Pardon Our Back-Patting ...
Among its vast amount of data and observation contained in the Project for Excellence in Journalism's third annual report on "The State of the News Media," our little blog received some attention. To be included in this very hefty and important study is flattering and just in case you didn't have time to get through the entire study, we wanted to let our regular readers get a little taste of where PE fits into all these changes the media landscape is experiencing.
In the chapter dedicated to Network TV, PE gets singled out for what we're trying to accomplish:
CBS has also devoted itself to unprecedented "transparency," another hallmark of the Web. It created a separate Web site, Public Eye, that is more independent of the newsroom than anything at other networks. The site serves as a kind of online ombudsman, adopts the informal voice of the Web, involves outside contributors and includes a central discussion thread, monitored by the site's editor, in which citizens can openly criticize and question CBS decision-making. The criticism often invites responses from the CBS News people who were involved in the stories being criticized.At another point, PE's mission was described like this:
One major component of the new look at CBS News.com is a Web log hosted by Vaughn Ververs named the " Public Eye." Ververs's blog is intended to illuminate the newsgathering process at CBS News, and the site has offered Webcasts of editorial meetings. NBC and ABC are also offering online sites that pull back the curtain on how the news is made at the major networks.And, in another section, we recieved some props – with a qualifier tacked on:
Uniquely among the networks and most other sites, CBSNews.com also contains CBS Public Eye … to allow consumers to react to, talk about, criticize and even interact directly with CBS news officials. More than a page, this is a site within a site. It includes essays from outside contributors, comments from viewers, responses by CBS journalists, and blogs by authors from Public Eye.Are we a work in progress? You bet, and hopefully we'll never quite be a glossy, finished project. One of the unavoidable lessons in this study is that the media landscape is quickly evolving into something quite different than past models – and that the ability to grow, change and adapt are key ingredients for survival. But that's going to be an ongoing process. In the near term, this calls for a long lunch and perhaps a champagne toast or two – we'll save a glass or two for the folks at the Project!It is probably the most serious attempt at transparency and dialogue we saw in our sample. It adds a dimension to the CBS approach that makes it, along with one local newspaper we monitored, the most significant attempt to create a sense of a news organization offering a distinct product with a different personality online, rather than just a news source that involves multimedia and constant updating. Yet Public Eye also feels like a work in progress, and the visitor senses that in a year or two it may be quite different, particularly if blogs begin to fade or evolve as a new dimension of the Web.