I’m not even going to try to compete with Matt Doig’s hilarious and infamous job post, but I will preface this by saying the Ledger is a very good place to work.

We’ve got great journalists here who make a habit of exposing the mind-boggling arrogance, greed, incompetence and corruption of the Garden State’s public officials. One of our colleagues just won a Pulitzer in feature writing for her investigation of the sinking of a small fishing vessel that killed six men. We’re led by top-notch editors who care about writing and about watchdog journalism that gets results.  My (relatively) new team is starting to do some cool work, and we have an ambitious agenda for the year ahead.

I’m looking for strong candidates soon. Please pass this along to anyone you think might be qualified. Here’s the job description:

The Star-Ledger is looking for a journalist to fill an entry-level position on its computer-assisted reporting team. The reporter will be responsible for acquiring and analyzing public records and data to support enterprise stories for print and online. He or she should be comfortable filing public records and freedom of information requests with agencies at the local, state and federal levels. The reporter will also contribute to the redesign and maintenance of NJ By The Numbers, our home for databases and statistics vital to New Jersey readers.

Qualifications: A background in local or investigative reporting for a daily news outlet and an affinity for math, web development and programming. Ability to identify and mine public databases for stories large and small and to build and manage relational databases. Experience displaying data graphically in print and online to engage readers.

Proficiency with Microsoft Excel and Access, SQL, HTML and CSS, ESRI ArcView and Google Maps. Bonus points for candidates who have experience or interest in scraping, scripting, frameworks (Django, Rails, ASP.Net) or statistical analysis with SPSS, SAS or R.

If you’re interested, send me a cover letter, resume and clips to my work email, tmeagher(at)starledger(dot)com.

In a slight departure from my day-to-day role working with numbers, I was asked to fill in for one of my bosses at a symposium hosted by John Jay College’s Center on Media, Crime and Justice. The round table discussion brought together police and journalists from across New Jersey to talk about working together and how using social media tools can help all of us do our jobs.

It was an interesting day to say the least. I sat in a room with 45 cops, reporters and editors who often have an adversarial relationship. I met cops who my reporters have been interviewing for years, as well as competitors whose bylines I knew well. It was refreshing to step out of the daily grind for a few hours and talk about our shared frustrations and how we can do things better, particularly with the explosion of social media tools at our fingertips.

After the jump, some of my prepared remarks, without the slight diversions I took when I delivered them.

What the public and the news media want from the police on the internet

1. Speed. Like news organizations and police departments everywhere, we have seen our resources dwindle. At the same time, competition has grown exponentially. We want the information fast. We want to know what’s happening before it happens and then we want to be able to alert our readers.

It can buy police departments time. If you get a tweet out quickly to alert the public or confirm or deny an event, then you can avoid calls from dozens of media outlets hounding you in the short term. It’ll give you breathing room to gather the facts on the investigation before responding to follow-up questions or releasing more details. We know the scanner chatter is often wrong, but often we can’t afford not to chase a story unless the police confirm that it’s wrong.

A tweet is a starting point. It can be a great way to immediately alert a lot of people to a major news issue (a high-profile arrest) or a public safety or infrastructure concern (tunnel closing, fire or tornado). But there needs to be….

2. Interaction. The nature of the internet has changed communication. It is not a one-way platform. For it to have any relevance, you have to interact.

People will come to you looking for answers. if you don’t provide them, lots of other people on the internet will try to fill in the gaps, often with misinformation. A tweet from a passerby that says something like, “I drove by a fire on Main St., and it looks like a plane hit a house. It’s carnage everywhere.” could have just been a small kitchen fire that sent lots of smoke into a residential street. There is no replacement for an investigation from the authorities.

This will inevitably raise a number of questions in departments large and small: Who is in charge of the Twitter feed? Who is empowered to post on it? Is there a policy for replying to tweets or Facebook comments? It can be time consuming to keep up to date. But a social media presence isn’t particularly useful as simply an archive of static press releases. (As I learned at the event, the International Association of Chiefs of Police Center on Social Media has drafted a model policy for law enforcement agencies on how to adopt social media tools).

