Thought I’d share this fantastic presentation delivered by Ryan Thornburg, an online journalism professor from UNC-Chapel Hill, at the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication convention. Good stuff!

Bogus ‘Obama Mom’ Grants Lure Students

by Sharona Coutts ProPublica, July 23, 10:34 a.m.

July 26: This story has been corrected.

Listen to Marketplace’s version of this story.

After being laid off from her job as a high school teacher in Dayton, Ohio, Nicole Massey decided to go back to college. For months, she scoured the Web for ways to fund her tuition, while supporting her 10-year-old son, Tyler. So when ads turned up in Massey’s inbox claiming that President Barack Obama had created special college grants and scholarships for single mothers, her hopes soared.

“You see his picture,” Massey said, “so I clicked on it.” The link took her to a new window, where she was asked to enter her name, age and other information about the degree she wanted. The site then produced a list of schools that lined up with Massey’s choices.

Almost immediately, recruiters from for-profit colleges, including the University of Phoenix, Kaplan University, Grand Canyon University and a couple of local schools, bombarded Massey with e-mails and calls.

“That’s when I would bring up the thing, ‘What about the Obama loans? What about the money for the single moms in the stimulus?’” she said. “And they would say, ‘Well, we’ll call you back with more information about that.’”

They never did — and little wonder: “There is no such thing as an Obama grant for moms,” said Robert Shireman, who until early this month was deputy undersecretary at the U.S. Department of Education. “Moms are eligible for federal financial aid generally — Pell Grants, student loans and other aid — but nothing specific to moms or single moms.” Nevertheless, the Obama mom ads have become “ubiquitous,” he said.

For-profit universities and career colleges are flourishing in the down economy, thanks in part to a gusher of taxpayer money flowing into the federal government’s Pell Grant program for economically needy students. Hundreds of thousands of Americans have already enrolled in for-profit colleges, which are fiercely competing for new recruits.

The grant windfall has fueled another boom: for online marketers that gather contact information from prospective students and sell it to schools. Just a few years ago, these firms, known as lead generators, fed the subprime mortgage machine. Now they are earning more than $1 billion a year for finding prospective students, according to one industry estimate.

Consumer advocates say they are alarmed by parallels between the subprime mortgage industry and for-profit schools, which also have come under fire for targeting low-income groups and signing up students for loans that can leave them buried in debt. Some schools earn nearly 90 percent of their revenue from federal student aid programs.

Single moms, the critics say, are especially vulnerable.

“In comparison with an 18-year-old traditional college student, a single mom faces unique, often unsurpassable obstacles to getting an education,” said Greg C. Frazier of Community Connections of Jacksonville, a group that works with disadvantaged women in Florida. “Frequently she will be lured by the promises of low-cost, easy online courses that in reality do not deliver.”

Harris Miller, president of the Career College Association, said the 1,400 for-profit colleges, universities and trade schools his organization represents object to using misleading or false advertising to recruit students. But Miller said lead generators often are subcontractors a couple of steps removed from a school’s recruiting operation, making them hard to police.

Shireman, while denouncing the ads, said the Education Department lacks authority to crack down on subcontractors. A spokeswoman for the Federal Trade Commission, which does have such power, called the ads misleading but declined to say whether the agency is investigating them.

Vital Market for Career Schools

Mothers are an important market for the for-profit schools. Women account for 65 percent of their students, and more than half have dependent children, according to the Career College Association. In many instances, returning to school could provide mothers with a step up to a better job and improved circumstances for their children.

But women who’ve responded to the ads told ProPublica they felt “targeted,” “victimized” and “insulted” once they discovered the Obama grants do not exist.

When banner ads and pop-ups appeared in her Facebook profile and on the Web site Blackplanet.com, Lisa Jackson, a single mom from Washington, D.C., clicked on the links.

Jackson lost her job as a project manager in a furniture dealership last year and spent a lot of time online looking for ways to escape unemployment. She realized there were no Obama grants for single moms after receiving e-mails from several for-profit schools.

“I feel it’s an insult to my intelligence to some degree,” she said.

The use of President Obama’s name also troubled Jackson, who is African-American.

“Some of these advertisers are playing on the sense that we have our first African-American president,” she said, noting that Obama’s image and name have been used to promote mortgage refinancing in minority neighborhoods. “It’s sad. They’ve used it for the wrong reasons.”

