Sensible Talk

How California's system for funding public schools enables economic segregation

Mon, 20 May 2013 18:36:00 MST

By Robert Niles: As some of you might know, both of our children went through appendectomies this school year. At the beginning of the fall semester, appendicitis struck our 15-year-old daughter, who ended up missing more than two weeks of school following her operation and a post-surgery infection. Less than five months later, at the beginning of the spring semester, our 12-year-old son fell sick. The local urgent care misdiagnosed him with rotovirus, so his appendix had been burst for more than four days before the local emergency room correctly diagnosed him and admitted him for surgery. Thanks to a brilliant surgeon, he came through, but not after having to spend an extra week in the hospital on antibiotics following the operation. As a result, he also missed more than two weeks of school.

Even though our children missed so much class time, they weren't excused from their work. They still were required to complete their missed homework assignments, quizzes, projects and tests. And their teachers still had to grade them.

Yet, because we live in California and attend California public schools, their schools weren't paid by the state for any of that work.

You see, California funds its public schools using a formula based on what's called "Average Daily Attendance." What that means, in short, is that if a kid doesn't attend school for a day, that child's school loses a bit of its funding from the state. No matter that absences actually create extra expenses for a school district and its employees, whether it's a teacher meeting after hours with a student and her or his parents to go over missed assignments, or staff members tracking down truants.

In the 1970s, when California courts ruled that funding schools based on property taxes was unfair to kids who lived in poorer communities, the state stepped in to take over the bulk of school funding. It came up with the Average Daily Attendance system, which on first glance seems fair -- schools get funding based on the number of kids they teach. [Here's a PDF that describes California's school funding system in exhaustive detail.]

But paying for education this way creates a couple of devastating consequences for the state's public schools. First, as I illustrated above, funding schools based on attendance rather than enrollment penalizes districts when kids miss school. It's not like a district can send a teacher home without pay for every 20-30 kids who call in sick on a given day. Of course, teachers get sick, too, but when teachers miss a day, they still get sick pay, and the school has to pay for their substitutes.

Economists have a term called "elasticity" to describe how easily an expense or price can adjust in response to another change. In the case of schools, public education funding is highly elastic -- moving up or down based on the number of kids who show up on any given day. However, a school district's costs are highly "inelastic" -- they're fixed based on the number of buildings the district has, and the number of teachers, counselors, and staff members it employs. Districts simply can't open and close schools, and hire and fire teachers on a daily basis in response to student attendance. Businesses hate being in that kind of situation -- it's the roadmap to bankruptcy. So it shouldn't surprise anyone why California schools always seem to be struggling with inadequate funding.

But there's a second devastating consequence to California's way of paying for schools. And it undermines the very reason for why the state took over school funding in the first place.

When students withdraw from a school district in favor of moving elsewhere or going to private schools, the district they leave loses money. But the district still needs to pay for a superintendent, school board, and all of its buildings. If enough students leave, the district can lay off teachers and even close schools, but that process costs money, too -- allocating staff time to decide whom to fire and what to close, and dealing with the inevitable community opposition. If staff reductions involve teachers taking early retirement, they don't come completely off the books, either, as the district's still on the hook for pension and health care expenses. Closed schools stay on the budget, too, as the district still must pay for maintaining those buildings. If a district decides raise money by selling some of its buildings, that decision leaves the district vulnerable to needing to come up with much, much more money at some point in the future to buy land and build new facilities if attendance ever were to rise again, which is why districts are very, very reluctant to sell excess property.

When students leave a district, the district simply can't cut expenses as quickly as it loses Average Daily Attendance income from the state. And when that happens, it leaves a funding deficit for the students who remain behind -- leading to increased class sizes and cutbacks in programs that might prompt more district families to decide to leave for private schools or other districts. Which further reduces school funding.

And as more and more middle class families leave a district, the percentage of students who are poor rises. Their families can't afford private schools or to move elsewhere. Since students from poor families need more school support to succeed -- their parents or guardians can't afford or aren't educated enough themselves to provide homework help, extra books to read, summer camps to attend, or even three good meals a day to eat, the district's costs keep going up as its Average Daily Attendance funding crashes. Title I funding from the federal government for poor students helps close the gap, but lagging test scores by poor students show that even that money can't make up the difference that a lack of support at home creates. Teachers are left to do what they can with their time and limited remaining resources, to try to help.

This is how California's school funding system absolutely devastates districts that are the victim of "white flight." It not only financially punishes districts where students flee to private schools, it encourages the flight of wealthy and middle-class families of all races by leaving those districts with proportionally less funding for wealthy and middle-class students who remain behind. California's current system of school funding effectively subsidizes economic segregation by creating a "death spiral" of ever-decreasing general funding to districts when wealthy and middle-class residents start choosing to send their children to private schools.

