Palmer wrote that she needs “professional-ish horns and strings for EVERY CITY to hop up on stage with us for a couple of tunes.”The pay for  a “quickie rehearsal” and performance?  ”Beer, hug/high-five you up and down (pick your poison), give you merch, and thank you mightily for adding to the big noise we are planning to make,” she wrote.

The post sparked a firestorm, as The Boston Globe reported Thursday, as several commenters accused Palmer of trying to get something for nothing. What made her request especially galling to some was that she recently raised $1.2 million from Kickstarter to fund her music.

The post and the blowback from it renews a debate over how ethical (moral?) it is to get free or near-free work out of people especially in these hard times.

One of the commenters on Palmer’s site, Chris Siebert, who described himself as a professional musician,  was clearly not amused:

With all due respect, your request for free labor sounds like a promotional gimmick dreamed up by a corporate republican who has no concept of the history of working people in this country …  you raised a million dollars through [K]ickstarter. That’s a lot of money. And the best you can do is come up with a scheme to take advantage of desperate musicians by reinforcing everything that’s wrong with the music business and the modern American economy?

Some said her request was so tone-deaf she must have written it on purpose to provoke the controversy.

Palmer did have her defenders among the commenters, one of whom pointed out that the Kickstarter campaign funded her new CD, not the tour per se. Others praised her for playing free concerts including for the Occupy Movement.

But the issue of wangling free or really cheap labor goes way beyond music. Unpaid internships in businesses of all types; the rise of user-generated content in media; and crowdsourcing across the board are all part of the same bigger picture.

And pushback as evidenced by the Palmer comments is likewise growing. For example,  Ryan Carson, founder and CEO Of Treehouse, assailed hackathon promoters for treating programmers as trained monkeys. If you doubt that this is a touchy subject just try asking an artist what she thinks about  99designs or a reporter about Journatic. Then duck.

As GigaOM’s Mathew Ingram pointed out in his post about Journatic, it’s important to maintain professional standards — including pay — but it’s also important to face facts — and the facts are that crowdsourcing, in some form, is a now a reality.

Feature photo courtesy of  Flickr user Zawezome

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There has been a debate raging in the media sphere lately over the practices of a journalism-outsourcing startup called Journatic, which used to provide hyperlocal news content to papers like the Chicago Tribune and the San Francisco Chronicle. The service was dropped by several newspapers after it was revealed that some stories it distributed had fake bylines on them, and others have stopped using it due to more recent reports of plagiarism. But those errors don’t invalidate the idea of outsourcing and/or automating the kind of information that Journatic specializes in — something more cash-strapped newspapers are likely going to have to consider, even if they produce or manage it themselves.

The latest incident occurred last Friday, when the Chicago Tribune said it had found evidence of plagiarism by a Journatic writer — who allegedly used a quote from another news report without attributing, and fabricated a second quote — and said it was suspending its use of the service (which it is also an investor in) indefinitely. Shortly afterward Journatic’s editorial director, Michael Fourcher, resigned, saying, “The founders and I fundamentally disagree about ethical and management issues as they relate to a successful news business.” Journatic, meanwhile, said that it had planned to fire Fourcher anyway.

Outsourcing is a reality, like it or not

For many critics, this cavalcade of errors reinforced their views about the whole idea of outsourcing local journalism in the first place, something former Journatic freelancer Ryan Smith compared to the sort of “pink slime” processed food that some companies have been accused of serving their customers. But as journalist and author Craig Silverman noted in a recent post at Poynter (and as we have pointed out before as well), that doesn’t change the fact that newspapers are going to need alternative processes — including outsourcing and/or automation — in order to survive the financial pressures they are under. As Silverman put it:

[E]ven as I abhor the plagiarism, fabrication and fake bylines, I also know that no matter how bad the behavior, there will absolutely be more companies like Journatic. Outsourcing, content farming, Mechanical Turk-like records/data processing — these things are going to increase and find their place within journalism at news organizations large and small.

As Silverman correctly points out, the idea of aggregating data around local communities isn’t unique to Journatic: A Knight Foundation–funded startup called EveryBlock, founded by pioneering data journalist and former Washington Post staffer Adrian Holovaty, started doing exactly that five years ago and was eventually acquired by MSNBC. While critics complain about Journatic’s impact on hyperlocal journalism, much of what the service was doing involved police blotters, real-estate sale reports, community award presentations and other kinds of information that are seen by many (including journalists) as a commodity.

