Online everyone is a competitor and no one is a competitor. As in, what you view as your competition has radically shifted. A kid on your block can now be your competition. In the same token, however, that kid can collaborate with you.

The Web is about being social and forming webs of connections. In that sense, just as anyone can be your competitor, anyone can also help you. If you embrace that collaborative spirit, you’ll find that the Web offers many more opportunities for collaboration than it does for competition.

The only thing I’d hold for print are longer, more enterprise stories. Longer-form content doesn’t do that well online anyway. Otherwise, I’d let everything go first online. It is the new first draft of history.

But in addition to the info, registrants have to accept the site’s e-mailed FYI Newsletter and FYI Offers. The offers can be customized, it looks like, but choosing from various categories. [By this point I would be pulling back.] Then they can pick from nearly two dozen e-mails; thoughtfully, three have been pre-checked—AM and PM Updates, Deals+Steals/Thrifty advice—meaning registrants have to uncheck them if they don’t the daily updates. Others range from zoned news to the Pet Central Newsletter. When I dug a little deeper, I found that I could delete the FYI Newsletter and FYI Offers but only from my member profile after registering.

That’s a requirement even if you sign up for a free account just to comment on content. Who comes up with these ideas? Staci Kramer at PaidContent puts it well:

Why does any of this matter? Day in, day out, we’re writing here about the ways news outlets are trying to get users to pay for content and registration is key in nearly every one. If it isn’t global, easy or transparent, the content had better be really good and the price better be right because the pool of people willing to complete the process—let along enter payment info—will get smaller and smaller along the way.

One of my biggest concerns with news paywalls is that I don’t trust news organizations — particularly newspapers — to make the process seamless and easy enough for consumers. It’s not enough to try to charge for something. We have to make the experience enjoyable.

Look at how bad most news Web sites are. Heck, look at how little thought most have put into their former cash cow classified advertising when it comes to the Web. What exactly have most news organizations done on the Web to inspire confidence that they could pull off a paywal?

I have grave, grave concerns that news organizations will spend too much time thinking about charging for news and content and not enough time thinking about how to make the user experience good.

Let’s change the world.

Micropayments will not work for news. Why not?

• I don’t believe there is a market — News is one of those things that I think macropayments make a lot more sense for. There are certain news outlets that I value a lot more than others. I suspect I’m not alone. The issue isn’t that people aren’t willing to pay for news-related products, but rather the issue is that it will be tough to get people to pay for a product that has been free for years. How about we try creating new products that have never been free? My guess is that we’ll have much better luck selling people on these. Instead of trying to sell micropayments of throw-away stories, why don’t we try to create macropayment products that add value to our ad-supported content?
• Transaction costs — Yes, Apple makes money off of micro transactions on the iTunes store and does sell songs for $0.69-1.29. First, there is a huge difference between selling a song for 99 cents and selling an article for 3 cents. And that’s assuming that an individual article is worth 3 cents (many articles I’d say have zero value, while others are worth a bit more than 3 cents). But beyond that there is something journalists have to realize; Apple wasn’t making money off of 99 cent transactions. Credit card fees can easily be 25 cents a transaction. Add in giving labels more than half, bandwidth, etc and that doesn’t leave profit. That’s why Apple begun bundling transactions and billing people less often. If I bill you weekly, I’m much more likely to make a profit than if I bill you daily. Also, Apple’s iTunes store sells more lucrative content than individual songs: movies, applications and even complete albums (in fact, Apple and music labels would much rather you buy full albums). Beyond that, Apple makes monster margins off of the iPod and iPhone. Apple doesn’t need to make money off of the iTunes Store, but if it does, well that’s just gravy. Without a physical device like an iPod to carry profits, how exactly are micropayments going to work for news organizations?
• It can’t be piecemeal — Let’s assume that micropayements are A) going to happen and that B) people would be receptive to them. Even if I were down with micropayments, I wouldn’t be down with a different micropayment system for each news site. If I can’t have one account that follows me around the Web, it’s no dice. There is no way in hell that I am going to register and put my credit card info in at every single news site that I visit. I’d only agree to this if a trusted third party (perhaps Google) created a system that kept me logged in while I was surfing the Web. When I came to a piece of content that I wanted to purchase, I could easily do so. No fuss, one bill.
• It would have to be effortless — The beauty of the iPhone is how effortless it makes it to buy applications and songs. If the buying process were a big ordeal that required me to type in my address, credit card info, etc, I’d almost never use my iPhone to purchase content. But I do. Why? Because it’s effortless. The same thing with Amazon.com’s 1-click buying. It’s just a great shopping experience. Which begs the question: When have news organizations ever had great consumer experiences? Have you seen there online classifieds lately? It’s embarrassing.
• In sum — I think micropayments are a bad idea because A) consumers don’t want them, B) they present serious technological hurdles and C) I don’t trust news organizations to roll out effortless systems.