If California chose instead to fund districts based on population -- the number of children between the ages of 5-18 who live in that district -- schools wouldn't be financially punished when residents opt for private schools. Instead, district funding would remain much more stable from year to year. If a "white flight" situation emerged again, such as happened here in Pasadena, where 10,000 students fled the district in five years following court-ordered desegregation in the 1970s, that district wouldn't lose income. In fact, with fewer students to service, the district could respond by adding programs and academic support for their remaining students -- features that might encourage some middle-class families to stick with the district, or even to come back.

Of course, one person's design flaw is another person's design feature. I'm not naive. I know that there are people in California who don't support public education and who are happy to continue under a system that dries up its funding and public support. But I'm not one of those people, and I hope you aren't, either. If we want to help California's public schools, we need to fight for a more just way of paying for them. We need to start a movement to end the system of funding schools based on Average Daily Attendance and change state law to pay for schools based on district childhood population, instead.

Why I'm not opting my kids out of standardized tests

Wed, 17 Apr 2013 15:02:00 MST

By Robert Niles: Some parents around the country are pulling their kids out of federally-mandated standardized tests this spring. They're hoping that by taking an individual stand against high-stakes testing, they can help change the system.

But opting out of testing is the wrong choice. By taking individual stands against testing, parents are reinforcing the corrosive belief that education is a consumer product. And they're making it easier for opponents to turn more citizens against their local schools.

The parents whom I've seen talk about opting out of tests strike me as well-informed, engaged parents who are wealthy enough to have both an Internet connection and the time to sit around and write about this stuff. Given that parents' income and education all but determine a student's test scores, this suggests to me that their kids would likely be scoring above average on their states' test.

If those kids opt out, their schools' and districts' test scores will decline, helping education "reformers" portray those schools and districts as failing.

If parents succeed in getting other parents to opt out, their school might find itself no longer meeting the minimum participation thresholds mandated by federal and state laws. Congratulations, you've just cost your school a bunch of money, which will lead to more layoffs, larger class sizes, less individual attention and probably, more punitive testing as the school tries to "earn" its funding back.

A boycott only works is if enough families pull out in enough schools, in enough districts, in enough states, that the federal government is forced to change the system. As anyone who's ever worked for a paycheck ought to know, a strike works only when the factory shuts down. If you're out on the picket line alone, you're only hurting yourself.

So how do we get what we want? The same way unions have for a century and more -- we organize. Whether it's joining a national group such as the Network for Public Education or a local organization such as Invest in PUSD Kids, parents will change public education only by working together, and not by acting alone.

If you look closely at the package of "reforms" bring introduced by corporate-backed politicians around the country, you see a common belief -- that education is a consumer product and that schools should be run like businesses.

But great education doesn't yield immediate returns. Education isn't a commodity -- teachers who do wonders for one student might fail another, and vice versa. The simplistic math formulae that allow a management consultant to maximize short-term return on investment in the banking and technology industries can't model the complexity of human learning for millions of students from wildly disparate backgrounds.

By pulling your kids out of state testing, you're acting like a education consumer -- and that's playing straight into the corporate "reformers"' hands. Yes, we need to stand up against the corporate takeover of our public schools. But we won't do that acting individually, as consumers. That's playing on the billionaire's turf. We'll only do this by working together, and becoming a political force -- millions of voters whom the billionaires can't buy.

If we want to build support for public education, we need to reframe the public discussion about it

Mon, 11 Mar 2013 14:22:00 MST

By Robert Niles: My post last week on the 'myth of the excellent teacher' elicited an intriguing comment from a reader that it should be easier to get rid of the worst of the worst teachers in a school system.

While I agree that abusive or bigoted teachers should find no place in our public education system, I think people who support public education need to think about how we frame our discussion of this issue. If we're willing to frame education reform as a question of "how to lay off bad teachers," then we've already lost. Why? That statement implicitly delivers suggestions that a) teachers are bad and b) schools spend too much and c) cuts are a given. By agreeing to address the "how to get rid of teachers" question, then we've conceded those important points about teacher quality and inevitability of education cuts.

Let's instead reframe the discussion as "how do we increase the number of good teachers available to help our students?" Or, how do we increase the chances that a student will be paired with a teacher who can forge an instructive relationship with that student? As I wrote last week, when we cut the number of teachers available to students in a particular grade at a particular school, we reduce the chances that each student will be matched with a teacher with whom he or she can have that type of productive relationship. Students are individuals, after all, not computer programs or gears in a machine that behave predictably in a given situation. Our students need and deserve human instructors who can adapt to their particular individuals needs, temperaments, and personalities. The more -- and more diverse -- teachers we have, the better the chances that our schools can provide teachers who match with every one of our students.

