journalism

Back when dinosaurs roamed the earth and I was a reporter, I occasionally would run across a self-important jackass of a public official who would try to confiscate my notebook, camera, or film to prevent me from reporting or photographing something.

I grew up with the notion that journalists were dedicated to openness and public disclosure, and opposed to the occasional wannabee totalitarian. But lately I've become convinced that in some professional journalistic organizations, the same tendancies lurk just beneath the surface.

I'm in Minnesota today at a workshop on digital storytelling pulled together by Nora Paul of the University of Minnesota's New Media Institute. It's a bit of old home week for me -- we're meeting at the Star Tribune. Participants include Ken Riddick, Will Tacy, Jamie Hutt and Matt Thompson, all currently at startribune.com, as well as longtime site designer Jamie Hutt, former editors Rusty Coats and myself, and various current and former competitors.

Staci Kramer reports that Post-Dispatch investigative reporter Christopher Carey is striking out on his own with a website called Sharesleuth, which will engage stringers and non-journalists in a quest to uncover "stock fraud and executive malfeasance on the national and international level."

Mark Cuban is bankrolling it.

If it works, this is huge. Much bigger than, say, Om Malik or Scoble and all the other stuff that's buzzing the net today.

From Moscow, just a short note (because I am on the world's slowest so-called 54-mb network):

From the Press Gazette, the UK's trade paper for journalists: Google's principal scientist Krishna Bharat describes how users are finding a broader slice of viewpoints through Google News:

I'm quoting economist Paul Romer at the top of my presentation Monday to the World Editors Forum in Moscow. Romer has said many smart things, but one of my favorites is this: "A crisis is a terrible thing to waste."

I've been noodling on a list of megatrends that present megachallenges for newspapers. What am I missing?