Priya Raghubir, a marketing professor at New York University’s Stern School of Business, said it’s not a coincidence that marketers are recycling techniques from the subprime mortgage boom. Obama has strong appeal among younger people, minority groups and lower-income households, she said. The same people were disproportionately targeted for subprime loans, according to research by the Department of Housing and Urban Development.

“For these groups particularly, he is a figure, a celebrity, who is highly liked and also signals something they would like to associate with — the way he has used education to break a number of barriers and get to where he has at such a young age,” Raghubir said.

Watchdog groups, Congress, the Education Department and some investors have voiced concerns (PDF) about recruitment at for-profits schools. A recent report (PDF) by the College Board found that more than half of the students at for-profits graduate with $30,500 or more in debt — compared with about a quarter of private college grads and 12 percent from public schools.

Middlemen in the Recruiting Game

Last year’s economic stimulus bill added $17 billion for the government’s need-based Pell Grant program, and an expansion signed earlier this year by Obama is expected to provide around 820,000 additional grant awards over a decade, according to an Education Department spokesman. The money began rolling in during the fiscal year that ended in June, and while public, private and for-profit schools all saw big gains in Pell Grant revenue, the overall increase to for-profits was highest — 70 percent over the prior year.

The University of Phoenix — the largest for-profit school — took in more than $1 billion from some 300,000 Pell Grants alone in 2009-2010, Education Department data show. That’s about what Phoenix’s parent company, the Apollo Group, spent on “selling and promotional” activities in 2009, according to company financial filings.

For-profits spend heavily on lead generation, typically some 20 to 30 percent of their ad and marketing budget, according to Ampush Media, a San Francisco lead generation firm. An Ampush research report prepared in February estimated that higher-education leads were a $1 billion market and said that market was “expanding rapidly” while mortgage leads had only “muted growth.”

Experian PLC, a company that provides consumer credit reports and advice, also operates lead-generation businesses. The company once used a video of a woman dancing energetically in front of her computer to funnel people to one of its websites — LowerMyBills.com.

The site was a major source of leads for subprime lenders during the housing boom, according to Sam Rogers, mortgage industry analyst at the Center for Responsible Lending, a nonprofit that monitors lending practices. (The Sandler Foundation, the principal funder of ProPublica, also provides significant financial support to the center.)

Experian used the same video at another of its websites, ClassesUSA.com, which collects information to sell to colleges. Another ad for LowerMyBills.com features a buxom blonde dancing suggestively under the text, “New Housing Bill Passed! $133,000 Mortgage for Under $529/Month!” That same dancing blonde sometimes also linked to ClassesUSA.com.

A third Experian ad is an animation of two young women walking side by side, with a banner saying, “Obama Asks Moms to Return to School.”

Steve Krenzer, president of Experian Interactive Media, declined to comment on why Experian used the ads to target both subprime mortgage borrowers and students.

“Here’s an example of an icon of the American financial sector luring unwitting consumers into prohibitively expensive borrowing that they can’t afford and that the taxpayers will have to make good,” said Barmak Nassirian, spokesman for the American Association of Collegiate Registrars and Admissions Officers, an industry group whose members include some for-profit schools.

ProPublica asked the two other major consumer credit reporting companies, Equifax and TransUnion, whether they had any such ads. TransUnion said it does not engage in direct-to-consumer lead generation. Equifax did not comment.

The most common ads are pop-ups that show up onscreen automatically. ProPublica also found examples of websites that referred to Obama mom grants or loans and provided links to lead generators.

“Barack Obama has made the pledge to help moms go back to school while the government pays for it,” said one. “Unemployed mothers can snatch a college diploma at the comforts of their own home without spending a dime for baby-sitting (sic),” read another.

Schools pay anywhere from a few dollars up to $85 per lead, said Daniel Kim, president of a small New Jersey-based lead generation company called MyCS Network. Although some nonprofit schools use lead generators, the biggest clients for higher-education leads are for-profit universities, according to Kim, who has worked in the industry since 2004.

ProPublica contacted several lead generators linked to the Obama mom ads, but all either declined to comment or did not return calls or e-mails. To determine which schools were buying those leads, we asked volunteers from the ProPublica Reporting Network to click on the links, fill out the online forms and report back.

Hana Shepherd, of New York City, received 10 calls and nine e-mails from recruiters within a day of filling out a form. Susan Sawyers, also of New York City, received pages of e-mails.