(Also note how I talk about "our" students. If we're to win back support for public education we must insist upon talking about it as a public good -- a system provided by, accountable to, and of great benefit to all. Public education isn't a consumer product, bought by parents for their individual student. Opponents of public education want to frame education as a consumer product, of concern only to parents and students, so that people without children in the system will be less likely to support the taxes that fund it.)

No, our communities don't have an infinite supply of money to spend on public education. But we do, collectively, have a heck of a lot of available money to spend. The stock market trades at an all-time high. Corporate profits are up, and richest Americans are richer than ever before. There's plenty of money out there to, at the very least, stop laying off teachers and even to start hiring more beyond that. But elected officials never will find the political will to raise taxes on the rich in support of public education if supporters of public schools can't reframe news media discussions about education.

Poverty levels in our schools are rising, thanks to declining purchasing power for working Americans over the past generation. More than half the public students in California today come from families that can't afford to pay for their students' daily lunch. Those students need extra attention, extra guidance and extra instruction from our public schools, to make up for all that they aren't getting at home. And yet, because these students' needs lead them to score lower on standardized tests, our cynically labelled "No Child Left Behind" framework gives their schools less money to meet those needs, enabling additional spending cuts for public education around the country. That leaves communities with less educated workforces, ultimately leading to more poverty and lower student performance. It's a vicious cycle, designed to weaken public education and drive away families who can afford an alternative.

(In California, the system is particularly vicious, as school funding is based upon student attendance days. So if a family chooses to send its child to private schools, that decision costs their local public school district money. Sure that decision reduces the district's cost by having one fewer child to educate, but districts maintain necessary overhead expenses that don't go away when students do -- boards, superintendents, buildings, buses, special education infrastructure, etc. That reduces the per-pupil funding remaining for the students who stay in public schools. Heck, if a public school student is sick for a day and stays home, that leads to school funding cuts. But it's not like a school can send a teacher home for an unpaid day for every 25 students who call in sick. For economists, this is called a highly elastic funding system to pay for highly inelastic expenses. You don't design systems this way unless you intend for them to fail eventually.)

If we want to be able to better match students with teachers, and to improve teachers' abilities to work with an increasingly diverse student body, we need more administrators, not fewer. We need principals, counselors, librarians, and coaches who have the time to get to know students and teachers, to discover strengths and weaknesses and to provide the matching, training and support that both students and teachers need to develop instructive relationships.

But districts can't provide that kind of support to their teachers if they must continue to lay off support personnel in an attempt to minimize the number of teachers they must dismiss to meet reduced budgets. Again, to use a sports analogy, we can't continue to play on this side of the field.

Still worried about getting rid of really bad teachers? OK, let's go there for a moment. There's not a district in America where you can't fire a teacher for cause. If a teacher is abusing a student, or discriminating against protected classes of students, a school board can fire that teacher once they build a case of evidence to support those accusations. But again, a district needs administrators to document those cases. Lay off your "extra" administrators, and there's no one left with the time to document a termination case. What about tenure, you might ask? What about it? For public school teachers, "tenure" simply means that a teacher no longer can be fired at the whim of school officials -- they have to have a reason, such as a documented case for cause, or overall layoffs. I suspect most American don't know that, and believe that tenure means lifetime employment for teachers, no matter what.

Again, that shows why we need to reframe the discussion about public education. If we're talking about the acceptable ways to lay off teachers, we've lost. We need to stop laying off teachers, and start hiring more. That is what we need to be talking about. That is what we need to be fighting for.

The myth of the 'excellent teacher'

Thu, 07 Mar 2013 17:12:00 MST

By Robert Niles: Sure, I've had several teachers over my life whom I considered excellent. But just because a specific teacher was excellent for me doesn't guarantee that same teacher was excellent for every other student he or she taught.

I remember one high school teacher who drove me and a handful of other students to improve our writing, and her lessons remain inspiring and instructive to me, even today. But many other students couldn't stand her abrasive style, refused to work and failed to develop in her classes. Was she an excellent teacher?

My daughter has a great year with one of her elementary school teachers, exploring music, writing and science at a deeper level than she'd done before. But my son endured a very different experience with the same teacher three years later. For my son, this previously patient, wonderful teacher was almost bullying, and my son hated the class. Was that teacher excellent?