Commodity news needs a new business model

Founder Brian Timpone — who was trained as a journalist — said in an interview with GigaOM that the whole point of Journatic is to outsource and/or automate those tasks so that reporters can have more time for the kind of journalism newspapers would rather spend their scarce resources on, including investigative or in-depth reporting. The fact that the Tribune and other papers have laid off dozens of staff at the same time as they started using Journatic makes it harder to believe that they actually want to do this, but that doesn’t mean the principle isn’t still sound. Even Fourcher argued in his blog post that the idea behind the service still makes sense:

Journatic’s core premise is sound: most data and raw information can be managed much more efficiently outside the traditional newsroom; and, in order for major market community news to be commercially viable, it needs be conducted on a broader scale than ever before.

It would be nice to think that newspapers could continue to finance a local bureau in every small town, with a reporter who could get to know the community and cover town-council meetings, human-interest stories and so on. But that simply isn’t economically viable for many papers any more, thanks to the rapid decline in the print-advertising income that makes up the bulk of their revenue. Journatic critics argue that they should see hyperlocal reporting as more valuable, but many newspapers like the Tribune simply don’t have the resources to do that in addition to the kind of civic reporting they are supposed to be doing.

Outsourcing to an aggregator like Journatic isn’t the only solution to this problem, of course. Instead of using cheap freelancers in other countries, Digital First Media has taken a different approach by setting up “community newsrooms” in the towns it serves with its daily and weekly papers as a way of bringing members of the community into the process. Another venture in local journalism called TBD developed a network of local bloggers as an attempt to cover some of the communities it couldn’t afford to send staff reporters to.

As both Silverman and David Cohn of Circa — who also founded a previous crowdfunded-journalism startup called Spot.us — point out, there are many lessons to be learned from what Journatic has done, including the importance of journalistic standards and a professional approach. But that doesn’t mean outsourced and/or aggregated news isn’t going to be a part of the media environment, because it almost certainly is.

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We’ve seen a ton of digital ink spilled over the implications of media startup Journatic faking bylines for some of its content, including my post about the underlying economics that have forced newspapers like the Chicago Tribune to outsource their hyper-local content. While some critics choose to see outsourced journalism of the kind Journatic produces as unethical “pink slime,” the controversy over the startup’s practices actually says a lot about how difficult it is to find new ways of producing that kind of content — in part because the traditional media industry and its supporters want to force everything into old models and familiar formats.

Just to recap, Journatic is a Chicago-based startup founded by former journalist Brian Timpone as a way of helping news providers cover local and community news more efficiently. The company has worked with a number of mainstream outlets such as the Tribune and the Chicago Sun-Times, as well as the GateHouse newspaper chain, providing the kind of commodity news that community papers specialize in: notices of events, local residents winning awards, real-estate transactions and so forth. Journatic pays staffers and freelancers — some of whom work in the Philippines — to produce this content from publicly available data.

The company was engulfed in a firestorm of criticism last week, after a Journatic employee (who has since resigned)told the public-radio program This American Life that it routinely used fake bylines for some of the content it provided to the Tribune and others. Timpone said in an interview with me that these manufactured bylines were only used for data-based stories that came from a sister company called Blockshopper, which aggregates data about real-estate sales in various communities, not traditional journalistic stories that were provided to newspapers — but he admitted that using the fake bylines was “absolutely a mistake.”

Why does the new have to look like the old?

As media industry blogger John Bethune pointed out in a blog post about the Journatic incident, the source of the mistake was a desire to make the content that came from Blockshopper look and feel like the stories that both newspaper owners and readers would be familiar with — in other words, a traditional newspaper story with the name of the author at the top. As Bethune put it:

The real issue was not that the company used fake bylines on its stories, but that it used bylines at all. Journatic screwed up because the company wanted to have it both ways: to embrace new-media principles while trying to disguise them. Instead of looking forward, it looked backward.

Timpone effectively admitted the same thing in his interview with me — that part of the mistake Journatic made was in thinking that the content it was producing needed bylines in the first place (much of what it provides to the Tribune for that newspaper’s TribLocal sites now simply says “Neighborhood News Service). Some critics of the practice have assumed that the fake bylines were intended to disguise the fact that contributors were from the Philippines, but Timpone said the practice was mostly designed to make the content look like a traditional story because that’s what the company thought newspapers would want.