The schools included Walden University, Kaplan University, Ashford University, American InterContinental University, Capella University, Colorado Technical University and the University of Phoenix — all for-profit institutions.

Volunteers also received e-mails from two private, non-profit universities: Golden Gate University and the University of Southern California Rossier School of Education. Jennifer Hanlon, director of marketing at 2tor, the company that manages the Rossier School’s online advertising, said she was surprised and disappointed to hear about the ad.

Part of the problem, said Hanlon, is that lead generators frequently farm out work to subcontractors. “It’s frustrating being an advertiser because you contract with one person and they have a group of affiliates they work with,” she said. “You just have to be a diligent advertiser and find out where you’re being seen, and if you see anything on the shady side, you have to do your due diligence.”

A spokesman for Capella said school officials also “periodically review messaging” used by lead generators, and that they had terminated Capella’s “involvement” with several ad campaigns earlier this year after discovering they were “paraphrasing President Obama.” A spokeswoman for Golden Gate University said the school would “immediately” ask any of its lead generators to stop should they find the marketers using Obama mom ads. The other schools did not comment.

At our request, volunteers asked the lead generators and college recruiters about Obama grants or scholarships for moms. While no recruiter claimed the grants actually existed, they generally did not dispute that they did. More often, said Shepherd, “I was told that a financial aid person could assist me later when I asked about the Obama grants.”

A Regulatory Vacuum

At a round-table meeting in Northern Virginia this winter, Education Secretary Arne Duncan was surprised by a question from one of the attendees.

“One of the students participating in a discussion actually asked: ‘Is there an Obama scholarship for moms? Because I’ve seen ads about it,’” said Shireman, who was Duncan’s deputy.

Duncan had never heard of the ads, let alone an “Obama” scholarship for moms. But Shireman had. “I’ve seen the ad myself on my personal e-mail,” he said, describing it as “misleading.” Yet the department lacks authority to stop the advertisements, Shireman said.

“We’re not a general regulatory agency around issues of marketing,” he said. “The Department of Education doesn’t have any direct authority over third-party entities, unless those third-party entities are working for the schools.”

The department recently released draft regulations that would strengthen its ability to crack down on misleading ads, Shireman said. But the new rules apply only to the schools or companies that work for them directly — not to subcontractors.

The Federal Trade Commission does have jurisdiction over fraudulent marketing, and is “actively looking at scams that use news about the economic stimulus package to falsely claim that the package includes money for government grants, home repair, to pay off debts, scholarships,” said Lois Greisman, director of the agency’s Marketing Division.

But Greisman said she could not comment on whether the FTC is looking at any specific entity and could not point to any previous enforcement action involving the Obama mom ads. Blackplanet.com did not respond to our request for comment and Yahoo! declined to comment about ads on its sites.

Miller, the Career College Association president, said for-profit schools have objected to the tactics used by some lead generators. In one instance, he said, schools were stunned to discover that a lead generator was using the promise of free food or housing to attract people to enter their data. “No one thought this was OK,” he said.

Schools often work with a primary lead generator and may require that company to sign a contract giving the school oversight of ad copy. Miller said his group is encouraging schools to hire their own “mystery shoppers” to police lead generators.

But Kim, of the lead generator MyCS Network, said all misleading techniques make the industry “look bad.” They persist, he said, for a simple reason — they work.

“It’s tough because there are these large companies doing it,” Kim said, “and they’re getting these leads to the schools, and the schools think these leads are good.”

ProPublica’s Joe Kokenge contributed to this report.

Several ProPublica readers belonging to our Reporting Network assisted reporter Sharona Coutts with identifying schools buying leads. If you’d like to help ProPublica with its reporting, join our Reporting Network.

Correction (7/24): An earlier version of this story incorrectly described the University of Southern California Rossier School of Education as a public school; USC is a private, non-profit university.

Correction (7/26): An earlier version of this story also incorrectly described Golden Gate University as a for-profit school; Golden Gate University is a private, non-profit school.

The caller on the other end of the line is angry, to put it mildly.

After months on the job hunt, he’s finally found something to fit his skillset. But after a few promising e-mails and a great phone interview, his potential employer suddenly informed him he was no longer in the running.

And he’s sure it’s your fault. Well, it’s really Google fault. Actually, it’s the fault of the guy who rear-ended him back in 2002, triggering a rage so intense the whole incident ended in an aggravated assault charge that was eventually dropped because it was all just a big misunderstanding.

