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journalism

Things to read

The evolution of sports journalism, as seen by one man who’s covered the Southeastern Conference for 33 years. Turns out it isn’t that much different than the news side of things, though some of those changes took place a generation ago. Take it away Ron Higgins:

Thus, you have bad feature stories. And soon you have little or no feature stories, because of a head coach who then publicly wonders why the media doesn’t write more “great” feature stories about his players.

With no feature stories to write, the news cycle gets amped up even more. Because beat writers are required to blog and tweet every hour, and write something for their paper almost every day, an item that was a throwaway note suddenly gets developed into a news story.

The next day after the coach reads the story or has someone read it for him, he angrily asks the reporter, “How is that a news story?”

If the reporter is honest, he’ll say, “It wasn’t. You left me no choice. I wanted to write a feature story on your wide receiver, but you limited access to him and those around him so much, it was a weak story. So a note became the news.”

THAT is what Dan Mullen and a lot of other coaches don’t get. In their quest to control the messenger, they sequester their program into a witness protection atmosphere of “you can’t.”

[…]

The average reader, looking at this blog, will say, “Wah, wah, wah, poor media. Who cares?”

So, untrained journalists, inflexible coaches and SIDs have ruined it for everyone. And, now, the fans. Higgins was absolutely taken to task in the comments of his own piece.

Here’s his reply:

I don’t ever expect coaches to have a friendly, buddy-buddy relationship with the media that was prevalent through the mid 1970s.

What I would like to see is coaches care enough to have honest communication with the media to discuss problems between the two sides, to develop a level of professional respect.

From the sports perspective, where the “bloggers are untrained as journalists and thus, ill-equipped for the job” has also taken unfortunate root, the problems are that athletic programs are intent on protecting their large investment, their athlete-students and their powerful coaches. The programs know their fans are going to be their fans no matter the media coverage and, just as importantly, they have their own tools — the same tools — to reach out to their public. That’s enough to make any sportswriter nervous.

Or, if politics is your thing here you have the logical conclusion to a Jerry Springer culture:

A Ron Paul supporter in Texas has taken out a full-page ad in a local alternative weekly newspaper seeking women who have slept with the presidential candidate.

“Have you ever had sex with Rick Perry?” asks the ad, which runs in this week’s Austin Chronicle. The ad was placed by Robert Morrow, who describes himself as a “self-employed investor and political activist” and a three-time delegate to the Texas state Republican convention.

Morrow is also the president and single member of the Committee Against Sexual Hypocrisy, which, he says, can help women publicize their “direct dealings with a Christian-buzzwords-spouting, ‘family values’ hypocrite and fraud.”

“I think it’s only a matter of time until somebody credible comes forward,” Morrow told Salon.

The Washington Post asked if we should be OK with this:

It’s not even a personal attack. It’s an ad hoping it can make a personal attack later. Is this really where we are?

“Gee,” this ad says. “Wouldn’t it be great if there were a scandal in Rick Perry’s personal life? Get on that, facts.”

“Rick Perry Is A Family Values Hypocrite*” the ad says. *We still have no facts to support this claim.

Are we okay with this? We shouldn’t be.

Meanwhile, the San Francisco Chronicle went immediately to the Let’s find out all about Morrow angle.

The coarsening of the political discourse (This isn’t new, and indeed goes back to the days of Jefferson-Adams. I published a book chapter on it last year.) is really a sign that the perpetual campaign lasts for too long.

The Birmingham News’ Sunday circulation is up, mirroring a recent trend taking place elsewhere. The reason:

The sour economy and a popular television show have combined to boost demand for the Sunday edition of The Birmingham News — among both frugal consumers and thieves.

Theft of the coupon-packed Sunday newspaper has increased about 15 percent since the April debut of the TLC show “Extreme Couponing,” said Troy Niday, News vice president for operations. Single copy sales of the Sunday paper have increased about 16 percent over the same period.

“It’s almost as if the market woke up and realized we’ve got coupons,” Niday said.

history / journalism / links / things to read / Thursday / video — Comments Off
18
Aug 11

Things to read

Why journalism remains a good major, as argued by a department chair and a third-generation journo:

If anything, (Chico State’s Susan Brockus Wiesinger) says, the skills the journalism program teaches—multiplatform writing and storytelling chief among them—are more in demand than ever before, and job opportunities abound.

