they are providing information directly to a community, it is the role of the journalists in those universities to provide a medium for that to happen — because I can bet it’s not going to happen natively, at least not to start with.

If I was the head of a journalism school or editor of a college newspaper, here’s what I’d do today:

• Reach out to heads of all departments/schools within the university and find out how they’re sharing information with the community already, if at all
• Reach out to the community to find out what kinds of information they care about
• Connect the dots between the two to align what’s already there with what the community craves
• Establish relationships with the existing modes of information sharing within the university (blogs? email newsletters?)

For those parts of the university that aren’t publishing (and I’ll bet that’s a large chunk), set them up to do so. Start simple. First, just a few departments — the ones that you know can be shining success stories. Get them set up with blogs that you cross-publish in print or link to on your main website. Set them up with an email newsletter that you can send to community organizations who might be interested. Hold in-person meetings with the two groups (academia and community) to get to know each other and learn about how they can help each other.

Does this all sound familiar? It’s like a blog network of the academia breed. If it really takes off and becomes successful, monetize the university blogs and do a rev-share, in which you can start to pay some of those people within the university who continue to provide unique content, which brings in more readers, which brings in more money, etc.

Through this virtuous cycle, you create incentivization via public recognition and a little bit of money. The community benefits, the university benefits, journalism schools benefit, and we create a foundation for an info-savvy generation of digital publishers. Ok, so it might not be that easy, but it’s a good place to start.

Other Carnival posts about this topic are published at carnivalofjournalism.com and at:

• David Cohn: Carnival of Journalism – Universities and their Role
• Daniel Bachhuber: Universities as hubs of journalistic activity
• Andy Dickson: The role of universities: the carnival of journalism lives!
• Jack Lali: We need universities smart enough to fix the potholes
• Craig Silverman: Bullshit Detection 101: Why universities need to teach the new literacy
• Michelle Minkoff: Universities should apply expertise to explain complex topics

My latest 10,000 Words post outlines the latest news design trends in the Google Chrome app store, many of which I believe could be pointing at a future of news design.

Notably, I point to:

• Grid layouts
• Keyboard shortcuts
• Full screen glory
• Multi-column text display
• Multi-paneled layouts
• Big, beautiful video and imagery
• In-browser notifications
• Offline reading
• Customizability

And, of course, the shortcomings:

• Lack of permalinks. If you want to link to a story within an app, the resulting URL leads to the standard website URL.
• No rich media. Aside fro the apps that are based entirely on video or audio, I have yet to see any apps that integrate video and audio within stories.
• Based on episodic storytelling. These apps work great for a news format based on tons of articles being reproduced every day. But what about stories that are told in format of data or long-living stories that could be built in wiki format? Sticking with episodic story display discourages newsrooms from thinking of new ways to tell stories.
• Where are the comments? Although this is a point of debate in the news industry, the inability for commenting and direct user interaction within the sites is worrisome.

Read the full post, complete with screenshots, at 10,000 Words.

Spurred by his recent interest in computational thinking, the idea of his session is to balance larger view concepts and how they can be applied to the news process.

Before diving into the topic at hand, Greg asked the 50-person audience to arrange our seats into a circle. We each went around the room and introduced ourselves.

Warning: these notes are all over the place because this session was all over the place. There was no structure. It was brilliant.

Types of thinking we brainstormed

• Analytical
• Linear/non-linear
• Critical
• Curiosity
• Inductive – start with small point and expand
• Deductive – start with larger point and look for the smaller picture
• Computational
• Visual thinking
• Brainstorming/visioning
• Episodic
• Stream of consciousness
• Narrative
• Philosophical
• Conventional
• Relational

After brainstorming a list, we identified the top “best practice” thinking as analytical, critical, computational, visual and relational thinking to come up with definitions. The following are the definitions we created and our subsequent analysis of those forms of thinking. (I did not attach names to each person’s comment simply because I could not keep up with everyone shouting over each other )

Analytical thinking: Gathering data, scientific thinking, testing a hypothesis, evidence, context.

• How we can improve analytical thinking? We have the day-to-day, but we don’t step back.
• We shouldn’t be scared of finding  ”right answer” to questions
• To be better analytical thinkers we need continued “liberation” of journalists from the old way of thinking and the physical model (deadline structure, form of the workday)
• The process informs the way we think
• We’re being trained in the “AP” style of thinking, don’t draw conclusions, don’t put your own analysis into it — people aren’t interested in reading that anymore
• The comment that the AP should die was followed up by a comment that maybe we need a better AP
• Identifying questions sufficient to a full story – the need for immediacy can’t distract us from covering a story fully (answering all the questions, identifying a hypotehsis, etc.)
• Hypothesis, method:

Critical thinking: Questioning face value

Computational: Using computing and applying it to other areas. The computer scientists in the room defined computational thinking as using user interfaces as a way of solving human problems in the world. Greg described it as abstraction vs. automation

