Being a journalist used to be a bit like being the Wizard of Oz. You spent a lot of time behind the curtain doing whatever you did back there and, presto!, a story came out. If you did a really great job on a particular story, especially one involving months of investigative work, a reader might wonder how you did it. How did she get these people to talk to her? Who are “informed sources” really? You could link one thing to another in a new and interesting way that told a story no one else had thought of. Or you could just be extremely thorough in eating every pizza in town until you found the best one.

Being a freelance journalist was even more mysterious. How could you get an assignment when you didn’t work at the publication? How did you get an editor’s attention? Could you make a living doing that?

Given the ease of self-publishing that Web 2.0 allows, anyone can see how the process works. That does not necessarily make everyone good at it. If anything, the difficulty of doing it well is much clearer. But it has made journalism a lot more transparent.

More publications have a feature called something like “reporters’ notebook” which is the equivalent of riding along in the cop car to see how they find the bad guys. Readers can watch a story develop. They are invited to submit questions to add to interviews. Comment functionality or via email or Twitter put readers a lot closer to the writer, make it easier to provide feedback and possible sources or story ideas. Query letters from freelancers no longer come in the mail, and the time from story pitch to assignment (or rejection) can be measured in hours, not weeks.

As the publishing ecosystem evolves, the initial enthusiasm for self publishing — the explosion in blogs, for instance, and attempts at citizen journalism — is waning. They will certainly be part of the future but not everyone wants to do the hard work of creating something that is interesting and relevant. Deadlines, as any kind of writer can tell you, are relentless.

The Wizard Revealed
Transparency has led to new tools for reporters of all kinds.

• Open source is certainly the most revolutionary of these new developments. Information exists in the cloud and is available to anyone. “All of our work is hosted in the cloud,” says Brain Boyer, applications editor for the Chicago Tribune. “We make a concerted effort to share as much as we can. Almost all of our technology is open source; a lot of our projects are open source. We’re all in it together so we might as well share.”
• “Journalists are being asked to do 10 times more with five times less,” says Peter Shankman, founder of helpareporterout.com. The Internet has played a huge part in how journalists find sources. HARO connects the two, reaching 135,000 sources and about 50,000 journalists since its founding in 2008.
• Spot.us takes story pitches and tries to find funding for their creation. Finding out who’s polluting the water, for instance, is a story many people might be interested in and willing to help pay for. Founder David Cohn has also had success getting funding from traditional news sources like the New York Times who use the service to supplement their own reporting capabilities with freelancers.

Tell Me a Story
The tools may have changed but journalism has not. “It’s a very exciting time if you are in the news gathering or story telling business,” says Dick Babcock, editor of Chicago magazine. “Going out there, gathering a lot of information and parsing it and presenting it in an efficient way to our readers, whether in print or on the Web, that’s our sweet spot. Telling good narrative stories about interesting people … we will continue to do that in whatever format.”

The richness for the reader has certainly changed. “Having the interactivity of digital products opens up storytelling in a number of different ways we didn’t have when the basic platform was just the paper,” says Jeff Webber, senior vice president and publisher of usatoday.com. “The user is often doing more than just reading.”

No longer hampered by the limitations of text alone, writers can tell a fuller story. Quality is a concern, says Julian Posada, founder and CEO of Café Media, “but I think of it as freedom. A reporter now has the opportunity to take a story and make it come to life with photography or add a video. If the goal is to get the story out, text will have its limitations. Photography adds more depth, voice adds more depth, video adds even more.”

Telling a story is also no longer a one-and-done phenomenon. Long-form journalism, the huge story that covers 20 pages in a magazine or jumps from the newspaper’s front page to two complete inside pages, is incompatible with the quick-hit style of online content. “There are a lot of spot stories,” Boyer says, “but in the aggregate, it becomes really interesting.”

Google is a big believer in the 360-degree story, for instance. The user can see many aspects of a story, from its historical context to the trends it points to. They can follow a topic over time and make use of “related stories” functionality that allows them to go deeper and deeper. Writers who receive funding from Spot.us are often asked to produce blog entries as well that tell the developing story and highlight their reporting process.

Additional platforms are the latest phenomena exciting publishers — or keeping them up at night. “More platforms, that will be the biggest opportunity for us,” Webber says.

“More and more ability for individuals to get news, information and entertainment in a huge variety of ways — to what we used to call a cell phone, which is now really a handheld computer, to a platform like an iPad, to a computer, to a digital sign. There are already digital portal frames.”

New platforms and new functionality change how information is written and presented — shorter for the web, longer in print,

readable on a cell phone or interactive on a touch screen. And everyday seems to bring a new factor into play.

“Things used to be much more established,” says Greg Burns, part of the editorial board at the Chicago Tribune. “About 10 years ago, things started to change due to the democratization of information. It’s really changed everything, nothing is as it was before.”