Anyway, the point is you should take down that online story on the whole thing, because searching his name gives the impression that he deals with stress and confrontation by applying a tire iron to a windshield — which is totally not the case. And nobody wants to get lawyers involved, right?

Conversations like these are familiar to Web producers and online editors, who are working to develop new strategies for dealing with very real concerns from the subjects of old stories.

It’s a complicated issue that’s typically determined on a case-by-case basis. But editors from a variety of media do share some common techniques, from unpublishing to follow-ups. Poynter’s NewsU even has a whole Webinar on the subject taught by Toronto Star Public Editor Kathy English.

Then’s there’s the quality advice we get from NewsRadio’s Joe Rogan, circa 1996 (hat tip to @grapechick for the quote and @bluestraggler for the ID):

“You can’t take something off the Internet. It’s like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool. Once it’s in there, it’s in there.”

Good discussion of your unpublishing policy is essential, and writing it explicitly in your ethics policy is even better. The better your staff understands how to apply the policy, the more consistently they will apply it when the issue comes up, and that’s a crucial part to your news org’s credibility.

What policies do you have in place for unpublishing requests? Is it ever discussed in your newsroom? Do you think it should have a place in your ethics policy?

People do all sorts of things for free.

They learn to play the guitar and restore old cars. They collect sports memorabilia or brew beer in their kitchens (my personal favorite).

But aside from regular hobbies, they also do things for which professionals are often paid a lot of money: like edit encyclopedias or develop operating systems.

This got Wired contributor Daniel Pink and NYU Professor Clay Shirky thinking. The magazine published a really great conversation in its latest issue between the two about what they’re calling the “cognitive surplus,” or what happens when people stop worrying about television and learn to love the Internet.

Shirky explains that the collective potential of everyone with a computer amounts to something amazing.

We can do back-of-the-envelope calculations, for example, using Wikipedia, to see how far we still have to go. All the articles, edits, and arguments about articles and edits represent around 100 million hours of human labor. That’s a lot of time. But remember: Americans watch about 200 billion hours of TV every year.

The publication of this discussion less than 24 hours after the finale of Lost seems to make it even more apt, but I digress.

It seems that so far, news organizations have been pretty bad at harnessing the potential of this cognitive surplus. Sure, CNN has iReport and we’re starting to see more local news mobile apps that allow users to share photos from their phones, but we should be doing more.

How do we make our news sites at least as engaging as Wikipedia, which edges time spent on the average news site by about a minute, despite being an encyclopedia? How can we encourage multimedia content creation like Facebook, which boasts 400 million users?

I’m not sure there’s an easy answer to that. But here’s a good first step to conceptualizing things, courtesy of Shirky:

When someone buys a TV, the number of consumers goes up by one, but the number of producers stays the same. When someone buys a computer or mobile phone, the number of consumers and producers both increase by one.

Especially in an age of shrinking newsrooms, that concept is big.

Oddly enough, I came across a talk from Pink last week on the related topic of motivation. He pointed out that one of the reasons people do amazing things in their free time — like learning to play the guitar — is because they draw satisfaction from mastery.

That’s good news for the news. It means that one of our core goals — helping people understand their world — aligns perfectly with a primary human motivator — to learn more about something.

So the question is twofold. How do we harness our audience’s creative surplus? And how can we challenge our audience to master the news?

Discuss among yourselves. You are the producers, after all.

Original photo courtesy hyku

I got the opportunity about a month or so ago to talk with Dr. Neal Lane ahead of his speech at N.C. State about the future of science in America. A molecular physicist who served as National Science Foundation director in 1993 and as President Bill Clinton’s science adviser in 1998, he had some really unique insight about the history of science and the challenges scientists will face going forward.

One of those challenges, as he made abundantly clear, was communicating with the public.

An edited version of the Q&A was published in The Charlotte Observer, but I thought it would be worthwhile to post a more complete portion of the conversation I found most interesting: that scientists must embrace the Web to help translate science to the public.

It’s important for the science community to find ways to reach out to the public, and probably the most effective way already today, but certainly over the next decade, is the Internet.

Surveys show that when people want to know something specific about science, or probably anything else, they go to the Internet. Most people get their news from the television, but when they want to follow up on something, they go to the Internet.

Now the Internet has all kinds of information, but it doesn’t sift things very well. So you can find all kinds of stuff on the Internet. If you know something about what you’re looking for, you can sort that out for yourself, but if you don’t, you’re really starting from scratch and it’s very difficult.

