Dean Wright is Global Editor, Ethics, Innovation and News Standards. Any opinions are his own.

YouTube has launched a worthy project called the Reporters’ Center, a collection of videos from journalists around the industry providing advice for aspiring citizen journalists.

I’ve contributed a piece on ethics and gaining and keeping the trust of your audience, and my Reuters colleague Adam Pasick, the U.S. editor of Reuters.com, has done a piece on shooting different kinds of video interviews.

You’ll also find contributions from folks who are a lot more famous, such as Katie Couric, Bob Woodward and Arianna Huffington, among others.

Dean Wright is Global Editor, Ethics, Innovation and News Standards. Any opinions are his own.

Are we too connected?

In recent days and weeks I’ve been wondering if our mobile phones, Blackberries, text messaging and constant access to email and social media have brought us too close together for our own good.

Or maybe the quality of our connected life is only as good as the information we share.

At this point, social media and microblogging phenomena like Facebook and Twitter focus on short answers to such generic questions as, “What are you doing?”

We hear from network and cable television anchors who tell us what they’re having for lunch (often a quick sandwich in the company cafeteria because they are, well, really busy). Or from usually cynical White House journalists who can’t resist Tweeting which B-list celebrity they saw at the White House Correspondents Dinner. Here are a few actual Tweets from the so-called nerd prom:

• “Just spend quality time with ricky schroeder #nerdprom”.
• “post #nerdprom sightings. demi/ashton, james franco, owen wilson, eric holder, mayor fente, d axelrod, christopher hitchens, dana delaney”. (This one’s fitting since Ashton Kutcher is the world’s most followed Twitterer).
• “Just got picture with Dule Hill.”

Given the quality of the material, it’s little wonder that a Nielsen study found that Twitter retained only 40 percent of its new members after a month of use. And that was after Oprah started sharing her 140-character thoughts. Before that it was 30 percent.

But could it be that this “me, me, me” quality of Facebook and Twitter is just an early evolutionary stage of something smarter and more useful? There are some encouraging signs — and that’s a good thing, because we’re becoming ever more connected.

How connected are we?

• Facebook has more than 200 million active users and more than 100 million log on at least once a day. More than 3.5 billion minutes a day are spent on Facebook and more than 20 million users update their statuses at least once a day.
• A Nielsen survey found that American teenagers sent and received an average of 2,272 text messages a month in the last quarter of 2008, an astonishing 80 messages a day. That’s more than double the previous year’s figures and works out to more than three messages an hour — if they never sleep or go to class.

How connected are we going to be?

• Delta Airlines reported that more than 300 of its aircraft will be equipped with wi-fi this year, enabling email users to stay connected — or shackled — to their accounts even seven miles above the earth. Other airlines are closely watching Delta’s experience.

Media outlets and other institutions are finding ways to take advantage of this connectivity, moving beyond gossip and gab.

• ProPublica recently introduced Change Tracker, an application that monitors government websites and sends out notices of changes as they are posted via a Twitter feed. Some of the changes are a bit obscure — “Biography of Millard Fillmore [rare] changed on 5/27″ — but others track changes to the website following the spending of economic stimulus money.
• The Vatican has added an iPhone app to reach out to young, connected people, according to Online Media Daily. Young people “are looking to a different media culture, and this is our effort to ensure that the Church is present in that communications culture,” said Monsignor Paul Tighe, secretary of the Vatican’s Social Communications department.
• At Reuters, we’re using Reuters Messenger to build chat rooms in which our journalists can expand their conversation with the marketplace through informal, dynamic interactions with a group of engaged financial news clients on our terminals.

We’re also using Twitter in some intriguing ways:

• Specialist journalists use it to share articles and build up a following.
• Online editorial staff and bloggers use Twitter to distribute news and solicit reader comment.
• Journalists are using Twitter during live events like Davos (Editor-in-Chief David Schlesinger used it to break news there earlier this year) and to solicit questions for newsmaker interviews.

There are huge implications for those of us in the news media as we try to reach an increasingly fragmented and distracted audience awash in information, some of it wanted and much of it not.

And journalists who work and live in the digital world (and that’s just about all of us now) will find that there is little or no difference between our professional and private personae in the wide-open world of social media. A visit to my Facebook page, for example, would reveal to my friends that I have a strong interest in horse racing; an affection for the New York Yankees (an obsession, my wife would argue); and take great pleasure in the words and music of Leonard Cohen, Bruce Springsteen and Townes Van Zandt. What you won’t find is an indication of my politics or religion.

Here at Reuters, we are developing guidelines for how our journalists interact with social media.

• If Reuters journalists want to use Twitter or social media as part of their professional role they should seek the permission of their manager.
• If Reuters journalists use Twitter professionally they should use the word “Reuters” in the name of their streams or somewhere else on the page.
• The Trust Principles apply to Twitter and social media — they should do nothing that compromises them.
• Microblogging and use of social media tend to blur the distinction between professional and personal lives: When using Twitter or social media in a professional capacity our journalists should aim to be personable but not to include irrelevant material about their personal lives.

In an email to the editorial staff, Editor-in-Chief Schlesinger told Reuters journalists, “whether we like it or not, our online identities are inextricably linked with our workplace identities….Things we do online could very easily taint our journalistic activity. If one of us self-identifies as ‘very liberal’ politically, it may well be the truth, but would advertising it simply feed the myth that journalists in general have a liberal bias?”

“The easiest rule,” Schlesinger cautioned, “is to stop, think and imagine: How would you feel and how would you react if someone made your Facebook page or blog or online comment a story? Could you defend your objectivity? Could Reuters defend having you on the beat you’re on? Could your reputation, and ours, survive someone making an issue of it?”

I’m sure neither Schlesinger nor I have had the last word on the relationship of journalism and social media, nor on whether we’re all too connected. What we need to pay attention to is the quality of those connections.

What do you think about how journalists are and should be using social media and microblogging? Let us know here — and don’t feel like you have to keep your thoughts to 140 characters.

Dean Wright is Global Editor, Ethics, Innovation and News Standards. Any opinions are his own.

There’s nothing like a disease outbreak to highlight the value of the media in alerting and informing the public in the face of an emergency.

There’s also nothing like it to bring out some of our more excessive behavior, essentially shouting “Run for your lives! (but, whatever you do, stay tuned, keep reading the website and don’t forget to buy the paper!).”

