The seven-part video – an hour in total – along with the rich assortment of examples, resources and tutorials is as compelling as it is complete a road map of the way forward.  Journalists ranging from the indie blogger to those working in large corporate outlets need to learn how to present stories extracted from the unprecedented amount of  data now available. That data may be collected independently with free and easy-to-use polling tools like Polldaddy or gathered  through sites like Data.gov and Google Public Data Explorer.

Here are two examples of data visualization presented in the documentary:

The Jobless Rate for People Like You, developed by The New York Times, allows viewers to drill down and personalize unemployment data.

The Stimulus Tracker, by MSNBC.Com, allows viewers to see where stimulus package money has been spent down to the county level and weigh its effectiveness. Viewers can also track where the money was spent relative to the voting records of politicians.

The idea that information presented visually and interactively on the web is a powerful way to draw in readers isn’t all that new. Infographics and interactive illustrations of events ranging from the trajectory of a plane crash to a winning Superbowl play have been around for years.  But growth in data visualization specifically has been hampered by the prohibitive  time and cost of parsing the data, developing the code and producing the final product.

The documentary does an excellent job of addressing these issues and the many other practical realities of producing and presenting visualization in a journalistic context.

In ‘Part IV: A New Era in Infographics’ Hannah Fairfield,  Graphics Director  for the Washington Post,  points out the importance of simplicity and the need to clearly present to viewers how to navigate the visualization. It’s also important to present the information in a way that is meaningful to those represented in the data.

In ‘Part VII: Technologies and Tools’ an assortment of heavy hitters in the field discuss the variety of tools now out there or in development that allow news organizations large and small to reduce the coding involved in producing interactive data visualizations. Many Eyes,  Protovis, and Flare are examples of software that offer templates to present timetables, charts and maps among other things.

In addition to their value as news content data visualizations have a lot of design appeal. IBM researcher Marten Wattenberg acknowledges that while stream graphs like ‘The Ebb and Flow of Movies: Box Office Receipts 1986-2008‘ are beautiful and effectively draw readers in, in reality they may not provide much depth of information. In the news world there is often a trade-off between design, approachability, deadlines and the actual information contained in a graphic.

In ‘Part VI: Exploring Data’ the documentary hones in on a topic that comes up throughout: the need to contextualize data and to give it narrative structure — the need to tell compelling stories with the data. Award-winning New York Times designer Amanda Cox along with others acknowledge the difficulty in striking a balance between allowing users to personalize data and draw their own conclusions while also providing the kind of narrative context that makes the information valuable journalism in the first place.

This may endure as data visualizations most vexing challenge.

I’ve learned quite a bit since starting Sunset Park Chronicled six months ago. Certain questions that plague the startup entrepreneurial journalist or blogger were easy to answer. It was a “hyperlocal” blog, so I had an audience—the neighborhood. Few news outlets cover this part of Brooklyn, and there is demand for news. And I knew my subject well. It is my “beat” at the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism.

Getting a blog up and running is easy as well. I started with WordPress.com, which is free, and offers good looking, flexible templates.

Then comes the learning curve and the growing pains. As an individual trying to cover a large and complex community, I don’t have the luxury of taking off one hat and putting on another. I wear them all at once–I aggregate news and I write it. I fix funky links and embed video. On occasion, I editorialize.

I do it imperfectly. Nobody really knows what the news landscape will look like in ten years, or even tomorrow. We do know it’s changing. Anyone can make news, and report it. This is what I have learned:

• Be consistent. Whether weekly, twice a week, or every day, make sure to set a blogging schedule and keep to it. Remember that morning paper that once landed on your doorstep? People like to know they can find something new when they go to your site and these days, people are hungry for as many updates as you can serve up. While a flurry of updates is always nice, consistency and quality pay off in the long run.
• Take a picture. Or a video. Or make a map. Try to create an interactive environment. Get people involved, even if only through watching and clicking.
• Use tags and pingbacks. Tag those posts like the A-train in the ‘80s. Tags help direct traffic. People still fish for news erratically, and you want to catch them in your net.
• Learn search engine optimization. Painful as it is, clever headlines are quickly becoming a thing of the past. You have to put key terms in the headline—like the tags, it helps put you on the radar of Google, Bing and the like. Save your quips for the lede.
• Talk to people. Respond to your readers. Ask questions. Engage thoughtfully with critics to create good dialogue, but don’t get defensive. And don’t take things personally. Doing so tends to take everyone off topic.
• Make a comments policy, and stick to it. You need to figure out what you are willing to put up there. My policy was to  write back to commenters asking them to remove offensive language, but I chose not to do it myself. If they’re not willing to reword their comment to get the idea up there, then it was likely a fleeting thing.
• Use the blog for story ideas. I have learned a lot from writing back to commenters asking them for more. Some speak on the record, some off. Some don’t respond at all, but you never know what you will find until you reach out.
• Shameless blog promotion. A news blog provides a service, an articulation of goings-on and issues, but it can’t work properly if no one’s reading it. Use Twitter. Tell people about the blog in person (gasp!). Then let the viral nature of word of mouth do its work.
• Use your analytics, but not too much. As an editor/publisher/marketer, stats are key. You can get a sense of who is looking and when, and what they want to read and like to look at. I originally used the data embedded into wordpress.com. Now I use Google Analytics, which offers a wealth of information, some of it still opaque to me. That said, there are stories, good stories, important stories that will never get the traffic that a cute cat video on YouTube pulls in an hour. That’s okay. Cute cat coverage does not a good reporter make.
• Be transparent. Don’t pretend you are something you are not. You are helping people understand their environment better. Let them see who’s talking.
• Link. For the love of god, link. Show people where you get your information. You are an educator as much as a reporter. Help them see how the job is done. You’ll build trust and credibility, hot commodities in our information age.
• Use your resources. One of my favorites is Google Alerts. It keeps me abreast of news and blogs, and offers story ideas. Twitter works too. And there is, of course, nothing like shoe leather reporting. It’s the best part anyway.
• Do your best. Life is busy. The news is fast. Blogging is a huge responsibility. Learn how to balance it all to keep quality high, readers interested and stay sane. Technical issues can be fixed, typos corrected, but a stain on your journalistic credibility is harder to clean up.

Tracking audio changes assume that louder scenes (explosions, musical crescendos, shouting) correspond to higher levels of drama. Rapid visual changes (quick motion across the screen, camera motion, or rapid edits) also correspond to action, a quicker tempo, and higher levels of drama. A combined index of audio and visual changes graphed over the length of the movie represents its unique fingerprint, revealing its dramatic highs and lows.

I analyzed forty noteworthy movies and collected the results in this interactive tool. Use it to explore the dramatic profiles for each movie and their corresponding scenes. Do the highest peaks in each profile match the movie’s climactic moments?

Explore the Story Analysis tool, which was used to produce the graphs. Use it to see how each movie’s audio and visuals are analyzed in real-time. You can analyze your own movies (FLV or MP4 format), output the data, and post the results for others to see.

How it was done
First, all the movies had to be converted to the correct Flash-friendly format. Each movie was converted to an MP4 (H.264 codec) file using Handbrake, a free open-source video transcoder. Then I had each movie stream into Flash with the FLVPlayer component.

Tracking the audio changes

Audio levels were analyzed with the ActionScript command, SoundMixer.computeSpectrum(). The command takes a snapshot of the current sound and stores the information as a series of numbers that can be translated visually. While my sound visualization is rather simple, there are countless creative ways to visualize sound. There have even been contests for the most creative visualizations. Since I was most interested in the variation of sound levels throughout the movie, I captured the amplitude (or volume) of the sound every 10 milliseconds and graphed it with a gray line. An average of the sound amplitude was calculated and graphed with a bold white line.

Tracking the visual changes

Every 10 milliseconds, Flash grabbed the image from the video stream with the BitmapData class. The command, getPixel(), gathered the red, green, and blue color information from each pixel. The red, green, and blue color distribution of an image is known as an RGB histogram. My goal was to track changes between histograms that would indicate major visual changes due to camera motion, edits, or subject motion. Much research has been already done on the subject of tracking shot changes for video cataloging, involving complex (and patented) algorithms. I made my calculation quite simple, determined by differences in the histogram area coupled with a dampening function to normalize the extreme values. The resulting index, which reflects visual changes, was graphed as a gray line. An average of the index was calculated and graphed as a bold white line.

Combining audio and visual changes

Combining the audio and visual indices resulted in what I termed, the “drama index”, a measure of the dramatic highs and lows in a movie. The overall shape of the profile, shown in red, can be interactively smoothed out or made more detailed by changing its resolution in the Story Analysis tool.