Yes, she tells students, corporate daily newspapers are suffering mass layoffs, but the nation’s thousands of community newspapers are doing well, as are magazines. And the need for clearly and cleanly written content in other arenas—on the web, in business, on cable or broadcast television, in the public-relations field, and in many other areas—is growing rapidly.

When students ask her where they can find jobs, she has a one-word reply: “Everywhere.”

There are some generalities in those anecdotes, but I’d agree with the overall sentiment. I also appreciate this part of her argument:

When Wiesinger talks to incoming freshmen journalism students, she likes to ask them bluntly: “Why are you here?” She wants to learn whether they have passion for the profession—because of its importance to democracy, because of the teamwork required to practice it well, because reporting and writing vivid, meaningful stories is fun and exciting and never boring.

And she wants to encourage them, to make sure they know that by majoring in journalism they are going to learn skills that are invaluable in almost any profession and that will make them attractive to recruiters.

Chico State is a writing program, because they fear sending unprepared multimedia types out into the world. That’s the case with several of the more traditional programs. There’s no reason a department can’t prepare students with both the soft and the hard skills, and maybe even send them to computer science for a minor that will arm them for the future. That was the basis of a panel discussion we recently held at AEJMC.

But I digress.

Non-breaking non-news from Poynter, who reports that Cleveland.com (Disclosure: I once worked for a sister site) is accepting anonymous comments with open arms. (They’ve been doing this for a long time.) But the perspective is worth repeating as more and more newsrooms grow weary of dealing with the vitriole that can hide in anonymity.

“I think you miss out on the full extent of the [online] medium if you block out what readers have to say,” Cleveland.com Editor In Chief Denise Polverine told NetNewsCheck. “Some news organizations feel their voice is the final voice on a subject, and that’s not the case at Cleveland.com.” That’s not to say the comments are untouched. Moderators remove offensive ones, and on sensitive stories comments may be disabled entirely. A community manager writes a note about commenters when they attain “featured user” status and quotes something they’ve posted recently.

Does an “extraordinary situation” permit you to use someone else’s work without permission? The BBC seems to think so:

Social media editor Chris Hamilton clarifies that the organization’s policy is to “make every effort to contact people who’ve taken photos we want to use in our coverage and ask for their permission before doing so.” However, Hamilton noted, “where there is a strong public interest and often time constraints,” a senior editor may decide to “use a photo before we’ve cleared it.”

I’m sure the BBC bristles when this happens in the other direction, however. That’s essentially the argument that people like Jeff Jarvis, Jay Rosen and others take about the news, that the paper (or other outlet) doesn’t “own” content, and that when it is out there, it is out there. Information, public domain and all of that.

And now that the shoe is on the other foot — even the BBC can’t be everywhere, so there’s the pro-am journalist solution — it will be interesting to see how this is accepted over time.

We’ve all had this kind of interview:

Ten social network settings you should check right away. These platforms don’t always default in the direction you’d like. Double-check your settings, just to be sure you’re showing and hiding what you’d like. I had to move a few settings over myself, here.

Cyberloafing is good for you:

“Employees who browse the web more end up being more engaged at work, so why fight that if it’s in moderation?” says Don J.Q. Chen, a researcher at the National University of Singapore and a co-author of the new report, presented Tuesday at the annual meeting of the Academy of Management.

[…]

Chen says the web surfing provided the workers with “an instantaneous recovery.” “When you’re stressed at work and feel frustrated, go cyberloaf. Go on the net. After your break, you come back to work refreshed.”

I think the best part about this story is how Neil Armstrong, Jim Lovell and Gene Cernan are relatable to audiences worldwide:

Armstrong was joined (in Afghanistan) by 83-year-old Jim Lovell, who famously commanded and rescued the botched Apollo 13 mission in 1970, and Gene Cernan, 77, who was the last man to set foot on the moon.

For Afghan trainee Lieutenant Khan Agha Ghaznavi, meeting “these great men who have actually been to the moon and could answer my questions directly… it’s overwhelming”.

That’s appeal.

When I was young, and at a summer day camp, I heard a speaker talk about his time drifting in the Pacific ocean. I don’t remember all of the details about his story, other than that he and his shipmates were in the sea for days, that their buddies were being picked off by the sharks and that they’d learned, through — trial and fatal error — the best way to stay afloat without attracting the attention of the predators.