But much of the content that comes from both Blockshopper and Journatic doesn’t really fit that model at all. Instead of being a story that a single individual produces (along with some editing), they are an amalgamation of data and contributions from multiple sources, some of whom scrape databases or make phone calls and others who edit or fact-check or perform other functions to produce the “story.”

Critics of the Journatic model, including Mandy Jenkins of Digital First Media and Anna Tarkov at the Poynter Institute, seem to want newspapers to continue to produce hyper-local community journalism in the traditional way, with reporters based in the community writing traditional stories. But given the kinds of financial pressures on the newspaper industry, that may simply not be viable for outlets like the Tribune or GateHouse. That’s not to say they shouldn’t devote resources to those communities, but it does mean that looking at alternative models for some kinds of content makes sense as well.

Not “pink slime,” just a potential new model

I think what’s important with a new model like the one Timpone is trying to implement is not to find ways of dismissing it as the “pink slime” of the journalism industry, but to see whether anything in it is ultimately worth keeping or is providing a worthwhile service for readers. Does Journatic or Blockshopper content inform readers about things that they might be interested in, and does it do so accurately? It seems to (no one has raised concerns about inaccuracy so far, just bylines). Do readers really care who wrote the post about the high-school student winning an award or the sale of a local property? I don’t know.

In a recent presentation about the future of media, Richard Gingras — former CEO of Salon and now director of news products for Google — notes that many of the models that newspapers and other media entities continue to rely on, including the traditional story format, are throwbacks to the days of print. Why do we need to use them online, where content is more fluid? Why not experiment with new forms? As Gingras puts it:

These were models that barely changed in 100 years — what, they added color? So people didn’t have a reason to evolve. [But] you now have people on the outside looking at the problem with a clean slate.

In many ways, this is related to the discussion that media theorist Jeff Jarvis and others have been having for some time now about how the news “story” needs to be blown up or dismantled, or at the very least re-thought. Since the way that news occurs and the ways in which information reaches us has been completely disrupted by the web and the democratization of distribution, the argument is that we need to have different models and formats for handling that information intelligently — whether it’s with tools like Storify or new ways of aggregating and filtering data in order to make it meaningful.

Could Journatic be one of those ways, at least for certain kinds of hyper-local content and information? It’s possible, or at the very least worth considering. And demonizing that approach as “pink slime” or something that is antithetical to journalism doesn’t really help.

Post and thumbnail images courtesy of Flickr user Zert Sonstige

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Updated: A Chicago-based media startup called Journatic, which we profiled earlier this year, has sparked a firestorm of controversy over the outsourcing of hyper-local journalism by newspapers such as the Chicago Tribune, after a staffer revealed that the company added fake bylines to its material — which in some cases is compiled by freelancers in other countries. A number of the startup’s clients have dropped the service as a result, while others are trying to essentially recreate it within their newsrooms. But despite the furor over what some see as Journatic’s unethical methods, the harsh reality is that the economic conditions that led the Tribune and others to make use of the service are not going away any time soon.

As we described in our post — which was based on an interview with Journatic founder and former journalist Brian Timpone — the service uses freelancers and staff to compile the kind of local news that typically appears in weekly community newspapers or the local section of a daily like the Tribune: that is, announcements about local sporting events, residents who have won awards, council meetings and so on. In many cases, the content is produced by a local staffer who pulls information from a database or website (or in some cases calls a local business) along with freelancers who work in the Philippines and elsewhere, and are paid either an hourly rate or on a per-piece basis.

Accelerating the death of newspapers or adapting to it?

In a recent interview with the public-radio show This American Life, a staffer who worked for Journatic described how the company would sometimes use fake bylines on its content — allegedly to disguise the fact that they were compiled by non-residents — and also how reporters working for the service in other locations would try to cover up the fact that they were not in the community they were writing about. Ryan Smith told the Poynter Institute’s Anna Tarkov that he came to believe that this behavior was wrong, in part because it was doing a disservice to local journalism:

I felt like the company I was working for was accelerating the death of the newspaper, luring many members of the industry into their own demise with the promise of short-term savings.