An outbreak of a form of influenza, which was known as swine flu before the World Health Organization changed the name, has killed scores in Mexico and infected others in the United States, Canada, Europe and New Zealand. It’s already having an effect on markets and travel plans, in addition to the obvious impact on public health.

The impact on markets could become more significant in time, but the impact on the media was practically immediate.

Cable television programmers went into crisis mode and a look at newspaper front pages and website home pages around the world showed a range of responses, from the almost hysterical to the concerned and more measured.

• In the New York Daily News: “SWINE FLU SPREADS!” (though it was played below a sports story on the New York Yankees losing to the Boston Red Sox).
• In the New York Post: “HOG WILD!” (also playing second to the Yankees’ humiliation, but illustrated with a pig sucking on a thermometer).
• In The Japan Times (using a Reuters story): “Swine flu in Mexico sparks global panic”
• In the South China Morning Post (which certainly has experience in covering bird flu and SARS): “Asia on high alert for swine flu as airports step up checks.”
• In The Guardian: “Swine flu: call for global action as outbreak spreads.”
• In the Toronto Sun: “CALM URGED AS FLU FEARS GROW.”

Later Monday, after the European Union health commissioner advised Europeans to postpone nonessential travel to the United States and Mexico, The New York Times led its website with “Europe Warned on U.S. Travel,” with a deck reflecting transatlantic disagreement, “Flu Advisory Unwarranted, C.D.C. Says.”

The BBC website focused on the confirmation of flu cases in the UK, with extensive Q&A’s on the origins of the disease and how it spreads and contributions from readers who were dealing with disease (some of them medical professionals in Mexico).

Big, bad-news stories can mean surges in audiences for media outlets and they certainly raise the adrenalin level of editors and reporters. They offer the temptation to go to excess, but they also offer the opportunity for us be of priceless service to our customers, clients and readers.

The question for me is how we in the media make sure we report accurately and informatively on the story and its impact on the markets and consumers’ lives without minimizing and without sensationalizing it.

“This is the type of story where our goal to stay factual and keep perspective is essential to uphold,” says Reuters Editor-in-Chief David Schlesinger. “Our role is neither to trivialize nor to hype or scaremonger, but to describe accurately what is happening and put its implications in context.”

Reuters has focused a great deal of resources—rightly, given our customers and audience—on the implications for the markets and the impact on the global economic downturn.

On Monday afternoon, Reuters.com was leading with “Will global recovery catch the flu?” atop a package of stories on possible market scenarios, the EU travel warning and factboxes on health precautions and industries being affected. One story noted, not surprisingly, that travel and tourism stocks were in turmoil.

Reuters.com also featured a special coverage page with the latest news, accompanied by a sober presentation of “Swine Flu Facts.” There’s even an invitation to receive updates on Twitter. Call me a skeptic on Twitter, but 140 characters won’t do much to add context to the story. Still, no one ever said Twitter was about context and at least you can follow developments, whether or not you’re near a computer.

My Reuters colleagues—especially the ones working bravely and tirelessly in Mexico—are succeeding in upholding the goal of staying factual and keeping events in perspective. It’s our mission to provide the information and insight our audience and customers need to make intelligent decisions about their investments and their lives. As shown by the World Health Organization’s decision Monday to raise the pandemic alert to Level 4, and later to Level 5, there’s plenty of drama to report without adding to it.

The flu story is still in its early stages and it remains to be seen if this becomes one of the biggest stories of our time. Whatever happens, it won’t hurt us all to take a deep breath now.

Dean Wright is Global Editor, Ethics, Innovation and News Standards. Any opinions are his own.

Kidnapping isn’t funny.

Neither are extortion, hijacking or murder threats.

So why have some in the media been laughing—or at least winking—at people who have been doing precisely that—the criminals who have been hijacking ships and crews off the Horn of Africa and holding them for ransom?

I think it has something to do with what we’ve chosen to call them: pirates.

Perhaps we in the media have all seen too many cartoonish films with Johnny Depp portraying the charming and engaging Jack Sparrow. Or maybe we remember an earlier era when Errol Flynn played a charming and engaging Geoffrey Thorpe who fights for commerce and his country (England) and the affections of a Spanish princess.

Maybe we need a break from the mostly grim coverage of the financial crisis and evaporating savings, continuing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, a tide of gun violence and unrest around the world.

The day after the crew of the Maersk Alabama kept control of their ship after the attack by pirates who later held Capt. Richard Phillips, the front-page headline in the New York Post was: “Yo, Ho, D’oh.”

A Google News search over the past month shows 414 stories with references to “ahoy,” 150 to “avast,” 76 to “walk the plank,” 61 to “Davy Jones,” and 165 to varying spellings of “arrgh.”

The White House press corps was not immune. As the Washington Post’s Dana Milbank wrote (sprinkling his piece with references to Davy Jones, walking the plank and scallywags), “ …the discussion of an American shipping captain’s successful rescue from pirates over the weekend brought the rare sensation of adventure on the high seas to the White House briefing room yesterday—and everybody seemed to enjoy the diversion.”

Maybe we do need the diversion, but this is deadly serious business and I wonder if we’re calling the Somali “pirates” something they aren’t.

At the risk of being accused of splitting hairs (oh, let’s split hairs!), dictionary definitions of “pirate” and “piracy” traditionally have much more to do with theft than kidnapping.

According to Merriam Webster online, “piracy” is defined as “1: an act of robbery on the high seas; also: an act resembling such robbery 2: robbery on the high seas 3a: the unauthorized use of another’s production, invention, or conception especially in infringement of a copyright b: the illicit accessing of broadcast signals.”

Putting aside the third definition (that’s another column), it seems that what the Somali “pirates” are doing is closer to extortion and kidnapping than robbery. They don’t want the grain in the holds of the Maersk Alabama and other famine relief ships headed to Kenya or even the vehicles on the decks of other seized ships. They don’t even want the ships. They want to exchange the ships and their cargoes for a ransom that is a very small percentage of what they are actually worth.

I know this isn’t the Council of Trent and I don’t hold out much hope of persuading my colleagues to call the “pirates” something else, like “kidnappers” or “extortionists” or “hijackers.” But I think we could turn down the “shiver me timbers” index considerably.

There are signs that the coverage of the kidnappings off the Horn of Africa are changing the ways some people think about “pirates.”

