Women’s Wear Daily publishes a feature story about Adam Chodikoff who stands behind Jon Stewart of The Daily Show and calls him a producer with “an old-fashioned passion for the old-fashioned media.”

Comedy Central’s Daily Show is a phenomenon. As the New York Times observed some time ago, ”at a time when Fox, MSNBC and CNN routinely mix news and entertainment, larding their 24-hour schedules with bloviation fests and marathon coverage of sexual predators and dead celebrities, it’s been The Daily Show that has tenaciously tracked big, ‘super depressing’ issues like the cherry-picking of prewar intelligence, the politicization of the Department of Justice and the efforts of the Bush White House to augment its executive power.”

Here are some secrets from Chodikoff’s toolbox, as described by WWD journalist Irin Carmon:

“Chodikoff reads seven newspapers a day in print, sits through hours of hearings on C-Span on a Saturday and watches Sen. John McCain grilling on Rachael Ray’s talk show. But consuming everything is only half the task. The competitive advantage he gives Stewart is having some historical memory in an amnesiac news cycle inherently more invested in the next angle than in context…

Chodikoff doesn’t use Google to turn up inconsistencies, preferring news stories on LexisNexis, and he ignores Wikipedia. Explaining why he prefers print over the Web, he cites a scene from the movie ‘Back to School,’ when Rodney Dangerfield asks his son why he’s buying used books. “And he says, ‘Because they’re already underlined, see?’ And Rodney says, ‘But that guy could have been a maniac.’ And that’s the problem with the Internet.”

When a [host Jon] Stewart rant fortified by his research generates millions of Web hits, as did the contrast between right-wing pundits’ takes on Bristol Palin and Jamie Lynn Spears’ teenage pregnancies, Chodikoff is only vaguely aware. ‘I’m out of the whole hipster, viral thing,’ he says…

He’s particularly proud of the moments when his research has pointed out substantive stories the major network newscasts mostly ignored, such as the second phase of the Senate Intelligence report in June, which concluded that the Bush administration lied in making the case for the Iraq war. Stewart skewered the Big Three for using their airtime for froth instead. ‘When they set themselves up for a target,’ Chodikoff said, ‘I love going in and getting them.’ “

Despite 20,000 Polish soldiers in total have taken part in this mission since 2003, the media coverage of Iraq War has been rather limited and often based on foreign sources like news wires and syndicates.

Sending own reporters to Iraq has always been seen by media executives as expensive and dangerous. After two Polish TV journalists were shot dead in 2004, some media outlets withdrew their reporters, some other embedded them with Polish units. This trend has forced journalists to depend more heavily on military sources.

In effect the Polish public opinion has not been aware of some facts and details about Polish mission.

Poles in Iraq War

Poland backed the American-led invasion of Iraq in 2003. Polish-commanded multinational division took over responsibility for five of Iraq’s 18 provinces. The contingent at the time numbered 9,000 troops from 21 countries of which 2,500 were Poles.

At first Polish soldiers performed so-called stabilization tasks: they helped with the country’s reconstruction, carried out patrols, and protected the headquarters of the Iraqi local authorities against attacks, for example, during the rebellion of the radical Shiite leader Muqtada al-Sadr in 2004. Later their tasks focused on advising and training the new Iraqi armed forces. The Polish contingent was reduced to 1,600, then to 1,400, and eventually to 900 troops. The multinational division was also reduced, with countries withdrawing their forces or decreasing their contingents. The zone controlled by the multinational division also shrank. Now the division includes contingents from eight countries apart from Poland.

After October 31st, there will stay only several dozen officers who will train Iraq soldiers, policemen, prosecutors etc.

In total 23 Polish troops were killed in Iraq. The number of wounded soldiers is not confirmed by the army and is estimated to 150.

Series at Gazeta Wyborcza

Two Gazeta’s reporters – Marcin Gorka and Adam Zadworny – disclose some of the secrets of Polish army in the series called “Iraq. Poles on war” that has been published last week.

The series is a result of a dozen months-long investigation that Gorka and Zadworny carried during their travels to Iraq and a dozen talks with former officers and soldiers.

Despite the official claim that Polish troops were well-prepared for the mission in Iraq, Gazeta revealed how poorly equipped they were in fact.

Their equipment was as old as the Warsaw Pact’s arsenal. Their cars had no armor but canvas. Their guns failed due to sand. Their boots crumbled from the heat.

Polish politicians and troops were really thinking they went to Iraq on a stabilization mission, but they quickly realized they had to fight the real war.

It was a new experience for both commanders and soldiers, as Polish troops used to serve peacekeeping operations only in Kosovo and Bosnia-Herzegovina.