That different people have different experiences with the same teacher shouldn't surprise anyone. Education is a deeply personal experience. A teacher can put forth all the lessons he or she can deliver, but education doesn't happen until a student learns. And when that happens depends as much on what ability, motivation and context the student brings to the class as what a teacher offers there.

This is why poverty has such a devastating effect upon student performance. If a student is fortunate enough to enjoy a wonderful relationship with a specific teacher, learning flows. But when that doesn't happen, a student with well-educated and resourceful parents can count on them to fill the gap. Those parents can step up to help explain lessons, assist with homework or hire tutors to help their child learn. (As I wrote above, two children with the same background, even from the same family, can have vastly different experiences with the same teacher. "Excellence," even when it does happen, is not a constant.) A child with poor, or absent, parents doesn't enjoy those resources. For them, the education happens in the classroom or it doesn't happen at all. If those students get lucky with a teacher who has the ability to connect with them as individuals, great. Otherwise, learning just doesn't happen in that class. Over time, a middle-class or wealthy student will continue to progress, regardless of their relationship with various teachers, while a poor student eventually will fall behind unless they hit the jackpot of being able to develop wonderful relationships with every teacher they get.

Which is really hard to do when states are cutting school budgets, increasing class sizes and leaving teachers with more and more poor students to try and develop instructive relationships with each year.

How, then, can anyone truthfully measure teaching "excellence"? More crucially, how can me measure teaching failure? Is it fair to label a teacher a "failure" when he or she is given a class of 30+ students with no home support and whose lack of access to proper nutrition, health care and even decent rest at night threatens their ability to learn? Even if a teacher in that situation managed to pull off the miracle of getting all those students to progress, it's folly to expect that they'll be able to progress at the same rate as a class filled with well-off kids with parents paying for good meals, quiet bedrooms, regular checkups and after-school enrichment programs.

And yet, we've got people like Michelle Rhee, writing books and showing up all over the TV, promoting the idea that if we can just turn education over to the "excellent" teachers and fire all those failing ones, America's schoolkids will live happily ever after.

If we really want to improve the quality of education for all American children, we're going to need a lot more teachers, not fewer. Only with more teachers can we increase the odds of students in a particular grade at a particular school system having available the teacher who's a good match for their needs, their temperament and their experience. Only by hiring more counselors and more administrators will we be able to do a better job of matching teachers with students and their communities, to improve the odds that education happens in the classroom, without relying on rich parents to pick up the slack.

We're not going to improve education by cutting support to all but a few arbitrarily designated "excellent" teachers. We're going to improve education in America only by spending enough to build and develop more instructive relationships between teachers and students, no matter their backgrounds and abilities. The more we focus on that, the more "excellent" teachers we will develop.

My wife often says that the key to education (she's a music teacher) is for an instructor to begin where the student is. You're not going to get far trying to work with an ideal of what you want a student to be, in lieu of working with the student you actually have.

It's the same for Americans and our education system. We might long for an ideal of cheap, easy schools where a few superteachers can ride in and save the day by teaching everyone the same way. But education doesn't work like that. Students aren't software programs or gears in a machine. They're people -- individuals with unique needs, dreams and abilities. They deserve the attention, care and instruction of a personal education experience. More than half of children attending California schools can't afford to buy or bring their own lunch. We've got to work with what we have, not what we wish to imagine our communities to be.

If we want to have and reward excellent teaching, we need to put students in position to have excellent relationships with them. Following the advice of those who wish to cut the number of teachers, increase class sizes, reduce support staff and leave teachers with less of a say in their work won't ever help that happen.

Update: If you care about public education, too, please take a moment and look at The Network for Public Education.

Want to catch people stealing your website content? Use an RSS honeypot

Thu, 14 Feb 2013 12:19:00 MST

By Robert Niles: One of the annoyances of publishing original content online is when Google chooses to return a copy of your work from another website before your original in its search results pages. Google's traffic is money for website publishers, as more readers can mean more money from ad revenue. But it's frustrating to see Google choose instead to deliver that potentially valuable traffic to another website that's ~~copied~~ stolen your content.

I'm not talking about sites that reference your work, summarizing it and providing a link back to the original. That's fair use, and I welcome the traffic from those sources, too. Heck, if people want to quote an entire article from me, then supplement it with their own original reporting and/or commentary, I probably wouldn't mind. It's the automated copying and reposting of content that really bothers me. So a while back, I decided to do something: I programmed the script that generates the RSS feed of my articles on ThemeParkInsider.com to append a line to end of each RSS feed article entry:

This article originally appeared at [article URL]. All rights reserved. If you are not reading this on a personal RSS reader (such as Feedburner) or on [website domain], you are reading a scraper website that has illegally copied and stolen [website domain]'s content. Please visit [article URL] for the original version, along with all its comments.

