journalism « Kenny Smith | A remarkable thing happens …

journalism

cycling / journalism / links / Tuesday / video — Comments Off
24
Jan 12

Yes warning

As you might have heard, there were deadly tornadoes across the South on Sunday. At least two people in Alabama were killed. As always, the tragedy could have been much more costly, despite the devastation of property. There were, experts now say, at least six twisters in Alabama. The fatalities were low because of the excellent and hard work of the National Weather Service and the local meteorologists.

Only ABC did not get that memo:

ABC 33/40 meteorologist James Spann — the best in the business and there’s no discussion on this — took his national network to task. He suggested Diane Sawyer “get a clue” and challenged her to a debate on the issue. His audience were also indignant, writing first on the local site and then at the ABC homesite, where the chastising grew even louder. Those comments are worth a read.

We live in a dangerous area when it comes to spring weather. December and January are dangerous here too. Storms fall out of the sky. Tornadoes flare up and destroy property and sometimes take lives, but the technology and science now allow meteorologists to give days worth of advance warning. Forecasting that was not available a generation ago saves untold numbers of lives every year.

And so Spann took umbrage. His colleagues at KATV in Arkansas, where other tornadoes touched down, did too.

After today’s social media uproar ABC News decided to interview Spann today. It was scheduled and then canceled and rescheduled. Somewhere in there ABC had to stoop to spinning their own newscast:

“The report that aired Monday was referring to the fact that many families were surprised because they were asleep when the tornado hit in the middle of the night,” an ABC spokesperson says. “‘World News’ will cover the latest on the aftermath of the tornadoes tonight and will clarify the warning and advance forecasts given.”

Not even especially good spin, but there it was all the same.

Their newscast this evening?

Spann wrote on his site that he was grateful for the interview and that the important message about the outdoor sirens was shared, but …

There was no apology, or mention of the botched story yesterday when Diane Sawyer said the pre-dawn tornadoes Monday were a “surprise” with “no warning”. A little odd how you just go from that one day, to a story on how good the warning process was the next day. But, I am not a journalist and maybe that is just the way you do it. Seems strange. I would imagine Diane actually didn’t write that copy, but she will probably think twice about fact checking on lead story intros.

[…]

My frustration with the situation yesterday is shared by ALL of those hard working people involved in the warning process. The National Weather Service, the EM community (emergency managers), and broadcast meteorologists. I felt that these people were devalued and insulted yesterday.

It has been an interesting day in local-national media.

The storms missed us entirely, all going far north. We had some much needed rain and that’s all. We’ll get some more later this week, hopefully without the storms. I’m sure ABC hopes that’s the case.

Beautiful day today. I got in a 26 mile ride at a nice, even 15 mile per hour pace. Now let’s see if I can do that again tomorrow.

Got a lot of work done otherwise, and made a handful of phone calls. More work tomorrow, more emails and reading and some time on the bike. We’re expecting 72-degrees tomorrow for the first time this year. Of course I’ll be riding …

football / journalism / links / Storify / things to read / Twitter / weekend — Comments Off
21
Jan 12

The Joe Paterno story

This looks like a great classroom exercise. I’ve been compiling the chronology of events worth pointing out to young scribes.

There are no winners there, no successes or celebrations. Just a few giant errors and important lessons.

I have a note out for Devon Edwards, the profoundly upset former managing editor of OnwardState, a student-run news outlet. (Read his Twitter account and you can’t help but feel for the guy. I’ve also written Adam Jacobi, the CBS writer who passed along what OnwardState reported. Hopefully they’ll reply to add a bit more perspective and give some insight into what went wrong and what can be learned from the experience.

cycling / iPhone / journalism / links / photo / things to read / Thursday — 2 Comments
19
Jan 12

Another lovely Thursday

Thirty-five miles on the bike today. I stopped around mile to do a little bike maintenance, looked up and saw this sky. (As with all panoramas on the site, click to embiggen.)

And that’s winter in the deep south to me. The high was 59 today, but I waited until it got to 57 before taking a ride. Even then I wore a jacket. It was chilly in the breeze and the late afternoon shade. Riding in the sun, or huffing up a hill, the temperature was perfect.

But 35 miles was a great distance for the day. It took me to the other side of little wide spots in the road that I have, on occasion, thought were too far to drive to.

Elsewhere I dabbled in spreadsheets and emails all day. Did some reading. Lot of that coming up tomorrow and beyond, as well. It was a full and lovely day in almost every way, except for the things I did not get done. But what doesn’t get done today will be on the list tomorrow. That’s always the way of it. Tomorrow is often a good second chance.

In the small world department: At dinner tonight we ran into the young lady who last week lost a wheel off her SUV. (We found it in our yard.) She had gotten it back after a rotate and balance at the dealership, but someone neglected to properly mount the front-passenger wheel, which, as gravity insists, is important.

When we saw them last her father had called AAA and was hauling the SUV back to the dealership. She told us tonight that they’d paid for all the repairs. She got it out of the shop and then, immediately, the radiator went bad.

