To those for whom quality of journalism isn’t a primary concern (read, UM System Board of Curators), I would — on a side note — add that cheapening the Missourian is also a dangerous business move. If I didn’t think that working at the Missourian would bring more to my education than a stint at the student newspaper of any other university, I wouldn’t have picked the Missouri School of Journalism. I wouldn’t have buried myself in the Midwest, and neither would have hundreds of out-of-state, tuition-paying, $25,000-a-year students.

I mentioned innovation because it is precisely, I believe, the point of having the Missourian, a paper my friend Matt Wynn aptly called the “canary in the coal mine” of the newspaper industry. If the Missourian loses that distinctive feature, it will be just like any other 7,000-circulation, small town paper, except with staff in training. The Missourian is that paper that’s not afraid to “fall flat on its face,” again as Matt puts it, in the interest of advancing the industry. Asking the Trib’ to save us from financial ruin — I say “us” because, in case you hadn’t noticed, I have a deep attachment to the Missourian — would be just a crutch, a temporary band-aid over the bullet hole, if you pardon the cliché, that wouldn’t change a thing to the sad state of the newspaper industry, which the Trib’ will too, eventually, have to deal with. That is not what the Missourian is about.

That’s where Tom’s suggestion of going online mainly comes into play. Journalism innovators have so far only skimmed the surface of what the Internet can do for our industry. I won’t repeat my common tech-evangelist diatribe, but a quick enumeration will do: interactivity, social networking, participatory journalism, data, hyperlocal, mobile platforms, public service, crowd-sourcing, community forums, Twitter, plenty other things we haven’t yet found a word for… There’s plenty to keep the students busy. With over a hundred unpaid staff, the Missourian has a unique opportunity to experience with everything other newsrooms don’t have the time and resources to do. I’m sure students would rather have the opportunity to dig deep into the issues that will shape their careers, than do the same write a story/edit it they’ll get to do at every other summer internship. And that’ll be something different to talk about in the job interviews. So what if we fall flat on our faces?  Sure there will be growing pains, but who makes a difference: the guy limping on the crutch, or the guy who volunteers to test out the bionic leg?

Don’t get me wrong, I still value a well-written story and thorough reporting. Those should be the primary skills taught to every student. I particularly lament the loss of quality writing in many newspapers, reduced to columns to AP-style, inverted pyramids without style or merit; and to promote better storytelling, I strongly recommend keeping a print weekend edition full of narratives, strong photography and innovative designs. The Weekend Missourian is the best thing we do; don’t lose it!

The biggest challenge will be to figure out how to finance the same quality journalism without print revenues. No one’s figured that one out yet. There was also a time in history when no one had figured out the printing press or Google. Put enough motivated people together in a room, and it will happen. One way to make sure that happens is to promote not just editorial excellence, but also business sense. I know math and money are dirty words to many journalists, but we must face reality. Our industry has hundreds of talented writers, editors, designers, producers, photographers… What it needs now is entrepreneurs. The journalism school should be a business incubator and a think tank for our industry, building partnerships with the business school and private enterprises, staffing the business side with students (supervised) and encouraging careers in publishing and media business.

On the editorial side, too, this is no time for half-measures. Here is the thought I’ve occasionally let slip, reinventing the world at Flat Branch, a honey wheat in hand: merge the newsrooms, get rid of sequences. The J school, which I adore, has got one thing wrong: it still defines the journalism by the platform on which it is published. You got newspaper journalism, radio-television journalism, photojournalism, magazine journalism and convergence journalism (a failed experiment, as a sequence, which I hear is on the out, but at least they risked falling flat on their faces). Keep a sequence to the side for them PR folks (or slide them over to the business school) and merge everything else. I dream of a comprehensive newsroom where student-journalists would be trained across platforms (how I wish I had learned radio, too) and KOMU, Missourian & Co., KBIA and other outlets yet-to-be-created would be partners, not competitors (for media diversity, there’s still plenty around town); where stories would find their expression in whatever medium works best; where students would be encouraged to come up with personal projects, even books, documentaries and start-ups. A place where our work’s only definition is ‘we get the truth out,’ and the only absolute is the ethical standards we all value.