This week, many of the newspapers that were working with Journatic said they have severed that relationship, including the Chicago Sun-Times and a number of papers owned by the GateHouse chain. A spokesman for GateHouse told Poynter that the newspaper company is working on a project that will more or less duplicate what Journatic was doing, by centralizing the production of local community news for the entire chain — and also said that the service didn’t really achieve what GateHouse hoped it would, which was to free up staff to take on more in-depth journalistic pursuits.

Journatic founder Timpone, meanwhile, told media blogger Jim Romenesko that the idea of using fake bylines was implemented for a sister company called Blockshopper, which automates and aggregates real-estate listings. He said that fake names were used because some freelancers had been the target of harassment — and also because the items were often produced by a combination of algorithms, U.S-based editors and freelancers rather than a single person. That practice has stopped, said Timpone, and items that are part of the Tribune’s TribLocal sites now say they come from the “Neighborhood News Service.”

Much of the reaction to the Journatic story has focused on how the fake bylines — and the way reporters described who they were in phone interviews — were designed to simulate hyper-local content, and how this is an unethical or at least unappealing thing for newspapers to do (although some have pointed out that newspapers have always used content that appears with “fake” bylines, including advice columns such as Ann Landers). Mandy Jenkins, who works at Digital First Media and writes a blog called Zombie Journalism, said that readers should demand locally-produced content from their newspapers as part of a “Buy Local” campaign.

Outsourcing and automation are part of the future

The uncomfortable reality, however, is that the Tribune and other newspapers started using Journatic because it was a lot cheaper than generating that kind of content with staff reporters, and newspapers have been scrambling to cut costs as their print-advertising revenue continues to free fall. The Tribune, for example, laid off 22 employees when it outsourced its hyper-local content to Journatic — and while GateHouse says it plans to create similar content in-house, it is still centralizing the production of that content somewhere else (although it may be closer than the Philippines).

Even AOL, which has tried hard to recreate some of the community-newspaper model with its Patch network of local bloggers and reporters, has found that the costs of doing this are almost prohibitive (it has spent over $150 million so far) and the advertising revenue that it derives from those operations is barely worth the trouble. Local bloggers — who have a much more personal connection to their audience — can fill some of the gap, but that is likely to be more of a labor of love than a commercial enterprise.

Is faking hyper-local content the answer? Probably not. But it’s also true that most newspapers can’t afford to continue producing a lot of the kind of content that Journatic generated. The fake-byline issue is a bit of a red herring in that sense: while it would be nice to think that a “Buy Local” campaign would convince newspapers to devote more resources to it, the fact is that most people don’t buy that kind of content at all. And the newspapers that outsourced it wanted to do so in part so they could (theoretically at least) concentrate on more important journalism, although whether they actually do so or not remains to be seen.

At the end of the day, centralized and partly-automated production of that sort of generic content is likely a reality for newspapers — or even fully-automated production, from services like Narrative Science, which generates sports stories, business stories and an increasing range of other content using algorithms instead of human reporters and editors. It may not be the kind of future that all journalists or news consumers would like to see, but it is probably the future nevertheless.

Update: In a phone and email conversation after this post was published, Brian Timpone said that the Journatic contracts with both GateHouse and the Chicago Sun-Times had already expired before the fake-byline report came out, and that only one client has dropped the service because of the report. He also said that fabricated names were only ever used for BlockShopper real-estate listings, and that most of these were created in 2009 and was given to newspapers as a placeholder until more local content could be created. The Journatic founder said the decision not to remove these fake bylines was “absolutely a mistake” and that the company is changing its process so that doesn’t happen again — and also to prevent writers from using pseudonyms, which happened with some Journatic stories from one writer that ran in the San Francisco Chronicle.

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The Chicago Tribune recently laid off many of the reporters and editors who produced its hyper-local editions, and announced that it was outsourcing those functions to a startup called Journatic — a move that drew criticism from those who saw the company as a Demand Media-style “content farm,” replacing journalists with algorithms and poorly-paid freelancers. In an interview with GigaOM, however, Journatic CEO Brian Timpone said that not only is his model more efficient than that of a newspaper, but it can actually help produce better journalism.