In Grand Rapids, Mich., Amy Hekman, a childhood literacy coach, told the Grand Rapids Press that when she’s talking to her children about the incidents, “I’ve been conscious not to use the word ‘pirate.’ I tell them a ship was captured.”

And 10-year-old Jacob Peterson told the paper that he’s not sure he’ll want to reprise his pirate costume for Halloween, because, he said, the Somali “pirates” “seem mean.”

Thank you, Jacob.

Dean Wright is Global Editor, Ethics, Innovation and News Standards.

Finally. The U.S. newspaper industry has come up with a brilliant solution to its profitability problem and will embark on a new wave of hiring journalists to staff its newsrooms and… Darn, I always wake up at that point, then turn to Romenesko to confirm that, yes, I was dreaming.

For those of us who have two or three decades behind us in our careers, the outlook is daunting. But what about journalists who have three and more decades of work ahead of them? How do they get out of bed in the morning and face the day?

I asked my assistant, Ben Frumin, that question and suggested he write about it. As you’ll see, Ben, a product of Columbia University’s graduate school of journalism, faces the future with “a strange combination of short-term skepticism and long-term optimism.” It’s gratifying that the talented new generation of journalists still has faith in the future of our profession, even while much of the news industry struggles to reinvent itself. (Of course, his opinions are his own, as are mine.)

Let’s hear from Ben.

—-

It’s only April, and already 2009 has been the worst year in my lifetime (and in the lifetimes of journalists three times my age) for the U.S. newspaper industry. And judging from the frequent “Woes-R-Us” conversations I have with other 20-something reporters and writers, an entire generation of journalists is close to losing hope.

The devastation in our industry has been mighty. The Tribune Company—owner of big-name dailies like the Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune and Baltimore Sun—is bankrupt. Colorado’s best daily newspaper, the Rocky Mountain News, shut down in February. The Seattle Post-Intelligencer slashed nearly 90 percent of its staff and stopped publishing a print edition. The San Francisco Chronicle, which reportedly loses $1 million a week, avoided imminent sale or closure (for now) only because its largest union gave management permission to cut at least 150 jobs. My hometown newspaper, the Pulitzer-winning, corrupt congressman-exposing San Diego Union-Tribune, dodged what seemed like inevitable bankruptcy only by selling itself to a Beverly Hills private equity firm whose interest in the paper probably has more to do with the valuable land the Union-Tribune office sits on than the print product it publishes. Across the country, there have already been more than 8,000 layoffs and buyouts at U.S. papers this year.

Even the august New York Times is struggling, temporarily cutting salaries and borrowing $225 million against its fancy new Manhattan headquarters—not to mention another $250 million at 14 percent interest from Mexican billionaire Carlos Slim, now one of the Times’ largest shareholders. And just last week The New York Times Company threatened to close one of the largest of the 18 newspapers it owns, The Boston Globe, winner of 20 Pulitzer Prizes.

It wasn’t so long ago that U.S. newspapers were profitable and proud. What happened? There’s been much hand-wringing and finger-pointing about the misfortune, mismanagement and mistakes that have led several newspapers to death, or at least its door. Publishers overleveraged themselves for dubious acquisitions. Newspapers spent years bungling their migration to the Internet, giving away content without figuring out how to make money off of it, allowing parasitic websites to effectively steal their stories (and sell ads surrounding them), and too easily surrendering their lucrative classified advertising businesses to Craigslist. Then the recession hit. Goodbye, remaining advertisers.

A thorough and devastating report by the Pew Project for Excellence in Journalism put it this way: “Imagine someone about to begin physical therapy following a stroke, suddenly contracting a debilitating secondary illness.” Ouch.

It’s not exactly a promising time to be a young journalist. Jobs are scarce, business models are broken, news organizations are shrinking and shutting down, and no one knows how much worse things will get before they get better; if they get better. I’ve been a journalist since 2003, and sometimes I lament with embarrassing self-pity that I got into this business at the absolute worst possible moment in the industry’s history. Then I remember there’s a whole batch of eager young students that will graduate from journalism school this spring. Sheesh. Maybe we all should have gone to law school.

I’m glad I didn’t, of course. I love journalism, and (cue the sappy music) I know that it’s critical to ensuring a healthy democracy and informed citizenry. Sure, you have blogs and Twitter and wikis and iReporters and YouWitnesses and citizen journalists and a seemingly infinite number of other newspaper replacements in this plugged-in, powered-up digital world where content can easily be created and distributed by just about anyone. But none of these things truly replace journalists—professionals who make their living intelligently gathering, analyzing and dispensing information that is trustworthy and true. The paper is, I grant, an outmoded antique. The news printed on it is essential. Crowdsourcing, parasitism, opinionating and happenstance witnessing are not the same thing as full-time, dedicated, professional watchdogging of cops and courts; of government and industry; of the powerful and corrupt. What we do matters. A lot. And celebrating the demise of newspapers—largely self-inflicted though it may be—as some have done, illustrates nothing if not ignorance and ingratitude.

Thankfully, hardly a day goes by now without some new “aha!” plan to rescue or reinvent newspapers being proposed, hailed or ridiculed—and typically all three. There’s been talk of university-like endowments for non-profit newspapers; automatic micropayments each time a reader clicks on a hyperlinked news story; an iTunes model for news; donations to journalists and news organization from readers, given either before an article is reported and written, or after it’s read; moving digital newspaper content behind a pay wall; building newspaper fees into monthly Internet access bills; and even (a not altogether serious) proposal for a government bailout of the newspaper industry.

It seems unlikely that any of these plans on its own will solve all of the news business’s problems. They’re all imperfect. As digital darling Clay Shirky wrote in a recent essay-gone-viral, “Nothing will work, but everything might.”

The great irony in all of this is that the same digitization that sped the destruction of newspapers may also resurrect the news business. Incredible new multimedia storytelling tools; shockingly simple self-publishing platforms that erase barriers to entry; a very literal World Wide Web that allows a writer to be read anywhere—it’s all terrifically promising for the future of journalism. The Internet may be demolishing newspapers, but it has also empowered journalists to untether themselves from news organizations, practicing their craft and publishing their work without relying on the expensive print-and-deliver infrastructure that newspapers once had a monopoly on. Anyone who wants to can be published. Clips are instant and eminently attainable. And the traditional journalism career path of starting as a beat reporter at a small local newspaper and working one’s way up the ladder there, or on to bigger and bigger papers, has largely been replaced by a juggling act of freelancing and self-publishing. Gigs are the new jobs.

