Jon Donley, editor of the New Orleans-based Web site, talks about community and online conversations
Melissa Metzger interviews Jon Donley
Jon Donley is the founding editor of NOLA.com, exclusive online outlet of The Times-Picayune of New Orleans. During Hurricane Katrina, Jon covered the storm from The Times-Picayune's hurricane bunker and worked to keep uninterrupted news coverage online after the loss of the newspaper's printing and delivery capability. He also directed NOLA.com’s expansion of forums, blogs and other user-generated features to guide search and rescue efforts, reunite scattered hurricane victims, and facilitate grassroots reporting and citizen journalism in the aftermath of the storm. A longtime newspaperman before going digital, Jon was part of the team of journalists awarded the 2006 Pulitzer Prize for public service and breaking news.
Melissa Metzger: For a little background, describe the chain of events during Katrina that led to the self-publishing component of the site becoming so important?
Jon Donley: It's important to understand this didn’t just happen on the fly. I took over NOLA.com 10 years ago. Then, in 1998, we had a brush with Hurricane Georges, and that was the first time there had ever been a major evacuation of the New Orleans area during a hurricane. ... We thought, “Our audience is gone. We are not going to be very busy. We’ll just have fun and cover what we cover."
But we had rolled out our community forums about six months earlier. And to our surprise, people got to where they were evacuating to and they came back onto the Web site, and started communicating with each other asking questions like, “Is the evacuation over, can we come back, does my neighborhood have power?” The kind of things you need to know before you pack the kids up and drive 500 miles back. We were pretty amazed by the amount of traffic we were getting by people who were not even here.
The Times-Picayune’s reaction [to Georges] was to create a hurricane bunker within the interior of The Times-Picayune and prepare it so they wouldn’t lose power and lose the ability to cover the news. Our reaction was, “Huh. We better create ways that people can communicate even better during the next storm.” ... Over the time between Georges and Katrina we had built up over 100 forums for various usage, a quarter of those were neighborhood or geographically based.
When there was a storm, we would roll out a hurricane- or storm-centric home page and promote those forums where there was the ability to keep up with the breaking news and contribute to the breaking news. That’s been a part of our model for storms for the past 10 years.
This is 2004. We had a full roll of blogs now that complemented our forums, several of which readers could contribute to. So by the time we got around to Katrina we had a pretty good set of tools at our disposal. But, more than that, we spent the last 10 years educating people that if something big happened we welcomed their input, and we wanted them to send us their photos and storm stories. That’s important as I tell this story because if we had just rolled out blogs, forums without the public knowing we were there, it would not have worked. A big thing with citizen journalism or crowdsourcing, it has to do with letting the people know you respect their input. So the first thing I started doing when I got into the Internet was get into forums and reach out to the same people who wrote letters to the editor. Now they get published all the time. Building up that relationship is a big deal. I’ve written letters to The New York Times before, but I’ve never gotten one published. [Laughs] My image is, when I send a letter to The New York Times, it has to go through a barricade of some very crusty Ivy League elite people.
Q: Guys in tweed?
A: [Laughs] Yeah. But the Internet gives me a chance to get my voice heard. And I’m the guy that votes. A lot of those guys in tweed don’t even vote.
Q: Why do you respect the reader-contributor so highly?
A: Our system of government is based on everyone voting and everyone voting in an informed way. That might not be the way it works, but that’s what it’s supposed to do. I believe in voter education. … But I’ve always found — and maybe I am just a human-interest reporter on my print side — but I just want to hear people’s stories. I want to hear their experiences. And I want to hear it without it being filtered. During the storm we had great journalists from all over doing the best job they could writing about the storm and shooting pictures, but the fact was they weren’t up to their necks. They weren’t watching people drown. They didn’t carry their kids into the attic chased by the water. Getting those stories second-hand is never as authentic as getting them first-hand. And that’s a dramatic example, but it applies to things like Jazz Fest and Mardi Gras, also.