Timpone — who got his start as a journalist working for TV stations and broadcast affiliates in Duluth, Minnesota and Springfield, Illinois and at one time owned several community newspapers — said he got the idea for what became Journatic after the dot-com bubble burst in 2000, when he started a content-management service for newspapers (Timpone also runs a data-driven real estate service called Blockshopper). He said that at the time, he was fascinated with the difference in market penetration between smaller community papers and large metropolitan papers:

[I]n Chicago, the penetration is so low, but in a small town it can be huge. So I started thinking about how you can build higher penetration in those kinds of markets… there are suburbs of Chicago with 50,000 people and there’s no newspaper at all, not even a weekly.

The Journatic founder said that he reacted negatively to suggestions that his company is a “content farm” because he believes it is completely different from what someone like Demand Media does, which involves aggregating information in the hope that it will do well in search. “We produce a ton of content, but we are completely different,” Timpone said. When asked how many stories or items Journatic produces, he said he couldn’t say exactly but it was in the range of “tens of thousands a month, and growing quickly.”

A lot of community news doesn’t need a reporter

What the company produces for clients like the Tribune — and a number of other papers such as the San Francisco Chronicle and the Houston Chronicle — is community-level news, Timpone says, but it is able to do so much more efficiently:

The base of community news is what they call in the industry ‘process news,’ and it doesn’t really require a reporter, it just needs some cleaning up. This is not some new concept, it’s how community news has worked for decades. Who makes community news? Churches, schools, municipal governments, all the town councils that have 5 meetings a month where no one ever goes to them. This is the same stuff you’d read in a community newspaper in the 50s.

Some of the information that Journatic generates — which turns into stories like the ones at a TribLocal site for the suburbs of Homewood and Flossmoor, which it has taken over producing from the Tribune — comes from press releases issues by schools, or various community groups. Journatic gets a lot of this the old-fashioned way, says Timpone: by calling people on the phone or emailing them. “We talk to the women’s club or the church or the school — so it’s a lot of elbow grease.”

The company also does a lot of data collection in various ways, including Freedom of Information Act requests, says the Journatic CEO. “We get foreclosures and other data through FOIA and then we clean them up. We have a big document collection team, and we know how to get that data. One problem newspapers have is their reporters just don’t have the time to do that kind of thing.” Journatic gets building permits and child-support records and other data as well, he says, and much of it comes through digging. “When it comes to small towns, almost nothing is on the internet, so we can’t just scrape a website. We have to go out and get it.”

Much of the negative commentary about Journatic has come because the Tribune laid off 20 of its staff, and replaced them with a company that reportedly pays freelancers $2 to $4 to write a story, or about $12 an hour. But Timpone says those fees are for “part of a story.” The Journatic model, he says, is a process in which different aspects of the package are generated or produced by different people. So one person might come up with the source material, another might write a paragraph or two, another would add links and another might do some editing (some of which is done in the Philippines).

It’s like an assembly line, we assemble stories from these different parts; we have people who just source stories, who just generate story ideas, we have people who just generate ledes, and so on. We have 200 different types of stories — some are deep features. But if we re-process a press release, why would anyone pay reporter-type wages to do that?

Journatic says it helps journalists do better journalism

Timpone said he doesn’t like to think of Journatic as displacing journalists — he thinks of what he does as making it easier for them to concentrate on doing the things they are good at, instead of writing up press releases about school awards. “This is a company of journalists,” he says. “It does not make me happy when anyone gets laid off. But if we don’t do it, then the future doesn’t look good. We can’t keep doing it in the way that we’ve been doing it.” One client newspaper that the company started working with, he says, had a team of 11 reporters for 11 different community sites, but they only produced about four stories per person per week:

That’s not because they were lazy or weren’t capable, it’s because they were spending all their time on process news, the type of stuff we do. Why not get that stuff off their plate so they can focus on what they are good at, like breaking news or human news? Writing about the high school honor roll is a waste of their time.

The Journatic founder said that what he does is help companies like the Tribune produce content on a community level a lot more efficiently, and that allows them to reach those markets and engage with readers directly at a much lower cost — which in turn allows them to do more of that kind of news, but also frees their reporters up to do more important stories. And the data that Journatic comes up with from its automated processes can build databases that those reporters can use to do better journalism.

It’s not just fodder to fill the paper, it’s the foundation of better local journalism. We’ll have probably 100 police blotters indexed this year, that information has never been collected systematically before, when reporters get access to that it can help them produce better stories. This is a road to a new kind of journalism… a better kind of journalism. That’s the vision.