Being on the internet has to be faster than telling reporters that they have to wait three days to talk to the designated PIO about a homicide (which we hear far more often than one would expect). And posting a single statement online isn’t sufficient. It’s a good place to start so we know what kind of story we’re dealing with, but we need to be able to follow up. We need to be able to ask questions to clarify statements and probe for more detail. You don’t have to answer all of the questions, but we need to be able to ask them.

We don’t want to ever have to attribute information to an agency’s website or Twitter feed. We use these as planning tools. Then we want to confirm the information with a real person in the department to make sure we got it right.

And the police can use these social media platforms to their advantage. The LAPD used Twitter to seek information in a hit and run of a valet at a restaurant, for instance. They later arrested an elderly man in the case, although it’s not clear if the tip that led to his arrest came from a Twitter user.

The NJ State Police has used Twitter to dispel rumors and bad information from scanner reports about a plane crash in South Jersey or SEALs training in the Delaware River. They’ve also used it to get out initial information on fatal accidents and crimes before being bombarded by reporters.

3. The internet is just a tool. If your department or PIO refuses to share public information with the public, then there’s no point in being online. You have to have information that people want for it to be worthwhile. Posting about park closures or issues of minor significance are not good enough. Users on social media, particularly Twitter and Facebook are voracious news consumers. They want substance and lots of it. If you’re not answering phone calls from reporters who need information, there’s no reason you’d do it online.

The benefit of encouraging an air of transparency in your department however is that it can help demystify the process of police work and humanize law enforcement officers.

4. Facebook and Twitter can also be investigative tools. When we background a subject of a story, a crime or otherwise, these sites are among the first things we look at.

In several cases in New Jersey lately, it’s been a key component of criminal charges against young people. In the Tyler Clementi case, his former roommate is charged with trying to doctor his Twitter account to remove incriminating information. In the case of a group of Old Bridge teens accused of beating a man to death, they allegedly held extensive conversations on Facebook about the night in question and the beating.

And it helps us track people down, like the Hoboken woman who shot the amazing picture of the Space Shuttle from the window of her airplane. We found her on Facebook.
—-

My talk went well, although it was a bit disconcerting to notice that one of my fellow panelists, Capt. Mike Parker of the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department, was looking up my resume on his laptop as I spoke. Even though I post all these things to the whole world on the internet, it’s easy to forget sometimes that anyone actually looks at it.

The rest of the day’s discussions offered a good opportunity to see some of these sources in a less-heated environment and learn from the other attendees and panelists (including Ted Gest of Criminal Justice Journalists and Nancy Kolb of the International Association of Chiefs of Police) about some of the resources we all have at our fingertips. I found out about The Crime Report, put together by Criminal Justice Journalists and The Center on Media, Crime and Justice. I also heard about IACP’s handy directory of police agencies with a presence on social media.

Probably the best reminder I heard all day though came from one of the other panelists, Capt. Jeff Paul, public information officer for the Morris County Prosecutor’s Office.  He bristled at receiving calls from reporters asking for information, in some cases demanding answers, without ever coming to introduce themselves to him.

Even with all of this magic from the interwebs to help us communicate faster and easier, there really is no replacement for building a personal relationship, face-to-face, with a police source, before you’re on deadline in the middle of a catastrophe.

Leave a comment below or follow me on Twitter @ultracasual and tell me about your experience working with police or journalists on social media networks.

I don’t intend to denigrate the years of service by so many passionate and intelligent fans. I wish they could have been compensated even a fraction for the sweat they’ve poured into writing about the game.

And with varying degrees of success, some organizations are attempting what I propose, to support legions of writers with the values and resources of their ancestors in newsprint. There’s a battalion, at least, of podcasters. There are networks of soccer scribes like American-Soccer-News.com. And then there’s MLSsoccer.com.

There has been a little debate about whether fans should consider MLSsoccer.com to be a legitimate and credible news outlet. Forget for a moment that no other major organizations provide comprehensive reporting on the domestic leagues (even though one would expect that ESPN or Fox Soccer would want to mount such an effort) and that MLS is simply stepping into the breach to give fans what they want.  With the sweeping inhouse relaunch of the site this season, the league and its employees clearly plan to “cover” the sport, both here and abroad. But should they, and if not, what role should the league’s official website play?