I think scientists and organizations that they are involved with will need to give a lot more attention to the Internet and how blogs are used and who writes for them and how the public reads them. A lot of social science, a lot of behavioral science needs to be done to help the rest of us understand how best to communicate people in this information age.

Luckily, there are a lot of scientists who are already taking Lane’s advice — especially here in the Triangle.

The ScienceOnline conference, the creation of Bora Zivkovic and Anton Zuiker, is dedicated to showcasing and discussing the best ways to use the Web to promote science understanding.  One of the things I’ve found most valuable is its ability to create an ongoing discussion between scientists, science communicators and science journalists about this shared goal.

What do you think? How can these three groups work to more effectively use the Web to promote science literacy? Which ones do you think are doing the best job?

These quotes and stories are low-hanging fruit conceived around the table at the editorial board meeting when no one can think of a better angle. It’s lazy and a waste of valuable journalistic resources.

On this topic, never underestimate the eloquence of a T-Rex.

There are two big reasons why this journalism is so shoddy.

For one, our audience has the ability to think thoughts. They also have the ability to express them to one another. Assuming people can do both of these things without journalists, what are we actually adding?

It’s tripe.

The second problem lies in the difference between facts and opinion. So often when we interview someone off the street, he or she offers some combination of the two. Even more often, the reporter makes little effort to distinguish them from one another, and both make it into the story.

Consider four hypothetical quotes for and against the recently passed health care reform bill.

“This bill will place a bureaucrat between me and my doctor.”

“Health care is a moral obligation the country must take seriously. It’s the responsibility of the government to do what’s right.”

“I shouldn’t have to pay for someone else’s health care, and I don’t like the government forcing me to buy something.”

“We need this bill because it will lower everyone’s insurance premiums, which are really high.”

Which of these statements are opinion and which are just wrong? (Hint: PolitiFact can sort that out)

Regular people on the street shouldn’t be expected to be experts on these stories. That makes it hard to argue that journalists should ask them the “tough questions.” But the problem is that spreading this tripe perpetuates the confusion that has become ingrained in these discussions.

And that’s actually the opposite of our job description.

I’m not making the argument that journalists should limit their sources to experts and suits with nothing but facts and data.

There are plenty of quality sources among “regular people” who have been affected by the issues in real ways. When we make the effort to find them, their input becomes more valuable and gives our audience greater insight. For this purpose, we need anecdotes and emotion because they make the abstract tangible and understandable.

I think News 14 did a good job in this regard following the passage of health care reform. We profiled a small business owner who pays the entire cost of his employees’ premiums for their so-called “Cadillac plan” because he says it’s the right thing to do. He’s against the bill. We also profiled a mother whose son survived cancer at a young age only to live the rest of his life with a pre-existing condition. She’s in favor of the bill.

The piece is far from perfect, but it’s a better approach to the story.

This isn’t the easy road. Forgoing the low-hanging fruit takes research, awareness and time. It also takes the courage to argue against the edit board’s insistence on getting the “reaction piece” by trumping it with more a powerful story.

Journalism like this is always worth the time and the effort.

And besides, we owe it to the man on the street.

Issue No. 1

As soon as I graduated from N.C. State, I picked up what my father jokingly insisted would be the last thing he’d ever buy for me — a beautiful diploma frame for a document it took me five years to earn.

I love N.C. State with a passion only a better writer than me can describe. My time there amounted to some of the best years of my life.

But despite the prominent place my B.S. holds on the wall in my office, the symbol of my proudest accomplishment is a large red book covered in a layer of dust in my library. It’s a bound collection of every edition of the Technician published during my tenure as editor-in-chief.

That paper made me the person I am today. It equipped me with the skills I needed to become a journalist and contribute something valuable to my community.

But now, the Technician is in trouble.

I’m not clear on all the details of what happened — the paper hasn’t published a story on it yet. But one thing is absolutely clear to me — the Technician cannot die. And I’m not alone in that opinion.

This student newspaper, which is just 10 years shy of its 100th anniversary, is too important to the community of North Carolina’s largest university, a university that commands more than half a billion dollars of taxpayer money.

So if you have a horse in this race — whether you’re a Technician alum, student, faculty, staff, community member or just a fan of student newspapers — I could use your help.

I’m trying to gather feedback on the way forward for this newspaper. I’m looking for anything you’re willing to give me, be it ideas, critique, complements or reasons why you believe it is doomed to fail.