The Times-Picayune has a very — jaded isn’t the right word — dignified view of Mardi Gras because it happens every year. It's like summer and winter. They have been covering it for 175 years now, and [laughs] they’ve got a set agenda. Nothing they do, nothing these professional reporters do, conveys the joy and the human face of Jazz Fest or Mardi Gras the way that the people who are actually in the middle of it do. In traditional journalism, the way you try to capture that is to send reporters out and to try to pry it out of people and then you put as much of it into a story as you can, and then you write a story that hopefully reflects it. But most reporters, and I am definitely one of them, wherever I am, I am observing. If I go to a party, I stand in the corner and observe like an objective reporter. That’s just training. I’m not even sure I have fun [laughs]. But you know, it's what we do. ... On the lighter side, we just finished Jazz Fest. And it’s a huge event and we cover it. And The Times-Picayune treats it like huge event, but actually getting across the simple joy and the feeling that is Jazz Fest is something that a journalist very rarely can do. So we ask people, “Tell us about your Jazz Fest. Tell us what it means to you.” And it is especially important now because we are trying to recapture and reclaim things that were lost during the hurricane. A journalist could maybe philosophically convey that, but other than that they are covering it as a big music event. Everybody in the crowd has the tools of journalism in their hands. If they’ve got a cell phone, they’ve got a camera, they’ve got a voice recorder, they’ve probably got the ability to send emails. And we’ve trained these people that we are a platform that loves them and wants to hear from them.
Q: What do you think motivated people to write in? I understand why during Katrina people would write in about missing family members, but what motivates people to write in during something like Jazz Fest—when they are not getting paid?
A: Well, everyone wants to tell their story. That’s one of the foundational rules of journalism. That’s why you can walk up as a human-interest reporter into a crowd and come out with a story if you are a good journalist because honestly everyone wants to tell their story. It's human nature.
Q: But is there a difference in the motivation of the person who will volunteer their story when asked, and the person who takes the extra initiative to log on and write something or upload pictures?
A: If you go to a small town with a healthy newspaper, you see that the paper becomes the forum where the voice of the community is expressed. And in NOLA’s case on the Internet, we are by far the leading site, but a huge part of the traffic is derived by the content we get from readers. And we have — at least since the hurricane — established ourselves as the place where the voice of the community can be expressed. The community wants to tell its own story. It’s an organic being. For centuries journalists have stood in the place of the people. They’ve represented the people. They didn’t have a printing press. They didn’t have the ability to go from town to town. We were their representatives like elected representatives. But now it has been democratized to the point where the people have the capability — and of course they can go start their own Web site or go start a blog on Blogger — but there is an extra added motivation for people to have their views heard on their hometown newspaper or Web site.
Q: So then as a professional how do you do your job and how do you think professionals should be involved in this new environment?
A: If you were a print reporter and you wanted to find the soul of Jazz Fest, you’d go there, eat some Crawfish Monica, and talk to dozens of people. Get a bunch of quotes, and try to form a picture in your mind to get a hold of that soul in everybody’s comments. Then you’d go back and try to distill it, hopefully accurately. What we do is not that much different. What we do though is let our readers read everything people have to say and see all the pictures, and then The Times-Picayune or we or both distill it. The Times-Picayune often writes at least parts of stories from what people have said or uses what people have said as a starting point for more analytical stories. In other words, the people each tell a small viewpoint story, and it’s a limited viewpoint. For example, you can see what’s happening on Bourbon Street during Mardi Gras on our webcam, but if you have a network of webcams all over the city, you have a lot of little windows you can look out of to get the big picture.
Q: So the metaphor is that the professional can take look at all of the different “webcams” — meaning people’s opinions — to get an idea of the big picture?
A: Yes, they can see trends. Trends are pretty clear. We were locked away in The Times-Picayune and we had a few reporters get out a short distance and two photographers con their way onto rescue boats. And those people came back with very gripping, graphic descriptions, but our disaster was so widespread that, even if we had every reporter out in boats, we would not have been able to tell the story of New Orleans. So, during the storm we got a package of pictures from a guy who was in his house in Chalmette and he pulled out his camera and started shooting the water rising up his living room window outside the house. He shot pictures as he was climbing into his attic, and then when he broke a hole to get on the roof. He sent me 83 pictures of that very gripping first-hand experience. This isn’t a professional photographer. This is a guy who is shooting pictures while he is having his house torn up. There are houses floating by. Shingles being ripped off and nails sticking up from the plywood. It was just powerful. There’s no way anyone could tell that story second-hand. ... It's much more gripping when you are hearing it from a coherent witness who is personally involved.
We got the news first that there were hundreds of people trapped in St. Mary’s Vietnamese Church from our forums. A guy with a BlackBerry was SMSing messages to us. He was saying, “We’ve got about 300 people here in the church and the water is getting deeper and deeper.” I think he sent about a dozen messages. And the last one was, “We’ve got a lot of old people in here and the water is up to our chests and the old people are losing the strength to hold up their heads.” That was right out of the center of the flood and that type of story happened over and over and over again. We troll our forums and our blogs constantly for story ideas.
