Back to the routine, then. Classes start this week. My first one is tomorrow.
So I polished up a syllabus today. I put together the massive spelling list required of this class. I outlined the first four weeks of class. I wrote the first two lectures. Fired off a solid salvo of Emails.
Things got done.
Also I caught up the July photo gallery. Lot of pictures in there. Tomorrow I’ll catch up the August pictures.
Rode the bike this evening. Got 26.9 miles on the bike, enjoying a dry evening’s air. Only got heckled once, by a car full of young ladies. Also, I think I hate kevlar tires.
Lately my rides haven’t been very good. Too slow, too much struggle or too much pain. Today it was all three. This started when I had to replace my Continental racing tires with some three ply version of heavy duty there’s-debris-in-the-road tires.
Racing tires weigh between 30 to 60 grams less. And I wouldn’t have thought that would be a big difference for a duffer like me, but I’m changing my mind. The problem is that racing tires are more expensive.
On the ride before this I got home to discover my front rim was riding against the brake pad. No wonder it felt like I was going nowhere. I was pedaling through my brake! So, yes, I want my old tires back.
Visited the local Kohl’s tonight. That was the temperature. How’s August where you are?
It was vital before the weekend, even as it is dated now, but here’s a bit of specialty reporting worth your attention. What do you do with prisoners during a hurricane? Nothing, apparently, if you’re New York City:
“We are not evacuating Rikers Island,” Mayor Michael Bloomberg said in a news conference this afternoon. Bloomberg annouced a host of extreme measures being taken by New York City in preparation for the arrival of Hurricane Irene, including a shutdown of the public transit system and the unprecedented mandatory evacuation of some 250,000 people from low-lying areas. But in response to a reporter’s question, the mayor stated in no uncertain terms (and with more than a hint of annoyance) that one group of New Yorkers on vulnerable ground will be staying put.
New York City is surrounded by small islands and barrier beaches, and a glance at the city’s evacuation map reveals all of them to be in Zone A (already under a mandatory evacuation order) or Zone B–all, that is, save one. Rikers Island, which lies in the waters between Queens and the Bronx, is not highlighted at all, meaning it is not to be evacuated under any circumstances.
Speaking of the storm, FEMA asked people to use Twitter and Facebook during the bad weather, for fear of otherwise overloading the cell phone system. How many stories are in that sentence, do you think? Meanwhile, the New York Times says Twitter was a playground.
Was Irene much ado about nothing? As of this writing there are 24 deaths and a great deal of flooding, but was the media too panicked? Did the system get too much hype? You could argue both sides. On one hand you never know about hurricanes until they make landfall, and by then it is too late for the media and government to caution and evacuate people. On the other hand, there’s Howard Kurtz:
Someone has to say it: cable news was utterly swept away by the notion that Irene would turn out to be Armageddon. National news organizations morphed into local eyewitness-news operations, going wall to wall for days with dire warnings about what would turn out to be a Category 1 hurricane, the lowest possible ranking. “Cable news is scaring the crap out of me, and I WORK in cable news,” Bloomberg correspondent Lizzie O’Leary tweeted.
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But the tsunami of hype on this story was relentless, a Category 5 performance that was driven in large measure by ratings. Every producer knew that to abandon the coverage even briefly—say, to cover the continued fighting in Libya—was to risk driving viewers elsewhere. Websites, too, were running dramatic headlines even as it became apparent that the storm wasn’t as powerful as advertised.
Copy editing extends to television graphics. Look at what Irene did to some of our nation’s finest cities:
That’s from MSNBC, and probably a layer or software glitch. “That’s live television” some may say, but remember, in times of crisis it is information people need. Be sure you have it right.
Quick hits: We are all members of the media now. I’ve been saying it in classes and presentations for years now. Some of our peers disagree, but the New York Times sees it. How can Google+ be used in journalism education? Here’s a primer from Bryan Murley. Half of U.S. adults use social media, says a new Pew study. The publishing end run on Apple. Publishers want their control, but Apple’s closed model insists they have control; publishers were only going to give for so long.
There’s a saying in broadcasting that every mic is a hot mic, which means be careful what you say around every microphone, because you might be broadcasting without realizing it. ESPN is telling their employees to consider Twitter a hot mic. Agree or disagree? Internet use is on the rise for farmers. The 9/11 archives, raw footage from a wide variety of TV stations and networks during 9/11/01, and the days that followed, is now online.
Finally, typos are bad (says the guy who leaves a lot of them on his own site). Big typos on signs at school, signos, are embarrassing.
What concerns me is that there are a whole generation of students who are being encouraged to pay for qualifications that will equip them to work in a 90s newsroom, because the people designing the courses and the industry input they receive are all from people who cut their teeth in a 90s newsroom.
A piece worth reading in its entirety.
Five curation tools you should know about. Pearltrees is a new one to me. I’ll check it out this weekend. The others are variations on one another, reminding you that you don’t have to be in every space. At some point these things are competing with one another. You want to be doing your work on the one that is the winner, which is to say has an ease of use, flexibility to do what you need and the place where your audience is willing to follow (or is already building a community). Otherwise you just build up platform fatigue.
