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Things to read

How do you make a long-running feature into fresh news? Localize the focal point.

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.

[…]

“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.

They patrol through hurricanes, by the way.

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.

journalism / links / things to read / Twitter / video — Comments Off
22
Aug 11

Things to read

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.

Mobile ads may not be the hit marketers expected:

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.

When the news comes to you, as a journalist:

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.

[…]

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.

books / Friday / journalism / links / things to read — Comments Off
19
Aug 11

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 / 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.