This way, I could do a Google search for that text string (well, for a part of it -- it is rather long), and discover which websites were automatically copying my site's content. This method wouldn't catch people who visited my site and manually copied the posts -- but I didn't care so much about them. I wanted to see who was simply creating scripts to automatically crawl RSS feeds and pull the content onto their own sites. That's the laziest form of scraping on the Web. (I figured that any human being copying the RSS feed would be smart enough to at least delete the disclaimer line.)

And here's what I found. Based my most recent search, here are the top 10 domains automatically scraping ThemeParkInsider.com's front-page content (domains in alphabetical order):

alltop.com
feed7.com
feedreader.com
mippin.com
nhsai.org
ofelio.com
orangehedgehog.com
regator.com
srsounds.com
tripsense.com

My questions for people running Google and other search engines would be: Why are you indexing content from these domains? Why not just ban the scrapers from your index and return instead links to original content? Forget for a moment complex questions about derivative content. This is just lazy automated copying and pasting. Dumping these domains from your index ought to be any easy call. Especially when publishers create honeypots like mine to help you identify the worst offenders.

Top quotes for would-be online publishing entrepreneurs

Wed, 13 Feb 2013 15:31:16 MST

By Robert Niles: Do you like to highlight passages in a book when you read?

If you've not used eBooks before, you might think that you'd lose that ability. After all, you can't exactly take a highlighter to a screen. But major eBook readers have a highlighting function built in (along with search, bookmarking, a dictionary for word look-up, and more.) One of the neat things that Amazon does is to aggregate that information for publishers, allowing people to see what the most-highlighted passages are in a particular book.

I've enjoyed discovering what readers have highlighted in my guidebook for website publishers, How to Make Money Publishing Community News Online. Most of these top quotes focus on the questions of defining the needs your website will fulfill and finding customers who'll pay you to fulfill those needs. Here are the top five quotes from my book, via Amazon:

Why is this important? Why is now the time to do this? Why are you the one who can do this? Why have you come to me?
9 Highlighters
Unless they're collectively paying you enough to cover a significant portion of the cost of doing business, those readers are not your customers. They're your audience, instead.
6 Highlighters
In envisioning your audience, then, focus your efforts not just to attract readers, but to attract readers that will, in turn, attract financial backers for your site, whether they be advertisers or non-profit foundations with their own needs and agendas.
6 Highlighters
The answer to the question "Why would anyone pay me money to do this?" must be: "Because I will meet a need no one else can."
4 Highlighters
The best way to meet the needs of advertisers is to serve the needs of your audience.
4 Highlighters

If you're interested in reading more, these quotes come from Chapter 1 of my book, which I excerpted earlier here on Sensible Talk. Of course, you can download the entire book, too. At just $6.99, I think it's an excellent investment in anyone's career.

Thanks for reading.

Five reasons journalists make great entrepreneurs

Mon, 04 Feb 2013 11:40:48 MST

By Robert Niles: I hate hearing former colleagues and other journalists tell me that they could never do what I do -- that they never could make a living publishing their own websites. Why does this frustrate me so much? Because, having worked as both a newsroom reporter and a publishing entrepreneur, I can see how very similar those jobs have turned out to be. IMHO, journalists are the ideal entrepreneurs. Few other professions better prepare people to meet all the various challenges of launching and running a business.

Here's why:

Journalists know how to listen

Forget the stereotype that insists entrepreneurs get their ideas from some divine inspiration, and listen to no one as their pursue their vision. Every successful business founder I've ever met spent an enormous amount of time listening to people before launching his or her business. You've got to learn what people's needs are, and what they're willing to pay someone who can meet them. Businesses can't exist without market demand, and only the entrepreneurs who listen to those demands successfully fulfill them.

Just like the best journalists, who keep their ears open to what's happening, and changing, in the communities they cover. You've got to listen to what's going on to cover a beat, and you've got to listen to what's going on to find real business opportunities.

Journalists know how to ask the questions that reveal community needs

Almost no one will just come up to you and confess their needs. You've got to ask questions to get answers. Reporters know this, as do entrepreneurs. Yet as readers do not see nor often appreciate the many hours that go into chasing leads that never develop into a news story, people who've not yet started a business don't understand that successful entrepreneurs spend a lot of time meeting people and researching markets for ideas that never pan out. But unless you ask the questions to do that preliminary research -- whether you are a reporter or an entrepreneur -- you'll never find the leads that grow into successes.