Down and dirty says you should never make something that your users don’t care about. Down and dirty means focusing on return on investment. It means admitting that we don’t have unlimited time, money or staff resources.

Once we realize that we have limited resources, we’ll focus on maximizing our resources to produce the best overall product. The core of down and dirty is incredibly simple: How can we maximize time, money and staff resources? Instead of saying, “If we only had more of X,” you’ll be saying, “this is how we can make the most with Y.”

And, perhaps most importantly, down and dirty abhors the idea of, “that’s how we’ve always done things.” Listen, if you don’t know why you’re doing something, you’re probably doing it wrong.

I ran BeatBlogging.Org on the down and dirty principles. We never made subjective changes to posts for the sake of making changes. Every edit we made had a clear purpose.

We also weren’t afraid of making changes or corrections to posts. Especially on the Web, the idea of finality doesn’t exist. We can publish content as the story unfolds. That’s really liberating.

We didn’t put monster production values into our podcasts (they are still better than most journalism podcasts, however). Rather, we focused on providing great content and we realized we couldn’t do it all. We knew that we weren’t going to be able to match broadcast level production values, but we also realized our users didn’t care.

Down and dirty means less overhead, less meetings and more of listening to users. If there was ever an industry that needed down and dirty, it is journalism today. Resources are being drastically cut, and the old bloated way of doing things doesn’t work anymore.

Here are some of the core principles of down and dirty:

• Focus on ROI — With limited resources it’s all about getting the most out of what we have.
• Balance quality with quantity — After you admit to yourself how much resources you have, you need to realistically figure out how much of something you can produce. From there, the quality will follow. You can’t put quality before quantity in a world of limited resources. If you don’t produce enough content on the Web, for instance, you’ll drastically hurt your ability to get page views, find users and build an audience. The next principle will help guide you further.
• Good enough is usually good enough — With limited time and resources, our goal should be to produce a product that the vast majority of people consider to be quality. You can’t please everyone. It will never happen. If you try to, you’ll please no one.
• Perfection is an enemy, not a friend — The problem with perfection is it’s an inherently nebulous concept that leads to subjective changes and wasted time. Journalism is inherently an imperfect business. We can make changes down the road. Perfection suggests finality. There isn’t a lot of finality in the world, so why should we strive to create it? The pursuit of perfection is more of a mental disorder than a sound management principle.
• More content creators than managers — Journalism is all about content and products, not about managers, editors and meetings. A certain amount of managers and editors are needed, but most news organizations are very top heavy. You want to be bottom heavy. That’s called being down and dirty.
• Beta is the new gold master — There is nothing wrong with creating a beta product. Even so-called shipping products have mistakes. Gold master software always has bugs. Cars always have defects. If mistakes happen anyway, why not embrace them? Why not say, we’ll put out what we can now, solicit feedback from users and then create a better product? In fact, there is rarely a greater sin than trying to create the perfect product without user input. You’ll usually find better results with creating a limited product, and then getting users involved to help improve the product. Same thing with reporting a story. Don’t wait for the perfect story. Get out there and report. Connect with users. Collaborate.
• Don’t duplicate work — If someone else is already doing something, do not also do it. Link, embed or excerpt their content. If parents are taking pictures at a high school football game, for instance, it’s makes much more sense to work out a deal with them than to spend staff resources on taking pictures at said game. If another news organization already covered a story, link to it. If you have something new to add, add it to a post excerpting the other news organization, but under no circumstances should you ever re-report. Re-reporting is something newspapers did in the 1980s. Don’t be a fool.
• Embrace open source — If someone else has already created a great piece of software, use that instead. Proprietary software is usually a money pit that quickly becomes outdated. Unless a proprietary CMS, for instance, is substantially better than Drupal, WordPress or Joomla, don’t invest in it. You’re wasting time and money for an inferior product (open source CMSs like Drupal are rapidly improving too). Open source also applies to processes and ways of conducting newsroom business. Learn from the best. Don’t reinvent the wheel.
• Creative commons and social networks are your friends — There is a lot of good content available under Creative Commons licenses. There is also a lot of good content available on social networks like Twitter, YouTube, Flickr, etc. Utilize it.
• Understand your audience – Every news organization has a slightly different audience. Different audiences prefer different content and different ways of covering content. Some audiences like long-form content, while others like serial blog posts and bullet point lists. You better understand which audience you have, because if you don’t, you’re wasting your time and your users time. Maybe your users would like podcasts. If they would, give them podcasts. If, on the other hand, your podcasts are flops, move on to something else.
• Don’t follow the herd — News organizations constantly do this. Editors and publishers hear some buzzword (podcasts and Twitter) and they jump on it. Listen, everything you do should have a purpose. Maybe creating podcasts makes a lot of sense (this was a huge buzzword in journalism five years ago). For a lot of news organizations, podcasts were a huge mistake. Why? Most news organizations created radio-like crap, instead of trying to create a Web-friendly product like Buzz Out Loud. It ended up being a massive waste of time and money. If you’re going to create something, understand why you’re going to create it.
• Let your users help — I’m a big gan of big photo galleries, but many journalists seem to think they’ll take forever to make. I mean, imagine writing 100 captions! Yeah, about that. Most people aren’t interested in reading 100 captions for one event. So don’t do it. Write one overview, and then allow users to tag and create their own captions for each photo. It will provide a better user experience and will save a lot of time. Note: I’m talking about big photo galleries, not short photo essays that rely on detailed captions. But the principle still stands.
• Never turn down free labor — If users want to help, let them help. Maybe they’ll tag photos for you (this is how Facebook works). If people are taking photos and videos of events and uploading them to Flickr and YouTube, use them.
• You can’t do it all — The day you realize this and go about your work realizing this, is the day you finally get what down and dirty is all about.
• Light IT – Heavy IT usually equals big headaches and inferior productivity. IT should always help you do your job better, but Heavy IT leads to the IT department fighting people over changes. Instead, use Light IT and Web apps. I’d much rather go with Light IT and Google Apps, Zoho, wikis, Web-based e-mail, BaseCamp, WordPress, etc than rely on Heavy IT. How do you tell if you have Heavy or Light IT? Simple. Is your IT department about helping you figure out what’s possible or about telling you what’s not possible? Oh, and, Heavy IT is really expensive. If IT isn’t making you money, what is it doing exactly?
• Throw crap at the wall — While everything should have a purpose, experimentation is needed. But there is a difference between good and bad experimentation. First, any experiment should be based on some research and logical thought process. “We should do X because it’s a better way to convey Y to readers.” But the other key to experimentation is to not be afraid to pull the plug. Experiment fast. Experiment cheap. Always experiment to make a better product.

In future posts we’ll look at examples of down and dirty work in journalism, as well of examples of the opposite.

I want to share with you a project I’ve been working on, and why I think it illustrates how engagement and interaction are coming to all old medium platforms.

Since earlier this year I have been helping best-selling thriller author Joseph Finder with his social media strategy for his new book Vanished and the book’s main character, Nick Heller. Heller is on Twitter and Facebook (Facebook is an experiment that we just launched this week, while we have been using Twitter for months). But he’s not just tweeting lines from the book or providing a Twitter novelization, but rather Heller’s Twitter account is a complimentary experience to the book that is centered around engagement.

I believe that within a generation it will be expected that characters like Heller will interact with users. The days of one-way experiences are coming to an end. Think of the generation after mine that has grown up with both the Internet and social networks. Do you really think they content with the same products that my grand parents loved? Doubtful.

We really wanted to create an experience for people:

• We interact on social media — If you tweet something worthwhile at Heller, he’ll tweet back at you, in character. Want to know some back story about him? Just ask. Want to ask questions about the case he is working on right now? Just ask. Heller responds to DMs and @replies. He also retweets interesting tweets. There was no point in putting Heller on Twitter if we were going to treat Twitter like it was a book.
• Blurring the lines between reality and fiction — We wanted to create a social media experience that made people believe that Heller was a real person, even if they already knew he was a character (and that the stories of corruption that he discusses could be real). First, Heller is always in character, but he acts like a character in the real world, not a character in a distant novel. Heller might be tweeting about a current investigation that he is working on about an AIG-style firm that involves some misplaced funds and possible corruption. Heller will then tweet links to real news stories about companies that did the same thing. Or if Heller is talking about looking over CCTV footage to find out what happened to someone, he’ll then tweet about how many CCTVs there are in DC, American, the world, etc.
• Additional content – Heller has additional fictional narratives that aren’t in the book that he tweets and talks about. We decided early on that we had to offer additional fictional content on Twitter. We always try to tie these side narratives to either current events or events in the past. This way we can link to news stories and provide facts and figures that help us blur the lines between reality and fiction.
• Creating a great experience even if you’re not a fan — You don’t have to be a fan of Joseph Finder, Nick Heller or Vanished to get value out of Heller’s Twitter feed (or know of any of those). We link to and discuss interesting stories involving politics, political corruption, espionage, corporate espionage, information technology and general stupidity. If you just want awesome links and witty takes on the news and world, Heller is an account worth following.
• Photos, why not? – We have a treasure trove of research photos for this book that we’ll be incorporating into the Twitter feed. Vanished takes place mostly in DC and the surrounding suburbs. All the events in the book either take place at real DC locations or are modeled after real locations. In addition, we’ve used smartphone pics and TwitPic for side narratives too. It’s all about creating an immersive experience.
• It’s an experiment – We would be the first to admit that sticking a fictional character on Twitter is an experiment, and it may not be a success (although it is low risk). The book isn’t out yet, so it’s hard to determine the success (Nick Heller will be appearing in a four book series over the next four years). Our goal is to provide a complimentary product that serves fans of the book, while also keeping interest up in between books.
• Social media is here to stay — I don’t know if Twitter and Facebook or any of the other current social networks will be around in 10 years, but I do know that the idea that media should be social is here to stay. People like interactivity and smart journalists, musicians, movie stars, book authors, characters in books and movies, etc will grok that.
• If Heller can do it, so can journalists — Journalism and social media go together so well. If people on Twitter are enjoying Heller on Twitter, I certainly think people will enjoy journalists on Twitter. Our research at BeatBlogging.Org indicates that journalists can get a lot of value out of social media. The best advice is to go where your audience is, and people are flocking to social media.

Here are some sample tweets of Nick’s that show the range of what he tweets about:

A response to a question about Heller’s life:

I’m a private spy, @Battleborne. No kids or wife. Not sure if I’ll ever settle down. Too busy with work, investigating firms, politicians…

Book based

Got a phone call from my Nephew Gabe. My brother is missing. His wife is in the hospital with a concussion.

Political corruption

Non-shocker of the day: Louisiana ex-congressman William Jefferson convicted of bribery in freezer cash case:http://bit.ly/creOQ

Helping out servicemembers (Heller is ex-military, so he’ll tweet military-related tweets and links for people)

Crafty? @OpGratitude needs #handmade scarves for holiday care packages–sent with LOVE to deployed #military! #knit#crochet #fleece #SOT

ATM news (Heller requently tweets about the lack of safety at ATMs)

Apparenty arming an ATM with pepper spray is a really bad idea: http://bit.ly/bhB58

The WTF?

High Fructose Corn Syrup, just like sugar, with an extra bit of Mercury thrown in for extra goodness: http://bit.ly/J1Sah

I encourage you to follow Nick Heller on Twitter (@NickHeller) and give me feedback. I’d love to hear what you think.

Both of these issues point to two inherent limitations with cloud-based services (software and storage that reside on the Internet, not on your hard drive). I use Gmail for e-mail, Google Docs for writing documents, DropBox for backing up my files, etc.

Well, when your Internet is not working and your power is out, cloud-based services don’t work. I was unable to write anything yesterday because I couldn’t access Google Docs. (While I could write in offline mode, I needed the Internet to get to my notes and files that I needed for my work. I also have a nasty habit of keeping some notes in my e-mail.) And while I could check my e-mail on my iPhone, I was unable to do any heavy duty e-mail writing, especially e-mails that contained attachments.

Don’t get me wrong, I love cloud storage and cloud applications. It allows me to work from any computer with a modern Web browser and an Internet connection. If one of my computers breaks, I can simply switch to another and continue working. My fortunes aren’t tied to a single machine.

But when the Internet is wonky or the power is out, local storage starts to look really good. I’ll have to work on a better solution that allows me to work better when I’m not online.

Everything went fairly well. Some minor health issues, but she’ll be fine in a few days. We’ll be back in 10 days for another round of shots.

If you were going to start charging for a free, ad-supported product, would you pick one of the nation’s worst economic times to start?

Well, would you? People are cutting back on spending right now. I don’t understand why now — besides desperation — makes sense for news orgs to erect paywalls.

Industries considered traditionally “recession proof” aren’t doing so well in this economic downturn. Even the venerable land line is being axed at many businesses. If an industry that hasn’t relied on advertising is feeling the heat right now, how do you honestly think a traditionally ad-supported product like news will do if news orgs try to charge for it?

There is only one way to find out, and it looks like we will later this year. Godspeed.

Being paid for your work sounds like a good idea. But the AP is going further than ever before with its copyright claims over its content, and blatantly ignoring Fair Use:

Tom Curley, The A.P.’s president and chief executive, said the company’s position was that even minimal use of a news article online required a licensing agreement with the news organization that produced it. In an interview, he specifically cited references that include a headline and a link to an article, a standard practice of search engines like Google, Bing and Yahoo, news aggregators and blogs.

Asked if that stance went further than The A.P. had gone before, he said, “That’s right.” The company envisions a campaign that goes far beyond The A.P., a nonprofit corporation. It wants the 1,400 American newspapers that own the company to join the effort and use its software.

The AP either has never heard of the Fair Use Doctrine or openly opposes it. I’m betting on the latter. Now, it’s important to note that Fair Use is a defense, not a right and it doesn’t explicitly spell out anything about word counts, headlines, links, etc.

But from the people I have talked to, headlines and links fall under current definitions of Fair Use. The question then is this: Is the AP gearing up for a court battle? If they implement this policy they will find themselves in court by at least the EFF and probably many more.

Some more thoughts:

1. I hope the AP didn’t spend too much time or money developing this DRM-like “wrapper” — Hackers will quickly break whatever copy protection AP devises, and I’m not sure how many member newspapers will join in anyway. Beyond that, I’m not convinced this wrapper will survive legal challenges. This could have been a giant waste of time and money.
2. This wrapper better not harm user experience – DRM always works like this: It never stops people who really want to steal or break the law, but it almost always hinders law abiding, paying customers. Will this extra layer of code eat up CPU cycles and RAM, bring computers to a halt and not even work on some machines? My guess is that this negatively impacts law abiding users. User experiences matter.
3. People may simply stop using AP content — If AP content is to become inherently un-Web friendly (unsharable, which is how the Web works), wouldn’t it stand to reason that people will simply use other content instead? I like sharing links. If the AP wants to stop me from doing that — and by extension, sending traffic their way — I’ll read and link to other content. There is nothing the AP does that is that unique that I can’t live without the AP.
4. Not everyone at the AP thinks this is a good strategy — From what I can gather from people I know at the AP, not everyone is on board with this strategy of fighting how the Web works. The AP feels like a disjointed company. Some clearly don’t get the Web and dislike it, while others at the company are developing kick-ass Web and mobile apps. The AP has one of the premiere news apps on the iPhone, and yet other people at the AP dislike the Web. I can only imagine the division decisions like these are creating.
5. Maybe the AP wants a court challenge — Fair Use remains a murky concept on the Internet, and a lot has changed with the fortunes of traditional news publishers. Even though I don’t think a court challenge would go the AP’s way, if they received a more favorable view of Fair Use handed down by the courts, it might be a game changer.

Inoffensive, “objective” journalism isn’t good journalism, it’s good business. At least it was before the Web. In a world where printing presses — and by extension, competition — are scarce, it’s good business to try to appeal to the largest audience possible. A good way to appeal to the largest mass possible is to try not offending anyone.

This naturally leads to journalism that tries to triangulate both sides and sit somewhere in between. Not every story or issue has two correct sides. Good journalism is about trying to find the truth, but the truth can be offensive to people who don’t want to hear it.

Writing a story about climate change? Get a scientist on the record talking about how it is happening, then go find someone to say that it is not happening or that man isn’t causing it. Then make no determination of which side has more evidence or what the preponderance of science supports.

Instead, take the inoffensive — often ineffectual — middle ground. Let readers “decide” based on the “evidence” presented. This will usually lead to many stories and issues appearing as if there is consensus. Offense minimized.

Then came the Internet, and smart people didn’t want this limp reporting anymore. They wanted experienced and knowledgeable journalists to help them make sense of it all. People want journalists to help them find the truth, no matter how offensive that truth may be to some.

This has become a problem for newspapers. The notion of modern objectivity doesn’t serve journalism, it serves making money. At least it did.

After the Web took off, niche publications, blogs, social media, etc began to flourish. Suddenly it was OK to offend people. Suddenly it was OK to tell people what they didn’t want to hear.

Why? The barriers to entry for starting a Web site or blog are incredibly low. Building a printing press took a large investment. A good way to pay if off — and rack in monster profits — was to try to appeal to as large of an audience as possible. But starting a blog is free and building a professional Web site is a fraction of the cost of a printing press (let alone operating and running said press).

Now appealing to everyone doesn’t make business sense. At least, it’s not a requirement. Suddenly it makes sense to appeal to niches. The nicheification of content is at the core of the Web. People have diverse interests, and the Web allows those interests to flourish.

Want to write about just science stories? Start a blog for free, and you’ll probably find more success by not trying to be in the middle ground all the time. If you’re knowledgeable about a topic, people want to hear what you know and think.

I don’t envision a future where we see giant 1,000 person newsrooms anytime soon. But if newspapers want to survive, they’ll have to consider creating passionate journalism again. They’ll have to consider offending people.

They key to offending people is to be right. I can respect someone who challenges my beliefs when they are right. After all, that’s a main way my beliefs change over time.

To bring this back to the lede, newspapers need more Dan Froomkins, not less. Dan was not afraid to offend people, and at one point, he probably challenged everyone’s views. He was willing to tell the truth and be fair and honest.

His brand of objectivity wasn’t to give both sides to every story, but for him to try his best to find the truth. And that can often be “offensive.” But that’s also what made Dan so popular and respected.

People are turning to blogs and new media outlets precisely because they find much of traditional media too afraid to tell the truth. But if newspapers accept that objectivity isn’t about telling all sides to every story, but rather about finding the truth, I believe they’ll find better success moving forward on the Web.

The notion of “objectivity” has been a big part of the downfall of traditional journalism. It turned into passionless, he said-she said nonsense. And people are smart enough to know that no one is truly objective. That’s why transparency trumps all.

The ideal would be to be transparent about who you are, what you do and what you believe and then try to go about objectively reporting. That’s what I strive to do.

The altar of objectivity has led traditional journalism down an unfortunate road of giving both sides of every issue equal time. That’s not objective. That’s just perverse.

Being objective should be the quest for finding truth, not for equivocating on every issue.

But no matter how we define objectivity, transparency should be the key to what modern journalism is about. It’s at the heart of the social Web.

Being the editor of BeatBlogging.Org has been a great ride. I’ve learned a lot about how beat reporters are adapting to the Web, how social media is changing journalism and where journalism is heading.

Working with NYU’s Jay Rosen has been a great learning experience. It’s very invigorating to work with someone who is interested in answering, “what’s next?” And in journalism, that’s the No. 1 question we all must answer.

What’s next for me? I don’t know yet. I hope to be able to contribute to the search for journalism next.

I’m interested in pushing journalism forward, in finding new ways to deliver content to people, in making journalism work on the Internet. We need journalism now more than ever, but journalism must adapt to fit new mediums, new paradigms and new ways of consumption.

I’m interested in working with people who want to move forward, not fixate on the past. I’m interested in working with people who believe that the Internet can offer incredible possibilities for journalism. I’m interested in working with people who want to fight to make journalism better, even in this dark hour.

I believe in journalism. I believe in the power of the Internet. And I believe that the Internet and journalism can work together to make incredible content and products for the world.

The fate of BeatBlogging.Org is undecided for now. I can at least assure you that the site will not be going away, as it is too strong of a new media brand to let die or even languish.

BeatBlogging.Org has certainly made me a better journalist and more prepared to fight the battles that lie ahead. I know that we travel a perilous road in journalism, but it’s a journey worth taking. The world needs good journalism.