Just my thoughts, respectfully submitted to the higher authorities

I put my reporter cap back on yesterday. Around 11.15 a.m., an explosion razed an entire house in the East Campus neighborhood of Columbia, Mo. In the explosion and the fire that ensued, Carl Sneed, 87, died, and his wife, Merna, 84, was gravely injured. A firefighter was also injured.

<object type=”text/html” data=”http://www.flickr.com/slideShow/index.gne?user_id=10488016@N04&amp;tags=explosion” height=”450″ width=”450″> </object

It was just 3 blocks away from my house, which actually shook from the blast. I honestly first thought it was my roommate once again slamming doors, but the sirens of fire trucks and ambulances told me otherwise. I rushed over there, though to his great credit, my roommate, photographer Kuba Wuls, got there even sooner and got some very telling pictures.

I called the Missourian and what ensued was an awesome example of teamwork on a local breaking news story. Our friendly neighborhood citizen journalism team, led by Clyde Bentley, practically a neighbor of the Sneeds, right away put together a Flickr gallery and got information from neighbors. One such neighbor submitted pictures that helped us identify the hero of the day, a firefighter who pulled Merna Sneed from the fire. We had a breaking news burst very quickly on the Web site and many updates throughout the day. The full story at the end of the day and the many sidebars painted a much more complete picture than the competing paper’s. We sent news alerts via text messages. We had reporters and editors working on site, in the newsroom and at the hospital. Convergence reporters brought back video, Kuba brought back wonderful pictures, and I was equipped with my own camera, too. (See below my first ever published picture. The slideshow above is a mix of published and unpublished ones.) See the whole coverage at www.columbiamissourian.com.

The most unusual thing that came out of that day’s coverage was an interesting twist on new media meets old media. Everyone in East Campus was asking questions all day. But East Campus is an odd neighborhood with a large student population and just as large a population of elderly people, who may not have the instinct (or even the Internet connection) to check the Web for more information. The Missourian’s Saturday edition being a weekly printed on Thursday nights, we had no way to get the news in print out to the people in time. (Note: We are also cursed with the Friday breaking news.) So we made one up. I use “we” loosely because I’m sure the credit goes to someone; I just wasn’t around when the idea came up so I couldn’t tell you who. Anyways, the Missourian had launched in partnership with the East Campus Neighborhood Association an email newsletter about the neighborhood. We revamped the idea for print. We designed a one-page, front-and-back newsletter with excerpts of our Web coverage, made 300 copies and 8 of us hit the streets, fixing the newsletter to doorknobs with rubber bands.

What really matters in this story is the tragedy of an old couple being stolen their right to a peaceful, quiet death. I’m usually wary about covering such tragedies because there is a fine line between serving the needs of your community and just plain preying on victims. I don’t mean to celebrate this day as an achievement in journalism, and I hope it’s not what this post sounds like. But in the end, I think we served our community right yesterday: when so many people were worried about what was going on and wanted to share who Mr. Sneed was, the Missourian delivered.

The work, of course, continued today. In no particular order and unfortunately not exhaustively, here are some of the people to be credited for these two days’ outstanding work: managing editor Reuben Stern, editor Katherine Reed, editor Clyde Bentley, assistant editor Katie Fretland, reporter Sean Sposito, reporter Matt Harris, news editor and Web site wizzard Jake Sherlock, photographer Kuba Wuls, photography director Rie Woodward, photo editing staff (don’t even know all your names, I’m so sorry), photographer Katie Barnes, editor Liz Heitzman, editor Jeanne Abbott, production chief Joy Mayer, convergence editor Mark Lewis, reporter Jonathon Braden, reporter Annie Harp, reporter Lauren Fredman, convergence editor Beth Androuais, convergence reporter Jenn Herseim, convergence editor Jennifer Leong, circulation yesmen Rob Weir and Bruce Moore, photographer Joshua A. Bickel, citizen journalist Jackie Kreigh … (Yes, we are a huge newsroom, and that helped.) Those are only the ones I personally saw work or whose credit I could find on the Web site. I know there are plenty more. I am both proud and humbled to be a part of this team.