Photo by Diego Radzinschi

We need to remind ourselves that MLSsoccer.com is the public relations arm of a major corporation. Many fans would agree that we really can’t trust the site to give us honest, straightforward reportage on issues that are less than flattering to the league as a whole. As other writers (including one at the U.S. Mens National Team Players Association’s official website) have observed, it’s like watching a snake eat its own tail when you try to get information from an official mouthpiece that also attempts to cover the news. You don’t rely on the Federal Reserve for unbiased, critical and important writing about U.S. monetary policy. You don’t need to do it with your favorite sport either.

MLSsoccer.com ought to be a repository of fast, easy-to-find video and (I credit this concept entirely to FakeSigi) openly accessible statistical data. The site should create a public API to allow fans to use the league’s entire database of historical game and player statistics. One can imagine how a blog like Climbing the Ladder, which I believe does its analysis with its own cobbled-together data, could be even cooler if it had the actual league stats to tinker with.

Although MLSsoccer.com is keeping more than a few people gainfully employed, I want to see more organizations spring up so that so many writers aren’t directly dependent on the league to make a living. We need to find ways to support good, young soccer writers so they can work, report and get better at their craft without having to shill for MLS.

Unravel the conflicting interests

Outside MLSsoccer.com, much of the writing on the U.S. game resembles the pamphleteering of the early Republic. Lots of Whigs and Federalists write blogs for like-minded folks, but their own biases can make them hard to take seriously.

Although some good coverage of the sport comes from partisans, I don’t want the writer on whom I rely to be staked in the camp of any one team. There shouldn’t be any fans in the press box. Stories and podcasts about games shouldn’t include the word “we.” Soccer fans are incredibly passionate, and they go to great lengths to identify with their teams. But I want knowledgeable, independent writers, free of the auspices of the league and its card-carrying supporters clubs.

To this end, I’d like to see American soccer writers, professional and amateur, adopt the ethical guidelines of the Associated Press Sports Editors. As an organization, the North American Soccer Reporters should publicly lean on its members, particularly those not affiliated with news agencies with their own ethics policies, to subscribe to this code. It reads, in part:

Editors and reporters should avoid taking part in outside activities or employment that might create conflict of interest or even appearance of a conflict.

1. They should not serve as an official scorer at baseball games.
2. They should not write for team or league media guides or other team or league publications. This has the potential of compromising a reporter’s disinterested observations.

As fans, we pay to support soccer in this country, whether in satellite packages or scarves. If for no other reason than we want to make sure that our money is well spent, we should expect the people who deliver the news to be minding the bank rather than boosting their club. The only hitch: we may have to pay more to get what we deserve.

No more free transfers

At the very least, we need more neutral, unaffiliated writers who embody the traditional values of newspaper journalism. In an ideal world, that would come with a major investment to create a news organization that could do justice to soccer’s huge potential in this country.

So far, there have been a handful of single proprietors who have been successful at making a living on the internet as soccer hacks, most notably my former Herald News colleague Ives Galarcep. But I’m proposing an online publication that would require the footprint and resources of a larger organization to make it work.

There are several–largely untested–business models that, with the right editorial direction and an angel investor or two, could produce soccer news worth paying for. Not everything needs to be locked behind a pay wall. Until relatively recently, Soccer America did just that, a print-focused decision that could be argued largely blunted its influence as the demand for soccer news on the web exploded. I’m not advocating for any particular model, whether its based on subscriptions, syndication, micropayments or the like. But readers need to understand that you can really only get the stories you want when a publication can pay for the work it takes to dig them up.

Early in my career, I wrote about the Kansas City Wizards for Cyber Soccer Associates, a group that still exists and now maintains the American Soccer News site. For two seasons, I followed the team, writing game previews and match reports. I hesitate to say I “covered” the Wizards. As a part-time writer, I didn’t have the time to attend training sessions, and I really had no idea what I was doing. I didn’t develop stories or break news. I mostly reacted and transcribed game events. It was a great gig, but in retrospect I see the missed opportunities to go deeper. The model of American Soccer News, and I believe The Offside as well, is to create a network of volunteer writers dedicated to individual teams and link them all under one banner. It’s a great idea, but it falls short in a couple of key aspects: it’s a part-time gig at best, and there’s a tendency for the writers to be advocates for the teams rather than probing journalists.