For five days they struggled to survive. Some 900 men went into the water. Just 317 were rescued.

I remembered the name of the ship when I heard the story years later and after I’d become interested in the history of that era. It was during a re-watching of Jaws, where the ship captain tells the same tale. This fictional character and the real man we heard as children were both on the USS Indianapolis. They’d delivered the first atomic bomb to the Army Air Corps and were later hit by two Japanese torpedoes.

As dramatic stories go, they don’t become any more intense than this one. From start to finish — when the shipment began in 1945, to the court martial the captain face (he was the only U.S. captain that lost a boat in the war put on trial for it), to his being restored to active duty and his eventual 1949 retirement or even to the Japanese sub commander who said in 2000 “”I had a feeling it was contrived from the beginning” or to his Congressional exoneration later that same year — this is a sad and epic tale.

And now it will be a movie. Hope they play it straight up.

journalism / links / Wednesday — Comments Off
17
Aug 11

Things to read

This is great video. What a country:

More details here. Hard to imagine that happening in a lot of other countries. At the same time, I suspect that people on the rope line will be a little more thoroughly screened in the future. There are reasons campaigns and politicians like to work friendly crowds. But, still, how great that there is occasionally the opportunity to just maybe have a fleeting conversation on something of substance with which you disagree about your president.

And good for President Obama, too, in briefly engaging with the guy. He blows him off at the end — there are a lot of people there to meet and greet — but he didn’t ignore him like you might imagine a politician doing. That’s nice to see.

Obama also reportedly said this, elsewhere in Iowa. Pretty sure everyone wishes he hadn’t:

“Democracy is always a messy business in a big country like this,” Obama responded. “When you listen to what the federalists said about the anti-federalists … those guys were tough. Lincoln, they used to talk about him almost as bad as they talk about me.”

This was during a Q&A with an “invited guest” (See?) who asked how he deals with his congressional critics in the GOP. The writer’s of that story then gleefully called up every Lincoln scholar in their office that day to disabuse everyone of this notion. Sometimes ad libs are bad.

Here’s a tale designed to chill you. Should you see a traffic stop gone wrong, think twice about pulling out your camera. That video could get you
sued:

The amateur videographer with the colorful vocabulary who memorialized the alleged 2009 police beating of Melvin Jones III during a traffic stop may be charged with illegal wiretapping.

One of four police officers disciplined for the incident on Nov. 27, 2009, Michael Sedergren, has filed an application for a criminal complaint against videographer Tyrisha Greene. Sedergren, who was suspended for 45 days, claims it was illegal for Greene to videotape him without his consent.

Greene made a 20-minute film that included Jones, who is black, being struck repeatedly by a white officer with a flashlight while a group of other white officers stood by without intervening. The video also included an expletive-filled commentary by Greene, 29, who sounded alarmed by the scene that unfolded on Rifle Street.

The suspect who was beaten has a record and apparently went for one of the officers’ sidearms. So, yes, he was going to be stopped. The officer who lost his cool, and his colleagues who stood around, should have also stopped.

You’d think with dash-mounted cameras, and more than a few of these stories making the news every year or two the officers would do well to pull the guy off, but that didn’t happen here.

The suspect’s mugshot — he was beaten badly — and the video are in that story, along with a thorough detailing of the legal aspects. The story comes down on the side of the videographer, who the plaintiff-officer claims “improper interception of wire and oral communication.” That makes no sense in this circumstance, as far as the stories go.

Oh look, a newspaper stealing a photo from a casual photographer. This never ends well. A woman took a picture of mannequins at a clothing store, made a clever comment and that generated some interest from various publications. The Washington Post asked for permission to use it, and she gave them her approval. The Daily Mail asked and she turned them down.

In the comments, however, there is a great debate about copyright, if you’re interested in that sort of thing. If this were an issue in the U.S. you could say Daily Mail basically followed the guidelines and precedent in place, using a thumbnail, and that was asking to use the private individual’s photo and being denied. Everyone is right, so everyone feels wronged. Given that this all took place in London, I’m not entirely clear on the etiquette and copyright details. More importantly, how did that woman take a picture in a mall without the mall cops giving her the Spanish Inquisition?

(Update: The story has been pulled altogether from the Daily Mail site, but the conversation on Boing Boing continues.)