While there are plenty of journalists who have found success in this new model, there are still few pros making real money off the Internet. For instance, my girlfriend and I worked as journalists in India for a year and, on the side, casually kept up a colorful blog that chronicled our adventures there. Traffic was paltry by Internet standards—just 500 or so unique visitors each month. Still, we put Google ads on the site, figuring that as long as people were reading our blog, we might as well try to make some money off of it. Total earnings over 14 months: $7.10. Maybe I’ll use that cash to buy us a (cheap) round of celebratory drinks.

Media veteran Alan Mutter put it this way: “The challenge for those who are, or who aim to be, journalists is to find a way to afford to do what you ought to do, what you want to do and what society desperately needs you to do.” Because as is, Mutter continued, “the comparatively thin revenues generated by most of these enterprises are not at the moment providing anything close to the compensation that professional journalists receive at even the stingiest traditional news organization.” It’s not like journalists were making AIG-level salaries to begin with.

Until someone figures out how to make the news profitable again, many journalists of my generation will likely continue to suffer from a strange combination of short-term skepticism and long-term optimism, disgruntled that the prospects of our careers and industry aren’t likely to get rosier any time soon, but sure that someday, even if it takes years, the same technology that demolished print will create a new, imaginative system that can sustain us.

Who knows—if we’re lucky, maybe things will start to turn around as early as this year. After all, it is only April.

–Ben Frumin

Dean Wright is Global Editor, Ethics, Innovation and News Standards. Any opinions are his own.

The global financial crisis may have drained the coffers of investors, businesses and nations, but it’s making our language a bit richer as we discover, revive, coin and develop words and phrases to help make sense of it all.

Some take hold quickly and spread far and wide. “Bailout,” naturally, was voted Word of the Year for 2008 by the American Dialect Society and by Merriam-Webster and was No. 2 on Time’s “Top 10 Buzzwords” (a list that also included “staycation,” a frugal vacation spent close to home). Interestingly—and predictively, as it turned out—the dialect society’s 2007 Word of the Year was “subprime.”

There is a blizzard of language that strives to describe—but sometimes obscures—the strange new financial world we’re in. Television shows, websites and talk radio have exhorted us to buy or sell, have faith or run for our lives, be calm and just trust CEOs or don’t believe a word they say. It’s enough to make you wonder if screenwriter William Goldman’s famous assessment of Hollywood—”Nobody knows anything”—applies here.

We who make our livings in financial journalism have a responsibility to help show the way through the blizzard—to translate and explain, or at least not to make it any more confusing. To that end, here at Reuters News, we’re updating our financial glossary. We want it to be a living document that changes as the world it describes changes. When we’re finished with updates, we plan to open it up to our users as a wiki. In the meantime, take a look and feel free to comment on this blog.

I also want to invite all of you to post on this blog your own words and phrases that capture the essence of the financial situation or help you make sense of it. Or you might want to share words and phrases that you’d like to see disappear from the language because they confuse and obfuscate, rather than illuminate.

Some words describing phenomena and financial tools that are causes or effects of the global financial crisis have quickly come into common usage. For many people, definitions for these important terms are still less than clear. Among them:

• Agflation: “Inflation driven predominantly by rising prices for agricultural products,” according to Word Spy. Reuters was quick to cover this phenomenon and we created a special coverage page, though the earliest use, according to Word Spy, was by the National Post in May 2007.
• Collateralized Debt Obligation: “An asset-backed security which uses a portfolio of bonds or loans as collateral, or security. A sponsor uses the portfolio to set up a special purpose investment vehicle which issues securities or CDOs, sometimes with a higher credit rating than any of the individual underlying assets. There may be reduced transparency in assessing the underlying risks,” according to our financial glossary. That’s not exactly a “Finance for Dummies” explanation, but it’s a complex term. Given what’s happened in the last year, maybe no one really understood CDOs.
• Leverage: Also known as “gearing,” according to our glossary, leverage is the ratio of debt to equity. As we’ve learned painfully in the current crisis, companies with extremely leveraged positions—that is, those who have borrowed much, much more than they own—are left vulnerable to major market fluctuations.
• Securitization: “The creation of asset backed securities. The assets to be securitised are sold to a special purpose vehicle (SPV), thus isolating the borrower from any claims for repayment. The SPV then issues bonds or other debt instruments which can be traded. The money raised by the issuance of the debt is used to pay the borrower for the assets. Mortgages can be securitised as can future royalties from a pop star’s song portfolio,” according to our glossary. Again, that’s not exactly an elementary explanation of this important term. More simply, securitization is a process of pooling assets that produce revenue—like mortgages—slicing them up, and repackaging them as securities that are sold to investors. In the U.S., securitization of mortgages—some of them “subprime” loans taken out by home buyers who couldn’t afford them and later defaulted—was a major contributor to the financial crisis.
• Stagflation: This one pretty much means what it sounds like: “A state in which an economy experiences high inflation accompanied by stagnant economic activity, i.e. low growth and high unemployment,” according to our glossary. Still, for the uninitiated, it might not be quite so obvious without the definition. And we’ve used the word more than once in stories without defining it.

Other words or phrases that are decades or even centuries old that have risen to prominence during this crisis:

• Clawback: “To get back (as money) by strenuous or forceful means (as taxation),” according to Merriam-Webster. This word, which the online dictionary dates to 1953, has been used a lot lately, typically in the context of recouping big bonuses from Wall Street high-fliers whose employers now need taxpayer-funded bailouts just to survive. New York Senator Chuck Schumer, a Democrat who’s received plenty of financial support from Wall Street, said on NBC’s Meet the Press earlier this month that the U.S. needs “really tough oversight” on limits to executive compensation. “I like clawbacks, for instance,” the senator said.
• Decremental: A gradual decrease in quality or quantity, according to Merriam-Webster. The online dictionary says this one has been around since 1610, but it’s certainly appropriate for a 21st century crisis (although “gradual” might not be entirely appropriate).
• Ponzi Scheme: Sadly, with the arrest and guilty plea of Wall Street swindler Bernard Madoff, this one is firmly back in common usage. “A fraudulent investment scheme that promises high returns which are derived from an inflow of new investors’ funds rather than from sound investments. The scheme collapses when there are not enough new investors to pay the old investors. Also known as a Pyramid scheme,” according to our glossary. Generally, we’ve done a good job of clearly explaining what Ponzi schemes are. For instance, this piece about the increase in Ponzi schemes devotes its entire fourth paragraph to this clear definition: “Such schemes use money from new investors to pay distributions and redemptions to existing investors. They typically collapse when new funds dry up.”