That makes three visits to the dealership in less than two weeks. She needs to catch a break.

Things to read: Textbook publishers? Apple is looking at you:

Digital textbooks available for iBooks 2 on iPad will come at a significant discount over regular paper-based books, with prices at $14.99 or less from major publishers like McGraw Hill and Pearson.

The implications will be widespread.

Who? Whom? Geoffrey Pullum will tell you, in just 786 words.

Is HDR photography acceptable in journalism? Interesting ethical question. Is it news only if it is in the human visible spectrum? (No.) Is it acceptable to publish a photograph treated in any number of techniques as NASA frequently does? (Yes.)

The old-school photojournalism professor — like the man I studied under, a talented old veteran who spent his formative years covering civil rights marches — would say that what is in the viewfinder is the news. His point was that cropping a picture is editorializing. (We all know that even the presence, if not the interaction, of a photojournalist can impact the news event, so in that strictest sense this becomes a thorny issue: any opened shutter is potentially changing the story.) I spoke with a younger photojournalism professor about this recently and he laughed at the notion. To him that is an ideal of a photographer who hasn’t had to get a job in years.

Ultimately, if you open a photo in Photoshop or video in After Effects or your software of choice you can improve the shot, or you can alter your story. After the Iranian faux-missile launch story a few years ago Guardian leapt into the debate. Others have similarly chimed in on both sides of the Photoshop/photojournalism “Does it lie?” issue.

It can, but this is increasingly difficult to get away with. (So don’t be tempted.) It doesn’t even take long to get caught. (To be fair, that one was on the hands of a stringer, and not a staff pro. And herein lies the key, it comes down to trust. It comes down to credibility. So hard to earn, so easy to lose.

Scrupulous photogs, scrupulous people of any industry, know that and guard it credibility with zeal.

And then you get into grey areas. The court won’t let cameras in, so a television station is re-creating “the more absurd aspects” of a corruption trial with muppets. (Video is at the link.) I’m sure it is useful and captivating and will probably be remembered by the newscast’s audience for a good long while, but I could see it also making people queasy, though it is just another way to reach audiences. I bet a lot of the people working on that project never imagined themselves as puppeteers.

Pew research says it is the economy:

The public’s interest in news about the economy far outreaches media coverage of it for the second week in a row this year, with 20 percent of people surveyed saying it was the story they were following most closely, while only 6 percent of news coverage was devoted to it. The week before, 19 percent of people said it was their top story, while 8 percent of coverage was devoted to it. This discrepancy continues a trend from last year, during which the economy was one of the most closely followed stories 32 out of 52 weeks, and was the top story of 2011 with 20 percent of coverage devoted to it. And yet in December alone, there was about twice as much interest in the economy as there was coverage of it.

Even during weeks when the economy was the top story, interest surpassed coverage.

Smart comments on that Poynter story, by the way.

All of these journalism topics land on my Samford blog, should be so inclined. Over there I don’t talk about riding my bike!

I also didn’t talk about the possum that brought the New York City subway to a halt:

The D train was evacuated after arriving at the West Fourth Street station in Manhattan, where a group of police officers, armed with heavy-duty gloves and a canvas bag, were on hand to nab their perp. The officers were turned back, however, after the animal bared its teeth and snarled, the police said.

This, apparently, was a job for the experts. The officers arranged for animal control agents to meet the train in a subway yard next to the Grand Concourse in the Bronx, according to Paul J. Browne, the chief police spokesman. Normal D train service was then resumed, after a 27-minute delay.

I could tell you about The Yankee’s experience with a possum just after we got married. She grew up 45 minutes from New York City and had a similar run-in.

I should probably get her permission before telling that tale though …

Auburn / football / journalism / links / video / Wednesday — Comments Off
18
Jan 12

Just the links

Don’t spend too much time trying to understand what is going on here, just let it soak all in. The first thing you’ll want to notice is how great Kirk Sampson is in dealing with the media. Good thing, that’s his job and all. The second thing is how ESPN, CBS et al fall all over themselves to … fall all over themselves.

That link is a selection of the emails Sampson fielded from media during the 2010 Auburn national championship and manufactured Cam Newton scandal. Deadspin asked for the emails, and the forensic analysis began the moment the university complied:

ESPN’s Joe Schad and Sampson have the following exchange in which the former pronounces himself “so jacked,” pimps his own Twitter feed, and generally expresses himself in such a way that it’s difficult to tell the reporter from the flack.

[…]

Our scare-quoting TV person is back, still determined to show Cam Newton taking his “softer side” for a spin around a local elementary school. He writes: “Possible pitch to Cam: When people see ‘high-profile’ folks giving back, it might encourage them to do the same….” (And thus did the flack get flacked.)

I shared a joke with a friend of mine, a prominent journalism professor, that he was close to mistaking sports reporting for journalism. Universities — intent on controlling their message and protecting their student-athletes — need to control their message, and generally do a great job of it. It is surprising they don’t go it alone more often. Consider: they have a devoted audience, multi-million dollar TV deals and the same dissemination tools as you or I. And yet there is always ESPN, playing kingmaker and empire destroyer almost within the same series of emails.