This all leads me once more to a key question, as Richard Whittall has asked time and again:

Don’t most soccer bloggers secretly consider a career writing for a major news organization with all its resources, access, accreditation and living-ish wages, the ultimate endgame for their online endeavours?

…Is this after all just a fun little hobby? And if not, what are we all going to do about it? Are traditional pay-for-content models really and truly dead?

The newspaper industry has largely ignored soccer, but the values of the daily print journalist are hard to beat. And the truly good newspaper reporter is impossible to replace for free. With all the writers slogging away at this subject, we have the raw talent. We have the knowledge. We have a market for the news. The soccer fan should be an advertiser’s dream demographic. We need the business acumen that can monetize the news so that writers can make the jump from dedicated and sometimes gifted amateurs to professional reporters, with all the accountability and responsibility that entails.

There are two things on which American soccer fans can generally agree. We want thriving, world-class domestic leagues, for both men and women, and we want the men’s national team to win the World Cup. At this point, we’re decades, if not generations away from realizing those dreams. But we can get there by taking one step at a time, and the most important step is to keep the sport alive here long enough for it to happen.

A vigorous press, despite its shortcomings, has always been vital for a strong democracy. For soccer to continue to grow in America, we need a stronger, independent press. To do it right, to have professional reporters competing to break stories in every city with a team, it will cost money. For soccer fans and other interested readers, it may be end up being cheap, but it won’t be free. At the end of the day, for the sport we all love, it will be a small price to pay.

Leave a comment below or follow me on Twitter @ultracasual and tell me what you think.

I make my living editing local news–town councils, zoning boards, school boards–for a daily newspaper. It’s been doubly frustrating for me then that a large majority of my colleagues in the media consider soccer to be a third-class sport.

By and large, soccer is ignored or, at best, squirreled away among the agate results, somewhere behind junior high water polo. Much has been written in the blogosphere about how soccer is a sport tailor-made for the internet. With the advent over the past couple of years of prevalent, cheap and quick streaming video, anyone can now watch live games from around the world. You don’t need broadcasters to watch the game. And you don’t need your major metropolitan daily newspaper to read about it.

Frustrated by the willful ignorance of newspapers and TV, soccer fans like me have created their own media. Blogs, webzines, podcasts and other online publications have proliferated, sustained by fans who weren’t getting the news and analysis they wanted. In many ways, American fans have provided a perfect example of the “citizen journalism” movement that Jeff Jarvis has been preaching about all these years.

It’s been great to see the level of engagement by so many regular fans, but I still find myself yearning for more. I want deeper reporting, better writing and smarter analysis. I want it all packaged in an attractive design, and I want more of it every day. I daydream about a soccer publication that embodies some of the best values of newspaper journalism infused with all the potential of the digital realm.

The press box at Red Bull Arena at halftime during the March 27 game against the Chicago Fire.

A familiar refrain

Many of the better critics and writers in the soccer blogosphere have tackled this subject before. I’m certainly not alone. A More Splendid Life, Pitch Invasion, This is American Soccer and others far more clever and thoughtful than me have bemoaned the same problem. A lot of readers want better coverage of the sport, on both the professional and amateur levels. But there are so few opportunities to make a living at soccer writing, it’s difficult to expect anyone to answer the Siren call as anything more than a hobby.

The problem begins with the big mainstream purveyors of sports journalism, the newspapers and magazines that have traditionally funded serious and ongoing reporting. They won’t, for the most part, touch soccer. Sure, we’ll see a few features between now and July 11, but that’s about it. At many publications, if they even have a soccer writer, he or she is pretty far down in the newsroom pecking order. They’re lucky if their stories get any kind of play on the cover of the sports section at all.

Fine. We’ve spent the better part of two decades whining about this. Soccer speaks for itself. The market for the game is growing and will continue to expand for some time to come. As Richard Whittall correctly observes:

And as large, ungainly media outlets are forced to cut costs and broaden content, in-depth sports journalism will be left to a sea of independent, often fan-biased bloggers working with their own resources. Many club supporters will be smarter, more connected, and more knowledgeable as information about club and league power structures are exposed to an increasingly-global fan base.