What’s more, curation is a function, not your every solution. All of these things, all of them, are options, tools and components at your disposal. As a journalist your job is to amass large amounts of information, filter, screen and select. Your job here, with these many platforms, tools and doodads, is similar.
Copy editors: read the story before writing the headline.
Also, beware of sneaky copy in those pull out boxes.
Everyone knows of Twitter, and the wise ones are using it to their advantage in their professional life. But now comes Pinq Sheets:
Unlike Klout and other similar services, Pinq Sheets is keyword- and campaign-based, as opposed to user-based. And because Pinq Sheets uses Twitter’s streaming API (instead of the search API), Pinq Sheets subscribers can pull down entire Tweets, rather than just numbers.
Pinq Sheets also does the dirty work for you, compiling the data in readable graphs (see below) that can easily be distributed to your clients. This is pretty stellar. When we do reporting for our clients, we find they love graphs and infographics. When we can make them pretty AND useful, so much the better. Seeing information and insights, for some, is often more valuable than reading a report.
[…]
Additional features include showing users which individuals talk about a particular hashtag or search term the most, giving you valuable insights about either your brand or the brand advocates/influencers.
“If you’re trying to market to a niche, this is the tool that’s going to tell you how to do it and who to talk to,” Jen says.
Was Twitter a vehicle for riots in England? A Guardian study:
Analysis of more than 2.5m Twitter messages relating to the riots in England has cast doubt on the rationale behind government proposals to ban people from social networks or shut down their websites in times of civil unrest.
A preliminary study of a database of riot-related tweets, compiled by the Guardian, appears to show Twitter was mainly used to react to riots and looting.
Timing trends drawn from the data question the assumption that Twitter played a widespread role in inciting the violence in advance, an accusation also levelled at the rival social networks Facebook and BlackBerry Messenger.
That’s part of a quality series from the Guardian, Reading the Riots.
When Kathy Johnson was raising her rambunctious teen son just a few years ago, she never dreamed Sgt. William David Johnson would become the 571st soldier to have the honor.
Johnson, a 2006 graduate of Rehobeth High School, will make his last walk as a Tomb Sentinel on Sept. 9, in front of a proud family and grateful nation.
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“The Walk” itself is one of the most celebrated and viewed ceremonies in the U.S. military. Sentinels, dressed in ceremonial blues, carry an M-14 rifle and walk in front of the tomb. He walks 21 steps in one direction in front of the tomb, then turns and faces the tomb for 21 seconds. Then, he turns to face back down the mat, changes his weapon to the outside shoulder, counts 21 seconds, then steps off for another 21-step walk down the mat. He faces the Tomb at each end of the 21 step walk for 21 seconds. The sentinel then repeats this over and over until he is relieved at the Guard Change.
Sentinels guard the tomb through all weather at all times. The ceremony is often witnessed by large crowds during good weather. Often, however, the sentinel guards the tomb alone.
Speaking of natural disasters, the 59. magnitude earthquake in Virginia. Arizona State’s Professor Thornton said “J-students: If tweets from people you follow didn’t include earthquake tweets, you need to follow more people, more news.” And that point is true, especially when Twitter was out in front of cable news in the first few minutes. One must also be tempered by the knowledge that there’s an echo chamber effect. Panic on Twitter gave way to business as usual shots from most places that felt the tremblor. As in all things in life, balance is the key.
Here’s the U.S. Geological Survey data, posted immediately after the quake. The intensity map and the shake map which is one of the first examples of online crowd sourcing? “Did you feel it? Tell us?” There’s an organic and realtime feel to that map. They also say “If you felt the 5.9 quake, let us know…help us improve the data.”
Sky News has done a great job with Alex Crawford in Libya, earning praise for the network while their BBC colleagues have been a bit behind.
She’s done a fine job throughout, and this piece is a bit more personal, with more personal pronouns than you might expect, but the tech they are using is ingenious. “Sky News sources told The Daily Telegraph that the astonishing footage from the streets of Tripoli was produced using an Apple Mac Pro laptop computer connected to a mini-satellite dish that was charged by a car cigarette lighter socket.”
I like to tell students that the world they work in will be different than the working world we know today. How you do the job by the time you’re getting ready for retirement could be almost unrecognizable. Consider, a woman working in a newsroom today, and what she had to work with when she started in the 1960s. But even before that, there’s a slightly more contemporary question. What devices will you carry in a decade?
Futurist and author Kevin Kelly posits that in 10 years time, each of us will carry 2 computing devices on us: “one general purpose combination device, and one specialized device (per your major interests and style).” He also predicts that we will wear on average 10 computing things: “We’ll have devices built into belts, wristbands, necklaces, clothes, or more immediately into glasses or worn on our ears, etc.”
The piece touches on form factors, but doesn’t mention motility, which will remain a pertinent point.