There are also a number of tongue-in-cheek phrases that poke fun at the gloomy fiscal landscape.

• Brickor Mortis: “A real estate market in which very few houses are being sold,” according to Word Spy. This one saw a lot of use in the United Kingdom.
• Flat is the new growth (or up): Let’s hope not for long.
• Jingle mail: “The practice of abandoning one’s house and mailing the keys back to the creditor because the mortgage is worth more than the house itself,” according to Word Spy.
• Utility vs. casino: Expresses the divide between conventional and unconventional banking.

Other new words are pure invention. For instance, the Dialogic blog listed the winners of the Washington Post’s Mensa Invitational contest, which “asked readers to take any word from the dictionary, alter it by adding, subtracting or changing only one letter, and supply a new definition.” I highly recommend the full list, and two or three of them seem appropriate for a new financial crisis vocabulary:

• Cashtration: The act of buying a house, which renders the subject financially impotent for an indefinite period.
• Intaxication: Euphoria at getting a tax refund, which lasts until you realize it was your money to begin with.
• Dopeler Effect: The tendency of stupid ideas to seem smarter when they come at you rapidly.

And at the Double-Tongued Dictionary, we find a number of words and phrases that have made it into the language, if not the mainstream dictionaries. The Double-Tongued Dictionary is edited by Grant Barrett, who is a co-host of the U.S. public radio program “A Way With Words.”

• Bad bank: Though it might sound like a scolding tut-tut given to irresponsible financial institutions, this term typically refers to the proposal for a giant, government-run bank that would buy toxic (or “bad”) assets from existing banks, hopefully allowing them to return to financial health.
• Econolypse: The situation we may or may not be in.
• I kill you later: This catch phrase was described this way on Bloomberg.com: “Using derivatives contracts known as accumulators, the company wanted to minimize its currency exposure resulting from a A$1.6 billion (US$1.07 billion) investment in an iron ore mine in Australia. Three months later, the Aussie had lost almost 40 percent of its value against the greenback, and Citic Pacific’s losses from the accumulators—so notorious in Hong Kong that investors refer to them as “I kill you laters”—had soared.”
• Jet-pooling: The mode of shared travel that’s been popularly, and sometimes sarcastically, suggested to corporate CEOs who fly on expensive private jets to Washington D.C., where they then asked the U.S. Congress for emergency bailout funds.
• Mini-Madoff: The nickname given to alleged Ponzi schemers whose suspected swindles—while not nearly as massive as Madoff’s US$65 billion fraud—have also been exposed by the economic downturn. As Warren Buffett famously said, “You only find out who is swimming naked when the tide goes out.”
  
• Zombie company: Firms kept alive by banks even though they were insolvent.

We’ve only scratched the surface. I know readers of this website are more plugged into the financial world than many. So let us know the words and phrases that you’ve heard that have enriched the language, if not your brokerage accounts.

Dean Wright is Global Editor, Ethics, Innovation and News Standards. Any opinions are his own.

This is the time of year when I’m reminded of how proud I am to work for Reuters News. So permit me to put criticism on hold for a moment and write a column of praise.

The 2008 Journalists of the Year awards were presented Thursday night at a ceremony at Thomson Reuters headquarters in New York. The 10 awards, presented by Editor-in-Chief David Schlesinger, honored individuals and teams responsible for the top journalism produced last year by Reuters News.

Looking at the winners, I’m not only proud but humbled. The expertise, the tenacity, the speed and in some cases the sheer bravery of these journalists is inspiring.

Take Goran Tomasevic, awarded Photo of the Year for his stunning image of Marine Sergeant William Olas Bee taking cover from Taliban fighters in Afghanistan. You can almost hear the bullets pinging into the foxhole. Goran is modest, though: “If I hadn’t already been pointing the camera at the Marine when the bullet hit the wall, there is no way I would have been able to react quickly enough to take those pictures.”

Or Emmanuel Braun, honored as Video Journalist of the Year for his work in Africa. He was the only agency TV crew to get into the Central African Republic, a near-forgotten crisis zone where conflict between rebels and the government has displaced tens of thousands. And when British mercenary Simon Mann went on trial in Equatorial Guinea, Emmanuel bravely carried on shooting subversively with a mini camera after his main camera was rendered useless by Guinean soldiers and he had been repeatedly threatened and told not to continue his coverage.

Tenacity doesn’t just happen in the world’s war zones, either. Patrick Rucker won the Scoop of the Year award for his July 11 report that the Fed would lend emergency funds to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. The Fed initially denied the story after markets closed that day, something competitors jumped on, even labeling our work erroneous. But Patrick’s reporting was rock-solid and, barely 48 hours later, his scoop was 100-percent confirmed.

I’m humbled by the expertise and solid reporting that Eadie Chen brought to her coverage of macroeconomic issues from Beijing. She was named Reporter of the Year for her efforts and was simply unparalleled in breaking economic stories in one of the toughest countries of the world on which to report. One of her secrets: Patiently and diligently cultivating contacts.

China was also the setting of the Story of the Year, the Reuters News team’s coverage of the Beijing Olympics. The Beijing Games was one of the most important since the Olympics began, as China cemented its importance on the world stage with a dazzling display of showmanship and organization.

Mike Dolan, who was named Editor of the Year, showed that a tumultuous year in the markets brings out the best in our journalists. Mike, the financial markets editor for Europe, the Middle East and Africa, delivered a balanced, astute and important news file that was light on hyperbole while still capturing drama. He’s the sort of smart, dedicated editor who helps make Reuters News indispensable to our clients.

Reuters News proved indispensable to clients in covering another war zone: Georgia. The Reuters Television team covering the war won the Video Story of the Year award. The team of more than a dozen dominated coverage of the conflict from the very beginning.