The vibrant and growing community of writers that has evolved online has been a great (if only partial) antidote. In some ways, this grassroots journalism resembles the punk rock and Jamaican music scenes of the ’60s and ’70s. If you don’t find what you want, do it yourself. This attitude has served soccer well at a time when the internet enables anyone with the chutzpah to pretend to be an expert and the free time to devote to it to become a soccer pundit with hundreds, if not thousands of followers. The laptop and Wordpress are the three chords of the internet revolution. Anyone can do it, and when the “professionals” won’t, anyone will.

The super subs

As I researched this piece, I kept finding (or being reminded of) more and more examples of very nice work being done by amateurs, bloggers and professionals alike.

There’s The Run of Play, whose ether binge cultural criticism is nothing if not fascinating (not to mention its design, which is truly unique in this genre). There’s the pseudonymous Fake Sigi (a Fake Steve Jobs aimed at those who follow one of Major League Soccer’s most successful and rotund coaches, Sigi Schmid), whose scathing dissection and analysis of the league-run mouthpiece, MLSsoccer.com, has been a real revelation in recent months.

Then there’s the fan-oriented networks of bloggers and podcasters who spend countless hours watching, breaking down and reviewing matches. Many of them conduct interviews with players, coaches and officials as well as journalists and fellow fans. Seeing Red, a relatively new podcast covering the New York Red Bulls, has been a valuable addition this season to the coverage of the team from the fan’s seats.

(In the spirit of full disclosure, over the past six years, I have edited a pair of soccer blogs, on my own and for my former newspaper. Those experiences, and their unceremonious ends, give me even more respect for those who continue to slog away at the daily grind of blogging.)

Add to these the traditional newspaper and magazine journalists who have taken to the web and social networks to hone their brand and solidify their command of the beat: Ives Galarcep, Steve Goff, Grant Wahl, Jack Bell and so on.

There’s a lot to like. Still, we can and should all expect a lot more.

Understandably, some bloggers and amateur reporters can adopt a defensive posture on the subject of professionalism. It’s not unique to soccer writing, and it’s certainly not unique to America. Although the issues are somewhat different in England, Lukey Moore, one of the fanatics behind the hilarious, exceptional and smart Football Ramble podcast, elucidated this view in a recent interview:

There is a bit of a backlash in the media these days against things like amateur blogs and podcasts, a lot of journalists think that the general public’s opinions are not as valid because they are not ‘proper journalists’. Doesn’t really bother me though, I can count on one hand the number of football journalists I actually respect.

There’s no argument that professional caliber journalists don’t hold a monopoly on opinions or incisive commentary. But in one important regard, they can’t be beat. Few others have the time, patience or ability to build relationships with sources in the game that can unlock difficult stories. That kind of deep reporting can grant them the authority to ask the unpopular questions that the powers-that-be would rather ignore.

The need for game-changers

In my little free time, I want to read something about soccer in North America that: a) I didn’t know already, b) casts a critical eye on the sport, and c) comes from someone who is a skeptical spectator, disinterested in the outcome of any particular game.

There are a few dozen solid reporters on the beat in this country, as the roster of the North American Soccer Reporters will attest. But there aren’t nearly enough.

New York Times executive editor Bill Keller’s recent review of a biography of Henry Luce captured a bit of my quandary.

…a significant population of serious people feel the need for someone with training, experience and standards — reporters and editors — to help them dig up and sort through the news, identify what’s important and make sense of it. That in no way precludes enlisting the audience as commentators, as contributors and as collaborators. (Witness the splendid hybrid of professional and amateur journalism that has kept alive the stream of news from Iran.)

Some days, it seems that 99 percent of soccer “news” could be classified as either game transcripts or outright boosterism. I read quite a bit of it, but I also want the news that you can really only get by chasing it full time, building relationships with players, front office staff, owners, league employees, coaches and referees over the years.

In the jargon of my industry, I want more of the old media’s values in this new media sport: Accountability, speed, skepticism, fearless questioning of authority. Get it fast and get it right, and when you don’t get it right, own up to your mistake and correct it. Without these kind of mores suffused into our writers, I worry that far too many important stories are crying out for more reporting. What happened to Charlie Davies on the night of his accident? What is going on with Shalrie Joseph’s life and career? What kind of negotiations went into crafting Major League Soccer’s latest labor agreement?