The comments are great, and even includes a few links of possibilities, like this one:
Still looking for a story idea? Alabama is one of just six states that have lost jobs within the last year. There are plenty of stories waiting for you to discover.
We’re spending a lot of time lately talking about curation. No one is better than Andy Carvin, who’s told us all about the Arab Spring from his home. This piece is aimed at higher ed, but it is a valuable read for journalists, journalism students and social media dabblers.
Amid the political upheaval in the Middle East over the past several weeks, a dependable source of information has been Andy Carvin (@acarvin), NPR’s senior social media strategist. But he’s not reporting out of Tripoli or Cairo. Rather, he’s tweeting from his Maryland home, often while his kids watch TV in the background and cats vie for attention at his feet.
Carvin, whom one Metafilter thread dubbed “Curator of the Revolution,” has been tweeting updates from sources who are on the ground in the various countries—Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Bahrain, Yemen and elsewhere—that have seen uprisings as of late. In doing so, he’s become something of a poster child for content curation.
The Atlantic hailed Carvin as an example of how curation is the new journalism. Carvin told the magazine, “Curation itself isn’t new; it’s just the way that some of us are doing it online that’s fairly new. The tools have evolved, but the goal of capturing a story and turning people’s attention to it isn’t.”
During the deadly April tornadoes in Alabama someone erroneously called me the Andy Carvin of the storm. That was too much flattery, but the effort and purpose were the same. Here’s an archive of I wrote during the twisters.
How does one calculate and measure all of the things we do online? This is an evolving science. It wasn’t long ago that we were quantifying what had happened on the site the day before or a few hours ago. Now the phrase you’ll need to know is big data …
The next wave of tools claim to use a crystal ball of website data and patterns to see the future. And they promise to help news publishers squeeze more money out of the content they already produce.
One of these is Visual Revenue, a product launched this year that gives an editor “a new best friend sitting across the table,” according to founder and CEO Dennis Mortensen.
“We created this model where I can take any piece of content created over the last day or two days … and model how well that’s going to perform in any given position … about 15 minutes into the future.” Mortensen said. “And since we know how well the future is going to play out, we can come up with a set of very specific recommendations about what to put where, for how long.”
[…]
Another new product is called JumpTime Traffic Valuator, founded by people with backgrounds at major media companies such as Yahoo and MTV. It focuses on the revenue potential of each page on a site, showing a publisher how much money each article and each piece of page real estate is generating.
And so on.
There’s going to be a great use of such predictive metrics. What will human hands be motivated by when influenced by this software? An algorithm that tells them how and what to publish? An algorithm that tells editors what will make money? These become thorny issues to contemplate in a new digital ethic.
Only one in five mobile ad campaigns used targeting by location in the second quarter of this year, according to a report from the Millenial Media ad network.
Almost as many ad campaigns (19 percent) used demographic targeting (by age and gender of the user, for example). A smaller share (6 percent) used behavioral targeting. A majority (55 percent) were not targeted and simply sought to raise broad awareness of the advertiser — commonly thought of as “branding” campaigns.
On the consumer side, only 14 percent of mobile device users favor receiving promotions based on their current location, according to a survey of 2,000 American adults using cellphones by mobile marketing firm Upstream.
This doesn’t surprise me much. First, there are actually times when you don’t want text messages or push notifications. And there are moments when we are not actually staring into our phone. What’s more, according to my entirely unscientific study, none of my college students like the implications of mobile advertising. They find it a little icky. (Technical term.)
Pedagogy: Using a blog as an independent study. Great idea, and the execution of it should be rigorous.
And that leads us into the last few items, all of which work together, after a time.
Does it matter where a story comes from, as long as it makes the news? Apparently it doesn’t matter at all, to many of the latest crop of journalism students who believe their smart phones hold the keys to truth.
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Today’s journalism students are like no other, in that they were born with a smartphone in one hand and ear pods in the other. The world comes to them, not the other way around. I did not expect that this would have a profound effect on their approach to newsgathering — after all, writing the news is simply the act of telling a story objectively and very well — but it has.
[…]
At first I was horrified. Then I realized they never have known a time when information was not immediate and in their face, screaming for attention. When there is so much of it, a person begins to believe it’s real, no matter where it comes from. But that doesn’t make it accurate.
[…]
This is where I deliver the bad news: It doesn’t matter how fancy the video is, how glossy the pictures are, how compelling the mystery voices in the background may be. Be very, very careful. Step back and think about it. Your temptation is nothing new, I confess, it’s been mine, too.
I refer you back to the Carvin feature at the top of the post. How, though, does one be very, very careful? Being skeptical is a natural skill for some, but others have to learn.
Kansas State professor Michael Welsh, on critical thinking and going beyond, from knowledgeable to knowledge-able:
If you like that topic by Welsh run right out and search for more of his material. It is fascinating, direct and applicable material.
Quick hits: Understanding the psychology of Twitter, by way of infographic. How do you write about the death of an important man few have heard of? A rock ‘n’ roll obituary. Finding the emotional photograph. Local television is expanding once again. Though not to pre-cut levels.