Journalists know how to cultivate sources

Honest reporters don't craft stories from their imaginations -- they gather information from sources, who help them build a story by providing quotes, data, context and background necessary to write the piece. Entrepreneurs don't build businesses on their own, either, despite Horatio Alger-like mythology. Business owners rely on networks of individuals who each play vital roles in the creation and maintenance of a business -- customers, contractors, employees, etc. A successful entrepreneur must know how to build and cultivate an action team of sources, just as successful journalists do.

Journalists know how to spread the word

Your business won't earn its first dollar if no one knows about it. Entrepreneurs utilize their action teams to start spreading the word about their new ventures to their associates' colleagues and friends. But, like journalists, they also understand that putting information in front of someone is very different from actually earning his or her attention. Both journalists and entrepreneurs know the importance of a great lead, a stunning visual and a compelling message that not only helps spread the word to new audiences, but also inspires those new readers (and customers) to keep spreading that word to their family and friends.

Journalists are great salespeople

And here's where I'm losing a lot of my journalism friends, I fear. But don't dismiss this! Good journalists sell every single day. They sell desk editors on giving them an assignment. They sell sources on talking with them. They sell front page editors on giving them P1. And they sell readers on looking at, and sticking with, their stories.

Compared with what some reporters have to do to get their stories, selling an ad on a website's nothing. Which would you rather do: Interview a grieving mother who's just lost her son in a school shooting, or ask a local business owner to spend $500 to place an ad that's going to bring dozens of new customers into her business?

Journalists fear selling because they don't understand it. Good selling isn't conning someone into spending money on something worthless. Good selling is knowing the value of what you're offering, and bringing that product to the attention of people who can get that value from it. It requires research -- so you know the value of your product, and communication -- so you can introduce it to people. The best salespeople let the product sell itself, just as the best reporters gather information and let the quality of that reporting "sell" the story to an audience.

Look, if you've got a newsroom job and you're happy with it -- great. Keep it as long as they'll have you. But if you're wondering if there's a better situation out there for you -- if you're daydreaming about how you'd run things if you ever had that chance, remember that if you have the skills to be a successful journalist, you have the skills to become a successful publisher, too. The same skills that make you a great reporter can make you a successful news entrepreneur. You just need to want to try.

Robert's new guidebook for news entrepreneurs, "How to Make Money Publishing Community News Online" is available from Amazon.com. At just $6.99 for the eBook and $11.99 for the paperback, it's a lot cheaper than going to business school to learn how to do this stuff.

Don't just write about the news -- link to it!

Tue, 29 Jan 2013 12:08:22 MST

By Robert Niles: Shouldn't journalists have made a rule by now that requires if you're writing a story about a webpage, your story should include a link to that webpage?

Apparently not.

Last week, the social service club my daughter helped start at her high school started an online petition asking the school district to prohibit using district funds to buy supplies from retailers, such as Walmart, that also sell firearms. This was the club's attempt to do something tangible to stop the spread of guns -- and gun violence -- in America. (Personally, I think the policy would be a far more effective strategy in distancing the local schools from job-killing, wage-depressing -- and thus local-school-harming -- Walmart, which is opening its first store within the district's boundaries later this year.)

The Los Angeles Times noted the petition in blog post that appeared on both the Times' website and its Pasadena Sun edition. Take a look. Notice anything missing?

How about a link to the petition?

Hey, there is an automated link for Walmart -- that directs to a 404 "page not found" error.

Newspapers have been running websites for more than 15 years. It shouldn't be too much to expect that newspapers train, support and insist on basic linking skills. If someone's interested enough in this petition to read the story, they're likely interested enough to want to see the petition itself. Give people relevant links, and you help earn their trust as a guide through the information overload online.

Yet too many newspapers continue to promote an internal culture that the paper should be a community's single source of information, just like they were for years before that whole Internet thing appeared. But it's not like a refusal to link outside the paper's website is going to keep people from realizing that there's a larger Web out there. It's simply going to encourage people to find better news sources online -- ones that aren't afraid to link to other, newsworthy websites.

Want to Start a Website Business? Find an Unmet Need

Wed, 23 Jan 2013 10:38:38 MST

By Robert Niles: The following is an excerpt from Chapter 1 of Robert Niles' "How to Make Money Publishing Community News Online," a guidebook for people thinking about starting their own website businesses.

Here's the first question to ask yourself, before you build a website:

& quot;Why would anyone pay me money to do this? & quot;

I've heard plenty of answers to this question & #8212; almost all of them wrong. You might think this question too personal to have a & quot;wrong & quot; answer, but people who think that are the ones most likely to come up with a wrong answer.