The Georgia War also produced another winner, Gleb Garanich, who was named Photo Journalist of the Year, for his haunting and dramatic photographs, which captured the scale of the conflict and the devastating toll it took on the thousands of people killed, maimed or rendered homeless. Gleb’s photos appeared on the front pages of hundreds of newspapers and magazines around the world.

In a year of so many big stories, the historic U.S. presidential election was surely one of the most far-reaching. Across the U.S., Reuters journalists seized the opportunity to showcase their multimedia storytelling skills in covering the campaign. They produced a vibrant and compelling package of content that won huge online play and told a story in words, photos, videos and blogs in a heartening illustration of our ongoing push for innovation. For their work, the members of the elections team won the Multimedia Storytelling of the Year award.

A new award this year was the Editor’s Choice, chosen by Schlesinger. He honored Mike Stepanovich, the recently named managing editor of Reuters Project Insider, our next-generation, multimedia information service for financial professionals, which was recently unveiled and will launch later this year. Again, this was a real team effort, but Mike’s tenacity was crucial to making it happen. He was a tireless champion from the time Insider was little more than a PowerPoint presentation.

There will be times when I will write about mistakes we’ve made and address issues with our coverage, as I’ve done in the past. But this is not one of those times.

So congratulations, not only to these winners, but also to the other nominees, and to the many other winners in their respective coverage areas. Just looking at the list of winners and examples of their work reminds me why I’m so excited to come to work every morning.

Chris Cramer is Global Editor of Multimedia at Reuters News and has editorial oversight of Reuters Insider, a multimedia information service for Thomson Reuters financial service subscribers that will be launched this year.

Media organizations the world over are currently focusing on the future of their businesses. As audience and viewer attention fragments and the internet fuels a wholly different kind of information consumption there are many siren voices suggesting that traditional media business models are dead, or in some cases on life support. Rising print and distribution costs and flagging advertising are driving even flagship newspapers and magazines to slash their costs, jettison journalists and production staff, and in some cases, go entirely out of business. In Britain, television companies like ITV — once described as having a license to print money — are reconsidering their entire business rationale and, crucially, their future relationship with viewers and consumers.

Yet this week the world’s largest multimedia news agency, Reuters, unveils what we believe will be the future of news dissemination — not broadcasting, but narrowcasting.

Later this year we will launch the next-generation information service which will produce live markets coverage, analysis and breaking news for the financial professional — in this case the five hundred thousand institutional professionals currently subscribing to Thomson Reuters financial services.

The service — delivered exclusively via broadband internet — launches during the world’s most profound financial crisis in half a century, a story Reuters is throwing all its resources against, and will draw upon our huge global network of 2,500 journalists, almost 200 worldwide bureaus and writers and commentators from Thomson Reuters professional publications.

This is not the first time the news agency has launched a television service just for its clients. Reuters Financial TV went to market, delivered via bandwidth hungry data lines, in 1993. The service was then considered well ahead of its time and, though professional and highly-regarded by its customers, had excessive distribution costs. It stopped transmitting in 2001.

But Reuters has long held ambitions to return to the programming business and during the past year we have secretly planned for a return to narrowcasting. In record time we have built state of the art studios in London and New York and broadband transmission points in many of our overseas locations, including Hong Kong, Washington, Singapore and other global newsrooms. Sophisticated newsgathering tools are currently being installed in our bureaus and hundreds of staff are being equipped with Flip video cameras and other IP transmission technology. A production team of more than 100 journalists and technical staff has been hired, including television anchors such as Axel Threfall from CNBC and Carrie Lee from CNN and producers from other business channels like Bloomberg. Pilot programming has been available to selected clients and business partners since October last year.

The key to our success, we believe, is that our programming will not be linear — one programme after another — but will be vertical and will provide the kind of rich content and analysis our clients need. Not for them the breathless hype and audio visual tics associated with much of the business coverage currently available on broadcast and cable. We know through detailed user research that they want the facts, uncluttered and at a length they can cope with. Timely information and analysis in bite-sized chunks.

We plan to offer deep verticals of content relevant to our clients — ranging from Commodities and Energy to Emerging Markets to Islamic Finance. Each programme segment specifically targeted to what our clients and partners tell us they need to inform and enable them to make smarter business decisions.

But financial programming will be just a part of Reuters’ new service. The financial news and information service — code-named Reuters Insider — sits on a unique broadband media player which will also serve as an aggregation platform for third party content from traditional media companies.

The media player will be fully interactive, serving both live programming and video on demand. It is capable of advanced personalization — users can create their own channels and services — and will offer passage navigation, instant transcripts and the ability to search, select and send edited passages to friends and business clients. Video clips, market reports and analysis can also be sent to mobile devices such as Blackberry or iPhone for offline viewing. Users can communicate with Reuters’ programme makers and journalists in real time, creating a financial community and an array of information verticals not currently available in the media marketplace.

The media player will also serve as a first-to-market platform for individual Thomson Reuters market divisions such as Media, Sales and Trading, Investor A and Enterprise, enabling them to programme for staff and for customers.

We believe Reuters Insider is the future of news dissemination. Delivering focused, fast, intelligent and relevant information to make our clients and customers smarter and more successful.

Not broadcasting, but narrowcasting.

Dean Wright is Global Editor, Ethics, Innovation and News Standards. Any opinions are his own.

It’s Oscar time, and I’m again reminded of the debt Hollywood and journalists owe each other. Journalists supply Hollywood with great stories and Hollywood sometimes makes us look cool—or at least worth a couple of hours of time and the price of a ticket.

Put aside the fact that a number of Hollywood movies literally are made from the pages of journalism –“Saturday Night Fever,” “Dog Day Afternoon” and “Adaptation,” to name only a few, were all based on magazine stories. We journalists are also the very characters that Hollywood screenwriters sometimes love.

In addition to sometimes bringing out our cool factor—although, really, what aspiring reporter could resist Robert Redford’s corduroy suits in “All the President’s Men”? — Hollywood movies can illuminate the kind of ethical, moral and values issues that journalists have to deal with.

This year’s slate of Oscar nominees again includes a movie with journalism as its subject. “Frost/Nixon,” the film adaptation of the Broadway play about British journalist David Frost’s pursuit of the ultimate interview with disgraced former U.S. President Richard Nixon, is nominated for five Oscars.