I worked with Greg Bowers, who reported and did narration on another video; Jake Sherlock, who took stills and edited the other video; and Keith Claxton, who handled audio, graphics and the upcoming Flash presentation, which I will link to soon. For my part, I handled the camera throughout, and edited and narrated the video below.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bnBNWgoaxe4&rel=1]

Notice there’s a lot of voice over? That’s because we had a flimsy mic that moved just half a millimeter in its outlet, enough not to record on 90 percent of the tape. Thankfully, we had a Marantz running so a lot of the natural sound has actually been added manually to the video. That’s why I was up till 2. That and the fact that I repeated my narration 20 times because I was growing self-conscious about my accent. Is it peeza? Pizaaah? Pizzzza?

Roy Peter Clark talks about the issue we wrangled with two weeks ago on the Mizzou Mafia listserv: does the word plagiarism apply to this particular incident?

Because the p-word is the scarlet letter of the literary world, because it is associated with a rogues gallery of writers and reporters, it should be reserved, in my opinion, for the most serious cases of malpractice.

I’m happy to say, Mr. Clark seems to share my opinion of what Mr. Merrill should and shouldn’t have done with the question.

There are two things I do not like about his column:
He should have dropped a quick attribution into the column (”as reported in The Maneater”). I’m not suggesting that not doing so was an ethical lapse, only that doing so would have shown respect to the student and the publication.
The column itself was a dinosaur cliché, the easiest kind of attack by a cranky old prof against the political correctness of gender studies. But that’s not unethical either.

But because he’s Roy Peter Clark, he doesn’t just wrangle with the question of whether the p-word applies; he answers it. He goes on to write…

Warhover has every right to develop standards for his staff that are tight to the point of strangulation. He can be the king of hyper-ethics if he wants to. But he has no more right to call Merrill’s actions plagiarism, than a prosecutor has the right to refer to reckless endangerment as murder in the first degree.

Um, did he, Mr. Clark? I actually went back to Tom’s column (FYI, Tom Warhover is the executive editor of the Columbia Missourian, with which I am affiliated, and was my professor for a while). It is to my knowledge the only piece he has published on the matter, but I might be wrong. In the Nov. 9 column when he announced the matter to the Missourian’s readers, Tom only talked of “using material from other publications without attribution.” The p-word appears just once in the column, in a quote from Mr. Merrill where he himself calls the mishap “unintentional plagiarism.” The word also appears in the header and the first sentence of a sidebar, which explains the Missourian’s “plagiarism policy,” taken straight from the Missourian syllabus. Remember, this is not just a community paper, it’s a journalism lab. With student writers, standards must be stringent. Excessive even.

Tom’s column also insisted on the fact that editors at the Missourian called the issue “a misdemeanor, not a felony,” a fact that seems to have been forgotten by many commentators. Funny they should use a legal metaphor; Mr. Clark goes on to argue in his own column that journalists should for once take a letter from the law and learn to make distinctions between minor and major offenses. I couldn’t agree more.

However, and maybe my Missourian bias is becoming apparent here, I would hate for a justified defense of Mr. Merrill to turn into an attack on Tom or the other editors at the paper. In another newsroom, Mr. Merrill’s lapse could have been handled with a slap on the wrist, maybe a temporary suspension. But when you’re asking 20-year-olds to work easily 20 hours a week or more for no pay, to constantly come up with original story ideas in an over-covered town, all the while maintaining stringent ethical and moral standards, you cannot hold their mentors to a lesser standard. You just can’t.

Minus that slight issue, I’ve enjoyed Mr. Clark’s column. He makes a distinction between morals, ethics and standards that would have made my high school philosophy professor proud. Like any Roy Peter Clark writing, it’s worth checking out.

For background, here’s the story. A reporter at the Maneater, MU’s student newspaper, noticed that Merrill had used several quotes from her own article in his Missourian column, without attribution to her or the Maneater. She brought it to the attention of Tom Warhover, our executive editor, who decided to quit running Merrill’s column after editors at the Missourian discovered 5 more instances of quotes taken from other publications without attribution. Tom announced the whole thing quite frankly in his regular column in the Weekend Missourian.