Here are some examples of pages:

Gorka and Zadworny told five stories:

• “They welcomed us with bombs and not flowers”: about a Polish sapper who disarmed hundreds of bombs with his hands. Finally, his car was attacked by insurgents and the sapper became the first ever Polish soldier wounded in Iraq. When he was transported to homeland, he was visited at a hospital by a minister and TV. Later he was refused any compensation despite he lost his leg, as his insurance policy did not cover “war”. The Army argued with him over 10 dollars of pension. His application for military sanitarium was rejected, as he was no longer a soldier (he was dismissed from the Army after his return).
• “The bloodiest battle of Poles since the World War II”: an untold story bout a a city battle in Karbala in 2004. Polish and Bulgarian soldiers killed hundreds of insurgents in a nearly week-long battle at the City Hall. Officially, there was no such a battle with Poles at all – the Polish Army has kept their involvement in secret, as it has not wanted to alert the public opinion at home about the reality of Iraq War and their mission.
• “It’s me who tells mothers: You son is dead”: confessions of a military priest whose mission is to inform about killed soldiers. He tells a heart-breaking story of his race to reach families before media.
• “War addicted”: a story about Polish ‘Indiana Jones’, an archeologist who enrolled in the Army after he read in a newspaper about damages done to the ancient ruins of Babylon where the US had built a helipad and a parking for heavy vehicles. Polish troops took over this camp and the scientist helped to document damages and antiquities. The archeologist could not calm down when back to Poland. He enrolled again and is going to Afghanistan.
• “I regreted I had no gun with me”: an interview with Edward Pietrzyk, a former commander-in-chief of the Polish Land Forces and Poland’s ambassador to Iraq. In 2007 he got wounded in an assassination attempt in Baghdad, by a roadside bomb, and received burns to about 20 percent of his body. He disclosed how the decision to send troops to Iraq had been made in 2003. “I asked the president: ‘What about equipment?’ I heard no answer. ‘What is our mission?’ No answer again. ‘How long should we stay there?’ The president did not know.”

Promotion of the series

The features were promoted in radio and in the newspaper with full-page ads and front-page article. Here are the examples:

Ongoing occasional skirmishes between Georgians and separatists from South Ossetia escalated to a war early in the morning of 8 August 2008, when Georgia launched a large-scale attack against South Ossetia.

This was followed by a Russian counter-attack into Georgian territory. In five days of fighting, Georgian forces were ousted from both South Ossetia and Abkhazia, another break-away region. Moscow recognised an indepdence of these two regions and its troops are still occupying parts of Georgian territory.

Western countries, including Poland, criticized Russia. The European Union’s leaders gathered today in Brussels for an emergency summit on the crisis.

Also today a new series has started in Gazeta Wyborcza. Our best foreign correspondents and reporters have looked behind doors of those in power and are going to tell this war’s stories from different perspectives:

• Wojciech Jagielski wrote about Georgian president Micheil Saakashvili: why did he started this war? What did he want to win? What did he loose? What is he going to do now? We published this feature story on Monday.
• Waclaw Radziwinowicz wrote about Russian prime minister Vladimir Putin and president Dmitry Medvedev: how they dragged Saakashvili to the trap. We will run this story on Tuesday.
• Marcin Gadzinski wrote about American president George Bush: what was the role of his holidays in this war? We are going to publish this story on Wednesday.
• Miroslaw Czech is writing about Polish president Lech Kaczynski: why did he go to Tbilisi during the war and blustered Russia when speaking on streets? This is a story for Thursday.
• Jacek Pawlicki is writing about French president Nicolas Sarkozy and German chancelor Angela Merkel: what are they fighting for? We will publish it on Friday.
• And on Saturday we are going to tell the stories of Ukranian leader Viktor Yushchenko and Belarussian one – Alexander Lukashenko: what are they afraid of?

These long narratives are accompanied by:

• personal diaries of a Russian journalist who was embedded to Russian troops that entered South Ossetia and a Georgian blogger who was simply trying to survive;
• background stories about ones of the real reasons of this war: oil and gas supplies;
• interviews with analysts and commentators like Moscow’s sociologist Viacheslav Igrunov;
• infographics showing a calendar of war, the major pipelines in the region etc.

Here you see the first part of this series:

The series was promoted in the newspaper and on TV. Here is an example of the in-paper promo published last Friday:

Translation: World on the brink of a cold war.

What’s the game of Putin, Medvedev and Bush? What’s the fight of Saakashvili, Kaczynski, Sarkozy, Merkel, Yushchenko and Lukashenko?

Features by foreign correspondents of Gazeta, opinions and comments.

What’s going to happen after this war in Georgia? Will the world fall into another cold war? What would it mean for Poland?

Read from this Monday in Gazeta Wyborcza and on Wyborcza.pl

The New Statesman has a long track of investigative journalism. Stephen Gray wrote about CIA rendition flights, Martin Bright exposed the link between the Foreign Office’s and radical Islamists or Chris Ames worked on the government’s notorious dossier on weapons of mass destruction.