Sometimes it seems there’s a disconnect between soccer writing and news journalism. I go to work every day and ask questions of people in power because I act as a proxy for the regular, taxpaying resident. There is a presumption that government should be open and accountable. Regardless of how much we couch it in terms of passion, culture and tradition, soccer is a business. It’s becoming a very lucrative business, and it’s very closely held. It’s a private enterprise, and thus there isn’t that same moral authority to ask questions and demand answers. But still, reporters should be using their access, knowledge and insight on behalf of the average fan.

Someone needs to ask probing questions. We need reporters to help hold managers and clubs responsible for their mistakes, whether they be poor tactical decisions at a US Open Cup match or the financial mismanagement of an entire club (See: Portsmouth, Leeds, Crystal Palace, Chester City, LA Sol, Miami Fusion, etc). We’re being sold a product, whether it’s season tickets or jerseys or television advertising. If we’re going to invest our money (not to mention time and energy), it should be worth our investment.

One has to wonder what other stories in the public interest (about systematic problems and corruption in sports, including those at the prep level) may have also gone unwritten. Although perceived as fun and games, sports at almost every level in the United States have become big business with consequences beyond the playing fields. Sports journalists have an ethical obligation to provide citizens and consumers with fair and balanced reporting on issues that affect their communities, their pocketbooks and the health and educations of their children.

Here in America, we need more reporters walking the soccer beat day in and day out, particularly in towns that aren’t so sexy. We need more people in Kansas City, St. Louis, Salt Lake City and Dallas, for example. We need more people asking tough questions and competing with the writers already out there. A competitor breathing down your neck really helps you kick it into gear and get a better story.

Before we get more writers (which I’ll discuss in a second part tomorrow), we need to add the values of professional journalism to the healthy and established internet community of writers. I’m not advocating for a new alliance of bloggers, each sitting in his own apartment and riffing, linking back and forth. I’m talking about a serious, concerted effort to groom, deploy and support soccer writers.

Tomorrow, I’ll discuss how the writers we have can get better and what we’ll need to do to get more of them.

Leave a comment below or follow me on Twitter @ultracasual and tell me what you think.

The programs, essentially a series of lo-fi internet radio call-in shows, were hosted by Sree Sreenivasan, dean of student affairs at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism. Like everyone else on the planet, I had been dabbling in Facebook, and I had heard a lot about Twitter but didn’t understand how to use either very well, particularly as a journalist.

So I charged through Sree’s programs (mostly using Google’s excellent Listen app on my Android phone). The most helpful were the episodes on Basic Twitter and Facebook for journalists. They gave some practical, but simple background on each service and shared advice from other working professionals. It was enough to make me feel comfortable experimenting.

Then I went to pick up more of the episodes, which covered topics like launching your own media company, using Google Docs in reporting and what exactly are we supposed to do with LinkedIn?

The audio quality wasn’t crystal clear, but the medium was simple and straightforward. Before finding these, I was addicted to my RSS feeds, checking each one religiously throughout the work day. I now can go three or four days without even remembering to open Google Reader.

Instead, with Twitter I have this incredible, if sometimes overwhelming, stream of information coming at me in (often) clever, funny snippets. And with its open, collaborative nature, it’s far more likely that I’ll be turned on to new, engaging news sources and writers than I ever would find by reading hundreds of individual blogs. I’ve found about a hundred writers covering media issues, food, beer, film, television and soccer to follow on Twitter and to keep me abreast of the news and ideas of the day. Particularly for a news junkie, it’s a great advance.

As I’ve gotten more comfortable with the service, I’ve experimented with a couple of Twitter management programs that help me more easily handle the onslaught of information. Seesmic has a half-decent app for Android phones, but I’ve settled on using Hootsuite (also on Sree’s advice). It’s got a great web interface that allows you to manage not only Twitter, but also LinkedIn, Facebook and Myspace accounts, and its Android app is easy and attractive.

If you’re curious about this whole Twitter phenomenon in particular, I’d recommend checking out Sree’s podcasts and then peruse his exhaustive Twitter guide for skeptics and newbies. If you decide to sign up (or if you’re already there), let me know so that I can start following your work too.

Leave a comment below or follow me on Twitter @ultracasual and tell me what tools you’ve found useful in navigating the social mediasphere.