So here is a completely arbitrary list of my top dozen movies about journalism that have something to say about the way we do our jobs–ethical or unethical, selfish or selfless. Aside from that, about the only thing they have in common is that they all were at least nominated for Oscars. I’ll also acknowledge that most of the films are U.S.-oriented, like the Oscars. So I want to especially encourage feedback and suggestions for films from all parts of the world. (A word of warning: There will be plot spoilers.)

The envelope, please.

12: “Roman Holiday” (1953)—A journalist decides that there are things worth more than getting the story– love and happiness, for example. Gregory Peck plays a struggling American reporter for a celebrity-oriented magazine in Rome assigned to cover a princess (Audrey Hepburn) on a state visit. The princess wants a taste of “real” life and escapes her handlers and falls into the arms of Peck, who sees the liaison as a chance to get an exclusive story and escape his down-at-the-heels lifestyle. Naturally, they fall in love and the princess sees just how much fun the common people can have. But Peck decides the exclusive story isn’t worth ruining his subject’s happiness as the princess reluctantly returns to her duties. Extra points for a bearded Eddie Albert’s portrayal of crazed photographer.

11: “Reds” (1981)–A journalist crosses the line from covering his subject to becoming part of the story. Warren Beatty is radical American journalist John Reed, who already writes from a strong point of view. He becomes more involved in leftist party politics, journeys to Russia to cover the 1917 Bolshevik revolution and becomes a semi-official voice for the cause, all the while engaged in a tempestuous love affair with fellow journalist Louise Bryant (Diane Keaton). Extra points for Jack Nicholson’s lecherous but poetic role as Eugene O’Neill.

10: “The Year of Living Dangerously” (1982)—A journalist uses his relationships with a lover and colleagues to further his career before deciding that love really is more important. Mel Gibson is an Australian radio reporter sent to Indonesia in the 1960s as President Sukarno breaks with the West. Working with a dwarf photographer named Billy Kwan (a stunning Oscar turn by Linda Hunt), his career prospers and he falls in love with a British diplomat (Sigourney Weaver), who may or may not be using him. As he gets wind of a coup, he must decide between love and his career. Love wins.

9: “The Killing Fields” (1984)–A foreign correspondent learns he can’t do his job without his courageous local colleagues and that life and friendship are more important than getting the story. Sam Waterston is New York Times correspondent Sydney Schanberg, stationed in Cambodia as the Khmer Rouge take over. His colleague, Cambodian journalist Dith Pran (Haing S. Ngor) sends his family to the U.S. as the Khmer Rouge move in, but Pran stays behind to work with Schanberg and falls victim to the brutal Khmer Rouge. Schanberg is wracked with guilt and works to ensure that Pran also gets credit for the award-winning journalism. After they were reunited, Pran worked in New York for The Times as a photographer and died last year.

8: “Broadcast News” (1987)—A trio of sad television journalists battle over the authenticity of news and learn that style often trumps substance. William Hurt is a handsome but glib and shallow newsman who’s not above staging shots and faking tears. Albert Brooks is his neurotic, by-the-book rival whose ethics, passion and knowledge are no match for Hurt’s hollow charm. Both men are after the romantic and professional attention of Holly Hunter’s producer, whose journalistic skill and success are equalled only by her private, self-destructive depression. Will the authentic journalist and authentic love win out? Don’t count on it.

7: “Citizen Kane” (1941)—It had to be here, didn’t it? A newspaperman’s youthful idealism turns to power-mad self interest. Orson Welles’ magnificent film about the fictional Charles Foster Kane (now who might that be?) tracks the rise and fall of a journalist who got into the business to afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted and dies a lonely, loveless tycoon. A great moment in the idealistic phase, as Kane talks about his creed: “…It is my duty, and I’ll let you in on a little secret, it is also my pleasure—to see to it that decent, hard-working people of this community aren’t robbed blind by a pack of money-mad pirates just because they haven’t anybody to look after their interests.”

6: “Frost/Nixon” (2008)—Journalists and politicians can’t live without each other and sometimes do the right things for the wrong reasons. In a gripping piece of drama and history, television journalist David Frost (Michael Sheen) seeks to save his career by landing an exclusive interview with former President Richard Nixon (Frank Langella). Frost wants to get the scoop and make news by forcing the disgraced president to confess. Nixon wants a platform to clear his name -–and the $600,000 fee. The truth wins.

5: “The Insider” (1999)—Corporate self-interest clashes with public-service journalism—and people in the middle get hurt. Al Pacino plays an aggressive television producer who wants to tell the story of whistleblower Jeffrey Wigand’s (Russell Crowe) revelation that the tobacco industry not only knew their product was dangerous, but deliberately tried to increase its addictiveness. When Pacino’s corporate bosses become nervous, Crowe loses his job, his wife and almost everything but his self-respect. Extra points for Christopher Plummer’s complex portrayal of Mike Wallace.

4: “Ace in the Hole” (1951)—A journalist who will do anything—and I mean anything—to get the story and revive a career. Once called one of the most cynical movies ever made, this is certainly one of the most cynical portrayals of a journalist. Kirk Douglas is Chuck Tatum, a down-on-his-luck former big-city journalist who stumbles on a story of a man trapped in a cave in New Mexico. Tatum takes charge and prolongs the rescue effort to milk the story for all the headlines it will take to get him back to the big time. (“Bad news sells best. Cause good news is no news.”) All the while, Tatum is romancing the trapped man’s wife, a blowsy Jan Sterling (“I don’t go to church. Kneeling bags my nylons.”).

3: “Network” (1976)—The line between news and entertainment blurs to invisibility. Released the same year as “All the President’s Men” (below), “Network” portrays journalists in a decidedly less positive way. Longtime network journalist and now ratings-challenged anchor Howard Beale (Peter Finch) has an on-air breakdown after learning he will be fired and promises to kill himself on the air. His struggling network decides to encourage his implosion after Beale’s antics begin to catch on, billing him as the “Mad Prophet of the Air Waves.” Beale’s famous line is, “I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take it any more,” but the more telling one is: “ But, man, you’re never going to get any truth from us. We’ll tell you anything you want to hear; we lie like hell.”