Will Journatic’s assembly-line, data-driven process enable newspapers to spend more time and resources on real journalism or better journalism? Or will cash-strapped owners simply use it and other services such as Narrative Science’s story-writing algorithms to reduce their costs and improve their profit margins as advertising revenue continues to decline? That’s the question many journalists are concerned with, and it’s something Timpone can’t answer. All he knows is that his way is more efficient.

We’ll be talking about these media issues and more at paidContent 2012, May 23 in New York City.

Post and thumbnail images courtesy of Flickr user George Kelly

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There was some consternation in the media industry this week when the Chicago Tribune announced that it was letting more than 20 of its journalists go and handing over its local coverage to an outfit called Journatic, which looked to some like a “content farm” not unlike AOL’s hyper-local Patch unit. Meanwhile, Wired magazine wrote about another emerging competitor for the traditional news business — namely, the news-writing robots or algorithms employed by startup Narrative Science, which automatically generate sports and business stories. Is this what the future of the media industry looks like? Robots and content farms?

The announcement from the Tribune made it sound as though the newspaper was investing more resources into its hyper-local unit, which is known as TribLocal and has been providing coverage of smaller regions and communities both online and in print for about the past five years. Editor Gerould Kern said that the paper made the move because “we believe that it is a more effective way of providing hyperlocal news, and we think we can do more of it in this way.” And the Tribune isn’t just outsourcing its local coverage to Chicago-based Journatic — it has acquired a stake in the company as well, although the size of the investment hasn’t been disclosed.

Journatic pays writers $2 to $4 for each story

For journalists at the Tribune and elsewhere, however, the big news was probably the fact that about half of the 40 journalists who worked for TribLocal — reporters, editors, designers and web developers — were going to lose their jobs, with the rest being reassigned elsewhere inside the Tribune. And who is replacing them? Much like so-called “content farms” such as Demand Media, Journatic appears to use primarily freelance contributors who are paid on a piece-work basis: one ad for writers says they will be paid $2 to $4 per story, which the site says works out to about $12 an hour.

Position: Per Piece Writer
Treatment: 1099 Independent Contractor
Time: You choose when you work, but we are looking for day availability
Location: Remote. As a contractor, you choose where you work
Pay: Per-piece, roughly $12/hr. For example $4 stories take about 20 +/- minutes, and $2 stories take about 10 +/- minutes.

For some observers, including Streetfight columnist Tom Grubisch, this solution makes perfect sense: while some journalists lose their jobs, the Tribune gets local content that costs substantially less than the stories it was producing — and some of those stories don’t really deserve any more than 10 minutes or $2, says Grubisch, if they simply involve note-taking at a city council meeting. In fact, he says some stories may not require human beings at all: “Reporters, at $12 an hour or higher rates, aren’t needed for most data journalism. That can be produced by software and algorithms.”

Are robot writers freeing us up, or putting us out of work?

And that brings us inevitably to Narrative Science, a company that also happens to be based in Chicago. Founded by a couple of data scientists in 2010, it now produces sports and business coverage for a range of outlets, including Forbes magazine — where it provided this auto-generated article about the expected earnings from the New York Times Co. The Wired magazine piece makes much of the fact that Narrative Science pieces are almost indistinguishable from traditional sports or business coverage.

Rebecca Greenfield of The Atlantic, however, says that we shouldn’t be scared of “robot journalism” because much of it is barely even journalism at all — a point that she has made before. Instead, she says, most of what the company does is the meaningless data-driven drudgery that regular journalists usually hate doing to begin with, because it doesn’t add much value (and having written earnings summaries, I can attest that this is true). So why not let robots do it? A similar type of argument could be made for using Journatic.

Data specialist and journalism professor Matt Waite makes this argument in his defence of “algorithms for journalism.” In effect, he says, we can use robots or automated tools to do what those things have always done — namely, take away boring and repetitive tasks that human beings have always done, and make it easier for them to focus on the things they do that really add value, in ways that only humans can.

That’s a powerful argument, but it presumes that the journalists who are “freed up” because of Narrative Science or Journatic can actually find somewhere else that will pay them to do the really valuable work that machines can’t do. If they can’t, then they will simply be unemployed journalists. And newspapers like the Tribune that make use of a content-farm style approach need to be aware of what they are getting as well — as the Washington Post recently found with one of its bloggers, asking for dozens of stories a day can tend to reduce the quality to an unacceptable level.

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