You can deliver that feedback in a variety of ways, many of which are sure to evolve over the next two weeks:

• Leave me a voicemail by clicking on the Google Voice widget in this post. We need your affiliation with the paper (reader, staff member, alum, etc.) but you don’t have to provide your name.

• Comment on this blog post.

• Share your thoughts on Twitter, or link to your own blog post on the topic, using the #ncsutechnician hashtag.

• If you’re a student at N.C. State, consider joining the staff of the Technician. Whether you’re headed for journalism or not, writing for a daily newspaper will teach you some valuable lessons about teamwork, time management and meeting deadlines.

Also, if you’re an alumnus of the paper, enter your information into my alumni directory so I can keep track of where the Technician’s past staffers have ended up.

With your help, I believe we can help guide this newspaper back onto the right path and ensure the sweat and tears of so many students in this paper’s 90-year history won’t be in vain.

But at the top of the list, much to the chagrin of all my friends, is journalism.

That’s why I’ve been so thrilled to be a part of two different panels over the past year on the future of journalism. Even more than talking about journalism, I love learning about journalism, and panels like these never fail to teach me something new, whether the audience is filled with PR professionals or college journalists. It proves that the intellectual weight at any of these discussions is always heavily skewed toward the audience.

The two most valuable points I took from a recent panel at the Society for Collegiate Journalists‘ 2010 Biennial Convention came from UNC Chapel Hill Professor Paul Jones.

One point provides some validation, the other requires a change in my vocabulary.

As a Web producer at News 14 Carolina, I’m part of a team that’s constantly working to figure out how to include viewers into our news gathering and news distribution.

As a “serious journalist,” I’d like to tell you that means forming such a good relationship with our audience that they keep us constantly informed on their surroundings, helping us share that information accurately and effectively with the larger community.

But more often than not, it means helping them share photos of their pets in silly hats.

I had some reservations about this when I first started working at News 14.

Is this really journalism? Couldn’t our time be better spent? And why do dogs look so universally pitiful when they’re forced to accessorize?

Being fresh out of college, I soon learned those questions were purely academic. I began to realize that this content was fun. Our viewers and users loved it, and we certainly got plenty of laughs out of it.

But even though I knew content like this was bringing us closer to our viewers, I wasn’t quite able to articulate why. On Saturday, Jones did so eloquently.

Small talk, he said, leads to big talk.

In other words, entice your audience with photos of pets, and they’ll be more willing to listen to vital community information that will inform their decisions.

Jones pointed out that Toastmasters teaches a similar principle with regard to good speeches: Try to open with a joke.

Balancing the serious and the silly isn’t just recommended, it’s damn good journalism.

But there’s another piece of Saturday’s discussion that’s closely related and essential here — and it requires a fundamental change in our vocabulary.

Jones says when it comes to the news, it’s no longer about delivery — it’s about engaging in conversation.

I’ve thought a lot about that point in the past, specifically with regard to social media. I’ve used it in my presentations to our news executives and my explanations to reporters, anchors and producers about how and why we should use services like Facebook and Twitter.

Jones’ comments made me realize that for the most part, I was paying lip service to the concept of the “news conversation.”

The conversation is no longer limited to our social media presence. It applies universally to our stories, whether they’re online or on the air.

The press is no longer delivering content, it’s participating in a discussion. At times, we initiate that discussion with breaking news or an investigative piece. Other times, as was the case with protests in Iran, we help open the ongoing discussion to a wider audience. And sometimes, adorable photos of animals provide some idle (but endearing) chatter.

Good conversation takes quality information, respectful interaction and comprehensive follow-up.

This isn’t just a metaphor — it’s a guide to good journalism practices.

By no means were these the only two valuable points of information during this panel. When you gather that many passionate people in a room, you’re bound to come away with quality ideas — especially when those people are college journalists.

With regards to the future of technology, for example, I think fellow panelist and NCSU Student Media tech guru Fred Eaker said it best.

“Hold on to your hats.”

UPDATE: Andria Krewson penned a great post at Innovate This on 2007 on this very topic.

Sorry Kyra, we want to see other people.

Your news audience isn’t big on commitment — or exclusivity.

That’s the conclusion of the newest Pew Internet and American Life report, which found that a whopping 92 percent of Americans consume the news on multiple platforms. That’s national TV, local TV, the Internet, local newspapers, radio and national newspapers.

But when it comes to the Web — the third most popular platform behind local and national TV — 59 percent of Americans pair it with other sources to catch up on the news.

There is a ton of great information in this report, and it’s important enough for every newsroom to review as they craft their plans for the future. But I think the some of the most salient data deal with the nature of the average news consumer. It’s information that can and should drive coverage decisions today, now.

Our audience is disloyal

Newsrooms need a new mantra. At least that’s what the data show.

When we truly accept that our audience doesn’t see us as their exclusive source for news, complete coverage just doesn’t make sense anymore. Only 7 percent of Americans say they get their news from a single source.

Practically, that means the modern newsroom now fits into a broader news ecosystem. The only way to succeed is through assymetrical warfare, tactics that differ completely from the competition.

That’s far from the standard now. For example, back in August, local news stations covered an admittedly interesting piece about a Durham, N.C., neighborhood fed up with speeders. The neighborhood’s solution: a sign threatening consequences.

The story absolutely had news value. But that day all four news organizations in the Triangle covered it: News 14 Carolina (my employer), WRAL, NBC17 and ABC11.

Four stories, four reporters, utterly undifferentiated.

Every time a coverage decision is made, it comes at the expense of covering something else. If we had thought harder about the fact that our viewers don’t care which station the story is on, what other unreported stories could we have found?

Our audience is overwhelmed

Although a majority of those surveyed (55 percent) say it’s easier to keep up with the news than before, substantially more (70 percent) believe the news is overwhelming. That’s not good — if for no other reason than an economic one.

With conversations raging about the cost and value of news, and the ever present plans to monetize it, news producers have to be worried about an audience perception that they’re awash in our product. No scarcity means no value, and we’ll only be doing ourselves a disservice by continuing to flood the market with something that can’t be differentiated from the competition.

Quite literally, we’re eroding the jobs beneath our feet.

This carries a lot of the same implications as the previous point. We need to make efforts to halt the duplication of information that makes our coverage so mediocre. That means we need to rethink that recap of the Tiger apology and the repeated insistence on covering national stories with our own reporters.

It’s easy to go for the easy turn sometimes. There’s no doubt about that.

One-man-band reporters routinely lug around their cameras, shoot their video, gather their information, edit their tape, write their stories and produce their packages in a day. Why not pitch the, “Let’s get the reaction to Event X,” story every once in a while?

The trouble is that subpar storytelling adds up quickly. If that’s the kind of story you want to tell, just make sure you’re thinking critically about whether it’s adding any value to the conversation.

Our audience is helpful

Our viewers like the news so much, they want to help us make it. About 37 percent of Internet users say they’ve contributed to the creation of news, commentary or dissemination of news through social media.

That’s huge, because as newsrooms continue to shrink, we’ll be challenged to effectively harness the power of our audience, who unlike us can be everywhere at once.

This data should lend a great deal of legitimacy to the efforts of those in the newsroom who embrace social media. This isn’t a fad. It’s not going away.

Our audience wants us to tear down the walls. They want to connect with the people bringing them the news. They want to be a stakeholder in the process.

That means that crafting an effective social media strategy is crucial for the survival and relevancy of any news operation. That means different things to different organizations, and it means more than simply setting up Facebook and Twitter accounts.

A good social media policy can’t just be a document tucked away on the office intranet. Reporters, editors and producers have to exist in the social media sphere. It might not be one of their major functions, or even their favorite thing, but they must add it as a tool to their arsenal. Ignoring it would be akin to refusing to embrace the telephone.

The result will be more incentive for the audience to engage with the newsroom. And that makes sense.

We do work for them after all.

Photo courtesy Mahalie

In an example of journalism everywhere, a commuter snapped a Twitpic of a sleeping transit worker in Toronto and shared it via Twitter, sparking controversy.

People aren’t so sure about context-based ads, according to a Seattle Times study.

That piece in The New Republic on The Washington Post was lazy!

No it wasn’t!

Brightcove CEO is serious about “TV everywhere” — even more so than cable companies.

John Temple, former editor of the shuttered Rocky Mountain News, hired as editor of a hyperlocal Honolulu news start-up.

Despite growth in referrals from social media, the NYT’s pay wall may cripple sharing.

Journalists testing the value of social media by cutting off all sources except for Facebook and Twitter.

Google’s really “optimistic about the Internet,” you know, just in case you were wondering.

Is the question mark in television health news sensational and misleading? Yes, says Gary Schwitzer.