Mr. Merrill said he didn’t mean to not attribute and simply forgot before sending in his copy. I’d tend to give him the benefit of the doubt for his reputation and legacy in journalism. Several people in the Mizzou mafia argued last week that it wasn’t such a big deal because we don’t have the same expectations of attribution for columnists as for reporters. But, as I put it to the listserv last week, it’s one of two things.
1) Either columnists don’t indeed need to attribute like a reporter, and that’s what Mr. Merrill should explain to us, rather than accept the blame and the punishment.
2) Or, and that’s my opinion, any quote taken from an outside publication should be attributed to that publication. It wouldn’t have bothered me if it had been quotes from the Missourian; we’re all a team here, and it’s expected. When one reporter does a follow-up story, they might use info from the previous story. If reused, quotes would be followed by the mention “said in previous Missourian reports,” out of fairness to the reader. Forgetting that would have been minor. But not attributing to the Maneater is stealing their work and livelihood, however small it is at a campus newspaper.
As for calling the whole thing a mistake, I’d be tempted to agree, had it not happened 6 times.

Was Mr. Merrill punished too hardly? Maybe so. I honestly feel for the man, who has done a great deal for this school and its students. I dare hope that this will not affect his stellar reputation in the long run; the listserv has already forgotten all about this, and I’m probably one of the last bloggers to even mention it.
But we can’t forget that the Missourian is a teaching newspaper. Some alumni have argued that it doesn’t even make sense that professors would publish columns in it. Why not let advanced students take a shot at column writing? A few reactions I’ve heard from students were to this effect: “If we’d done it, we would have failed the class immediately. So why shouldn’t he lose his column?” What can you say to that, as a teacher?

Speaking of journalistic discouragement, I think I upset a couple old-timers in the newsroom today. I explained to them that I hadn’t particularly noticed the teaser to the Sunday paper on the front page because, although I browse the print product to see what it looks like (and, let’s face it, see my name in print), I am unabashedly part of this new generation who only reads news online. I got stares. Me, a newspaper journalist, taking part in the downfall of the industry? I believe it’s time I explain my newspaper philosophy.

Newspaper is a state of mind. Newspaper is NOT cheap paper and runny ink. I get the nostalgia of fingertip smudges on the front page and Norman Rockwell-like delivery boys, but we all have to get past it.

Let me run you through my news routine. I typically get woken up by my cell phone beeping. That’s my weather forecast from the Columbia Missourian. As soon as I’ve regained sufficient consciousness, I listen to a couple podcasts as I get ready: always the New York Times’ front page by the fascinating voice of James Barron, and a few others depending on my mood. I check my e-mails and get daily newsletters from the New York Times and Le Monde. On my walk to work, one or two more podcasts, mainly from French public radio, NPR, the Washington Post and the Times. When I get to work, I check the Sentinel’s Web site. Throughout the day, occasionally I get breaking news alerts via email from the Times and Le Monde, and via text message from the Missourian and Columbia’s KOMU/Channel 8. A widget on my laptop lures me to more Times stories and another one allows me to listen to pretty much any French national radio station. I also have quick access to streaming video from Al-Jazeera English on my desktop. (Yeah, I know what you’re gonna say about Al Jazeera, but I still have to be proved that it’s bad journalism.) On my lunch break, I prefer video podcasts, especially from the Washington Post. For guilty pleasures, there’s Radio Lab, This American Life, On Being, and Rendez-vous avec X.

Notice that I haven’t opened a newspaper yet? But notice the sources of all this news I get: New York Times, Washington Post, Santa Cruz Sentinel, Columbia Missourian, Le Monde… Um, sounds like newspapers to me. Newspaper is a way to do journalism. I chose the newspaper sequence at the J school because I wanted the best training as a reporter and editor. Newspapers have a commitment to depth of analysis and storytelling that you just don’t find on TV, and rarely in blogs and other online news sources. (Radio is in a different category that I might get to some day.)

For the same reasons that I trust newspapers for my training as a writer, I trust newspapers for my news fix as a reader. From newspapers, I get breaking news, analysis, investigation, depth, meaning, connection and pleasure. So I might just have to strangle the next person who tells me newspapers are dying. Hold on to your journalistic principles, and stop defining yourself by wood fiber and ink.