You see, no one cares why you want to start a new business. No one cares about anyone's award-winning-career as a newspaper reporter. No one cares about your heartfelt passion for your hometown. No one cares about the bills you have to pay or your need to find a new way to make some cash.

Get over it. Accept the fact that no one cares about you. But people do care about themselves, and if you can meet an unfilled need for people, they will pay you money to do it.

Starting a business & #8212; whether it's a news website, an auto repair shop or an organic grocery store & #8212; is all about finding an unmet need in a community and providing a good or service that takes fulfills it. Want to start a business? Then start by looking for the need in a community.

This is the only acceptable answer to the question I asked above. Your answer to the question, & quot;Why would anyone pay me money to do this? & quot; must be: & quot;Because I will meet a need no one else can. & quot;

Now, what is that need? And how will you meet it? Those are the personal questions you will need to answer as an individual. But never forget that the core concept behind any successful publication is always the same: it meets a need for its customers. Keep your focus on that core concept and you'll have a chance at success in publishing.

Ultimately, you will be in the business of helping your customers. Plenty of people have started websites for selfish reasons & #8212; heck, I've done it a few times, too. But the people who have succeeded in making those websites into profitable businesses have found ways to meet the needs of paying customers along the way. The sooner you change your focus as a publisher to customer service, the sooner you'll be earning the income that can transform your publication into a sustainable business.

Who is your customer?

If your mission is to serve a customer, you first must know whom that customer is. Too many publishers fail to identify their customers. So who is your customer? Here's the easy answer, taught to me by Tom O'Malia, Director Emeritus of the Lloyd Greif Center for Entrepreneurial Studies at the University of Southern California's Marshall School of Business:

& quot;A customer is anyone who writes you a check. & quot;

Simple, huh?

Yet it's depressing to see how many publishers fail to understand that. Too many online publishers think that their customers are the readers clicking around online & #8212; people who never pay them a dime. Too many newspaper publishers think their customers are home delivery readers, whose subscription fees hardly cover the cost of printing and delivery & #8212; forget about the cost of reporting and producing the paper.

Unless they're collectively paying you enough to cover a significant portion of the cost of doing business, those readers are not your customers. They're your audience, instead.

Audience is important. Without an audience, you've got no chance of landing paying customers. Serving an audience therefore will be an important part of your publishing business. But for most news publications, the audience is not the customer. So, then, who is?

Now, if you are a current news reporter or a journalism student, don't stop reading after the next paragraph, okay? This will all work out fine, just stick with me for a few more paragraphs. (And if you're not a journalism veteran, just ignore this paragraph. You probably aren't coming to this book with the news industry's philosophical baggage & #8212; which teaches that thinking about money is bad and which prevents many news reporters from becoming successful publishers. Be thankful for that.)

Remember, the customer is & quot;anyone who writes you a check. & quot; So for most news publishers, your customer is... your advertiser. If you're going to succeed publishing an ad-supported publication, you've got to meet the needs of your advertisers.

Unfortunately, decades of ethics training in the journalism industry have taught news reporters not only that they should ignore the needs of their publication's advertisers, but that doing anything to help an advertiser constitutes an egregious violation of professional ethics. So when I write that a publisher's primary responsibility as a business person is to meet the needs of his or her customers (in other words, advertisers), I suspect many news reporters will want to quit reading, abandon their dreams of becoming a publisher and look for another way to make money instead.

But whom would that help? Not communities that need more and better coverage. Not the business owners who need simpler, more direct ways of connecting with their local community than trying to get noticed through Google. Giving up on your dream of community publishing really only helps existing news publishers, who will have one fewer competitor to face.

Journalism leaders originally developed these ethical principles to ensure that reporters didn't end up writing glorified ads for sponsors, instead of reporting accurate news stories. The idea was to prevent writers from putting the needs of advertisers over the needs of the audience.

But journalism ethics fail if they discourage new publishers from getting into the business. In this book, I will argue that you can serve both your readers and your customers. That's because the best way to meet the needs of advertisers is to serve the needs of your audience. Businesses have a huge need to connect with people who aren't yet their customers. They need to reach an audience of people who might likely be interested in their business, but who haven't been motivated enough to walk in (or click over) and buy anything yet. Publishers meet that need by selling access to their audience, through advertising.

So if you don't have an audience that advertisers want to reach, you can't meet the needs of those advertisers.

Your challenge, as a publisher, is to meet the needs of an audience so that enough of them read your publication to make it an attractive channel through which to meet the needs of your customers (advertisers). You can do both, and you must.