Deadspin may have captured the moment perfectly in two sentences. “This is how sports scandals unfold now. ESPN creates and amplifies the controversy from which ESPN alone can provide the safe haven.” The local guys were far more decent about the thing.

Read that link. It will all make sense.

I’m so glad this expression has become acceptable for use in headlines. The comments, as a joy, are the state’s pride and treasure.

We often talk about juxtaposition in a news design sense. This is now the best example ever. It was discovered by Napo, former classmate of mine, who went on to be a great designer and program developer.

This is better than it sounds:

It’s quite easy, really. You don’t even need any heavy equipment. In 1988 the Ostry family in Nebraska wanted to move their barn to higher ground.

Ostry’s son Mike showed his father some calculations. He had counted the individual boards and timbers in the barn and estimated that the barn weighed approximately 16,640 pounds. He also estimated that a steel grid needed to move the barn would add another 3,150 pounds, bringing the total weight to just under 10 tons.

The next step is to gather about 350 of your best friends and invite them to come lift your barn. The video shows the result.

They should show that video at team-building conferences.

Almost two dozen years ago 344 men and women moved that barn by hand. I wonder how the building and the family are doing these days.

journalism / links / Thursday / video — Comments Off
12
Jan 12

To clarify and other things

I’m not pessimistic about the media. The opposite is, in fact, true. Instead I see the changes continuing, mediums shifting as we alter the way we consume news. Vocus, mentioned here yesterday, is optimistic about the present media because they are a PR firm and they cater to media outlets. They have to be.

Look, brands change, businesses change. People that acknowledge that in the media industry are the ones that can survive and thrive. If you see disruption as an anomaly, a one-off to endure, you’re writing your own fate. This is confusing revolution and evolution, still and again. Transitioning to the Internet was revolutionary (and unnecessarily slow in many respects) for traditional media. It was evolutionary for customers.

For example, look at the newspaper data. Sadly there was a surge of newspaper job cuts in 2011. Advertising sales slid again, far from the golden age of 2005. Almost 4,000 newspaper jobs were eliminated in 2011, according to Paper Cuts, which reports almost 40,000 job cuts since mid-2007. Individually, economically, journalism/community information — no matter how you look at it there’s no good news in that.

Alan Mutter wrote about it recently in E&P:

Barring a miraculous turnaround in the economy, a sea change in the thinking of media buyers or a late-breaking proclivity for print in the sub-geezer population, publishers in ever more communities are likely to reduce the number of days they provide home delivery – or print a newspaper altogether.

Nowhere is the demise of daily delivery more dramatic than in Michigan, where more than two-thirds of the households will be unable get seven-day service after the end of January.

[…]

Anecdotally, we know there are many more cases across the country. We just don’t know how many. Although you would think that ABC, the industry-supported group that audits circulation, and the Newspaper Association of America, the industry’s principal trade group, would want to keep an accurate count of something as important as the dwindling number of daily newspapers, they profess not to know.

[…]

In five-plus years of ever more vigorous retrenchment to salvage some degree of profitability, publishers have trimmed staff, crimped newsholes and outsourced everything from call centers and accounting to production and delivery. With scant behind-the-scenes economies left, publishers now are being forced to make the most conspicuous cuts of all: Reducing the number of days they publish or deliver papers.

It is hard to be optimistic about that. Newspapers are important, yes. Once they were much more important — which is to say, they once played a more prominent role in our civic lives. If enough news outlets of any medium disappear we’ll soon recall how important a service they provide.

The way we get information is necessarily changing. Mutter, again, writes about the next step: big tech companies swooping in over local outlets. “Most local media companies have no idea what’s about to hit them – much less a plan to respond.”

There are reasons to be optimistic, singing the praises of old media because they didn’t disappear last year as fast as the year before that is not optimism. (You can see shades of that, among some newspaper historians at least, since radio first burst into our homes.)

But there are reasons for optimism. Here’s one: we are a part of a great sorting out period of media.

Other things of note: I believe that, a generation from now, we’re going to see a group of great leaders based on the experiences life has put them in. I submit Daniel Rodriguez.

And here’s your rebuttal to that belief. Birmingham was the feature city on The First 48, A&E’s program on real homicide investigations. They were detailing the apprehension and conviction of a guy tied to five murders. There are four members of his family. They’re all in prison on various murder charges.

There is a fair amount of cognitive dissonance here:

Froma Harrop took it in stride, replying “Sure, much of my careful reasoning ended up on the cutting-room floor, but it was fun.”

Meanwhile, on Stephen Colbert’s show he’s announced an exploratory committee to consider the possibility of running for the president of the United States of South Carolina:

And then:

We’re writing a paper about this. I’ve grown more and more convinced that the entire gag is a stunt conceived of making fun of our current election laws. He even nods to it at the end of the segment.