What does your favorite movie look like?
Analysis of forty distinguished movies–the top ten of all time, the worst ten, the ten highest grossing films, and the previous ten Best Pictures–not surprisingly reveal no common pattern, but it does provide a standard, objective way of tracking a film’s dramatic peaks and valleys–their position, duration, and intensity. This screenshot is a profile of Star Wars. Note the dramatic beginning when Princess Leia’s vessel is boarded, and the slow build-up to the three dramatic peaks at the end: the rescue from the Death Star, the duel between Darth Vader and Obi-Wan Kenobi, and finally the destruction of the Death Star. The analysis works best on modern action films. There is, of course, no consideration for acting, for cinematography, or for the dramatic climaxes that may come in quieter moments (such as the sudden change that crosses an actor’s face with a revelation).

Other movie visualizations
There are many other interesting visualizations of movies. NetFlix recently ran a contest to see if the public could find a more effective way to predict which movies users would prefer based on past ratings. The results of two of the top teams can be visualized as a network of similarities between movies, or as a landscape with similar movies clustered together. (Based on these maps, if you liked Star Wars, then you probably also liked RoboCop).

One recent visualization cleverly plotted the interactions between characters. The hand-drawn map and synthesis of time and geography reminds me a little of Charles Minard’s map of Napolean’s march to Moscow, as discussed and praised by Edward Tufte as a gem of information design.

Finally, the New York Times produced a fascinating look at the box-office revenues of the movies. I love seeing the periodicity in the graph reflecting the predictable huge bumps during the summer blockbuster months and holiday season before the Oscar considerations. Notice also the relatively short, squatter profiles of recent movies compared to the long tails of movies in the past.

What more can we visualize of movies, or the structure of individual stories?

The plan is to build on The Times’ work, which first launched in the spring 2009, and to make it more scalable, generating greater community contributions and involvement. (Read more about the project here.

Jere Hester, director of the J-School’s award-winning NYCity News Service, and I just kicked off a Hyperlocal news course that will help feed The Local with news posts and collaborative projects.

Our goal, however, is not just to have ten students cranking out copy for The Local. We’ll take this collaboration as an opportunity to innovate Hyperlocal coverage on a platform that has growing traffic and momentum to make these Hyperlocal projects meaningful to people living in Ft. Greene and Clinton Hill.

We won’t keep the lessons to ourselves but will share them with you here each month, starting with a post next month on nurturing and motivating community contributors.

In the meantime, if you have ideas about what we should try to implement on The Local, please let us know in the comment section.

When I asked her if there would be a time when such a title would be an oxymoron, she said simply that that time is now.

Schiavocampo has the job many of my students, all aspiring foreign correspondents, want most. With her wheel-on backpack, she goes off to assignments in places like Haiti, Lebanon and Ghana. She blogs, takes still photos, files broadcast pieces for the nightly news and for MSNBC.com, often as her own one-woman video and audio crew.

NBC, like most of so-called mainstream media, has sharply reduced or outright eliminated its foreign newsgathering operations in the past five years. Always the most expensive and perceived by many even inside the industry as the most expendable form of reporting, foreign news gathering has taken a body blow in the dramatically changing economic environment and the digital refiguring of journalism.

But in the supposed ashes of the crash burning of foreign reporting, Schiavocampo and others see a bright future.

“I’m very optimistic,” she said. “We’re finding new ways to tell stories. Things are changing in a way that makes foreign reporting better and more exciting.”

In my shortened career as an editor at Newsday, a paper like several others that closed all of its foreign bureaus, I saw the quick emergence of the advantages of technology in gathering and dispersing foreign news. Satellite phones themselves were remarkably useful as replacements for the scratchy, impossibly unpredictable service from some countries. Transmission of stories in the first Gulf War was possible at times only through cable. Earlier, photographers and broadcast journalists who covered big events like the Iran hostage crisis at times would have to put their film on a plane to get it out to their news organizations.

Schiavocampo, who started out on a traditional path, pursuing a job as a news producer, wanted to be a foreign correspondent. So she left to pitch stories as a print reporter. She added the other skills to meet market demand as a freelancer. NBC noticed and hired her. In that wheel-on backpack, she fits her cameras, two laptops, lights, cables, a tripod and a boom microphone. It all goes in the overhead bin.

Like me, Charles M. Sennott had been a newspaperman his entire career until the Boston Globe closed all its foreign bureaus three years ago. Sennott, with Philip S. Balboni, started Global Post early last year.

“My thinking,” he said as he drove (hands-free) to work in Boston one morning last month, “was 100 percent in the direction of the digital age.”