About that Miami football scandal, here’s a nice look at the presentation from many of the online outlets, via the always outstanding Fear the Hat. Surprisingly ESPN’s site has been incredibly late to the party, as you’ll see in the screen caps.

I took a look at the front page of the Miami Herald this morning. They ran the story as a lead piece on the front page, but there was no color and no art.

NBC 10 in Philadelphia is flexing a little social media muscle:

The local NBC station in Philadelphia has started reporting news on location-based social network Foursquare. Initially, NBC 10 will pick one lead story a day and have a reporter check in on Foursquare from relevant locations and leave text and photo news updates. Later, this will extend to multiple stories and individual Foursquare accounts for each reporter.

That’s a fine idea. And since the Poynter piece didn’t do it, I’ll add that in addition to working Foursquare, they should also run a similar program elsewhere. You want to have some say in your distribution? You have to know, and go, where your audience is. Expand this program to Facebook Places, Gowalla, and, really, wherever their audience gathers.

journalism / links / things to read / Tuesday — Comments Off
16
Aug 11

Things to read

Make the authorities nervous, and they’ll cut your lines of communication. The British? Oh, no. This was in California. There was a shooting that led to chatter about protests, which made the locals overreact, killing cell service:

Since shutting down cell service on Thursday to try to quell rumored protests which never came to fruition, the Bay Area Transit Authority (BART) has had an interesting weekend and Monday.

Aside from getting investigated by the FCC as to whether it exceeded its authority in shutting off cellphones, the myBART website has been hacked by collective Anonymous on Sunday, with Anonymous claiming that the hack was motivated by the fact that BART’s actions were anti-free speech. The breech exposed identifiable contact information of over 2,000 employees and passengers.

While the original protests were planned in response to the shootings of Charles Hill and Oscar Grant by transit police, Anonymous also took their anti-BART campaign to real life by organizing more protests against the cell service disruption, starting today at San Francisco’s Civic Center station at 5pm. This resulted in a sort of dual protest, both for the cell service issue and the deaths.

According to local reports, the movement was at its height around 100 people, chanting slogans like “No justice, no peace, disband the BART police.” All in all four subway stations, Civic Center, Powell, Embarcadero and Montgomery were shut down and reopened within an hour’s period. Perhaps having learned its lesson the hard way, BART did not interfere with cell service this time, although it had threatened to.

That’s not about Anonymous, but about what might have been. Consider if there had been an emergency of any kind. Thankfully nothing of the sort seemed to happen, but had there been a need to make a phone call, everyone would have been helpless.

It is also about precedent, and the comfortability of doing such a thing again. This is a fair way down that argumentative slippery slope.

Does the Associated Press “get it”? You can pick up the new style book — the reporter’s Bible, as it were — for $13 on Amazon, or $20 on their own site. It’ll cost you $25 to get the iPhone app. I wish them well with that, but they’ve inverted their model.

One more time: you make the app once and you don’t have to bind it, run new editions or distribute it. (Well, you shouldn’t have to, but it seems they are pushing the app as a yearly thing, rather than simply updating the pre-existing app like every other offering in the app store.) So the overhead is gone. This is, then, a pure profit machine. Should people find it necessary to download one. But I doubt that is happening as much as they’d like. The stylebook itself (which does get updated every year in the dead tree edition) is a small enough (read, portable) piece that you can carry it anywhere. And if you’re going to have to pay for annual app updates you may as well just have the book.

Albert Brown survived the 65-mile Bataan Death March. He spent more than three years in captivity, contracting and fighting off so many diseases and ailments that, when he was liberated, doctors told him to not expect to see his 50th birthday:

But Brown soldiered on, moving to California, attending college again and renting out properties to the era’s biggest Hollywood stars, including Joan Fontaine and Olivia de Havilland. He became friends with John Wayne and Roy Rogers, doing some screen tests along the way.

“I think he had seen so much horror that after the war, he was determined to enjoy his life,” Moore said.

He recently died at 105 years old. It is a great story that I commend to you. And there’s a timeless quote from his biographer: “The underlying message for today’s returning veterans is that there’s hope, not to give in no matter how bleak the moment may seem. You will persevere and can find the promise of a new tomorrow, much like (Brown) had found.”