Thinking about going the non-profit route, to avoid that whole icky advertiser thing? Keep this in mind, then: As digital entrepreneur and journalist Tom Davidson said at a Knight Digital Media Center boot camp, & quot;Non-profit isn't a business model. It's a tax status. & quot; The core principle behind the business remains the same. Instead of getting money from advertisers trying to reach your audience, you'll be soliciting money from foundations and other organizations trying to reach your audience. You're still selling access to your audience, either way. Plus, you'll need to deal with reams of tax forms and regulations that many for-profit publishers can ignore.

What about direct sales, some would-be publishers might ask? Why not start a publication that readers pay for directly, so that you don't have to worry yourself with meeting the needs of advertisers or foundations?

People are paying publishers billions of dollars a year to read a class of publications that has no advertising or foundation support. These publications are books, and smart news publishers are taking advantage of a revolution in eBook publishing to cash in with them. I'll write more about eBook publishing later, and I'll make an argument for why they should become an important part of your publishing strategy.

But even with eBooks, you won't make many sales if you don't build an audience first. So before we think any more about customers, let's start with our audience and finding a need you can address that will build an audience large enough to become commercially viable & #8212; no matter whom your customers turn out to be.

To learn more about start-up online news publishing, please read the rest of "How to Make Money Publishing Community News Online," available for $6.99 [eBook] or $11.99 [paperback] from Amazon.com.

Are journalists supposed to tell the truth, or tell a story?

Wed, 16 Jan 2013 23:57:00 MST

By Robert Niles: Journalism occupies an unstable place between novels and social science. While news publications aspire to truth-telling, in training and practice, reporters work more often as creative storytellers than disciplined researchers.

The Manti Te'o girlfriend hoax illustrated the predictable result -- journalists are suckers for a good story, and won't bother to let the inconvenience of verifying get in their way of telling it.

I majored in math and social science as an undergraduate, and took several "hard science" lab courses in both college and high school. That makes me a bit of a freak in the journalism profession, where the vast majority of reporters and editors I've worked with over the years had -- at best -- a limited understanding of and ability to practice math. Many knew of the scientific method as a concept, but very few ever had designed or conducted an experiment or academic literature review.

Journalism education instead focuses on the format of telling stories -- with multiple courses in writing, editing and presentation. Most journalism schools require students to complete classes in the social sciences, but those are almost always lower- to mid-level survey courses that rarely demand formal research skills.

Without training or experience in the formal methods that social scientists employ to find truth, journalists -- essentially -- wing it. Journalism reporting teachers love to scare their students with the cliche: "If your mother says she loves you, check it out" (which I've amended to this), but how, exactly, are reporters supposed to "check it out"?

Call your dad and ask him what mom's saying behind your back? Read her mail? Follow her home from work and see if she stops off to see any other kids first? You'll find as many ways to "check it out" as reporters you bother to ask.

And that's the problem. When you don't have a time-tested scientific method for pursuing truth in research, you've instead got to bring an almost crippling level of skepticism to your work. It's hard to connect with a community (something I argue is vital for journalism's survival), if you're forcing yourself to look upon everyone you meet as a potential liar.

Some publications -- notably magazines -- do a better job of enforcing a routine reporting process than others, allowing reporters to set aside emotional judgments and get in the habit of fact-checking everything. But for most reporters, whether or not to fact-check is a judgment call. And it's hard to make the right judgment when you're tempted by one beauty of a story.

That's what the tale of Te'o's alleged girlfriend was: a tragic story of love denied -- one that would allow broadcasters to reach beyond a core audience of college football fans to millions of other drama-loving viewers clicking around the dial on an autumn's Saturday night. So they went for it. They reacted like story-tellers, not social scientists.

Only when the reporters at Deadspin applied some real research did those other reporters learned that they'd been burned.

I'm sure that this episode will encourage many reporters to work more skeptically, at least for a while. But for how long? How long will reporters be able to hold out when new, equally alluring stories emerge?

Evolution doesn't happen when an organism suddenly alters its form to adapt to a changing environment. It happens when organisms that lack the ability to survive in that environment die, leaving only the mutants that can live to survive and reproduce new generations.

If journalism is to evolve from a form of quick-turnaround storytelling to a more rigorous practice of finding and reporting truth, it can't rely on current reporters to change their time-hardened ways. It needs new teachers, new reporters and new publication standards -- ones inspired more by science and less by literature -- to come forward and take their place.

Otherwise, we're just marking time until the next fake story blows up.

Robert Niles is the author of "How to Make Money Publishing Community News Online," a guidebook for aspiring website publishers, available for $6.99 [eBook] or $11.99 [paperback] from Amazon.com.