Global Post is an unquestioned journalistic success with more than 70 correspondents under contract in almost 50 countries, and an ever increasing number of daily hits from not only this country but around the world. Many of the reporters are foreign correspondents who lost their jobs in the abrupt downsizing. But some are talented younger correspondents who never worked for a newspaper or broadcast foreign bureau. Sennott, the executive editor, runs the multi-media website almost as a traditional foreign desk, with assigning editors and copy editors on staff.

“We’re able to put together multi-media packages that are like the best of what was being done when newspapers had foreign bureaus,” he said. “And we’re doing this for the American news consumer. Sure, lots of material is available online from the BBC and other sources. But Americans need foreign reporting that’s geared toward their interests and experiences.”

Sennott is a boisterous personality, passionate about keeping foreign reporting alive. He sees the digital tools available to foreign reporters as a means, not an end, to the pursuit that he has dedicated his professional life to with many years as a correspondent in the Middle East. He continues to report himself, and was particularly proud of this audio slide show he did with photographer Seamus Murphy that accompanied an article from Afghanistan, headlined “Life Death and the Taliban.”

But while the prospects for great journalism are evident in the digital age, the same dogged questions of economic sustainability are on Sennott’s mind a lot these days, as with all of us who love foreign reporting. Global Post seeks advertising and offers a premium subscription service. It pays its correspondents a flat salary that is not comparable to a newspaper and certainly not a broadcast salary for foreign correspondents. It also offers stock incentives.

“I’m really sad that the luxury is gone from having one news organization that took care of you and provided a steady salary, security and benefits for you and your family. It was a wonderful time but that’s over. We have to move on and that’s what we’re doing here. No one knows if Global Post or any other new venture will make it. But foreign news is so important that we have to try.”

The journalist, professor and journalism historian John Maxwell Hamilton, sees Global Post and other ventures not as the dying gasps of foreign reporting, but as a natural progression of an ever-changing environment for foreign news. His important new book, “Journalism’s Roving Eye: A History of American Foreign Reporting,” traces the incremental evolution through the colonial period when publishers would go to ships to get reports from passengers through various technological, economic and political developments to today.

Prof. Hamilton’s conclusion is that we are in a new stage that he has called the confederacy of foreign correspondents. In this new world, that traditional path of correspondents working for a news organization as described by Sennott is only one of a rich mixture of types of reporters covering foreign news—from reporters at the New York Times to citizen journalists, who used new technologies like cell phone photography and blogging to figure so prominently in the coverage of news events like the Mumbai terrorist attacks, the protests over the Iranian election and the impact of the Iraq war on Iraqis.

In the book, Hamilton, a former foreign correspondent himself and professor at Louisiana State University, describes the eight members of this confederacy, including local foreign correspondents, who write about foreign news from here; foreign foreign correspondents, non-Americans who are often citizens of the country they cover; parachute foreign correspondents, such as Mara Schiavocampo; and premium foreign correspondents, who work for high-cost news services, such as Bloomberg or Dow Jones.

When I caught up with him in his office, Hamilton was as optimistic as Schiavocampo and Sennott.

“First of all, it’s not as if there is going to be one solution to the problem,” he said. “I don’t see this as a collapse of bureaus leading to less coverage. Some organizations have pulled back on bureaus, but some have remained strong. The bureau concept has changed. The ability to travel efficiently with reduced equipment and with less people saves time and costs.”

Hamilton argues that foreign reporters have always been in short supply and that foreign news has always had the lowest audience of readers.

“It has always evolved slowly and been the most susceptible to changes in technology and economic conditions. But now we have a much greater variety of information available and a wider variety of the types of reporting and reporters available. We are now seeing an adjustment to the changes. In foreign reporting in particular, and journalism in general, it has been a constant adjustment to change. And it survives through the efforts of the journalists.”

Arianna Huffington, editor-in-chief of the Huffington Post

In her 13-minute commencement address to the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism Class of 2009, Arianna Huffington, the outspoken editor-in-chief of the Huffington Post, told the graduates that the eternal truths of journalism, including the need to speak truth to power, remain as important in the era of Twitter and Facebook as at any time in the past.

“Still, now, there is nothing that is as exciting as reading a well-turned phrase that combines storytelling, drama and, indeed, puts the apostrophes in the right places,” she said. “These are the eternal truths of journalism no matter how much technology changes and the world around us changes.”

Yet it seems to be a contemporary truth of journalism that new media types will chastise old or mainstream media types – and vice-versa – whenever a good opportunity arises.