You can run away from this robot, if you can run 6.9 miles an hour. Also, it has knees. There’s a video, which can’t be embedded (sure, there’s a running robot, but you can’t embed this clip … ) and it is clear, the Cylons are here.

If you’ll recall, this spring was when Skynet was supposed to take over. I’m no Luddite, but they can’t take over if we don’t invent them. Just remember that when the mechanical reckoning comes.

I’ve covered a lot of horrible stories of death, murder, callous views of humanity and all manner of nearly unspeakable horrors. (There’s a reason I left hard news.) This one is just about the worst story I’ve ever read.

journalism / links / Monday / video — Comments Off
15
Aug 11

Linky things

As the stage rigging began to teeter, Laura Magdziarz grabbed her 3-year-old daughter, Maggie, by the armpits and delivered a one-word directive to Maggie’s grandmother and two older siblings: “Run.”

The next thing Magdziarz remembers is being on the ground amid the debris. Her arms were empty.

Maggie was a good five feet away, crying in her tutu, which she had worn to match Sugarland’s Jennifer Nettles. Magdziarz tried to stand but fell right back down — her leg was broken.

Maggie started walking to her, so she thought maybe her daughter was OK. Until she saw Maggie’s left arm — bone, flesh and blood, probably from elbow to wrist.

If you’ve not seen the video of the stage collapse in Indiana, you can find it here, along with a great piece of analysis from the local paper’s (solid) coverage. The crash is horrifying and, once again, it seems a miracle that the death toll isn’t higher. (Maggie is OK.)

If you like crisis communications here’s a solid analysis of what has and hasn’t happened after the disaster. Three of the bullet points from there:

The first rule of crisis communication is to “Be first. Be right. Be credible.” The very agencies that people are depending on for this information were not. And now that social media has become more prevalent, the days of depending on emailed press releases written by committees and regularly rescheduled press conferences are way over (a press conference was originally scheduled for midnight, and then rescheduled to 1:30 am. But they could have kept the news media up to date with occasional tweets and quick blog posts).

I’m struck by the irony of the authorities asking people to use social media to give updates while they barely use it themselves. Hopefully this will convince the first response authorities start to use it themselves.

The crisis communicators responding to crises like these need to start including social media in their own responses. Not only can they get news out to the public, they can respond to rumors and bad information immediately, squelching it, and getting out good information instead.

As I’ve been saying to students, scholars, firms and pretty much anyone else who would listen, you ignore these tools at your own peril.

From the same post at ProBlogService (Which, apparently, offers blog ghost writing. Really? Really?):

The news media would be smart to start streaming their news programs on their websites during emergencies like this. I was communicating with people in Chicago, Alabama, and even Toronto about the incident. All I’ve been able to do is send them to stories on sites, but they could watch this live if the stations would stream their emergency news broadcasts.

We’re coming back to that, but first a quick trip to California, where your rights are being further eroded:

Police Chief Jim McDonnell has confirmed that detaining photographers for taking pictures “with no apparent esthetic value” is within Long Beach Police Department policy.

McDonnell spoke for a follow-up story on a June 30 incident in which Sander Roscoe Wolff, a Long Beach resident and regular contributor to Long Beach Post, was detained by Officer Asif Kahn for taking pictures of a North Long Beach refinery.1

“If an officer sees someone taking pictures of something like a refinery,” says McDonnell, “it is incumbent upon the officer to make contact with the individual.” McDonnell went on to say that whether said contact becomes detainment depends on the circumstances the officer encounters.

McDonnell says that while there is no police training specific to determining whether a photographer’s subject has “apparent esthetic value,” officers make such judgments “based on their overall training and experience” and will generally approach photographers not engaging in “regular tourist behavior.”

You’re beyond a slippery slope, here.

And considering that piece from Long Beach, I’d like to go back to Indiana, where Erik Deckers reports:

If you’ve ever had any doubt about the need for a smartphone, or the power that citizen journalists wield, know this: all of the footage and images that all the newscasts are showing, and the ones that the national news outlets will be playing over and over, came from people and their smartphones. Not news cameras recording the aftermath of an event, but real action shot by real people who were on the scene.

Traditionalist newspaper reporters don’t like it, but that doesn’t matter. We’re all reporters now. Except for in Long Beach, and select Florida towns, where you can get arrested if a cranky cop runs across your path.

Finally, you’ll laugh, but I’ve had this nightmare: