Centerpieces

When I left television news 11 years ago to do multimedia at a Web site based at a newspaper, I didn't know anyone else who had made such a change.

In October, Brett Akagi, the director of photography at one of the best TV photojournalism shops in the country, took the job I recently left at StarTribune.com. These days, he's not alone in switching between mother ships. More and more journalists are finding opportunities just by crossing the street.

On the Web, news organizations are directly competing in ways they never quite did when they were simply newspapers and television stations. As newsrooms grow their Web sites, they are discovering gaps in skills within their own staffs and searching for ways to fill those gaps.

Recently, they've started looking where they have rarely looked before -- at the competing TV stations and newspapers in town. Newspapers are finding video skills at television stations, and stations are finding interactive thinking at newspapers.

Laurie Bennett is a lifelong journalist who sized up the shifting landscape of her profession years before most of her colleagues. In 1999 she left a job with Knight Ridder and moved into a farmhouse near, of all places, Podunk, N.Y.

Through some pretty difficult years, she used her background as a reporter and editor to begin building a database that would become ePodunk, a company that made available demographic and, later, key ancestry information on virtually every municipality in the U.S., Canada, and the United Kingdom. Eventually, through affiliate advertising, she began making more money than Gannett and Knight Ridder ever paid her.

Bennett sold ePodunk in 2007. She and other former mainstream media journalists are now building Muckety – a Web site that maps the business and social relationships among newsmakers as stories unfold across the nation. Think of a timely Who's Who with maps and context.

In many ways, Bennett is at the vanguard of where the market may be heading for many professional journalists: more independent, more entrepreneurial, no longer relying solely on the large family or corporate-owned institutions to support the kind of journalism that originally drew many into the profession.

From her new company offices in New York City, Bennett participated in a Q & A.

In the past few years, we've seen news organizations become increasingly more adventurous and creative in the ways they deliver content to consumers. We've seen legacy media expand to new delivery vehicles. Newspapers have reinvented video online, taking cues from broadcast fundamentals while creating their own. And NPR has hired some of the top multimedia journalists from the newspaper industry to ramp up its online video and multimedia content.

One key component of the industry has yet to make this same transition: how to make money. News organizations are trying to reinvent the wheel, but they're taking these reinvented wheels from their cars and putting them on airplanes, expecting them to fly. Print display ads have, for example, evolved into banner ads; television commercials have become pre-roll and post-roll for online videos.

With the combination of a struggling economy and new news consumption habits, making money is key to news organizations' survival.

I'd like to start a virtual brainstorm and pose the question: How can journalism make money?

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Today, and tonight, are all about numbers. And charts. And maps. And if John King is on CNN, it's about a touch-screen computer with maps that zoom in, change colors and let him impersonate John Madden.

Election Day is the perfect opportunity to tell stories without words. So much information pours out -- turnout figures, reports of voting problems and long lines, and of course, the vote results -- that it only makes sense to let everyone poke around and see what they find.

As the primaries stretched on, I saw that the major news sites moved more and more toward data visualizations, featuring continuously updated Flash-based maps and charts on their home pages. I am eager to see tonight how they've developed their maps and graphics in ways that convey the national picture down to precinct results. (The New York Times has a "dashboard" that will update results in a small browser window, freeing the main window for other browsing.) In fact, Politico's home page graphic is already up.

But several data visualizations were unveiled even before the polls closed. Perhaps the most innovative is The New York Times feature that asks, "What one word describes your current state of mind?" (E-Media Tidbits contributor Ken Sands posted something about it earlier today.) Users can see what the most popular words are, enter their own (or choose one on the screen) and select whether they voted for McCain or Obama (or neither). The words scroll across the screen, and you can see how McCain supporters feel compared to Obama's.

Voters spend most of Election Day in a state of anticipation, with little hard information -- mostly anecdotes about long lines and polling problems. This feature focuses on what people are thinking and feeling and tries to quantify it. This is the story of the day; why wait until the polls close? Tonight, when (if) the losing candidate concedes and we find out who our next president will be, this feature will allow people to share their reactions and see how others are feeling.

The Times has also mapped newspaper endorsements around the country and compared them to the papers that endorsed George W. Bush and John Kerry in 2004. It also highlights notable endorsements -- those that switched course to back Obama or that didn't endorse.

Several sites are monitoring the voting throughout the country, which is a natural for data visualization. Of course there is Twitter Vote Report, which has already been covered well by others. The site is mapping and cataloging wait times and problems at polls across the country.

In a similar vein, The Washington Post set up Vote Monitor 2008, which asks users to describe their voting experience and maps the answers. (The pop-up windows display a code categorizing whether the person reported a problem, but if you click on the ZIP code or the state, you can read the person's description.)

The Post also features a TimeSpace: Election map, which collects blogs, tweets, video, audio, wire photos, Post photos and articles. A slider at the bottom allows you to select which span of time you want to view. I found it most useful to scan photos from around the country; no audio or video was posted, and almost all of the tweets and blog posts are from its "The Trail" blog.

Finally, a nod to simplicity: Facebook's "I voted" application, which counts all the users who say they voted. I was the 1,393,930th Facebook user to note that I voted. I don't know what that tells me about the election or Facebook users, but you know what? It's nice to be counted.

I'll be scanning sites tonight. Tell me about noteworthy work you see by posting a comment or e-mailing me at smyers@poynter.org.

If polls are the fix that political junkies crave, this campaign is no time to try to get clean. In a survey research version of the 1980s crack cocaine boom, public relations firms, interest groups and news orgs have been peddling their numbers on every street corner.

Those polls have created a relatively new dilemma for journalists and news consumers: How do you make sense of it all? (Or, to push the drug analogy, who has the good stuff?) How could Obama be ahead by 10 points in one poll and yet in a dead heat with McCain in another? Which polls matter –- state, national, partisan, battlegrounds?

A number of specialized blogs and sites have sprouted up this election to aggregate and discuss polls. One, though, goes further with a two-pronged approach: one theoretical, the other practical. FiveThirtyEight is part blog, part journalism, and fairly addictive. (I signed up for the daily text message updates, which has not improved my home life.)

Nate Silver, FiveThirtyEight's founder, takes all the polls he can find, plugs them into calculations that adjust for factors such as reliability and state demographics and then issues his own projections of who will win. Meanwhile, blogger Sean Quinn and freelance photographer Brett Marty have been driving around the country in a 1998 Ford Escort, dropping in on McCain and Obama field offices in an effort to assess the big unknown on Tuesday: turnout.

Given unprecedented new voter registration numbers and expected record turnout on Tuesday, there are certain to be questions at the polls. Answering those questions and covering voting problems requires anticipation, verification and perspective provided by nonpartisan sources. Reporters who are unprepared may get whipped around by party operatives and end up confusing voters, rather than informing them.

To help journalists prepare, I spoke with Doug Lewis, executive director of the National Association of State Election Directors, about possible issues and how to address them.

Tip: Ask what your local elections office budget was in 2004, in 2006 and what it is this year. Determine whether/where any cuts were made.

Some of the potential voting problems began years ago, when states started struggling with their budgets. "We've had local jurisdictions around the country that have cut their budgets in a presidential election year and ordered their elections offices to cut their budgets. ... My guess is that we've had 30-40 percent probably ordered to cut budgets or more. It depends on what shape their county governments were in. We know a whole lot of jurisdictions were told, 'Times are tough, and we're cutting across the board.' " Lewis says he told people to bring a map into the county commission and ask them, what part of the county can we afford to let vote this year?