Over at the Interchange Project Jeremy and I discuss the whole Jim Romenesko/Poynter affair and much more this week.

We think both Romesnko and Poynter were in the right and wrong here. It’s complicated. We wish things would have ended better.

Our discussion of Romenesko leads Jeremy to discuss how he handles miss attribution and plagiarism with his students.

We then discuss the top 40 most shared stories on Facebook in 2011. Some very interesting finds. And then we have a few more topics to go over.

It’s a good show. I promise.

Listen to this week’s show.

What’s the biggest problem facing journalism today?

Lack of journo-hackers? Not enough staff resources? Too little focus on mobile? Not enough data? Print curmudgeons? Lack of free coffee for employees?

No. The biggest problem facing journalism today, particularly at legacy news operations, has nothing to do with journalism. The biggest problem facing journalism — a traditionally ad-supported industry — is the inability to support itself with ads via the Internet.

This is the last year of the Knight News Challenge in its current form. It’s had a few notable successes — Spot.Us and Everyblock. It’s had far more failures than successes and a bit of redundancy. But that’s to be expected and encouraged.

After all this competition is all about taking risks and trying new things. The problem has been Knight’s insistence on not caring about whether or not projects could make money. I had a high ranking Knight News Challenge person tell me that Knight doesn’t care if every project fails to be able to support itself financially or if every project just plain fails.

I think it’s time for that to change. In fact, it’s time for Knight to start funding projects whose only objective is to help news organizations make money. And I think it’s time for Knight to care that some of its project succeed.

Last year Windy Citizen’s real time ad project was funded. Will it succeed? Not sure yet, but more ideas like it would really help journalism.

I guarantee you we would have a lot more innovative ways to do journalism and inform the public if we had more ways to financially support journalism. We’re seeing a rise of non-profit journalism, which is good, but we’ll need more than that.

How about an open source Groupon competitor that news orgs could install? How about a new classifieds platform that crushes Craigslist on usability and experience? How about an open source self-administered ad platform ala Facebook ads?

These are all things news organizations could use. These are all ways news organizations could better support themselves online. But what about business ideas that no one has even thought about yet?

One of things I love most about Spot.Us is that it’s a project that has the audacity to ask, “How will we fund meaningful journalism?” To me that’s what Knight needs to get into the business of doing.

Good journalism requires money. While funding mobile application projects may be en vogue, these projects won’t be self sustaining, nor will they get to the heart of what is ailing journalism today. Not to mention that its expensive to develop a good multi-platform mobile application, and it will require years of continued development (which it doesn’t appear many of these applications and best winners are factoring in).

I do believe that journalism itself is changing and that we do need new ways to tell stories. There is no doubt about that. But until we find a way to properly support these new ways of telling stories, will it really matter?

We deserve to be heard.

Social media is amplifying that voice, letting us reach people and institutions like never before. Smart companies and individuals have leveraged social media to connect with more people than ever before.

But this week I had a local politician tell me my voice didn’t matter. I didn’t show up for a public hearing, and thus what I have to say — while publicly — isn’t the same. But he wasn’t just talking to me. No, he was saying that anyone who engages him on his official Twitter and Facebook accounts isn’t really engaging in the political process.

I have to ask, why would you even be on social media then? The idea being social media is to engage people.

So, what was this hearing about and why wasn’t I there? For several years now, a small but vocal minority has been trying to get a pedestrian bridge built from a parking garage to a new library under construction in downtown Silver Spring. All pedetrian bridges were expressly forbidden by CBD Urban Renewal Plan and the proposal has been voted down before. But this vocal minority won’t rest, and thus we have more hearings.

The reason I — and almost everyone else who lives in Silver Spring — wasn’t at the meeting was that the meeting was in Rockville, Maryland, at least a 30 minute drive from the proposed spot of this bridge. Why would that be? Well, to officially engage in the official process one must travel to the official place of politics, which is Rockville, the county seat of Montgomery County, Maryland.

I don’t own a car, and many people who live in the area don’t either. Silver Spring has great public transportation and is increasingly becoming more walkable (that public transportation is much better to get between Silver Spring and DC, Arlington and Alexandria. Getting to Rockville isn’t quite as easy). This is one reason why so many people in the area are against a bridge that’s designed to serve car drivers from outside of the area at the expense of local residents.

You might understand then why I was a little bit upset when one of my local politicians wrote this:

“I agree that social media has its benefits but I don’t think it substitutes for actually engaging in the process.”

How is reaching out to an elected representative to personally — and publicly — engage in a dialogue about issues not engaging in the process? Why does showing up for “official hearings” the only way to engage in the process?

This is archaic and a great way to keep people disinterested in politics. Local politicians count on low turnout at “official” events to justify decisions. “If you were so against this bridge being built in your town, how come you didn’t show up to this other town while you were working to voice your opposition to it?” As polarscribe said on Twitter, “brilliant, nobody under 50 matters.”

It is true that the way politics are conducted — especially at the local level — the process is largely aimed at older constituents. There are formal hearings held at times that younger people are often working or trying to raise their families. The idea that social media isn’t a way to engage in the political process will only further keep younger voters disinterested in politics.

But social media is popular with older cohorts too. The Internet is popular with everyone. The only thing I see old about this is how many politicians act like it’s the 1980s still.

The Internet is a transformative technology. It’s one of the biggest inventions in human history. It has the power to make the political process more transparent, open and inviting.

Let it. Embrace the Internet. Embrace social media.

Social media can help liberate the Arab world, but it can’t help me reach my local politicians? Social media can’t help me explain to my politicians why I would be against a $1.5 million bridge to serve car drivers over those of us who live in the area, while the county has had to make huge cuts to close a $779 million budget gap? That’s ridiculous.

Before Silver Spring was redeveloped and given a walkable core, it was economically depressed. The urban renewal plan forbade pedestrian bridges (also know as skywalks) because they are precisely the kind of thing that leads to an urban area becoming blighted. These bridges are built to get people off the streets, which allows cars to move faster. These areas become opening hostile to people on foot and to ground-level business activity.

My hometown of Cleveland, Ohio has them and many depressed rust belt cities do too. These cities are hemoraging residents left and right because they are little more than places for suburban commuters to work in and watch sporting events in. To the immediate residents of downtown Silver Spring, building pedestrian bridges to serve commuters from elsewhere in the county is a great way to throw Silver Spring back into the economic depression it emerged from.

Bridge proponents are pushing for the bridge under the guise of accessibility for the disabled. The argument goes that disabled people that drive to the library can’t be expected to use crosswalks on the ground level, and thus we should build a pedestrian bridge to make it easier to cross. One person even suggested that this bridge needs to be built because this library houses materials for the visually impaired.

Obviously, this is a ruse, because no one wants to admit that they support this bridge because they don’t want to step foot on the sidewalks of Silver Spring. Yes, some disabled people do drive. I would submit that the visually impaired do not.

I have several disabled people in my condo building, and downtown Silver Spring has a lot of disabled people because it’s not car-dependent. There are ample sidewalks, ramps and curb cuts. Many of these people do not drive, but they are able to live full lives because they live in an area that makes it easy to get around without a car.

To recap: A local politician said that the only way to engage in the official political process about a bridge for the disabled in the city I live in was to somehow travel to another city to discuss it. And not being unable to make the meeting and instead sending him messages via social media does not count as engaging in the political process.

How accessible.

To every Montgomery County politician reading this blog, I am against the pedestrian bridge to the new Silver Spring library. The people who live in the immediate area largely agree. I’m going to send you tweets, Facebook messages, e-mails, phone calls.

This blog post is written in ink far more permanent than any faxed or mailed letter ever could be. It’s public and people have the power to share it and comment on it. If I wasn’t serious about this issue, I wouldn’t have written something so public, so permanent.

I may never make it to a hearing in Rockville, but that doesn’t mean I don’t have a voice. Or a vote.

We have a voice

We will be heard.

There are a bunch of tools to get people and organizations a mass of Twitter followers quickly. But raw numbers won’t help you. What your organization needs are followers that actually care about your product and want to interact with you.

That’s why I advocate slow, organic growth. Don’t go around mass following people (in the hopes that they will follow you back). Only follow people that you want to interact with and that would be interested in your organization or product.

Most importantly, create a quality experience on social media that will get people to interact with you, retweet you, link to you, talk about you and tell their friends about you. That’s the best way to get organic growth.

For instance, for our RarePlanet Twitter account, I only follow people and organizations who are involved with conservation or environmentalism or who are interested in them. We do not follow random people to artificially boost our follower account. We only follow people and organizations that we want to be social with and that would want to be social with us.

We’re also looking at ways to be as interactive as possible and be an experience that people find useful and that they look forward to. Our work on social media should be a positive for our followers/fans/friends or would-be followers/fans/friends.

We’ve had steady growth over the last few months, but what I’m more concerned about is our follower-to-listed ratio. There are people out there who have thousands of followers and are on very few lists. What this tells me is that the people following them back don’t know much about them and don’t care to know more either. When people put you on a list, they know enough about you to categorize what you do and they care enough about what you do to go through the process of categorizing you.

That’s big. Our follower-to-listed ratio is somewhere around 9 followers for every list we are on (it has been even stronger in the past). Many people and organizations that just randomly follow people have ratios north of 100-1. What does that say about the quality of the community that they are building?

Rare is a small organization that is only really known within the conservation community. We couldn’t just create a Twitter and Facebook account like a large organization and watch as followers and fans came in. We had to make our presence known, but I didn’t want to do it in a disingenuous or spammy way.

My plan (and it’s a plan that I think would work well for other small, less-known non-profits) is to provide a quality experience every day on Twitter and Facebook that isn’t just about the work that we do. We want to talk about what the larger conservation and environmental communities are up to, and we want to be a part of those communities on social media.

I also look through lists of people that I trust in the conversation and environmental space and find people to follow that I think we should connect with. I’m trying to following my 10-5 rule, which is that for every 10 posts that are talking at people (links to cool stories, videos, photos, blog posts from around the Web or work that we are doing) or asking people questions, we should have at least five tweets that are @replies to people we are following.

Do you have any tips to share about connecting with people on social media?

The latest numbers the company has shared with us include 15 billion photos uploaded in total, an average of 220 million new pictures posted each week, and at its busiest, 550,000 images being loaded each second.

Somehow news organizations lost sight of the fact that people love photos.

Instead they poured money and resources into newer, trendier fads, while neglecting a market they should be owning. What makes this even more inexcusable is how much money news organizations — especially newspapers — spend on cameras. Why give a photographer $10,000-20,000 worth of equipment for just a few shots to appear in the newspaper and online?

Still today most news organizations are only uploading a few photos from events that they take hundreds or even thousands of photos at. Still today news organizations are passing up events like high school proms, even though they are fantastic community and brand building events (and they will generate a ton of traffic and time spent). Still today most news organizations don’t allow users to upload photos to their Web sites.

Instead, people are uploading billions of photos to Facebook, Flickr, TwitPic and other sites. Imagine if those photos (and those eyeballs) were instead on news orgs’ Web sites? Imagine if news orgs tried to aggressively sell photos? Imagine if news orgs sold user-submitted photos and developed a profit-sharing model?

I hear all this talk about videos and databases and iPhone apps and Web ninjas, when news organizations could be making a killing by just utilizing something they have done well for decades: photos. Why have we lost sight of the fact that people love photos?

A few suggestions:

• If you attend a community event like a high school football game and take hundreds of photos (or thousands), upload hundreds of photos.
• Make photos big and beautiful. If my high school can do it, any news organization can too.
• Make buying photos incredibly easy. Again, if my high school can do it, any news organization can too. Check out their awesome photo buying system. Just click on the photos you want (with add to basket button under each photo), go to check out and select the sizes and quantities you want. Really simple.
• Allow users to upload photos. This is especially big for community events like parades, festivals, proms, sporting events, etc. Just check out how many people are at each of these events with digital cameras. We want their photos.
• Forget about captioning every photo. It’s a huge time sink that often delivers zero value (how many original captions could one sporting event really have?). Stop thinking about captions for community events and start thinking about tags.

Yes, the same Facebook that, had you listened to the digerati, has jumped the shark.

But Facebook hasn’t jumped the shark. It’s still becoming more popular and adding more features. Facebook may have jumped the shark for the kinds of people who have to try every social networking service in its alpha-invite-only stage, but it certainly hasn’t for everyday people.

It’s great to have friends who are pushing the envelope, and to be with people who are willing to try new things. I love my digerati friends. But we cannot lose sight of what the average person is doing.

When I say non-wired, I don’t mean someone without a mobile phone, computer or the Internet. But I mean people who don’t live and breathe Web 2.0. In fact, they probably don’t read Wired magazine, and isn’t that the ultimate barometer of one’s wiredness?

Let’s look at Twitter as a good example. If you just listened to bloggers and the digerati you would think that Twitter is the hottest thing going today on the Web. Oh wait, it’s jumped the shark because of frequent outages recently.

In reality, Twitter has less than 2 million users in the world. In many ways, Twitter isn’t even mainstream, let alone clones like Pownce. In comparison, Facebook has more than 70 million active users.

My friend is like the majority of Americans — high school diploma, has a computer with Internet, uses a mobile phone but doesn’t have a blog, probably doesn’t know what the hell Web 2.0 is supposed to mean (does anyone, really?) and probably has no interest in joining Twitter.

Ultimately, we have to build products that not only interest people on the cutting edge, but that also provide functionality that average person can and will want to use everyday.

For my friend, the time was right to join Facebook because its functionality made sense for him. I don’t think he’ll be joining Twitter (or FriendFeed) anytime soon.

Traditionally, I used Facebook to connect with some of my closest college and high school friends. We’d exchange inappropriate wall posts, send news over direct messages, post photos of each other and in general just have a good time staying connected, even though we have dispersed around the world.

Everything changed after Facebook opened up to everyone. Now potential employers were lurking on Facebook, scrutinizing every wall post, photo and friend connection. Now I’m getting friend requests from people I have never met.

It’s a whole different social network. As Facebook has gotten larger and tapped into a bigger social community, is has actually become less social between individual members. I now have more friends, but I less to share with each friend.

I have to be guarded. It’s no longer just my close friends viewing my profile. They get my inside jokes, our drunken photos from parties and they know when I’m serious or not.

Because of this, many of my friends have stopped using Facebook as much. Once you graduate, you have to think of your career, and the last thing you would want to happen is have a social network derail your career.

So, my profile is a lot tamer. I even use Facebook for business and journalism purposes now. This is why I finally put a link to my Facebook page on my connect page. I never publicized my Facebook usage before, because I tried to keep my friends list to people I know.

But times have changed. That’s why if you want to connect on with me on Facebook, you can. I have just a few requests of you if you choose to friend me on Facebook:

• If you want to be my friend, act like it. This means saying hello, sending me IMs and messages, debating issues and in general being social. Facebook is not LinkedIn. If you just want to have me as business connection use that service instead.
• I’m still going to be me. I can only make my profile so tame. I’m going to have fun on Facebook, and you should too. Again, if you want to see an extremely business side of me, there are other social networks for that.