Huffington warned the graduates not to fall into the trap of access. Too often mainstream media allows itself to be used as little more than ‘stenographers to power,’ she said. The seductive nature of access and proximity to power are why mainstream media outlets missed the two biggest stories of this decade: the lead up to the war in Iraq and the economic meltdown.

She also presented some interesting figures compiled by Karl Fisch, the Arapahoe High School administrator in Littleton, Colorado, behind ‘Shift Happens’ and the ‘Did You Know?’ series of videos. Here are a few examples:

• More video was uploaded to YouTube in the last two months than could have been aired by ABC, CBS and NBC every minute of every day since 1948.
• Newspaper circulation is down 7 million over the last 25 years while unique readership of online news is up 34 million in the last five years.
• We send more text messages a day than there are people on the planet.

Journalism needs to be reinvented, she said.  To do that journalists today need to confront the professional world as it is, not as it was or as they’d like it to be.

“This is an amazing moment to be entering journalism,” she said in closing. “You are in a unique position to transform not just journalism but our world that desperately needs transforming.”

Watch the video:

Arianna Huffington – Commencement 2009 from CUNY Grad School of Journalism on Vimeo.

I had provided a link to David Carr’s latest Media Equation column, “The Fall and Rise of Media,” in which he wrote:

Historically, young women and men who sought to thrive in publishing made their way to Manhattan. Once there, they were told, they would work in marginal jobs for indifferent bosses doing mundane tasks and then one day, if they did all of that without whimper or complaint, they would magically be granted access to a gilded community, the large heaving engine of books, magazines and newspapers…

Once inside that velvet rope, they would find the escalator that would take them through the various tiers of the business and eventually, they would be the ones deciding who would be allowed to come in.

As even casual readers of media news know, those assumptions now sound precious, preposterous even. Calvinistic ideals are no match for macromedia economics that have vaporized significant components of the business model that drives traditional publishing.

Carr recites a now-familiar litany of media industry woes: fewer pages, lower revenues, a seemingly endless trail of buyouts and layoffs, and traditional skill sets that are no longer in demand at a price most would equate with earning a living. And yet, Carr concludes on a note that I read as hopeful:

Young men and women are still coming here to remake the world, they just won’t be stopping by the human resources department of Condé Nast to begin their ascent. For every kid that I bump into who is wandering the media industry looking for an entrance that closed some time ago, I come across another who is a bundle of ideas, energy and technological mastery. The next wave is not just knocking on doors, but seeking to knock them down…

Their tiny netbooks and iPhones, which serve as portals to the cloud, contain more informational firepower than entire newsrooms possessed just two decades ago. And they are ginning content from their audiences in the form of social media or finding ways of making ambient information more useful. They are jaded in the way youth requires, but have the confidence that is a gift of their age as well.

For them, New York is not an island sinking, but one that is rising on a fresh, ferocious wave.

Carr’s column unleashed a torrent of thoughtful responses from third-semester students just days away from graduation. Some were encouraged, like the young woman who said, “Thanks! A good read and break from all the obits being written about media,” and another who wrote, “That was a bright side, nice for a change. Someone still believes in us.”

A third said:

It does depress me a bit. I don’t know what’s out there for me and I’m 10-15 years older than most. But I’ve also been around long enough to have seen and heard other reports that “the sky is falling.” So…I do believe that there’s still hope.

Another student, also older than most of her classmates, had this perspective:

The people who chose to ignore the teetering and heedlessly dig deeper screwed us all by not using their vantage point to scope out firmer ground. So now as the legions of burgeoning j-students slouch into being, we don’t get the secure escalator, sure, but maybe that’s a blessing. Maybe what we needed all along was to stay grounded.

Yet another wrote, “Thanks for this. I guess there is some hope,” but later that day, sent further thoughts:

Yes, the landscape is ripe for innovation, independence and freelancing, but how are we making money? Yes, I can start a blog, maybe get a few Google ads, but I don’t have the luxury of waiting for the money to come with the reality of rent, bills and student loans that are in the now. So I’m optimistic yes, but believe me, it’s hard.

Similarly, one of the young men about to graduate, and frustrated by the hunt for a “traditional” media job, voiced a concern of those for whom becoming an entrepreneur feels more like a burden than an opportunity:

I know my limitations. While some young people can easily turn their ideas into small companies, we don’t all have the talent to create a new app or software that would change the media landscape. I still consider some of the traditional skills — curiosity, skepticism — to be vital to journalism.