• Dan Berko of the New York Times said the data is not the end all of itself to tell a story. Data is just one source of information that can lead you to different conclusions
• Will Mitchell of Washington City Paper said that looking for relationships (domain modeling, for example) in any set of data is where he starts with any problem when building a system
• Mitchell also said to look for outliers, look for points in a set of data when the assumptions break down. One example is a “best of” issue of a newspaper that’s produced once a year. How do you map a print-based product into something usable online?
• When a political reporter comes to him (Mitchell) with a set of data he wants to analyze, he first looks for relationships within the data, answers relatively simple questions that need to be answered. From that it evolves into a process of finding trends (what he calls “domain knowledge”).
• Greg says there’s a need to find the balance between human thinking and computational thinking
• Before we can think computationally, we have to relate to each other as human beings first
• There are parallels: modeling vs. storyboarding, algorithms vs. editorial structure
• Similarities between object-oriented programming vs object-oriented journalism
• The point: there needs to be a middleground
• Educators say that students aren’t coming out of education with a new way of thinking. Worried that we’re not in school telling students its OK to melt the two ways of thinking — you can find these students with these kinds of thinking, not the ones in journalism programs.
• Independent thinking is important to journalism because education is institutional

(We didn’t get to jump into the following modes of thinking because we got so caught up on computational thinking:)

Visual thinking: Mapping, images, patterns, visceral

Narrative: Description, telling a story, inverted pyramid

Relational thinking: Linking, connecting

I wrote a post Tuesday about a new collaborative called The Climate Desk that is grabbing much attention in journalism circles.

Ad Age hailed it the “revolutionary” future of journalism. The CJR questioned whether it would work.

I believe that yes, it is, and yes, it will — but there are still some rough edges that need to be worked out.

Based on my current impressions of The Climate Desk, collaboration primarily takes place at two points in the editorial process:

1. Brainstorming
2. Distribution

That makes sense. Those are the easiest two points at which collaboration is possible. But those aren’t the most important points. What about all the in-between? Sharing sources, sharing data, reporting together, editing together.

If the collaborative model is going to scale for newsorgs, we need better tools for storing and sharing data.

If I work at newspaper x and I want to work with newspapers y and z about climate change, how would I go about sharing the data I’ve already collected?

If I wanted to find all the data about climate change based on coverage my newsorg has already done, the process would look like this:

• Do a Google site search of “climate change” at [mynewsorgsdomain].com
• Find the dates those articles about climate change were published
• Go back through some date-structured folder system on my newsorg’s server to find contact sheets, notes, drafts of said article
• Email those files to the other newsorgs collaborating to report on climate change
• Everyone shares their contacts, someone puts together a Google Spreadsheet to combine the data we found and make something functional out of it — an overall picture of sorts

This process isn’t ideal for finding and sharing data because it doesn’t structure that data in a way that would be more usable the next time the newsorg wants to collaborate around climate change. If we collaborate again in six months, I’d have to go back to that spreadsheet, copy the data that is useful for me, then start a new spreadsheet titled “Climate Change Resources Oct. 2010.”  It’d be redundant and inefficient.

This ties into Daniel Bachhuber‘s upcoming discussion for BCNI about knowledge management systems. He asks:

[...] what I mean by this is how news organizations manage all of the data they’re privy to that is either stored in structured format or could be stored in a structured format if they had the tools to do so.

I see two of topics that Andrew Spittle brainstormed as being directly related to collaboration:

• Cross-platform tracking of information
• Role of KMS in on-going coverage

If we can figure out how to store data in a way that’s transferrable across multiple platforms and in on-going coverage, collaboration not only becomes easier, but becomes the next logical step in knowledge management.

A few thoughts:

The structure can’t be owned by anyone. It has to be native to the web

There needs to be universal markup for certain kinds of data — markup that’s native to the web like HTML, but not owned by any one brand. I want to be able to tag something as <location =”12.9982348 14.23423423″>home</location> and have that data be transferrable to any maping platform, whether it be Google Maps or Mapquest. The same goes for time. I want to be able to tag something as <time =”15:32 PST”>time of the event</time> and then be able to filter all data on the web related to that exact minute.

If we have a standardized structure for all types of metadata, then we can begin to organize and reuse that information on a large-scale and in new ways.

A CMS that builds layers of data on top of each other

Crowd Fusion has always stuck with me as a good baseline for a knowledge management system. Crowd Fusion is the CMS built originally for tech product review sites on top of wiki, blogging, RSS and social networking tools. The creators understood that databases are good for information and blogs are good for news, but there’s no way of connecting all those pieces. My thoughts when I first discovered the CMS in Sept. 2009:

This CMS created by Brian Alvey reminds me a lot of the CoPress connection engine. The concept is dynamic, combining databases, blogs, RSS, social networks and wikis to give the user an all-in-one experience. I wish a newspaper had developed this software and I wish it was open source. I could see a new direction for newspaper websites. [Update: Apparently now there's an open source beta. Yay]

Built into the CMS are features for both data management and collaboration:

• Workflow
• Group feed reader
• Assignments
• Database
• Wiki
• Team-based permissions
• Applications that work on top of the data
• Topic-based user experience

More about it here (worth the watch, I promise):

I’d be interested to see a newsorg adopt the software and start to build more interactive applications on top of data generated from back-story research and interviews– plus combining it with user-generated content and collaborative reporting from multiple newsorgs.

Anyway, that’s all I have for now. Let’s continue this conversation at BCNI Philly, to which I am hopping on a plane at 10 p.m. PST and arrive in good ol’ Philadelphia at 6 a.m. for the 9 a.m. conference. Who needs that sleep thing, anyway?