The doctor and two nurses from Memorial Hospital who were charged with euthanasia. One thing we do all the time now is a feature we call “In Your Own Words” where we ask people to post on a blog about whatever the big topic of the day is. Well, we were asking people what they thought about these charges, and there was just an overwhelming amount of support for these medical people and criticism of the attorney general. One woman wrote in, “I was there. I was in the middle of this and I support them.” So on our little patrol [for story ideas], a little red flag went off. I contacted her and said, "Why don’t you tell your story?" She said, “Okay and I have pictures.” “Oh Yeah?” “And I have video.” “Oh Yeah?” So I went in and interviewed her. And she had about 30 video clips and hundreds of photos she had taken with her digital camera. And her father had died the day before in the hospital, and the family was there in a family apartment across the street. They just happened to be there when the storm hit, and this woman just started taking pictures. She said, “I didn’t see any reporters around. I thought it was important this story got out.” We’ve all heard how horrible it was there. You know, nurses fanning patients with chunks of cardboard. Trying to push gurneys up steep garage ramps to get them to the top to be pulled off by helicopter. She had video of all this, and we did a video feature on it. She deliberately said to herself, “This needs to be reported.” And that’s the attitude we’ve been working ever since the hurricane.
Q: Do you get a sense of the demographic of people writing in or would you say it’s a pretty diverse crowd?
A: Statistically speaking, our city is so screwed up here I don’t want to make any judgments. I think it was at the American Press Institute someone asked, “Isn’t it an elitist white medium? You are doing okay getting to the well-off white folks, but isn’t this creating a distance?” Well, when we were getting cries for help, we were getting them from every area of the city. It has been my experience working in the French Quarter with a lot of the service people that even the kids that tap dance on the street, they all have MySpace pages. They are very computer literate. Same with gang members. They may not have a computer, but they have a cell-phone, they can send text messages because that’s how it was being done [when we were receiving pleas for help]. I don’t really have an opinion about that at the moment. I will say that the NAACP of St. Tammany Parish has a blog on our site. The president of the NAACP has been very active. But The North Shore is so exceedingly white and well-off you can’t draw any conclusions from it. It is the most Republican parish. But Jefferson parish is our next target for this [blogger feature], and they are in the other direction. More 50/50. More of a range.
Q: What has surprised you most?
A: I’m trying to think if I’ve had any surprises. The same spirit and energy that motivates people to get involved is exactly the same thing we ran into in my career as the op-ed editor with letters to the editor.
Q: What about fact-checking? As an editor there’s no way you can fact-check everything that comes in?
A: [Laughs] Let’s just say that as someone who has trained young reporters, I will tell you young reporters have no special skills over a decently educated American citizen. We hold ourselves to be experts in covering news, but if you take a newspaper and look through it, the overwhelming majority of what is in a paper could have been done by a monkey. I’ve been interested in the guy who has been hiring people in India to cover the city council meetings in this small town. They are doing it by watching the video, the Web screen of the city council meeting, and they are writing stories. Your first instinct: “Come on.” But remember, when a reporter goes to cover a city council meeting, when you are talking about the suburbs, that is probably going to be one of your most junior reporters. They haven’t paid their dues yet. That’s why they are sitting there. You are trusting that reporter to sit through the meeting. ... You have to trust that reporter to come back and say, “This is the most important thing that happened.” If I have a blogger cover it, that blogger is obviously going to be from that town, so whatever is happening is going to personally affect that blogger more than it is the junior reporter. Sometimes The Times-Picayune reporter and the blogger are at the same meeting and holding them up side by side generally the blogger tells a better story. Because he has more background on the situation and — if they are talking about drainage for example — he can backfill with details about the flooded yard and roads and what’s happened since they cleared that big field for a housing development. That’s his life.
But to me the important thing is how you label it, just like everything else. We don’t expect editorials to be totally objective. We hope someone at some point has really rationally considered both sides, but we label it very clearly as editorial for exactly this reason. We are not putting a stamp on this saying, “This is true.” We are saying, “This is how people feel.” So in all of our user-submitted stuff, we make very clear to say, “These are our users. This is their stuff.” You take it for what it is. There is an active philosophy out there among the online journalism geeks from [Jeff] Jarvis to whoever that there is a thing out there called The Wisdom of Crowds. That is, if you take a camera and take pictures all over the city and stick ‘em up on the wall like a mosaic, you are going to get a fairly accurate picture of what’s out there, a fairly authentic idea of what that city is. And it works the same way with users. We take all of the user content that we’ve gotten during and after Katrina and you get a very authentic, accurate view of what life is like here.
Q: So does the wisdom of a crowd come from its numbers, that it's able to accomplish more than any professional group could?