Finally, there was this:

I love Carr’s take on this, but it makes me really tired, to be honest. It is hard enough to think about writing good stories and being a good journalist, let alone having to also figure out how best to package and sell it at the same time. I feel a lot of pressure, as traditional models are shattered, to become not only a good journalist, but a good entrepreneur. And I don’t particularly care to be one of those latter animals.

I think that in this urgent conversation, we forget … [that] a writer is not a photographer is not a copy editor is not an editor is not an ad salesman. In “traditional’ journalism,” those things hung in a kind of balance. Maybe imperfectly, but functionally.

That model is going the way of the dodo. That’s fine, we can’t change that. We have to come up with something new. But, as graduating student journalists, we are being asked, expected, required to have as many specialized skills as possible in order to have a hope of making a living in this field. Sure, there are some multi-talented, bottomless-energy folks who are able to do this. But not everyone can. And not everyone wants to.

Still, this same young woman concludes:

I’m as excited as Carr that enterprising people who love technology and information are able to create new avenues for delivering stories. And really, as curmudgeonly as all the above may sound, I don’t think that “traditional” media does it perfectly. We’re all just fumbling through as we always have. I just hope that in the scramble to make a dime in this business, we don’t forget why we’re doing it and who we’re serving.

So, DNJ readers, take a look at Carr’s piece; do you find it depressing? Hopeful? Somewhere in between, or something entirely else?

While the idea of getting many people to donate small amounts of cash to fund a project is not new — charities do it, political campaigns do it — some forward-thinking journalists and entrepreneurs, as Mashable recently observed, are starting to apply the same crowdfunding concept to the news.

One of them is David Cohn at Spot.Us, a Bay Area-based project that’s using crowdfunding to support investigative journalism. Members of the public provide tips and suggestions for stories; an interested journalist crafts a pitch; the pitch is then presented back to the public for funding. Once enough money is raised and the story is completed, it is offered or sold for publication. (Read more about how Spot.Us works here, see the stories it has reported here, and watch Cohn explain his mission here.)

Spot.Us crowdfunded reporting made its way recently into the pages of the New York Times. The story,  “Afloat in the Ocean, Expanding Islands of Trash,” by Lindsay Hoshaw, described a a plastic garbage patch in the Pacific Ocean that’s twice the size of Texas. It included a photo slideshow, and a note at the end that “travel expenses were paid in part by readers of Spot.Us.”

As the first such high-profile partnership of its kind, the article has garnered a lot of attention among new-media observers. Below are links to some of the discussion that ensued online.

Even before it was clear that Hoshaw and Spot.Us would raise the money necessary to report the story, the Times’s Public Editor Clark Hoyt wrote about the newspaper’s experimental relationship with Spot.Us in a column called “One Newspaper, Many Checkbooks.”

“To some, this is exploitation — the mighty New York Times forcing a struggling journalist to beg with a virtual tin cup,” Hoyt wrote.

But Hoshaw does not think so. To her, it is an opportunity she cannot pass up — a story she has long dreamed of, and a chance for a byline in The Times. To David Cohn, the founder of the nonprofit Spot.Us, it is a way for the public to commission journalism that it wants. For The Times, it is another step into a new world unthinkable even a few years ago.

The day Hoshaw’s story was published, Cohn, in his blog, called it “a great case study for Spot.Us, arguably the best of the 40+ projects we’ve undertaken in the past year,” and praised the Times for acting “as if they were a lean and mean startup,” in contrast to the frustrating experiences he’d had with other news organizations.

But over at the Columbia Journalism Review, Megan Garber trashed the Times’s garbage patch story, saying it failed to deliver the “human connection” promised in the pitch, had too much of a “could-be-done-from anywhere” type of reporting rather than the first-hand sense of being out at sea, and “could have been much, much better.” Garber wrote that she wished the Times article had more closely resembled the “good stuff” that appeared in Hoshaw’s personal blog of real-time reports, filed during the time she spent in the Pacific researching the story.

Here’s Lindsay Hoshaw’s response to CJR, in which she acknowledged that her blogging-at-sea had indeed given readers a richer story. “I wrote what I believed the Times wanted,” she said, “though they never specified the type of article they expected.”

Bill Mitchell of Poynter also analyzed the Spot.Us/New York Times experiment, as did Mashable.

And it was Scott Rosenberg who pointed out that “The Times’s reluctance to capitalize on — or even link to! — [Hoshaw's] blog indicates the limits of its own willingness to embrace new modes of journalism far more than any problems or failures in the Spot.Us model.”

All told, it was a spirited discussion about an experiment in what could be one of the ways forward for journalism.