Earlier this week, I was invited to speak on a panel to address the faculty at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism. It gave me the opportunity to reflect on LNS’ first 10 months of operation and what I’ve learned. Here’s a draft of my scripted remarks:

What’s changing, and what isn’t, in newsrooms today?

Let me start first with a little bit of background, because I get a lot of questions about what the Local News Service is and how it’s related to the Star-Ledger.

In 2008, the Star-Ledger lost about 45 percent of its staff through a massive buyout. Its parent company, Advance Publications, decided to set up a separate company to provide local news. This was not unprecedented. For years, the Ledger’s high school sports and obituaries have been done by an outside outfit.

LNS was launched last year to create a new cost structure and to fill the local pages of the Star-Ledger and its website, NJ.com.

We have a newsroom of 15 reporters and 3 photographers covering municipal, local and breaking news in the six core counties of the Star-Ledger’s coverage area. Three experienced editors, including myself and Rick Everett (retired Star-Ledger managing editor), offer direction, context and guidance.

We have an additional nine or 10 staffers who produce 26 listing calendars a week as well as community news items, Scouting and schools news and a history column.

Our purpose is to produce more content for print and online with fewer, less experienced journalists. At the same time, we want to maintain the same quality and standards that readers expect of the state’s biggest newspaper. And we’ve done just that. Our photographers and reporters produce a ton of copy. We have helped bolster the Ledger’s zoned county sections, and on occasion, we’ve contributed stories to the features, business and sports sections. And while our primary objective is local news, we’ve also snagged 27 front page stories and probably twice as many Jersey section cover pieces since we went live in March.

Along the way, I’ve observed a few things:

The competition is changing. Our old enemies have become our new friends as we join to fight new enemies. We now compete online with dozens of hyperlocal websites (Patch, Baristanet, Maplewood Online, The Local, etc) as well as our old print foes from the Gannett papers. At the same time, the Ledger has largely buried the hatchet with its old rival the Bergen Record, and they now share most stories and have a combined statehouse bureau in Trenton.

Everything is faster. When we get a breaking news tip, we want to get it confirmed and get a short version of the story online immediately, if not sooner. The pace is picking up.

Our news gatherers are young. Only one of the 15 we hired was over 30. This has resulted in the loss of some institutional memory. In many cases, the veterans who had been in the Ledger’s county bureaus for decades are gone. Some are now working as spokesmen for various state and local agencies and private companies. But they have been replaced, by and large, by ambitious and energetic reporters who know little to nothing about New Jersey and its stories. It has been a challenge for us to fill those gaps while our reporters cover, in some cases, 10 or more towns.

Although our reporters are sophisticated Web consumers and are comfortable with blogging, Facebook, shooting photos and even producing videos, there is no replacement for basic reporting skills. The most important thing I need from a new reporter is the ability to ask questions and chase a story. It does me no good if you can make a sound slide or build a web page if you can’t find a story, ask questions and get it right. I’ve also noticed that as great as it is, Google has almost grown too popular. I have a reporter who rather than check the Star-Ledger’s own, comprehensive online archives when looking for old clips, she will instead just Google it and see what hits come up from NJ.com. She doesn’t even go to her own website to look for stories.

All this turmoil and change has been a very tough transition for readers. Our sources, particularly our favorite gadflies and midlevel local bureaucrats, have found this very confusing. They had been used to, in many cases, dealing with the same reporters for a decade or more. They knew who to call when there was news. Now they don’t know who covers what. We have gone to great lengths to get our name out there. We’ve sent our reporters to as many meetings and events as we can in our towns to schmooze residents and officials and explain we’re a new operation and get our faces out there.

All of this is, however, exciting. We have a great time doing what we do. Our reporters, because they haven’t been poisoned by the malaise that afflicts many news organizations, really enjoy their jobs. We have fun going into work every day and chasing the news. We get excited when one of our people gets a front page story.

In many ways, even as business models evolve, the work we do as journalists every day hasn’t changed all that much. We have better tools to work with in some cases, and we’ve got to do more, faster, but at the end of the day, it’s journalism. I couldn’t be happier.