The editors believe there are five areas that they believe need investigating, but before they assigned these topics to any journalis in the newsroom, they had asked readers to vote and tell what the Statesman’s priorities should be.

The poll was announced online. Readers could vote and make comments with other story ideas.

Readers could choose following topics:

• Who funds the UK Conservative Party?
• What is the influence of giant multinational PR and lobbying companies?
• What Prinve Charles is really doing and will he stop his meddling in the areas of agriculture, architecture and education when he becomes king?
• What is the state of British Childhood? Why is it that British children always end up near the bottom of international “happiness” comparisons?
• Asylum Crisis – why one of the richest countries in the world leaves asylum seekers on the streets with no access to benefits?

Finally, on Friday evening 84 % of votes went to the Asylum Crisis. The Statesman has not disclosed how many users voted.

The magazine’s political editor Martin Bright promised on his blog that the results of the investigation will be published by the end of the year. ”An investigation into such a controversial and complex issue will take some time,” he explained.

Even if this experiment is not as unique as the UK news magazine claims, it shows that something changes at the respected newsrooms – editors try to engage readers in new ways.

Interaction is no longer just a selection of letters to the editor published on page number 87.

How a new daily involved… every household

Probably the most fascinating example of a similar poll that I know about is the case of Divya Bhaskar, a daily newspaper in Gujarat, India.

Before it was launched in 2001, the newspaper’s representatives had visited personally (sic!) all (sic!) 800,000 (sic!) households in Gujarat three times (sic!).

Firstly they asked what kind of newspaper people would like to have, secondly to find what they did or didn’t like in their old paper, and thirdly to show people a dummy and an order form for a three-month subscription.

The launch of Divya Bhaskar was accompanied with a an advertising campaign with a simple slogan: “Now your wish will prevail.”

No wonder the new daily was number one on the market from day one.

I have learnt this story at the IFRA International Newsroom Summit in 2007 in Paris.

Asking questions is not enough

Asking readers for tips and votes is only a beginning. From my own experience, it is much harder to listen to what they really say.

Many newspapers ask questions, but they don’t really care about answers. Many newspapers invite readers to join the debate, but want to control this debate on every stage.

People in the newsroom interacting with readers often face problems like these:

• How to explain to a journalist that a reader complaining about a story or sending a correction is not a foe?
• How to convince a journalist that maybe the story idea submitted by a reader should have a higher priority that a story this journalist is working on?
• How to convince an editor that reader’s question or view may not be less important than traditional sources of opinion – like scientists, analysts, lobbyists, politicians, spokesmen etc.?

These are common problems in many newspapers and we don’t even touch issues like usage of user-generated content, crowd-sourcing etc.

Where are the limits of readers’ involvement

I asked Sue Matthias, an acting editor of the New Statesman, the following questions:

1. The Statesman has limited the readers involvement to vote on the topics and to share people’s views of what media have missed when covering the issue. Have the magazine ever considered any deeper involvement of readers?
   Just as an example I mean: collaboration in data gathering, analysis of documents, or any other activity assigned usually to proffesional journalists.
2. Can they imagine that a news organisation like the Statesman goes deeper into a collaboration like this in the future? And what would be the troubles, or challenges one would have to face?
3. In the Statesman’s poll Asylum Crisis story was a winner. What will happen to other story ideas like party funding or lobbying? I understand the editors have found them important enough to put them on the list. Will they investigate these issues even if they don’t get readers’ appreciation in the voting?

I will publish Sue’s answers here as soon as I get them.

Join the debate

What do you think: are there any limits of readers’ involvment in editorial work? Should editors of respected newspapers and news magazines go deeper in collaborations like this? What would be the troubles, or challenges they would have to face?

The New York Times writes about ”A different way to pay for the news you want”.

”You think your local water supply is polluted. But you’re getting the runaround from local officials, and you can’t get your local newspaper to look into your concerns. What do you do?

A group of journalists say they have an answer. You hire them to investigate and write about what they find.”

The Times writes about two new ventures.

• Spot Us, a nonprofit site where anyone can propose a story, though the editors ultimately choose which stories to pursue. ”Then the burden is put on the citizenry, which is asked to contribute money to pay upfront all of the estimated reporting costs. If the money doesn’t materialize, the idea goes unreported.”
• Pro Publica, a group led by Paul Steiger, a former managing editor of The Wall Street Journal, is being bankrolled by several major foundations to pursue investigative projects that it will then offer to newspapers and magazines.

The idea for crowd-funded journalism comes from the financial model of many charities and political campaigns – like the Obama one – that use the power of the Web to raise small sums from vast numbers of people, ”making average citizens feel a part of the process in a way they had not felt before.”

Critics say ”the idea of using crowd-funding to finance journalism raises some troubling questions. For example, if a neighborhood with an agenda pays for an article, how is that different from a tobacco company backing an article about smoking?”