2: “All the President’s Men” (1976)—Hard-working journalists put their reputations on the line in pursuit of public good. As earnest in its portrayal of journalists as its Oscar-rival “Network” was cynical, Alan Pakula’s film focuses on journalists as investigating, crusading watchdogs. A search of the script fails to turn up any references to “ethics”, “ethical” or “unethical,” but few films about journalists portray reporters—played memorably by Dustin Hoffman and Robert Redford—as more dedicated to not just getting the story, but getting it right. And I still get nervous in lonely parking garages.

1: “Good Night, and Good Luck” (2005)—A tough choice for No. 1, but for me no film does a better of job of telling the story of journalists who act courageously and responsibly, fighting powerful corporate pressure to take on injustice. Perpetually wreathed in the tobacco smoke that killed him far too young, storied journalist Edward R. Murrow (David Strathairn) and his producer Fred Friendly (George Clooney) challenge and eventually triumph over Red-baiting Senator Joseph McCarthy. And extra points for Frank Langella (“Frost/Nixon”) and his nuanced portrayal of CBS chief Bill Paley.

So what do you think? What are your favorite journalism movies? What would be on your list of films journalists should either pay attention to or ignore? And again, I’d especially like to see suggestions for films made outside the U.S. Let the fray begin.

Dean Wright is Global Editor, Ethics, Innovation and News Standards. Any opinions are his own.

The president was inaugurated in front of adoring crowds and positive reviews in the media. As the unpopular incumbent sat on the platform with him, the new Democratic chief executive took office as the nation faced a crippling economic crisis. The incoming president was a charismatic figure who had run a brilliant campaign and had handled the press with aplomb. The media were ready to give him a break.

That was 1933, and in Franklin Roosevelt’s case, the media gave him a break.

For Barack Obama, the honeymoon was shorter.

Less than 36 hours after Obama took the oath of office, the White House denied news photographers access to the new president’s do-over swearing in, instead releasing official White House photos of the event. Reuters, The Associated Press and Agence France-Presse protested and refused to distribute the official photos (which nevertheless showed up on the websites of a number of large U.S. newspapers).

This is an important issue for news organisations, the public and for an administration that has promised a new era of transparency in doing the people’s business. How are people to know, for example, that the official photos haven’t been staged?

All U.S. administrations seek to manage the flow of information and the White House and the news media have a complex, interdependent relationship. Each needs the other. But it’s important that media organisations remember who’s most important.

For Howard Goller, Reuters editor for political and general news for the U.S. and Canada, it’s clear who’s most important.

“A news organisation’s first obligation is to its clients,” he says. “Our correspondents have a front-row seat at the White House, we ask questions at news conferences and briefings, and we travel with the president wherever he goes. Our photographers work just as hard for our customers. We became concerned when on taking office, the new administration prevented Reuters and other news organisations from taking our own photos. We’ve had several conversations with the new administration since those first days and we expect a more open relationship going forward.”

Most administrations get a bit of a honeymoon. Gallup polls show that every incoming, newly-elected president back to Dwight Eisenhower enjoyed majority approval ratings. Even the lowest-rated incoming presidents, Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush, had job approval ratings of 51 percent and disapproval ratings of only 13 percent and 6 percent, respectively.

Obama’s approval rating, 68 percent, was exceeded only by that of John F. Kennedy, who had a 72 percent rating. Even a plurality of Republicans—43 percent—give Obama positive marks.

The media have also generally been positive—or at least, not very negative– about new presidents during their administrations’ first 100 days, one of those round numbers we seem to like so much.

The Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism compared the coverage of the two most recent first-term elected presidents, Bill Clinton and George W. Bush. In measuring the tone of coverage by network television, newspapers and a major weekly news magazine, the study found that only 28 percent of the coverage of both presidents’ first two months was “negative.”

No president has been more successful at managing the media than Roosevelt. So carefully did the administration control the president’s image that only a few pictures were published in newspapers of the president—disabled by polio– using his wheelchair. Indeed, in a scene in the movie “Yankee Doodle Dandy (1942),” James Cagney was able with a straight face to portray Roosevelt in a song and dance number, as the “president” wittily told reporters what was on and what was off the record.

Betty Houchin Winfield, a journalism professor at the University of Missouri, argues in “FDR and the News Media” that “FDR’s consummate news management skills served as a major key to his political artistry and leadership legacy” and that “a strong president such as Roosevelt can indeed influence the journalists’ newsgathering, the reporters’ reactions, and the final news stories.”

As Douglas McCollam notes in the current issue of the Columbia Journalism Review, many believe much of the media are already in the tank for Obama.

A Pew Research Center poll during the heat of the campaign in September 2008 found that 36 percent of those questioned believed news organisations were biased in favor of Obama, while only 14 percent said the media were biased in favor of Republican John McCain. Forty percent detected no bias. A Rasmussen poll last summer was even more stark, with 49 percent saying they believed most reporters would “try to help the Democrat with their coverage.” Just 14 percent believed reporters would try to help McCain win and only 24 percent believed that “most reporters will try to offer unbiased coverage.”

Those are depressing numbers for a journalist to read—and the only way to respond is to aggressively cover the issues that matter to your audience.

For Reuters News, that’s a global audience and a financial audience.

Goller says that in response to the change in administrations, “We have made some big changes, especially in the way we work together to cover the big economic stories in the face of the financial crisis as well as the politics of climate change and health care….We’ve put more people on both the White House and the Congressional beats in part because the president…has promised change and both he and the Democratic-led Congress have made a priority of addressing the crisis, no small matter for our core financial clients.”

So how do we balance the need to be close to the newsmakers at the White House with the danger of being in a bubble where news can be managed?

Goller puts it well: “For Reuters, the key is to keep our eye on the issues, and that means to be aware of the impact a president’s words and actions or non-actions have on business, the economy, other countries and Americans as a people. We ask the tough questions in the briefings—and in the stories we write. If we don’t get the answers, our stories say so. This is our job.”

As in coverage of the Middle East, there are partisans who will never, ever be convinced that journalists can report objectively. As in the coverage of the recent Gaza fighting, all we can ask our audience to do is judge us on the journalism we produce—and tell us when we’re wrong.

It’s especially important now, as coverage of the new administration moves out of the warm, feel-good glow of the inauguration. As we saw Wednesday, the stimulus bill passed the House without a single Republican vote, a reminder of the deep divisions that remain and a sign that the story of the Obama administration is just beginning. It will be up to the hard-nosed, experienced journalists in Washington to push beyond the soft, easy, feel-good stories and tell the hard and complete truth.