A: It’s a scientific principle. If you do one test on one test tube, it will come out one way or the other, but it doesn’t necessarily prove your case. If you do ten thousand tests on ten thousand test tubes, and 70 percent of the test are the same, then you know 70 percent of the time the medicine is going to work. That’s the scientific principle. You do lots of experiments on lots of subjects and then you come out with a general view of the way things are mostly. One of the problems with journalism, and a problem a lot of people have with journalists, is that they have the idea that they are smarter than the average person. They’re not. There are some journalists who may have become very expert in their field, but as a general rule, journalists are people who have been trained to stand back and observe and tell a story.
The Times-Picayune has 20 photographers. I like to tell them, “You all have 20 photographers. I have twenty thousand.” [Laughs] A lot of those photos may not be worth the digital space they are taking up, but a lot of them are good, too. There are times where The Times-Picayune has back-published some of their [users’] photos. And that’s one of the goals of the company. It was a big issue last year with the story of all the people who got tattoos after Katrina. And this is on the lighter side. Rather than having a reporter look into this, The Times-Picayune had us put a solicitation on our front page: If you felt strongly enough about Katrina to get a tattoo, send us a picture and your story. ... We got hundreds and hundreds of photos you couldn’t imagine. And they did a front-page story from it. There were maybe two 'graphs by a reporter to lead it off, and from there on out it was just the voice of the public.
Q: So then The Times-Picayune, as an example, is making money from advertisers and these people are basically working for them for free. Are there any ethical issues with that?
A: NOLA has a lot of ads. We have so many ads, we have to turn them away. You have to be on a waiting list to advertise on NOLA. That’s a good thing. That means five years from now we’ll still be here for people to do that. We are fulfilling a basic human need. And we are making money to allow me to get my paycheck and for me to feed my family, and for the fairly significant cost it takes to produce this. ... Certainly I am not going to apologize for the fact that all life is about supporting yourself and getting your family fed. And anyone who thinks that journalism or what we do can be done for free is fooling themselves. One thing is, who is going to do good old-fashioned investigative reporting when the papers fail? Even television can’t support that kind of staff. Only newspapers and news magazines can do that. So that’s a good question because we are getting close to the tipping point for newspapers because you have to have this much advertising and this much circulation to put out a paper at all. It’s not a question of how many people are in the newsroom.
Q: Do you think that crowdsourcing could fill that role?
A: Well, that’s one thing we are trying to find out. I’m very interested in Assignment Zero because some very smart people are trying to find an answer to that question. We don’t know the answer yet. But if we can’t ... If anyone has the idea, that the general public is going to pay for investigative journalists, they’re wrong.
As a matter of fact, investigative journalists are often unpopular. Woodward and Bernstein were unpopular with the public. They brought down a presidency and set an example of what the fourth estate really could be. But the fact is when they were doing that, the public hated them. This is the same public that voted Nixon into his second term in [one of] the most overwhelming landslide[s] in American history. If the public doesn’t support you, they’re not going to pay for you. Woodward and Bernstein — that could only have been done by a paper who said, “Screw what’s popular. We want to do what’s right.” And doing what’s right rarely pays off. And anyone who thinks part of the public is going to pay for that very important part of journalism is fooling themselves. If it paid, then TV would be doing it. We’ve got to figure this out before newspapers die. The public can fill in a lot of these places with crowdsourcing journalists, but in the end someone’s got to pay a very high-level talented reporter for months — sometimes years — of investigating a single story. That takes money. Whatever your opinion is on corporations, corporations have provided the only investigative journalism that has ever been done in this country. I’m hoping someone comes up with a better model, but it isn’t going to be done with Marxist rhetoric. And, by the way, the Soviet Union never had investigative reporters and they don’t now. If they try, they get taken somewhere. [Laughs]
Q: Any thoughts of where this trend may be going, what the future could look like?
A: There’s always a danger that even sites like NOLA could become irrelevant unless we tap into our communities. We’ve got a window right now because of our connection with the newspapers and their traditional links to the community. With so many tools coming out, and people being able to do things socially on the Internet, there’s every possibility for a localized Google or a more in-depth Craig’s List to take our place, so we have to reach out, and we have to reach out actively. I’m very much against the idea that if you build it, they will come. I have not had that experience. All of our success has been due to active missionary work in the community before and after Katrina. A lot of time people don’t get involved because they don’t feel like anyone is paying attention to them. And naturally people want other people to pay attention to them. That’s a natural thing. And that’s what we’re banking on. Just real, natural human needs.
(Edited by Jeremy Verdusco)
5/21/07