In February, after a very successful stint at the Herald News–which included helping to lead it to win the award for best small daily in the state from the New Jersey Press Association–I left to join a start-up newsroom. (Alas, I also left behind my neglected soccer blog) Now I am one of the news editors at the New Jersey Local News Service. Owned by Advance Publications, we have a team of 15 reporters who cover municipal beats across six counties here in the Garden State.

On top of that, as part of my fellowship at Fairleigh Dickinson, I’ve been taking a course this spring on Web programming, specifically with ASP.net. I’ve also been lucky enough to play a good amount of soccer and DJ a couple of times with friends.

At a time when many newspapers are convulsing or collapsing, working for LNS has been a really unique opportunity to help build a news gathering outfit from the ground up. We provide all of our stories to the Newark Star-Ledger and its Web site NJ.com. So far, we’ve been having a blast. I have a feeling that we’re going to see more news organizations following this model: start an outside company to focus intensely on local news and provide content for print and online. It’ll be great to set the precedent for how it can be done.

Here in Passaic County, we got hit by a major news story last week, and in the process of overseeing our coverage, I rediscovered a fantastic resource I wanted to share.

On Nov. 23, a gunman walked into a Syrian Orthodox Church in Clifton, N.J. looking for his estranged wife. Police say the man shot three people in their heads before he fled, killing his wife and another parishioner and critically injuring his wife’s cousin.

It was a sad story, and our coverage on that Sunday and in the subsequent days revealed a small, tight-knit community of Christians here that is made up predominantly of immigrants from the southern Indian state of Kerala. (Unfortunately, the relaunch of our Web site this week wiped out about six other stories we wrote)

Pretty quickly after the shootings, parishioners who were in the church gave our reporters the name of the man they thought was the shooter (and who was arraigned in court today). I found his phone number in California, and we called it. The woman who answered the phone didn’t speak English, only malayalam, the language used in Kerala. I wondered how I could find a translator on a Sunday evening.

Then I remembered that for the past four years I’ve been a member of the South Asian Journalists Association or SAJA. I was ashamed I didn’t think of it sooner. So I sent an e-mail to another member looking for help. Within 15 minutes, I got a phone call from someone willing to do some on-the-fly translation through a conference call.

When we called California again, perhaps unsurprisingly, no one answered. But I was pleased by the help that SAJA was willing to offer. Then one of its members posted about our story on the group’s South Asian issues blog, SAJAforum. The comments that the forum’s readers left in response to the story helped our staff members find new avenues of reporting in the following days. It was an indescribable boon.

I was truly impressed with the resources SAJA had assembled and the collegiality and professionalism of its members as they offered advice and help with our story. I was sold on renewing my membership.

Then, a couple days later, the terrorist attacks in Mumbai happened. Since then, SAJA has gone into overdrive. SAJAforum has offered loads of tips, including daily podcasts and phonecasts. With its coverage of this event, SAJAforum has proven itself an indispensable resource for anyone seriously covering South Asian news, both here and abroad. I can’t recommend it enough.

In years past, I had flirted with Friendster and Myspace with varying degrees of interest. But Facebook seems to be the juggernaut that is outpacing all its competitors. So I’ve begun to set up a profile and nose around it. Here’s my question for you, my small cadre of readers: Once you’re signed up on Facebook, what do you do with it?

I mean, there are only so many long-lost college classmates to track down. And once we ascertain that we both exist in cyberspace and exchange some pleasantries, then what? What’s your favorite thing about Facebook?

And once you’ve built your social network, what do you think is the best use for it?

I’d love to hear your thoughts and advice.

I know it’s been awhile, and summer has already sprinted past us, but here’s a quick update. Now that school’s back in session, I have one more responsibility to add to my plate. This semester, I’m the North Jersey Media Group fellow at Fairleigh Dickinson University. As part of the fellowship, I’m teaching an introductory course in CAR for students at the campus that straddles the lazy Hackensack River.

The semester has barely begun, but so far I’m enjoying working with my tiny class. The students seem curious and eager to learn about working with Excel and databases, even if it’s not quite clear to them yet what to do with it all. I think this will be a good chance for me to practice my classroom demeanor. And hopefully it’ll give me the impetus to make some more headway on fleshing out the Best Practices section.

What advice do you have for me as I strive to teach the next generation of journalists and writers?